Climate change goals and actions are often discussed with reference to their feasibility. However, in the climate change literature, there is no agreed upon understanding of what feasibility means. In this paper, insights from political philosophy are used to address this problem in a two-fold way. First, different uses of the term feasibility in the climate change context are critically analyzed, surfacing problematic uses that can have severe consequences for what goals or actions are considered. Second, the ‘conditional probability account (...) of feasibility’ is presented as a positive account of how feasibility should be understood in the climate change context, and applied to the case of managed retreat as an approach for adaptation to sea level rise. Together, the critical analysis and the positive proposal furthers a necessary discussion on feasibility in the context of climate change. (shrink)

In Utopophobia Estlund offers a prominent version of a conditional account of feasibility. I think the account is too permissive. I defend an alternative incentives account of feasibility. The incentives account preserves the spirit of the conditional account but qualifies fewer actions as feasible. Simplified, the account holds that an action is feasible if there is an incentive such that, given the incentive, the agent is likely to perform the action successfully. If we accept that ought implies feasible, then we (...) should reject some normative requirements on agents that Estlund would accept in light of his more permissive conditional account. But we can still recognise normative requirements on individual and collective agents that, if complied with, would result in a world that is radically better than our own. (shrink)

The political psychologists Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith accuse orthodox moral foundations theory of predicting what is already intrinsic to the theory, namely that moral beliefs influence political decision-making. The authors argue that, first, political psychology must start from a position which treats political and moral beliefs as equals so as to avoid self-justificatory theorising, and second, that such an analysis provides stronger evidence for political attitudes predicting moral attitudes than vice versa. I take this empirical result as a starting point (...) to intervene in a debate in contemporary normative political theory which has, to my mind, become largely unwieldy: the political realism controversy. I advise the realists to ‘downplay’ the (thus far) inconclusive debate over realism’s metanormative standing in favour of a non-metanormative inquiry. Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith’s study makes for an excellent backdrop. It affirms the realist hypothesis that politics is in some relevant sense – a causal, psychological sense – prior to morality. (shrink)

A common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It (...) will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible. (shrink)

If Alison McQueen is right that there is a broad ‘family’ of realist approaches to political theory, then it follows there are several ways of ‘doing’ realism, as illustrated by this collection. Here, I set out one such way, normative behaviourism, by explaining its realist character on four fronts: Its starting point; its values; its ambitions; and its treatment of a shared problem. The argument then considers two key objections to the described approach, both of which affect a range of (...) possible realisms. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on feasibility and justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim in this paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is (...) done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizing as intuitively plausible – the ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’ – which elucidate a number of aspects relevant for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. Second, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice. (shrink)

Realist thinkers in political philosophy often criticize ideal theorists for neglecting or eliminating the fact of politics in their work. This is supposed to be problematic because we should never expect to overcome politics. Any theory that attempts to do so is said to be unrealistic, naïve, and impractical. Although much has been said in the dispute between realists and ideal theorists in recent years, this particular line of criticism, which should be distinguished from other criticisms of ideal theory, has (...) not been clearly or explicitly addressed by ideal theorists in the literature. I deal with this issue by examining the ideal theory of John Rawls, which has been a prominent target of realist criticisms. My aim is to see where politics exists, or might exist, in Rawls’s theory, and whether this politics satisfactorily answers to the various aspects of the realist’s critique. My analysis suggests that there may be no inherent or necessary conflict between ideal theory and real politics, after all. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that a progressive approach to normative political theorizing should incorporate a conception of meaningful political change that is nonutopian (it conceives of advancements as gradual stages), large-scale (it involves the largest possible numbers of organized and unorganized social movements), and democratically emancipatory (it displays a commitment to breaking down the barriers that prevent individuals from feeling responsible for the direction of society). Bearing this in mind, such an approach should be organized around a cooperative effort (...) between theorists and agents of change and should be oriented toward the collective construction of large-scale actionable proposals for social and political change here and now. (shrink)