“Ideal Theory” as Ideology

individual subsume the workers, women, and nonwhites who are also persons-even if, admittedly, they were not historically recognized as such? I think the problem here is a failure to appreciate the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to the cognitive rethinking required, and the mistaken moveespecially easy for analytic philosophers, used to the effortless manipulation of variables, the shifting about of p's and q's, in the frictionless plane (redux! ) of symbolic logic-from the ease of logical implication to the actual inferential patterns of human cognizers who have been socialized by these systems of domination. (This failure is itself, reflexively, a manifestation of the idealism of ideal theory.) To begin with the obvious empirical objection: if it were as easy as all that, just a matter of modus ponens or some other simple logical rule, then why was it so hard to do? If it were obvious that women were equal moral persons, meant to be fully included in the variable "men," then why was it not obvious to virtually every male political philosopher and ethicist up to a few decades ago? Why has liberalism, supposedly committed to normative equality and a foundational opposition to ascriptive hierarchy, found it so easy to exclude women and nonwhites from its egalitarian promise? The actual working of human cognitive processes, as manifested in the sexism and sometimes racism of such leading figures in the canon as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and the rest, itself constitutes the simplest illustration of the mistakenness of such an analysis. Moreover, it is another familiar criticism from feminism that the inclusion of women cannot be a merely terminological gender neutrality, just adding and stirring, but requires a rethinking of what, say, equal rights and freedoms will require in the context of female subordination. Susan Moller Okin argued years ago that once one examines the real-life family, it becomes obvious that women's exit options from marriage are far more restricted than men's, because of the handicaps of sacrificing one's career to childrearing (Okin 1989). So a commitment to fairness, equal rights, and justice in the family arguably requires special measures to compensate for these burdens, and reform social structures accordingly. But such measures cannot be spun out, a priori, from the concept of equality as such (and certainly they cannot be generated on the basis of assuming the ideal family, as Rawls did in A Theory of Justice). Rather, they require empirical input and an awareness of how the real-life, nonideal family actually works. But insofar as such input is crucial and guides theory (which is why it's incorrect to see this as just "applied" ethics), the theory ceases to be ideal. So either ideal theory includes the previously excluded in a purely nominal way, which would be a purely formal rather than substantive inclusion, or-to the extent that it does make the dynamic of oppression central and theory-guiding-it is doing nonideal theory without calling it such. (Compare the conservative appeal to a superficially fair "color-blindness" in the treatment of people of color, whose practical effect is to guarantee a blindness to the distinctive measures required to redress and overcome the legacy of white supremacy.) 178 This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.56 on Tue, 18 Oct 2016 04:58:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms