Ryan Muldoon

I probably would have given this book a 5/5 for being thought provoking if I'd read it before Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society. However, since Gaus's book integrated the most critical of these ideas, it was less impactful.

That said, this book, while dense, was fairly short and, in my opinion, captured what I considered the most critical takeaway from The Tyranny of the Ideal (although less formally): society is not homogenous and yet much of social contract theory (in particular, those of a Rawlsian bent), assumes that there is a normalized perspective from which we can reason about justice. That idealized perspective generally tries to take the perspective of a neutral citizen that does not identify with any particular life.

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, it's not really realistic. People are not actually capable of leaving their individual perspective behind. Instead, they just end up translating the views that they derive from their perspective into the language of the acceptable perspective. As this translation becomes more and more strained, the social contract derived from such a reasoning process becomes increasingly tenuous.

More critically, a common normalized perspective ends up being a least common denominator perspective which forces people to leave out information that may be critical to moral reasoning. Since we are not privileging one perspective, we don't know which of those left out bits bits are useful (race? gender? religion? blue/black vs white/gold dress?). However, it seems unlikely that just because we do not understand which bits are useful that none of them are.

So instead, we have to take as central that we cannot abstractly reason our way to justice. If we take that as a starting point, having a diversity of perspectives goes from being a liability to being the engine for generating social progress.

Because of our individual agency, we each deserve a voice in determining the social contract. Furthermore, those voices should be our true voices, not translated through some lens of an artificial common perspective -- this is what Muldoon calls the View from Everywhere. But in this world, not only will we disagree on the outcomes -- the details of the social contract -- we will disagree at a more fundamental level of our worldviews. We will not agree on the objects we are reasoning about. Muldoon gives the example of the debate over abortion: are we debating about a person, a potential person, tissue, etc.?

Since we cannot agree on what we are reasoning about, we can only agree about the outcomes: the rules and norms that we will abide by. Determining these norms becomes a negotiation about what is minimally acceptable to the perspectives involved in the negotiations. (The discussion of this negotiation is one of the areas where Gaus's more rigorous presentation is more valuable. Gaus frames minimal acceptability as being any rule which is better than not having any rule at all from the point of view of that perspective. E.g., in the abortion example, pro-life advocates might vastly prefer that abortions are illegal, but if they knew that they absolutely could not get they, they might prefer a rule that they are done by qualified medical practitioners over no rule at all.)

This is not a process we do once and then declare done. Instead, this is an iterative process where we identify the common ground, identify the areas of disagreement and negotiate on the norms and rules that apply, and then allow people to arrange their lives in any way that is compatible with those norms. These experiments in living become the basis of the next round of the social contract.

This iterative process of discovery is important for two reasons. First, we do not know what true justice looks like. This is something we must discover. Allowing people flexibility in domains where there is not consensus helps discover what does and does not work in practice. Note the important assumption here: justice works in practice with real humans living real lives. If a standard of justice doesn't work when applied to real humans, it is the standard that is wrong, not the humans who need fixing.

The second reason is that the right social contract may change as the perspectives that compose a society change. Muldoon hypothesizes that while there are likely factors that will emerge in all social contracts that integrate diverse views -- he has a strong suspicion about the importance of at least some freedom of expression -- he also hypothesizes that there is not a one-size-fits-all social contract. The best social contract for a society is one that derives from the mix of perspectives in that society.

Muldoon has some good discussion about the details of what this might look like. It's reasonably concrete for political philosophy -- which is pretty abstract by normal standards. The most important part of this is that we cannot assume that people will allow others a voice in determining the social contract because they believe that those with alternate perspectives have something to add to the conversation. (They might agree in principle, but in practice "those people" are the exception.) Instead, Muldoon appeals to the idea that diversity often yields opportunity for non-zero-sum economic interactions, and that it is this potential for gain that incentivizes people to allow those different than them to participate in society. (This was a good connection to the book I read just after -- Nonzero -- which frames it as being less willing to go to war to someone who is a valuable trading partner.) This economic tolerance might eventually yield a deeper belief in the equality of others -- but that's not necessary as long as each perspective gets a seat at the negotiating table.

That same discussion, however, reveals the main weakness of this model of the social contract. A negotiation model is only as powerful as the ability of negotiators to walk away with no deal. However, in today's interdependent society, opting out is not really a realistic option. So while, overall, I think that the idea of the social contract evolving is a critical part of dealing with a diverse, changing society, I think that the ideal of getting a social contract that is fully agreed upon by everyone who is constrained by it is unrealistic. But as a directional goal, I think it is a fine one.… (plus d'informations)