Abstract
Is normative political theory possible for intellectually limited creatures such as ourselves? Answering this question requires thinking carefully about what the term “political theory” entails and about the resources available for the project that this term demarcates. In his new book, Jonathan Floyd sets out to provide a definition of political theory that focuses on its ambitions to intellectual persuasiveness and seeks to show why political theory, understood in what he calls a “mentalist” way, cannot possibly succeed given its methods of proceeding. Floyd argues instead for a more behaviourally centered vision of normative analysis.
Floyd’s book sets out to answer—or, perhaps better, to consider how one might answer—three interlinked questions. These are the Organising Question (OQ), the Foundational Question (FQ), and the Guiding Question (GQ) (6–7, 37). The Organising Question is: How should we live? Because this question does not give enough guidance about the kinds of reasons that political theory requires, the book argues that we will do better to examine the Foundational Question: Why should we live that way and not another? Answering this question requires substantive arguments for one set of social patterns and practices rather than another and is the primary task of most normative political theory. Yet Floyd believes that we often take the answerability of this question for granted, when we should instead examine the Guiding Question of his inquiry: Is it possible to provide a meaningful and convincing answer to political philosophy’s organising question? Floyd sets out to examine this latter question and to argue that it is not possible to provide a meaningful and convincing answer through the theoretical methods usually adopted, so that we must turn toward an alternative method that he describes as normative behaviourism.
The book’s inquiry is divided into three long chapters, bracketed by an introduction and conclusion that largely summarize and restate the content of those chapters. Because Floyd seeks to canvas a very wide variety of positions and scholars across these chapters, they are sometimes heavy going and often have the texture of literature reviews of many competing positions. Key arguments often remain underdeveloped given this aspiration to comprehensive scholarly engagement. In chapter 1, Floyd sets out to show that debates in normative political theory are interminable, not only historically—they have in fact not terminated—but logically as well. Although political theorists aim for reflective equilibrium or something like it within professional debates, evidence suggests that it is never actually achieved or usefully approximated. Rather, one political theorist sets out to show that a commitment to equal treatment requires (say) the difference principle, while another invokes somewhat conflicting principles and concludes that luck egalitarianism represents a better target, while a third offers something else.
Demonstrating symptoms of philosophical interminability is naturally difficult, and it is hard to see how this might be done with much grace and concision. The chapter is, even so, overpopulated. Chapter subheadings pick out John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Joseph Raz, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty as targets of discussion, but this barely captures the scope of the theorists who get separate discussions. A subsection entitled “Rawls and a Few of His Rivals” (41), for example, examines Rawls alongside Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin, whose basic theoretical claims are dutifully laid out, along with Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel—all in the span of five pages. The discussions of this brief section do not break much new ground but instead outline details from each theorist’s work to show that they did in fact disagree about many things. The chapter then proceeds through its further roster of theorists, seeking to show that they also disagree with one another, and that they are uncertain how to deal with disagreement when they see it. The parade is long here and fully compelling only if one is already persuaded that disagreements between, say, Rawls and Nozick are symptomatic of a fundamental instability in political philosophy. Floyd suggests that those who are already convinced that philosophy cannot resolve its central disagreements can safely skip this chapter (25). I would suggest, on the contrary, that this chapter will be most fruitful to those who are already convinced of the book’s thesis and seeking examples to illustrate its intentions to colleagues.
The book picks up momentum substantially with the second chapter, on “mentalism,” which argues that political—and, more centrally, moral—philosophy fails, because it relies too much on attempts to invoke shared intuitions as part of a package of core reasoning skills. The chapter focuses especially on three types of intellectual tests deployed by political philosophers, in the form of hypothetical choices under conditions of enforced partiality (124), examination of considered judgements (131), and intuitive choices of abstract principles (138). The core of the book as a whole emerges most strongly in Floyd’s discussion of the latter, where he argues that our central normative intuitions are inconsistent, not only across individuals but much more importantly within them. Floyd draws centrally on psychological research on moral decision making, with a special focus on the ways in which different framings can drive different judgements. This is illustrated in his view by different cases of the “trolley problem” (140–41), but more powerfully it is indicated (“known,” in Floyd’s preferred terminology [143–45]) by a wide variety of experimental manipulations of our moral intuitions. The key, then, to Floyd’s critical argument lies in this central portion of the book (141–53). If he is correct that our moral intuitions are inherently inconsistent even within single individuals, then it is easier to see disagreement across individuals as marking not simply unfinished argumentation or disagreement about epistemically difficult empirical matters but as reflective of our lack of meaningful mental data about what normativity requires.
