Well, skimming over the already posted critiques of Matt's critique of Mills's critique, I get it. It's hard to perfectly address all the problematic aspects of someone's thought in one little essay.
Still, this kind of post is why I re-upped my subscription. In a relatively limited space I get to see quite a bit of thinking by smart people over many years in a way that widens my perspective and reorients my thinking. I'll have a much sharper eye, heretofore, when I'm examining arguments and proposals in the future and will be, with any luck, smarter and wiser.
That Matt slipped out of his Twitter feed long enough to read yet another complicated book and assemble reflections taking into account a lot of related work to write a semi-long piece at a distance from the usual scrum strikes me as selfless and admirable, and needed.
I usually agree with posts on this blog, and as smart a guy as Mills probably is, I think his argument in this instance embodies lots of the fallacies we see in public discourse these days.
1. "The person who came up with idea X is bad. Therefore, X must be a bad idea." (About Kant)
2. "Idea X is insufficiently anti-racist and is therefore bad." (About Rawls.)
3. "System X is inherently associated with group A and was constructed specifically for the exclusion of group B." (Is liberalism inherently white? I would think of Japan, for instance, as a liberal democracy.)
4. "System X has led to bad outcomes for group A, so we should dismantle it. Later, we can come up with a different system that'll definitely be better." (Regarding the lack of an alternative theory.)
>>it’s not the case that Hispanics or Asians or other ethnic or cultural minority groups would benefit from Darity’s reparations program. Even if you are simply seeking non-white allies, you need an agenda with broader appeal.<<
Pursuing reparations, no matter the ethical and moral basis for it, seems an excellent way to create a broad-based Republican coalition, uniting working class/non-college whites, Latinos and many Asians. You know, the Democrats' dream coalition, except for the other party.
Great! Except . . . this form of "reparations" is to give them priority access to affordable housing that Santa Monica is building. That is, they're moved to the front of the line and pushing others (probably mostly Latino) down below them on a waitlist that currently lists 6000 families.
In other words, absent actions to increase housing density more in Santa Monica, or put up bounteous affordable units north of Montana Avenue, this benevolent action will impact the city's rich white residents not at all and only punish invisible others who won't even know that they are being punished. Or if they do find out, they'll probably take another look at the Republican party.
I'm tempted to suggest that *any* moral / political philosophy is subject to exactly the same flaws as those Mills claimed had "broken" the work of Kant and Rawls.
E.g. it's easy to be a consequentialist that abuses animals, simply by assigning animals less negative utils upon experiencing pain - for many people and many animals (e.g. fish), this is in fact what they believe. In other words, issues of measurement, definition, and assumptions make it easy and tempting to determine that what is good for me (or makes me right) is good for everyone, no matter your philosophy, not just Rawls.
So. I think this is a bad argument against any moral philosophy.
It's also silly (IMO) to suggest that any one of these systems ought to be used by themselves, without including elements of others. A pure utilitarian community could plausibly involve a lot of state-sponsored murder (e.g. bad or wasteful people). People recoil against this for practical and self-interest reasons more than "ideal" reasons - the murder system isn't one you'd risk handing to any but the most pure and honest people, but how to tell who is pure and honest? And also, what's pure? Hmmmm... maybe let's have strong rules against state-sponsored murder, except in the most severe cases where we all agree on the moral wrongness ... (enter argument on capital punishment).
To me, it's always seemed that racial-focused philosophers / commentators are starting from some deep belief (what's happened to me/us is *wrong*) and then back rationalize their policy positions or philosophical systems to justify whatever it is they're trying to actually accomplish (e.g. reparations). These arguments are not convincing to me, *because* they are so transparently self (or group) interested. To have any chance of bending my ear, the argument needs to *start* by explaining how this new system or policy would truly benefit *everyone* (or, at least, most people on balance). Reparations and affirmative action don't cut it, but broad-based redistribution based on wealth or income DOES cut it. Let's try that first, before we create an even more racially segmented society than we already have.
The problem that I have with texts like this is that they concentrate on the black/white dichotomy, ignoring the millions of people who don’t fit cleanly into this framework. Mills criticizes Rawls for writing about justice in 1970 and ignoring the civil rights movement. Couldn’t the same criticism be directed at Mills? How can you write about justice in the twenty-first century and ignore the devastation that the US inflicted on the middle east?
My family is Assyrian, a small minority indigenous to Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Since 1990 alone, the Assyrians have been bombed, starved, bombed again, attacked, occupied, and then subjected to a genocide at the hands of ISIS. Since 2003 the Assyrian population in Iraq has plummeted from over a million to around 200,000. If a case can be made for reparations to the descendants of slaves, then I don’t see why Iraqis in general, and Assyrians in particular, aren’t entitled to reparations as well. But of course this is even less likely to happen than Black reparations.
