Current debates about ideal theory and idealization in modern moral and politicalphilosophy do not typically scrutinize the form of reflection itself. This is anunfortunate oversight: assumptions about the form of reflection shape thepositions defended in those debates. I argue that the appropriate form ofreflection on the nature and justification of standards of justice and moralityis the form of practical reason. I further argue that the form of practicalreason cannot support many of the idealizations typically deployed in modernmoral and political philosophy.

This essay discusses the relation between ideal theory and two forms of politicalmoralism identified by Bernard Williams, structural and enactment views. Itargues that ideal theory, at least in the sense Rawls used that term, only makessense for structural forms of moralism. These theories see their task asdescribing the constraints that properly apply to political agents andinstitutions. As a result, they are primarily concerned with norms that governaction. In contrast, many critiques of ideal theory are structured and motivatedby their commitment to an enactment model of political theorizing. This insteadsees political agents and institutions as instruments for producing or promotingbetter states of affairs. Enactment models treat the evaluations that rankdifferent states of affairs as justificatorily basic, rather than normsgoverning action on which structural models focus. This reveals an importantfeature of debates about ideal theory. Whether ideal theory is capable ofappropriately guiding action will depend on what the criteria for appropriatelyguiding action are, about which different theorists have importantly differentviews. For example, some popular strategies for defending ideal theory fail,while it may be much less clear that some alternatives to ideal theory canprovide action guidance than their advocates claim.

Starting with a particular case of familial care for the aging, the discussionpoints to the difficulties in deriving practical judgments from ideal theory incases where there seems to be injustice, but where there are multiple competingdimensions of value and cost. The essay argues that the problems discussed aredeeply embedded in modern western cultures, where life expectancy has risendramatically and has been coupled with a range of other social and demographicchanges that make familial care for the aged difficult and burdensome, and whereour thinking about justice and rights are integral to the conflicted ways inwhich people construct and experience these situations, rather than standingindependently as a solution to them. The essay argues for a set of partial,limited, and “realist” responses that reduce some elementsof burden, without pretending to provide a solution that is in any sense idealor wholly just. The argument from a case is integral to the essay’scase for realism in moral and political philosophy.

G. A. Cohen famously argued that fundamental normative principles (for example,concerning justice) are “fact-free” in such a way thattheir truth is independent of non-normative facts. For our purposes here, wetake Cohen’s claim as given. Our focus is on what might be thought ofas the “other side” of this issue — on whetherthe non-normative facts that determine what might be feasible for us toaccomplish are value-independent. We argue that they are not, that people havereason to think that the normative properties of different possible options canand sometimes do have a crucial impact on their feasibility. In other words:facts about feasibility are partially dependent on Cohen’s“fact-free moral principles.”