Are Utopias Useful?

FRANCISCO GARCÍA GIBSON

Mainz

Seminario; Kolloquium, Institut für Politikwissenschaft; 2015

Universidad de Mainz, Instituto de Ciencia Política

When making actual public policy choices about institutional reform, is it helpful to have a picture of the perfectly just institutional design? I assume that policy choices should be preceded by a comparative assessment between several feasible institutional designs, in order to determine which design would best promote justice. Amartya Sen argues that identifying the perfect design is neither necessary, nor sufficient, nor even contributory for that comparative task. Sen rightly claims that using the perfect design as a comparison standard between imperfect designs may lead to wrong policy choices. Principles of justice, not the perfect design, are the proper standard. In this paper I contend that the perfect design has nevertheless an important role to play in the prior task of justifying principles of justice. I also show that the perfect design ?in at least one sense of this term? has a legitimate role to play as a goal for present policy choices.