What does it mean to say that a certain institutional arrangement P in some society S ought (or is morally required) to be? Maybe that comes to this: S is required to come up with and implement a plan to achieve S. And perhaps that, in turn, comes to something like this: each individual and collective agent in society is required to make reasonable efforts, relative to role or position, to promote S (all of us collectively) coming up with and implementing a plan to achieve P. Different agents in different roles would have different more-specific requirements.
Is this kind of analysis standard? What are the alternatives?
If this analysis, or something very much like it, is right, there would seem to be some important results that I don’t think are always acknowledged in discussions of justice with regard to the basic structure of a society.
First, it will not do, if one has a deontic theory, to just say “society ought to do this thing.” Society is not an agent in the primary sense, coming up with and implementing a plan is not anything like an action that society can simply perform, and it is not the case that society ought to do anything in the basic, action-guiding sense of ‘ought’ (or ‘morally required’). So: without unpacking the analysis here, the shorthand here as likely, it seems to me, to yield confusion as insight.
Second, both coming up with a plan and implementing that plan present problems of conflict and coordination among the relevant agents. As such, within the processes of coming up with a plan (whether through consensus or through a powerful agent imposing) and of implementing the plan (including enforcing standards on agents to achieve enough compliance), there are questions of what each agent is morally required to do vis-a-vis the other agents (of course one of the collective agents here might be a government or different government agencies).
Third, if there is no plan, general and specific requirements to do things to implement are moot. In such a situation, the truth of “S is required to PHI” does not yield very specific requirements for the composing agents. These agents – including you and me, if we are in this kind of situation – are under the requirement (something like an imperfect obligation) to do what they can (what could reasonably be asked by others, perhaps) to help come up with a plan. In addition to being something like an imperfect obligation, the requirement here is probably not very stringent or costly (for many, it might be discharged by simply being willing to cooperate or do one’s part in any reasonable plan that comes down the pike). But, perhaps most importantly: that is it, there are no other requirements implied for the composing agents.
(I do think there are important special cases in which there are any number of obvious plans that are better than nothing and powerful individual or collective agents able and willing to implement the plan without much help from others. For example, society ought to solve at least its worst problems of criminal injustice and so, if a member of a society with little or no criminal justice has plan and power adequate to the task, that person might be required to get the job done, to achieve the relevant minimally-criminally-just social arrangement (maybe the cattle rustlers rounded up and put in a makeshift jail). However, I think that, in almost any such situation, at least upon basic non-criminal order being established unilaterally, many agents, including the one who achieved the temporary or makeshift criminal justice enforcement, would then come to be required (conditions having changed) to take various steps to make the criminal justice enforcement more comprehensive, public, rule-governed, impartial, etc.)
Policy of Truth 
In the case of libertarianism there’s a difference between “everyone ought to follow the non-aggression principle,” which can be a purely deontic claim about individual behaviour with no reference to an ideal to be aimed at, and “everyone ought to work toward establishing a libertarian society.” And yet if everyone followed the first injunction, a libertarian society would be achieved automatically without the need for the second injunction. However, if one takes the first claim to be binding on each individual even if most other individuals are not complying, then the second injunction requires more of the individual than the first injunction does.
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Why doesn’t perfect, universal adherence to the principle count as an ideal to aim at?
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I suspect that anything like the non-aggression principle does not have a precise-enough common understanding prior to public codification to automatically yield, through a kind of perfect compliance, a just public regime of non-aggression. If not, then even non-aggression principle based libertarianism would require a distinct public ideal for full-justice with respect to people aggressing against each other. And maybe we would be required to realize this!
I’m now thinking that, absent various propitiousness conditions, this “requirement” comes to something like: (i) each participant has a perfect requirement not to muck up the project and (ii) each participant has an imperfect requirement to help out to the extent that this is fair or might be reasonably demanded by others. If there is an effective-enough path or plan to the just social arrangement (say an effective-enough plan and clear, fair-enough roles for folks to play in the plan), then, in addition to or in place of [ii], I think we get perfect requirements to promote the social ideal. For example, in non-aggression-style libertarian world, there might be a perfect obligation to do various good-citizen-type things in a democratic process that turned out to be the best means to coming to a decent consensus on how to codify the non-aggression principle. This is how I would drag even this kind of bare-bones libertarian into more of a mainstream position on justice or fairness in matters (at least one matter) distinctively public.
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@Michael
I guess I would say that the analysis you give in your opening paragraph is either standard or fairly plausible. But I don’t see any intractable problems as arising from it.
