Debate: Levels of Non‐ideality

IMAGINE you’re sitting in an outdoor caf e, adjacent to Tokyo’s Hachiko Square, which is one of the world’s busiest intersections. You notice an elderly man, laden with shopping bags, completely stranded between two lanes of noisy traffic, and looking utterly bewildered. Should you go to his aid, or is it all right for you just to continue sipping your coffee and observing his plight? I believe that, on virtually all views of what morality requires of us, you should go to his aid. You have a duty to do so and, in an ideal world, you would comply with that duty. That is, your failure to comply makes some contribution to the non-ideality of this world. An exasperated complaint levelled with increasing frequency against much current political philosophy is one deploring its utopian preoccupation with delineating features of an ideal world. Ideal Theory, as it has come to be called, is alleged to be so exclusively focused on constructing the best account of what justly should be done by whom and for whom, that it utterly fails to offer any guidance as to what should be done in the circumstances that actually confront us: circumstances pervasively shaped by both past and present non-compliance with moral duties. It fails to address the moral slack generated by noncompliance. Now, while this complaint is not without some merit, I think it seriously overlooks several important distinctions and, in so doing, must be judged to carry less weight than its authors seem to suppose. For, as I shall argue, noncompliances come in significantly different types, and they thereby lend themselves to an ordering which is of particular relevance to the concerns of political philosophy. Let me begin that argument with a true story that I told for many years in the opening lecture for the freshman introductory course in political philosophy at the University of Manchester. I entitled the story Political Philosophy and the Redistribution of Bone Marrow: