Political Constructivism

Peri Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415339872
• eBook ISBN: 9781134299003
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Constructivism is concerned with the justification of principles of political justice in the face of pluralism. Contemporary accounts of multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity have challenged the capacity of political theory to impartially justify principles of justice beyond the boundaries of particular communities.

In this original account, Peri Roberts argues that political constructivism defends a conception of objective and universal principles that set normative limits to justifiable political practice. Political Constructivism explores this understanding in two ways. Firstly, by engaging with constructivist thinkers such as John Rawls and Onora O'Neill in order to lay out a basic understanding of what constructivism is. Secondly, the author goes on to defend a particular account of political constructivism that justifies a universal primary constructivism alongside the many secondary constructions in which we live our everyday lives. In doing so he outlines an understanding of principled pluralism which accepts diversity whilst at the same time recognising its limits.

This volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers of political theory and political philosophy.

1
Introduction

Political constructivism is a theory that has developed comparatively recently which is centred on a set of ideas primarily about the justification of principles of political justice, and so also about justifying political actions and institutions. Everyday, we find ourselves in situations that require us to justify principles and our actions, either to others or to ourselves. We are faced with questions such as ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘Was that the right thing for me to do?’ or ‘Should we have treated those other people in the way that we did?’ These questions demand answers that attempt to make transparent the reasons for our actions and principles. In addition, these answers often make claims about what reasons other people have or should recognize. The answers that we give in this questioning process might themselves be open to question, and these further answers may in turn be worthy of examination. A key question for justification is to ask whether this regress of questions ever comes to an end or are our reasons subject to an infinite regress of questions and answers and questions again. Justification is usually taken to consist in identifying the stopping point, or foundation, of such a regress, the ‘unmoved mover’ that anchors a chain of reasons.¹This foundational reason is regarded as an ‘unjustified justifier’ that necessarily occupies a position of authority in justificatory argument and is therefore the ground of our reasons and justifications.² Identifying a foundational reason prevents further questioning and underpins the authority and objectivity of our reasons and principles.

Sceptics about justification usually agree that this is what justification is all about, that a justified reason either is, or is grounded on, a foundation. However, sceptics dispute whether any such foundations are available to us and thus whether objective and authoritative reasons are identifiable. Either, they argue, the regress is infinite (so that it is always open to significant question whether and when something counts as a reason) or the chains of reasoning stop in different places for different people (perhaps dependent on subjective tastes, beliefs or experiences or perhaps on the perspective of a certain society, community or culture). These positions frame some of the central questions for this book: is objective justification possible and, if so, what form does this justification take?

The basic and traditional model of justification is foundationalist. Identifying a foundation for justification involves claiming that some certain reasons have a special status independent of further consideration. Foundations are what we check our everyday reasons against to reassure ourselves that our actions and principles are justifiable. The foundational reason functions as a sort of ‘moral fact’ that can be pointed to in order to verify a normative claim. On this account, when asked ‘Why should I limit my actions in this way?’ an answer that justifies would show that this is what is required by a foundational principle and that foundational principles provide reasons for everyone. As such, foundations constitute an ‘independent moral order’ that grounds legitimate normative reasoning and thereby underpins claims about the objectivity and authority of our reasons. A useful and formal statement of the core of foundationalist justification is provided by Timmons.

If the propositions of a set A of ethical propositions can be justified … then:

i there is a subset A* of A such that each member of A* can be justified independently of (i.e., without appealing to) any other member of A;

ii all other members of A (all non-A*s) must include in their justification … some member of A*.³

For the foundationalist, a principle is justified either if it is a foundation in itself or if it can be grounded in a foundation by some plausible chain of reasoning.

