Abstract Abstract: I begin this paper by examining what MacIntyre has to tell us about radical disagreements: how they have arisen, and how to deal with them, within a polity. I conclude by radically disagreeing with Macintyre: I shall suggest that he offers no credible alternative to liberalism's account of radical disagreements and how to deal with them. To put it dilemmatically: insofar as what MacIntyre says is credible, it is not an alternative to liberalism; insofar as he presents a genuine alternative to liberalism, this alternative is not credible. In large part the credibility problems that I see for MacIntyre's project arise from the history on which he bases it; it is with this history that I begin. Reflection on MacIntyre's profound and subtle political philosophy thus fails to dislodge liberalism from its contemporary intellectual supremacy-a supremacy which I think liberalism has well earned. If anything, such reflection enhances the hegemony of liberalism still further. And a good thing too. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History The most famous part of MacIntyre's most famous book may well be the "disquieting suggestion", the picture of a world after the collapse of science, with which it begins (MacIntyre 1981, 1-2): "The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same grave state of disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described." This brilliant coup of philosophical and historical imagination continues to captivate even those, like me, who have rather fallen out of love with the project of After Virtue. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History To show that our language of morality is disordered in the fundamental way that he proposes, MacIntyre does two things. First, he offers a survey of the contemporary moral scene that leads him to the verdict that "The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which those disagreements are expressed is their interminable character [. . . ] there seems to be no rational way of securing agreement in our culture." (6) Secondly, he traces a history that is meant to demonstrate how moral concepts, principles, and modes of argument have been wrenched from the contexts in which they originally made sense and redeployed in contexts where they are no more at home than, say, a pendulum is at home in a tumble drier: how allegedly universal rules, for instance, have been detached from the descriptive teleology in which they were grounded in the Aristotelian tradition, and without which such rules can, according to him, have no ultimate cthomas@example.org. (This, briefly, is "why the Enlightenment project had to fail".) MacIntyre's Diagnostic History MacIntyre's complaint about pervasive disagreement might seem an odd one. Why, as Stephen Mulhall (in: Horton/Mendus 1994) asks, should we even want a way of securing agreement in ethics that meets the standards suggested by MacIntyre's talk of "unassailable criteria", "compelling reasons" (MacIntyre 1981, 8) ? Ethics is not science; not even broken-down and disordered science après le délu-ge. In any mature science, we can demonstrate results-Mulhall's example is the result that there are mountains on the moon-by methods to reject which is simply to manifest scientific incompetence. Nowhere in ethics (either contemporary ethics, or any other credible sort of ethics) can we do anything remotely parallel. In ethics a Sartrean move is always available. It is always possible, not only to query the accounting, but also to query the currency: to any Condorcet who says to us calculemus (see Berlin 1969, 52) , we can always reply not only calculemus aliter but also NON calculemus. This fact alone-and quite apart from the obvious, banal, and patently un-World-Historical phenomena of special pleading and bad faith which play such important roles in so many human interactions-is enough to explain persistent disagreement even if we accept a common currency of well-regimented argument, whether that common currency is a pernicious Bayesian consequentialism, or a salutary Aristotelian teleology. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History A further question about MacIntyre's idea that our disagreements are a sign of our moral degeneracy is: when was it ever otherwise? MacIntyre's Diagnostic History 1 Consider the detail of MacIntyre's extended history of our alleged moral collapse-his Interminably Long History of Ethics, as MacIntyre himself amiably calls it. I cannot do justice to that still-in-progress historical project here, but I can offer a few comments. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History MacIntyre writes (MacIntyre 2006b, 239 ): MacIntyre's Diagnostic History "What is lacking in modern political societies is any type of institutional arena in which plain persons [. . . ] . are able to engage together in systematic reasoned debate, designed to arrive at a rationallyfounded common mind on how to answer questions about the relationship of politics to the claims of rival and alternative ways of life." MacIntyre's Diagnostic History The right retort is: "What do you mean, 'lacking in modern political societies' ?" It is not as if some previous society had been very good at this sort of debate in a way that we are not. Certainly classical Athens was not very good at this; overall, the history of the Athenian ecclêsia is not a history of "systematic reasoned debate", but of riotous assembly. The same applies, for instance, to the Assemblée Nationale from 1789 to 1793. Even its striking initial results, though certainly achieved by the expression of a "common mind" about political theory, were not products of debate with the French crown, but of defiance of it. Thereafter the Assemblée declined steadily towards the condition of what Carlyle acidly called "a Sanhedrin of pedants", bickering over the small print of constitutions that were never actually enacted, while, for good or ill, the real Revolution happened elsewhere. