Toward a Non-Ideal, Relational Methodology for Political Philosophy: Comments on Schwartzman'sChallenging Liberalism

Abstract

Lisa Schwartzman's Challenging Liberalism (2006) has a positive and a negative agenda. Schwartzman's positive agenda advocates two methods in political philosophy. First, political philosophy should start thinking from the injustices we encounter in our non-ideal, unjust world, and think about those problems from the perspective of those who are oppressed by that injustice. Call this non ideal standpoint methodology. Second, political philosophy should consider indi viduals in their social contexts, paying particular attention to the ways in which social practices construct group identities and place individuals in op pressive, hierarchical social relations in virtue of their group membership. Call this group relations methodology. Schwartzman's negative agenda criticizes liberalism for committing itself to two methods incompatible with the ones she advocates.' The first is individu alism: the theoretical representation of persons as individuals abstracted from their group identities and hence from the hierarchical social relations through which they interact with others. This is incompatible with group relations methodology. The second is abstraction: the construction of ideal conceptions of society, for purposes of deriving principles of justice and assessing the degree to which any given world is just, that attempt to transcend the details about how our current society works. This is incompatible with non-ideal methodol ogy. Her criticism of these two methods is epistemic: they do not offer effective guidance to identifying the injustices of our actual world. Individualism fails to do so because the principal injustices in our world are founded on unjust group based social hierarchies, and individualism fails to represent these hierarchies. Abstraction fails to do so because it unwittingly incorporates unjust features of