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Political Ideals and Political Practice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
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The pursuit of high ideals in politics is often scorned as unrealistic and, therefore, undesirable. This article considers two new ways in which this might be true. One allegation is that ideals might be so highly idealized as to be inaccessible to ordinary agents and hence incapable of guiding their actions. The other notes that the full and simultaneous implementation of all of our ideals is typically unrealistic, and that first-best ideal desiderata may well be imperfect guides to choice among second-best worlds.
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References
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29 Suppose our goals are ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’. Suppose we have but two alternative courses of action, A and B. And suppose that the impact of each course of action upon each goal (where 100 represents perfect fulfilment of the goal and 0 complete non-fulfilment of it) would be as follows:
![](https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20151019064734851-0695:S0007123400007055_eqnU1.gif?pub-status=live)
‘Maximin’, for example, would lead us to opt for action A: the least fully realized goal (‘equality’) gets a higher score performing action A than does the least fully realized (‘fraternity’) performing action B. But surely in such a case we would think that the vastly greater fulfilment of the other goals under action B more than compensates for this marginally worse performance on the least fully realized goal.
30 To perform the arithmetic exercise, we would need once again to establish comparable measures of goal-fulfilment across all goals, in addition to cardinal weightings. Either alone might be asking too much – both together might be asking much too much.
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35 Indeed, that is the very definition of a ‘good’ within the economics tradition that inspires all these trade-off models.
36 And insistently so. As Keeney, , ‘Value-focused Thinking’, p. 471Google Scholar, writes, if there is ‘any violation of independence [then that] suggests that additional objectives’ are in play: interactions between goals are analytically ruled out of court; any interaction effect is to be treated, within these models, as yet another (composite or synergistic) goal.
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43 Such appearances deceive, however. The proper application of those principles is in terms of the extent to which our goals themselves are attained, whereas the ‘conditions’ here in view are operational means for attaining those goals.
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45 Problems of second best arise particularly when descriptions are couched in terms of surface attributes rather than more directly in terms of the underlying sources of those values. But that is just the way political ideals are typically cast (e.g., we want a liberal democracy with a market economy, welfare safety net and open borders). Without the requisite independence among underlying value attributes (of the sort described in the previous section), second-best problems will of course arise even if descriptions are cast directly in terms of bedrock underlying values.
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