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This introductory chapter outlines the empirical context of the debate over reparations for historic international injustice, with particular reference to colonialism and the slave trade. It characterizes the argument of the book as a specific type of non-ideal theory, and explains the book's commitment to a particular kind of practicality, whereby its arguments can be employed by real world political actors. It outlines an approach to international justice labelled ‘international libertarianism’, advocated by writers including John Rawls, David Miller, Michael Walzer, and Thomas Nagel, which is analogous to domestic libertarianism in terms of its commitment to respect for sovereignty, self-ownership, and the minimal state. This is distinguished from alternative accounts of international justice such as cosmopolitanism and realism. The book's focus on rectificatory duties, rather than rights, is explained, and the terminological relation between terms such as restitution and compensation, and nation and state, is explicated.

This chapter examines other ways the Argument from Completeness might be attacked. It identifies two strategies that the realist might deploy in order to avoid the difficulties engendered by the applicability of the Completeness Theorem to the ideal theory. The first is to insist that the theory be cast in some non-first-order language which resists completeness. The second is to allow ideal theory to continue to be rendered in first-order form, but to argue for a semantics in which interpretations take such a new shape that there is no longer any guarantee that any consistent theory has a model in the new sense.

This chapter explores the practical implications of the cosmopolitan ideal of a just world order, and discusses ‘the guidance critique’ of this ideal: the claim that cosmopolitan theories are too idealistic to guide action in real-world circumstances. It argues that proponents of this critique either misapply cosmopolitan principles, or have unreasonable expectations regarding the sort of guidance a theory of justice can plausibly deliver. Theories of justice do not answer questions such as: ‘What specific actions ought we to take, here and now?’ Instead, they offer normative frameworks for guiding our thinking with respect to such questions. Because cosmopolitanism does provide a distinctive normative framework – that is, it insists that our international distributive duties are grounded in justice, as opposed to humanitarian assistance – it fulfils the guidance requirements that can plausibly be placed on a theory of justice.

This chapter outlines a number of critical responses to the project of seeking to rectify historic injustice, and explains why they largely do not apply to international libertarian accounts of international justice. It distinguishes between backward-looking and forward-looking accounts of distributive justice in both ideal and non-ideal theory, and looks at how both accounts relate to ideas of rectificatory justice. If one advocates a forward-looking account of distributive justice, and so advocates a redistribution of resources with each new generation, then the rectificatory project will seem to be of little importance. However, this nonchalance in the face of historic injustice is unsustainable if one advocates backward-looking principles. Since international libertarians resist cosmopolitan calls for a generational redistribution of resources across political boundaries, they must carefully scrutinize the provenance of modern day distributions.

Part I. Distinctive features of Newton’s method: Successively more accurate approximations and increasing empirical support from measurements. Part II. The Mercury perihelion problem: A proposal to alter the inverse-square law ruled out by a more precise measurement. Einstein’s theory accounts for the extra precession and recovers the successful measurements of Newton’s theory. An alternative to general relativity that would answer a new challenge from Mercury is ruled out by a more precise measurement. Part III. Newton does not require or endorse scientific progress as progress toward Laplace’s ideal limit of a final theory. Part IV. Newton’s conception of scientific progress through successively more accurate approximations is not undermined by the classic argument against convergent realism. Part V: Agreeing measurements from diverse phenomena play a decisive role of in transforming dark energy from a dubious hypothesis into part of the accepted background framework guiding empirical research in cosmology today.

This chapter contrasts his consequentialist account of democratic rights with prominent nonconsequentialist accounts, including those of Rawls, Habermas, Barry, and Waldron. He explains why majority rule itself requires a consequentialist rationale. To illustrate that the rationale for democratic rights is consequentialist, the chapter proposes an alternative to democratic rights, election by deliberative poll, that would be an improvement under the main principle, were it not for the potential for abuse. Democratic rights are a solution to a CAP. To be endorsed by the main principle, democratic rights must equitably promote the life prospects of all compliers and nonresponsible noncompliers. The chapter argues that group rights or cultural rights are not fundamental rights, but rather rights that are instrumental to protecting the individual rights of members of minorities against majorities. The chapter shows that the main principle can explain why human rights, including democratic rights, should be inalienable. This is a puzzle on many nonconsequentialist views. The chapter describes one kind of problem that no form of government, not even democracy, is very good at solving, the time lag problem. Finally, the chapter discusses the inappropriateness of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning campaign finance reform laws on free speech grounds.

The chapter defends the use of ideal theory, and that moral theory should rely on insights from the social sciences. An ideal theory is one that assumes away some political constraints, while the resulting model is unrealistic it plays a vital evaluative function. The conclusions of the social sciences matter in virtue of concepts like wellbeing, which are partly empirical.

This chapter considers John Rawls' conception of ideal theory, with particular emphasis on the implications of problems of feasibility for normative political philosophy and market democracy's institutional guarantees. It defends Rawls' general view of ideal theory, first by explaining why the objection to market democracy—that even if market democratic institutional forms appear attractive in theory, they are unlikely to deliver the goods in practice and so are defective for that reason—has little force when applied against the idealism of left liberalism. It then examines why such arguments are equally ineffective when trained against the idealism of free market fairness. It also analyzes Rawls' idea of “realistic utopianism” before concluding by asking whether market democratic regimes that treat economic liberty as constitutionally basic can realize all the requirements of justice as fairness.

