Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

HILARY W. PUTNAMHilary W. Putnam is Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Departmentof Philosophy at Harvard University, USA

Abstract The present paper examines two currently popular approachesto ethical theory — namely, ‘Expressivism’ (also known as ‘emotivism’ and‘non-cognitivism’) and contemporary forms of ‘Kantianism’ — and arguesthat neither provides a suitable foundation for the capabilities approach.Two philosophers are discussed in some detail — Simon Blackburn, as aleading representative of Expressivism, and Thomas Scanlon, as a leadingrepresentative of ‘Kantianism’ — but the views of Habermas also comeunder some scrutiny. The paper ends by advocating a view close to that ofJohn Dewey.

Key words: Simon Blackburn, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, ThomasScanlon, Democracy, Entanglement, Expressivism, Fallibilism, Kantianism,Positivism

Introduction

The present essay will describe Expressivist and Kantian approaches toethical theory, each currently popular, and explain why I think we shouldreject both of them. As I shall argue, the ‘capabilities approach’ to issuesof human development does not fit very happily with either of thesebroader approaches to ethical theory. I shall close by describing analternative approach to ethical theory — one more consonant with thecapabilities approach — that might be described as ‘Deweyan.’

Explanation of the terms ‘Expressivist’ and ‘Kantian’

Let me begin by explaining two terms I am going to use. The term‘Expressivist’ is probably unfamiliar to many readers of Journal of HumanDevelopment. The heart of the Expressivist position (formerly best knownunder the rubric ‘emotivism’) is the idea, made famous by CharlesStevenson’s (1944) book Ethics and Language, that ‘‘the disagreementsthat occur in science, history, biography’’ are ‘‘disagreements in belief,’’whereas ‘‘it is disagreements in attitude … that chiefly distinguish ethicalissues from those of science’’ (Stevenson, 1944, p. 13). While the theories

Journal of Human DevelopmentVol. 9, No. 3, November 2008

ISSN 1464-9888 print/ISSN 1469-9516 online/08/030377-12 # 2008 United Nations Development Programme

DOI: 10.1080/14649880802236581

of truth and meaning employed by Stevenson’s present-day successors arefar more sophisticated than Stevenson’s, this sentence represents a pointon which they still all agree. Stevenson himself was an admirer of thelogical positivists, and the conclusion that both Stevenson and thepositivists drew from the doctrine that ethical sentences do not state anyfacts, but only ‘express attitudes,’ is that there is no such thing as a validargument in ethics (see Stevenson, 1944, especially pp. 252–254).

This doctrine was enthusiastically embraced by Lionel Robbins, asmany readers of the Journal of Human Development will know. What isnot so well known is that it was also embraced by economists of a moreliberal bent than Robbins. To give just one example, in 1947 PaulSamuelson wrote:

It is fashionable for the modern economist to insist that ethicalvalue judgments have no place in scientific analysis. ProfessorRobbins in particular has insisted upon this point, and today it iscustomary to make a distinction between the pure analysis ofRobbins qua economist and his propaganda, condemnations,and policy recommendations qua citizen. In practice, if pushedto extremes, this somewhat schizophrenic rule becomes difficultto adhere to, and it leads to rather tedious circumlocutions. Butin essence Robbins is undoubtedly correct. (Samuelson, 1947,pp. 219–220)

There are many varieties of Expressivism on the scene today, but here, forreasons of space, I will pick out just one for examination — the versiondue to Simon Blackburn. This is the view he calls ‘‘Quasi-Realism’’(Blackburn, 1993). Members of a group like the Human Development andCapability Association, conceived in benevolence and dedicated to theproposition that rational discussion of questions of justice is possible,must surely find both classical logical positivism, and its daughter‘Expressivism,’ deeply opposed to their very raison d’etre. ButBlackburn denies that his version of Expressivism has the irrationalistconsequences that Robbins and Samuelson so enthusiastically endorsed,and even explicitly endorses the capabilities approach, which makes hisviews especially interesting in the present context.