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History Consider, again, the following remarks: MacIntyre's Diagnostic History "We have all too many disparate and rival moral concepts [. . . ] and the moral resources of the culture allow us no way of settling the issue between them rationally. Moral philosophy, as it is dominantly understood, reflects the debates and disagreements of the culture so faithfully that its controversies turn out to be unsettlable in just the way that the political and moral debates themselves are." (MacIntyre 1981, 235) The existence in our moral discourse of a plethora of moral-theoretical resources with multifarious origins need not reveal the incoherence that MacIntyre sees. As MacIntyre himself shows, concepts can be and are adapted to fit new frameworks, and sometimes this process enhances the concepts rather than mutilating them. Socrates' response to Simonides' definition of justice as "rendering to each what is due to him", which begins in Republic Book I as a flat rejection of the Simonidean formula, has been turned by the end of Republic IX into a transformation of it: "render each his due" is, it turns out, precisely what the perfect Platonic state does. The Republic (notoriously, in some commentators' eyes (Foster 1937) transforms the ordinary Athenian concepts of justice and happiness in the course of investigating them. Nor, as Bernard Williams observes, need a plethora of diversely-originating resources be a sign of ethical confusion rather than of profusion. To take it that way is, ironically enough, characteristic of the very moral philosophers whom MacIntyre opposes: "Theory typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can." (Williams 1985, 117) Anyway, to repeat, it is hard to identify another age that was any less incoherent or confused. MacIntyre himself has provided no picture, not even a sketch, of a golden age of practical rationality. On MacIntyre's own showing in 1981, chs.11-12, Plato and Aristotle both struggled throughout their careers, not just to prove certain theses within an uncontested method of argument that was accepted by a philosophical community around them, but also to establish the propriety of the method of argument itself. This second-order debate was just as contentious and just as wide-open as the first-order debates that its deliverances were supposed to settle, or at least to regiment. In the Gorgias Socrates and Callicles are just as much at odds about whether pleasure is the good as they are about what counts as a good argument that pleasure is or is not the good. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is not only trying to argue us into a particular view of human well-being, he is also trying to liberate us from what he considers a crucially mistaken account-Plato's-of what argument about human well-being can be. Beyond these diverse conceptions of the nature of moral argument-conceptions which deserve to be called "incommensurable" if any do-there stands a wider Athenian society which, like ours, mostly does not even recognise that moral argument is philosophical at all, as opposed to a religious practice, or a rhetorical or dramatic or narrative practice; or simply a reflection of the play of individual and corporate emotional forces. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History If we wanted a paradigm of a society that was fundamentally divided between incompatible and incommensurable conceptions and currencies of moral debate, we could hardly do better than classical Athens. Just as, if we wanted an example of a society where arguments were rationally interminable, or where a method of argument had degenerated into a mere mask for the pleading of vested interests, we could hardly do better than the scholasticism of pre-Reformation Europe. As many Protestants over the centuries, not least John Locke, have noted: We can agree with MacIntyre that Locke's splendid invective is, on the whole, unfair to the achievements of scholasticism without swinging-as MacIntyre apparently did at the time he wrote After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? -to the other extreme, and claiming that there is nothing at all in the Renaissance/Reformation critique of scholastic method. We can then agree with MacIntyre that the scholastic era was not a dark age for philosophy and practical rationality (in fact, not even Locke thinks this 2 ), without accepting as the only alternative the idea that it was a golden age. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History In political argument, it is always a bad strategy to commit oneself to a hunt for a golden age. The hunt for a golden age is an unfortunate feature of MacIntyre's philosophical history in After Virtue. We might want to opt out of that hunt even if we agree with MacIntyre about the importance of philosophical history in general: "it is only by reference to [the history of morality-and-moralphilosophy] that questions of rational superiority [between traditions] can be settled" (MacIntyre 1981, 269) , or in the words of Hegel that MacIntyre here echoes, "the court of truth is the world-court of history" (Hegel 1820, 343) . MacIntyre's Diagnostic History 2 "I say this not any way to lessen Aristotle, whom I look on as one of the greatest Men among the Antients; whose large Views, acuteness and penetration of Thought, and strength of Judgment, few have equalled; And who in this very invention of Forms of Argumentation, wherein the Conclusion may be shewn to be rightly inferred, did great service against those, who were not ashamed to deny any thing." Locke, Essay IV.XVII, 4: a pointed rejection of the magisterial reformers' noisy abuse of Aristotle (not to mention