Kaveh Pourvand

This paper develops an interpretation of political realism centred on strategic rationality. It contends that political agents have instrumental reason to anticipate how their rivals will respond to their decisions. A strategic focus has various payoffs for realists. First, strategic rationality is superior to the Hobbesian desire for peace, which is the instrumental norm already prevalent among realists. Second, strategic rationality reveals how a realist theory can be centrally concerned with feasibility while remaining distinct from non-ideal theory. Third, strategic dynamics lay the basis for a distinctively realist account of moral progress.

It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society.