"Gaus shows that your theory of the ideal social system, whatever it may be, is almost certainly wrong. And even if it isn’t, it probably can’t work as a useful guide to political decision-making — especially not in a diverse liberal society, like ours, rife with disagreement about ideals.
Ditching our utopias for an appreciation of what Gaus, following Karl Popper, calls an "Open Society" of liberal pluralism, mutual accommodation, and incremental democratic reform brings clarity and gravity to this election season’s big choice...
As long as we can reliably identify injustice, we can focus on fixing injustices that enough of us agree to be urgent and obvious, and simply make things progressively better. That's all we need.
If you're climbing a mountain, you don't need to know what the peak looks like to know what to do next. All you have to do is make sure your next step is up. Similarly, by rectifying injustices, one after another, we can just keep gaining in moral altitude. When there's nothing left to be done, we've made it. We don't need a picture of the top to get there...
The "just go up" rule risks stranding us at a "local optimum" of justice, lacking in moral ambition. But morality demands that we don’t stop short. We’re duty-bound to shoot for the best possible social order — the "global optimum."...
In order for my ideal to play this orienting function, I needed to think that it was both possible and awesome. So I did. And that meant pretending to have good answers to hard questions I really didn’t really have evidence to back up."
I think I'm an incrementalist, not and idealist, on justice - because this really spoke to me.
Or maybe it's a failure of imagination, a product of having grown up in this society with all of its ingrained unjust stati quo, so that I don't know what "ideal" would look like - I just know that this isn't it, and I can concretely identify some of the reasons why. So all I can do is try to solve those until I can identify more.
FB: "there's no satisfactory way to decide among several equally compelling but incompatible ideals of justice"
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