The point here is that there are countless marginal groups in the US, groups that are too small to ever get the kind of special treatment that they might deserve. Even worse, they risk being harmed by efforts to help other groups. If 11 trillion dollars in reparations were doled out to Black Americans, it wouldn’t only be white people who would have to pay. It would also be Roma, Hmong, Assyrians, etc. Similarly, affirmative action by definition lowers the chances for everyone not included in the protected class.
Any policy that singles out one group for special treatment harms all the others. It takes justice and turns it into a zero sum game. If you really care about justice, you should prefer redistributive programs that focus on class over race. This is the only option that doesn't grind small minorities under the wheels of the metaphorical trolley.
The idea that philosophy undertaken in largely homogenous societies in the fairly distant past is somehow fatally undermined by modern racial dynamics just seems depressingly nihilistic. So many great works fail this test.
Maybe the book is just completely compelling that nothing about the human condition can be analyzed without a grounding in America’s particular racial context. I’m skeptical but maybe I’ll pick it up on your recommendation.
But you just wrote an essay on the long history of the human condition and didn’t see fit to mention Emmitt Till either. I don’t feel like this was a serious omission. There are so many frames of reference that do not need to center the United States of America from 1619-2021.
Just got diagnosed with covid this morning so I have some time on my hands! Here are my Ramblings from a Covid Bed
This is very much my specific field, so I'll try to avoid doing the thing where I get indignant that a short blog post didn't nail all the details. Here are four thoughts:
1) Someone else in the comments pointed out that what Kant and Rawls are engaged in to a large degree is meta-ethical. You might think the two of them reached the wrong conclusions - I often do - but that's different from critiquing the basic setup of the project, which is what Mills attempts, I think rather unconvincingly. The project is basically the assertion that justice, in morals and in politics, is the answer to the question "What rules would generic (nonembodied, unencumbered, identityless) agents choose to govern them?" Michael Sandel has much more compelling takes than Mills on why this doesn't work, I think.
2) I'm sympathetic to Parfit's project of demonstrating the convergence of utilitarianism and deontology. If only it were easier to draw out their extensions!!
3) If you're gonna read Mills, you really ought to read Tommie Shelby's replies to him. Shelby basically argues that ideal theory is indispensable for non ideal theory: you need a theory of the political ideal to orient your actions. Once you know that justice requires you to work to the benefit of the least advantaged, you fill in the details of your particular society and apply it. I go back and forth on whether I think this reply works but I do think it must be grappled with. My latest position is that you need both a theory of the political ideal as well as a theory of the moral in order to know what to do in your non ideal world. You need to know where (political) utopia lies, and a map of all the rest of the places that aren't utopia and how they rank on the political ideal scale. Then you need a theory of morality to know what moves you're allowed to make. If you think that history is path-dependent, it might be impossible to reach utopia based on how morality constrains your actions. (You might not be allowed to wage a violent revolution killing all the opposition in order to set up a communist paradise.) But I'm inclined to think the theory of morality alone is insufficient, since morality probably licenses multiple courses of action and you need to know which is the best, in the sense of getting closest to utopia. (My intuitions about morality being under determined might be off, though I'd probably call, say, a comprehensive utilitarianism a political as well as moral theory.) (These thoughts are influenced by reading the first chapter or so of Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, but I haven't finished it so perhaps he already says all of this!)
4) I've spent the past semester thinking hard about reparations, reading a LOT of philosophy on it from a lot of different camps. At this point I'm totally unconvinced by it all, and sympathetic to Shelby's position (contra Mills) that present distributive justice (a la Rawls) renders reparations unnecessary. Is very hard to come up with a convincing theory of why Obama is deserving of special compensation while poor white kids aren't. And to the extent that all Black people continue to suffer injustice as a result of white supremacist institutions, the suffering within the group varies wildly, and I haven't seen a principled reason to address the suffering on a group basis instead of at the individual level. (Pragmatism, but if I were to spell out this position more I really mean why racial grouping vs economic groupings. Dropping a term paper on this soon if anyone's really interested in the weeds, lol.)
Also, my favorite piece of reparations cognitive dissonance is people who support Black reparations in the states/Indigneous land-back movements but also vehemently oppose the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. (Hypothetically you might imagine a time cutoff but I haven't seen any convincing principled way to have reparations phase out.)
I’m probably not going to check Mills out, but I am grateful for this summary. I remain doubtful that reparations advocacy could ever have much political value for someone who simply wants massive investment in public education, Canadian-style health care, and a rapid transition from oil and gas.
Vulnerable as I am to any rousing sermon in a liberal voice, I, too, once said some pretty silly things after I read Coates’ essay on reparations. I came to my senses by thinking through what I might personally owe as a Mayflower descendant. I mean, even if you could convince me that my retirement should be delayed to cover the reparations bill, or that the legacy intended to help my kid swing a mortgage should be diminished (I may propose in fact propose this to her, because she’s one of the very wokest, and I’d love to see what her reaction would be), what do you say to convince all the modern Americans whose ancestors came post Civil War and thereafter, that they should pay up?
