Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy, by David Estlund

Abstract

Over the past few decades, political philosophers have been entangled in a methodological debate over how theorizing about justice should proceed. Until recently, the dominant approach was ideal theory: theorizing about ideal or full social justice. But many have grown worried that ideal theory is practically irrelevant, telling us hardly anything about how to improve actual societies by meeting the various injustices we face. These self-described nonideal theorists have therefore called upon members of the discipline to shift their attention away from ideal theory, and toward nonideal theorizing about how to make existing societies more just. But ideal theorists resist this call, typically arguing that ideal theory enjoys a sort of methodological priority over nonideal theory. We need a conception of ideal justice, they claim, to serve either as a standard to approximate or as a long-term goal for reform. In his innovative and wide-ranging Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy, David Estlund challenges not only many recent criticisms of ideal theory, but also the very terms of the debate. Much of the literature has focused on the alleged priority of ideal theory—on whether, in particular, it provides a standard or goal that we must appeal to when doing nonideal theory. But Estlund concedes that ideal theory enjoys no such priority, and that ideal justice plays neither role: it is a fallacy to assume that approximating it makes things better, and it is foolish and even dangerous to treat it as a goal if realistically we will never realize it. Nevertheless, Estlund argues that ideal theory identifies principles of ideal or full social justice that are moral requirements genuinely applying to actual societies, even if such requirements are unrealistic in the strong sense that human nature precludes their realization. And he argues that ideal theorizing about these requirements is important, in part because understanding them helps us to figure out how to improve actual societies, but also because this understanding is non-instrumentally valuable.