In this essay, I explore the role of philosophy in politics and public policy along one dimension that is suggested by the question ‘Does reason have a place in the shaping of public policy and institutions?’ In considering this question, I focus on the factors that prevent reasoned argument from influencing political process and outcome. Among the factors standing in the way of reason, two, I think, are of special importance. The first is the dominance of interests, and the second is the dominance of fixed ideas rooted not in interests but in myth and fantasy. I begin with the role of interests in politics arguing that interest provides a limited role for reason, but that this role erodes the more interest is an expression of greed. I then turn to belief and the way belief systems operate as the more powerful of the two factors excluding reason from politics.

While interest-based politics can create space for reason, what now tends to dominate in politics is not interests so much as other factors operating on an altogether different plane. These are the factors associated with fixed ideas, convictions made impervious to any doubt by forces over which reason has no power. It is possible, of course, to attempt to treat conviction as a kind of interest. We can, after all, be said to take an interest in our belief systems. Yet, an important distinction can still be drawn, within the set of objects in which we might take an interest, between those associated with belief and those associated with the narrower matter of economic well being.

The Great Financial Crisis that broke in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed has led many to question the very structure of contemporary economies. Some argue that the economic model of the past forty years is now broken. Criticism has also been directed at the orthodoxies of economics. For example, neoclassical equilibrium economics, the mainstream economics of the day, is accused of failing to understand some of the most basic aspects of the modern economy (debt and money), of supporting policies that have led to the economic breakdown (deregulation), and of failing to see the crisis coming (Bezemer 2012, Keen 2011). Consequently, heterodox thinking in economics is getting a hearing as never before. Heterodox economics offers itself as the requisite radical reconstruction of the science of economics and also proposes policies for the radical reconstruction of the major economics.

Yet to talk of the reconstruction of the modern market economy is at the same time to raise the ethical question: what shape ought the market economy to take? Heterodox economics may acutely analyse the inadequacies of real economies and propose plausible reforms, but as an essentially descriptive science there will be limits on its ability to state what ought to be. Rather, what is required seems to be a systematic prescriptive ethics. In other words, recent events in the world of economics have provided an opening for what ethical philosophy should be best at providing. Determining whether a specific ethical philosophy, to be identified shortly, has the capacity to address the questions raised by heterodox economics is the task of this paper.

In The Just State, Richard Dien Winfield has completed his exposition of the immanent logic of ethical life, the earlier parts of which are developed in his books The Just Economy, The Just Family, and Law in Civil Society. The purpose of his exposition is not to discuss isolated or miscellaneous topics pertaining to politics or ethics. Instead, his goal from the beginning has been to show objectively what justice looks like when it is fully embodied in a state's political and social institutions. The just state, as he presents it, is simply the largest possible political framework for maintaining equitable arrangements within a country's already established civil society, a framework that permits civil society to adjust to new contingencies as they arise, be they domestic or international. The purpose of the just state is to preserve, not to tamper with, the political and nonpolitical freedoms of its citizens. The essence of these freedoms is that they are all modes of self-determination, whereby what one does is freely determined by oneself and not by the arbitrary controlling authority of others. An individual whose life is determined by family, by tradition, or by commandment, is unfree. A state whose people are imposed on by a leadership class, or by any authority other than that of the people themselves, is likewise unfree. In order to establish freedom and justice, the citizens of a sovereign state must codetermine their own institutions. In accordance with this purpose, their institutions must be constructed in a particular way, which is the subject of The Just State.

The Just State, as Richard Winfield notes at the outset, is the culmination of an ambitious project devoted to limning the contours and content of a systematic philosophy of right. Apart from its value as a substantial contribution to the understanding of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, The Just State offers its own self-standing, content-rich account of political justice. Winfield's book is overflowing with argument and analysis, which calls for careful, detailed consideration, and the brief set of comments that follow cannot possibly do it full justice. It is useful, however, to focus on a specific topic concerning normativity discussed in the ‘Introduction’. In particular, I would like to raise some questions about the principle of equal opportunity and the adjustment problem that arises from it.

Before turning to those questions, it might be helpful to offer an overview of the overarching structure of The Just State. The ‘Introduction’ and eight chapters can be clustered thematically into three parts. The ‘Introduction’ has the important task of clearing away the obstacles thrown up by sceptical arguments against the very possibility of a normative theory of political justice. Chapters 1-3 set the stage for the account of political justice proper, which then takes up the remainder of the book, chapters 4-8. So the argument starts, in the ‘Introduction’, with a refutation of the sceptical denial of the project of political philosophy understood as the normative theory of political justice. This is important because the positive upshot of this anti-sceptical argument is the identification of a singular normative criterion: self-determination.

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.

Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless (see Aristotle 1984b: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18-1094b12).

Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy.

When I was first studying Hegel, I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale University, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading, I want to talkabout the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science.

In the thirteenth century, Aristotle's scientific and philosophical texts were becoming available in European universities from the Muslims in Spain. These texts offered a well-argued, systematic, and more comprehensive scientific view of the universe and its god. Reading Aristotle, people quickly realised that his ideas contradicted some Christian (and Muslim) doctrines. For example, Aristotle argued that the world could not have had a beginning in time, while the religious revelations told of a first moment of divine creation. Aristotle's obscure treatment of the active intellect seemed to argue that there was no individual immortal soul, while the revelations spoke of individual survival after death. And Aristotle's god, the totally self-absorbed first mover, the pure actuality, seemed useless for religious purposes.