Kevin V. thinks eudaimonism makes a better fit with public-reason liberalism than with NAP. By contrast, I don’t think eudaimonism and public-reason liberalism are compatible. Eudaimonism is a “comprehensive doctrine,” a “conception of the good,” and one that regards the content of justice as being essentially informed by (though also informing) the other virtues, and more broadly by an overall conception of human flourishing. Public-reason liberalism, by contrast, holds that we can determine the content of justice without relying on any specific conception of the good. The contrast seems pretty stark to me.

Does this mean that eudaimonism requires a perfectionist politics? No, at least not in the sense of having political institutions try to mold virtuous citizens. Virtue itself puts constraints one what one may permissibly do to promote virtue in others. The traditional political mistake that has beset eudaimonism since the Republic is to forget, in the political sphere, what eudaimonists rightly stress in the ethical sphere: that virtue is first and foremost a quality to be embodied in each of the agent’s actions, not some sort of global goal to be maximised.

The Unbearable Lightness of Public Reason

Kevin maintains that “when we coerce others based on rules and norms that they, on reflection, regard as inconsistent with their projects, plans and values, we subordinate them to our will and treat them unequally” – even when that norm is the NAP. But this argument proves too much; it takes out all the alternatives to NAP as well.

Suppose Libertarian Libby and Collectivist Colin, both reasonable and sincere (let’s stipulate) in their commitments, come into conflict over an umbrella in Libby’s possession. According to Libby’s libertarian principles, the umbrella is her rightful property, the product of her labour , and she is entitled to defend her possession of it; according to Colin’s principles, Libby’s umbrella belongs to the community, Libby has had possession for long enough, and it’s Colin’s right to take it for a while. So Colin tries to grab the umbrella forcibly from Libby, who in turn tries to fend him off by whacking him on the head with it.

According to Kevin, it seems, we should not side with Libby. By whacking Colin on the head she is coercing him based on rules and norms that he, on reflection, regards as inconsistent with his projects, plans and values, and thus subordinating Colin to her will and treating him unequally. But by the same logic we cannot side with Colin; for by forcibly grabbing Libby’s umbrella he is coercing her based on rules and norms that she, on reflection, regards as inconsistent with her projects, plans and values, and thus subordinating Libby to his will and treating her unequally. To be sure, being a Rothbardian, say, means being “prepared to enforce Rothbardian property rights on reasonable non-Rothbardians” but by the same token, being a non-Rothbardian (being a public-reason liberal, say) means being prepared to enforce non-Rothbardian property rules on reasonable Rothbardians. (Unless Kevin’s claim is just that there cannot be such a thing as a reasonable Rothbardian; but given Kevin’s broad standard for reasonableness, that’s going to be a hard case for him to make out.) NAP has the advantage of allowing us to choose sides between Libby and Colin; but Kevin’s preferred substitute condemns both sides and so seems a non-starter when it comes to providing guidance. Hence why not set public-reason considerations aside and examine Libby’s and Colin’s principles on their own merits?

Part of Kevin’s response, I take it, will be that while under a public-reason approach neither Libby nor Stan will be “able to institutionalize the principles they think best,” they can instead “institutionalize principles they believe are acceptably just, but sub-optimal,” since “rational and reasonable people acknowledge that it is better to have some property rights regime that is justified and binding for all rather than none.”

But this approach once again treats justice as some global good to be maximised, rather than as a constraint on individuals’ actions. We may not be responsible for all the shortcomings of the social systems to which we contribute, but we are responsible for all of our own shortcomings. In evaluating an individual’s conduct, whatever is suboptimally just is not “acceptably just”; it is unjust.

Live Free or Die

In a note in the comments section, Kevin asserts that “[i]f you violate the NAP, in a great many cases, you’re not impinging on people’s projects, plans and values in a morally significant way.” But he can hardly expect a Rothbardian or Nozickian, who regards violations of the NAP as a form of enslavement, to agree with Kevin that such enslavement is morally trivial.

Kevin asks “why free and equal persons should comply with the authority claims made by Rothbardian property owners, even when they’re in cases of serious need.” But the answer, from a eudaimonist perspective, is that it is more in one’s self-interest to die justly than to live unjustly – better to suffer as a decent person than to survive as a predator. Eudaimonism involves reconceiving one’s conception of benefit and harm; whereas Kevin’s argument leaves conventional notions of benefit and harm unchallenged. For the eudaimonist, no all-things-considered assessment of the relative merits of destitution and aggression can be made apart from an overall conception of the good; the Rawlsian notion of “primary goods,” basic goods whose value is constant, uncontroversial, and independent of broader conceptions of the good, has no place in eudaimonism.

Hence my skepticism about the possibility of reconciling eudaimonism with public-reason liberalism. And anyway we can reverse Kevin’s question: why should Rothbardians comply with the authority claims made by public-reason liberals, when they regard those claims (even if wrongly; though in my judgment, rightly) as tantamount to enslavement?

In any case, as Kevin acknowledges, the implementation of the NAP would not in practice entail that “the masses live at a subsistence level while a small elite enjoys a spectacular amount of wealth”; quite the reverse, in fact. But Kevin insists that “the fact that Rothbardian principles of justice permit this state of affairs, however unlikely, means Rothbardian premises are false.” But I’m not sure why this is a special problem for the NAP. After all, it’s equally true of the Rawlsian difference principle, for example, that it would permit a situation where “the masses live at a subsistence level while a small elite enjoys a spectacular amount of wealth,” if the worst off would do better under that regime than under a more egalitarian alternative. Of course no one thinks it likely in practice that such a situation would meet the requirements of the difference principle; but Kevin grants it’s not likely that it would meet the requirements of the NAP either. Both are possible in principle, sure; but any decent theory of justice has to be prepared to walk away from the counterfactual Omelas, should it improbably arise. Sometimes the heavens have to fall.

