Realism and the relativity of judgement

Moralism

That is the end of the overview of my two theses, so now I shall start the actual discussion with an attempt to approach realism ex negativo by describing the position with which it is to be most strongly contrasted, ‘moralism’ or the ‘moralising’ approach. ‘Moralism’ is a quasi-technical term describing in the first instance a complex consisting of a conception of morality and a particular set of assumptions about the motivational force and the explanatory value of appeals to (this) morality. There are, I will claim, two slightly different but related dimensions to moralism or contexts within which moralism needs to be located. First, it must be seen as a set of attitudes and views in a ‘practical’ context, in a very general sense of ‘practical’ that is one of exhortation, advice and the justification or legitimation of action. But second, it is associated with a set of beliefs and attitudes in the theoretical context of understanding and explaining our human world. A lot of what makes this whole domain problematic is connected with our tendency to flip back and forth between the ‘practical’ context of exhortation and the justification of action, on one hand, and the ‘theoretical’ context of trying to understand and explain, on the other hand, and this discussion will unfortunately have to instantiate this complexity. To start, let us try to understand what moralising as an approach is by looking first at its ‘practical’ dimension, at a specific social practice in which its nature emerges particularly clearly.

Consider the phenomenon of popular Christian preaching in settled European societies. The Christian preacher operates in a particular, highly structured social context which is governed by a number of shared expectations. The context is an asymmetrical one: the preacher speaks in a quasi-public space, addressing a potentially varied crowd of people which anyone in principle can join: all the rest of us constitute an audience and are silent. We simply listen without interrupting, or contributing to the discussion, or indeed even applauding at the end. If the situation is not asymmetrical, if anyone can contribute ad libitum, it can quickly stop being one in which ‘preaching’ takes place and become a general discussion. Applause would be inappropriate because it would indicate that what the preacher said (or how he said it) had pleased us, but the point of the exercise is not to please us. Furthermore, to permit even expressions of approval might give rise to the idea that we were competent judges of what we heard and entitled to make independent evaluation of it. Thus, only in certain highly demotic forms of religious observance is it even permitted for the audience to encourage the preacher by shouting out ‘hallelujah’ (or ‘hear! hear!’). This is the format of preaching in societies which are already Christian. There is, to be sure, a special category of ‘missionary preaching’ which does not fit this ideal type because it is to peoples who have not yet been socialized into the standard forms of behaviour and hence may depart from the ideal script, for instance, by stoning the preacher, but one would need a different ideal type for them. ⁸

It is, of course, true that some deviant (or at any rate ‘minority’) Christians did in fact have doubts about the practice of preaching. There could be two distinct reasons for these doubts. First of all, there were moral reasons. Christianity was partly founded on an opposition to ‘Pharisaism’ ⁹ which meant a form of self-satisfaction with one’s own moral state, and preaching could be seen as encouraging this state, at any rate, in the preacher himself. It also seems that a certain (minority) strand of Egyptian monasticism took Christ’s words ‘Judge not that ye may not be judged’ to heart and consequently refrained from preaching and prosyletising. ¹⁰ To be sure, what seems to have troubled them most was the moral and spiritual danger which preaching posed for the soul of the preacher, who by virtue of presenting himself as a kind of judge should himself expect to be judged, but views about the inefficacy of moral exhortation (as opposed to exemplary action) seem also to have played a role, and this is the second reason for having reservations about the institution of preaching. ¹¹ Some of these minority views may seem to us to have humanly attractive features, and we might even go so far as to consider them more in keeping with the original theological message of Christianity than what later became the Christian mainstream, but the point here is that they did not themselves for whatever historical reason become the dominant view; rather preaching became an accepted and recognised institution.

In settled Christian societies, then, the preacher has over the ages had a variety of tasks including the enunciation, explanation and advocacy of a variety of supernatural and spiritual truths, the inculcation of approved modes of piety, consolation in time of trouble and so forth. One important task, however, has often been moral exhortation. This practice can be thought to have two relevant preconditions. First, it seems incontrovertible that traditional Christian preachers held that they had access to absolute, universally valid and universally applicable, moral truths; their task was to formulate and transmit them clearly and authoritatively and not, for instance, to submit them for consideration and discussion, analysis or argumentation. Again, if the ‘preacher’ is not in some sense dogmatic, we have what may quickly turn into a seminar discussion. Second, it seems to be a pragmatically integral assumption of actual practice that the preacher believes that verbal exhortation, of the kind he is engaged in when preaching, can change both people’s beliefs and their behaviour. If he does not think that preaching would change people’s attitudes and beliefs, why is he doing it? In the traditional dominant Christian configuration, absolute moral truth stands on its own two feet, and presenting it in a clear and competent way will have a tendency to bring it about that people believe and act on it. If this does not happen, either the presentation has not been competent or the audience is at fault. The failure of the audience to be persuaded is a form of resistance; the members of the audience, then, are perverse, benighted, backsliding, weak-willed, ‘carnal’ or what have you.