On your first point:
True, but I doubt anyone today would say that. The “plan” to implement P could involve a combination of centralized and de-centralized dimensions. The centralized dimension could consist of a constitution intended to regulate or govern the “basic structure of society” in Rawls’s sense, but there could be a large decentralized dimension that in effect says, “Everyone come up with a plan of your own for the constituency that can feasibly realize it,” where the “constituency” could be as small as a nuclear family or even smaller.
Second point:
Certainly true, but not insurmountable. A theory of institutional ideals needs an account of how individual plans are to be coordinated with The Larger Plan, allowing possibly for opt-out as well. The larger the society, the harder this may become. But that implies that if P is important to you, perhaps it’s best to live in a smaller-scale society where coordination problems are relatively tractable (unless P inherently requires scale).
I don’t understand the inference behind problem 3. Suppose we’re talking about the decentralized part of our plan. Decentralization means that the task of planning is outsourced to individuals, who come up with their own separate plans for realizing P. P, of course, has to be the kind of thing amenable to realization in this way. (If it’s not, then there’s a mismatch between decentralization and P. But I’m setting that case aside.) The obligation may well be imperfect, but it doesn’t follow that it’s not specific, stringent, or costly. Take any particular imperfect duty and conjoin it with the imperfect duty to promote your own moral perfection (or for that matter, conjoin it with a perfect duty to promote your own moral perfection). The particular duty will become stringent and costly, and in particular contexts may well become fairly specific. It’s just a matter of discretion exactly how you’ll realize it. But that doesn’t by itself make it vague, lax, or cheap.
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Thanks, that is quite helpful. Good points and good motivation to revise and clarify.
I was not being specific enough with the first point. Here is a particular implication that might be underappreciated (or ignored or confused): on this kind of analysis, when all the individual agents meet their public-spirited justice-related imperfect (or on occasion perfect) requirements (to help out, to do one’s part, go along with inasmuch as can be reasonably asked of them), but the more-just social arrangement is not realized, saying “oh nos! society has failed to meet its requirement to plan, build, comply with these institutions” confuses matters. There is no literal moral requirement going unmet (or reject the analysis). The collective failure here, as a failure to realize justice, might have some other kind of special moral status for us. What we actually need to do is say what this is. Intuitively, a kind of moral disappointment or regret is appropriate here but would not be appropriate for, say, our failing to achieve a more economically productive social arrangement. Maybe that is a start.
(In response to some of your remarks here, I’ve tried to drop reference to planning – and the prospect of some grand plan – in favor of just doing what is effective – or helping as one can or doing one’s part, etc. – in realizing the more-just social arrangement. At a societal scale, there will usually be some high-level planning elements, but this should not be exaggerated. You know, Hayek and all that.)
On my second point, I agree with what you say. However, I meant to focus on moral requirements that might compete with the public-spirited (often imperfect) moral requirement to help realize the more-just social arrangement. (Not such requirements, as codified, asking too much of one, making exit a salient option. Not asking too much is something built into the normative requirement to do what one can to promote more-just social arrangements.) In particular, I’m concerned with what we owe to each other as we interact with each other in attempting to realize more-just social institutions. When there is conflict between these personal-level requirements and the public-spirited requirement to help realize a more-just social structure, sometimes the former wins.
Suppose I have the best plan (for our achieving some more-just social arrangement) and the means to implement it unilaterally or at least without achieving broad consensus. If the general requirement to help realize the more-just social arrangement wins out in this particular case, I’m required to go ahead and implement my plan in a dictatorial or semi-dictatorial way. But, at least usually, it is the requirement to respectfully achieve consensus in attempting to address the substantive justice issue that takes priority – even if I know that we’ll do a worse or outright incompetent job of achieving the substantively more-just social arrangement. So: there seems to be this kind of respectful-consensus-concerned deontic, normative limit on the general requirement to do what one can to help realize substantively more-just social arrangements.
On my third point, you are right that imperfect obligations can be strenuous (or properly ask quite a lot of us). But, the requirement to do what one can to help realize a more-just social arrangement is imperfect precisely because the realization of the better social arrangement is iffy (whether or not because we need a grand plan or local plans but do not have them in hand). So the force of the obligation seems to be diminished (relative to the presumably perfect obligation to help realize the more-just social arrangement if there is a consensus plan with a role for one). I suppose that does not matter as much if we are potentially moving from terrible injustice (in some important respect) to adequate or full justice. If this is the situation, then the public-spirited requirement to do what one can to help realize a more-just social arrangement can still ask quite a lot of one.
