Scepticism about the point of making moral claims
For it to be worth doing political philosophy at all, you need to think that there's a point to making and defending moral claims. So, it's important to address any doubts that you might have on that score. Below are some reasons that someone might have for thinking that there's no point. Click on any that seem plausible to you.
People are fundamentally selfish ⇨
The short answer that I have for this is that it's just not true that people are fundamentally selfish, and that the kind of evidence that people give for thinking that they are turns out to be the result of, rather than an argument for, their view.
But you shouldn't be convinced by that bare assertion. Click here for more.
People aren't unselfish enough ⇨
You might concede that people aren't fundamentally selfish, but still think that they're too partial to themselves and their families and friends for the kinds of moral claims that political philosophers consider to have any effect on them. For those claims often involve pretty demanding principles, such as that we should have open immigration, or that we should take huge pay cuts for the sake of equality.
I think you're right to be concerned about this. Some of the principles that moral and political philosophers defend are very demanding. I think that there comes a point when a principle is implausible because it's so demanding.
So, there are limits to what we can plausibly expect of people. But are those limits set by facts about people's selfishness? Or are they set by facts about what it's reasonable, morally speaking, to ask of people?
It seems to me that the limits are set by what we can reasonably ask of people. But that in itself is a moral claim, so it's certainly not an appeal to the pointlessness of making moral claims. If this is what you think, then, there's no reason to be a sceptic about the point of making moral claims.
Even if you think that there are limits that are set simply by the facts of human nature (and I agree with you about that, too), that still doesn't show that making moral claims is pointless. For it's not clear where the limits are, and within those limits there's room for a range of different moral principles to apply. So, though you may be sceptical about specific moral claims, there's no reason for scepticism about the project of analysing and defending moral claims in general.
I can think of two reasons that you might think this. The first is a kind of pessimism about people's capacity to change their behaviour. This needn't be pessimism based in some judgment that they're selfish. You might simply think that the moral and other habits that people are in are pretty much impossible to change.
I think that this is just obviously false. People once thought that slavery was permissible; now they don't. They saw women and black people as by nature inferior; now they don't. They thought that one's ancestry determined one's value; now they don't. What's changed in each case is people's moral thinking, and there has been a corresponding change in behaviour.
People really do change their behaviour when they come to believe that what they were doing was wrong; and they really can be convinced of the wrongness of their behaviour. No one's pretending that this is a process that moves quickly or easily. But it can and does take place.
The second reason for thinking that you can't change people is based in scepticism about free will. Perhaps you think that people can't change because they have no free will—that free will is an illusion.
I don't have the space to go into the debate on free will here. But you should know that it takes a lot of argument to establish that we don't have any. Plenty of philosophers are both determinists (they think, roughly, that all our actions are fully determined by prior states of the world) and compatibilists (they think that this is compatible with our having free will). So, you can't just help yourself without argument to the idea that we have no free will.
Moreover, even if we don't have any free will, it remains the case that people may change their behaviour, and that among the causal factors that bring about this change may be their beliefs about morality (even if they have no say, as it were, about whether to have those beliefs). So scepticism about free will doesn't entail scepticism about people's capacity to change, or, therefore, this kind of scepticism about the point of doing political philosophy.
Political philosophy is unrealistic ⇨
Assuming that the thought here isn't that people are too selfish, or that you can't change them, what might you mean in saying that political philosophy is simply unrealistic?
Some moral claims are implausible because it's simply impossible that people could live up to them. It's implausible to claim, for example, that you're morally obliged to be sixteen feet tall. That's just not possible. So, if a moral theory produces the requirement that you ought to be sixteen feet tall, then so much the worse for that theory.
Something like this idea might underlie the view that there's no point doing philosophy because it's unrealistic. But we should note an important difference between the kinds of claims that we most often come across in political philosophy and the claim about being sixteen feet tall.
The difference is this. The moral claims that we make in political philosophy don't require anything that's actually impossible. So, your scepticism about the unrealistic nature of political philosophy must have to do not with possibility but with likelihood. You may suspect (with good reason) that many of the kinds of moral and political principles we discuss would fail to gain enough support for there to be any wide compliance with them, or for their legal implementation to be achieved in a democracy. ("Who's going to vote for that?" you might say.)
But how good a reason for this is scepticism about the point of saying that they should? From the fact that people aren't going to behave as a moral theory says they should, it doesn't follow that the theory is false. People often don't behave as they should. We shouldn't necessarily allow that fact to pollute our theorising. What we're interested in, at least in part, is the truth, after all.
Two responses to this point may have some force. The first says that there's no point making moral claims if no one's going to follow the requirements they specify. The second says that the fact that no one's going to follow the requirements of our moral theories is enough to show that those theories can't be true.
Now, there's a debate about this (known as the 'Ideal Theory' debate) currently going on, and no clear winner has emerged yet. But it's worth noting that the two responses I just described get at least some of their plausibility from the idea that no one will follow the requirements specified by the claims and theories in question. Yet it's not obvious that we should grant that no one will. People sometimes act against their apparent interest when they're convinced that this is what they ought to do, morally speaking (see the replies to the selfishness arguments above).
So, if we can convince people, by arguing convincingly for the truth of moral claims, that they ought to do something, it seems likely that some of them will actually do it as a result. So, you can't assume that no one is going to comply with the requirements that we argue for.
You can't infer, then, from the fact that not everyone will vote for some moral principle, either to the conclusion that there's no point in making moral claims, or to the conclusion that those claims can't be true.
After all this, I hope that you're convinced that there's a point to doing moral and political philosophy after all. If you're still sceptical, perhaps your scepticism is in fact based on scepticism about the possibility of truth, or about our right to make moral claims. In that case, head back and see why I'm not sceptical in these ways either. Otherwise, click on 'I'm still not satisfied' below.