‘Moralising’, then, is basically a set of views and attitudes about the importance, centrality and efficacy of expressing judgements of morality. What, however, is this ‘morality’ or ‘moral truth’ which is the main content of preaching?

The term ‘morality’ and its associates are used in two distinct ways. First of all, recall that humans are capable of assessing or grading the objects in the world relative to a wide variety of different ways and of making a variety of different kinds of evaluative judgements. So, we categorise apples as larger or smaller, more or less crisp in taste, green in colour or red in colour, or we can judge an international trade agreement to be more or less conducive to fostering further peaceful relations between the signatories, more or less ‘just’ (by one or another conception of ‘justice’), more or less ‘transparent’ in the operations it permits and prohibits and more or less likely to increase trade. We can sometimes give an abbreviated, cumulative judgement by describing them as ‘better’ or ‘worse’. We do this overall assessment in a variety of different ways for different purposes: an apple good for cooking will not necessarily be good for eating; good weather for the ducks, or for the fields, is not necessarily good weather for us if we are on holiday and are looking to swim outdoors. Just as we can class books as good reads or bad reads or the weather as good or bad, so we can classify humans, their intentions, or their characters, or their actions or the habitual results of their actions. This is done relative to certain purposes of functions: a good military leader, a bad administrator and an indifferent negotiator. We can then abstract that form of classification from any highly specific form of function and speak of a person as ‘good’ without adding any particular further qualification. We might say ‘a good egg’. This means ‘good’ in general, that is, in a broad-gauged sense for a wide variety of the purposes for which we evaluate humans, whichever they may happen to be. ¹² So, ‘morality’ may be used in an extremely broad and general way to refer to any even minimally organised and systematic way of evaluating or assessing individual people as ‘good’ or ’bad’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’, on the understanding that that evaluation is taken to have the property of being a final or overall or definitive judgement. I merely note that the objects of ‘moral’ evaluation are generally individual humans, and it will be an open question whether or not ‘good’ and ‘less good’ are used to refer to societies as a whole, social institutions or political decisions or actions in the same sense in which they are used to classify individual humans and their actions, intentions and personality traits. ¹³

Christians generally use the term ‘morality’ not in the broad sense outlined above but in a very much narrower sense. To say that a person is ‘a good citizen’ or ‘a good egg’ is not necessarily the same as saying he or she is a ‘morally good’ person in the highly specific Christian sense of ‘moral’. ‘Morality’, that is, in the specific Christian sense is not here a mere gesture at some vague distinction between good and bad but has a much narrower and more specific meaning which is centred around a way of assigning value to individuals based on the quality of the exercise they make of their ‘free will’, where this exercise is construed on the model of a set of choices individuals make between the clear, but exhaustive, alternatives of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

With this notion of morality and of a ‘(specifically) moral’ truth about the potential choice between that which is absolutely good and that which is absolutely evil, there comes a particular epistemology. Knowledge of the absolutely good (and the absolutely evil) must in some sense be potentially context-free and relatively easy to acquire. Of course, one can reject the good and choose evil, but the absoluteness of the good means that recognising what it is – once it has been minimally pointed out – is not difficult. It is not like learning to distinguish antecedently boys and girls who will make good football players from those who will not or a good scientific experiment from a poor one or a good historical account of some series of events from a bad one. All of these require contextually based experience, perhaps complicated theoretical training and nice judgement, but once you have understood what lying is, you know it is absolutely wrong and will be wrong in all contexts, so you do not need to take account of the particular context. Judgement in any case is, in principle, simple – even a child can do it – and absolute.

Furthermore, the moral knowledge which Christian preachers transmit is construed as in some sense (potentially) self-realising. This does not mean that people always do what is good, but it does mean that the knowledge of good and evil in itself should be a sufficient motivation for acting so as to realise the good. To be more exact, traditional full-blown Christianity had a doctrine of ‘divine grace’ to which appeal was made to explain human choice of the good: If you choose the good, it is because you have accepted or are ready to cooperate with divine grace, although the nature of this ‘acceptance’ and in general the relation between divine grace and human free will was a sore spot and breeding ground for infectious and insalubrious theories for centuries. In any case, the story about divine grace and human free choice ended any interesting further discussion of reasons why someone might have chosen the good. If, on the other hand, I choose evil, there was a similarly simple theological story about the sinfulness of the human will, original sin and thus about intentional human resistance to the moral truth.