The other term I used was ‘Kantian,’ and here I need to say at oncethat I use this term not in its historical sense, as referring to the doctrinesof Immanuel Kant, but rather as referring to a number of contemporarypositions in ethics that share one particular idea of Kant’s, however muchthey may differ in other respects. That idea is that what makes a course ofaction ethically right is that it is dictated by a rule upon which all rationalhuman beings (or, in some versions, all rational and morally concernedhuman beings) could agree. Rawls’s ethical writings clearly have ‘Kantian’elements (for example, Rawls, 1980; 1999, s. 40), and Habermas’s idea thatethical problems are to be resolved (via ‘communicative action’ in an ‘idealspeech situation’) in a way that all who are affected by the decision will

H. W. Putnam

378

agree upon is, it seems to me, likewise a Kantian idea (for example,Habermas, 1990). As with Expressivism, there are many varieties ofKantianism on the scene today, but once again I will pick out just one forexamination, the version due to Thomas Scanlon in What We Owe to EachOther (Scanlon, 1998). It is not obvious that Kantianism does notcomfortably fit the capabilities approach – I expect we may not all agreeabout that – but I will shortly explain why I say that it does not.

Expressivism and the rationality of ethical judgments

In a lecture entitled ‘Disentangling Disentangling’ that Simon Blackburndelivered two years ago (Blackburn, unpublished manuscript), he listed anumber of things that, he said, ‘‘many of us wish to applaud’’; namely,‘‘the demise of positivism and its contempt for value theory, theresurgence of ethics as a subject, the parallel resurgence of politicalphilosophy, and, as Putnam stresses, the demise of homo economicus andthe resurgence of pluralistic accounts of the good in writers such as MarthaNussbaum and Amartya Sen.’’ Blackburn goes on to argue thatExpressivists can have an ‘‘attachment to these civilized things’’ just aswell as philosophers like myself — call us ‘cognitivists’ — who believe inthe possibility of moral knowledge. Given all this, why do I say that thecapabilities approach does not fit very comfortably with BlackburnianExpressivism?

The core thesis of Expressivism, in all its versions, is that thedistinctive function of ethical utterances is to express ‘attitudes’(Blackburn also uses the term ‘stances’). They may also express beliefs,but, according to Blackburn, those beliefs vary from speaker to speaker.Contrary to my position in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy(Putnam, 2004a), Blackburn insists that the expressive ‘load’ and thedescriptive component of a thick ethical term can be ‘disentangled’.Moreover, he claims that the descriptive component of such a term isextremely variable. According to him, while there may be a fact as towhether or not the descriptive component associated with the term by aparticular speaker on a particular occasion fits the world, there is no suchthing as an ‘attitude’ fitting or failing to fit the world. ‘‘Representations ofhow things stand must fit the world whereas it is the world that must fit, orbe desired to fit, or regretted for not fitting, our attitudes’’ (Blackburn,‘Disentangling Disentangling’, unpublished manuscript, p. 7).

This leads to a problem that Blackburn himself recognizes, andresponds to – but not, in my opinion, successfully. The problem is that it isnot clear how ‘attitudes’ can be rationally evaluated, if they are completelynon-cognitive. What is Blackburn’s response?

He begins by admitting that:

Putnam is right, of course, that Sen’s approach, like anysubstantial ethic, can only be supported if there is space for

Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

379

substantial, rational, discussion of value. He reminds us of themelancholy fact that some positivists, particularly in the nineteenthirties, denied that there was space for such discussion. Hisparticular example is the economist Lionel Robbins who indeedmade hair-raising pronouncements of just this kind. But for morethan fifty years since then, and two hundred years before,expressive theorists have taken great care to acknowledge thatdiscussion of attitudes and stances is fundamentally impor-tant…it is important because when you change someone’s mindabout a value, you change their stance towards the world, andthat will typically change what they do and what they support andwhat they regret and what they campaign for. (Blackburn, unpub.p. 7)

This response may seem a little strange, since neither the positivists norLionel Robbins ever denied that ethical discussion is important, in termsof its real-world effects. What they denied is that it was rational. ButBlackburn immediately addresses this issue:

