# Morally philosophizing the indefensible or politically theorizing the disagreeable?

Julian Culp

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Julian Culp. Morally philosophizing the indefensible or politically theorizing the disagreeable?. Ethics & Global Politics, 2024, 17 (4), pp.16-24. 10.1080/16544951.2024.2397183. hal-04958825

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# Morally *philosophizing the indefensible* or politically theorizing the disagreeable?

Julian Culp

**To cite this article:** Julian Culp (2024) Morally *philosophizing the indefensible* or politically theorizing the disagreeable?, *Ethics & Global Politics*, 17:4, 16-24, DOI: 10.1080/16544951.2024.2397183

**To link to this article:** https://doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2024.2397183

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Published online: 08 Sep 2024.

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# Morally philosophizing the indefensible or politically theorizing the disagreeable?

Julian Culp

Department of History and Politics, The American University of Paris, Paris, France

## ABSTRACT

Shmuel Nili's Philosophizing The Indefensible – Strategic Political Theory represents a sophisticated response to the widespread support of political positions that seem unreasonable from the perspective of liberal political morality. Nili takes seriously extreme right-wing, pro-life, pro-business, and climate change-sceptic positions that other liberal theorists seem to prefer sweeping under the carpet when turning towards yet another puzzle of liberalism. This is a refreshing move, which Nili pursues masterfully through the critical analysis of such seemingly indefensible positions in painstaking detail. That said, readers who are intrigued by the political philosophical methods of Charles Larmore and the late John Rawls, who accept the fact of reasonable moral disagreement and focus primarily on the question of political legitimacy, may sometimes find that Nili's argumentations are somewhat moralistic.

## ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 16 July 2024
Accepted 7 August 2024

## KEYWORDS

methodology; activist political theory; moralism; reasonability; polarization

## Activist political philosophy in a Socratic Mode

Contemporary politics in Western democracies can easily seem unreasonable from a liberal perspective that recognizes all citizens as free and equal. A case in point for such ‘unreasonable politics’ is, for example, this recent proposal of Germany’s extreme right. At a meeting in Potsdam in November of 2023, the far-right activist Martin Sellner and high-profile party members of the *Alternative für Deutschland* (AfD) suggested that ‘non-assimilated’ German citizens should be deported (Correctiv 2024). Yet how could the deportation of the ‘non-assimilated’ citizens be justified? Wouldn’t the deportation express an unequal treatment that is incompatible with said principles of liberal political morality? Thus, it seems like we should call those who propose such a policy ‘unreasonable,’ which, following Nili’s (2023, 3) terminology, means that they ‘fail to respond in minimally adequate ways to key moral reasons that are clearly pertinent to the political subject at hand.’

## CONTACT

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jculp@aup.edu

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Department of History and Politics, The American University of Paris,

147, Rue de Grenelle, Paris 75007, France
For any given political observer, it is obvious that such ideas that conflict with liberal political morality do not represent outliers within an otherwise liberal-democratic political climate. Instead, they are widespread phenomena distinctively characterizing the present political reality, which contrasts profoundly with the mainstream liberal political discourse that has been dominant in democratic societies up until the end of the financial crisis of 2007–9. In fact, in the recent 2024 European elections the AfD received 16% of the vote within Germany. Even more remarkably, perhaps, France’s extreme right-wing parties *Rassemblement Nationale (RN)* and *Reconquête* received 32% and 6%, respectively, of the vote in these elections.

It is curious, hence, that despite the present-day centrality of seemingly illiberal ideas, a large amount of contemporary political philosophy and theory continues discussing political problems that are merely internal to the liberal paradigm. Problems internal to liberalism are, for example, issues of climate change or global distributive justice, fair trade, workplace democracy, or gender equality. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that editors of major newspapers like Kaube (2024) from the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* are openly accusing theorists of denying the present political reality. After all, this reality is profoundly shaped by right-wing populists as well as the widespread resistance to broadly liberal, progressive ideas regarding a green economy, non-binary gender identity, fair trade, or open borders. Political journalists who pay close attention to what many people say judge that political theorizing takes place within a bubble, removed from citizens who lead their lives disconnected from the urban centres of intellectual debate.