And, by the way, do I get a discount for those of my ancestors who fought in the Union Army?
Good piece. I'm not sure how the theory and philosophy of identity formation fits into the consequentialist/deontologist divide but I think it needs to be considered here. The world is divided into sovereign nations, which Benedict Anderson described as "imagined communities" - the members imagine a shared identity with each other and that identity tie is part of what motivates and makes possible, among other things, shared trust and laws for the common good of members of the community. Anderson was arguing against blood and soil, ethnic/racial essentialist theories of nationhood and national identity. Showing that our identity was not handed down from Mt Sinai but is something we made up - and that means we can imagine it to be as inclusive as we want it to be. I'm not an expert on them, but I don't know that Kant, Rawls, and some of the other philosophers mentioned here really had a good understanding or proper focus on the contingency of identity formation, and the role it plays it the formation and maintenance of a healthy national community. I think today racial justice advocates - Kendi, for example - often fall into the same kind of essentialized thinking about identity that not only is theoretically bogus but also has been a source of great harm in the world.
It’s a little strange to describe all of moral philosophy for past 300 years without mentioning of Rorty, Foucault, Nietschze, Derrida and others as a third major “Continental” branch that basically denied the usefulness of consequentialism and deontologism both. Rorty in particular thought these philosophical constructs were a complete waste of time, which is perhaps why he accurately predicted the rise of authoritarianism in America if “the Left” continued to focus on winning over the English departments rather than state legislatures. And here we are.
For me, this post encapsulates the many problems with philosophy in the academy and how philosophy is used by the educated elite generally.
Many comments highlighted some good criticisms, so here are my 2 cents from a slightly different angle.
First, academic philosophy lacks an appreciation for the limits of human cognition and perception. Thus there will always be debates about philosophy, and there will never be a "grand unified theory" of philosophy. Like politics, it is endless.
Secondly, people are not blank slates who are exposed to philosophical constructs and then work down from there to figure out how the world works or ought to work. Instead, people have ideas about how the world works, with their own biases and perceptions about:
What is just and what is not, what is legitimate and what is not, what is ideal and what is not, and what society should prioritize. It's at that point where philosophy enters the picture, and most people go find the philosophy that supports what they already want to do and what they already believe. And the same goes for philosophical criticism, which is on display in this post - it's working backwards.
Additionally, much of philosophy also ignores or downplays universal human features like the natural ability and tendency of humans to self-organize into communities and develop in-groups and out-groups. Attempts to assert some ideal framework that does not recognize such realities is, IMO, a waste of time.
Therefore, the critique of Mills or whoever as not providing some pathway or theory that incorporates modern notions of racial justice and equality, falls into that trap. History has not ended and what we think now is not the universal truth by which the merits of philosophical traditions can be objectively judged.
It's also important to point out that philosophical principles can be evaluated on their own merits, independently of the people who created them. Criticism of Mills, or whoever, for not sufficiently addressing contemporary opinions about racial justice or anything else, suffers from the ad hominem fallacy.
Finally, too much of academic philosophy relies on gimmicks. The "trolley problem" is the best example of this. This gimmick only works because of the weirdly constrained framework that results in an artificial binary choice which ignores every other consideration. It's useful only as an thought exercise because it is intentionally constructed to be divorced from real situations involving real people. It also demands we ignore obvious questions, such as the circumstances that would result in tying people to trolley tracks in the first place, and the morality of that. Point being, if one's philosophical construct depends on such gimmicks and cannot stand on its own in the real world, with real people and real situations, then it is probably junk.
I’m going to be somewhat pedantic here, because your history of liberalism in the 19th century and of 19th century politics is problematic.
First, liberalism went hand in hand with democracy and nationalism. The idea was that there is a demos (a people) which governs in a democracy, and a demos was equated with a particular nation (i.e., a type of people) who would have a democratic nation state. Liberalism proceeded to go hand in hand with this, because the opponents of liberalism, nationalism, and democracy were old aristocracy with its illiberal reactionary hierarchical attitudes denying the inherent rights of the masses AND who either happened to either rule over multinational empires which lacked a sufficient binding identity to be kept together in a democratic polity or were part of a transnational class often linked by family ties. 19th century liberalism as a political force was primarily a balancing act between nationalism and democracy’s tendency to draw us-vs-them lines somewhere and liberalism’s more open and progressive attitudes.
As for the US Liberal Republicans … (a) Grant’s socially liberal was also more nationalistic [think of the various know nothings who joined the GOP, many of whom were pro-black but anti-immigrant because of an us-vs-them attitude where they preferred English speaking black Protestants to Catholic foreigners] and (b) the Liberal Republicans were an amorphous thing whose 1872 nominee was the most woke/progressive guy imaginable, was much more immigrant-sympathetic than Grant’s GOP, and was bolstered especially by Republican turncoats who were concerned about rampant corruption in the Grant Administration. [Grant was not himself corrupt, but often hopelessly naive and far too trusting]. The emergence of upper Midwest democratic machines was as much a force of Republicans passing anti Catholic and anti foreign language laws as anything else.
