Political Reason Also by A llyn Fives POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATES IN WELFARE ( 2008 ) Political Reason Morality and the Public Sphere Allyn F ives Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Political Science and Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway © Allyn Fives 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-23898-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-31601-4 ISBN 978-1-137-29162-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137291622 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 For Anne Marie Power and Joanna Fives This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction – Political Reason after the Enlightenment 1 2 Reason and Tradition 37 3 Reason and Faith 68 4 Agonism 94 5 Reasonableness 119 6 Civic Education for Democracy 142 7 Global Distributive Justice 160 8 Conclusions 183 Notes 188 Bibliography 189 Index 199 vii Preface The structure and content of the final version of this book are very different from what had been planned. An even more significant change occurred to the book’s main argument. The primary reason for this lies in a reappraisal of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work, namely his attempt to conduct political philosophy from within a specific ‘tradi- tion’, Aristotelian Thomism. The reassessment came about not so much because of a concern with MacIntyre’s Thomism, an aspect of his work many have either chosen to ignore or treat as reason enough to ignore MacIntyre’s arguments in total, but rather because of what came to be seen as fatal flaws in his, and indeed in any, attempt to conduct rational enquiry from within a tradition, whatever tradition that may be. I came to the conclusion that such a ‘historicist’ approach is deeply flawed as it creates irredeemable problems in regard to epistemology, ethics, and politics. In earlier versions of some of these chapters, I had argued that, taking away the troubling historicism, which was the cause of the concern, in particular, regarding relativism, it should be possible to build on MacIntyre’s work so as to provide an account of human flour- ishing that had universal application. Then there would be a basis for political reasoning in some notion of the human good that did not lead to relativism. However, I also came to see that, although it may be possible from within a moral and philosophical doctrine such as Aristotelian–Thomism broadly defined to defend such a universal conception of the human good, and Philippa Foot among others has tried to do this, morally speaking it was i nappropriate as a basis for political debate. It would be morally i nappropriate on the grounds that in politics we should expect to find, and we should accept when we do find, disagreement about such things as the best way to live, or the true purpose of human life, or the virtues that are expressions of our potential, and so on. But if we should not try to base political reasoning on some account of the human good held to be universally true, what then happens to the moral content of political reason? In addition, it also became clear that the problems MacIntyre could not overcome were not so dissimilar to problems that characterize the work of post-modernists, neo-Nietzscheans, and post-structuralists, who take the view that the certainty looked for in reason and morality viii Preface ix is continually undermined by power and difference. Indeed it seemed more and more to make sense to place MacIntyre in the same cate- gory as Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Mouffe, Laclau, and others who take a post-modern and post-structuralist stance. It was not that my earlier papers on MacIntyre did not criticize his historicism. What had changed was my coming to the conclusion that MacIntyre and post-modernists were open to the same criticism and for the reason that they were opposed to the same heritage in moral thought, namely the Enlightenment. While accepting that post-modernists baulk at MacIntyre’s stated inten- tion of finding rational and objective answers to moral questions, and that MacIntyre has unambiguously distanced himself from the immor- alism of Nietzsche and his followers with their rejection of conventional moral virtues, not least Christian virtues, nonetheless, what binds them together, and the reason both approaches are equally problematic, is their wholesale opposition to the Enlightenment. This book adopts the view that the Enlightenment is characterized by two commitments: 1. a commitment to rational justification, i.e. scepticism with respect to validity claims, in particular moral claims; and 2. a commitment to moral equality, i.e. the contention that all should be viewed as moral equals and that all are owed equal moral consid- eration, in particular when offering reasons to others in justifying our beliefs and actions. Such a statement needs some clarification, and hopefully that is what the chapters in this book provide. But briefly it is not assumed here that, for instance, if one has a strong sense of tradition, or strongly held religious beliefs, or takes a critical stance to the pervasiveness of power, then one cannot also be truly rational; nor is it assumed that if one is to be committed to moral equality one must also be a secularist or a liberal. Nonetheless, both MacIntyre and post-modernists clearly and repeatedly reject both the idea that moral issues can or should be settled by the force of the better argument as such, that is, by appeal to reason-as-such and morality-as-such, and the idea that, as others are our moral equals, then to justify moral conclusions we must offer reasons others can be expected to accept. So if the approach of MacIntyre is no less problematic than post-modernism, what direction should political philosophy take? Perhaps the direction taken in this book was simply determined by the way in which MacIntyre and post-modernists have been criticized, for