I’m sorry but I found this post very unclear throughout, so I have questions about almost every sentence. No expectation that you respond to all of them, obviously, but here goes:

o Why/who are the self-described philosophers who are really poets? What do you mean by that?
o The ‘ability to absorb counterexamples’? If ‘absorb’ means accommodate/explain, then it begins to sound like unfalsifiability. Yet you say philosophical claims should be capable of being verified or falsified. Do you mean empirically? If so, it seems very implausible.
o Why are political philosophy and moral philosophy two sides of the same coin?
o Why are lives ‘incommensurable’, rather than of equal worth? What does that have to do with the justification of ‘telling somebody what to want to do’?
o When you talk about being volunteers rather than conscripts in the army of virtue (who is the philosopher you admire, by the way?), it sounds like you’re talking about the ‘argument from autonomy’: the worry that if there are objective moral laws, truths or values, that compromises our autonomy somehow. That argument tends to be used in favour of constructivism. Is that what you’re defending? In any case, I’ve never felt the argument to have any force. Why should we be moved by it? And I completely fail to see where the comment about liberty fits in. We may agree that it is usually unacceptable to coerce others, but also believe that there are objective moral facts – including the fact that coercion is prima facie wrong – and that these facts pose no threat to autonomy.
o You seem to conflate the question of whether rationality is normative (to which the usual and, I think, correct answer is ‘yes’) with the question of the importance rationality plays in our lives. I don’t see the identity or even the connection between these.
o Justice: it seems true that a plausible theory of justice would have to present justice as something that is in everyone’s (or at least most people’s) best interests, but who denies that? This doesn’t tell us at all what justice is, or why it is the right thing to concentrate on when doing political philosophy.
o How are Hayek and Dworkin successful in influencing institutions? I’d be interested to know more about that.
o Then you talk about the need for political philosophy to be practically engaged/useful. But you don’t say anything about how, or about Geras and why he does it well.
o Given the difficulty I’m having in understanding you, it doesn’t help when you say that you ‘won’t name names’, but that many left-wing political commentators just use philosophy to prop up their own personal inclinations. Who? In what way? And what about the ‘unpalatable cynicism and contempt for society, the West, and the politically uninterested’? This is a familiar accusation from the right, but I’ve never encountered anything that substantiates it.
o You say that as a liberal, you ‘naturally inclined to the rational’. What does this mean, other than that you think liberalism is right and true?
o What is so good about philosophy being an ally to those in power? On the contrary, if that’s true, it seems like a good reason to be suspicious of it.

I don’t like to comment on things I’ve written, as it seems more than my fair use of space. So I won’t say more after this, and hope others might be interested enough to talk. Suffice it to say that the mistake you’ve made in reading this, was clear in your first statement: I think by reading it ‘sentence for sentence’, you’re missing the forest of the argument, ’cause of the trees of each word. Some charity of interpretation should hopefully give you a clearer understanding — I didn’t think it was quite as opaque as you make out.
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To pre-empt some of what will no doubt be said (including a charge of absolutism, no doubt), I’ll just give a little background on what I mean when I speak of philosophy:
Philosophy can only speak of what we can know. Is this a mere opinion? Well, even if it is, is it really that controversial? There are things philosophy/logic can’t tell us (just as there are things science or maths can’t). Those things aren’t unimportant; they are just beyond, and above, reduction.
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This notion is so often seen as a tyrannical and arbitrary ‘exclusion zone’, set up by an arrogant school of empiricists. But it keeps logicians from straying into questions that are better considered through human psyche, social conscience, feeling and experience. It keeps philosophers from becoming charlatans and Pied Pipers. Far from a tyranny, it’s a tolerant and humble acknowledgement of the limits of objectivity.
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That ‘feeling’, mystical side of being human is disfigured by the absolutism inherent in concepts such as Truth. The ‘mystical’, the aesthetic, is beautiful without pretending you’ve nailed anything. It’s about getting another to grasp some quality of being human, and enjoying the creative complexities of the intellect. I’ve always felt that philosophy only tidies up epistemic confusions, leaving us a clean slate for the fun stuff – art, music, literature and conscience.

I notice this was posted under ‘Philosophy’ – presumably because the ‘Bollocks’ category is full?

I really don’t know where to begin; from the claim that often philosophers are poets (ridiculously false – just pick up a journal), to the author concluding that his liberalism is evidence of his natural inclination to the rational (as opposed to all those people who take their political convictions as evidence for their irrationality?), this article is peppered with falsehoods, misunderstandings and old-fashioned drivel. But the author has every right to his opinions, and to seeking avenues for their publication. What I object to is that this article is filed under ‘Philosophy’.

I’m all for opening philosophy up to the public, but the way to do it is by both asking actual philosophers to write for the public, and asking the public who are interested to make an effort to engage with highly complex and difficult arguments. The way to increase the distance between the public and philosophy is to dress up any old bunch of opinions as a serious philosophical meditation. I can only hope that the founders of this blog who are trained philosophers had nothing to do with its publication under the label ‘Philosophy’. The internet is full of schlock christened philosophy by their authors; it’s a sorry state when usually well-informed blogs legitimise that vanity.