Matt is grossly conflating pre-war GOP coalition politics with post-Civil war.
As for Dred-Scott, that case shouldn’t be read more much legally. It was an activist opinion written at the behest of President Buchanan. Meanwhile, the American south from the 1830s on actively became more openly *illiberal* and many leaders openly repudiated the language of the Declaration of Independence as being a lie. By contrast, the north was (while still racist) inching in a more racially liberal direction because of a desire for philosophical consistency.
Is this too obvious a thought to express?Or maybe just an incorrect one? But I always thought of our political system as doing a decent, practical job of mashing together Kant and Bentham by having a Bill of Rights (and similar rights in other amendments and in some statutes) that enumerated certain ideals that were to be treated with something approaching absolutism (although subject to moderation through the courts to help them work in real-life contexts) while at the same time subjecting all other policy matters to the will of the majority in the legislature. Have the pols done a better job inventing a CONCEPTUALLY acceptable system of ethics than the philosophers? Or am I just muddled here?
Another thought: the way people talk about Kant's undeniable racism lacks rigor. It is true that Kant contributed a bit to the formation of scientific racism, but his anthropological writings really aren't a very important or influential part of his corpus. They are interesting *to us* because (like the racist remarks in Hume's essays) they reveal that Kant was racist in a pretty unreflective way. This casts his universalism in an unfavorable light. Still, the utilitarian tradition has similar skeletons in its closet. Mill's writings on India justify colonialism in a way that should make us squirm just as much as anything in Kant.
Oddly, Enlightenment figures who clearly *weren't* racist like Montesquieu and Herder contributed more to the development of scientific racism. That is because Montesquieu and Herder were innovative theorists of cultural diversity, and their work was twisted by later theorists who believed that some cultures or "peoples" were superior to others and who began to use biological arguments to justify their position.
Also Kant is peripheral to the social contract tradition (in spite of the Metaphysics of Morals), and belongs to a German liberal tradition that just wasn't nearly as involved in justifying imperialism as French and English liberals like Locke and Voltaire were. Many of Rawls's blind spots are inherited from Locke IMO, not from Kant.
1. Rawls' choice to do "ideal theory" was not "weird" when you look at it in the context of the times. As I have shown in two books, during the McCarthy Era, philosophy was the hardest-hit academic field, and came out of it deeply traumatized. That helps explain why, by 1972, political philosophy had died out in America (to such an extent that the Rockefeller Foundation appointed a researcher to try and explain its death), and why Rawls' resurrection of it had to be so carefully irrelevant.
2. Using Kantian principles to combat Kantian racism is not so easy. The universalism of the Categorical Imperative, Kant's single basic moral principle, requires us to eschew all our desires and our concrete identities when making moral decisions, acting only from principles which apply to everyone. As Adorno and Horkheimer note in their "Dialectics of Enlightenment," the Imperative--and therefore Kant's entire ethics, and perhaps the Enlightenment itself— "reeks of cruelty." Racist domination in Kant is preceded by the "principled" domination of the desires by reason.
3. The mention of Adorno and Horkheimer brings up the issue of continental philosophy, raised in another comment. It is true that Mills does not openly discuss continental thinkers, but he and I were grad students together at Toronto in the 70's, and he certainly was aware of them; they were not empty names to him.
Charles' work might or might not have been stronger if it had taken them publicly into account, but I certainly agree that doing so would have made him less influential—and he is one of the very few philosophers who had a duty to be influential. For those of us working in other philosophical fields, I can agree that continental thinker are marginal, to the extent that taking them seriously renders you philosophically suspect. But I have always seen that as a choice between doing philosophy influential in American philosophy departments, on the one hand, and doing good, non-wheel-reinventing, philosophy on the other.
Matt, if you were a philosophy undergrad at Harvard today, you would have read Mills. At least when I was at Chicago, the main profs teaching Rawls (Chiara Cordelli, Ben Laurence, Martha Nussbaum, and Jim Wilson) all assigned Mills alongside Okin as the major critics of Rawlsianism from within the left-liberal tradition. Notably Laurence, Nussbaum, and Wilson are all very interested in nonideal theory, which like you say is a big thing atm and was largely prompted by Mills's work. Mills's untimely death unfortunately robbed us of his fully-fleshed-out positive vision, which began appearing in working papers, etc. towards the end of his life.
If you haven't yet, you should read Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration and Private Government, which are very up your alley and combine social science with philosophy.
Well, skimming over the already posted critiques of Matt's critique of Mills's critique, I get it. It's hard to perfectly address all the problematic aspects of someone's thought in one little essay.