Foundations are often taken to be ‘undeniable and immune to revision’ as is fitting in their role as the moral facts constitutive of an independent moral order.⁴ There have been many suggested foundations for normative reasoning. Foundations for principles of political justice have been variously regarded as intuitively correct, self-evident, appealing to the authority of God, embodying fundamental accounts of human nature, constitutive of the common values inherent in a way of life; or existing in some transcendental or supernatural realm. Examples of prominent types of foundational justification, but by no means a definitive list, might be Platonic foundationalism that justifies principles of justice by reference to an eternal and unchanging set of facts or ideas that are more real than the transient world in which we find ourselves. For Plato, these foundations are the Forms and ultimately the Form of the Good.⁵We are generally more familiar with this sort of foundational account when it is understood in religious terms as an account of the word of God or of natural law. We are also familiar with what can be referred to as economic foundationalism.⁶ Here, the foundation is a particular understanding of human nature and the structure of human reasoning and motivation. Reason is understood instrumentally as a tool for the efficient satisfaction of pre-existing and motivating desires or preferences rather than as critically assessing which desires we ought to have. Here, our desires function as a foundation for reasons and justification must be grounded on these desires in order to be successful. Some desires, such as the desire for security, might appear to be motivating for everybody. On this account, perhaps as exemplified by Hobbes, we cannot give reasons for our desires, only for our actions in pursuit of their satisfaction.⁷ Desires are the ‘stopping points’ for chains of justificatory reasons. We are also familiar with cultural foundationalism in which the fundamental values of a way of life are regarded as authoritative for members of the associated culture. Actions and principles are justified if it can be shown that they are required by ‘our way of life’ or by an account of our shared understandings of social meanings.⁸

Each of these foundational accounts of justification identifies foundations as the basis of an explanation of why certain sorts of reasons are objective and thus authoritative for us; they are God’s will; we have the relevant desire or we have been born into and shaped by the relevant way of life. Each of these foundational strategies for justification has been subject to long-standing questioning. However, the idea that reasons can be objective at all has also been subject to fundamental examination. Scepticism about the possibility of objective reasons focuses on the partiality of proposed foundations. Sceptics might draw our attention to the many ‘cultural anthropologists ready and waiting to unveil exotic tribes and bizarre rituals’ in order to question the self-evidence of our intuitions or our confidence in the universality or objectivity of our claims about abstract moral facts.⁹What we regard as intuitive or self-evident may not be as evident to others as it is to us and may fail to exhibit Platonic or theological ‘deep connection with the fabric of the universe’.¹⁰ That this is the case explains our widespread experience of disagreement about basic principles, even about those that are supposed to be self-evident. On this account, the partiality of our principles of justice and conceptions of the good is highlighted by our experience of multiculturalism and the normative and political pluralism and diversity that underpin it. Our reasons and principles may come to be regarded as historical artefacts of a local history and a particular way of life.¹¹ In this way, reasons and justifications are understood to be always partial, always reflecting the local and particular rather than the general and universal. While, strictly speaking, some of these accounts may be structurally foundationalist (they are often forms of cultural foundationalism), they are concerned to undermine the traditional, foundational understanding of objectivity. Instead of objective reasons providing reasons for everyone, reasons can only ever provide reasons for ‘people like us’ and ‘people round here’. The environment for normative justification is always limited by necessary theoretical, practical and motivational limitations on the relevance of our reasoning.

This understanding of reasoning is familiar to us in critiques of universalism from postmodernism and from the mainstream of communitarian and multiculturalist literature.¹²Common to each of these accounts is an understanding that the sources of authoritative reasons are plural and probably incompatible with each other. The argument goes that our continuing experience of pluralism and disagreement implies that it is not possible to subsume these diverse reasons under a single account of reasoning or reasonableness. Reasons are therefore often regarded as incommensurable in that they cannot be either translated into each other or compared by reference to some common value. Pluralism appears irreducible and this in turn implies a broad conceptual relativism (in that reasons and values count as reasons and values only relative to one of a plurality of ways of life or to one amongst several conceptual frameworks, for example). Irreducible pluralism is considered to undermine any claim that particular principles or reasons might be objective and universal. Claims to have identified universal and objective values are regarded either as justified on the basis of a mistaken overconfidence in the foundational character of what are actually partial assumptions or as not justified at all.

Much of contemporary political theory accepts that the contexts for reflection and action are plural; indeed, pluralism is often regarded as a background condition against which theorists work. However, contemporary theory also witnesses consistent attempts to demonstrate that some sort of universalist account of justified political principle is possible, in spite of a general acceptance of the ‘fact of pluralism’ and the reasonableness of our disagreements.¹³ These accounts have tended to be ‘thin universalist’ conceptions that try to minimize partial and controversial claims, perhaps by justifying on a thin, rather than a thick, set of universal principles. Although the term thin universalism is Walzer’s, which he contrasts with the various ‘thick’ or ‘maximal’ cultures we inhabit, his own account is not as useful as we might hope.¹⁴ As is discussed below, in the final chapter of this book, Walzer’s account does not justify objective and authoritative universal reasons or principles. Instead, his thin universalism is a matter of the contingent overlap of our extended sympathies, an expression of solidarity firmly rooted in our various maximal moralities. To a significant degree, Walzer’s is not an account of universal reasons or justification at all, but an explanation of how it is possible that situated persons might come to identify sympathetically with others who do not, initially, appear to be very much like them.