Moralism, judgement and explanation

Up to now, I have spoken of ‘moralism’ in practical contexts like those of preaching, namely, as an attitude which exhibits a particular optimism about the possible effects of enunciating moral truths (of a certain kind). Now let me shift to the second aspect of ‘moralism’, moralism not in an exhortatory but in a theoretical or explanatory context. We turn now from the preacher to the theoretician trying to understand and explain what happens in the world. The first difficulty in applying the moralising paradigm is that moralism is focused on individual decision-making, and it seems completely unclear how it can be used to understand and explain some large and important domains of politics, social action and international relations, given that these are collective phenomena in sometimes highly institutional settings. Note, too, and this is a second difficulty, even if one does have something that can be made to seem like an individual decision, such as Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait or to use chemical weapons against his own people, or Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq, a moralising approach will not be explanatorily useful and will not give one much real understanding. If the most important thing to say about Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds is that his doing it was an evil act, it does not tell us much. Similarly, if Blair claims that the proper explanation for what he did was that, as he would put it, it was ‘the right thing to do’ – as we might say it was an act of absolute goodness opposing absolute evil and thus self-transparent and self-motivating – even if you accept that it was a good thing to do, this is no explanation and gives no understanding. So moralism makes for a cognitively lazy approach to the world. Once you get the moral reading on some event, you have what is most important. The question of how they came to see ‘what is good’ and ‘what is evil’ is simple to answer, because this distinction is really elementary and drawing it context independent, so you do not need much further knowledge, and the question of why they acted as they did – doing good or evil – is also easy. If they did what was good, that was only what was to be expected, given that good is naturally attractive and (potentially) self-realising, in that it requires no further external incentive to move someone to do it (although, depending on your theology it may require god’s grace) and if they did evil, that is just sinfulness, perversity.

Just to draw out this point and make it unmistakable, if one thinks it is a difficult task requiring much cognitive effort and, therefore, a potential object for study to understand why people thought it was good to do Z, that is, what factors made it possible for them to see that Z was a good thing to do, then one has already placed oneself outside the framework of moralism, and this is true even if one oneself agrees that it was right to do Z. Similarly, if one thinks there are complex factors that explain why they did in fact act on Z, even after they saw that Z was the moral thing to do, one has also already positioned oneself outside the paradigm of moralism. So, one initial specification of ‘realism’ is just that there is always a non-theological explanation for why people come to hold that X is the right thing to do, which is worth investigating and discovering, and further that there is always a non-theological explanation for why people do even what we or they take to be the morally right thing to do, and it is always worthwhile discovering this. If ‘moralism’ is correctly understood in this way, it is easy to see that one can reject it most vigorously without denying that some moral valuations might be true while others are false, without denying that moral judgements play an important part in our lives and need to be taken seriously.

Moralism in politics

Moralism then skews and biases the landscape in which real explanation has to take place and thus blocks understanding which might otherwise be accessible, and it short-circuits the political decision process. Thus, before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a group of experts on the Middle East met with Tony Blair to urge caution because, as they told him, the situation in Iraq was very complex. Blair is said to have listened with evident lack of interest and increasing annoyance and to have repeatedly interrupted the experts with the rhetorical question: ‘But Saddam is evil, isn’t he?’ ¹⁴ This was obviously intended as a knock-down argument that would close discussion and also serve as an adequate justification for the policy of military intervention.

This does not mean, of course, that the true explanation or a full understanding of Blair’s decision would run: he decided on this foolish and disastrous policy simply because he thought that Saddam was evil. The distinction made above between theoretical contexts (in which one is looking for good explanations) and practical contexts (where one is concerned with justification of action, exhortation and the like) is highly relevant here. Blair’s assertion about Saddam belongs to the context of justifying action and he thought he could use it effectively to close discussion and if not convince, at least disable his opponents. Moralistic forms of discourse were sufficiently well established in the society to permit him, correctly, to think he could appeal to them to silence critics; he might also himself have believed some version of some of the things he said but that is a separate point. Saying that the function of the assertion in this context is to put an end to stop further inquiry and put an end to discussion is compatible with thinking that a full and correct explanation of what he did would require reference to all sorts of other factors.

The very notion of a ‘full’ explanation of a large-scale event like the invasion of Iraq might be problematic, and it might be better to work with a notion like ‘an explanation adequate for the purposes at hand’. This would make it clear that ‘purposes at hand’ was an important variable which could not be simply factored out or ignored. Taking this into account, a contextually more adequate explanation would take account of geopolitical, structural, historical, conjunctural, strategic and institutional factors: the presence of oil in Iraq, the history of United Kingdom (and United States) relations with that country and the region, the powers and interests of the major actors, the institutional forms decision-making takes in the various state-structures of the countries involved and so on. Then within that framework one could move on trying to understand how the UK decision came about (and was implemented). In that process, various decisions by Blair as Prime Minister would be seen to have played a role and one could study as part of that process the factors that may have weighed in his decision. Some of these will have been considerations he consciously entertained and took account of.

I do not myself think that I know exactly what those factors were, but I would submit that they were things such as an analysis of the configuration of power in the House of Commons – the certainty that the Conservative Party would support intervention and the correct calculation that the Labour Party would fail to mobilise itself against intervention – calculations about the expected electoral advantage to be gained from certain courses of action –the expected ‘Bagdad bounce’, a set of assumptions about the advisability of cultivating a positive, long-term relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. Other factors may have been explanatorily relevant but not because they were objects of his conscious attention. For instance, one might think that his desire to be in the spotlight was important for understanding what happened because it meant that courses of action which would allow him to think he would be seen as central to what was happening would have special salience for him in making his decisions. He may have calculated that the Conservative Party could not resist support a military adventure in the Near East, but it is unlikely that he sat down and consciously considered what he could do to put himself in the spotlight, or at any rate, he will not have considered this question in exactly these terms. Finally, part of the explanation of his decision might be his belief that Saddam Hussein was evil (and belief that that in itself was reason enough), or part of the explanation might be that he thought he could appeal to this moralistic attitude and use this vocabulary to make his point publicly in an easily comprehensible way and silence possible critics.