their willingness to entertain contradictions). MacIntyre's Diagnostic History In its biggest and most general claims, the diagnostic history of After Virtue faces potentially decisive criticisms. Its more particular claims can be criticised too: for instance, the claims that Aristotle and Kant are not historicists in the good sense, not examples of "tradition-constituted" inquiry (MacIntyre 1981, 277; 1988, 8) . MacIntyre's Diagnostic History A tradition-constituted inquiry is one in which (1) "To justify is to narrate how the argument has gone so far", (2) where "what justifies the first principles [of a theory], or rather the whole structure of theory of which they are a part, is the rational superiority of that structure to all previous attempts within that tradition to formulate such theories and principles" (MacIntyre 1988, 8) , and (3) where "rational superiority" consists both in greater capacity to explain or otherwise rationally connect the rival theories' target phenomena, and also in a capacity to explain why the rival theories were less successful. On this definition, MacIntyre himself notes good evidence that Aristotle was a historicist: "Aristotle tried to write the history of previous philosophy in such a way that it culminated with his own thought." (MacIntyre 1981, 146) Here Aristotle contrasts sharply with Plato, for instance, who will not even name his chief opponent among his predecessors (Democritus), takes most opposing philosophical views to be in fundamental error, and has a theory-the myth of the Cave-which explains why this is so. Compare Aristotle's well-known methodological dictum tithenai ta phainomena (NE 1145b3): a philosopher should take previously-accepted beliefs as his starting-point, do as much as he can with them, and abandon as few of them as possible. (As the opening of the Analytica Posteriora tells us, "All instruction given or received by way of argument proceeds from pre-existent knowledge.") It conflicts with this evidence to say, as MacIntyre does, that Aristotle "envisaged the relationship of [his] thought to those predecessors in terms of the replacement of their errors or at least partial truths by his comprehensively true account", or that his view was that "once his work had been done, theirs could be abandoned without loss" (MacIntyre 1981, 146) . For "the comprehensively true account" that Aristotle aimed at was not exclusively his at all, any more than the true picture of the world that the later Wittgenstein aimed to rescue from the deceptions of philosophy was Wittgenstein's own. Broadly, Aristotle's aim was to secure a common understanding of the world, largely inherited from those "received opinions" (endoxa) of his predecessors which he undertook to incorporate within his own explanatory framework, and only partially undergirded by the new foundations of his own philosophy. In this sense Aristotle's inquiry was, precisely, historicist and tradition-based; and, in its opposition to Platothe greatest enemy of historicism in the Greek tradition, and the philosopher whose authority Aristotle most consistently rejects-self-consciously so. MacIntyre's Diagnostic History Kant too saw his own inquiry as tradition-constituted in MacIntyre's sense. From the opening sections of the First Critique it is clear that Kant regards his own work in epistemology as a proto-Hegelian synthesis of the predecessor rationalist and empiricist alternatives. Comparing the opening sections of the Groundwork, it is equally clear that Kant regards himself as synthesising a number of earlier ethical views: the Christian view that virtue is rewarded and the Stoic view that it is its own reward; Locke's individualist contractarianism and Rousseau's collectivist communitarianism; Grotius's positive account, and Hobbes's sceptical account, of the place of principles of natural law antecedent to the formation of any particular political community. Kant's claim about these resources from the history of philosophy is that his own theory appropriates what is right about each of them, without recapitulating the mistakes of any of them-because Kant's own theory also possesses the resources to explain why those previous views were mistaken. The antithesis between Kant and traditionbased inquiry is another antithesis that does not stand scrutiny. Utopias and the Art of the Possible If modernity is in such a mess then what is MacIntyre recommending we do instead? I am, as promised, working towards the conclusion that MacIntyre's policy recommendation is best understood as one that classic Millian liberals like myself can and should accept. To reach this conclusion, I will trace a route from one well-known MacIntyre quotation to another, even better-known quotation, which we'll get to at the end of this section. My train of thought between them stops at a number of stations, some of them some distance from recognised MacIntyre territory, and will recruit some surprising names as more or less intimate allies of MacIntyre: Nozick and Rawls, for instance. Utopias and the Art of the Possible First, then, a quotation from MacIntyre's essay on Marx's Theses on Feuerbach : "The modern state [. . . ] behaves part of the time towards those subjected to it as if it were no more than a giant, monopolistic utility company and part of the time as if it were the sacred guardian of all that is most to be valued. In the one capacity it requires us to fill in the appropriate forms in triplicate. In the other it periodically demands that we die for it." (Knight 1998, 227) The modern state does indeed have a split personality of this sort. Call the utility-company side the Bureaucracy-and forget, for our purposes, the term's rather pejorative flavour. Call the sacred-guardian side the Community-and forget, for our purposes, the term's rather cosy flavour. (I capitalise both terms to mark