Still, this kind of post is why I re-upped my subscription. In a relatively limited space I get to see quite a bit of thinking by smart people over many years in a way that widens my perspective and reorients my thinking. I'll have a much sharper eye, heretofore, when I'm examining arguments and proposals in the future and will be, with any luck, smarter and wiser.
That Matt slipped out of his Twitter feed long enough to read yet another complicated book and assemble reflections taking into account a lot of related work to write a semi-long piece at a distance from the usual scrum strikes me as selfless and admirable, and needed.
I usually agree with posts on this blog, and as smart a guy as Mills probably is, I think his argument in this instance embodies lots of the fallacies we see in public discourse these days.
1. "The person who came up with idea X is bad. Therefore, X must be a bad idea." (About Kant)
2. "Idea X is insufficiently anti-racist and is therefore bad." (About Rawls.)
3. "System X is inherently associated with group A and was constructed specifically for the exclusion of group B." (Is liberalism inherently white? I would think of Japan, for instance, as a liberal democracy.)
4. "System X has led to bad outcomes for group A, so we should dismantle it. Later, we can come up with a different system that'll definitely be better." (Regarding the lack of an alternative theory.)
>>it’s not the case that Hispanics or Asians or other ethnic or cultural minority groups would benefit from Darity’s reparations program. Even if you are simply seeking non-white allies, you need an agenda with broader appeal.<<
Pursuing reparations, no matter the ethical and moral basis for it, seems an excellent way to create a broad-based Republican coalition, uniting working class/non-college whites, Latinos and many Asians. You know, the Democrats' dream coalition, except for the other party.
For example, Santa Monica, the city I worked in, is offering affordable housing to Black families which were displaced with paltry or no compensation during the building of I-10 almost 60 years ago. And in one sense that's great, because the decision had no moral basis -- it merely punished the weakest part of the community. (https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-12-26/santa-monica-to-people-long-evicted-by-freeway-come-back-home)
Great! Except . . . this form of "reparations" is to give them priority access to affordable housing that Santa Monica is building. That is, they're moved to the front of the line and pushing others (probably mostly Latino) down below them on a waitlist that currently lists 6000 families.
In other words, absent actions to increase housing density more in Santa Monica, or put up bounteous affordable units north of Montana Avenue, this benevolent action will impact the city's rich white residents not at all and only punish invisible others who won't even know that they are being punished. Or if they do find out, they'll probably take another look at the Republican party.
I'm tempted to suggest that *any* moral / political philosophy is subject to exactly the same flaws as those Mills claimed had "broken" the work of Kant and Rawls.
E.g. it's easy to be a consequentialist that abuses animals, simply by assigning animals less negative utils upon experiencing pain - for many people and many animals (e.g. fish), this is in fact what they believe. In other words, issues of measurement, definition, and assumptions make it easy and tempting to determine that what is good for me (or makes me right) is good for everyone, no matter your philosophy, not just Rawls.
So. I think this is a bad argument against any moral philosophy.
It's also silly (IMO) to suggest that any one of these systems ought to be used by themselves, without including elements of others. A pure utilitarian community could plausibly involve a lot of state-sponsored murder (e.g. bad or wasteful people). People recoil against this for practical and self-interest reasons more than "ideal" reasons - the murder system isn't one you'd risk handing to any but the most pure and honest people, but how to tell who is pure and honest? And also, what's pure? Hmmmm... maybe let's have strong rules against state-sponsored murder, except in the most severe cases where we all agree on the moral wrongness ... (enter argument on capital punishment).
To me, it's always seemed that racial-focused philosophers / commentators are starting from some deep belief (what's happened to me/us is *wrong*) and then back rationalize their policy positions or philosophical systems to justify whatever it is they're trying to actually accomplish (e.g. reparations). These arguments are not convincing to me, *because* they are so transparently self (or group) interested. To have any chance of bending my ear, the argument needs to *start* by explaining how this new system or policy would truly benefit *everyone* (or, at least, most people on balance). Reparations and affirmative action don't cut it, but broad-based redistribution based on wealth or income DOES cut it. Let's try that first, before we create an even more racially segmented society than we already have.
The problem that I have with texts like this is that they concentrate on the black/white dichotomy, ignoring the millions of people who don’t fit cleanly into this framework. Mills criticizes Rawls for writing about justice in 1970 and ignoring the civil rights movement. Couldn’t the same criticism be directed at Mills? How can you write about justice in the twenty-first century and ignore the devastation that the US inflicted on the middle east?
My family is Assyrian, a small minority indigenous to Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Since 1990 alone, the Assyrians have been bombed, starved, bombed again, attacked, occupied, and then subjected to a genocide at the hands of ISIS. Since 2003 the Assyrian population in Iraq has plummeted from over a million to around 200,000. If a case can be made for reparations to the descendants of slaves, then I don’t see why Iraqis in general, and Assyrians in particular, aren’t entitled to reparations as well. But of course this is even less likely to happen than Black reparations.
