Metaphysics, Political Philosophy, and the Process of Liberal Political Justification

I

The present article is an attempt to explicate two largely neglected ideas from a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America, Charles Hartshorne. The first is the thesis that, although political questions are much harder than metaphysical ones, due to entangling influences in the former, mistakes at the metaphysical level ensure that political disasters will follow. Hence, the most important function of metaphysics is to help us in any way possible to enlighten ourselves and to encourage us in our agonizing struggles in politics.¹ The second is the claim that a political liberal is one who knows that he or she is not God.² This explication will borrow widely from the thought of the greatest political liberal, John Rawls, and another great liberal thinker, Alfred North Whitehead. That is, my article can be termed an exercise in process liberalism in which I will be arguing for both the processual character of political liberalism and the politically liberal character of process metaphysics. How can people live together in a free yet peaceful manner in a condition of pervasive pluralism of religious, moral, and metaphysical comprehensive doctrines? It is precisely this question that will be the focus of the present article.

I will start with two assumptions that deserve more attention than I am able to give them at present. The first is that the best available method in both political philosophy and metaphysics (indeed, the only available method, according to Thomas Scanlon³) is that of reflective equilibrium or Aristotelian dialectic. We should be wary of the proof paradigm in these disciplines in that any attempt at deductive rigor or finality is always met with further questions and qualifications. As should be evident from Plato’s dialogues, attempts to move beyond dialectic are themselves to be located within a dialectical context. Or again, the results of other proposed philosophical methods (for example, the transcendental method) are nonetheless subject to the dialectical criticisms that other thinkers typically offer.

Nonetheless, there are relatively fixed points such that to neglect or reject them is to put into disequilibrium everything else that we consider important. Reflective equilibrium is thus compatible with a sort of weak foundationalism, as in Lincoln’s claim often quoted by Rawls to the effect that slavery is wrong if anything is wrong. In this regard, it should be noted that the relative fixity provided by the principles agreed to in the Rawlsian original position is itself part of the overall dialectical process of reflective equilibrium in which agreement is sought between our ordinary unreflective political beliefs and some theoretical structure that might unify and justify these beliefs. Or again, in the method of reflective equilibrium we do not have to choose between moral particularists, who think that morality should be based on particular intuitions concerning which we are most certain (for example, that the killings at Auschwitz were immoral), and moral generalists, who think that what is most important is that we get clear on the general principles that justify political beliefs and behavior. Rather, we ought to be engaged in the process of finding the most appropriate fit between intuition and theory so as to do justice to both. At times we have to criticize theory, and at other times we have to alter or even abandon intuition. Three moments can be isolated in this method: identifying initial beliefs or intuitions about justice, trying to account for these from some objective point of view, and trying to reach equilibrium when the previous two moments diverge.

The second assumption is that political liberalism is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of philosophy as a result of its ability to solve, both theoretically and practically, the wars of religion in Europe in the early modern period. Preliberal political philosophy or political theology concentrated on two major tasks: (a) to figure out the characteristics of the good (the definite article is crucial here), and (b) to figure out how to get those who understood the good into power and to make sure that they were succeeded by...