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I think butimbeautiful (below) has a point: your formulations are too abstract to think about in this form. Each of the claims you make above can be interpreted so many different ways that it’s too hard to know what you have in mind.
Let me just stick with the first point. Suppose we live in a society in which many people are in poor health, and many lack access to health care. Without having any integrated society-wide plan to deal with this, each of us exerts ourselves as best we can to help out those in medical need. But suppose that despite our best efforts, a huge number of people in need remain. In other words, we barely make a dent in the problem.
Since we’ve stipulated that we were doing “the best we can,” it’s tempting to say that we can’t say that “we’ve failed” at anything, which is true enough in the specifically moral sense. If everyone does their best, no one is morally culpable. But our efforts could still be non-culpably defective, which is a different kind of failure. Our efforts might lack imagination, for instance. We could have failed to see how we might have combined our efforts in a more integrated, self-consciously planned-out way.
Given that, this claim is ambiguous:
There is no moral requirement being violated, but there is a social need going unmet, and morality (justice or benevolence or whatever) can demand that we take the next step and figure out how to improve our efforts (without blaming anyone for not having done so already).
Maybe that’s what you mean by this?
I’m not sure.
I don’t really get this sentence:
I don’t think that regret is appropriate. (Contrary to Bernard Williams, and the whole line of argument associated with the defenders of moral luck, I think regret is inherently tied to culpability. You can’t coherently regret something that was never in your control. Since the failure here is ex hypothesi out of anyone’s control, it isn’t regret-worthy.) Disappointment, maybe. Does responding to medical need count as “a more economically productive social arrangement”? I would say so. But if so, then if there’s a failure to respond adequately, disappointment is warranted.
I mean, this is pretty disappointing:
Disappointing, but not my fault. So I feel no regret over it.
But even if everyone was striving to do their best, individually, to be charitable to those in medical need, if we encountered the preceding state of affairs–people being denied health care for inability to pay medical debt–we could reasonably be disappointed in our society and think that it had failed in the sense of exhibiting some serious defect.
Where disappointment is an appropriate response, it’s reasonable to predicate failure of some kind. Something has gone wrong. Where something has gone seriously wrong, and we can set it right without incurring problematic costs, then there is some prima facie reason for thinking we should set it right. No need to retrospectively ascribe culpability in every such case, but morality does have something to say about dealing with the failure itself.
I’m not sure whether what I’ve said is an agreement or disagreement or both with what you said.
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Mostly agreement. However: if one has done all that one is required to do to help address a collective problem, then morality (or justice or whatever) could not require or demand that one do more.
If the collective problem is one of there being an unjust social arrangement (e.g., conditions that do not allow each citizen access to basic goods in life) then there is, for sure, an urgency to solving the problem (and maybe there is as well when the conditions are morally indecent). One would have moral reason to do more. And, from the standpoint of simply being a participant and the reactive attitudes — not agency — perhaps it is appropriate for all of us to have certain negative reactive attitudes in response to our not having solved the problem, made more progress, etc. As certain profiles of this latter sort of thing are typical appropriate responses to requirements being violated, this could explain why we use the language of requirement in reference to these kinds of good social goals.
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That I agree with: the consequent practically repeats the antecedent.
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I was responding to the ‘demand’ part of your: “There is no moral requirement being violated, but there is a social need going unmet, and morality (justice or benevolence or whatever) can demand that we take the next step and figure out how to improve our efforts (without blaming anyone for not having done so already).”
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Ah, you have a point. I both say that there is a demand, and that there isn’t.
But I think what I said is ultimately consistent. There’s an ambiguity in the phrase “we’ve done all we can do.” It has to be relativized to knowledge-at-t. So “we’ve done all we can do” is really elliptical for “we’ve done all we can do with respect to X right now, given our knowledge right now.”
If you do the best you can do, and the outcome is highly problematic, you have (other things equal) an obligation going forward to figure out why. Prior to satisfying it, you can’t have a moral obligation: ex hypothesi you’ve done all you can relative to what you know. What you now have is perhaps a purely epistemic obligation: you have to figure out why your best efforts have failed.
You might, of course, ask “why” and realize that it’s futile to continue. But my point is, you do face a normative requirement of some kind.