It is surprising that so much of Floyd’s argument in a nearly 280-page book hinges on claims presented in about twenty pages that do not appear until its middle. Nonetheless, the literature from experimental psychology is not easily disposed of. I will accept its essential correctness here. What follows for “mentalist” political philosophy from this evidence of foundational instability in many normative intuitions? One might, as Floyd does, conclude that mentalist philosophy is maintained only by “convention” and “personal obsession with system and particular cognitive biases in favour of assuming an underlying order” to our intuitions (155). The mentalist project of political and normative philosophy has not only, in Floyd’s view, failed in practice. The instability shown by experimental psychology means that it is “demonstrably doomed to failure” and, even more strongly, “an impossibility” (165). Somewhat surprisingly, Floyd acknowledges that some core normative intuitions seem nearly unanimous among human beings (148, 165) but asserts that it would take much more than a few shared points for such intuitions to provide the foundation for political judgements about how we should live together. It is not obvious that the latter claim is correct. If there are indeed a few normative fixed points, then the mentalist project has grounds for seeking to determine the long chains of connection or disconnection between them, in ways that can generate the fruitful disorientation one often encounters in philosophical debate. Given the vast number of potential errors in conceptual construction, logical bridging, or empirical judgement, effective reasoning is unavoidably difficult. We face these difficulties in other areas of philosophy as well: disagreements about the nature of mind, for example, are deep and persistent, underpinned as they are by substantive debates about what constitutes evidence and how it should be interpreted. Yet it would be strange to conclude from this that there has been no progress in the study of mind and that none will be forthcoming as discussion moves forward. It is likewise hard to conclude that the book has presented evidence sufficient to justify the conclusion that mentally driven political philosophy is impossible rather than simply difficult. Are there really good reasons to believe that normative political philosophy has not, for example, been greatly clarified by the work of Rawls and the broad range of responses to it? There are persisting disagreements in political philosophy, but it is hard to see that the argument of this chapter has provided sufficient grounds for the impossibility claim it seeks to make.
This does not mean that political philosophy as traditionally practiced cannot be strengthened by empirical evidence about political and normative preferences as revealed in social science. Floyd sets out to articulate his preferred form of empirical analysis in the third chapter, “Normative Behaviourism,” which argues that we should give up mentalist imaginings about what people will choose in hypothetical conditions and see what they actually do choose politically. The chapter looks especially at cross-national data on insurrection and crime and argues that this data supports a broad package of social institutions described as “social-liberal-democracies” (185). These are familiar states of the Western European type, which marry popular sovereignty and individual rights to robust welfare protections. Unfortunately, the book’s discussion combines empirical evidence for all three legs of this triad together, which means that the chapter spends substantial time showing evidence that liberal democracies are more stable than other known arrangements—not a new or especially difficult claim to make. Indeed, in earlier chapters Floyd had documented the degree to which almost all positions in current political philosophy already accept the importance of both liberalism and democracy in a broad form (e.g., 90–92).
The chapter’s really interesting claim, then, is about the “social” leg of the triad, which gives pride of place to economic egalitarianism. Here Floyd argues that the evidence suggests that more equal societies are less prone to insurrection and, more importantly, less prone to crime. There is potentially a great deal to be said here about the range of economic institutions that exist within the states in the studies Floyd cites, and one expects that here, where the existing controversies about distribution in political philosophy are most intense, the book would examine the social science in detail, unpacking the methods used to study inequality and crime, considering competing explanations within the empirical literature, and so on. Unfortunately, the book does not do this. The set of institutions picked out as “social” in the relevant way is thus overly vague, given the broad variations within welfare state formations of Western Europe and elsewhere, their relationships to other aspects of liberal and democratic rights, and so on. About the only obvious intellectual position canvased in chapter 1 that is eliminated by the discussion of this chapter is Nozickean libertarianism, which is judged to be too dangerous even to the wealthy themselves to be attractive (229–30, 234–35; see also 273). The chapter thus does not make the strong case it intends given insufficient explication and discussion of the key evidence itself.
Despite the book’s frequent focus on defeating other positions rather than in articulating the details of its own, there is a great deal that is of interest and value in its conception of normative behaviourism. Most important is the claim that observed action is more revealing of human normative preferences than are untested intuitions or beliefs (20), such that we can learn a great deal from what people actually choose in social practice (cf. 241–44). Floyd’s research program is in its early stages (276), and there are reasons to expect that it will continue to develop in clarity and precision going forward. It may be that it will ultimately show the capacity to give targeted answers to otherwise indeterminate philosophical debates that the author hopes. My own sense is that normative behaviourism can at most provide an additional instrument to be used in conjunction with the traditional toolbox of political philosophy (cf. 276). But effective tools for this task are, as the book rightly argues, difficult to find and acquire. If this book succeeds in adding to our existing toolbox, it will have done great service to political philosophy as a profession. This is a strong reason to look forward to the future development of the book’s research program.