The Tyranny of the Ideal by Gerald Gaus

Author:Gerald Gaus [Gaus, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 3-6. The small world of an open society

Such an Open Society will not be characterized by a shared ideal. Through the interactions of its constituent “republican” communities it will be a forum of contestation, disagreement, and, sometimes, mutual incomprehension. That it will not share an ideal or even a rough roadmap to an approximate utopia does not, however, mean that its communities cannot come to agree on moral improvement, and point the way to more just social relations. When networks connect diverse perspectives, ideologies that seem entirely at odds can provide important inputs into each other’s searches, leading to common recognition of more just social worlds.

This may all appear a Pollyanna perspective on diversity. Why should various perspectives on justice, each committed to its own ideal of the just society, endorse the structure of the Open Society, which by its very nature precludes complete attainment of what each treasures—a collective life based on its ideal? Perhaps if we still shared the Enlightenment’s conviction that free inquiry in morality, as well as in science, will eventually lead to consensus on the truth, all perspectives might concur on the liberal framework of free inquiry. “Enlightenment philosophers,” John Passmore observed, were convinced that “mankind had in the seventeenth century lit upon a method of discovery [the scientific method], a method which would guarantee future progress.”77 Each field was awaiting its Newton: “in the eighteenth century there was a fairly wide consensus that what Newton had achieved in the region of physics could surely also be applied to the regions of ethics and politics.”78 And so, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted:

It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was its great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would replace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural peculiarities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places.79

Some cling to this Enlightenment faith that free inquiry will lead to moral consensus, but the history of morality in open societies exhibits a far more complex pattern: there has been both remarkable agreement about some improvements (e.g., the wrongness of racial and gender discrimination), together with ever-deepening disputes about the place of humans in the universe, the roles and natures of the sexes, the role of the state, the relative importance of liberty and equality, and indeed the very nature of morality itself. “Western Judeo-Christian society” has not been transformed into a new secular order, but has dissolved into a complex, global pattern of Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and secular orientations—and each of these refracts into a spectrum of versions. Thus Rawls’s core insight: the exercise of human reason under free institutions leads to disagreement.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.