Some liberal philosophers have already acknowledged that their debates are detached from apparently unreasonable, though widespread, political assumptions. In response to De-Shalit’s (2020) call for more practical guidance from political philosophers, van der Vossen (2020), for example, has conceded that many liberal philosophical debates amount to a retreat to the ivory tower. Remarkably, van der Vossen also rationalized this flight from political reality by an appeal to the unavoidable consequences of a resolute commitment to truth. If the truth about political ideals does not align with what the people think, then ‘so what’? Such misalignment is a problem for the people, but not for scholars. Thereby van der Vossen and others follow the Platonic tradition of doubting that an identification of what the people think is an adequate source for gaining knowledge. In this spirit, Goodin (1996, 56) also defended the importance of ‘timeless truths, ideally ideal ideals,’ and Cohen (2008, 309), likewise, suggested that ‘facts cast normative light only by reflecting the light that fact-free first principles shine on them.’

Pace van der Vossen and like-minded Platonists, Kreide (2016), by contrast, strongly criticized liberal political philosophy’s abstraction from views that are seemingly beyond the pale of what could count as reasonable. Such abstraction, she argued, would result in a ‘liberal silence’ that rendered it inapt to provide proper normative guidance regarding some of the politically most pressing recent developments. Nili (2023, 38–43) follows the likes of Kreide by maintaining that political theory must be ‘activist.’ It should consciously engage with, and have something to say about, the most salient political phenomena of our time. What is more, political theory should be ‘truly political,’ in the sense that it should speak to what considerable portions of the people in contemporary democratic societies do and think. Thereby work in political theory can become itself part of the
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political discourse, which is why, according to Nili (2023, 42), theorists should not view
academic and other kinds of political discourses as separate. To the contrary, they should
actively contribute to the porosity of these discourses by way of analysing even those
political positions that they do not view as reasonably defensible.

An intuitive characterization of Nili's particular way of pursuing such an activist political theory is that of a Socratic dialogue. Nili is talking, as it were, to those citizens holding views that are at first glance not reasonably defensible from a liberal moral perspective. According to Nili's explanation, what renders these citizens 'unreasonable' is, as already mentioned, that they lack minimal responsiveness to the relevant moral reasons. However, by argumentatively engaging with such unreasonable citizens – or, as the title of his book indicates, by *philosophizing the indefensible* – Nili hopes to 'pull' citizens from the unreasonable towards the reasonable side of the political spectrum.

Nili's pulling power, to use Habermas's dictum, is the 'unforced force of the better argument.' Accordingly, it is through a battery of meticulously crafted arguments that he wants to show that even if one initially accepted the premises of citizens' not reasonably defensible political positions, then, if one simply followed the steps of his argumentations, one would ultimately end up defending a political position that was reasonably defensible. This is similar, thus, to the way that Socrates, for example, reveals to Thrasymachus through a sequence of thoughtful arguments that the position that might is right is untenable, and that we must ultimately accept the view that justice involves everyone acting according to their specific societal role and not being a busybody. Hence, Nili's Socratic strategy for an activist political philosophy is to pick up citizens where they presently stand, and lead them, from a political position that is not reasonably defensible to one that is so.

The citizens that Nili identifies as unreasonable include Israeli Zionists who refuse to cooperate with Arab political parties to avoid the election of Binyamin Netanyahu (Chapter 2), members of Christian-right voters who support Trump due to his 'pro-life' defence of anti-abortion legislation (Chapter 3), as well as corporate defenders of major banks and of customary commercial ties with dictatorships (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). When reconstructing the unreasonable citizens' argumentations in favour of what Nili deems morally indefensible political positions, he clearly highlights which premises he views as problematic but nevertheless accepts for the sake of his strategic arguments. For example, Nili (2023, 170) takes for granted climate change scepticism when attempting to show that, *even when accepting this premise*, the corporate defenders' conclusion, which says that commercial ties with dictatorships that sell oil and gas are morally defensible, does not follow.

## The virtues of strategic political theory

Nili's *strategic political theory* has three virtues. First, Nili offers diligent characterizations of the arguments that supposedly unreasonable citizens use to vindicate their political positions – a hermeneutic activity that he (2023, 17) describes as ‘worldviewing.’ Employing this methodological device, Nili’s strategic political theory renders intelligible the political positions of allegedly unreasonable citizens.

