Egalitarian Blood and Skeptical Turnips

Abstract

Ackerman is surely correct that his conception of the basic problems of politics and political philosophy is grounded in assumptions familiar from most recognizably liberal thought. (1) Human beings are end-oriented, goal-seeking creatures whose actions and patterns of action cannot be understood or assessed apart from their conceptions of the good; (2a) conceptions of the good, and hence the goals of action, are irreducibly plural; (2b) there is a scarcity of the goods that human beings seek and of the resources necessary to effective pursuit of those goods; (3) hence there is certain to be disagreement and competition and very likely to be conflict among human beings; (4) disagreement, competition, and conflict neither can nor should be entirely eliminated, but conflict must be contained within nondestructive limits; (5) the primary if not the exclusive objective of politics is to arrange and order human interaction so that each individual has the greatest possible freedom to pursue goals compatible with effective constraints on destructive conflict; (6) the task of political philosophy is to achieve an understanding of human beings and their interactions that will contribute to this objective. In its generic form (or rather its apparent generic form), moreover, the (putatively) master notion in Ackerman's political philosophy, the notion of Neutral dialogue or constrained conversation, is also tolerably familiar. Recognizing, on any one of several grounds, the truth of 2a, and realizing that disagreement over conceptions of good is the source of the most destructive conflict (and/or the modes of stilling conflict most destructive of the freedom of some), in politics each of us must cease to claim the superiority of our conception of good and order our interactions by principles neutral among such conceptions. This selfdenying ordinance (historically first or at least most emphatically adopted in respect to religious beliefs) will itself prevent the most violent and freedomdestroying conflicts, thereby permitting individuals and groups of like-minded individuals a great increase in freedom to pursue their goals as they see them. Given its first systematic expression by a thinker, Thomas Hobbes, to whom Ackerman is much indebted, this understanding assigns to politics and the state the primary task of maintaining and enforcing the conversational constraints. In the most uncompromising versions of the understanding, perhaps best represented in our time by Michael Oakeshott's notion of a civil society or societas, the conversational constraint is extended so as entirely to exclude considerations of ends and purposes from politics and political interactions. A proper political association is an association exclusively in terms of subscription to what Oakeshott calls adverbial rules, rules that speak not at all to the substance and purpose