Steven,
This article isn’t an introduction to philosophy, or an outline of a particular ‘philosophy’ (900 words isn’t enough to do that). It’s a suggestion about a role for philosophy in politics. I presume that may be why it’s filed under ‘philosophy’. That’s sort of what it’s opining about. The idea that a suggestion could be “flase” (as opposed to, say, “subject to objections”) seems unintelligble to me. Also, I find it strange that you deny that poets who think they are philosophers aren’t really that. This is a primarily political blog, and I’m not going to write philosophical treatises on their server. But I’ll discuss my understandings and opinions about such things. Nonetheless, thank you for acknowledging my right to an opinion.

The reason it’s filed under philosophy is because it’s about philosophy. Just as posts about Barack Obama are filed under Obama. That doesn’t mean he wrote them :p

First off, I’d have to say I agree with the previous commentators in finding this post unclear, ill-written and full of unsubstantiated opinion dressed up as philosophical argument. But I’d like to concentrate on just one of the claims expressed early on in the article:

‘even people who understand themselves to be philosophers are often poets more than anything else.’

Implicit in this is the idea that poets do not, and cannot, claim to be saying anything that has the same value as the statements made by philosophers. Poetry, according to this view, is an aesthetic nicety with no capacity to offer profound philosophical insight; so for a person to be a poet rather than ‘anything else’ is for them to produce something that’s admittedly rather pretty, but that doesn’t have the same relevance to human society and thought as a philosophical text.

There are so many problems with this that it’s hard to know where to begin. If what poets produce is inherently more hermetic and less relevant to effecting change on political structures than philosophy, why did Plato have the poets banished outside the republic and the philosophers in? Why are some of the earliest texts that deal with human existence, society and morality (Homer, the Rgveda, etc.) written in poetical form? Or if the idea is that in modern societies poetry has no societal or philosophical role, I’d like to see some argument for this. Some of the most radical and explicitly philosophical work on the structures of language and their effect on human thought and discourse has been accomplished through the medium of poetry. It’s not an accident that Wittgenstein supported Georg Trakl financially and visited him on his deathbed; it’s not an accident that Paul Celan’s constant poetic investigations into the meanings created by language were primarily motivated by the murder of his family in the death camps, or that his poem ‘Death Fugue’ had a huge effect on postwar German thought; nor is it coincidental that Pablo Neruda was a senator in the Allende government and dedicated ten years of his life to producing a 1000+ page poem dealing with the political history of latin america (the ‘canto general’).

I could go on. It’s not that Tendai’s position is necessarily wrong, I’d just like to see some evidence for his claims. Sure, you can argue that philosophy has more of an effect than poetry has on public policy, political thinking etc., or vice versa. The truth is that both are minority pursuits whose influence pales in comparison to that of a single lobbyist group with enough cash and connections.

I enjoyed the article. The fact that it begged more questions – the fact that it has evoked so many comments – indicates that it was a genuine point of view of someone attempting to discover and come to terms with philosophy, rather than some boring attempt to show off without any personality coming through. I find philosophy is appropriate to everything, from the personal, through the political and, for some, it even has relevance to the spiritual. Philosophy is for everyone and, just as there are so many interpretations of what it is, so there are many different approaches to discussing it. I find the western analytical tradition pretty dull and enjoy the continental style for its flair. Philosophy is not about answers or truth, but a journey of discovery.

OK, I’d have preferred to not say anything, but the incredible hostility with which these views were greeted, makes it hard not to answer the calls for clarification.
1) The article is not *a* philosophy, and it’s not even a summary of political philosophy — it merely takes a paricular perspective on the usefulness of philosophy in politics. It’s talking ABOUT philosphy, not proposing one. Surely it’s unreasonable in the extreme to have a thesis-worth of footnotes in a 900 word blog article? The idea that I’m dressing up opinions as philosophy is just not borne out by the limited claims of the article. I said right at the beginning, “let me make my starting assumptions clear”, thereby at once acknowledging that I do HAVE starting assumptions, and am not speaking God-Truth.
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2) Saying that I dismiss poetry’s role in human understanding is a particularly perplexing criticism, considering how I said above that there’s a vast chunk of intellectual activity that IS useful, but just isn’t susceptible to logic — and that we don’t need to disfigure it by over-extending the capabilities of either logic, or poetry/art. I clearly say this in one of the responses.
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3) There is also a view that’s implicit here that if you have favourite philosophers, ideas, or preferred starting points, you’re arrogantly claiming a monopoly on Truth. Could we not attack the argument on its own terms, rather than saying “well you’re a [whatever-ist] anyway, so these claims aren’t even worth reading”? One can discuss theology without a belief in God.
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4) There is only so much you can say in 900 words, which is why I have declared my assumptions honestly, and focussed on very specific things. To include the whole philosophical canon here is impractical, just as it’s unreasonable to make your first objection the fact that “you missed some texts there”. Of course I did, but that’s because I had no intention of drawing any attention to them to make my particular points. And speaking of which, I’m not sure why philosophy is seen, here, as being a long list of texts and ‘schools’, rather than a long tradition of inquiry.
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5) The idea that this whole opinion fails because lobbyists are more influential seems to be walking off in a direction that the article never intended to look at: I never promoted philosophers over lobbyists I just wasn’t talking about lobbyists. At any rate, I disagree that because philosophy’s a minority pursuit, it’s irrelevant. It’s well-known how influential Hayek and Friedman were on Thatcher, for instance. The whole point of this article is to consider some of the ways in which philosophy might be useful (or made more useful) to politics, not to list how many politicians I know did something ’cause Witggenstein said it.