the technical senses I give them.) Then the thesis of this section is not 'Bureaucracy bad, Community good'; though this sometimes seems to be MacIntyre's message, and is certainly the burden, more often than sometimes, of much recent 'communitarian' writing. Utopias and the Art of the Possible 3 Nor is the thesis 'Bureaucracy good, Community bad (or at any rate suspect)'; though that often seems to be what 'libertarians' want to tell us. Rather, my thesis is 'Bureaucracy good in its place, Community good in its place'. The institutions of Bureaucracy and Community both serve essential purposes. But they serve different purposes, which it can do great harm to confuse. If we find ourselves well-placed historically to see not only the importance of the Bureaucracy and the Community, but also the differences between them, that is just our good luck. (As we have seen already, my optimism about our present situation is not the only way in which I read history differently from MacIntyre.) Utopias and the Art of the Possible My slogan 'Bureaucracy good, Community good' should not, of course, be read as meaning that I think that either a Bureaucracy or a Community cannot go wrong. What it means is that they constitute different threats when they do go wrong (as happens with depressing frequency), and achieve different goods when they go as well as they can (which happens with depressing rarity). Utopias and the Art of the Possible The distinctive goods that a successful Community achieves are familiar from a whole library's worth of stirring writings: Utopias and the Art of the Possible "Although, in [the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, man] deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man." (Rousseau, du Contrat Social, 1.8) George Orwell's marvellous Homage to Catalonia could be read as a book-length study of the states of political consciousness, characteristic of a sense of Community, that Rousseau sums up in this one short brilliant paragraph. In particular, perhaps, the ending of Orwell's book is a study of the sad truth in Rousseau's foreboding parenthesis "[. . . ] did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left". Utopias and the Art of the Possible Humans acting and living in concert achieve goods that they can never achieve alone; they achieve a sense of belonging and purpose that transforms their lives, and leads to acts of idealistic altruism unmatched by the individualist. 4 The political "community cannot express authority unless it possesses corporate initiative; that is, unless the mass of its component units are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, are conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the whole sovereign indeed" (Belloc 1911, 1). But when "corporate initiative" is there, so is a political authority which is not just in-principle and theoretical, but exhilaratingly actual. Something of this is what Orwell found on the streets of Barcelona. 4 As for the distinctive ways in which the state conceived as Community goes bad, these hardly need rehearsing to anyone at our point in history. As Orwell himself was to emphasise in his later books, and as Proudhon pointed out in 1851, with the state-as-Community the thin end of the wedge is intrusiveness, and the thick end is tyranny: 4 "To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, published. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." (P.-J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, quoted in Nozick 1974, 11, footnote) 4 The more a government sees itself as legitimated by, and indeed the expression of, a popular enthusiasm, the 'corporate initiative' of a Community, the more it is prone to see itself as entitled to meddle in every aspect of its citizens' lives; to presume that they owe an account of themselves to it rather than vice versa, in such forms as, for example, compulsory voting, the formalisation of a duty to report minor infractions to the state's operatives or to incriminate oneself, and the carrying of ID cards. No Bureaucracy (in my sense of the word) that correctly understood its own limits, and that it is by rights no more than the servant and agent of citizens' freedoms, would be likely 5 to engage in such presumption to any great extent. 4 This stress on the Bureaucracy's proper limits brings us neatly to the good points of the state conceived as (no more than) Bureaucracy: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and farreaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?" (Nozick 1974, ix) The Copernican turn made in this first question of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arresting, even shocking. Nozick's question is not the boringly familiar 'How much room should the state allow individuals?', but the bracingly novel 'How much room should individuals allow the state?' I take this to be a salutary shock. In political philosophy, at the level of first principles, the individual rules: the state is there for the individual, not the individual for the state. To think anything else is to be victims of our own rhetoric. We are well used to the organic conception of the state that, at the foundations of our culture, Plato, Aristotle, and St Paul all give us in their different ways-and later on, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx 6 do something different with the same basic idea. We are so used to the organic conception that we forget that the state is never literally one body, and that St Paul can hardly have meant to say that the church was, either. Or we forget that the polis is not literally a substance for Aristotle, and-despite the higher tides of the rhetoric in Politics Book I-cannot possibly be understood as a substance, given Aristotle's fundamentally individualist background metaphysics. 