Moreover, from a eudaimonist perspective, inasmuch as justice stands in reciprocal determination with prudence and benevolence, the prima facie badness of being forced to live at a subsistence level is already one of the inputs into the deliberative process whereby NAP is constructed – as are the low probability of such a consequence, the rule-consequentialist considerations against being too free with exceptions, and the anti-consequentialist considerations embedded in the prima facie content of justice.

Sed Magis Amica Veritas

The fundamental problem with the public-reason approach, as I see it, is that it sacrifices truth to reasonableness by giving reasonable but mistaken views equal status with correct views.

Actually, I don’t think the rejection of NAP is ordinarily a purely reasonable or innocent mistake; as I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s “a moral vice, rather than a mere cognitive mistake,” though “like racism and sexism” it’s “the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace,” a “form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning.” Still, accepting the legitimacy of aggression is still culpable, even if the error usually comes about through culpable negligence in the management of one’s inner psychic economy, rather than via deliberate wickedness.

But even if the rejection of NAP were reasonable, why should reasonable views that are mistaken have equal rights with reasonable views that are true? If Libby’s views on property rights are correct, then Colin’s grab for her umbrella is aggression, and the fact that his mistake is in some sense innocent is no reason to demand that Libby be disarmed and defenseless against him. Or, for that matter, if Colin’s views on property rights are the correct ones, then it’s Libby’s striking him with the umbrella that is aggression, and the fact that her mistake is in some sense innocent is no reason to demand that Colin be disarmed and defenseless against her.

I don’t deny that avoiding the imposition of norms on people who innocently (if mistakenly) reject them is a desideratum – one of many considerations that go into the pot along with everything else when constructing the content of justice. But I can’t see why we should follow the public-reason approach in privileging and exalting this one desideratum and giving it veto power over every other consideration. Such a one-sided approach seems, well, “unacceptably sectarian.”

Now Kevin has said in the past that he doesn’t regard public reason as forbidding self-defense against innocent threats. But if so, then he himself acknowledges that it’s sometimes okay to coerce people on the basis of norms they reasonably and innocently reject. But people who reasonably disagree about justice are naturally going to regard each other as innocent threats. What determines when force against innocent threats is licit and when it is not?

In any case, the compromise approach is not going to get Kevin what he wants, because if the level of reasonable disagreement is high enough to make such a compromise necessary, it will be high enough to guarantee that some people will reasonably disagree with the compromise – thus mandating a further compromise that will have the same problem again. Any solution specific enough to solve the problem of reasonable disagreement will be specific enough to provoke – reasonable disagreement. Public justification, in the sense defended by public-reason liberals, seems to me to be an unattainable will-o’-the-wisp, that leads us away “to bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool,” finally abandoning us in a trackless waste.

One illusion to beware of is the notion that we can make a rights-claim more susceptible of public justification by watering it down. Watering down Libby’s rights-claims entails beefing up Colin’s; watering down Colin’s rights-claims entails beefing up Libby’s. Dissent is simply redistributed, not eliminated. There is no public-reason short cut that can spare us the need to considering claims of right on their own merits. Nor is there any standpoint, neutral among these perspectives, from which one can assess one perspectives’s concerns as more pressing than another’s.

Postscript: In Bonds of Iron and Adamant

In the comments section of Kevin’s post, Mark D. Friedman suggests that “[t]hose who hold that objective morality is defined in terms of human flourishing” would or should “investigate empirically which moral codes produce this good” – an approach he contrasts with the view that “moral truths are like the truths of math and logic,” and thus “known primarily through reason.” But the eudaimonism I favour, though indeed basing objective morality on human flourishing, is closer to the math-and-logic approach than to an empirical approach. The relation between morality and flourishing is not one in which the former “produces” the latter; morality is a constituent of the good life, not an external means to it, and thus determining the content of morality is a conceptual enterprise, not an empirical one.

That is not to say that causal considerations are irrelevant; as explained before, consequentialist economic considerations do go into the pot. But economic principles are not empirical either.

The approach to mathematics I find most convincing is one that holds, as mathematical constructivists do, that the existence of mathematical objects and truths consists in the possibility of performing the relevant proofs and constructions. (That doesn’t mean I want to sign on to everything else that mathematical constructivists go on to say.) My view in ethics is similar; as agents we are essentially deliberative beings, and our very natures – the boundaries of the self, and of the self’s interest – are a deliberative construction. We construct the content of flourishing in the light of prima facie judgments about morality, and at the same time construct the content of morality in the light of prima facie judgments about flourishing. Nor can we just construct these things in whatever way we like, just as in mathematics we cannot; there are constructions we can make sense of for ourselves as coherent and defensible, and constructions we cannot.

Is moral constructivism incompatible with moral realism? I don’t think so. The concept of realism is topic-relative; a view is regarded as antirealist only relative to some possible view that is more realist. If an account of the nature of galaxies made ineliminable reference to mental states, we’d call that anti-realism about galaxies; but if an account of the nature of minds made ineliminable reference to mental states, we wouldn’t call that anti-realism about minds. Likewise, if someone said that the truth of claims about when Napoleon died consists in facts about what we have best reason to accept, that would be an anti-realist view about historical truth; but there’s nothing anti-realist about saying that ethical truths consist in facts about what we have best reason to accept, because an ethical judgment just is a judgment about what we have best reason to accept (since acting on a consideration is a way of accepting it).