Sponsored by the Penn Series in Moral and Political Philosophy and the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy.

Comments will be provided by Jules Coleman, Yale Law School

ABSTRACT

Political philosophy seeks to understand, among other things, what
societies and states and their members ought to be like, what they are
required to do, what they are and are not permitted to do. Some
political philosophy (through out its history) has held society to
standards that are very unlikely to be met, arguing, for example that
social justice depends on more public spirit or civic virtue than we
expect actually to see. My target in this paper is the common objection
to such theories that goes like this: human nature contains elements of
partiality and selfishness that will never be eradicated, and political
philosophy must operate within these limits of human nature. Political
philosophies that would require greater levels of civic virtue than this
are, for this reason, false. I will argue, to the contrary, that the
fact that a theory of justice requires things that people, owing to
human nature, will be unable to bring themselves to do, is no defect at
all in that theory. I will not argue, as is also traditional in these
disputes, that human nature is variable enough that it places virtually
no such limits. Rather, I will grant for the sake of argument that human
nature includes characteristic inabilities to transcend selfishness and
partiality. Even so, theories of justice that require more unselfishness
and impartiality than this are not, as is so often assumed, defective
for that reason. Justice might perfectly well require things that human
nature will keep us from ever achieving.