How Ideal Is Ideal Theory, Actually?

Philosophy Today 67 (2):349-371 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Rawls is not actually an ideal theorist (as it is commonly understood), that his political theory remains unconvincing nevertheless, and that we should understand justice as failure in order to unlearn our adherence to dysfunctional ideals. I demonstrate that Rawlsian ideals are not removed from actuality, as both ideal theorists and their critics seem to think. Instead, they are already actualized as something to aspire to in a given culture. They are actual ideals. Non-ideal theorists, such as Charles Mills, who claim that instead of starting from ideals we should start from actual conditions thus miss the target. I then present an argument against theories of actual ideals: the original position requires optimal epistemological conditions in order to source actual ideals from public discourse. I offer Aamer Rahman’s “Reverse Racism” joke as a test for whether these conditions apply. I argue that in our world, they do not. Finally, I suggest justice as failure as a critical practice that may help us to unlearn our inherited dysfunctional actual ideals.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 102,440

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Kant, Realism, and the Theory of Ideals.William Levine - 2024 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 50 (8):1264-1281.
Idealized Non-ideal Justice Theory in Law of Peoples.Hye-Ryoung Kang - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 25:37-44.
Political Ideals and the Feasibility Frontier.David Wiens - 2015 - Economics and Philosophy 31 (3):447-477.
Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory.David Wiens - 2011 - Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (1):45-70.
Properties of ideals on the generalized Cantor spaces.Jan Kraszewski - 2001 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 66 (3):1303-1320.
Personal ideals and the ideal of rational agency.Sarah Buss - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):232-254.
How to do Applied Ethics Right.Peter Jaworski - 2017 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2):163-170.
Political realism and the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory.Greta Favara - 2023 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (3):376-397.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-06-24

Downloads
34 (#683,480)

6 months
9 (#455,121)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references