Rational Choice and Value-Incommensurability in Political Life
| Author | John Gray |
| Published date | 01 April 1981 |
| Date | 01 April 1981 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1981.tb00048.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Rntional,
Choice
and
~aZue-Incon;mensurability
in
PoZiticaZ
Life
41
R~~f~~~L
CHOICE
~~~
VAtUE-f
NCOMMENSURABILITY
IN
POLI~IC~L
LIFE
(1)
JOHN
GRAY
It has long been supposed that utilitarianism enjoys an especially privileged
status as providing a rational code of political ethics. More recently, rational
choice models have been widely received as containing peculiarly pOWerfUl
resources for the explanation of political behaviour. These two developments
are not unconnected. One way of explaining what someone does is to show that
he
had a good reason
for
doing it, and one way
of
doing this is to identify the
state
of
affairs he intended to bring about by his action. Whereas utilitarianism
might perhaps serve as a purely normative theory, rational choice approaches
almost inevitably acquire both explanatory and normative uses.
My
argument aims to undermine the primacy of consequentialist conduct in both its
explanatory and its normative aspects.
I
shall submit that the image
of
political
life secreted in utilitarian ethics is defective inasmuch as it is bound to
neglect the rivalry of contending ways of life and the collision of their associated
and inco~ensurable values by which the political domain is partly constituted.
Taking the problem of the rationality of political participation as my central
?xample,
I
shall maintain that, though some well-known difficulties in the
utilitarian account
of
this question may not be fatal to it, it remains the case
that utilitarian reconstructions of political life encourage a systematic neglect
of
its expressive dimensions. Further, utilitarian ethical theory embodies the
assumption that rational choice necessarily involves reference to a unitary scale
of
meta-preferences. But some political choices occur in a circumstance of conflict,
between irresolvably conflicting ways of life, and the considerations which inform
them cannot be expressed in any common unit of measured by a single standard. In
requiring that all consequences be finally coomensurable and in suggesting that
political conflicts can be made fully intelligible in cost-benefit terms, utilitar-
ianism tends in its political applications to suppress its subject-matter, political
conduct itself. The domain of the distinctively political disappears and is
replaced by that of managerial, administrative
or
even engineering practice.
Political deliberation suffers a Sea-change in which it becomes indistinguishable
from the search for technically adequate solutions to agreed problems, In all this
it is neglected that
our
society contains areas of moral conflict and of moral
uncertainty, which it is the defining purpose of political conduct to arbitrate,
That the arbitration of such conflict has no kinship with the solution of problems
in engineering suggests an ultimate constraint on the intelligibility which rational
choice approaches can confer on political behaviour.
The assimilation of political conduct to other kinds of practical life is attempted
also in theories of justice and rights that have arisen in the wake of contemporary
revulsion from utilitarianism. In Rawls and in Nozick we find the project of
a
sort of moral geometry for which a status is claimed of political neutrality
and
of
impartiality toward rival ways of life. Here political conduct
is
assimilated to legal procedure
or
to a species of private moral engagement rather
than to administration
or
engineering. My thesis will be that preserving the
essential subject matter of political studies involves acknowledging that these
theories of justice and rights, no less than their utilitarian rivals, embody
categorical absurdities in virtue of which the distinctive and defining
characteristics of political life must elude them.
Srme
?mbZerns
in
the
~~~~ni~io~~
of
Uti
~~~a~~anisrn
What is the force and scope of the principle of utility?
A
conventional view
is that the common feature of all moral codes that come underthe name 'utilitarianism'
is
the claim that the rightness and wrongness of acts should be appraised by
reference to states of affairs consequent upon them. Whatever their disagreements,
it might be supposed, James Mill and John Stuart Mill were agreed that the
rightness
of an action is to be judged solely by appeal to states
of
affairs
brought about by the action. It
is
often stipulated that a defining feature of
a utilitarian moral code is that it comprehends a consequentialist theory
of
rightness and obligation, An obvious difficulty here is that of defining what
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