The point here is that there are countless marginal groups in the US, groups that are too small to ever get the kind of special treatment that they might deserve. Even worse, they risk being harmed by efforts to help other groups. If 11 trillion dollars in reparations were doled out to Black Americans, it wouldn’t only be white people who would have to pay. It would also be Roma, Hmong, Assyrians, etc. Similarly, affirmative action by definition lowers the chances for everyone not included in the protected class.
Any policy that singles out one group for special treatment harms all the others. It takes justice and turns it into a zero sum game. If you really care about justice, you should prefer redistributive programs that focus on class over race. This is the only option that doesn't grind small minorities under the wheels of the metaphorical trolley.
The idea that philosophy undertaken in largely homogenous societies in the fairly distant past is somehow fatally undermined by modern racial dynamics just seems depressingly nihilistic. So many great works fail this test.
Maybe the book is just completely compelling that nothing about the human condition can be analyzed without a grounding in America’s particular racial context. I’m skeptical but maybe I’ll pick it up on your recommendation.
But you just wrote an essay on the long history of the human condition and didn’t see fit to mention Emmitt Till either. I don’t feel like this was a serious omission. There are so many frames of reference that do not need to center the United States of America from 1619-2021.
Just got diagnosed with covid this morning so I have some time on my hands! Here are my Ramblings from a Covid Bed
This is very much my specific field, so I'll try to avoid doing the thing where I get indignant that a short blog post didn't nail all the details. Here are four thoughts:
1) Someone else in the comments pointed out that what Kant and Rawls are engaged in to a large degree is meta-ethical. You might think the two of them reached the wrong conclusions - I often do - but that's different from critiquing the basic setup of the project, which is what Mills attempts, I think rather unconvincingly. The project is basically the assertion that justice, in morals and in politics, is the answer to the question "What rules would generic (nonembodied, unencumbered, identityless) agents choose to govern them?" Michael Sandel has much more compelling takes than Mills on why this doesn't work, I think.
2) I'm sympathetic to Parfit's project of demonstrating the convergence of utilitarianism and deontology. If only it were easier to draw out their extensions!!
3) If you're gonna read Mills, you really ought to read Tommie Shelby's replies to him. Shelby basically argues that ideal theory is indispensable for non ideal theory: you need a theory of the political ideal to orient your actions. Once you know that justice requires you to work to the benefit of the least advantaged, you fill in the details of your particular society and apply it. I go back and forth on whether I think this reply works but I do think it must be grappled with. My latest position is that you need both a theory of the political ideal as well as a theory of the moral in order to know what to do in your non ideal world. You need to know where (political) utopia lies, and a map of all the rest of the places that aren't utopia and how they rank on the political ideal scale. Then you need a theory of morality to know what moves you're allowed to make. If you think that history is path-dependent, it might be impossible to reach utopia based on how morality constrains your actions. (You might not be allowed to wage a violent revolution killing all the opposition in order to set up a communist paradise.) But I'm inclined to think the theory of morality alone is insufficient, since morality probably licenses multiple courses of action and you need to know which is the best, in the sense of getting closest to utopia. (My intuitions about morality being under determined might be off, though I'd probably call, say, a comprehensive utilitarianism a political as well as moral theory.) (These thoughts are influenced by reading the first chapter or so of Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, but I haven't finished it so perhaps he already says all of this!)
4) I've spent the past semester thinking hard about reparations, reading a LOT of philosophy on it from a lot of different camps. At this point I'm totally unconvinced by it all, and sympathetic to Shelby's position (contra Mills) that present distributive justice (a la Rawls) renders reparations unnecessary. Is very hard to come up with a convincing theory of why Obama is deserving of special compensation while poor white kids aren't. And to the extent that all Black people continue to suffer injustice as a result of white supremacist institutions, the suffering within the group varies wildly, and I haven't seen a principled reason to address the suffering on a group basis instead of at the individual level. (Pragmatism, but if I were to spell out this position more I really mean why racial grouping vs economic groupings. Dropping a term paper on this soon if anyone's really interested in the weeds, lol.)
Also, my favorite piece of reparations cognitive dissonance is people who support Black reparations in the states/Indigneous land-back movements but also vehemently oppose the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. (Hypothetically you might imagine a time cutoff but I haven't seen any convincing principled way to have reparations phase out.)
I’m probably not going to check Mills out, but I am grateful for this summary. I remain doubtful that reparations advocacy could ever have much political value for someone who simply wants massive investment in public education, Canadian-style health care, and a rapid transition from oil and gas.
Vulnerable as I am to any rousing sermon in a liberal voice, I, too, once said some pretty silly things after I read Coates’ essay on reparations. I came to my senses by thinking through what I might personally owe as a Mayflower descendant. I mean, even if you could convince me that my retirement should be delayed to cover the reparations bill, or that the legacy intended to help my kid swing a mortgage should be diminished (I may propose in fact propose this to her, because she’s one of the very wokest, and I’d love to see what her reaction would be), what do you say to convince all the modern Americans whose ancestors came post Civil War and thereafter, that they should pay up?