Not only is discussion important, [he writes] but there are betterand worse ways of conducting it and it is the good ways that arecollected under the umbrella ‘rational’. Manipulation, conceal-ment, evasion, fantasies, arguments ad hominem, ad baculum,and the rest are bad … Only some means are compatible withrespect for the other person. Changing the other person’s mind –changing their stance towards the world – is a fine art, butexpressivists as much as anyone else can distinguish between mybringing it about that someone wants something by deceptionand manipulation, and bringing it about by revealing truths aboutit that, in one’s own eyes, ought to impress the subject favorably.(Blackburn, ‘Disentangling Disentangling’, unpublished manu-script, p. 7)

This is hardly reassuring. First of all, the explanation just quoted is‘loaded’, to use Blackburn’s own favorite term, with evaluative words:‘‘deception’’, ‘‘manipulation’’, and even ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’. If thequestion is how, on the Expressivist account, evaluative judgments canbe rational, a string of evaluative judgments is hardly responsive to thequestion! Blackburn’s account of the good ways that are collected togetherunder the term ‘rational’ faces an age-old problem here. The justificationof any particular set of desiderata for rational belief-fixation is normallythat beliefs fixed in those ways are more likely to be true. Blackburn,however, advocates a ‘minimalist’ account of truth. On this account, thepredicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ can be applied to all sentences with the‘surface’ linguistic properties appropriate to assertoric discourse, but whatentitles one to call a statement true varies according to the sort ofdiscourse to which the statement belongs (Blackburn, 2005, p. 60). In thecase of ethical sentences, Blackburn’s minimalism gives the same results as

H. W. Putnam

380

the ‘‘redundancy theory’’ (Blackburn, 1984, pp. 229–260): that is, thetheory that all there is to say about truth is that to call a statement true isequivalent to simply making the statement. Evaluative judgments are notpossible ‘cognitions’ according to Blackburn’s view, but if one has an‘attitude’ that leads her to make one, say p, then she is perfectly in order tosay ‘it is true that p,’ whatever the evaluative judgment p may be. Thus forBlackburn to say that evaluative judgments that we are persuaded toaccept in one of the ‘good ways’ are ‘more likely to be true’ is just for himto say that they are more likely to be ones that he would accept. And this iswhat he does say, in effect, when he writes that in ‘‘in one’s own eyes’’they ‘‘ought to impress the subject favorably.’’

The logical positivists would have said that ‘value judgments areneither true nor false’, and it is to avoid saying this that Blackburn resortsto his minimalist account of truth. But he does say, as we mentioned, thatthey do not ‘represent’ anything, where ‘representing’ is equated with‘fitting the world.’

Here, it seems to me, Blackburn suffers from a severe impoverishmentof categories. In The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy I argued thatnot all objectively correct judgments are representations (Putnam, 2004a).Truths of logic and mathematics are not true just because the world, as itcontingently happens to be, does not falsify them, but because the worldcould not falsify them. They are not ‘representations’ in Blackburn’s sense.(However, Blackburn’s skepticism extends to a skepticism about objectivemathematical and logical necessity, as he has made clear in a number ofpublications; for example, Blackburn, 1993, pp. 52–74.)

Here it may be useful to contrast Blackburn’s view with Scanlon’s. OnScanlon’s ‘contractarian’ theory, according to his famous formula in WhatWe Owe to Each Other (1998), the moral motivation par excellence is thedesire to avoid an action if the action is such that any principle allowing itwould be one that other people could reasonably reject. I will shortlydiscuss the strengths, and what I see as the limitations, of Scanlon’scontractarianism. But Scanlon is surely right that the notion of what isreasonable is crucial to ethics, and indeed to science and to all of life. Andjudgments of what is reasonable, as I argue in Ethics Without Ontology(where I refer to them as methodological judgments; Putnam, 2004b,pp. 67–72) do not fit the Procrustean bed of ‘either it’s a representation ofthe world or it’s an expression of an attitude’. That metaphysicaldichotomy, which descends from Hume, is precisely what preventsBlackburn from giving any account of why we should care about arrivingat our ethical convictions in the ‘good ways’ that he purportedly ‘collectstogether’ by calling them ‘rational.’

