Analogical Argument, Liberalism,

and the Avoidance of Relativism:

Reply to Lessno
HILLIARD ARONOVITCH
University of Ottawa
I am grateful to Lessno for his thoughtful response to my paper.
1
I want to
address briey four (overlapping) issues he usefully raises. All, I believe, can be
answered by clarications or rebuttals.
1. Must analogical arguments presuppose generalizations as the key to cogency?
Are analogical arguments merely rhetorical? Evidently, I maintained that the
answers are no, but Lessno is not persuaded. Regarding my example that
someone's disliking Garcia-Marquez's surrealism would render probable their
disliking Rushdie's surrealism, Lessno objects that the example actually
depends on assuming a general dislike of surrealist novelists, but why? The
intent was a striking anity between quite exceptional cases (the inhibiting
realist temperament I mentioned was to be a reaction specically to them). But
maybe the anity is not striking. Lessno oers himself as someone in fact
disliking Garcia-Marquez but liking Rushdie, apparently because he thinks
Rushdie is a good surrealist and Garcia-Marquez is not. Then a proposed
analogical argument has been defeated by an internal disanalogy, which is part
of the game. As to any generalization here: why is not Lessno's liking Rushdie
and disliking Garcia-Marquez proof against generalizations? What general-
ization covers his preferences? Maybe he would say he likes all good surrealists;
but that seems implausible, and is anyway vague and risks irrefutability.
Yet Lessno `can see no way of discussing the merits of any analogy . . . that
does not involve assessing the merits of the implied generalizations'. To my
illustration that we can best decide whether spanking a disobedient child is
acceptable by seeing if it is like or unlike plain bullying, Lessno replies that `the
answer depends on which of two principles one accepts: roughly, it is never right
for a stronger person to hurt a weaker one, or (alternatively) that controlled and
limited iniction of such hurt . . . is acceptable if its intention and eect is moral
education'. But both these alternative principles are unacceptable because
overly-generalized (the rst rules out various sports and some self-defence, and
the second is not limited to (one's own) children and is both too broad and too
narrow in tying spanking to `moral education', etc.); and the more we try to
remedy the alternatives the more we come back to the pristine instances. Lessno
is of course not to be faulted for slips in formulating principles he intends only as
rough and illustrative. The diculties are endemic to the endeavour of general-
izing, and why go that route when we have pristine instances whose similarities
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
1
Michael Lessno, `The role and limits of analogical argument', Political Studies, XLV (1997)
9396.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 9799
and dierences can be explored? As I stressed, potentially important general-
izations or principles can arise over time through these considerations, but they
will be approximate and subject to interpretation by reference to their part-
iculars (which allows for reevaluating particulars in hindsight).
Analogical arguments are thus not merely rhetorical, as my diagnosis of the
merits of Mill's various arguments for the equality of women was meant to
show, though Lessno reads it the other way. Mill's arguments from rst to last
I suggested, succeed insofar as they are (construed as) analogical, rather than as
abstract and utilitarian. Now, since Lessno does concede some value to
analogical arguments here as rhetorical, we must ask, what does he mean by
`rhetorical'? Surely he is not prepared to sanction such arguments at all if
`rhetorical' means `irrational' or even `non-rational'. Is Lessno perhaps feeling
the logical force of the analogical arguments and just not seeing them for what
they are? My view is that sound analogical arguments (those satisfying
standard criteria indicated in the paper) do, by virtue of their special argu-
mentative sequence, connect with an audience, and that that is part of their
worth in political debate, practical and philosophical.
2. Is political reasoning to be like legal reasoning? Yes, but with crucial quali-
cations. Lessno is right to say that I am recommending the merits of analogical
reasoning for politics partly by urging a special analogy: between legal
reasoning, which is signicantly analogical, and (moral-) political reasoning,
which should also be; and I meant that intent to be evident. But is not legal
reasoning inherently conservative (an important question for me, since I want
to uphold liberalism)? To some degree indeed, yet far from fundamentally so, at
least in liberal-democratic systems of law (think of US free speech cases, class-
action suits, etc.). And note that liberalism has always been supposed to be
especially and closely linked to the rule of law. Still, is not legal reasoning
irretrievably tied to precedent? It may be presumptively tied but not irretriev-
ably, as Ronald Dworkin among others have argued, and as actual cases show.