The point here is not that Blair’s moral judgement would be irrelevant in all contexts or whether or not it is rhetorically effective. It would make sense if one were to suppose that politics is essentially an eschatological exercise in the moral evaluation of leaders, but it presents itself as also something more than that, namely, as a contribution to what most of the rest of the people who live in Britain take politics to be: the attempt to make a reasoned choice of policies based on as full an understanding of the existing situation as possible. It is not a useful contribution to that discussion, if only because it actively devalues the pursuit of ‘full understanding’, if that phrase is taken to refer to any non-moral aspect of a situation. Blair’s moralising intervention arbitrarily limited political vision and cut short enquiry in several respects. First of all, it actively derailed discussion of the real situation in Iraq in all its complexity. Second, it diverted attention from, and was almost certainly intended to divert attention from, a discussion of what Blair’s real motives might have been in adopting and pressing for a policy of military intervention. Finally, by focusing on the individual moral attributes of the leaders in question – the ‘evil’ purportedly represented by Saddam Hussein and the moral rectitude purportedly exhibited by Blair – it strongly discouraged potential discussion of such further things as, for instance, the institutional arrangements and the international context which constrained British foreign policy decisions at that time.

Bismarck gives a good instance of a position which is the opposite of moralisation, which I have tentatively identified as ‘realism’. He replies in a letter (1857) to a correspondent about policy toward France:

I too accept as my own the principle that one must struggle against the revolution but … I do not think it possible to apply this principle in politics in such a way as to allow something which is only a potential further consequence one might draw from this principle through an arbitrarily large number of further steps to override every other consideration. One should not, that is, allow this principle to constitute the only trump in the game, so that the weakest card of this suit simply trumps even the highest card of every other. ¹⁵

Bismarck had his ‘principles’. One might argue about whether the principle he articulates here is a ‘moral’ or a ‘political’ principle, but I do not think that matters much. In any case, his political judgement here is contextual: whether or not to act on the principle of opposing revolution, and if one is to act, how exactly, are matters than can be determined only in the concrete case, and one will get varying answers depending on the context in which the question is asked.

If one takes this passage from Bismarck as the expression of an archetypically ‘realist’ position, as Blair’s reply to the experts was an archetypical expression of an anti-realist position, or what I have called ‘moralism’, then it seems clear that Bismarck at any rate sees no connection between rejecting moralism and rejecting the content of our post-Christian morality, although he does reject the absolutist framework within which this is usually presented. Bismarck, that is, can be construed as rejecting ‘morality’ tout court, only if one assumes that ‘morality’ must be a set of absolute, contextless principles, that automatically legitimate acting on them no matter what. I will call this ‘Plato’s assumption’: if morality is not absolute and contextless, it does not really exist. Why, however, should one assume this?

Realism, relativity and relativism

Realism can be said to have a negative and a positive aspects. It is constituted by a rejection of moralism – that is its negative aspect. Since ‘moralism’, as I have described it, is a complex conjunction of a number of positions, one can reject one component of it without necessarily rejecting the others. This will give rise to a spectrum of views, all of which have some claim to being called forms of ‘realism’. So I construe ‘moralism’ as a narrow, if very powerful, sect, but ‘realism’ is a very broad church indeed, encompassing a very wide swath of non-moralising positions.

I do not at all think that even if realism was just an inherently critical or negative doctrine, this would be any serious objection to it, provided that the configuration of which it was critical was sufficiently well entrenched and sufficiently significant. Still, Carr does propose a positive view about the importance of couching satisfactory explanations in terms of powers and interests, and the practical analogue would be advice in terms of powers and interests. The simplest formula one finds in Carr is that moral views and conceptions do not come from nowhere but arise from specific constellations of powers and interests and always retain the property of being a reflection of such powers and interests. ¹⁶ Even moral claims are to be analysed in this way. You do not explain why X did Y simply by claiming that Y was ‘morally the right thing to do’, although you might explain why X did Y by showing that X believed Y to be morally right, and then explaining the origin of that belief in a nexus of powers and interests.

Is this kind of ‘realism’, then, a form of ‘relativism’?

The first thing to note here is that the term ‘relativism’ can be used in two quite distinct ways. There is common or garden variety relativism – which is not in any way a toxic doctrine but just a form of common sense. Reasonable answers to the question: ‘Should I take an umbrella?’ will depend on (i.e., be ‘relative to’) the present visible conditions, whether it is raining, looks menacing or is set fair, and on the prognosis (if any is available). This is what I have been calling ‘contextualism’. When philosophers, and other theorists who stand under the influence of philosophers, however, use ‘relativism’ as a term of opprobrium or abuse, they have in mind not this common sense use of the term but a special philosophical sense.

