Abstract
This chapter assesses John Gray’s modus vivendi-based justification for liberalism. I argue that his approach is preferable to the more orthodox deontological or teleological justificatory strategies, at least because of the way it can deal with the problem of diversity. But then I show how that is not good news for liberalism, for grounding liberal political authority in a modus vivendi undermines liberalism’s aspiration to occupy a privileged normative position vis-à-vis other kinds of regimes. So modus vivendi can save liberalism from moralism, but at cost many liberals will not be prepared to pay.
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Notes
- 1.
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Rawls (1993, p. 147) dismisses the idea of grounding liberalism in a ‘mere MV’ because a MV, unlike the kind of settlement he terms ‘overlapping consensus’, does not enjoy the moral allegiance of all involved parties.
- 3.
To date, among the most articulate defences of the project of grounding liberalism in a MV is the one John Gray developed in a number of recent writings (1996, Chaps. 2 and 6, 2000a, b), which will indeed feature prominently in my analysis. Other promising defences of modus vivendi have been put forward by David McCabe (2010), John Horton (2006, 2010), and Patrick Neal (1997). Claudia Mills (2000), Bernard P. Dauenhauer (2000), and Scott Hershowitz (2000) defended the idea of modus vivendi more narrowly, against Rawls’ reservations.
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On this distinction, see Jubb and Rossi (2015).
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This is not to say, of course, that it is only possible to conceptually make sense of them in the light of that problem; neither is it to say that they are to be understood primarily as responses to that problem—even though for deontological liberalism, this is probably the case.
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Another reason for doing so is that Gray explicitly attacks neutrality as the dominant paradigm in his 2000b and highlights its tight connection to deontological liberalism; however, the words ‘neutrality’, ‘neutralism’, or ‘neutralistic’ are not even present in the index of 2000a. This is strange, because to a large extent 2000a presents a more articulated version of the arguments outlined in 2000b. I take it however that when Gray, in 2000a, refers to ‘legalistic’ liberalism, he has in mind what is generally termed ‘neutralism’, as this remark (among many) also confirms: ‘The shift from toleration of evils to neutrality regarding the good is such a shift. It has gone with an ambitious programme of reconstructing liberalism as a project in the philosophy of right. It is not by accident that the notion of neutrality has been associated with deontic liberalism’ (2000b, p. 326).
- 7.
Charles Larmore (1998) has shown how the project of Kantian deontology can be understood as a response to the fragmentation of the good (Chap. 1). He also traces some of the connections between this project and the ideal of liberal neutrality (Chaps. 6 and 7).
- 8.
The point is not that pursuing justice equals to pursuing a conception of the good, because the citizens unite in the pursuit of a justice as a goal or an ideal. In a sense, Rawls is right in saying that there is a difference between pursuing justice and pursuing a conception of the good (1993, p. 146). Justice, as a concept (or goal, or ideal), is neutral with respect to conceptions of the good. The problem, however, is that each conception of justice (such as Rawls’ own ‘justice as fairness’, or Nozick’s libertarianism, etc.) will inevitably give priority to a set of goods and interests over others.
- 9.
It is in this sense that Gray describes neutralistic liberalism as ‘legalistic’. For a discussion of how rights that supposedly settle conflicts between interests are (sometimes) not capable of doing so because of the fact that they themselves embody some such interests can be found in the jurisprudential work of Jeremy Waldron (1999, p. esp. Part III). The tradition of American Legal Realism advances similar contentions (Leiter 2005), so much so that a systematic study of its connection with the new political realism is now overdue.
- 10.
Will Kymlicka has shown that Rawls’ attempt to give priority to the right by promoting equal liberty and distribution of primary goods boils down to a position on what best promotes the good of citizens: ‘[E]qual liberty and the distribution of primary goods are the most appropriate conditions for promoting our essential interest [...] Rawls and a perfectionist do not disagree over the relative priority of the right and the good. They just disagree over how best to define and promote people’s good’ (Kymlicka 1989, p. 35).
- 11.
I employ terms like ‘goods’, ‘values’, and ‘interests’ as what one might call ‘rough synonyms’: there are differences between them that I am of course willing to acknowledge, but as far as my arguments are concerned, these differences can safely be ignored. Suffice it to say that a value, good, or interest is something that provides a reason for action (the kind of reason—pro tanto, internal, external, etc.—depends on the general account of value we choose to employ).
- 12.
The idea here is that, for the purposes of practical reason, conflict about values can indifferently be explained as a clash of different values (e.g. liberty vs. equality) or of different aspects of the same value (e.g. happiness).
- 13.