Second, contrary to a great deal of contemporary political theorizing, Nili deals with ‘the elephant in the room’ of present-day Western societies. This reality is the
widespread presence of political positions that are in tension with liberal morality, but which progressive liberal discussions of open borders, global equality of opportunity, or a green economy often sideline. Thus, these discussions may seem at best naïvely utopian and at worst deeply biased. Nili, by contrast, does not deny the populist and other political realities that fundamentally challenge the liberal political outlook and which, according to some political theorists, reflect the failure of liberalism (cf., e.g., Deneen 2018). Nili is not fiddling as Rome burns but has crafted the method of ‘strategic political theory’ to re-establish political philosophizing as politically meaningful and effective.<fnref n="1" />

Third, Nili’s Socratic method expresses respect to those citizens who are seemingly unreasonable. He takes their moral premises seriously and engages with them through demanding normative argumentations. Thereby he recognizes these citizens’ views as worthy of detailed attention. Thus, he intends to avoid a condescending moral and political stance that simply ignores these views or considers them only in passing before quickly declaring that, being obviously wrong, they are of no intellectual interest. *Philosophizing the indefensible*, thus, seems to escape the long-standing critique of liberalism, that it suffers from an exclusionary kind of moralism that favours, though not openly, the elites. By dialoguing with those who hold political positions that a liberal morality apparently cannot view as reasonably defensible, Nili takes the wind out of the sails of this line of criticism.

## Philosophizing the indefensible as applied moral philosophy

Despite its virtues, however, Nili’s *Philosophizing the indefensible* also suffers from neglecting the potential depth of reasonable moral disagreement. Thus, it represents an exercise in applied moral philosophy rather than in a political philosophy that takes reasonable moral disagreement as its point of departure. To elaborate, consider, first, that a central feature of Nili’s strategic political theory is a narrow understanding of what counts as a political position that is reasonably defensible. Again, following Nili, a political position is reasonably defensible if it is at least minimally responsive to the relevant moral reasons at hand concerning a given political issue. While this represents a formal, and seemingly weak criterion as to what position is reasonably defensible or not, Nili understands it to be cutting deep.

To see this, note, first, that the ‘minimally responsive to relevant moral reasons’-criterion not only identifies as unreasonable those citizens whose political positions *explicitly* reject the liberal premises of citizens’ freedom and equality. Indeed, Nili reserves the label of ‘repugnantly unreasonable’ for citizens who hold such positions and that they do not deserve critical scrutiny. Nili’s criterion also deems as non-repugnantly unreasonable those citizens who, while affirming basic liberal premises, uphold other moral premises that are not minimally responsive to adequate moral reasoning. This limits the use of the predicate reasonable as follows. Neither citizens who deny liberalism’s basic moral premises nor citizens who are otherwise failing to be minimally responsive to moral reasoning can be called reasonable.

<footnote n="1">¹Frazier (2016) also uses this reference to Nero to accuse ideal-theoretical political philosophers like Estlund (2020), who oppose the idea that political philosophy needs to be practically oriented, for failing to address liberalism’s crisis.</footnote>
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A corollary of this conceptual housekeeping is that several of the existing political conflicts will *not* be deemed as emerging from a reasonable moral disagreement as to what constitutes the right or just policy on a given political issue. After all, many of these conflicts may just as well have arisen from an unreasonable moral disagreement that exists because some citizens fail to properly engage in minimally adequate moral reasoning. It is such faulty moral reasoning that explains why citizens, while recognizing democratic citizens' freedom and equality, are nevertheless unreasonable. The holes in citizens' moral reasoning, in turn, represent the entry points for Nili's strategic political theory. For it is the correction of their mistakes in moral thinking – through systematic normative argumentation – that is meant to enable Nili to bring the citizens holding not reasonably defensible political positions back to the terrain of the reasonable.

Nili's *narrow* understanding of what constitutes a reasonable moral disagreement can be contrasted with a *wide* understanding of such disagreement, which views as reasonable all moral disagreements of citizens who explicitly recognize each other as free and equal – and who thus recognize that they have an equal moral standing and owe each other moral respect (cf. Culp 2014, 110–7; 2015, 142–6).<fnref n="2" /> The followers of this wide understanding, thus, abstain from claiming that these citizens are unreasonable. Notably, they do so even if they may entertain doubts as to whether certain of their fellow citizens' political positions minimally respond to moral reasoning.

