A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory

Abstract

Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates-such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and political moralism and political realism-are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called 'fitness constraint' and the 'functional constraint', through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory.

Global democracy and feasibility

“…In line with other theorists, we find it plausible to assume that the concept of feasibility applies only to the (possible) realization of a state of affairs through intentional actions by agents (Southwood & Wiens, 2016, p. 3041, n. 6). Natural events giving rise to certain states of affairs thus fall outside its domain of application and so it would not be meaningful to ask whether heavy rainfall today is feasible or infeasible (Erman & Möller, 2019).…”

“…Political theories have myriad aims and goals, contexts and delimitations, and we think that there are no general answers to best understand feasibility (Erman & Möller, 2018). As we will argue below, whether feasibility is best understood in terms of, say, conditional ability or costliness depends on what an intended normative political principle aims to regulate (functional constraint) and how it fits together with the other principles, values and states of affairs which are endorsed in the account (fitness constraint) (Erman & Möller, 2019).…”

“…The theorist may conclude that if her account of democracy is not compatible with the target practice, so much the worse for the target practice. In other words, given her aim with the account, what matters might be that there is a possible arrangement playing the (approximate) role of the EU in which democracy may be upheld, not that the institution is constituted in the same way as the current EU (Erman & Möller, 2018, 2019.…”

“…And there are no predetermined limits to functional variety within an account nor to the number of principles it may incorporate, as long as the principles harmonize so that the fitness constraint is fulfilled. In a nutshell, this means that if an account includes an applied principle construed under demanding feasibility constraints, and a more general higher-level principle construed under weaker or no feasibility constraints, the applied principle must be reasonable from the standpoint of the higher-level principle given the feasibility constraints assumed by the applied principle (and vice versa) (Erman & Möller, 2019).…”

“…If an account of democracy demands too little of people, the account is equally infeasible as an account of democracy. This would mean that, rather than attempting to find a bar of 'democracy' low enough to be compatible with, say, the practice of slavery, abolishing the practice in its entirety seems to be the better alternative (see Erman & Möller, 2019).…”