And, by the way, do I get a discount for those of my ancestors who fought in the Union Army?
Good piece. I'm not sure how the theory and philosophy of identity formation fits into the consequentialist/deontologist divide but I think it needs to be considered here. The world is divided into sovereign nations, which Benedict Anderson described as "imagined communities" - the members imagine a shared identity with each other and that identity tie is part of what motivates and makes possible, among other things, shared trust and laws for the common good of members of the community. Anderson was arguing against blood and soil, ethnic/racial essentialist theories of nationhood and national identity. Showing that our identity was not handed down from Mt Sinai but is something we made up - and that means we can imagine it to be as inclusive as we want it to be. I'm not an expert on them, but I don't know that Kant, Rawls, and some of the other philosophers mentioned here really had a good understanding or proper focus on the contingency of identity formation, and the role it plays it the formation and maintenance of a healthy national community. I think today racial justice advocates - Kendi, for example - often fall into the same kind of essentialized thinking about identity that not only is theoretically bogus but also has been a source of great harm in the world.
It’s a little strange to describe all of moral philosophy for past 300 years without mentioning of Rorty, Foucault, Nietschze, Derrida and others as a third major “Continental” branch that basically denied the usefulness of consequentialism and deontologism both. Rorty in particular thought these philosophical constructs were a complete waste of time, which is perhaps why he accurately predicted the rise of authoritarianism in America if “the Left” continued to focus on winning over the English departments rather than state legislatures. And here we are.
For me, this post encapsulates the many problems with philosophy in the academy and how philosophy is used by the educated elite generally.
Many comments highlighted some good criticisms, so here are my 2 cents from a slightly different angle.
First, academic philosophy lacks an appreciation for the limits of human cognition and perception. Thus there will always be debates about philosophy, and there will never be a "grand unified theory" of philosophy. Like politics, it is endless.
Secondly, people are not blank slates who are exposed to philosophical constructs and then work down from there to figure out how the world works or ought to work. Instead, people have ideas about how the world works, with their own biases and perceptions about:
What is just and what is not, what is legitimate and what is not, what is ideal and what is not, and what society should prioritize. It's at that point where philosophy enters the picture, and most people go find the philosophy that supports what they already want to do and what they already believe. And the same goes for philosophical criticism, which is on display in this post - it's working backwards.
Additionally, much of philosophy also ignores or downplays universal human features like the natural ability and tendency of humans to self-organize into communities and develop in-groups and out-groups. Attempts to assert some ideal framework that does not recognize such realities is, IMO, a waste of time.
Therefore, the critique of Mills or whoever as not providing some pathway or theory that incorporates modern notions of racial justice and equality, falls into that trap. History has not ended and what we think now is not the universal truth by which the merits of philosophical traditions can be objectively judged.
It's also important to point out that philosophical principles can be evaluated on their own merits, independently of the people who created them. Criticism of Mills, or whoever, for not sufficiently addressing contemporary opinions about racial justice or anything else, suffers from the ad hominem fallacy.
Finally, too much of academic philosophy relies on gimmicks. The "trolley problem" is the best example of this. This gimmick only works because of the weirdly constrained framework that results in an artificial binary choice which ignores every other consideration. It's useful only as an thought exercise because it is intentionally constructed to be divorced from real situations involving real people. It also demands we ignore obvious questions, such as the circumstances that would result in tying people to trolley tracks in the first place, and the morality of that. Point being, if one's philosophical construct depends on such gimmicks and cannot stand on its own in the real world, with real people and real situations, then it is probably junk.
I’m going to be somewhat pedantic here, because your history of liberalism in the 19th century and of 19th century politics is problematic.
First, liberalism went hand in hand with democracy and nationalism. The idea was that there is a demos (a people) which governs in a democracy, and a demos was equated with a particular nation (i.e., a type of people) who would have a democratic nation state. Liberalism proceeded to go hand in hand with this, because the opponents of liberalism, nationalism, and democracy were old aristocracy with its illiberal reactionary hierarchical attitudes denying the inherent rights of the masses AND who either happened to either rule over multinational empires which lacked a sufficient binding identity to be kept together in a democratic polity or were part of a transnational class often linked by family ties. 19th century liberalism as a political force was primarily a balancing act between nationalism and democracy’s tendency to draw us-vs-them lines somewhere and liberalism’s more open and progressive attitudes.
