Abstract
Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates—such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and political moralism and political realism—are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’, through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory.
Highlights
In recent years we have witnessed an intensified discussion in political philosophy about the usefulness of normative political theories
Our aim in this paper has been to contribute to the growing literature on feasibility by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory
We have suggested two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible—the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’—through which we have elucidated five aspects of relevance for determining proper feasibility constraints in an account
Summary
In recent years we have witnessed an intensified discussion in political philosophy about the usefulness of normative political theories. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in the debates between practiceindependence and practice-dependence, between ideal and non-ideal theory, and between political moralism and political realism are too rigid and underestimate the available feasibility space, i.e. the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible—the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’—through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. This requirement is captured by something along the lines of Nicholas Southwood’s ‘Ought-implies-feasible’ proviso:
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