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The point is that, while the participants in a society might meet all of their requirements with respect to promoting some ideal of full justice (in the basic social structure) — as construed on the suggested analysis — it might still be that that basic social structure falls short justice-wise. That seems to be different from the basic social structure falling short in a non-justice-wise way that is merely undesirable (and this seems to be captured by describing the failure as one of justice and by using the language of society being required to be some way). Not finding an obvious difference in agency normativity, I fell back on differences in observer/reactive normativity (our regretting or being disappointed about the collective failure to achieve full or greater justice).
I think my despair here was premature, though. Consider this: if one does more than one’s fair share to promote greater or full justice in social structure (say, in the medical system), one supererogates in the sense of doing more than what is required. If one is not required to contribute to some more-desirable state of the same social system, then one cannot supererogate in this way with respect to it. From the observer/reactive normative standpoint, the agent is especially praiseworthy when one supererogates. But, arguably, there is a difference from the agency normative standpoint as well. Something like this: there is normative pressure of the familiarly urgent moral type (that usually, but not always, generates perfect or imperfect requirement) in the direction of doing yet more to promote justice in the basic social structure (or some element of it). That’s not the case with respect to the prospect of one’s action generating more efficiency or any other desirable feature in social conditions.
As a bonus, I think we get a nice explanation (or “error theory” of sorts) of why the language of requirement is used to refer to society achieving basic-structure institutions (and compliance) that exhibits full justice. Promoting greater justice always has the urgent, requirement-associated normative pull even when the requirements that it generates have already been met. So maybe this is how things are when, as the suggested analysis allows, everyone does as they should with respect to justice in the basic structure, but the basic structure falls short of full justice.
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That’s one way to go, but I’m skeptical of supererogation as a concept. That’s a long story which I’ll spare you right now.
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Finally, I want to say something about the “cash value” of all this. That is this: if one takes seriously and literally the idea that society is required to achieve full justice in its basic social structure, this pushes in the naive direction of thinking that each participant in society is required to sort of endlessly strive for more and more justice in the basic structure until full justice is reached. That’s wrong, and not many people literally think this, but there is nonetheless pressure in the direction of “taking too seriously” the task of doing what one can — or all one can — to strive for greater justice in basic social structure.
(Estlund forecloses this by distinguishing different sorts of requirements, admitting that society (and its participants) ought not strive to achieve full justice in basic social structure if doing so is likely to lead to disaster — but nevertheless insisting that society is, in some real and important sense, required to achieve full justice in the basic social structure. Part of the reason for the abstractness and my assuming instead of explaining context here is that I’m shadow-boxing with one of my former professors.)
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Well, I haven’t read Estlund on this, so I can’t literally sign onto his view, but it doesn’t, from your description, sound wrong to me.
You make the view sound wrong because you’ve sort of baked unreasonably stringent demands into your description of it. The phrase “endlessly strive for more and more justice…” makes the whole thing sound Sisyphean. But I “endlessly strive” for ideal dental hygiene–minimally, a mouth without cavities–by brushing 2-3 times a day (ideally, every day), flossing, and avoiding sugar. Do I lapse? Yes. But am I generally adherent? Yeah. Does it take effort every day? Yes. Is it overly stringent? No. I’ve managed to “endlessly strive for dental hygiene” without becoming a fanatic about it. People manage to keep in good shape without becoming fanatics, as well. But it takes “endless striving.”
I would say the same thing about justice. But instead of speaking so abstractly about “the basic structure of society,” it might be more useful to ditch that language and use the language of the common good. Do you have an obligation “endlessly to strive” for a common good of which you’re part? Yes, I’d say, until you’ve done “enough,” relative to your resources, the prospects for success, and the efforts of others.
One of the things that’s problematic about liberal theory (a la Rawls and Estlund) is that it conceives of the promotion of justice in terms that are so abstract, and in social contexts that are so impoverished, as to make the whole task seem like an unrewarding chore rather than an appealing aspiration. If “justice” means striving to promote “the basic structure of society,” with no thought as to how you benefit from your own efforts, what intermediate goals can successfully be realized, or what you have in common with the other people involved, then the pursuit of justice seems quixotic. If we’re talking about a society as large and morally heterogeneous as the United States, then it’s conceivable that we have no obligation endlessly to make it better. Asking whether we have an obligation to promote justice in “the basic structure of society” is like asking: should you devote enormous amounts of time and energy to making the world a better place for a bunch of scumbags who have no reciprocal interest in your welfare? No. But things change if you choose a different aim and describe it a different way.