4 7 Or we forget that, despite the structuring metaphor of Plato's Republic, the state is not literally a soul in three parts, either. The organic conception of the state is basically a metaphor, and what is only metaphorical cannot have moral priority over what is literally real. To elevate the rights of the state above those of individuals is to fossilise the organic metaphor into literality. 4 For all that, I would not quite as far as Nozick: 4 here is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more." (1974, 33) Pace Nozick, there are social entities in some sense, even if that sense is less fundamental than the sense in which there are individuals. There is even such a thing as their flourishing: think of the various ways in which a team, a fellowship, a society, a partnership, or a business can-in a perfectly literal sense-do well or badly. None of these 'social facts' (to reuse Durkheim's phrase) is reducible to facts about individuals. But all of them presuppose individuals: there can be individuals without any such social entities, but there can be no such social entities without individuals. If social entities exist and flourish, that flourishing is not a good that those social entities themselves can enjoy (in any experiential sense) or promote (in any agential sense). It is individuals alone who are pleased at the success of societies, and individuals alone who can take steps to realise or perpetuate such successes. The flourishing of social entities is a good -where it is a good at all-only by being a good to individuals. No converse statement is true. There is no good sense in which my health only matters insofar as it subserves the purposes of some larger association. Irreducibly, my health also matters to me. The first axiom of political philosophy is therefore: individuals first. As the classical utilitarians saw, the whole point of political arrangements is to make things go better for individuals. Or as Adeimantus so nearly objects to Socrates (Republic 419a1), to design a political system that makes no individual more eudaimôn is peculiarly futile. 4 If it is objected, in classic Marxist style, that my "Individuals first" can only mean "Individuals of a particular ideological and historical sort first", or that I have up my sleeve some ideologised account of happiness, I simply deny it. So far I have no commitments at all about the meaning of "happiness" or "individual". Moreover, I am reasonably sure that all the conclusions I want about individuals and their happiness will go through on any plausible account of what individuals and happiness are, including the Marxist one: variations in the definitions of "happiness" and "individual" will cancel through. This is not to deny that "individual" and "individualism" and "happiness" can provide an ideological cloak for various nefarious developments. Of course they can (as can the key concepts of Marxist theory 8 ): indeed ideological cloaking is one of the distinctive ways in which the state, conceived as no more than a Bureaucracy, is apt to malfunction. 4 For a Bureaucracy, four sorts of malfunction seem especially typical. Three are the themes of objections to Bureaucracy familiarly pressed by MacIntyre: the relativism charge, the moral-vacuum charge, and (as just seen) the ideologicalcloaking charge. A fourth charge is less insisted on by MacIntyre, though something like it has been well developed by other critics of the Bureaucracy conception and the libertarianism that goes with it. This is the charge of heartlessness. 4 No doubt the four charges are connected: it is because the Bureaucracy is apt to look morally uncommitted in itself that it is likely to take on whatever colour its participant citizens give it-both overtly and, more sinisterly, covertly. Furthermore, it is just its lack of moral commitment that makes a Bureaucracy look heartless. In itself, and as understood by Nozick, a Bureaucracy seems to have none of what Hilaire Belloc calls 'corporate initiative', the kind of generous impulse of compassion that leads, say, to the formation of the Churchill-Lloyd George or Attlee-Bevin welfare state. 4 These charges can be parried by a better understanding of what the Bureaucracy is for. I have already said that the Bureaucracy is there for the individual; the Bureaucracy is that conception of the state on which it is true that the state is there for the citizens, not the citizens for the state. The point of the Bureaucracy is to support the aspirations of individuals. (More below about what "support" means.) But one thing individuals aspire to do is participate in Communities-i.e. different versions of that conception of political organisation on which it is not precisely true that the state is there for the citizens, not the 8 Berlin 1969, 61-62: "There is a sardonic note (inaudible only to their most benevolent and single-hearted followers) in the words of both [Marx and Hegel] as they contemplate the discomfiture and destruction of the philistines, the ordinary men and women caught in one of the decisive moments of history. 4 [Here] the two great prophets of destruction are in their element; they enter into their inheritance; they survey the conflagration with a defiant, almost Byronic, irony and disdain [. . . ] When history takes her revenge-and every enragé prophet in the nineteenth century looks to her to avenge him against those he hates most-the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverised."-In short, Marxism can be a good cloak for ressentiment. 