Mich: From moral principles to political judgments

Pierre-Etienne Vandamme (KU Leuven)

Political judgments – whether to vote for A or B or to prefer policy x or y – are usually a combination of a normative principle or intuition with an appreciation of empirical facts. When building political judgments, one can hardly do otherwise than appreciating what is achievable and what the consequences of a given choice are likely to be given the knowledge we have about our world. The interesting philosophical question is whether this kind of considerations should be integrated in the normative principles themselves or should be considered apart. This is the core of the debate between partisans of ideal and non-ideal theorizing. At first sight, if a theorist is concerned with guiding political judgments, non-ideal theorizing seems more attractive, for it delivers normative conclusions that can be (more easily) applied in the existing, far-from-ideal world. In this presentation, I will first argue that ideal theorizing might be considered valuable even by theorists moved by a pragmatic concern (guiding political judgments). Then I will outline one way of deriving concrete political judgments from abstract moral principles and apply it to two test cases (basic income and the rights of migrants). Drawing on these examples, I will conclude by considering the benefits (and some costs) of proceeding in this way rather than starting from non-ideal theorizing.