For Blackburn, apparently it is enough if those ways change the mindsof those he reasons with in ways that ‘in one’s own eyes [Blackburn’s],ought to impress the subject favorably’. But those of us concerned withhuman capabilities and development had better be able to say somethingbetter to the billions of people whose lives will be affected by our

Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

381

recommendations, if and when some or all of them are accepted, than ‘inour eyes, they should impress you favorably.’ To say only this is just tomake the late Richard Rorty’s move of endorsing discourse ethics, andsimultaneously saying that the notion of rationality it assumes is justifiedbecause it is what ‘we’ westerners like (for example, Rorty, 1991). LikeStevenson’s older emotivist view, Blackburn’s new version of Expressivismturns the choice of an ethical argument into a mere choice among the waysthat will be likely to cause the change we desire in the behavior of those towhom it is addressed. To say that one does not approve of certain ways ofdoing this (‘bad’ ways), and that one does approve of others (‘good’ways’’) does not change the Expressivist position at all – Stevenson andLionel Robbins would have said that too – and ‘collecting together’ theways Blackburn likes under the label ‘rational’ is not something Blackburnhas shown he is entitled to do.

Scanlon and capabilities

In my view, the most attractive of the ‘Kantian’ approaches to ethics nowunder serious discussion by moral philosophers is the version of‘contractarianism’ that Thomas Scanlon (1998) developed in his wonder-ful book What We Owe To Each Other. What makes it attractive, at least inmy eyes, is its modest and pluralistic approach to morality, which contrastswith the rigorism and overweening ambition that often goes withKantianism. And I called it a ‘wonderful’ book because its discussionsare simultaneously broad, deep, and original. If there were a version of‘Kantianism’ that capability theorists should be happy with, it would beScanlon’s. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I do not think it is what wewant. In this section, I explain why I think this.

According to Scanlon’s theory, what makes an action wrong is that ‘‘itsperformance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set ofprinciples for the general regulation of behavior that no one couldreasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement’’(Scanlon, 1998, p. 153). The theory is supposed to simultaneously providean account of moral motivation:

According to the version of contractarianism I am advancing hereour thinking about right and wrong is structured by … the aim offinding principles that others, insofar as they too have this aim,could not reasonably reject. This gives us a direct reason to beconcerned with other people’s point of view: not because wemight, for all we know, actually be them, or because we mightoccupy their positions in some other possible world. [here,Scanlon is referring to John Rawls’s ‘‘veil of ignorance’’ and‘‘original position,’’ as described in Rawls (1999, pp. 118–123 andpp. 15–19)], but in order to find principles that they, as well aswe, have reason to accept … there is on this view a strong

H. W. Putnam

382

continuity between the reasons that lead us to act in the way thatthe conclusions of moral thought require and the reasons thatshape the process by which we arrive at those conclusions.(Scanlon, 1998, p. 191)

I do believe that Scanlon has well described how one sort of ethicalclaim can have motivating force in any community that shares one of thebasic interests of morality. But I also believe that morality has a number ofbasic interests, including respect for the humanity in the other, equality ofmoral rights and responsibilities, compassion for suffering and concern topromote human well-being, and not only the desire to be governed byprinciples for which we can give one another reasons, although that too isone of them. Even though those interests sometimes conflict, I believethat, on the whole and over time, promoting any one of them will requirealso promoting the others. Precisely for that reason, a philosopher whosuccumbs to the temptation to see ethics as standing on a single‘foundation’ can always write a book ‘showing’ that all of ethics ‘derives’from that interest – indeed many such books have already been written.But I believe this temptation should be resisted.

It should be resisted, because if we to package together the variousbasic ethical interests under the single wrapper of ‘principles it isreasonable to accept,’ the package will be in constant danger ofbursting. The strain on the ribbon (‘reasonable to accept’) will be justtoo great.

To see that this is so, let us consider just two kinds of objections to theidea that morality requires the idea of equality (which I take to be the ideathat all human beings are worthy of respect as moral agents). Theseobjections represent principles that governed human societies millenniabefore the idea of moral equality was ever formulated.