Constructivism is an alternative account of what a thin universalism might be. Whilst accepting both the fact of pluralism and the reasonableness of disagreement, constructivism continues to be committed to the idea of objective and authoritative justification. Where objective justification has traditionally been foundationalist, constructivism attempts to show that it does not have to be. Constructivism need not reject the possibility of a successful foundationalism but does demonstrate that foundations are not a necessary element in any objective account of reasons and principles. Part of this task involves working out what an appropriate conception of objectivity is where normative judgements are concerned. We might ask if there is something about the circumstances in which persons find themselves, in the relations between them and in the way they reason practically, which enables us to regard objective standards for normative judgement as a human construct.¹⁵As will become clear, in exploring these possibilities, constructivism will draw heavily on an everyday understanding of objectivity as involving unbiased and impartial universal reasons for everyone. Constructivism argues that at least some universal reasons of this sort are justifiable. In sharp contrast with the perspectivism of particularists such as the communitarians and many multiculturalists, which regards a demonstration of pluralism as the end of an argument about justification, constructivists regard pluralism as the start of an argument, as an invitation to reflection and critical reasoning.

Not surprisingly, given its title, this is a book about constructivism in political theory; however, it is about constructivism in two different ways. In part, it focuses on prominent constructivist positions, most notably those of John Rawls and Onora O’Neill, in an attempt to better understand what political constructivism involves. Here, we find that there is a broadly shared account of constructivism’s key features and that these can be drawn out in a general account of what constructivism is and of what it entails for the justification of political principles. This book also takes the first steps in a more ambitious project. This involves providing an independent set of arguments, related to but markedly distinct from those of Rawls and O’Neill, which develops and justifies a constructivist approach to principles of political justice in a simple but plausible way. Both of these tasks are important. Although ideas of constructivist justification have been prominent in contemporary political theory for several decades they have been the subject of few extended studies and only a small number of important papers.¹⁶ On the one hand, taking a detailed and systematic look at several constructivist positions is a contribution to this much-needed discussion. On the other hand, developing an independent argument for an innovative constructivist position shapes the way that this discussion must develop in the future.

Chapters 2–4 form a distinct group focused on the constructivism of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, on the constructivism of Rawls’s Political Liberalism and on O’Neill’s constructivist writings, respectively. The main body of each chapter is concerned to refine our understanding of what constructivism might involve by examining a prominent constructivist position. This necessitates fairly detailed textual engagement, and there are times when this process is unavoidably pedestrian. However, just as pedestrians make real progress towards their destination with their small steps, so will we. It becomes clear that a general understanding of constructivism develops and that, importantly, something like this basic position holds steady throughout the breadth of both Rawls’s and O’Neill’s positions.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls outlines a constructivist project where objective principles of justice are justified by subjecting uncontroversial assumptions to reflective examination in an account of practical reasoning based on a conception of reflective equilibrium. Chapter 2 lays out a straightforward and largely mainstream account of Rawls’s justice as fairness and shows how its justification is consistent with this basic constructivist account. However, it also becomes clear that Rawls expects too much of his constructivism as he tries to over-determine its conclusions. His constructivism cannot bear all the weight that justice as fairness appears to require.

Rawls attributes this failure to a lack of awareness concerning the extent of pluralism and the implications of this for justification, a mistake he attempts to rectify in Political Liberalism. Chapter 3 examines this reworking of constructivism in order to proof it against continued failure. He proceeds by explicitly outlining a conception of political constructivism that draws on ideas fundamental to the public political culture of democratic society as resources avai...

Table of contents

• Routledge innovations in political theory
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Constructivism and A Theory of Justice
• 3 The constructivism of Political Liberalism
• 4 Primary constructivism and O’Neill
• 5 Reasoning practically
• 6 Making practice reasonable
• Notes
• Index