Social Ideals and Social Reform

Abstract

What, if anything, does our conception of the ideally just society tell us about how we should improve our own? I argue, against most ideal theorists, that it tells us very little: it provides us neither with a benchmark for evaluating nonideal societies nor with a long-term target for reform. But if the ideal can’t guide us, then should political philosophers instead engage in problem solving—identifying present instances of injustice, diagnosing their causes, and prescribing targeted solutions—as some self-described nonideal theorists have recently suggested? While problem solving has its place, I argue that it is not enough: problem solving is a good way to identify short-term improvements in justice but not long-term ones. So how, then, should we theorize about long-term reform? I argue that we must supplement problem solving with an attempt to work out how to make our society more “progressive”: better at getting better, or more conducive to further improvements in general. I offer an account of progressiveness emphasizing experimentation, learning (epistemic feedback), and selection (practical feedback). And I begin to explore how we might improve the progressiveness of existing societies. Since, I suggest, one way to improve progressiveness is to shift the practice of political philosophy from a focus on the ideal society to a focus on problem solving and progressiveness, I conclude by arguing that we ought to make this shift not only so that we can better understand justice, but also so that we can better pursue it.