Conservatism: Analytically Reconsidered

Abstract

This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments in a language that is acceptable to and understandable by analytically trained philosophers. The contributions of this special issue show that conservatism can profitably be approached from the point of view of analytic philosophy. Many of them are indebted to Jerry Cohen’s (2012) seminal paper on conservative value, which develops a sophisticated justification of what Michael Oakeshott (1991) called the disposition to be conservative. In this vein, Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin contribute two important papers, by which they complete a ‘trilogy’ on conservatism, that is to say a series of papers that present three forms of conservatism: adjectival, practical, and nominal. While the mentioned authors dealt with adjectival conservatism in previous work (Brennan and Hamlin 2004), in their papers in this volume they analyze practical and nominal conservatism. Practical conservatism is an attitude involving an empirical claim about possible costs and risks of departure from a status quo that is interpreted as a convention-equilibrium. Such equilibria are highly difficult to plan and replicate, so that the process of change from the prevailing equilibrium to some different equilibrium that is desired though not yet established necessarily occasions significant transition costs. Hence, practical conservatism develops a status-quo argument against imprudent forms of change under circumstances of uncertainty or risk. Nominal conservatives hold specific values not recognized by others and they do so even under conditions of certainty. According to Brennan and Hamlin, these specific and substantive values attribute normative authority to an element of the status quo because it is an element of the status quo. More specifically, they argue that nominal conservatives attach particular value to things of positive basic value. The opposite does not apply. Conservatives do not attribute negative particular value to things of negative basic value, as this would make conservatism indistinguishable from radicalism. Equally, they do not, here and now, attribute positive particular value to things in the future. They just consider they might do so once they get there. In sum, this means that nominal conservatives either justify the status quo because they attribute a particular value to it or they necessarily need to remain silent.