The “incredible hostility” you generated means that you are doing something right, so 10/10 for your writing skills. As for the rejection of philosophy as poetry – has no-one read Plato’s Symposium? Totally agree with you on your point about philosophy being a long tradition of enquiry (for everyone) rather than something that ‘belongs’ to texts and ‘schools’. Well done, Socrates.

Tendai:

I’m sorry if it came across as incredibly hostile; that wasn’t my intention – in any case, what hostility there may be is directed solely at the arguments and is not at all personal.

‘Saying that I dismiss poetry’s role in human understanding is a particularly perplexing criticism, considering how I said above that there’s a vast chunk of intellectual activity that IS useful, but just isn’t susceptible to logic — and that we don’t need to disfigure it by over-extending the capabilities of either logic, or poetry/art.’

Fair point in a way, but my point wasn’t that you thought poetry was totally useless; it was more that the assumption that philosophy (or logic) has a particularly special role to play, and poetry/art a totally separate role, and that neither should be disfigured by ‘over-extension’ is one that I find worrying; it just seems to impose highly questionsable limits on what can be considered philosophically important.

Also, it’s not that I don’t get that your article is 900 words long and as such you have to deal with things concisely – I appreciate that’s a bloody difficult thing to do, and I also see that your some of your starting assumptions are explicitly stated. What worries me is that there are a lot of assumptions made that are just taken as being generally sound without it being clear that they’re just opinions.

‘The idea that this whole opinion fails because lobbyists are more influential seems to be walking off in a direction that the article never intended to look at: I never promoted philosophers over lobbyists I just wasn’t talking about lobbyists’

Again, sorry if I was unclear; that point wasn’t really meant as a criticism of the post per se – it’s more that I find the fact that philosophy doesn’t have more influence on politics very depressing, and I wanted to be clear that I wasn’t saying I really thought poetry had much of an effect on politics either. I’m aware of Hayek and Friedman’s influence on Thatcher, but that doesn’t prove that philosophy in general influences public policy, just that, as you say, philosophy is useful to those in power.

‘not to list how many politicians I know did something ’cause Witggenstein said it’

Don’t understand this, but if we’re talking about hostility it seems like a good example.

Anyway, I’ll make this my last post as I’ve probably occupied a fair bit of space, and other people might want to comment.

The point I make about logic vs poetry is a purely methodological one: in terms of clarifying and testing validity, logic can be used in a way that poetry can’t, and vice versa — not because poetry’s philosophically useless, but because it just doesn’t enable that kind of reductive analysis. The one is not more important than the other, they just do things differently. Testing that an argument follows, is a job logic’s good at. Testing that a premise is true/acceptable is somethng both logic and ‘poetic’ methods can do. So it was not a ‘hierarchy’ of importance I was considering, but a separation of competency. I didn’t think that ‘hierarchical’ view was the only possible way my words could have been interpreted — but again, what’s clear in one’s own mind doesn’t always come across on paper (itself the sort of problem logic can assist in mitigating).
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The reason why I’ve not put “[opinion!]” next to every sentence, is that I make the generous assumption of readers, that they are familiar with the arguments supporting the underlying opinions. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to patronise you with logical proofs for everything I said. And because this is a political blog, that sort of “jargony” detail seemed inappropriate for the medium (Steven, I am trained in formal logic, and am taking legal and political philosophy this year, by the way; but that’s not really a fun way to talk to normal people). I take it for granted that most writing has some basic opinions underlying it, implicit or explicit. The question is whether they are so contentious that they really damage the argument. Which is why I didn’t think Lorna’s chopping up of each statement was a useful or relevant way of following the concerns *I* wanted to raise. The fact that there are indeed opinions in this piece (mine as well as other writers’)must surely be so obvious we needn’t signpost each of them?
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I concluded my response to you by saying “[my purpose wasn't to make a list of politicians who made policy because of Wittgenstein's influence]“. That wasn’t hostility, I was just disowning the idea that I was making such a grand sort of claim in this piece.

Ok – I still disagree with a lot of things there, but there’s probably nothing to be gained by me going on about it. If what I thought was hostility wasn’t, fine, no worries.

Tendai

I’ve not come upon your stuff before. It may be that you’re a new voice on TTE, or I’ve simply missed you’ either way, welcome to my bit of the blogosphere.