In cases of garden-variety relativism – my contextualism – I can take away the appearance of some deep-seated ‘relativity’ and decontextualise the statement by simple rephrasing which gives it a categorical syntactic form. Thus, instead of saying, ‘Whether or not you should take the umbrella depends on –that is, ‘is relative to’ – the circumstances’, I can bring the ‘circumstances’ into the formulation of what then will look a categorical statement:

In all cases categorically, take your umbrella when the weather is predicted to be rainy; otherwise not.

Non-philosophers might suspect that this is some kind of trick. If such a simple device can work, there cannot have been much of a problem there to start with. I have great sympathy with this intuition that in the final accounting, ‘the problem of relativism’ is a made-up one. Something, although, can be learned, I think, by seeing what is wrong with this simple manoeuvre. The sloughing off of the appearance of relativity depends on being able to locate the relative system in a wider system which is taken to be closed. To say that a system is ‘closed’ means to assert that nothing else outside it is relevant to judging it. Once you know that this action would be an instance of lying, the situation can be considered a closed system – that is, this information in itself is enough to allow you to make a definitive judgement about it. No further information, such as that the lie is told in order to save a human life, is relevant, and so using this manoeuvre allows one to preserve this misleading structure.

The traditional view which goes back (at least to Plato) has it that if you cannot at least ‘in principle’ ‘resolve’ a relative or contextual statement into an absolute and categorical one, then the original statement could not be a reliable guide to action. So the existence of some final absolutist framework is necessary for there to be any form of valid knowledge or practical orientation in life at all. This is what philosophers mean by ‘relativism’ and why they take it to be sure a danger. ‘Relativism’ for these philosophers is the denial that there is an absolute final framework for theoretical practical knowledge, the failure to provide such a framework or simply agnosticism – the view that the existence of such a framework is an open question. They take such ‘relativism’ to be tantamount to the undermining and destruction of all of our ability to orient ourselves in the world.

Perhaps, it would be a good thing for us to have such a final framework into which all our contextually specific statements could be univocally slotted – although if this very idea is incoherent, it would be neither a ‘good’ nor a ‘bad’ thing to lack such a framework – but to claim that the validity and usefulness of any contextual claim depends on the existence of such a final framework seems to be a non-sequitur. Suppose I am in the desert and suffering from thirst. You tell me that if I go to my left 100 meters I shall find 2 litres of water. Does the usefulness and ‘validity’ of this information actually depend on your or my or anyone’s ability to provide a categorical framework? I can go left even if I cannot locate myself on any kind of Cartesian grid which would give me an absolute position. ¹⁷ Similarly, even if I now get the water and drink it, I know that I shall get thirsty again tomorrow. The water’s ability to quench my thirst is limited because there is only 2 litres. To say that this piece of advice or guidance is not real guidance because it is only relative to my situation is to miss the point, which is that I am in this situation and all I need is guidance in it. If the guidance is sufficient for my context, one might think it is sufficient, period. To say that this directive does not be give me (valid) knowledge and an orientation at all is like saying that because 2 litres of water will not quench my thirst forever, it will not quench my thirst now. But unless one has a very peculiar and highly dubious quasi-religious view, to the effect that when I seem to want a drink of water now, I really want ‘the waters of eternal life’ or a kind of water that will not quench my thirst for 2 days but forever, this is utterly implausible, although it has a kind of tempting plausibility which is especially important to resist. Plato’s own example is that the pilot does not really have knowledge or skill because although he can get me from one side of the river to the other, he does not know whether it is (finally!) better for me to cross the river or not. ¹⁸ But this is to make the same mistake of assuming that unless you have everything you might want – water that quenches thirst forever or knowledge both of how to cross the river and whether that would (in the final analysis) be good for you, you have nothing. To fear the toxic effects of ‘relativism’, you need to make this implausible assumption.

The traditional absolutist model of thinking about morality which is common to Plato, (most forms of) Christianity and Kant is that we do not simply treat certain contexts as closed, or even that we are sometime virtually forced to treat them as closed, but that there really is a context, or a God’s eye view as it comes to be in Christianity, in which or from which or for which everything is really closed. The realist denies that such a God’s eye view, even if it exists, is accessible to us and fears for the consequences of pretending that it is. ¹⁹ To claim that if morality is contextually embedded in configurations of power and interests, then this must imply some kind of toxic moral relativism, or even must imply that there can be no guidance for action at all, is to make a highly controversial theoretical claim. This claim would seem plausible only if one also thought that there was no way to evaluate complexes of powers and interests apart from reference to some absolute standards of the Platonic kind. How inherently plausible is that? After all, it is a restatement of Plato’s claim rather than a defence of it and to appeal to it in the context of a discussion about ‘contextualism’ would seem to be a case of petitio principii.

