(1) It is psychologically impossible for me to eat grass.

(2) You could persuade me (without offering bribes or otherwise changing my incentives) to eat grass.

Both seem obviously false, right? I surely could eat grass. But, given the actual circumstances, I just as surely won’t do so.

For the individual, the precepts of justice are primarily negative — respect the natural rights of others and fairness in exchanges and distributions. Those precepts were generally the same for the state, but with one critical addition — the obligation to the social common good. It’s this third feature that fills the “gap” that’s desired to be filled here, isn’t it, and without contortions or imaginary constructs?

I was puzzled by the footnote concerning “anti-egalitarians.” The egalitarians’ historical doctrinal opponents have been the libertarians. (They’ve been at loggerheads since the founding!) So, the comment about hard work made no sense to me. The libertarians’ argument is that liberty should be sovereign, while the egalitarians say that equality should be sovereign. The common sense view has always been that justice is sovereign over both liberty and equality. Our everyday speech seems to reflect this. We often speak of too much equality or liberty, but we don’t tend to hear anyone arguing that there is too much justice. So, was the comment about labor just a straw man overstuffed for the occasion?

Finally, one comment about the amusing exchange about a 100% tax rate. Many years ago, I had an opportunity to ask the then-Minister of Finance of Algeria, which had a 100% rate on personal income above the equivalent of about $20,000. With a smile, he acknowledged that not one tax return had ever been filed reporting income falling into the top marginal rate.

I don’t think anyone would claim otherwise. It seems pretty obvious that even from the standpoint of non-ideal theory itself, “persuading laggards to do their duty” is one of the options on the table that must be considered. So I take it your point is merely that some unnamed non-ideal theorists are failing to apply their own theory correctly. Right?

“if we find that it’s possible (without some other moral violation) to change their dispositions (to persuade them), then that fact, combined with the other facts, does suffice”

Nope. We should do whatever is actually best. And just because ideally folks would phi, it doesn’t logically follow that the best use of our limited resources is to persuade folks of this whenever possible (or even ‘possible without other moral violations’). Sometimes that’ll be plain inefficient.

Counterexample: suppose everyone ideally ought to donate 10% of their income to charity. Suppose that Super-Rich-Dude, after donating his own 10%, could invest the rest of his fortune in moral education that would convince the rest of us to do our duty too. Further suppose that this investment is inefficient: the amount it costs SRD is more than the 10% of everyone else’s summed incomes that ends up going to charities. Then it would be better for SRD not to bother morally educating us laggards, but instead donating those resources of his directly to the needy charities.

To get your conclusions, we instead need the further premise that moral education (persuasion, whatever) is the best available option in the actual circumstances. Any non-ideal theorist will agree that from this it follows that we should engage in such moral education. But not from any weaker claim. And this strong claim will often not be true.

“how do you feel about the notion of psychological possibility?”

It’s fine, but you shouldn’t confuse psychological impossibility with ordinary stubbornness. Sometimes people just won’t do something (and nor are they especially open to being persuaded otherwise), but they certainly could do it (in the ordinary sense of ‘could’). I take it the relevant sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ here is something like ‘would have done otherwise if he had wanted to‘ (with extra provisos needed to deal with compulsive desires, e.g. the unwilling addict).

A final point: there can be possible worlds where Bob does his duty, even if there are no true conditionals of the form “if I [were to] phi, then Bob will [would] do his duty”. Proof: for the latter claim to be false, all we need is for the *closest* world where I phi to be one where Bob fails to do his duty. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for Bob to do his duty after I phi. It’s just really unlikely. (This is a rough formalization of the bog-standard intuition that non-pathological stubbornness is possible.)

They do not suffice to make this proposition true: “given that the most productive capitalist might not work with taxes that high, we ought to establish, in this society as it currently stands, a 100% tax rate on the top bracket.” But neither do they suffice to make the negation of that proposition true — which is what I think a lot of the objectionable non-ideal theory claims.

Rather, they demand further inquiry about how necessary or contingent the dispositions of the most productive capitalists are. And if we find that it’s possible (without some other moral violation) to change their dispositions (to persuade them), then that fact, combined with the other facts, does suffice to make the pair of propositions “we ought to change the dispositions of the most productive capitalists to conform with these ideal conditions” and “we ought to establish a 100%…” true.

My point here is that too many people fly right past that last step.

Also, how do you feel about the notion of psychological possibility? I think there are some pretty clear cases where we say something’s psychologically impossible — I might be unable to quit smoking, for example, or to admit that I was wrong, or to torture a puppy.

If there is such a thing as psychological impossibility, then it probably ought to apply to cases where A has no disposition to X and it’s impossible to persuade them to do X. After all, in such a case, in every possible world where A has the package of psychological traits he has, A doesn’t X… sounds like impossibility to me.

An affirmative answer is clearly daft. But if you answer ‘no’, then you accept the need for non-ideal theory instead. Looking at the ideal world doesn’t suffice to tell us what to do in our actual circumstances.

But your broader point is entirely compatible with non-ideal theory (as I understand it). It’s both important and true to note that “attempting to persuade laggards to do their duty” is among the (non-ideal) options available to us. We should pick the best option available — and who knows, maybe sometimes this will be it! But again, there’s no guarantee. It’s an empirical question, the answer to which is determined by non-ideal theory.

So I don’t see any case here for thinking that non-ideal theory per se is “mistaken”. You’re just pointing out that it could be pernicious if done badly. (That’s true of all ethical theorizing.)

N.B. I don’t see why you say, “if we persuade the laggards to pull their weight, we’re not doing non-ideal theory anymore.” I guess if we succeed in bringing about utopia, then subsequently we won’t do any more non-ideal theory. But the act of persuading laggards is itself very much in the non-ideal realm. In an ideal world, no such persuasion would be necessary, after all. We could simply go about our own duties, without having to harry others into doing theirs.