I do think some of the comments above are a but ungracious. You’re trying to set out why philosophy is important to contemporary politics in less than 1,000 words and to an non-specialist blog audience, so of course there are going to be gaps; and an assumed knowledge is what makes the bloposphere tick, and why as a blog reader am happy to take on board what you say and assume the gaps. Others appear reluctant to do so.

On the substantive argument in your OP, I’ll pick up on your view that:

‘The weakest attempts to persuade on those lines make reference to such vague and made-up things as “duty”. I’m not being flippant in calling duties “made up”, but I’m drawing attention to the problem of treating what are essentially social fictions, as things that were ‘read of universe’.’

To claim that a philosophical approach is invalid if it depends on some kind of ontology of the ethical i.e. essential duty is to dismiss, for example, Confusianism and the primary cocept of the ‘dao’ as a philosophical concept (and it’s worth noting the influence of the early translations of Confucius on 18th century englightenment thought). While Western philosophy, and the political philosophy borne of it, may well grounded in the question of ‘what is reality?’, there is another way of going about things.

That’s not as esoteric as it might seems, as it equates woth the modern political science structure/agency dilemma/dialectic.

What I’m trying to get at is that simply because people may start from the point of the ethical (Kant) rather than the analytical (Marx) doesn’t mean that they end up in a different place, or that the a philosophy based on an anmalysis of ‘what is reality?’ is any less or more powerful or useful for modern times than one based on ‘how should I live?’. Intelligent christians/muslims can be good Marxists.

Hi Paul,
A measured response, with explicit, and reasoned objections. Glad we’re addressing the concerns raised. One of the reasons I excluded Eastern philosophy and ontology was not because I think it’s an invalid tradition, but because I consider politics to be a form of practical and social reasoning in the first place. There is a place for ontology, but much of the work ontology purports to do on practical or normative questions either faces the is-ought problem quite quickly, or isn’t work that can’t be done by simpler tools. So I’m opting for an Occam’s Razor approach here. I am concerned that ontologies have the inherent difficulty of being so fluid (and even personal) that, without using some fairly advanced logic, it becomes difficut to even represent them, much less tell others to share them. Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” gives some indication of where I’m headed here (yes, Lorna and others, it’s ‘just his opinion’ but it’s a good argument, and it isn’t asking too much to address it before ignoring it).
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In addition, I specifically wanted to avoid referring to ontology because that’s the sort of thing that makes people think “what planet’s he on?” when philosophers speak, even though it’s reasonably understood within the community. And for philosophers to be useful in politics, it may be wondered if they even need to go that far in looking at questions of social organisation. When I spoke of “reading off the universe”, I was raising these problems of knowable-ness that ontology runs into, rather than quetioning it’s part in philosophy.

There’s nothing unclear about this article, in fact it’s a model of clear writing: says we could spend forever bickering about what political beliefs to have, everyone has different priorities, cant measure how important different things are to different people, so let’s not bother with that anymore. Therefore political philosophy would be more useful if it focussed on justice. How’s this ‘difficult to understand’? And Lorna how the hell did you unilaterally decide that “the correct answer” on rationality is that it is normative? It isn’t on it’s own reason-giving — and that’s philosophy 101. Your lit. crit like analysis is utterly silly. You clearly don’t even know the difference between a bare opinion and an argument.

Steven, you’re a cunt and a troll, nothing in this article deserved the personal abuse you gave the author. I could wonder how far some of his claims are true, as I could with all arguments, but to say it’s ‘bollocks’ without more, is just sophomoric. The problem is half of you don’t know the first thing about philosophy other than what’s on your reading lists. At least the writer’s clearly conversant with the concepts and debates of contemporary political philosophy.

Tendai

Yes indeed. The fact that we don’t necessarily need to go back to the deeper ontological musings of some of Western philosophy (and indeed in the ancient Indian), but can start from the point of th ethical, as expressed in universalist rights/duties (the Kantin first principles, for example), was what I was trying to get at.

You simply said it a lot more clearly than I did in your response to me (and the point about blog comments on proper blogs like TTE and TCF, where I write, is that the comments streams are as important as the OPs because they allow for proper, though often robust exploration of the OPs and this is often at much greater length than the OP itself, which simply becomes a debate opener).

I actually think to see the wood from the ontological (and inevitably contentious) trees in this way is quite important for the step forward into practically oriented political philopsophy. The reason I have so much time for Habermas and his project to recover ‘modernity’ from the relativist mush is that he is happy to acknowledge the need for the (unontological?) concept of universal human rights and justice etc.,and then to ground his work in working out how to get there.

Anyway, at least I got away without being called a trollis cunt. So that’s good. I think in his turn Martin, while justified in defending you, goes a tadge too far in his attack on Lorna and Steven, who seem to me to be simply unused to the unwritten protocols that go with engaging on sensible blogs like TTE – protocols which are still evolving in the context of a blogosphere which is moving quite quickly from the quick, flash harry’ type of blog to more mature, considered (and often joint) blogs like this. I don’t think Lorna and steven should be blamed for that, a long as they behave more appopriately next time around.