Utopianism and the ‘impossible’

One might say in conclusion that the concept of ‘realism’ which I have been discussing in this article deviates rather noticeably from one of the things people sometimes mean by ‘realism’. When the students of Paris in 1968 wrote on the walls ‘Soyez réaliste; demandez l’impossible’, ²⁰ this slogan got its point from the assumption that there is an apparent or prima facie contradiction between the first demand and the second, which the person who invented the slogan and who stencilled it on the wall recognises but is exhorting the reader to struggle to overcome. The assumption is that being realistic means not asking for what is impossible. This is a position like the one Carr suggests when he contrasts realism with utopianism. The utopian asks for that which is impossible.

‘Realism’ as the theoretical position I favour, and ‘being realistic’ in the sense in which this expression is being used above, are two different things. The second is not a theoretical position, but a policy, attitude or disposition to behave in a certain way. The realist is someone who denies that a certain kind of morality has a special status. The person who ‘is realistic’ accepts the existing framework for defining what is possible and impossible and tries to cut his desires to fit the cloth which his particular society has made available. Rejection of the special status of morality, however, is a theoretical position which is compatible with being realistic or unrealistic in one’s particular demands. Indeed, on some accounts, one might think that theoretical realism should start with a recognition that the process by which a society sorts certain potential courses of action and certain outcomes into two groups: ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ is itself highly variable, and that to some extent it always reflects the given distribution of powers and interests. The distinction between what is possible and what is impossible is itself in most political contexts to some extent a social construct. A realist who understands this will refuse to take this distinction as it is socially defined at any given moment to be the final and unquestioned framework for thought or action.

When we are told that it is pointless to strive for what is impossible, this is often associated with the assumption that ‘impossible’ is used here in something like the sense in which we speak of ‘physical impossibility’ – that is, something that is incompatible with basic laws of physics or rather with our everyday conceptions of how the physics of large-scale objects in our world operates according to strictly exceptionless laws. So, ‘a body cannot really be in two places at once’ might be one such law. Most of the things we call ‘impossible’ in politics do not have a standing that is anything like that. They are context dependent in at least two senses. First of all, the sorts of things we say are possible or impossible are generally things that depend on ‘laws’ that are themselves descriptions of the ways in which highly changeable social configurations operate. Thus, in the modern world, many people have tried to claim that it is a law that democracies do not go to war with each other, so trying to get Ireland to go to war with Iceland over any issue or sequence of issues is out of the question. ²¹ Regardless of the plausibility of this particular example, the purported general law would not seem to be of much use until one gave some further content to the concept of ‘democracy’ and that means providing much more information about the concrete context. The second kind of context-dependence results from the fact that in politics, most of the discussion about what is (practically) possible or impossible partly depends on what price the people involved are and will continue to be willing to pay to attain various ends, and this is a variable. What counts as ‘impossible’ is defined by society, and what ‘society’ means in the relevant sense is also something that must be contextually determined. Sometimes, it can mean a local community, sometimes a large institutionally structured sector, sometimes something like a nation or nation-state, and sometimes one or another of the systems of states that have existed from time to time. Here, too, choosing the right context is of great importance, and there are probably no hard-and-fast rules which will remove from us the burden of exercising our judgement. While we must take this construct – ‘the (socially) impossible’ – in some sense as given in that we must recognise it and start from it, we can learn to treat it as a construct, not as a simple fact of nature, and we need not limit ourselves aspirationally to what it prescribes. After all, in the human world, much of what we might desire is not antecedently given as possible or impossible. Many options are not available until someone has made a play for them, perhaps an unconditioned and cognitively thinly grounded play. Wishing does not make things so, but there are things that can become possible only if enough people want them (and pursue them) in the right way, and which otherwise are ‘impossible’. This set of facts about the human situation is the continuing soil in which utopianism rightly flourishes.

Carr tends to assume, and I think this is an assumption that has often been made, that utopianism must be absolutist, in the sense that the values that are instantiated in a utopian society are held to have a status like that of the traditional Christian, Platonic or Kantian ‘moral’ values, and there are plenty of examples of this. Certainly, in their descriptions of the ideal societies, Plato and Thomas More do seem to be appealing to what they take to be absolute values. And Carr himself, after all, had written a book on Dostoevsky, whom he interpreted as a utopian author. ²² However, there are also instances of utopianism that do not seem obviously to have this structure, such as the description of the Abbey of Thélème in Rabelais. ²³ It is in any case unclear why the attempt to demand what is ‘impossible’ under the circumstances in which we happen to find ourselves need to imply any kind of context-free absolutism. If it is impossible to provide all the members of our population with adequate medical care because of certain existing social institutions, I can demand the impossible – health care for all – without being committed to the view that health care has any kind of absolute, categorical or transcendental value. I just think it, on balance and in the situation which now exists, more important than the maintenance of the social institutions which now make its universal provision impossible.