The first objection I will imagine as coming from a society of slave-owning aristocrats. Such an aristocrat will doubtless object that Scanlon’sformula ought to read: ‘An action is wrong if its performance under thecircumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the generalregulation of behavior that no slave-owner could reasonably reject as abasis for informed, unforced general agreement among slave-owners.’ AndScanlon will doubtless reply that this formula is not an expression ofmorality at all. And indeed it is not. But my question is whether theKantian ambiance of Scanlon’s book, an ambiance I can best describe bysaying that morality is constantly portrayed as something required byreasonableness, really tells us why morality requires that we be concernedwith everybody, with the poorest and weakest and not only the rich andpowerful. After all, knowing what reasonably follows from certaininterests, or how certain aims may be reasonably attained, is requiredby every human activity, moral, amoral, or immoral. It is true that moralityrequires equal concern for others, the sort of concern I formulated in TheMany Faces of Realism by means of the following three principles(Putnam, 1987, p. 45):

Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

383

I. There is something about human beings which is of incomparablemoral significance, some aspect which is of incomparable moralsignificance, with respect to which all human beings are equal, nomatter how unequal they may be in talents, achievements, socialcontribution, etc.

II. Even those who are least talented, or whose achievements are theleast, or whose contribution to society is the least, are deserving ofrespect.

III. Everyone’s happiness or suffering is of equal prima facie moralimportance.

and I noted there that the respect of equality (the ‘‘something abouthuman beings’’ mentioned in principle I) has been differently interpretedby different traditions and different philosophers (Putnam, 1987, p. 48).(For example, in the Kantian tradition, as I interpreted it in that book, it isthe ability to think for ourselves about moral matters that is the respect ofequality.) Additionally, I noted there that the third principle came to beemphasized later than the first two (Putnam, 1987, p. 45). It is preciselybecause equality (or ‘‘respect for the humanity in the other,’’ as Kant putit) is a fundamental interest of morality that the slave-owners’ definition of‘wrong’ is not a moral one. But note: pace Scanlon, that cuts against theidea that the central concern of morality is reasonableness. Since it is truethat every concern — moral and non-moral— that has to do with society orwith human life in society requires that we look for principles whichothers who share that concern could not reasonably reject, one could justas well argue that the central concern of morality is equality, in the aboveKantian sense, and that morality requires that we look for principles thatothers with an interest in equality could not reasonably reject.

Now let me imagine an objection to equality coming from a societydedicated to a warrior ethic (what I called a ‘macho’ ethic in Putnam,2004b, p. 29). Members of such a society will doubtless object thatScanlon’s formula ought to read: ‘An action is wrong if its performanceunder the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles forthe general regulation of behavior that no courageous male couldreasonably reject.’ Once again, Scanlon will reply that this formula is notan expression of morality at all. Yet this formula was at least implicitlyaccepted by many societies for probably something like 30 000 years. Thereason that we reject it is that we have come to feel the appeal of a way oflife that does not regard the warrior as the very peak of human excellence.But that is not because we have became more able to see what isreasonable in given circumstances if we have certain given interests; it isbecause we have come to have fundamentally different interests.

What justifies those interests? The justification in each case has tocome from within morality, not from outside or from a foundation prior tomorality. We have come to reject warrior ethics (‘macho’ ethics) because wehave come to appreciate that the idea that the warrior is the ideal type ofhuman being represented an extremely limited view of human excellence.

H. W. Putnam

384

(And ‘limited’ is, indeed, a ‘value-loaded’ term, as Blackburn would say.) Wehave come to reject aristocratic ethics and patriarchal ethics partly becausewe reject the claims to certain sorts of intellectual superiority and superiorreasonableness traditionally advanced by aristocrats and males as empiri-cally false, but also because we have come to appreciate the superiority ofwhat Dewey called ‘the democratic way of life.’ (And yes, ‘superiority’ is avalue-loaded term.) We have come to value universal moral norms, as, forinstance, the idea of universal human rights, in large part because universalnorms, somewhat like constitutions, contribute to the rule of law indemocratic societies (that Kantian ethics emerged at the time of the firstdemocratic revolutions is not accidental). And all of the interests that thevalues of democracy, equality, compassion and universal legal norms serve,themselves lead to and serve a pluralistic and compassionate vision ofhuman well-being with such wide appeal that, in our time, even manytotalitarian regimes have had to pay lip-service to them.

