The Normative Autonomy of Politics

Many contemporary political realists intend to be normative (Rossi and Sleat, 2014), i.e. to offer reasons to prefer some state of affairs over others. Rejecting unfeasible ideals, like non ideal theorists suggest (Valentini, 2012), is not sufficient from a realist standpoint (Sleat, 2014b). Realists contend instead that politics is autonomous: the normative force emerges from within the political sphere, not from an external moral domain deductively applied to political questions (Jubb and Rossi, 2015). However, moralists rightly rebut that realists are somewhat evasive. On a methodological level, realists do not clearly outline how this political normativity is distinct from moral normativity (Maynard and Worsnip, 2018). Moreover, on a substantial level it is not obvious that different values actually follow from it (Erman and Möller, 2018), as many realists subscribe to the same liberal values that moralists advocate (Finlayson, 2015). Methodologically, this paper aims to locate a previously unrecognised normative source within the function that political institutions discharge. The hypothesis considered is that political normativity is a kind of functional normativity, which pertains to the political function. Most realists converge on the weaker view that political values are a subset of moral values, which are derived from politics or compatible with its practice (Sleat, 2016), yet the proposed conception originally defends a functional normative source, genuinely detached from conventional moral reasoning. Substantively, this paper uses the functional normative source to ground a radically different normative standard, prior to and independent from moral ideals. Most realists converge on the same liberal values, albeit defended in a non-moralist way: equality (Jubb, 2015), liberty (Hall, 2015), non-violence (Mantena, 2012) or social justice (Philp, 2016). The proposed outlook instead aims to secure a radically different desideratum: the capacity of institutions to secure collective decisions despite disagreement. The argument unfolds as follows. First, I claim that functions yield normative standards, which are independent from morality: a ‘good soldier’ is someone who is good at fighting (his function) independently of whether he is a good man. Second, I claim that politics is best understood as a vital function of social groups, namely selection and implementation of collective decisions. Third, I conclude that political normativity is a functional normativity of politics, and this implies that institutions are good in a functional sense when they can select and implement collective decisions despite disagreement about what these should be. In the fourth part, I consider how trade-offs between the functional standard and other moral values are adjudicated and claim that the justice, fairness, freedom, equality of these decisions is only relevant once the threshold of the basic function is reached. In the last section, I respond to the worry that this normative standard may close off the normative space to criticise domination.