Jacob Barrett

This Element provides an opinionated survey of the ideal and non-ideal theory debate in political philosophy. It adopts a minimal conception of ideal theory as “theorizing that aims to characterize ideal or perfect justice” and then investigates four major questions. First, does ideal theory provide a benchmark for evaluating what is more just than what? Second, does it provide a target for long-term reform? Third, does it provide a gauge of appropriate or permissible responses to injustice? Fourth, to what extent should we do ideal theory? The core message is that ideal theory is not uniquely or especially well suited to serving these roles, and deserves no pride of place in the discipline. Nevertheless, ideal theory is somewhat valuable and it should remain one active research program among many. Connections to related debates beyond political philosophy are briefly explored. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Philanthropy has an uneasy relationship with democracy. It distributes decision‐making power plutocratically, in proportion to wealth. It allows unelected, unaccountable, and often untrustworthy individuals to shape social outcomes. And it does so in domains where democracy should be authoritative. Yet, at the same time, philanthropy does much good, and hardly anyone would claim we should eliminate it altogether. So how can we make philanthropy consistent with democracy? In this article, I propose a new answer to this question. I argue that while democratic critics are right to worry about much current philanthropy, there is an important class of philanthropy that is not only highly beneficial, but that also, so far from undermining or conflicting with democracy, can complement or even enhance it. I call this “philanthropy for the disenfranchised,” and argue that we can resolve the tension between philanthropy and democracy by encouraging this sort of philanthropy while discouraging forms of philanthropic abuse and folly. I also outline a program for social reform that involves differentiating the institutions surrounding philanthropy to make them better perform this role, which I contrast with the more familiar programs of democratization and effective altruism.

There is a resurgence of interest in social experimentation as a means of promoting social progress, including progress in justice. In this chapter, we first advance an argument in favor of social experimentation drawing on its capacity to resolve uncertainty both about how to achieve socially valuable goals and about which goals are worth pursuing. We then identify four challenges: the information problem (experiments may not yield relevant information), the selection bias problem (potentially informative experiments may not be undertaken), the uptake problem (the information generated by experiments may not be put to good use), and the risk problem (experiments may carry unacceptable risks). Finally, we argue that certain injustices can exacerbate all four problems, rendering social experimentation a less reliable path to progress, and, in cases of severe injustice, perhaps even a regressive force. The upshot is not that we should abandon social experimentation, but that we should temper our expectations and focus on constructing conditions under which experimentation is more likely to be progressive. Specifically, to render social experimentation a more reliable engine for social progress of any sort, we must remedy or mitigate the injustices that diminish its value.

The Diversity Trumps Ability theorem suggests that, under certain conditions, more diverse groups outperform groups of more individually competent members. Despite initial excitement about the theorem’s application to democratic decision-making, critics have largely dismissed it as irrelevant to real-world democracies. I argue that this dismissal is unwarranted. After informally reconstructing the theorem, I explain that while it fails to literally apply in realistic cases, we can extract an important “baton-passing” mechanism from it that both employs a wider range of diversity and activates in more contexts than the theorem itself suggests. Most notably, it applies not only in problem-solving contexts where we share values, but also in bargaining contexts where we don’t. And it can be given a dynamic interpretation that helps explain iterative improvement over time. Diversity doesn't really trump ability, but understanding when diversity facilitates baton-passing—and when it doesn’t—can illuminate both democratic successes and democratic failures.

A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. To frame my discussion, I argue, first, that justice does not in principle override beneficence, and second, that justice does not even typically outweigh beneficence, since, in institutional contexts, the stakes of beneficence are often extremely high. While defenders of the priority of justice have various responses available to them, a running theme is that no such response challenges the core methodological point that political philosophy should abandon its preoccupation with justice and begin to pay considerably more attention to social beneficence—that is, to beneficence understood as a virtue of social institutions.

According to the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare, something is good for me to the extent that I desire it. This theory faces the “scope problem”: many of the things I desire, intuitively, lie beyond the scope of my welfare. Here, I argue that a simple solution to this problem is available. First, I suggest that it is a general feature of desires that they can differ not only in their objects but also in their “targets,” or for the sake of whom one has the desire. For example, I can desire that my child win an award either for their sake or for my own sake. Second, I show that we can use this idea to solve the scope problem by holding that something is good for me to the extent that I desire it for my own sake. Despite first appearances, this solution is not ad hoc, incomplete, or circular.

Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both individually and politically. So, what should we do? Moral uncertainty theorists provide a theory of what individuals should do when they are uncertain about morality. Public reason liberals provide a theory of how societies should deal with reasonable disagreements about morality. They defend the public justification principle: state action is permissible only if it can be justified to all reasonable people. In this article, we bring these two approaches together. Specifically, we investigate whether considerations of moral uncertainty support public reason liberalism: given moral uncertainty, should we favor public justification? We argue that while moral uncertainty theory cannot vindicate an exceptionless public justification principle, it supports adopting public justification as a pro tanto principle – albeit one that can be overridden when the moral stakes are high. It also provides new answers to some intramural debates among public reason liberals and new responses to some common objections.

A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. To frame my discussion, I argue, first, that justice doesn’t in principle override beneficence, and second, that justice doesn’t typically outweigh beneficence, since, in institutional contexts, the stakes of beneficence are often extremely high. While there are various ways one might resist this argument, none challenge the core methodological point that political philosophy should abandon its preoccupation with justice and begin to pay considerably more attention to social beneficence—that is, to beneficence understood as a virtue of social institutions. Along the way, I also highlight areas where focusing on social beneficence would lead political philosophers in new and fruitful directions, and where normative ethicists focused on personal beneficence might scale up their thinking to the institutional case. GPI Working Paper No. 11-2022.

Ideology critics believe that many bad social practices persist because of ideology, and that critiquing ideology is an effective way to promote social reform. Skeptics draw on game theory to argue that the persistence of such practices is better explained by collective action problems, and that ideology critique is causally inefficacious. In this paper, I reconcile these camps. I show that while game theory can help us identify contexts where ideology critique makes no difference, it also reveals causal mechanisms by which ideology critique can have a significant effect. I then consider some objections and directions for further research.

We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field by exploring the case for, and the implications of, ‘institutional longtermism’: the view that, when evaluating institutions, we should give significant weight to their very long-term effects. We begin by arguing that the standard case for longtermism may be more robust when applied to institutions than to individual actions or policies, both because institutions have large, broad, and long-term effects, and because institutional longtermism can plausibly sidestep various objections to individual longtermism. We then address points of contact between longtermism and some central values of mainstream political philosophy, focusing on justice, equality, freedom, legitimacy, and democracy. While each value initially seems to conflict with institutional longtermism, we find that these conflicts are less clear-cut upon closer inspection, and that some political values might even provide independent support for institutional longtermism. We end with a grab bag of related questions that we lack space to explore here.

The animal agriculture industry causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Many ethical vegans argue that we therefore have an obligation to abstain from animal products in order to reduce this suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s dietary choices are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. In this paper, we criticize common replies to this challenge and develop an alternative argument for ethical veganism. Specifically, we argue that individuals should abstain from animal products because vegans, as a group, successfully reduce animal suffering, and individuals are obligated to participate in, rather than free ride on, this collective endeavor. Or, at the very least, individuals have strong reasons to purchase fewer inhumanely raised animal products—even if they are not obligated to go vegan per se.

Recent years have seen a flurry of interest in longtermism: roughly, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. Familiar calls to take a long-term view towards global problems such as climate change and poverty typically urge us to plan on a scale of decades or perhaps a century. By contrast, longtermism asks us to take seriously the idea that what we should do right now may depend on the effects of our actions thousands or even millions of years hence. This volume brings together leading scholars to discuss four sets of overlapping questions raised by longtermism. First, should we accept some version of longtermism? Second, to what extent can we predict and control the far future? Third, which ethical priorities are recommended by longtermism, and how revisionary are they? Finally, what implications would longtermism have for the design or reform of social, political, and legal institutions? Contributors include both supporters and critics of longtermism, and are drawn from a range of disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, law, political science, and mathematics, and from private industry.