In addition to what I have argued to be the theoretical weakness ofScanlon’s theory – the arbitrariness of privileging the interest in having ourbehavior be governed by reasonable principles over all the otherfundamental ethical interests – I have a further reason for claiming thattheory does not fit happily with the ‘capabilities approach’; namely,Scanlon’s obvious unwillingness to give the notion of human well-beingmuch of a role, if any, in his account of ethics. Since the notion ofcapabilities that humans have reason to value would seem prima facie tobe a notion of human well-being, one would naturally expect Scanlon tomention that approach, but he does so only in passing. Most of the pagesof What We Owe To Each Other devoted to well-being are addressed toarguing that well-being is not a ‘Master Value’ — that is, a value fromwhich all of morality can be derived — and that, moreover, the concept ofwell-being has boundaries that are not well defined (Scanlon, 1998,pp. 108–146) — as if it thus contrasted with, say, the concept ‘reasonably’!But he does say that moral justification can appeal to (1) ‘‘the well-being ofparticular individuals with whom we interact, [those] whose well-being isdeterminate and can be known’’; and (2) ‘‘more specific forms ofopportunity, assistance and forbearance that we all have reason to wantrather than to the idea of well-being abstractly conceived’’ (Scanlon, 1998,p. 140). Clearly this is a case of ‘too little and too late.’ Scanlon needs tosay much more about the notion ‘that we all have reason to want,’ as wellas about the contrast between the ‘specific’ and the ‘abstract’ on which hisobjections to the use of the notion of well-being depends.

But what is the alternative?

Before describing the ‘Deweyan’ alternative to Expressivism and(Scanlon’s contractualist version of) ‘Kantianism’ I promised at thebeginning of this essay, I want to say a word about the Kantian spirit inethical theory. ‘Kantians,’ in my sense, are haunted by the idea of

Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

385

universal agreement. This is explicit in the case of Habermas, who talksabout rational discussions (concerning norms) that are supposed tocontinue until the ‘consent of all’ is secured — his principle U reads: ‘‘Fora norm to be valid, the consequences and side-effects of its generalobservance for the satisfaction of each person’s particular interests mustbe acceptable to all’’ (Habermas, 1990, p. 197) – but it is also there, justunder the surface, in Scanlon’s talk of principles, that no one (with aninterest in being governed by such principles) could reasonably reject.

The problem with the Habermasian form of Kantianism is that in thereal world it never happens that everyone agrees, if ‘everyone’ meansliterally everyone and the norm in question affects a very large number ofpeople. This is not a trifling objection. On the contrary, it cuts very deep,in the sense that no simple modification will rescue Habermas’s idea of theconsent of everyone who is affected.

For example, the late, lamented Richard Rorty, who, strangely, had hisHabermasian moments, once proposed that the rejection of a claim p isjustified if everyone except a few ‘‘dubious characters notorious formaking assertions even stranger than p’’ think that those who defend p‘‘must be a little bit crazy.’’ But, as I am sure Habermas would agree, it mayhappen that the proposed rejection of a claim p is justified if everyoneexcept a few ‘‘dubious characters notorious for making assertions evenstranger than p’’ are misguided and it is the majority that is unreasonable.Doubtless Giordano Bruno seemed to his peers (who burned him atthe stake) to be a dubious character who made strange assertions,but that has nothing to do with whether his objections to the receivedChristian cosmology were or were not justified. For that reason, onecannot ‘repair’ Habermas’s ‘consent of all’ formula by allowing a norm tocount as valid even if this or that minority is not included in the consensusof ‘all.’ And if, as I claim, the consent of literally ‘all’ is not something wefind in real life, then Habermas’s universalization principle U belongs to aUtopian fantasy.

