Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00936.x |
| Author | Holly Lawford-Smith,Pablo Gilabert |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Explorationpost_936809..825
Pablo Gilabert Holly Lawford-Smith
Concordia University Australian National University
To date there is no systematic exploration of the concept of ‘political feasibility’.We believe that feasibility is a central
issue for political philosophy, conceptually as well as practically,and that it has been g iven background status for far
too long. Roughly,a state of affairs is feasible if it is one we could actually bring about. But there are many questions
to ask about the conditions under which we are justified in thinking that we could bring about a political state of
affairs. In this article we bring together several aspects of the concept of feasibility defended in the literature thus far,
and build upon them to give an analysis of the notion of political feasibility.We suggest that the notion involves a
relation between agents and the pursuit of certain actions and outcomes in certain historical contexts, and that there
are two important roles for feasibility to play in political theory,corresponding to two feasibility ‘tests’:one categor ical,
the other comparative.We showhow the tests operate in the assessment of three different levels of a normative political
theory: core normative principles, their institutional implementation and the political reforms leading to them.
Focusing on the third level, which has received the least attention in the literature, we proceed to explain how
feasibility considerations interact with desirability and epistemic considerations in the articulation of normative
political judgments.
Keywords: political feasibility;ideal and non-ideal theory; utopianism and realism;justice;
political judgment
Just as social theorists in the 1950s probably disagreed about the feasibility of equal pay
for women in the United Kingdom, and in the 1970s probably disagreed about the
feasibility of civil rights for gay couples in the United States, so too today theorists
disagree about the feasibility of a binding global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Very roughly, some state of affairs is feasible if there is a way we can bring it
about. But is there a fact of the matter about what we can bring about? The concept of
feasibility is widely used across political theory. To give just a few arbitrary examples,
Philip Pettit is skeptical about whether a truly just system of criminal punishment is
feasible (Pettit, 2002), Leif Wenar argues that cosmopolitanism on the preferred model
that globalizes Rawls’ original position is infeasible ( Wenar, 2006), and Thomas Pogge
argues that a global institutional order is unjust whenever there are feasible alternatives
that would produce a superior pattern of human rights fulfillment (Pogge, 2008). In this
article we explore this important concept, working from the assumption that at least some
of the extant disagreement about what is feasible comes from ambiguity in the concept.
If we can resolve the ambiguity, we will be in a better position to arbitrate on whether
theorists genuinely disagree about whether some state of affairs can be brought about, or
whether they are simply engaging different concepts of feasibility. We divide the article
into four sections. First, we survey existing elements of a concept of feasibility. Then we
use those elements to build our own account. Later we consider two recurring objections
to our account, and explore how feasibility functions as a part of making all-things-
considered political judgments.
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00936.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012 VOL 60, 809–825
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
Elements of an Account of Political Feasibility
Why should political philosophers care about feasibility? An answer can be provided by
considering John Rawls’ helpful idea of a ‘realistic utopia’. According to Rawls,a nor ma-
tive political theory (or in his case,more narrowly,a conception of social justice) must satisfy
two desiderata. The first is that the theory must demand social arrangements that are
morally appealing or desirable. Such just arrangements may be quite different from the
status quo, and may be ‘utopian’. This is often a good thing, as a conception of justice
should help us to assess critically our current condition. However, when our theory is
utopian, we must also consider whether we can ‘realistically’ expect to achieve what it
demands. This is the second desideratum, which concerns political feasibility. One impor-
tant role of political philosophy is,as Rawls puts it, that of ‘probing the limits of practicable
political possibility’ (Rawls, 2001, pp.4–5). But what are the criteria for the demands of a
normative political theory to be feasible? Answering this question is not easy. As Rawls
himself notes,
there is a question about how the limits of the practicable are discerned and what the
conditions of our social world in fact are;the problem here is that the limits of the possible are
not given by the actual, for we can to a greater or lesser extent change political and social
institutions, and much else’ (Rawls, 2001, pp. 4–5, see also p. 13; Wr ight, 2010).
What we say here should not be taken to imply that all of political theory must be equally
constrained by what is feasible. There are more and less stringent feasibility constraints,
which apply depending on which kind of theory we are dealing with (see also Goodin and
Pettit, 1995, pp. 1–4; Miller, 2008). Our focus is on exploring what those constraints look
like. Although there is to date no systematic elucidation of the concept of political
feasibility, disparate strands are scattered throughout the literature.In this section we try to
bring these together, and in the rest of the article we ultimately extend them into a concept
we believe is up to the task of fulfilling the theoretical role that feasibility should play.
Geoffrey Hawthorn in PlausibleWorlds is concer ned to give the conditions for plausible
counterfactual histories. Feasibility is about plausible counterfactual (and actual) futures,so
not all of Hawthorn’s conditions are relevant (Hawthorn,1991, p.158; see alsoTetlock et al.,
2006). He says that neither our historical permutations, nor the implications that follow
from them,may be ‘fantastic’, and what he means is that some events have a momentum and
inevitability that make it fantastical to assume that they could have been otherwise. Some
actions are strongly out of character for key political figures. To g ive a historical example,
someone might argue that Karl Marx had such an impact upon people’s thinking, and
Russia’s political leaders were so ideologically driven, that it was bound to be the case that
Russia ignored Marx’s criterion for the kind of country ‘ready’ to instantiate communist
ideals, and went ahead with its disastrous attempt. To transpose the point about counter-
factual histories on to counterfactual futures, note that we are in a world still reeling from
the failures of certain kinds of political ‘experiments’, like communism in Soviet Russia,
racial purity in Nazi Germany and racial assimilation in colonial Australia. A future in
which these experiments have succeeded is ‘fantastic’ because we cannot expect people
simply to forget political history. Thus two ingredients of an account of feasibility are
momentum and inevitability.
810 PABLO GILABERT AND HOLLY LAWFORD-SMITH
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012, 60(4)
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