Steven and I are not the same person. Steven can speak for himself, but I would say one thing about his comment about it being inappropriate to put this post under ‘philosophy’, because I think that derailed the discussion somewhat. I take it that what he meant was that the post was bad *as philosophy* and bad as *comment* on philosophy, and therefore that those who care about the subject should find it unfortunate that philosophy is done and talked about in this way. But that’s not what *I* said. What I said was that I found it ‘very unclear throughout’ – that’s about as aggressive as I got. I did then take the time to separate the various things I was unclear on or found problematic. So Paul: It’s not really that I’m unused to blogs; I just don’t think it’s fair to say that my comment was aggressive or inappropriate.

Martin (speaking of ‘aggressive and inappropriate’): First, you ask what’s difficult to understand about Tendai’s argument, which you explain as follows: ‘we could spend forever bickering about what political beliefs to have, everyone has different priorities, cant measure how important different things are to different people, so let’s not bother with that anymore. Therefore political philosophy would be more useful if it focussed on justice.’ Well, if that’s the argument, I suppose my reaction is: yes, we could spend forever bickering about what political beliefs to have, and yes, everyone has different priorities. But I can’t see how focusing on justice transcends these difficulties or is obviously a good reaction to them. My view is that what we say about justice, and even the decision to focus on justice in the first place, will itself be the expression of a political belief. Second, I didn’t ‘unilaterally decide’ that rationality was normative. What I said that it’s usually understood as such – that’s my impression. But by ‘normative’ I don’t mean ‘moral’, and I don’t mean that we always do what is rational or that we ought always to do what is rational. I just mean that it is normative in the sense that it has to do with /rules/ and is supposed to guide action. I fail to see what is ‘lit crit’ about that. But then I know nothing about lit crit, and never claimed to.

Tendai: I don’t know why you associate me with the charge that what you say is ‘just opinion’. I never said that. I wasn’t criticising the post on the grounds that there were gaps in it. That would obviously be unreasonable. My worry was *not* that you didn’t cover everything or give a conclusive proof of every claim. The worry was first that it was unclear what the claims were, and second, that insofar as I thought I could see what you were claiming, I disagreed/was unconvinced in several places – that’s what I explained in my first comment.

Paul,
Habermas is an exceptional philosopher, and I admire that he’s willing to transcend ‘schools’ — and I was remiss for having failed to mention him. Ironically, he was what I had in mind, when I originally thought about this piece, as being the ideal modern political philosopher: his ability to speak to various traditions, and require critical rationality without going too far over to empiricism (which of course isn’t always descriptive of social facts), or altogether ignoring the ontological, is a really productive way to do philosophy.
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I suspect the article came across as an excessively ‘empiricist’ notion of philosophy, and political philosophy. Your contributions have made that clearer to me now. I suppose ‘where I come from’ all my caveats would have been taken for granted as implicit, so it’s hard to judge what people will seize on before questions are asked. The other concern that you address rather neatly was the concern of how to make ontology relevant to politics. The whole logic vs ‘poetry’ theme was a, perhaps mismanaged, attempt to draw this out: “what sort of political values is it good to have” etc. Your mentioning Kant makes me consider the extent to which political and moral philosophy face the same epistemological problems: addressing normativity, universality, ‘duty’ etc. For this reason, I think it’s a waste not to use the tools of moral philosophy in political philosophy. The single caution I’d hold myself to in using those methods, is the temptation to reify moral concepts — which is what I meant when I spoke of “made up things like duty”. I’m inclined to constrain myself to thinking of them as useful hypotheticals, rather than ‘things’ the same way that cells and neurons are things.
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Two chunks of concerns in political philosophy are therefore of interest to me: one with a focus on ideal forms of social organisation, the other on ‘what sort of social/political values it is good to have’. I’m at the moment dissatisfied with how the left has traditionally focussed a little too much, and maybe optimistically, on the values bit, without addressing the tension inherent in requiring people to believe or value things, even if they are not so inclined, and have no reason to be so inclined. Do we have a duty to make people *want* to have these values, or is that irrelevant? Is it necessary? Is it even possible? These are tensions that I think may be worth discussing more in leftwing political philosophy.
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PS: Martin I’m glad you understood the article, but I’m fine to have the discussion with minimal acrimony — there’s been enough of that for one day :p

Lorna you were hectoring the author over trivial questions of meaning and semantics, as though words are fixed entities and anything much turned on individual ones here. Follow the argument and put it in its strongest possible form before complaining you don’t understand. The post was in no way ‘bad philosophy’ or ‘bad comment’ on philosophy. It was all accurate it just wasn’t exciting. But why should it be. And nothing follows from the fact that something’s rational, analytical premises don’t entail normative conclusions. Even in the sense of being action-guiding, we are daily in conflict between desire and rationality, anyone who’s binge-drinked can tell you that. People speak like the greatest sin you could possibly commit against Humanity and Reason, is to be non-rational or irrational in some of your actions.
The reason this pissed me off so much is because it’s reflective of a generation that’s been schooled on frothy ‘Theory’ and deride philosophical investigation that doesn’t quote Derrida every second sentence.