4 citizens for it, since what individuals characteristically want in a Community enterprise is that they themselves should, in one way or another, be subsumed in it. 4 If then the Bureaucracy is there to support the aspirations of individuals, and Communities rank high among those aspirations, the Bureaucracy must also be there to support the aspirations of individuals to be involved in Communities, and indeed to support the aspirations of Communities themselves. But Communities will, as MacIntyre notes, express very different ideas of the good; and the Bureaucracy is equally committed to supporting all of them. The Bureaucracy cannot fulfil this commitment without being neutral between the different communities. No wonder, then, if any Bureaucracy appears to be, in itself, a moral vacuum, and to reflect nothing more objective than the differing preferences of its constituent individuals and Communities-whether by overt relativism, or covert ideological cloaking. For that neutrality is the point of the Bureaucracy. 4 The Bureaucracy's role is transcendental: not to achieve a substantive conception of the good, but to provide the preconditions without which no substantive conception of the good can be achieved. The point is a Kantian one, parallel to Kant's famous doctrine of the transcendental role of pure practical reason in ethics. In the individual, pure practical reason is not a commitment to a substantive notion of the good: it is a commitment to doing or being what any agent needs to do or be to pursue any substantive notion of the good. Likewise in political philosophy, the role that I propose for the Bureaucracy is not to pursue any particular utopia, but to make possible the pursuit of all manner of utopias. It is not only in the most familiar sense of the phrase that the sort of politics that concerns the Bureaucracy can be called "the art of the possible". "Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people live different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias." (Nozick 1974, 312) The Bureaucracy's neutrality between different particular utopias or Communities is easily confused with relativism or moral vacuum; just as, in Kant, pure practical reason's neutrality between conceptions of the good is easily misinterpreted as subjectivism. But the Bureaucracy's neutrality is not contentless, any more than Kant's pure practical reason fails to lead to specific moral instructions to the individual. (There is of course a whole tradition, from Fichte to MacIntyre himself, of objecting to Kant that pure practical reason is contentless. I believe this tradition to be mostly mistaken, but cannot tell that story here.) 9 Another familiar way of attacking this notion of pure practical reason, in the political deployment that I give it following Kant, is to deny that such transcendence is attainable. So MacIntyre writes: 9 "It is an illusion to suppose that there is some neutral standing point, some locus for rationality as such, which can afford rational resources sufficient for enquiry independent of all traditions [. . . ] the person outside all traditions [. . . ] has no adequate relevant means of rational evaluation and hence can come to no well-grounded conclusion, including the conclusion that no tradition can vindicate itself against any other." (MacIntyre 1988, 367) I waive the response, developed in the first part of this paper, that Kant is not in fact working "outside all traditions". 10 I simply ask: As an anti-Kantian point, how should this be taken? Not presumably as the denial of the thesis that there is some standpoint that is not itself a standpoint; no one worth five minutes' thought will assert that. Then perhaps, as the denial of the thesis that there exists some standpoint from which all other standpoints can (interestingly, rationally) be assessed? But it is important to note that Kant does not need the very strong thesis that we get by putting the quantifiers this way round ("there is some standpoint such that for any other standpoint [. . . ]"). His transcendental practical philosophy can get by with the much weaker thesis that for any pair of standpoints, there exists some standpoint from which they can be compared. Indeed he can make do with a weaker thesis still: that for at least a good number of pairs of standpoints, there exists some standpoint from which they can be compared. Since this last thesis is manifestly true, the moral is that Kant's aspiration to transcendence does not prevent his ethics, and his politics, from becoming grittily practical. 9 Suppose the Bureaucracy is there, as I've suggested, to enable the pursuit of utopias. This commits the Bureaucracy to being more than a moral vacuum, even if it is and must be neutral between the utopias. Roughly, it commits the Bureaucracy to John Stuart Mill's Greatest Liberty Principle: the liberty worth promoting and protecting is the greatest liberty for any consistent with the same liberty for all. More specifically, it commits the Bureaucracy to ensuring that each utopia and individual is not arbitrarily prevented from pursuing the goods that it cares about, by e.g. violence, murder, or coercion into someone else's conception of the good. 9 One form of arbitrary prevention arises from extreme need. Is the Bureaucracy committed to doing anything to alleviate such need? I believe it is, precisely because extreme need is arbitrary prevention. (Recall Kant's duty to assist the needy, which he derives directly from the categorical imperative itself.) 9 Here we come to the charge of heartlessness against the Bureaucracy conception of the state. That charge seems entirely justified against Nozick-style 10 I also waive the obvious point that, while no one can ever be outside all traditions, still outside some tradition is often a useful place to be: it can highlight problems that are real, but invisible to those within the tradition. So I have argued, in my "Why wasn't Socrates a Cosmopolitan?" (forthcoming), that for most Greeks of Plato's time the conflict between the universal principle of the Crito ("Harm no one") and the Euthyphro's indifference to the rights of slaves was virtually invisible. To them, the idea that slaves were among those whom we should never harm would have seemed a preposterously literalistic reading of the Crito's principle, just as many gentlemen in early America would have thought it preposterously literalminded to assume that the 'All men' who were 'equal' according to their own Declaration of Independence included those men (and come to that women) who were black slaves. 