Normative behaviourism and global political principles
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088216630998 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(2) 152 –168
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088216630998
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Normative behaviourism and
global political principles
Jonathan Floyd
University of Bristol, UK
Abstract
This article takes a new idea, ‘normative behaviourism’, and applies it to global political
theory, in order to address at least one of the problems we might have in mind when
accusing that subject of being too ‘unrealistic’. The core of this idea is that political
principles can be justified, not just by patterns in our thinking, and in particular our
intuitions and considered judgements, but also by patterns in our behaviour, and in
particular acts of insurrection and crime. The problem addressed is ‘cultural relativism’,
understood here not as a meta-ethical doctrine but as the apparent ‘fact’ that people
around the world have culturally varying intuitions and judgements of a kind that lead
them to affirm different political principles. This is a problem because it seems to follow
(1) that global agreement on any substantial set of political principles is impossible and
(2) that any political theory in denial of this ‘fact’ would be, for that reason, deeply
unrealistic. The solution to this problem argued for here is that if domestic political
principles (i.e. principles intended to regulate a single state) could be justified by
normative behaviourism, and in reference to culturally invariant behaviour, then an
international system supportive of such principles is justifiable by extension.
Keywords
Cosmopolitanism, cultural relativism, global justice, normative behaviourism, realism
Introduction
We political theorists are agog with talk of our subject being unrealistic. Although we
might talk of ‘political theory’ or ‘political philosophy’; of ‘impractical’, ‘unapplied’,
‘unengaged’, ‘quixotic’, ‘indeterminate’ or even ‘dangerous’; and of ‘ideal’ versus
‘nonideal’ theory, ‘moralism’ versus ‘realism’, ‘utopian’ versus ‘concessive’ theory,
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Floyd, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 11 Priory Road,
Bristol BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: Jonathan.Floyd@bristol.ac.uk
630998IPT0010.1177/1755088216630998Journal of International Political TheoryFloyd
research-article2016
Article
Floyd 153
‘transcendental’ versus ‘comparative’ theory, or even the idea of ‘political political the-
ory’, there can be little doubt that the three general questions of whether political theory
is unrealistic, in what ways it is unrealistic and what if anything needs to change about
the subject as a result are now central ones (the seminal works here include Estlund
(2008), Farrelly (2007), Geuss (2008), Sen (2011), Waldron (2013), and Williams
(2005); for overarching discussion, see Rossi and Sleat (2014) and Valentini (2012b)).1
In response to these developments, and before we consider specifically global polit-
ical theory, I want to ask an odd question, the relevance of which will become clear in
a moment: What would our students make of all this? The answer, I suspect, is that
they would be surprised, and not just because they are unaware of the described cen-
trality. Insisting that we need some kind of ‘reality check’ more than we need anything
else, they would also be surprised that it has taken us so long to make these questions
so central. Somewhat defensively, we might respond by noting that discussions of the
gap between theory and practice, and between justification and motivation, are as old
as Kant, Hobbes and Plato. Yet that response, as well as ignoring the recent trend from
margins to centre (and thus the older trend from centre to margins), also ignores the
core of (what I take to be) the typical student reaction here: the point that we are, some-
how, in need of a reality check. So, let’s think about that claim. What do they mean?
And why would they think that?
Again, a natural response here would be dismissiveness. We might say, what differ-
ence does it make what they think, or why they think it, given that they have only just
started thinking about such things? Yet that response also, I think, misses the point, albeit
in a more important way. Think specifically here about what it means to be ‘realistic’;
about what it means to take seriously the gap, if there is one, between political theory and
‘real politics’. Among other things, I presume that it means taking seriously, not just our
new objections to the dominant theories of the day but also the objections of real people
to what we do.2 As a result, there is surely nothing odd about taking seriously whatever
objections our students have to the way we do things, and in particular the reasoning
behind those objections, to which I now turn.
This reasoning, subject to distillation, runs as follows. They say, ‘the problem with all
your theories is that they’re too unrealistic’. We say, ‘what do you mean by theories?’
They say’either arguments for particular institutions and policies or, more commonly,
arguments for principles (e.g. of justice) that could be translated, subject to context (e.g.
high levels of economic development) and local process (e.g. democratic deliberation),
into such institutions and policies’.We say, ‘so what do you mean by too unrealistic?’
They say, ‘because nobody would ever agree to them’. And that is the crucial bit: agree-
ment. Or at least, this plus their theories for the impossibility of agreement are the crucial
two bits.
Those theories emerge if we push them a bit more. We might say here, ‘are you sure
that nobody would agree?’, to which they will say, ‘well, most people’. We would then
say, ‘but why?’ and they then say roughly the following: (1) some people wouldn’t agree
because they are too selfish (egoism), (2) some wouldn’t agree because they have natu-
rally different intuitions or feelings regarding right and wrong (subjectivism), and (3)
some wouldn’t agree because they come from different cultures (relativism). And note,
these theories imply not just that they wouldn’t agree with us, ‘the philosophers’, on
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