Table Of ContentPolitical 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
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For
Anne Marie Power
and
Joanna Fives
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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