9 libertarianism, but can be accommodated by a better understanding of what the Bureaucracy should be. 9 Nozick offers a historical entitlement account of distributive justice: "whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just" (1974, 151) . If there was no injustice already present in a given distribution, and if no unjust transfers have taken place since, then there can be no injustice in the present situation. Nozick's arguments for this account are three. First, he apparently takes the account to be self-evident, in something like the way of physical conservation principles: "if we start with justice, and we add nothing but justice, and, in particular, no injustice, how can we end up with injustice?" (Cohen 1995, 41) . Second, Nozick thinks that anyone rejecting his account of distributive justice must accept a pattern-based account instead-egalitarianism or prioritarianism or something like that-and he offers cogent arguments against pattern-based accounts. Third, he describes his own project as that of providing a "potential explanation" of why certain developments have taken place in political philosophy, and why certain views of a broadly Lockean sort look plausible there, which derives the political from the non-political, i.e. moral, background (1974, (7) (8) (9) . He disclaims any ambition to explain or defend the moral views that he finds in this background, which he identifies with "the law of nature in [Locke's] Second Treatise". 9 This third argument is almost, but not quite, an appeal to intuition. If it were an appeal to intuition, we could respond that the intuitions to which Nozick appeals run no deeper than the intuition that when someone is in dire need, he can have a right to our assistance. However it is not an appeal to intuition, but rather to the authority of Locke. And Locke writes this, though Nozick does not quote it: 9 "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions [. . . ] Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another." (Locke, Second Treatise II. 2.6) Locke himself tells us that others (and not only the direly needy) can have a right to our assistance-and that in virtually the same breath as he tells us about the rights of self-ownership and property that Nozick so much stresses. 9 This merely exegetical fact demolishes Nozick's third argument for his account of distributive justice. The third argument was just the authority of Locke, and Locke's authority is not on Nozick's side at all; Locke recognises a duty to help those who are in need when we are not in need ourselves. To neglect this duty would be a breach, not only of justice, but specifically of distributive justice, because what the duty requires is precisely redistribution: from my surplus to someone else's deficit. If there is, as Locke says, a duty to assist-and I see no reason to doubt that there is-then the existence of this duty destroys Nozick's first argument too, because it shows how his principle that "whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just" is not only not self-evident, but not even true: it faces compelling counter-examples. Given the world's familiar vicissitudes, the situation where X is in dire need and Y is not can easily be a situation which has "arisen from a just situation by just steps". An earthquake, for instance, does not arise by injustice. That does nothing whatever, if X is an earthquake victim, to abridge the stringency of X's right to Y's help, and of Y's duty to help X. Finally, the existence of a duty to assist also destroys Nozick's second argument for his account of distributive justice, namely that anyone rejecting it will have to accept an unattractive pattern-based account instead, such as egalitarianism. I agree with Nozick in rejecting egalitarianism (and I will resist the temptation to say that there is more than a whiff of egalitarianism in Locke's Second Treatise-or at least, I will resist the temptation to say more than this about it). When someone claims, like Jerry Cohen, that "in socialist perception, there is injustice in a system which confers high rewards on people who happen to be unusually talented" (Cohen 1995, 256) , I just find myself having bizarreness reactions. If everyone has enough, why it should matter, from the point of view of justice, that some have much more than enough? Any argument that I can imagine for Cohen's 'socialist perception' will have to use the premiss that any inequality of distribution is intrinsically unjust. But that premiss is obviously false. How is it unjust for you to be, say, better at darts than me? 9 Perhaps what drives the 'socialist perception'-more broadly, the theory of egalitarianism-is the thought that, where there is a marked inequality between the holdings or positions of A and B, this is bound to give A, who holds more or is better positioned, power over B, who holds less or is worse positioned. But this is highly doubtful; it would be absurd to say that your superior darts ability delivers me into your power, doubly absurd to say that it is bound to, and triply absurd to describe your superiority in darts as unjust because it inevitably so delivers me. There are many sorts of inequality, and they do not all cut the same way. If A is a publisher and B is a bank manager, A has positional power over B when B asks A to publish B's novel, and B has positional power over A when A asks B for a loan. Even differences in holdings of money, which no doubt is what egalitarians are mainly thinking of, need not