Why did Carr identify ‘utopianism’ as the thing with which realism was to be contrasted; rather than, as I wish to claim seeing that the appropriate contrasting configuration is what I call ‘moralism’? I suspect that he was influenced by Marx’s criticism of ‘utopian thinking’. There are any number of different ways in which a particular utopian project can be criticised. I can say that even as explicitly presented, the utopian society or state of affairs is not really attractive, or that although the way it is presented makes it seem attractive, it would have other consequences which are not mentioned but are inevitable and which would make it on the whole significantly less attractive than it initially seems to be. I can also criticise utopian constructions to the extent to which I assume they must be images of closed societies ²⁴ that are construed to be perfect and thus immune to further historical change; I might, in contrast to this, think that any such thing as ‘the human good’ has no possible closed and ‘perfect’ realisation, that the human good is something historically open and always developing. By far, although, the most usual criticism concerns the lack of specification of any mechanism for attaining the utopia starting from where we are, from our present.

The main focus of Marx’s objection to utopianism is on this final point. ²⁵ The utopians thought that presenting their suggestions and showing why they were attractive was enough. But to think that presenting a state of affairs as attractive is ‘enough’ in politics, means tacitly to make a very substantial further assumption, namely, that it is ‘enough’ for a certain state of affairs to be seen to be good, for people to aspire to realise it, and then that this was enough to expect that it would eventually be realised. This, although, looks very much like one of the basic structures I analysed earlier in this article when discussing ‘moralism’. It looks, that is, as if the utopian thinks his or her utopian is (to some extent) ‘self-realising’, just as the moralist thinks that showing that something is morally right or wrong is self-motivating; it is ‘enough’ to point out clearly what is the ‘(morally) right’ thing to do is. Further thought about why and how one then does ‘the right thing’ is not terribly important.

Although Marx’s criticism of what he calls ‘utopianism’ is focused on the lack of specification of a mechanism for realising the utopian state, there is a further strand in his work which would cause him also to object to another aspect of one kind of utopianism. This is the utopian idea that the human good could potentially be exhaustively embodied in any kind of steady-state or closed and perfect social form. Many utopian thinkers have subscribed to this ‘done-and-dusted’ ideal of a perfect society not subject to further change, and we are familiar with the criticisms of this by thinkers who point to the potentially totalitarian uses to which such utopian conceptions can be put. However, not all utopians were committed to some positive image of unchanging perfection. Thus, for instance, Gustav Landauer construed the task of utopian speculation as not to construct the image of a possible perfect world but as a focused study of those human desires and needs that continue to torment us but are incapable of being satisfied under present social circumstances. These desires, needs and aspirations are not ‘absolute’ but historically constituted and changing, and so, this view is perfectly compatible with the idea that there can be no complete and final state of absolute perfect in which any change could only be a falling-off from the ideal. For a variety of reasons, low-level and relatively unsophisticated simple empirical methods will not be sufficient for studying ‘impossible’ aspirations and needs – you cannot perhaps ‘directly observe’ them or read them off from responses to questionnaires – rather determining what they are and how in changed circumstances it might become possible to satisfy them, will require using a variety of interpretative techniques and perhaps a complex theoretical apparatus of assumptions. It is probably also the case that making any headway in coming to see what these desires are will require a form of ‘experimentation’ that will have a rather different relation to political action than that envisaged in simpler kinds of social enquiry. That need not imply that there is nothing cognitive about the attempts to discover what these unsatisfiable ‘utopian’ needs and desires are. There is no reason to assume that we can find and circumscribe a definitive set of them which we can satisfy once and for all in an imagined ‘ideal’ state; we may rather assume that they change over time and trying to find and satisfy them is a historically open-ended task. ²⁶ For a number of reasons, it seems a good idea to shift the focus of utopian thinking from images of purported future unchanging perfection to a more historically informed analysis of existing, but changing, dissatisfactions and needs, and possible (contextually and historically specific) ways of satisfying them. ²⁷

‘Utopianism’ is used (at least) in two ways, with reference to ‘content’ and with reference to ‘form’. The content-based usage refers to the fact that the utopian project is outside the bounds of what are conventionally thought to be politically or morally possible, or that it focuses on human needs and desires that cannot be satisfied in the basic structure of society as it now exists. The more form-based use describes utopian thinking as presenting the advantages of a final state to be attained without giving an account of how we are to get there. It is this second form-based usage that bring ‘utopianism’ close to ‘moralism’ (as I have described it) and that is the main object of Marx’s criticism. Note that Marx’s own suggestions come close to having a ‘utopian’ content if you think that he focused on desires (for a decent life on the part of the proletariat) which were, he thought, ‘impossible to satisfy’ under the then-prevailing socio-economic conditions.