This problem does not arise for Scanlon because: (1) he does notrequire that everyone actually consent to ethical norms, or would consentif discussion went on long enough, but instead that no one could‘reasonably’ reject them; and (2) he does not pretend to offer necessaryand sufficient conditions for an objections being ‘reasonable,’ although hedoes argue that the notion of ‘well-being’ has no role to play. Moreover,Scanlon wisely allows ethical principles themselves to be ‘open-ended’and to contain clauses of the form ‘unless there are overriding moralreasons.’ But when there is disagreement about what is reasonable (as inpractice there always is in a democracy), how are we to decide?

So how do we decide?

The ‘Deweyan’ answer I wish to defend is not metaphysical but practical. Itcan be summed up in two words: democracy and fallibilism.

H. W. Putnam

386

Democracy

What makes Habermas’s philosophy so unrealistic is that it has so little todo with actual democratic politics. To be sure, Habermas offersjustifications of freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry and everythingnecessary for these. But when it comes to actually deciding on policies, hegives us only the Utopian idea of continuing discussion until everyoneaffected is in agreement. On the other hand, if, with Scanlon, we seekagreement of all those whose arguments are ‘reasonable,’ then we throwall the weight on a concept that, I argued, is unable to bear the load. As weall know, the alternative we settle on in practice, instead of seeking theconsent of ‘all’ or the consent of the ‘reasonable,’ is to seek arguments thatconvince substantial majorities, arguments that we hope will produce an‘‘overlapping consensus’’ (Rawls, 1996, pp. 133–172).

That is the alternative as far as voters are concerned, but thealternative as far as experts (e.g. academics and members of non-governmental organizations and others involved in suggesting and/orimplementing policies) are concerned is similar. ‘Experts’ may not takeformal votes, but if their policy recommendations are to be acceptable theymust be arrived at by informed discussion that respects ‘discourse ethics’and that tries to understand and make explicit the concerns of all affected.Thus far, Habermas is surely right. But it is not to be expected that theresult will usually be unanimous agreement, among the experts any morethan among the voters.

So, am I saying that a decision reached in this way by a majority of the‘experts,’ or a majority of the voters, is necessarily right? Or necessarilyreasonable? Certainly not. This is where fallibilism enters.

Fallibilism

A Deweyan pragmatist does not propose necessary and sufficientconditions for ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ for ‘reasonable’ or ‘well-being,’ or forany other important value concept. What Deweyans possess is the‘democratic faith’ that if we discuss things in a democratic manner, if weinquire carefully and if we test our proposals in an experimental spirit, andif we discuss the proposals and their tests thoroughly, then even if ourconclusions will not always be right, nor always justified, nor always evenreasonable — we are only human, after all — still, we shall be right, we willbe justified, we will be reasonable more often than if we relied on anyfoundational philosophical theory, and certainly more often that if werelied on any dogma, or any method fixed in advance of inquiry and heldimmune from revision in the course of inquiry. In sum, what WinstonChurchill said about democracy applies to inquiry as well: fallibilisticdemocratic experimentalism is the worst approach to decision-making inthe public sphere that has ever been devised — except for those others thathave been tried from time to time.

Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories

387

ReferencesBlackburn, S. (1984) Spreading the Word, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Blackburn, S. (1993) Essays in Quasi-realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Blackburn, S. (2005) Truth: A Guide, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Blackburn, S. Disentangling Disentangling, Unpublished Manuscript.Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by C.

Lenhardt and S. W. Nicholsen., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.Putnam, H. (1987) The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, Peru, Ill.Putnam, H. (2004a) The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, new

edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.Putnam, H. (2004b) Ethics without Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.Rawls, J. (1980) ‘Kantian constructivism in moral theory’, Journal of Philosophy, 77,

pp. 515–572.Rawls, J. (1996) Political Liberalism, revised edition, Columbia University Press, New York.Rawls, J. (1999) A Theory of Justice, revised edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

Mass.Rorty, R. (1991) ‘The priority of democracy to philosophy’, In R. Rorty (Ed.), Objectivity,

Relativism, and Truth, pp. 175–196, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.Samuelson, P. (1947) Foundations of Economic Analysis, Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, Mass.Scanlon, T.M. (1998) What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

Mass.Stevenson, C. (1944) Ethics and Language, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

H. W. Putnam

388