Chapter 8 takes up the problem of implementing the marriage law of ideal theory in a non-ideal world. It addresses concerns that minimal marriage would worsen the lot of the vulnerable, especially women, by eliminating anti-poverty marriage promotion, mandatory alimony and property division protecting the economically dependent, and permitting gender-structured polygyny. Liberals could consistently support transitional provisions for benefits and property division, but liberalism can, and should, also address such problems through legal vehicles other than marriage, especially through education and default rules of financial fairness. Political liberalism holds a number of insufficiently recognized tools for feminists, including rectification, neutrality, and the status it assigns to goods of care and self-respect.

This chapter addresses the feasibility challenge against conceptions of global justice as it applies to the fulfillment of basic socioeconomic human rights. Section 4.1 introduces the challenge. Section 4.2 provides an analysis of the concept or feasibility. It identifies different types, domains, and degrees of feasibility, and explains how feasibility interacts with moral desirability in the justification of obligations. Section 4.3 accounts for the role of feasibility and desirability in the design, critique, and revision of conceptions of justice, domestic and global. Section 4.4 identifies two broad strategies of response to feasibility obstacles, one focused on levels of generality and the other on temporal variation. The notion of “dynamic duties” to expand feasible sets of political action is introduced. Section 4.5 identifies two important feasibility obstacles to the pursuit of basic global justice, which concern nonideal circumstances of lack of robust international institutions and a strong ethos of cosmopolitan solidarity. Section 4.6 responds by deploying the idea of dynamic duties within a transitional standpoint; it explores mechanisms of political empowerment such as institutional experimentation, protest, and public deliberation.

This chapter identifies several different enduring models of utopian-ideal thought, arguing that one stands out as meriting closer investigation. It argues that this is an attractive understanding of utopian-ideal theory, that it makes sense of the theory's appeal, and why those such as Oscar Wilde thought ideals are a necessary part of any “map” of political reform. This understanding is broad enough to include a wide range of traditional utopian theory, as well as many current ideal theories. It also makes sense of many of the current facets of the ideal theory debate among contemporary philosophers, such as that between Amartya Sen and Rawls on the importance of ideals in pursuing justice.

This chapter aims to locate this book's motivating concerns in the context of traditional and contemporary political philosophy. The argument to come is not a defense, nor is it a critique, of any particular conception of what justice requires. The guiding idea is rather, roughly stated, that an account that requires more than we ever expect to achieve is not thereby in the least flawed, even if it is not everything worth having. Whether anyone ought to set out for justice given pessimistic prospects is a separate matter; futility is plausibly a defect in a practical project. A second theme, then, is that the connection between sound political philosophy and guidance for political practice has often been exaggerated, and not just in recent times.

We are currently seeing an upsurge of ‘realism’ in political philosophy, in the work of theorists such as Raymond Geuss and the late Bernard Williams. A key part of this work is a critique of Anglo-American ‘ideal’ political philosophy. This chapter argues that we find a very similar critique of analytical political philosophy in the work, from Ideologies and Political Theory onwards, of Michael Freeden. Both Freeden and the realists stress the importance of historical contingency, the autonomy of the political, and the ideological nature of political philosophy—all features that they take ideal theory to neglect. It is, however, also important to understand what distinguishes Michael Freeden’s work from realism. Whereas the latter offer an alternative conception of how to do first-order political philosophy, Freeden sees his work as engaging in a second-order exercise of ideology analysis.

This chapter presents John Rawls' ideal and non-ideal theory of justice. The ideal theory argues that institutions are well ordered when they are both just and known to be just, and when individuals both accept and comply fully with the requirements these institutions impose on them. This notion suggests two different ways in which circumstances may fail to be ideal. On the one hand, background institutions may not be just; on the other hand, individuals may not fully comply with the standing requirements placed on them. For each kind of defective case, there is a corresponding branch of non-ideal theory—the partial compliance theory and the transitional theory. The former specifies what happens to an individual's obligations when others fail to do their fair share within some distributive scheme, while the latter specifies the obligations that individuals have to bring just institutions into existence.

The moral error theorist faces many kinds of opposition. One kind of opponent offers an identity claim between moral properties and certain naturalistic properties (e.g., of the format “Goodness = N-ness”). Usually the error theorist will object to the plausibility of this identity claim, but sometimes another kind of defense of the error theory is possible: when there is uncertainty whether the description of the naturalistic property in question (“N-ness”) even succeeds in denoting anything. Perhaps the naturalistic description is incomplete, such that we can be confident that it fails to denote. Or perhaps the naturalistic description leaves it open whether it denotes anything; the advocate of the theory assumes that it does, but there are serious grounds for doubt. If we take such an identity claim seriously, but there exists doubt about whether the right-hand side of the equation denotes anything, then there is equal doubt about whether the left-hand side, the moral descriptor, denotes anything. Thus the would-be moral naturalist is, or may be, unwittingly advocating a moral error theory. Examples of this mistake are canvassed, including dispositional theories of moral value and virtue ethics.

This chapter argues that assurance problems may arise among morally motivated agents, and that these are of fundamental relevance for the political philosophy of “ideal theory.” It is argued that the question of global justice must take an international form, for lack of a sufficiently well-assured alternative to our basically international way of managing global-sized affairs.

This chapter delineates two types of ideal theory that are found in Rawls’s corpus of work. The first is ideal-method theory, which is theory constructed using idealizing assumptions that do not directly correspond with the actual world. The second is ideal-content theory, namely criteria for assessing whether something is a perfectly justice institution. The chapter provides an independent justification for both types of theory, arguing that ideal-method theory is valuable within certain parameters; for instance, the idealizing assumption of strict compliance helps to clarify the distinction between distributive and retributive justice. The chapter illuminates the value of ideal-content theory by clarifying and defending Rawls’s claim that nonideal theory depends on ideal-content theory. In particular, it argues that in order to gain a systematic grasp of the more pressing problems of nonideal theory it is plausible to argue that ideal-content theory is necessary.