On the distinction (and the frequent confusion) between incommensurability and incomparability, see Chang (1997), ‘Introduction’. (The point is that incommensurability occurs when we cannot put two values on the same scale; but that is not a necessary condition for a comparison to take place.) How often we actually encounter such hard cases is something that Gray does not address; however, a realistic assessment of this could give us a better sense of the relevance of the issue of incomparability. However, in general it seems at least plausible to say that such conflicts are rather common in our everyday experience.
- 14.
Gray writes that ‘questions of value are answered at the bar of experience’ (2000a, p. 64).
- 15.
It is not clear whether Gray understands his value pluralism as a theory about the objective nature of value (that, e.g. is clearly his interpretation of Berlin’s pluralism, which he uses in some of his own arguments as well) or as an epistemological idea. However, some of his passing remarks, and most explicitly those in the final paragraphs of Two Faces of Liberalism, point towards such a sceptical interpretation of MV: ‘It would be idle to deny that modus vivendi is a sceptical view’ (2000a, p. 139).
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Gray does acknowledge that not all liberals are committed to full-scale temporal and geographical universalism. However he also holds that even the more particularistic liberals such as Raz tend to be committed to the view that, in some contexts, liberal values are necessarily to be raked before non-liberal ones. This is because those particularistic liberals rely on empirical assumptions about the better ‘performance’ (in delivering well-being) of liberal values in certain societies, or on a philosophy of history that conceives of liberalism as the definitive ethic for a certain historical context or for a certain stage in the moral evolution of humankind. Gray then argues that those empirical assumptions do not hold in the face of, say, the success of illiberal Asian values in capitalistic Western societies. He also dismisses philosophies of history that sanction the necessary priority of liberal values in certain contexts.
- 18.
So notice the difference between Gray’s position and David McCabe’s, the other prominent attempt to ground modus vivendi liberalism in value pluralism. McCabe defends a form of ‘pluralist perfectionism’ (2010, p. 116), and so he does not shy away from embracing a robust conception of personal autonomy as the link between pluralism and modus vivendi liberalism. Whatever the merits of this position, it should be quite clear that its expressly moral character will not appeal to realists, so discussing it at length would take us far from this paper’s topic.
- 19.
It is not clear whether Gray understands these as merely negative interests (universal evils), or also positive ones.
- 20.
What is more, depending on how much weight we want to put on the context-dependence of the way we understand our basic interests, it is not even certain that it will always be possible to achieve a MV: some group may construe its basic interests as incompatible with those of some other group. It seems however plausible to assume that these will be rather rare cases.
- 21.
That is not because I think that liberalism is by definition immune from charges of immorality; rather, because I maintain that a morally unsatisfactory version of liberalism is not worth pursuing.
- 22.
At this point one may worry, as George Crowder has done even for Gray’s less teleologically articulated version of MV (2002, pp. 121–122), that this way of presenting MV risks of focusing too much on peaceful coexistence and protection of universal values as a set of goals, thus making MV not very different from the traditional forms of teleological liberalism it is supposed to overcome. Indeed, surely MV is a teleological theory, as Gray himself notes (2000a). Now the interesting question is whether there are any significant differences in the structure of MV’s teleology, as opposed to that of the traditional teleological justifications of liberalism. It seems to me that there is at least one rather significant difference. In brief: unlike (say) utility for a classical utilitarian, peaceful coexistence and protection of basic rights for the advocate of MV are not a goal that is set ex ante, independently of any other considerations. That is to say, whereas for a utilitarian in any possible world there will be a way of maximising utility (at least in principle), a MV will not necessarily obtain. The feasibility of its goals is not decided ex ante, but is dependent on whether the parties in conflict actually happen to share enough common ground to be willing to engage in a MV. It is this contingency of its goals that differentiates MV from traditional teleology. In Gray’s own words: ‘The end of modus vivendi is not some supreme good—even peace. It is reconciling conflicting goods’ (2000a, p. 25).
- 23.
I expand on this issue in Rossi (2016).
- 24.
For a different and more effective defense, see, for example, Horton (2006): ‘Even when we have felt pressurised and agreed reluctantly to do something, we often still think ourselves bound so to act [...] Modus vivendi contains within it the idea that the resulting political accommodation or settlement is in some sense ‘acceptable’ to the parties to it: it is not the ruthlessly, coercive imposition of a particular set of arrangements by one party or another’. This move anticipates what Bernard Williams (2005) calls the realist ‘basic legitimation demand’. For illuminating discussions of this notion, see Hall (2013) and Sagar (2014). It is also worth pointing out how the role of Williams’ ‘critical theory principle’ within his account of legitimacy tends to be played down by his liberal interpreters and by liberal realists more generally.
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Rossi, E. (2019). Can Modus Vivendi Save Liberalism from Moralism? A Critical Assessment of John Gray’s Political Realism. In: Horton, J., Westphal, M., Willems, U. (eds) The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79078-7_6
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