deliver the poor into the hands of the rich, and need not in any obvious way operate unjustly. The fact that, say, Donald Trump is far richer than I am has no general tendency to deliver me into Trump's hands, and even in the special case where Trump and I are engaged in litigation, will not necessarily win the day for him. 9 Perhaps egalitarianism might also be derived from the thought that when I am allocating resources that I have the right to allocate, and when an indifference argument applies to those to whom I allocate, then I act irrationally if I do not allocate equal shares to all. But not even this thought seems correct. If I have the right to allocate these resources, then I will typically have discretion about how to allocate them. Where I do not have such discretion, that is most likely to be either because the indifference argument does not apply, or else because I am in one of the familiar situations where we take equal shares as a mark of equal respect, and equal respect to be morally required. (Some decisions about wills, for instance, are like this-though even here not all.) But where I do have this discretion (as I sometimes do), I can without irrationality allocate the resources however I please, notwithstanding the indifference argument. 9 The thought that rationality always requires equal allocations of all resources that I have the right to allocate is wrong. Even if it were right, the words in it that I have just italicised would still be crucial. One capital issue between the egalitarian and the non-egalitarian is which resources 'we' have the right to allocate. Nozick says: Only those resources that we hold by just acquisition. I say: Only those resources that we hold by just acquisition, plus whatever else we need to appropriate to meet dire needs. The egalitarian, apparently, says, or just assumes, that we have the right to allocate everything. (Perhaps he holds that a refusal actively to allocate is tantamount to a decision to allocate by abstension. In this rejection of the act-omission distinction, and adoption of a global model of agency 11 , the egalitarian shows up, interestingly, as the ally in political philosophy of the act-consequentialist in ethics. Now that's what I call guilt by association.) So, for instance, Thomas Christiano quietly builds this assumption into his defence of egalitarianism by way of what we might call The Egregious Passive: "The key idea is that if there is a reason for any person to be brought to a certain level of well-being, then the same reason holds for every person to be brought to that level of well-being." (Christiano 2007, 62, my italics) Who is supposed to have the right to do this "bringing", and what are they allowed to appropriate in order to do it? The egalitarian idea that we at least start from the presumption that everybody has that right, and can appropriate anything, begs one of the main cthomas@example.org. But to say, as I do, that there is a duty to assist the seriously needy which forms an important part of any plausible theory of justice is not to buy into any sort of egalitarianism. 9 12 All 11 On these see further Chappell 2007, especially chts. 5 and 8 (available online at my OU webpage). 9 12 Unless perhaps it is to buy into some sophisticated and diluted sort of egalitarianism such as that defended by Michael Walzer under the name "complex equality" (1983, (19) (20) : "The regime of complex equality is the opposite of tyranny. It establishes a set of relationships such that domination is impossible [. . . ] complex equality means that no citizen's standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good. Thus, citizen X may be chosen over citizen Y for political office, and then the two of them will be unequal in the sphere of politics. But they will not be unequal generally so long as X's office gives him no advantages over Y in any other sphere [. . . ] So long as office is not a dominant good, is not generally convertible, officer holders will stand, or at least can stand, in a relation of equality to the men and women they govern." 9 There is much to agree with in this passage. It brings out nicely, for instance, some of the deeper and less obvious reasons why political corruption matters so much. But it is not clearly an advocacy of any distinctively egalitarian thesis, unless it is egalitarianism to believe that all citizens in the state should (in general) be treated with equal justice, and (as a particular application of that general requirement) given equal protection against what Walzer calls "tyranny". This requirement of equal justice is not, it seems to me, a requirement of equality; it is a requirement of justice. Thus I agree with the substance of Walzer's thesis of complex equality, but disagree with him that it is well labelled egalitarianism. 9 justice requires is what we do have the right to bring about by redistribution via the instruments of the Bureaucracy: that every member of society should have a minimally decent level of well-being, resources, and opportunity. To say that is not to advocate a pattern at all; as many patterns are consistent with this requirement as are consistent with Nozick's own. 9 ("But why should an individual duty to assist, fulfilled by voluntary acts, imply a state's duty to assist, fulfilled by coercing individuals and appropriating their holdings?" The logic that gets us from the one to the other is Nozick's own. It is Nozick's view that the state's coercive rights depend entirely on what justice is for individuals. If his account of justice for individuals omits a vital duty of individuals to assist the needy, we may expect, by his own reasoning, that that omission will be mirrored by an omission in his account of what the state may permissibly constrain individuals to do.) 9 This much to
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