In any event, the latitude for analogical reasoning in politics and morality is
obviously much greater than for such reasoning when applied within the
institutional structures of courts, judges, etc. Moral and political philosophers,
and all of us as citizens, are not only clearly free to question fundamentals but
also specially able to use analogical arguments for that, partly by comparing
dierent analogical sequences and traditions of them.
But Lessno forcefully remarks concerning important injustices and
inequalities which have taken much time to rectify through evolving laws and
values, that `it would have been better if [the rectications] had been achieved
much earlier, on the basis of principles'. Indeed. Yet: (i) It just is the case
(typically) that it has taken people time, generations even, to see their way
through, step-by-step, to notions such as equal rights, particularly because this
requires undoing, breaking free from, entrenched notions and deeply rooted
false analogies. This is also to say that the principles relevant to the issues are
the analogically developed ones, arrived at through the fray, and not axioms
available at the outset; yet compatible with their only now being seen as that
they were always true. (ii) Progressive change via analogical reasoning, secures
stability, agreement, and the avoidance of violence, and these are political
goods, though of course ones to weigh in a balance with others. (Incidentally,
Oakeshott for me is hardly a hero, just one source of suggestions, and I strongly
reject his conservatism, as I noted.)
98 Debate
#Political Studies Association, 1997
3. Is analogical reasoning involved in or suitable to all ideological positions? In a
way, yes, and I meant to emphasize that. Even revolutionary thinking can and
does call up images and precedents fromthe past, as Lessno is right to point out
and as Marx famously did in the Eighteenth Brumaire. But the marriage of
analogical reasoning with liberalism is especially appropriate and important, for
the various reasons given above and because liberalism normally and sensibly
does aspire to a middle ground between radical change and conservative inertia,
and because of point 4 below. Certainly, I want to reclaim for liberalism the
notions of tradition, cultural signicance, etc., from conservatives, commun-
itarians and relativists; and I want to put political argument more in touch with
political reality. Analogical argument is important to those aims.
4. Defending liberalism and avoiding relativism. I claimed that my defence of
analogical reasoning for politics is linked to securing rational and non-relativist
`foundations' (for liberalism), but I enclose the term in scare quotes because it
has been so variously used that some warding o of unwanted associations is
necessary. If foundations means bare, non-normative, tradition-free axioms,
then I have none to oer and would be sceptical of any proposed. (I did
acknowledge some universal features of human nature and their relevance to
respecting in some fashion the worth of human life and freedom, but this is a
complex matter and applications are questionable.) What I did and do assert is
that reasoning analogically in political matters allows for justication by
established norms or particulars which are more basic and more certain than
matters typically in question. Dierent traditions may each claim this by
reaching back to their respective fundamentals, but I argued that in the
unavoidable comparison of traditions, the special merit of the liberal tradition,
given its various basic particulars and the manner of their evolution, emerges.
Why and how? First, because key elements of liberalism (basic toleration,
etc.) are often by now presupposed, implicitly if not explicitly, by critics of
liberalism. But even without such concessions two other points apply. Thus,
second, I presume that science and a broad range of factual issues are not in
question; that these overarch moral-political traditions and ideological controv-
ersies, even though of course science is in some ways a product of western,
liberal societies. This body of knowledge is relevant to challenging various false
beliefs that underpin notions of inequality and the like. And third, through such
knowledge and by pressing for logical consistency and sound analogical
reasoning, liberalism allows for what may be called superseding explanations in
relation to key positions of other traditions. (This term was not in the paper; the
point was.) That is, on crucial matters liberalism is able to show that it has
arisen by seeing through erroneous beliefs and false analogies of contrary views
(such as the falsely naturalistic biological metaphor for society; I leave open
what the preferred alternative is). So liberalism can successfully explain how the
contrary views arise but they cannot explain how it arises. This is an essential
and distinctive ingredient of analogical argument as the narrative of a morally
vindicated tradition.
2
(Submitted and accepted: 22 April 1996)
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#Political Studies Association, 1997
2
J. Raz, `Morality as interpretation', Ethics, 101 (January 1991), 392405, criticizes M. Walzer's
tradition-based (but non-analogical) approach in Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge
MA, Harvard University Press, 1987) in ways thus not applicable to my view.
Debate