This distinction between utopianism with regard to content and with regard to form is not the same at the other important distinction between the Platonic variant of utopianism – realisation of absolute values in an ideally unchanging – and Landauer-style utopianism – focused on articulating deeply rooted but historically constituted human desires and aspirations that are in fact impossible of realisation in current society, with no commitment to any kind of ‘closure’. While my main aim is to defend ‘realism’ and aspiration to the impossible (and the conjunction of the two), I wish to propose that the distinction between Plato and Landauer may throw some light on things Carr says which might otherwise seem peculiar. Carr sometimes seems to think of ‘realism’ and ‘utopianism’ as opposite and incompatible ²⁸ – as if one had to choose between the two – but sometimes as if they were opposite but complementary – so that it was not only possible but desirable to combine the two. ²⁹ I suggest that this is a result of a slight shift between two senses of ‘utopianism’ or, perhaps one might prefer to say, two different major accents one can place differentially on different parts of the utopian tradition. The ‘utopianism’ which is incompatible with realism is Plato’s absolutist version and, I have already suggested, that what is wrong with this is its commitment to something structurally very similar to what I called ‘moralism’. The ‘utopianism’ which should be a part of a sensible realist project is one of ‘wishful vision’ ³⁰ (rather than ‘wish-dreams’ ³¹ ).

Judgement and the importance of context

Realism then is about the importance and centrality to politics of a form of judgement that is context dependent, although not ‘relativistic’ in the traditional philosopher’s sense. Avoiding moralism is perfectly compatible with making evaluations of a more contextually specific kind. In fact, international relations cannot be any more value-free than most other parts of the human sciences, but it can be, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘moralinfrei’ – free of that highly idealised, colourless, odourless ‘value’ of ‘pure morality’ which was so prized by traditional philosophers. ³² The moralist wishes to construe politics as basi-cally a way of taking a rather primitive and limited absolutist scheme for judging the ‘morality’ of individual actions and applying this scheme to complex social phenomena. The realist rejects this, partly because of the various important differences that exist between individual humans and social institutions. Politics is not applied individual morality, although there is a politics of individual moral behaviour and judgement.

One misses something in Carr if one does not see that he himself had some strongly held value-judgements and consistency with his own theoretical reflections in no way required him to deny this. He did think, I assume, that these views were not absolute but were founded in hard empirical study and the exercise of context-dependent judgements. He also perhaps had a disinclination to trumpet them magisterially in what he thought were inappropriate contexts, such as that in which his primary task was to understand as clearly as possible what had happened in history and politics. To say that moral systems arise from and have to be understood in the context of conjunctions of power and interests is not to say that local Might is always Right, ³³ and what we mean by ‘local’ is capable of indefinite extension. To say it is capable of ‘indefinite’ extension is not to say that it is capable of arbitrary or infinite extension or that the question of its extension, of how far it can appropriately be extended is rationally unanswerable; it is just that there will be different answers depending on the context in question and that one cannot antecedently say what the reasonable limits will be. So, Carr’s realism neither condemns him to silence when the practical question ‘What is to be done?’ is asked nor does it force him (even tacitly) to endorse the status quo or prevent him from speaking the truth to local power. He thought the Treaty of Versailles was a very bad idea, although the Allies did have the power to impose it – they had the Might, if one wants to put it that way – and expressed his opposition unmistakably enough. It is important to get as clear an account as one can of the grounds and reasons for his opposition to the Treaty, but the idea that these will fall out into neat, separate boxes, labelled ‘moral reasons’ and ‘non-moral reasons’, or into a set of pigeon-holes, labelled ‘moral reasons’, ‘political reasons’ and ‘other reasons’, is highly implausible, and the insistence that they must conform to one or another of such system of categories a sign of an obstinate temperament, not of special insight or a particularly high level of human moral or political development. Judgement has to be more flexible than this. Systems of categories are invented for a variety of different reasons, and it is unlikely that the categories in any system (apart perhaps from mathematical ones) will be absolutely clearly definable, or that the system will be able to accommodate neatly everything in a changeable human world. Judgement requires us not merely to use given categories but to modify and amend them as circumstances change, as they are doing continually, and that the categories themselves are subject to historical change is an insight which is one of Hegel’s abiding contributions to our understanding of politics, society and history.

Anyone who studies Carr’s life carefully will see that it conformed to this pattern of engaged, theoretically reflective commitment which was no respecter of persons or institutions. ³⁴ Such a commitment, which should be considered an integral part of the wider realist project, can still serve as a model to us all.

The rejection of the narrow sect of moralism in favour of one of the many variants within the broad church of realism will not, of course, in itself ensure that the political judgements any one person or group of people makes at any given time will be wise, humane and enlightened. Indeed, it will not even guarantee that judgement will be careful, informed and well grounded, and how could it? The fact that ‘realism’ does not offer a simple formula or recipe for success and the fact that it is not and is not intended to be a panacea are both strengths of it as an approach rather than weaknesses. Part of the point is precisely that judgement is a kind contextual activity for which any such guarantees are lacking, and that nothing is gained by pretending they could exist when they patently do not.

So, I would like to leave you with three thoughts: First of all, one can make evaluative judgements, even, if one wishes to use this terminology, ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ judgements without engaging in what I have called ‘moralism’. Second, realism is not incompatible with all forms of utopianism. In particular, it is difficult, but not obviously impossible, to envisage a ‘realistic’ engagement with forms of human desire that cannot be satisfied by present society. Finally, human judgement is context dependent, and thus, if one wishes to call it that, ‘relative’ – but from that it does not follow that it has the toxic form of the philosopher’s bête noire: ‘relativism’.