Rational Political Philosophy

Abstract

The solution of the problem of ideology is rational political philosophy, which can avoid the problem of relativism by giving an objective justification of political values and making an objective distinction between proper and improper values. The nature of rational political philosophy, or moral political science, as it might also properly be termed, is the concern of this final chapter. Rational political philosophy, as a normative discipline, is the study of objective moral and political reality. Chapter 5 considered Roy Bhaskar’s scientific realism, which holds that there is a scientific reality which is both independent of and accessible to human thought. This stress on objective reality is to be welcomed as an antidote to the relativism of both the post-positivist natural science of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend, and the interpretivist social science of Winch and Taylor. However, Bhaskar’s normative thought is not adequate. I now propose to argue for a more adequate moral and political realism, as the only antidote to the problem of moral relativism, which is the problem of political ideology.