22
Conclusion
Appeals to our case-specific intuitions about real and imagined cases will
remain the starting point of reflection – the unavoidable first word -- for political
philosophers. Nothing in the last section is meant to challenge the basic strategy of
organizing our considered judgments about justice in a way to make them hang
together coherently. More than teaching the detailed content of clashing political
moralities, we are offering to our students a method about reflecting upon political
life. I’ve suggested that the more explicit we are about the diversity of methods
available for this task, and their respective limitations, the better.
Political philosophers hardly conceive their work as a purely theoretical
exercise. In the classroom we are inclined to emphasize this, drawing on richly
textured cases from our colleagues. We are prone, I think, to downplay a discussion
of method in the interest of highlighting ethical issues of politics that have an
immediate urgency. But the desire to provide off-the-shelf guidance for political
actors should be tempered by the aim of instilling an approach to thinking about
seemingly intractable issues in a way that forces us to see them in a new light. At
times these tools will appear flashy or other-worldly, stretching our moral
imaginations, but I’ve suggested that this approach is at the core of any plausible
pedagogy of political philosophy. As Henry Sidgwick puts it in The Methods of Ethics:
Practical men will recognize that the effort to construct a Theory of
Right is not a matter of mere speculative interest, but of the deepest
practical import; and the will no more try to dispense with the aid of
philosophy than the moral philosopher--if he knows his own
limitations--will try to dispense with the aid of moral common sense.
39
39
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1982), p. 24.
Convention