The core claim of my book is that much moralism in politics rests on a set of hard-to-resist assumptions about responsibility, namely, that our responsibility is capable of being identified in advance, reckoned up, negotiated, balanced out, or discharged. Moralism’s focus on what can be calculated (and therefore captured in specifiable moral rules) allows us to evade the more demanding, unwieldy, and ongoing aspects of our responsibility under the guise of a diligent, and sometimes punitive and self-righteous, bookkeeping of moral duties. Thus, “workfare” welfare regimes distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, by deploying metrics like time spent on welfare and hours spent looking for work, while ignoring the structural causes of poverty.
Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo acknowledges the “perils of an account of responsibility that reduces it to measureable quantities,” but in his view, my book overstates that peril. He claims that my concern for the “incalculable” dimensions of responsibility downplays the calculable character of “hard” political questions of “accountability.”
I agree that it is neither possible nor desirable to leave calculative approaches to responsibility behind; my book cautions against doing so (see, e.g., pp. 16, 146, 191–193). Bookkeeping belongs to our strongest notions of political justice. The narrowly focused political ethos I articulate seeks instead to give calculative approaches to responsibility their place, while also keeping them in their place, so they cannot purport to exhaust political responsibility. One can honor the calculable aspects of responsibility, while watching for its less emphatic incalculable dimensions.
Vázquez-Arroyo finds my claims about the unfolding “world,” which is not fully captured through the lens of calculable responsibility, too “abstract” and “politically indeterminate.” But such claims are a necessary first step to “re-cognizing” (his term) specific worldly phenomena. For example, the current neoliberal political “situation” draws upon the new moralizing force of “cost–benefit analysis.” According to recent U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, when Congress calls for “appropriate” regulation, the relevant agency must take account of costs to business, even if Congress does not specifically call for such accounting. More than ever, a genuine realism now demands relentless attention to incalculables and a way of conceptualizing that attention. This is not an “ethereal” diversion. It is a grave mistake to equate hardheadedness with calculation, or abstraction with softheadedness.
Vázquez-Arroyo further criticizes my book for “slicing and dicing” the texts that it addresses, with insufficient attention to their “overall architecture.” But one task of political theory is to follow individual threads of a thinker’s thought, including threads that are in the background, not fully woven into a systematic whole, and even left hanging. Those odd threads are evidence of a thinker’s struggle to articulate and sort worldly phenomena. Internal tensions provide insight no less than do consistencies. My “readings” of Plato and Kant are readings of their own struggles with the allure of calculable responsibility. And the presence of a common thread—say, an account of the connection between calculative thinking and moralism—across thinkers usually thought to be in opposition, writing during different historical periods, suggests a phenomenon worth exploring. (My selection of main thinkers is not unassailable, but nor was it arbitrary; see p. 13 of Extraordinary Responsibility.) Following threads, while acknowledging a whole text or oeuvre, need not distort the whole, though it may disturb the whole’s apparent seamlessness. Vázquez-Arroyo himself follows threads of Simone Weil’s thought that are different from the one’s I chose, yet his selective emphasis is still illuminating.
Vazquez-Arroyo summarily dismisses, as “extravagant,” my central claim about the connection between moralism and calculative thinking. Yet a confrontation with that claim would have revealed how our very different books might work together. After all, the lacuna, as I see it, in Political Responsibility is his failure to theorize the morality and moralism that his historically sensitive political ethic energetically repudiates.