Thereby the follower of what I call, following Larmore (2020), the political philosophical approach, express a form of epistemic humility. They recognize that from their necessarily limited epistemic standpoint, they may lack the relevant epistemic moral capacity for identifying what should count as minimally responsive moral reasoning on the part of their co-citizens. Accordingly, in their professional capacity, these theorists pursuing a political philosophical approach do not seek to morally persuade citizens that they should adopt political positions that can count as reasonably defensible according to what they have determined as being minimally responsive to moral reasoning. Instead, they focus on a different theoretical task, namely identifying the conditions under which the exercise of coercive political power can count as justifiable or legitimate, given the reasonable moral disagreement among citizens who uphold basic liberal premises. In other words, in the tradition of Larmore (1987, 2020), Habermas (1998), and Rawls (2005), they politically theorize reasonable moral disagreement.

## Why theorize reasonable moral disagreement politically?

Thus far, I have merely distinguished a political philosophical approach from an applied moral philosophical approach of identifying and dealing with moral disagreement. In what follows, I present five arguments in favour of the political philosophical approach. To begin, due to what Rawls (2005, 54–58) has deemed the burdens of judgement, citizens of a democratic society who are not subject to oppression, and who thus enjoy liberties such as freedom of conscious, freedom of thought, and

<footnote n="2">²There is no reasonable moral disagreement, thus, that all possess what Forst and Flynn (2012, 177) calls 'a basic human right to justification,' which can viewed as a fundamental requirement of political justice.</footnote>
freedom of speech, will inevitably disagree on moral questions. To clarify, 'inevitably' means that citizens will not only accidentally fail to agree with one another on moral questions because they do not try hard enough to exercise their moral reasoning. Instead, the idea is that even if they do their best in engaging in moral reasoning, and faithfully attempt to get it right as to what morality requires, they will still end up reasonably disagreeing as to what morality's requirements are (cf. Larmore 1987).

The upshot of the insight into this fact of reasonable moral disagreement is hence that sometimes there is simply no point in further engaging with certain persons in moral reasoning. Sometimes, that is, it is inadequate to suppose that citizens will change their views due to – more or better – (moral) reasoning. This is why the political philosophical approach that follows this insight dispenses, at least to some extent, the aim of pursuing moral reasoning for the sake of eventually generating moral consensus. Only 'to some extent,' however, since this kind of political philosophy is not fully independent from moral philosophy and its reasoning. After all, such an approach focuses on the question of what can morally count as politically legitimate coercion. Yet, such reasoning accepts that there will continue being a considerable number of disagreements on a wide range of moral issues, especially regarding questions of the good life and concerning distributive justice, and that at least some of these disagreements must be deemed reasonable.

Second, the political philosophical approach is respectful of all citizens' reasoning in a way that Nili's approach is not. This is because the political philosophical approach does not aim at revealing to citizens that they have committed a moral mistake when defending their political positions that are seemingly not reasonably defensible. Again, politically theorizing reasonable moral disagreement means to accept that there will be a wide range of moral assumptions that may initially appear as unreasonable. In addition, it also requires holding back from attempting to show, through moral argumentation, that these premises are mistaken or that a reasonably defensible political position can be developed based on these premises.

Instead, the political philosophical approach acknowledges the moral disagreement, and assumes it to be reasonable, but then moves on from this moral to the political or legal level to ask how the state with its coercive powers should address this disagreement. Thereby it avoids conveying the idea that those citizens who hold moral premises or political positions that do not align with those of the theorist – e.g. Christian-right supporters of Trump – have inadequate moral reasoning. Instead, the political philosophical approach fully affirms all citizens' normative equality in terms of their episodic capacity for identifying political positions that are sufficiently morally supported.