Imagine that instead of thinking in national terms, one thinks in institutional terms (a hospital, a school, a business), or in terms of a polity the size of a “city-state”: in other words, a polity with a population between, say, a few hundred and a 100,000. Given certain background conditions, endlessly striving for justice in that milieu is a different matter than anything you’re apt to find in Estlund or Rawls. The scaled-down ideal is both more feasible and easier to imagine than it is if you’re talking about “promoting the basic structure of society” for a polity of 330 million. The fantasy character of ideal liberal theory arises, I think, because the nation-state is not the right object for our moral aspirations. Liberal theory assumes that it is, but that assumption needs to be contested.
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I can’t help adding that Israeli politics is very instructive here. For present purposes, ignore the fact that Israel is an apartheid society that treats its Arab population as second- or third-class citizens or non-citizens. Just focus on the part of Israeli society that Israel intends by design to include.
Precisely because Israel is about the size and population of New Jersey (rather than something as big as the United States), there is a real sense in which it cultivates a genuine sense of the common good. This is one reason why (even if we ignore the Palestinian issue) American-style liberal theory doesn’t really fit very well as a template for Israeli politics. Israel has no constitution, so it has no American analogue to the “basic structure of society.” But it has a genuine sense of belonging and the common good, which is something that (outside of very special contexts, like the military) Americans really do not have. American nationalists try very hard to pretend to have it, but they’re pretending in ways that Israelis don’t need to pretend. For that reason, (though I reject them) Zionist ideals have a vividness and concreteness that American liberal ideals lack. They’re not as rarified and abstract. There is a common narrative there, supplied by Judaism, whether as a religious or an ethnic phenomenon (or both). Americans lack anything comparable. People speak loosely of our “American civic religion,” but that’s hard to take seriously or believe in.
That’s what makes Israel so attractive to people, even to anti-Zionists like me. I feel more alive and at home in Jerusalem than I do in any American city. The city feels like a community, not like a bunch of buildings bisected by an interstate. (I’m exaggerating a little.)
But what’s instructive is that precisely because Israel is a heterogeneous society of several million, and not a city state of 50,000, it suffers from a milder version of the same problem that besets superstates like the United States. Judaism or Zionism only goes so far to unify Israelis. Eventually, they break down, just as American nationalism breaks down. The population of Jerusalem is something like 875,000. That’s just about the point (or maybe, past the point) where a polity starts to become too big for its members to feel a sense of lived, realistic kinship–civic friendship–with one another. After a million, I think political ideals start to become more of a fantasy and more of a lost cause. So while Israel is better off than the US in this respect, it still fails. The nation-state is a failure, frankly. We’ve gotten used to it, and have trouble imagining life without it, but it’s fucked up our moral concepts and moral reasoning in semi-irreparable ways. We reflexively think of justice in terms of its demands, what makes it better off. But that strikes me as a mistake.
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One can (and I probably should have) run the same argument, tying the abstractions to a concrete, small-scale case — say achieving full justice in the distribution of criminal policing resources across the different neighborhoods of a city. Policing is part of the basic structure of a city in that it is an institution that profoundly affects the well-being of everyone in the city. In what sense, if everyone has done all that they are literally required to do to promote or realize full justice (different things required of people in different positions, obviously), but the distribution of policing resources remain significantly unfair or unjust, is society required to achieve full justice here? As far as I can tell, there is no genuine moral requirement here. Yet something rings true in the requirement formulation. The best I can come up with is, roughly, that there is an urgency to achieving full justice, an urgency that often yields requirements to help promote or realize, but does not in this case.
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Well in practice, we might generally agree as a society that murder ought not to be allowed. Then we implement it, through public disapprobation and penalties etc. But really the process is much more organic. Is the point of the discussion whether society as such exists? Or whether it can have a moral viewpoint? Or whether, having one, it can implement it? To all those questions I’d say that society as a loose collective of individuals exists and can both have a view and implement it. But perhaps that’s not what you’re getting at. I know the use of abstractions and equations are de rigeur in philosophical circles but I think they obscure the argument being put.
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I think Michael is pursuing the last of the three question you pose, but doing so given his own implicit answers to the first two questions.
In other words, because society as such doesn’t exist, and doesn’t have a moral viewpoint (in the way that an individual does), what do we mean when we say that “society has failed” or “society is to blame,” or “our society is unjust,” or “it is incumbent on us as society to ___”?
I don’t think the issue is nearly as puzzling as he does. My view on this is not far from yours.
