I am grateful to Eva Erman and Niklas Möller for their thoughtful review and for this chance to revisit what they rightly highlight as the key to my approach: its treatment of justice claims as ideological. They regard my approach as mostly indistinguishable from ideal moral theory (IMT), except insofar as it is radically different and, in that difference, “problematic,” “deficient,” and “threat[ening].”
They see it as nothing new for three related reasons. First, I wrote that my approach lets theorists do all the things IMT does (though differently, p. 127). In citing this statement, Erman and Möller omit that it is a response to proponents of IMT who, as detailed in Part I, hold that “only ideal moral principles of justice can inform critique and guide action” (p. 127)—an objection precisely to the hypothetical normativity, the ideological character, of justice claims. Second, they construe my position that all justice claims are ideological as meaning that all justice claims depend on values for their justification. This restatement distorts my position, again ignoring that the point in treating justice claims as ideological is to ascribe those values hypothetical, not categorical, normativity. Third, Erman and Möller assert that all theorists treat justice claims as essentially contested. I find that claim astonishing. True, if pressed, many ideal theorists would concede that their accounts of justice might in principle be wrong. That is hardly equivalent to making the actual contestedness of justice claims foundational to one’s theorizing, as my approach does.
In effect, Erman and Möller try to domesticate my position to liberalism and to IMT by reading out the radical implications of treating justice claims as ideological. To support this reading they cite my statement that “treating justice claims [as having hypothetical normativity] does not mean that they are this way” and that my approach does not depend on its being true that they are. I wrote this to try to sidestep the kind of meta-normative debate that Erman and Möller, in their book, suggest we avoid. I do not know if there is some truth out there on which to ground justice claims, and I do not know how to show that there is or isn’t. The bifocal approach is designed to theorize for a conflictual and pluralistic world in which theorists cannot and should not assume that there is a truth (or that they, and not others, have it). Thus the stipulation that political oughts have no categorical force is a realistic one that enables critique and prescription in a different, epistemically chastened, mode.
What is at stake here? Erman and Möller view my position on hypothetical normativity as “unnecessarily [inviting] the threat of relativism,” when hypothetical normativity is the essence of theorizing justice claims as ideological. Others seem to recognize this: I have been called a “thug,” berated for my “nihilism,” and accused of Trumpian equivalation of good and evil. Tellingly, when I reject the search for moral foundations and justifications and emphasize instead the clear formulation and expression of values, arguments, and critiques from within a self-consciously ideological position, Erman and Möller read me as denying the need for good arguments that link values to choices and action. That is because, for them, it is untoward to acknowledge these foundational issues; they prefer the Rawlsian strategy of simply avoiding them. It is that characteristic avoidance, I argue, that makes IMT distortional, entitling theorists to make unqualified pronouncements about the requirements of justice while denying their ideological character.