Martin, it’s simply false to say that I was ‘hectoring the author over trivial questions of meaning and semantics’. That should be apparent from reading my first comment.
The post’s being ‘bad philosophy’ and ‘bad comment on philosophy’ was a point I was attributing to Steven, as I made explicit (although, as it happens, I agree with him).
And about the rationality point: I said that I *wasn’t* claiming that we should always do what is rational, or that rationality is the most important thing in the world. I don’t see how I could have made that any clearer. Your binge-drinking point is therefore irrelevant.
Even if I *had* been saying that rationality is the most important thing in the world, I don’t see what that would have to do with Derrida. But maybe that’s because, far from having been schooled in that tradition, I’ve been schooled mainly in analytic philosophy and have never read any Derrida in my life.

The extraordinary level of acrimony here is quite startling. A group of people who know nothing about each other are tossing about the wierdest accusations imaginable.
As far as I can tell Tendai wrote a piece about the role of philosophy in politics, which was by its nature brief. Lorna asked him to expand on what he meant, and then it descended into rudeness. I personally also found it difficult to get to the point Tendai was making, and found the sorts of questions Lorna was asking useful. I think I see more clearly his point now, but am a bit dubious about the claims he is making about individual philosophers.
I think it would be useful if people stopped attempting to impute underlying attitudes to people, and engaged with the words they are saying.
The Derrida claim is ridiculous, and incomprehensible, especially if you know the people involved.

If you were schooled in analytic philosophy then you should have no difficulty following and restating an argument, with an eye for relevance. It’s of course true that a lot of his claims are subject to counterarguments, but it would be more fruitful to focus on what he’s chosen to raise. And an analytic student should recognise that “we are volunteers not conscripts” is from Philippa Foot — whose work is worth a read in light of some of your doubtful comments on morality (objective moral laws/facts: do you mean moral realism, or something else, by that? I know that people still do work on moral realism, but I don’t think anybody still speaks convincingly of mind-independent moral facts anymore).
On rationality, you say it’s ‘usually’ understood as normative. By who, though? I’ve certainly never come across that as a common or uncontested claim. You say you “just mean that it is normative in the sense that it has to do with /rules/ and is supposed to guide action”: but that’s basically just saying normativity and rationality inform eachother sometimes which is true but trivial, and couldn’t possibly have been denied in the original article, given that he says “Reason is only applicable in so far as it allows for your chosen goals, and, possibly, in selecting those same goals”. At any rate, you’d started by saying “you seem to conflate the question of whether rationality is normative (to which the usual and, I think, correct answer is yes)”; that’s a pretty bold “I think you’ll find rationality IS normative”. I don’t see that he does conflate them anyway, even if his expression was infelicitous. He clearly attacked the idea that you should have to want to be rational. So that comment is a red herring.
The more I think about the OP, the more I actually wish he’d gone even further on the tantalizing lines of inquiry opened, and stated his argument more confidently, because it’s a worthy one. But maybe a blog is a bad place for that.

Dan,
I drew attention to those philosophers to propose that political philosophy can take root in institutions that make policy — a grand claim, possibly, but let me elaborate. Hayek and Marx, I think go without saying. As for the others, being a law student, I’ll give Dworkin as an example. His importance isn’t in that he’s written a lawyer’s manual, but that his clarification of conceptual problems in law influence, first, tutors, and then students who then go into practice, writing and policy-advising. When you read judgments from the 50s and those from the last decade treating the same issues, you become aware of the extent to which adjudication is influenced by differing concepts of law of each generation. And any given generation’s conceptualisation of policy problems will affect how they attend to them. People like Dworkin, Richard Posner (who is presently a judge in the US) and Ronald Coase are capable of altering (and do alter) such conceptualisations. So when I suggest that some of these philosophers have been ‘successful in influencing institutions’, I refer to the wide acceptance their ideas now enjoy in, first the academic sectors of those institutions (tutors, lecturers, policy advisors), and then in the way that institutional practice evolves in response. I suggested that one critical reason for this, is that philosophers of that mould clarify conceptual problems, and identify errors in institutional practice, rather than setting Brave Agendas about the Rights of Man. This is why my definition of phiosophy in the original post required a particularly ‘analytic’ understanding of it, to get this point. I agree it’s very hard to ‘prove’ the causality of a claim like this, other than by reading the footnotes in papers, and considering how textbooks explain those shifts. But by doing just that, and considering the concepts one’s tutors refer to in teaching, I am led to believe that philosophers can and do influence institutional actors’ understanding of policy.