As for the US Liberal Republicans … (a) Grant’s socially liberal was also more nationalistic [think of the various know nothings who joined the GOP, many of whom were pro-black but anti-immigrant because of an us-vs-them attitude where they preferred English speaking black Protestants to Catholic foreigners] and (b) the Liberal Republicans were an amorphous thing whose 1872 nominee was the most woke/progressive guy imaginable, was much more immigrant-sympathetic than Grant’s GOP, and was bolstered especially by Republican turncoats who were concerned about rampant corruption in the Grant Administration. [Grant was not himself corrupt, but often hopelessly naive and far too trusting]. The emergence of upper Midwest democratic machines was as much a force of Republicans passing anti Catholic and anti foreign language laws as anything else.
Matt is grossly conflating pre-war GOP coalition politics with post-Civil war.
As for Dred-Scott, that case shouldn’t be read more much legally. It was an activist opinion written at the behest of President Buchanan. Meanwhile, the American south from the 1830s on actively became more openly *illiberal* and many leaders openly repudiated the language of the Declaration of Independence as being a lie. By contrast, the north was (while still racist) inching in a more racially liberal direction because of a desire for philosophical consistency.
Is this too obvious a thought to express?Or maybe just an incorrect one? But I always thought of our political system as doing a decent, practical job of mashing together Kant and Bentham by having a Bill of Rights (and similar rights in other amendments and in some statutes) that enumerated certain ideals that were to be treated with something approaching absolutism (although subject to moderation through the courts to help them work in real-life contexts) while at the same time subjecting all other policy matters to the will of the majority in the legislature. Have the pols done a better job inventing a CONCEPTUALLY acceptable system of ethics than the philosophers? Or am I just muddled here?
Another thought: the way people talk about Kant's undeniable racism lacks rigor. It is true that Kant contributed a bit to the formation of scientific racism, but his anthropological writings really aren't a very important or influential part of his corpus. They are interesting *to us* because (like the racist remarks in Hume's essays) they reveal that Kant was racist in a pretty unreflective way. This casts his universalism in an unfavorable light. Still, the utilitarian tradition has similar skeletons in its closet. Mill's writings on India justify colonialism in a way that should make us squirm just as much as anything in Kant.
Oddly, Enlightenment figures who clearly *weren't* racist like Montesquieu and Herder contributed more to the development of scientific racism. That is because Montesquieu and Herder were innovative theorists of cultural diversity, and their work was twisted by later theorists who believed that some cultures or "peoples" were superior to others and who began to use biological arguments to justify their position.
Also Kant is peripheral to the social contract tradition (in spite of the Metaphysics of Morals), and belongs to a German liberal tradition that just wasn't nearly as involved in justifying imperialism as French and English liberals like Locke and Voltaire were. Many of Rawls's blind spots are inherited from Locke IMO, not from Kant.
Three quick comments:
1. Rawls' choice to do "ideal theory" was not "weird" when you look at it in the context of the times. As I have shown in two books, during the McCarthy Era, philosophy was the hardest-hit academic field, and came out of it deeply traumatized. That helps explain why, by 1972, political philosophy had died out in America (to such an extent that the Rockefeller Foundation appointed a researcher to try and explain its death), and why Rawls' resurrection of it had to be so carefully irrelevant.
2. Using Kantian principles to combat Kantian racism is not so easy. The universalism of the Categorical Imperative, Kant's single basic moral principle, requires us to eschew all our desires and our concrete identities when making moral decisions, acting only from principles which apply to everyone. As Adorno and Horkheimer note in their "Dialectics of Enlightenment," the Imperative--and therefore Kant's entire ethics, and perhaps the Enlightenment itself— "reeks of cruelty." Racist domination in Kant is preceded by the "principled" domination of the desires by reason.
3. The mention of Adorno and Horkheimer brings up the issue of continental philosophy, raised in another comment. It is true that Mills does not openly discuss continental thinkers, but he and I were grad students together at Toronto in the 70's, and he certainly was aware of them; they were not empty names to him.
Charles' work might or might not have been stronger if it had taken them publicly into account, but I certainly agree that doing so would have made him less influential—and he is one of the very few philosophers who had a duty to be influential. For those of us working in other philosophical fields, I can agree that continental thinker are marginal, to the extent that taking them seriously renders you philosophically suspect. But I have always seen that as a choice between doing philosophy influential in American philosophy departments, on the one hand, and doing good, non-wheel-reinventing, philosophy on the other.
Matt, if you were a philosophy undergrad at Harvard today, you would have read Mills. At least when I was at Chicago, the main profs teaching Rawls (Chiara Cordelli, Ben Laurence, Martha Nussbaum, and Jim Wilson) all assigned Mills alongside Okin as the major critics of Rawlsianism from within the left-liberal tradition. Notably Laurence, Nussbaum, and Wilson are all very interested in nonideal theory, which like you say is a big thing atm and was largely prompted by Mills's work. Mills's untimely death unfortunately robbed us of his fully-fleshed-out positive vision, which began appearing in working papers, etc. towards the end of his life.
If you haven't yet, you should read Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration and Private Government, which are very up your alley and combine social science with philosophy.