This is a common dynamic between Michael and me: I tend not to be puzzled by the things that puzzle him, and he tends not to be bothered by the things that bother me. Somehow, we’ve managed to sustain this dynamic for thirty years. In other words, our conversations have outlasted all of my cars, all of my homes, all of my jobs, and all of my wives. Amazing at some level, depressing at another.
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I’ll go with ‘amazing’. It is less about being puzzled (“how could this be?”) and more about seeking the right conceptual and metaphysical account of something when I don’t have one (“wait, how does this go — what might constitute or explain it?”). Hopefully, I succeed in making Irfan a bit more interested in some things that really do require more conceptual, philosophical figuring-out or explaining. I certainly rely on Irfan to make me more bothered about more things that I should be more bothered about!
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Testament to a long friendship perhaps 🙂
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I’m assuming quite a lot of prior context and, yes, being pretty abstract — perhaps too much so for the purpose or context here (ideally, in a longer format, I’d at least put in lots of concrete examples). If so, apologies! Your third question is closest to my topic (what it means to say that society is required to achieve some fair or just social arrangement). To use your case, a social order that discourages murder is more fair or just than one that does not. Plausibly, a society that does not have the murder-discouraging social order is morally required to bring it about. The question is what the being-required here comes to: though I have a reasonably clear idea of what it is for an individual person to be morally required to do something, it is less clear to me what it is for a society to be morally required to do something. So maybe we should understand the former in terms of the latter? (This does reflect, as well, the general idea that it is individuals — what matters to them, what they ought to do — that is basic or important, not societies.) That’s the basic thought process without quite so many bells and whistles (whatever their virtues and vices).
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I think I take issue with the idea of being morally required. If an individual or society don’t think that a practice is wrong, then who or what requires them? Only, presumably, another individual or society with greater force at their disposal.
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There are different senses of being required. One sense involves requirers and require-ees (X, as some kind of authority, requires of Y that she do this or that thing). We can then evaluate the requiring acts or public regimes (and ask how they square with what the require-ee ought or has reason to do; probably most or all requiring acts or public regimes are at least mildly coercive; often, requiring acts or public regimes are impermissibly coercive or oppressive).
Another sense — the one I had in mind — concerns the reasons or normative pressure that bears on an agent. I’m morally required to refrain from murdering people (even if I mistakenly fail to think that doing so is morally wrong). This means something like: in all or most choice situations that I face, the option of murdering another person is normatively ruled-out (the option is horrible, much worse than the others that I face, and I should not even think about its potential merits — something like this). Similarly, I might be personally required not to do things that go against some deep personal value that I have or pragmatically required to take this exit off the highway (say it is the last one that will allow me to make my flight).
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By the way, Estlund’s favored analysis of this kind of thing goes like this: it being required that X perform PHI and Y perform PSI (or that society arrange itself in a fully just way) = (i) X is required to PHI if Y PSIs, (ii) Y is required to PSI if X PHIs, and (iii) it morally ought to be the case that X PHIs and Y PSIs, where the normative property here not itself a moral requirement (but itself requires further analysis). Estlund calls such collective requirements “plural requirements” and would say that society is plurally required to arrange itself in a fully just way.
My position is that it is not the case that, in any sense of ‘requirement’, it is required that X perform PHI and Y perform PSI (or that society arrange itself in a fully just way). Similarly, if we treat society as a collective agent, it is not the case that society is literally required to arrange itself in a fully just way. I’m happy to concede that, when society fails to achieve full justice (or when it is not the case that X performs PH and Y performs PSI, some tragedy resulting), there has been a kind of moral failure (and failure of justice). In some of these cases, it might even be apt to say that “something wrong has happened.” I’ll also concede, at least for the sake of argument, that the situation is adequately captured by Estlund’s analysandum. It is just that the relevant normative feature is not a literal requirement-type deontic feature.
It is possible that nothing much hangs on what we say about what the proper characterization of the basic phenomenon (the analysans) is. My worry (voiced above) was basically one of people confusing the basic phenomenon with each person having actual, non-conditional requirements to achieve — or strain every muscle as it were to do all that one can to try to achieve — the relevant social arrangement. Broadly, though, there is the question — unanswered by either my analysis or Estlund’s — of what reasons or requirements we have in the neighborhood when such important action-coordination scenarios or social arrangements “go undone” (all or part of this might be answered by providing an analysis of ‘it morally ought to be the case that’ or [iii] in Estlund’s analysis). Plausibly, it is appropriate to care quite a lot and experience relevant reactive attitudes of some sort, etc. I think there is more to be said, whether or not (or in what precise sense) social failures to achieve full justice are deontic failures.
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