Lorna,

I understand justice to be a procedural concept (whether allocating welfare or hearing a trial). Nothing more pretentious. The conclusion that we should focus on justice followed this reasoning…We can’t ever really settle the question of what social priorities and allocations of power people should prefer. This, because, it can be wondered how well such an ambitious project will really succeed. The relative lack of political success of the left in the US and the UK, if taken by the measure of winning elections and reform, for example, leads me to wonder how well the left’s programme of values is really succeeding, or ever going to. Also, I have ethical doubts about requiring people to believe and prefer what you do, or to labour under your class’s ideas about what society should look like. Hence the mention of the problem of incommensurability – the mention of which seemed to offend you. Its relevance is in the fact that individual personal preferences and the reasons for them, simply cannot be ranked by importance next to another person’s, without relying on arbitrary measures of what is good to desire and what’s bad to desire. They may be incomparable, because e.g. your life experiences may cause you to value something that another’s life experiences may not. So, I say, we should leave that business now.
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Instead, I suggest, one thing we could talk more about is *whether* distributive procedures (i.e. concepts of justice) could be a better focal point for political philosophers than ideology and political virtues, as those make minimal demands on what you should prefer. That is to say, maybe we should focus more on considering the sorts of procedures and outcomes that optimally balance competing interests; instead of focussing solely on the discourse of struggle and power, or requiring others to share your notions of what’s socially valuable.
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To turn to your next point – that a theory/concept of justice is also susceptible to politicisation. First, the easy bit: questions about *whether* a concept of justice should be the focus of political philosophy, can be resolved without first worrying whether people will rely on their political beliefs to talk about it. Second, the hard bit: you object that once (or if) we’ve decided to talk about justice, it’s gonna get political and nasty. ‘what justice requires’ is an inherently political question, you suggest. I can think of counterexamples to this notion. First, there are distributive mechanisms whose procedures have little epistemic reliance on political commitments. Economic methods are an example, and Amartya Sen is a leading example of the sort of thinker who considers justice through such distributive mechanisms. The procedure rules of a deliberative assembly such as Parliament, are another example of types of rules that regulate personal advantages of participants without reliance on political commitments to inform those rules. Those counterexamples do have weaknesses. Often market actors are only acting for one or a few people, and the House of Commons procedure rules are only regulating a few people with roughly convergent goals. Nonetheless, what makes them exemplary is how they allow you to participate in distribution while preserving many of your innate or acquired advantages, and beliefs.
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And even if politics and ideology would still arise quite quickly in this type of discussion, one of the main points of the original post was to say that philosophers should spend time explaining why justice might be a *better*, or more useful or more valuable focus of political energy, than talking about what sort of governments to vote for.
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One could, I believe, rely on tools of philosophy that are altogether apolitical to achieve such ends [if you're not already familiar, look, for example, at 'Rational Holism' if you have time and inclination]; because the focus is not on determining what you should prefer but on safeguarding as many of your preferences as possible, while allowing people with less to maximise or realise their own. The focus on procedure is what makes it less politicised than questions of how power should be allocated, and what sort of government people should vote for. Now of course it’s untrue to say that justice and politics have nothing to do with eachother: your priorities if you have power may be different to what they might be if you don’t. But I don’t see that it’s a zero-sum game, for reasons given above.
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I had said in the article, that deciding how to optimally distribute resources is something that Rawls, Cohen and Nozick each addressed in their work (with different conclusions, but all really strong arguments). I suggest that we would do well to focus more on that aspect of political philosophy, on the left. The market is one example of a distributive system that, I’d argue, works at least fairly well, regardless of your political beliefs, as does (to a less politically-neutral extent) due process of law, and that good old British tradition of queuing.
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I’m content to end my contributions to this discussion now, and apologise if there’s more to say, but I’ve already lost a lot of time on this. Best wishes to all.

Tendai, some interesting points. On institutional influence, I can certainly say my tutors had an influence on what I now teach and supervise, and what we’re choosing to talk about at the moment (I had the good fortune to study under Joseph Raz — who’s been cited in judgments — so I can see some basis for your belief up there). I personally would define the role of philosophers here slightly differently, as being one of agenda-setting, rather than direct institutional activity. But that’s not wildly different from what you described.

The justice argument is nuanced, but some questions. If justice is a purely procedural concept, how do you account for the epistemic aspect of adjudication and how do you account for how people select the outcomes they want form distributive systems? When a president formulates a healthcare plan, is his hoped-for outcome not a political (i.e. ideological) one? By your argument, I suppose you could overcome that issue by saying that you can create procedures that simply don’t prejudice anyone harshly or at all, even if they favour some groups explicitly. You could also say that a person can be procedurally just in the sense of being unbiased in collecting information about who needs what. Or a more laissez-faire argument could say that you simply make no judgment about what outcome should be desired in general terms, but allow the players to decide that for themselves, using those procedures as instruments for their own ends.

Your justice argument therefore has a lot of merit, but I think there remain problems it’s unable to answer. For example, questions about urgency of action: can we arrive at a resolve to address climate change and third world issues, by purely procedural means? If I’m generous I could see your argument being able to riposte to that objection (or ‘absorb’ it, to use your term), by saying that if we include the interests of the third world or future generation in our allocative procedures, then we could still pick up concerns such as climate change and famines. Do you have a previous life in philosophy or economics (I note you say you’re a law student)? You’re quite well-informed if you don’t.