This matters, because Nili's applied moral philosophical approach, by contrast, risks to shoot itself in the foot. While his approach starts out by stating that it recognizes all citizens as worthy of respect and consideration, it ultimately ends up examining and identifying the ways in which citizens fail to reason in a morally minimally adequate fashion. Arguably, citizens who are told that they are unreasonable, or that their positions are not reasonably defensible, due to being insufficiently supported by minimally adequate moral reasoning, might worry that they are not fully recognized for who they are and develop a feeling of resentment.
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Notably, the danger that Nili's approach backfires exists even in those cases in which he is correct that those citizens that he deems as holding not reasonably defensible political positions have failed in properly exercising moral reason. In fact, given the extremely cogent normative argumentations that Nili presents throughout the various chapters, it is hard to pin down as to why citizens would not want to follow him in his moral reasoning and would object that their moral perspectives have not been taken seriously enough. For example, he makes a very strong case that Zionists should be willing to cooperate with anti-Zionists to protect Israeli democracy. However, the question as to whether Nili's moral arguments are bullet proof is not the only one to consider. This is because some citizens, even if they should accept Nili's moral argumentation and change their political positions, might nevertheless perceive Nili's strategic political theorizing as reflecting a condescending attitude and accuse liberals like him for being moralistic. And this, in turn, can further exacerbate political conflicts, even though this would be exactly the opposite of strategic political theorizing's intention. The possibility of such side effects is real, however, and the accusation that liberalism is problematic precisely because it is prone to such condescending attitudes is well-established (cf. Holmes and Krastev 2018).

Again, my point here is not that those who count as (non-repugnantly) reasonable citizens on Nili's view should, or necessarily will, perceive Nili's argumentation as reflective of a condescending attitude. After all, academic discourse itself is fallible, and the mere fact that a moral argumentation is published by an academic press does by no means warrant the validity of that argumentation. Unfortunately, however, citizens might not be aware of these 'subtleties,' and merely take note that scientific elites discredit the moral reasoning that is grounding their political positions.

Furthermore, my fourth argument is that Nili need not fully abandon strategic political theorizing to avoid this danger of generating an unintended backlash against liberalism. A different way of hedging the risk of this danger would be to pursue the goals of strategic political theory outside academic outlets, as citizens who, in their capacity as public intellectuals, target a wide, public audience in mass- as well as socially networked media. This way of proceeding would be less risky, because the moral argumentations that would be presented in such outlets would not carry the stamp of being scientifically certified. Thereby citizens whom Nili deems unreasonable would not necessarily gain the impression that the academic elites view their moral reasoning as inferior.

In fact, this fourth argument is one that he might accept, since Nili (2023, 42), as already mentioned, is all in favour of contributing to public debate. It would thus come as no surprise if Nili and other adherents of the strategic method of political theorizing would embrace this suggestion and engage with citizens in moral argumentation in other media such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, YouTube, or podcasts. This would not only create a more equal epistemic playing field between academic discourse and lay discourse, but could also turn out to be more effective, given that the reach of said media is much wider than that of even a first-rate academic publication.

Finally, adopting the political philosophical approach of theorizing reasonable moral disagreement politically puts the emphasis on crucial political and legal questions of how to deal with citizens who seem either non-repugnantly or repugnantly unreasonable. For example, under which conditions, if at all, would it be permissible to limit the
political expression of apparently unreasonable citizens? For example, should publicly funded television or radio stations refrain from debating with politicians that defend political positions that appear not reasonably defensible? Consider also, once again, the example from the beginning of this article. What are the conditions for prohibiting a political party such as the AfD, which does not honour the implications of viewing all citizens as free and equal? All of these are relevant political and moral questions that political theorist would focus on when taking seriously the fact of reasonable moral disagreement.

## Conclusion

Nili's *Philosophizing the indefensible – strategic political theory* represents a sophisticated response to the widespread support of political positions that seem unreasonable from the perspective of liberal political morality. Nili takes seriously right-wing, pro-life, pro-business, and climate change-sceptic positions that other liberal theorists seem to prefer sweeping under the carpet when turning towards yet another moral puzzle of liberalism. This is a refreshing move, which Nili pursues masterfully through the critical analysis of such seemingly indefensible positions in painstaking detail. The fact that Nili throws light on what is a partially neglected side of the political spectrum within political theory, in combination with the high level of sophistication of his argumentation, render it worthwhile paying close attention to this book. That said, readers who are intrigued by the political philosophical method of Larmore, Habermas, and Rawls, may sometimes find that Nili's argumentations are, in virtue of their pretension of being a piece of political theory, at least somewhat moralistic.

## Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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