Why Political Philosophy? - Part 3

I’ve been rather busy lately with my move to Ohio and have had neither the time nor the intellectual energy to write the final episode of this series on the need for political philosophy. But Friday, in an attempt to energize my rather sluggish intellect, I picked up a book I’ve been waiting to begin for quite some time, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics by Douglass Rasmussen and Douglass Den Uyl. In the preface of this book, I ran across the following passage, which perfectly expresses the point I had wished to make in this post:

Unlike the dominant philosophical fashions of the last century, we do not regard it a philosophical virtue to advance arguments in ethics and political philosophy as if the existence of deeper commitments can be denied, ignored, or at least not called to mind. Such commitments are crucial to the interpretive context of arguments in ethics and political philosophy, and if they are not made explicit, then they may be supplied by others, often with disastrous results for the intelligibility of these arguments. And if those commitments are not supplied, political philosophy will simply rest on an irreconcilable intuitionism.

The problem Rasmussen and Den Uyl point out is simple: people make deeper assumptions and if we don’t bring those assumptions to the surface, then we won’t be able to really understand what others are saying. Rasmussen and Den Uyl, of course, are working one level deeper than we have been. Whereas we’ve been talking about grounding politics in ethics and political philosophy, they are talking about grounding ethics and political philosophy in metaphysics and epistemology. But the same principle holds: if we don’t expose our underlying assumptions about deeper questions, we will be unable to communicate with people who don’t share our assumptions.

And that is the simple point I had intended to make in the final post of this series: avoiding grounding politics in more serious political philosophy produces incoherent discourse, because nearly everyone makes philosophical assumptions that others do not share. But Rasmussen and Den Uyl also highlight a fact that has other implications for our discussion of the merits of political philosophy. They argue that trying to do ethics and political philosophy without attention to deeper commitments to metaphysics and epistemology leaves us with “an irreconcilable intuitionism.” It is this “irreconcilable intuitionism,” it seems to me, that worries the sort of people whose concerns prompted this series of posts. The solution to which Rasmussen and Den Uyl point us, however, is the opposite to which we might naturally gravitate. They do not suggest that we avoid grounding our political claims in ethics and political philosophy because those things are nothing but a bunch of “irreconcilable intuitionism.” Rather, they suggest we ground our ethics and political philosophy on deeper commitments so that they are not a bunch of irreconcilable intuitionism.

This solution, of course, leads us to harder, more complicated questions. But the path of philosophy is always the path to deeper and harder questions. It is not an easy path, but it is one we must take, if we are to answer difficult questions about human existence. Questions about politics are among the most difficult questions about how to live in a human society, and it should be no surprise that attempting to answer such questions leads us to ask deeper and deeper questions about human life and ultimately about the universe human beings inhabit. I don’t expect you to have exhaustive answers to all of these deeper questions. I certainly don’t. But I refuse to pretend that refusing to ask them is desirable or wise.