Martin,
The justice issue is, I think, being complicated by a temptation to first settle ‘what justice is’ (and what is just) in a Platonic sort of sense. I don’t think we need to do that anymore than we need to consider what music is before composing: its basic characteristics are well-recognised enough to know roughly what we are talking about, when we speak of justice. The most basic, and least contentious of these properties is its procedural character — that, whatever else justice is, it’s definitely a practical kind of thing, and implies a sense of impartiality. We wouldn’t need political ideology to settle this.
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I will assume by ‘epistemic aspect’ of adjudication etc, you mean that when you’re distributing something, or deciding whether rules have been properly applied, you will always rely on value judgments to recognise what’s lacking, or what’s undesirable in the arrangement before you. I’ll admit this is more difficult to speak of solely in procedural terms: you do some thinking, you’re not on auto-pilot. To address this, let me make a distinction between a) deciding, as the organiser, what sort of stuff you want your distributive procedures to achieve b) deciding as a participant, what sort of outcomes you want to get out of those procedures.
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The organiser may have to choose from a range of competing concerns, with her/his finite resources. Surely ideology will make her/him favour some over others? A Conservative government may use savings to give tax cuts to an ‘overburdened’ corporate class, or cut national debt; whereas another sort of government may use surplus to increase spending on education. All the concerns may exist simultaneously, and it’s only politics that decides who gets the bounty. In response I’d say 2 things. First, even an optimal system of distribution would never eradicate political decisions. It’s not meant to. It would mitigate or minimize the penalties on the losers. Take the Tort system as an example. One of the things that Tort law does is that it makes social activities bear their own costs, instead of society as a whole. Second, procedures that distribute power itself (such as elections and the make-up of deliberative assemblies) may be arranged to ensure that no one person wins every time. The essential feature of a justice-based focus still remains: you’re not needing to convince people to give up their preferences in favour of yours.
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And if you’re a participant, you’re only constrained by procedural options (of which there may be many), not choice of goals. The important thing is, they don’t penalise your neighbour. This does, however, raise the problem of unacceptable goals, which I address just below. Nevertheless, the central appeal of the idea I’m trying to describe is in allowing people to agree to disagree on universal values, but be guaranteed of participation in distributive systems of that society.
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I agree, again, that substantive issues may remain unresolved here if we’re not careful. How do you solve an issue like fox-hunting? Do we, if we’re opposed to it, just tolerate a society which allows it? And what about value-type issues such as prostitution or pornography? These aren’t the sorts of questions that can readily be solved by an appeal to justice. That’s undoubtedly the weakest aspect of the argument. I think there are three possible answers: we decide that we’re so committed to liberty that we ignore it. Or we attempt to argue them out of that activity (and be ignored). Or alternatively, we can appeal to a tradition of adjudicating contentious matters, that the entire society considers binding. The law is the central example, and legislative debate is a second. That way, our procedures still answer the questions in a way that’s reasonably acceptable to others. The point being, the matter could be decided by a norm that’s universally acceptable in that society. The point is, there are solutions that don’t require bulldozing those who disagree. And those procedures give each person with his or her collection of private values, just as much chance of winning as the next person.
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I’m NOT, proposing a “theory of justice” or anything quite so pompous here; and much of what I say to demonstrate IS taken from other works. I’m arguing why theories of justice ought to have a more central role in political discussion on the left.

I pick up one thing from the comments here, and from the other philosophy pieces on this blog: most of you know fuck all about philosophy. These amateurish responses seem to be informed by the sort of coffee table tosh Guardian readers tend to think of as philosophy. Having checked out some of the other entries on this blog, it’s revealing that the only worthwhile piece on political philosophy is a guest post.
Justice and public practical reasoning are HOT on the agenda of modern political philosophy. Any of you actually heard of Michael Sandel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, Amartya Sen? Any of you actually read them?! Probably not, seeing as they’re not obscurantist German bores who died before the first world war, or French ponces who use words like “intersubjectivity”. And this poetry/philosophy debate is ludicrous to anyone who’s actually studied philosophy. Poetry is not philosophy, and philosphy is not poetry. It’s a serious pursuit, that uses argument, experience and reason, not gilded expression, to make observations about humanity and ideas. I really do despair of the slow death of serious philosophy in British universities. Philosophy is directly releveant to political problems today, and if you take them seriously, you can’t escape what philosophers have to say about them. Have you guys considered having a little more contemporary philosophy around here?

Well Ben, I’m not sure who you are directing your criticism at, since everyone except me commenting on this piece is not a regular contributor. Could you be a bit more specific? Which was the only good post on philosophy we had? I absolutely agree with you that philosophy is relevant to political ideas today, I’m not sure where you get the impression that anyone doesn’t.

Well, Dan, of about half a dozen philosophy articles here, this is about the only one that resembles what I understand to be modern political philosophy. What maks a just society, the problem of reconciling personal commitments with social obligations, are all at the forefront of contemporary dialogue in political philosophy. Outside US and Australian universities, political philosophy on the left has become hopelessly moribund. Students (your blog’s ‘about’ leads me to believe this is mainly a student enterprise) nowadays seem to be more interested in wanking over irrelevant Germans, and quoting them out of context, than pushing forward the debate on leftwing political problems.