The audit political philosophy had to have has begun. Jonathan Floyd’s book is an important preface to this probe, but also suggests there is a way to go. Political philosophers ought to be concerned just how persuasive the first “critical” half of Is Political Philosophy Impossible? turns out to be, but then also the extent to which its second supposedly “restorative” half recommits the exact same fallacies. The answer to the book’s title, qua its argument, in other words, is “sure seems like it.”
The proposed approach in the restorative half, called normative behaviourism, is nevertheless both innovative and instructive, and must seem at least partly right to synthetically inclined thinkers (it does to me, at any rate). It is a position the Mr. Scrooges of the political science world might get behind; those Scrooges who dismiss political philosophy as nothing more than emotive utterances hidden behind perplexing jargon like “reflective equilibrium” will find it grist to their mill. The approach looks to the revealed preference of individuals living in alternative social orders and ranks the regimes according to the levels of crime and insurrection. (Hobbes would be beaming from the grave with this book.) Crime and insurrection are treated as proxies for when a society has become unbearable. Real-world unbearability, not flighty philosophical speculation, is the only coherent litmus test for Floyd. Forget the abstract arrangement of thoughts about justice, fairness, and equality then; we should instead be busying ourselves gathering empirical evidence on institutions and dissent.
So (the political scientist will be delighted to hear) we have institutional variation as our independent variable and levels of crime and insurrection as our dependent. Much like Daniel Dennett arguing that the traditional problems in the philosophy of mind should collapse into questions of neuroscience, Floyd argues “How should we live?” is best answered with good, honest, social-scientific analysis. Proper philosophical method is not method from the armchair; it is method enriched by the collection and analysis of data. In this vein, the third chapter of the book serves as a refresher of the political science literature, showing that “liberal-social-democracy” has been established to cause lower levels of crime/insurrection more than any other historical alternative. It is not due to confounding factors that we observe less in egalitarian as opposed to highly unequal societies, in democracies as opposed to hereditary monarchies, in market-based societies as opposed to collectivist ones; it is due to the nature of the institutions themselves. Given that these institutions can be intelligently designed, normative behaviourism suggests that we should design them accordingly. There is no other metric by which we can do so without a strong dose of question begging.
The first two chapters are devoted to demonstrating how alternative metrics fail in this respect. The alternatives constitute the current political philosophy orthodoxy from Isaiah Berlin to Richard Rorty. They are all fatally flawed, Floyd argues, because they presume a set of shared normative thoughts or patterns of thought to which we can axiomatically appeal. He calls this mentalism. The book storms through a number of canonical thinkers, showing that each disagrees with the others on the content of the grounding normative beliefs, thus demonstrating that they are not in fact shared. John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, for instance, makes the case for an egalitarian theory of justice while purportedly accounting for reasonable disagreement. Yet Floyd suggests that Rawls builds in the acceptance of the egalitarian-generating original position into the very condition of reasonableness. It is unlikely a Nozick-style libertarian—an intuitive case of a reasonable disagreer—would accept the original position procedure when it conflicts with a baseline freedom from coercion. Deliberative democrats similarly suggest using deliberative mechanisms for overcoming reasonable disagreement. But, “[i]f we ask what justifies this deliberation, then they can say that it is required by some further value, such as mutual respect. But what then? If we now ask what justifies mutual respect, we hear silence” (p. 61). It begs the question why we should extend mutual respect to fascists, conspiracy theorists, libertarians, Marxists, or even bourgeois ideologists for that matter. The disagreement that deliberation was introduced to overcome returns in determining the limits of mutual respect. The book also summarizes efforts to appeal to toleration as a reasonable way of dealing with disagreement, but again, when toleration licenses parents to inhibit the opportunities available to their children in the name of tradition, Floyd notes how contestation over its limits abounds. The question is left begged.
The criticism of mentalism cuts deeply for the sample of political philosophers as they have been described by Floyd. I am confident it is not the last word on the thinkers though given many—particularly Rawlsians—will likely contest his interpretations. Yet the criticism can be distilled into a broader and less interpretive worry: If one is to try and analyze the nature of justice, for instance, how will one know they have discovered its true nature if they did not know what it looked like to begin with? The paradox of analysis, in other words. We need pregiven desiderata to judge the success of our mental inquiry. This poses problems particular to the political philosopher due to the nature of politics. Where philosophers have fruitfully challenged commonsense platitudes like “Meaning is conventional” and “Knowledge is true justified belief” by showing they cannot be simultaneously held with other, dearer, platitudes, the contestatory nature of politics means there is no analogous uncontested set of dearer commonsense platitudes for political philosophers to use as axioms to begin with.
Floyd believes that normative behaviourism avoids the paradox trap, however, by taking convergent behavior rather than dispersed and inconsistent thought as its starting point. It looks for patterns in common preferences for or against institutions. The most important section of the book is hidden toward the end of the (near-300) pages. Section 3.8 explains “Reasons to Be Convinced by Social-Liberal-Democracy” to whoever has, or claims to have, a revealed preference for alternate systems (be they Marxist, libertarian, authoritarian, whatever). While normative behaviourism blocks an appeal to a prior principle due to the principle’s likely contestation, this is not to license the claim “Because you and radicals like you have not resisted liberal-social-democracy through risky violence in the past any claim you make against liberal-social-democracies is just cheap talk and may be ignored.” A radical is well justified to respond: “Were I presented with a decisive choice between social-liberal-democracy and my preferred alternative, I would certainly choose the latter, but as it happens any attempt at insurrection I engage in now is simply infeasible thanks to collective action problems.”
To this, Floyd adds on reasons post hoc. Radicals should prefer social-liberal-democracies because they tend to less “cruelty” and tend to promote “human flourishing.” But as Floyd has earlier shown in Chapter 1, there are incommensurable problems with how to measure, aggregate, and interpret cruelty and human flourishing. A Marxist would not claim a market society that incentivizes the division and alienation of labor comes close to promoting human flourishing. The radical can quite easily respond that Floyd is presupposing a prior normative commitment here. Despite denying the charge (p. 229), it is hard to see how he has not reintroduced the paradox of mentalism just under a new empirically charged cloak.
The convinced readers of this book might cut back that the level of cruelty and flourishing produced by a system can be unproblematically measured by the number of individuals who find it unbearable (i.e., through crime and insurrection). To this, however, there are plenty of token case studies of elite insurrection motivated primarily by the desire for further riches, not the unbearability of the current regime. There are even more token examples of white-collar crime. While these counters are not exactly decisive, as the patterns for crime and insurrection still hold were we to control for socioeconomic status, it demonstrates the worry. Floyd claims that it does not “make any difference [to normative behaviourists] if the people whose actions led to the collapse of the regime actually wanted that regime to survive” (p. 252). The only way to maintain the link between unbearability and crime/insurrection, then, is to judge the lives of those engaged in crime and insurrection as unbearable, which, without recourse to some observable preference, is to again apply an assumed (and not necessarily common) normative judgment. Either way, it needs justification, and that justification can only fall back into mentalism.
Irrespective of whether you agree or disagree, Is Political Philosophy Impossible? begs important questions and puts new burdens on a discipline that is arguably too cosy with exclusionary assumptions. The conclusion that political philosophy is impossible is—as Floyd notes—too much to stomach. This rightfully places the burden on political philosophers to respond with a brand of analysis that avoids the snares and fallacies clearly and constructively identified in the book.
