¹ Wildavsky, Aaron, Speaking Truth to Power (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 216Google Scholar; Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), chap. 6Google Scholar. Cf. Goodin, Robert E., Political Theory and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chap. 7Google Scholar, and ‘The Political Realism of Free Movement’, in Barry, Brian and Goodin, Robert E., eds. Free Movement (London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 248–64.Google Scholar

² Stebbing, L. Susan, Ideals and Illusions (London: Watts, 1944)Google Scholar; Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations, 3rd edn (New York: Knopf, 1963), esp. pp. 4–15Google Scholar; Keohane, Robert O., ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Hoffman, Stanley, ‘Realism and Its Discontents’, Atlantic Monthly, 256, no. 5 (11 1985), pp. 131–2, 134, 136Google Scholar; Beitz, Charles R., Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 11–63Google Scholar; Cohen, Marshall, ‘Moral Skepticism and International Relations’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 13 (1984), 299–346Google Scholar. These disputes are orthogonal to that between self-styled ‘historical materialists’ and their ‘idealist’ opponents – between, most famously, Marx and Hegel – over the relative causal efficacy of mere ideas as opposed to material conditions of existence.

³ Calabresi, Guido and Bobbit, Philip, Tragic Choices (New York: Norton, 1978).Google Scholar

⁴ See, for example, Ball, Terence, Fair, James and Hanson, Russell L., eds, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, or Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).Google Scholar

⁵ Critiques of ‘universal human rights’ as varied as Burke's and Marx's are couched similarly in terms of objections to such ‘abstractions’; see Waldron, Jeremy, ed., Nonsense Upon Stilts (London: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar. Among contemporaries, such themes are echoed by writers as diverse as Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962)Google Scholar, and Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ See O'Neill, Onora, Faces of Hunger (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), esp. chap. 3Google Scholar; ‘Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism’, Ethics, 98 (1988), 705–22Google Scholar; ‘Presidential Address: Constructivisms in Ethics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 89 (1988–1989), 1–17Google Scholar; and Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 11.Google Scholar

⁷ There are of course schemes for by-passing people's intentions altogether, guiding their behaviour from behind their backs. For example, it might be better that people should generally follow slavishly some commonsense morality, which is itself broadly utilitarian in its form and function, than that they internalize utilitarianism, which, when misapplied, would yield less utilitarian results; see Smart, J. J. C., ‘An Outline of a Utilitarian System of Ethics’, Utilitarianism, For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1–75 at pp. 42–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But that is just to say that the underlying moral discourse need not be accessible to everyone in the community, though it none the less has to be accessible to someone (rulers, at least) if it is to be used even in this behind-the-back mode of rule.

⁸ Reprinted in Lewis, Jane, ed., Before the Vote Was Won: Arguments For and Against Women's Suffrage (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 21–46 at p. 30Google Scholar. See more generally Goodin, Robert E., Motivating Political Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chap. 5.Google Scholar

⁹ O'Neill, , Faces of Hunger.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Nelson, Barbara and Evans, Sara M., Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Rhoades, Steven, Incomparable Worth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. These calculations would appear far more familiar to followers of traditional Australian wage fixing procedures involving a ‘national wage case’ and various arbitration proceedings flowing on from it; see Hancock, Keith, ‘The First Half-Century of Australian Wage Policy’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 21 (1979), 129–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Elucidated in part by Neustadt, Richard E. and May, Ernest R., Thinking in Time (New York: Free Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Sunstein, Cass R., ‘On Analogical Reasoning’, Harvard Law Review, 106 (1993), 741–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Van Parijs, Philippe, ed., Arguing for Basic Income (London: Verso, 1992).Google Scholar

¹³ Hayek, Friedrich A., ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, American Economic Review, 35 (1945), 519–30.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Goodin, Robert E., Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar. See similarly Hardin, Russell, Morality Within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁵ One reason is that rules often are, and often must be, framed around statistical artefacts rather, than real people. The statistically ‘average’ family may have 2.7 children, for example, but-certain child custody arrangements apart – that hardly describes the actual circumstance of many real families.

¹⁶ For some of the problems with equality measures, see Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2, and Cowell, Frank A., Measuring Inequality (New York: Wiley, 1977).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Or at least that the ideal has several dimensions, often at variance in any particular application. See, more generally, Rae, Douglas W., Equalities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Goodin, Robert E. and Le Grand, Julian et al. , Not Only the Poor (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), esp. chap. 10.Google Scholar

¹⁹ It does not much matter whether these goals are contingently or necessarily in conflict. Precisely the same problems would arise in precisely the same form if the ideals were merely contingently jointly unattainable, just so long as those contingencies are relatively ineradicable in the short to medium term.

²⁰ Goodin, Robert E., ‘The Development-Rights Tradeoff: Some Unwarranted Economic and Political Assumptions’, Human Rights Quarterly, 1 (1979), 31–42Google Scholar; Frohock, Fred M. and Sylvan, David J., ‘Liberty, Economics and Evidence’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 541–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ For synoptic summaries of the broad alternatives, see Stokey, Edith and Zeckhauser, Richard, A Primer for Policy Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978), chap. 13Google Scholar; Barry, Brian and Rae, Douglas, ‘Political Evaluation’, in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., eds, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 337–401Google Scholar; and Keeney, Ralph L. and Raiffa, Howard, Decisions with Multiple Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs (New York: Wiley, 1976).Google Scholar

²² Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, sees. 8, 39 and 82. I shall follow Rawls in calling this form of priority ‘lexical’, for short.