Ideal theorists aim to describe the ideally just society. Problem solvers aim to identify concrete changes to actual societies that would make them more just. The relation between these two sorts of theorizing is highly contested. According to the benchmark view, ideal theory is prior to problem solving because a conception of the ideally just society serves as an indispensable benchmark for evaluating societies in terms of how far they deviate from it. In this paper, I clarify the benchmark view, argue that existing criticisms of it are unsuccessful, and develop a novel redundancy objection to the benchmark view and the claim of priority it allegedly entails. I then consider the extent to which ideal theory might facilitate problem solving without being prior to it and argue that it can only play a modest role in this regard. The upshot is that ideal theory is neither required for nor especially relevant to problem solving—but it is not completely irrelevant either. It facilitates problem solving to some limited degree, but no more, say, than theorizing about dystopia.

In previous work, I have argued that subjectivists about well-being must turn from a preference-satisfaction to a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being in order to avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. In a recent paper, Van der Deijl and Brouwer agree, but object that no version of the desire-satisfaction theory can provide a plausible account of how an individual's degree of well-being depends on the satisfaction or frustration of their various desires, at least in cases involving the gain or loss of desires. So subjectivists can avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons only by adopting a substantively implausible view. In this reply, I defend subjectivism by arguing that the totalist desire-satisfaction theory avoids Van der Deijl and Brouwer's objections, and briefly suggest that it may also be able to handle the problem of adaptive desires. I conclude that subjectivists should endorse the totalist desire-satisfaction theory.

In his classic “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson introduces us to an optimist who believes that our moral responsibility practices are justified by their beneficial consequences. Although many see Strawson as a staunch critic of this consequentialist position, his stated view is only that there is a gap in the optimist’s story where the reactive attitudes should be. In this paper, I fill in the gap. I show how optimism can be suitably modified to reflect an appreciation of the reactive attitudes. And I argue that the ensuing position—on which our moral responsibility practices, taken as a whole, are justified both by their regulation of behavior and by their enabling of interpersonal relationships—provides us not only with a plausible justification of our moral responsibility practices, but also with a fruitful framework for evaluating potential reforms.

Hobbes believed that the state of nature would be a war of all against all. Locke denied this, but acknowledged that in the absence of government, peace is insecure. In this paper, I analyse both accounts of the state of nature through the lens of classical and experimental game theory, drawing especially on evidence concerning the effects of punishment in public goods games. My analysis suggests that we need government not to keep wicked or relentlessly self-interested individuals in line, but rather to maintain peace among those who disagree about morality.

Our world is complex—it is composed of many interacting parts—and this complexity poses a serious difficulty for theorists of social reform. On the one hand, we cannot merely work out ways of ameliorating immediate problems of injustice, because the solutions we generate may interact to set back the achievement of overall long-term justice. On the other, we cannot supplement such problem solving with theorizing about how to make progress towards a long-term goal of ideal justice, because the very interactions that render problem solving unsatisfactory raise insurmountable epistemic difficulties for this latter approach. To accommodate complexity, we must therefore give up on ideal theory, and instead supplement problem solving with a new sort of theorizing that aims to work out how to make our institutional arrangements more progressive: more conducive to further improvements in general, though not necessarily to the achievement of any antecedently specified goal. More concretely, we must identify ways of improving our capacity to flexibly experiment with many promising solutions to problems as they arise, to select for those solutions that prove successful while eliminating those that do not, and to learn from both our successes and our inevitable failures.

According to the Maximin principle of distributive justice, one outcome is more just than another if the worst off individual in the first outcome is better off than the worst off individual in the second. This is often interpreted as a highly egalitarian principle, and, more specifically, as a highly egalitarian way of balancing a concern with equality against a concern with efficiency. But this interpretation faces a challenge: why should a concern with efficiency and equality lead us to a concern only for the very worst off? Egalitarian proponents of Maximin tend to meet this challenge by showing that it possible to formally derive Maximin from surprisingly weak conditions relating efficiency and equality to justice. But in this paper, I argue that this reply fails. The issue is not that the proofs are invalid, but instead that every existing proof of Maximin transforms into an impossibility result as soon as we realize that any reasonable conception of equality must satisfy a certain formal property. The upshot is that even if it is possible to defend Maximin on other grounds, there is no known way to defend it on the grounds that it balances a concern with equality against a concern for efficiency. Further, more general implications of this result for egalitarian theories of distributive justice are also explored.