²³ Dworkin, Ronald M., Taking Rights Seriously (London: Butterworth, 1977)Google Scholar, although Dworkin does not always stick strictly to the implications of this metaphor (see, for example, pp. 191–2).

²⁴ The notion is introduced in Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975)Google Scholar and illustrated with reference to national defence policy in Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, pp. 226–31.Google Scholar

²⁵ Harsanyi, John C., ‘Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality?’ American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 594–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Luce, R. D. and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957), chap. 13Google Scholar. These rules were originally designed for special problems of making choices under uncertainty, but they can and often have been thought to apply to choice situations quite generally; see Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, chap. 9.Google Scholar

²⁷ Rawls's (secs. 12, 13 and 26) so-called ‘difference principle’, telling us to maximize the position of the worst-off representative individual, is the most familiar variant. To perform this exercise with the precision that that formulation demands, we would need to establish comparable measures of ‘goal-fulfilment’ across all our various goals.

²⁸ The model here is the Arrow-Hurwicz rule; see Luce, and Raiffa, , Games and Decisions, pp. 282–4Google Scholar and Goodin, , Political Theory and Public Policy, pp. 177–9Google Scholar. How this ratio is determined is left as an open question; the most natural ways of fixing it cause this class of decision rules to start shading over into the third (‘weighting’) class.

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:

‘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.

³¹ Compare Okun, Arthur M., Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1975).Google Scholar

³² Rawls, , A Theory of Justice (p. 542)Google Scholar backs off demanding lexical priority of liberty over material well-being for precisely this reason, thus compromising his case for a lexicographical priority rule more than he seems to have realized; see Barry, Brian, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), chap. 7.Google Scholar

³³ Barry, Brian, Political Argument (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965)Google Scholar, chap. 1. See also Barry, and Rae, , ‘Political Evaluation’.Google Scholar

³⁴ ‘In combining … single-attribute utility functions into a multiattribute utility function, there is almost always an attempt to utilize independence assumptions …[Indeed,] any violation of independence suggests … additional objectives, and thus attributes’, in the gloss provided on this literature by Keeney, Ralph L., ‘Value-focused Thinking and the Study of Values’, in Bell, David E., Raiffa, Howard and Tversky, Amos, eds, Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 465–94, at p. 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, similarly, Edwards, Wade, ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement for Social Decision-making’, in Bell, David E., Keeney, Ralph L. and Raiffa, Howard, eds, Conflicting Objectives in Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1977), pp. 247–76, at pp. 255–6Google Scholar; Keeney, and Raiffa, , Decisions with Multiple Objectives, chap. 3Google Scholar; Raiffa, Howard, Decision Analysis (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968), chap. 9Google Scholar; and Fishburn, Peter C., ‘Independence in Utility Theory with Whole Product Sets’, Operations Research, 13 (1965), 28–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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.

³⁷ Allais, Maurice and Hagen, Ole, eds, Expected Utility Hypotheses and the Allais Paradox (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Machina, Mark, ‘Expected Utility Analysis Without the Independence Axiom’, Econometrica, 50 (1982), 277–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁸ It is striking to note the extent to which the most subtle of these decision-analytic techniques strive to force the multiattribute utility function into an additive form simply summing across values derived from all component attributes. See, e.g., Fishburn, , ‘Independence in Utility Theory’Google Scholar; Edwards, , ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement’, pp. 255–6Google Scholar; Keeney, and Raiffa, , Decisions with Multiple Objectives, chap. 3Google Scholar; and Keeney, ‘Value-focused Thinking’ p. 471.Google Scholar

³⁹ MacCrimmon, Kenneth and Wehrung, Donald A., ‘Trade-off Analysis: The Indifference and the Preferred Portions Approaches’Google Scholar, in Bell, , Keeney, and Raiffa, , eds, Conflicting Objectives in Decisions, pp. 148–71.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ More generally, these models specifically assume monotonicity within each value, as well as independence across values; see Edwards, , ‘Use of Multiattribute Utility Measurement’ pp. 255–6.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Little, I. M. D., A Critique of Welfare Economics, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), chap. 2.Google Scholar

⁴² Lipsey, R. G. and Lancaster, K. J., ‘The General Theory of Second Best’, Review of Economic Studies, 24 (1956), 11–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another political application, see Coram, Bruce, ‘Second Best Theories and the Implications for Institutional Design’, in Goodin, Robert and Brennan, Geoffrey, eds, The Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

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.

⁴⁴ Lipsey, and Lancaster, , ‘The General Theory of Second Best’, p. 11.Google Scholar

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.

⁴⁶ Or so would be suggested by the ‘Wilt Chamberlain example’ in Nozick, Robert's Anarchy State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), chap. 7Google Scholar; I cite his argument without in any way endorsing its conclusions.

⁴⁷ Such is the lesson Roy Pateman draws from his experiences with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. He tells of how freedom fighters travelled so lightly as not even to pack a change of clothes, knowing that they could count upon sympathizers in the next village swapping clean clothes for their soiled ones; but as he comments, villagers could only be expected to be happy to let others raid their wardrobes in that way so long as those wardrobes were not very extensive in the first place. See his ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: Aspects of the Eritrean Revolution’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 28 (1990), 457–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁸ Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, sec. 82.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Goodin, , ‘Development-Rights Tradeoff.’Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Rae, Douglas W., ‘Decision-rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice’, American Political Science Review, 63 (1969), 40–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Michael J., ‘Proof of a Theorem on Majority Rule’, Behavioral Science, 14 (1969), 228–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar