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Question Can an ideal be achieved? If my understanding of what ideals are is correct (i.e., a mental conception regarded as a standard of perfection), then it seems that they are, by their very nature, unattainable (at least in a corporeal sense). Yet, nations are built, wars are fought, and people are killed over ideals. If they are only "perfect ideas", doesn't that seem a bit absurd and irrational? Is my understanding of what an "ideal" is incorrect?

Accepted:
February 14, 2006

Comments

That an ideal is achieved is no more impossible in principle than that a concept is instantiated or exemplified. In the latter case, we find something in the world that has all the properties that are definitive of the concept -- e.g., all the properties something must have to count as a plate. To be sure, such a thing, i.e. a plate, is not a concept -- it merely realizes a concept.

Now why can't we think about ideals in this way as well? Think of your ideal of the perfect professor, and fill this in with all the properties such a professor would have. Then see whether you can find (or create) such a person in the real world. If you achieve this, you'd have an exemplification or instantiation of the ideal professor. But this professor would not be the ideal, s/he would be one realization of it. This is obvious from the fact that the actual professor would have many additional properties over and above those s/he must have to be an ideal professor (e.g., a height, weight, gender, etc., which presumably need not be exactly as they are for her/him to count as an ideal professor). And similarly for other ideals, such as that of a free society or that of a just and peaceful world (which could not have several realizations simultaneously).

I conclude that it is not the case that ideals are in principle unrealizable. Some are unrealizable, e.g. because they are incoherent. And others are empirically unrealizable. No blood should be spilled over those; and too much blood has been spilled even over realizable ideals -- some of which (e.g., ideals of racial purity) were quite immoral. Those struggling to realize an ideal are often not sufficiently sensitive to the question what moral cost of its realization would be excessive.

In ordinary English, 'Ideal' has at least two meanings. One is an exemplar of perfection, as you say. E.g. an ideal professor, or an ideal partner. There seems no reason why this necessarily could not be attainable; that is to say, why such an object could not in fact exist.

The other is a notion of a religious or moral nature that entails specific features that appear to be incompatible with the nature of existing things. So, for example, the ideal of an absolutely pure or selfless moral act. There are many plausible accounts of human nature (specifically of how human beings are motivated to act or make decisions) according to which this ideal is not possible.

However, it seems to me that we misunderstand the nature of ideals if we focus on whether they are factually achievable or not. An ideal inaugurates a project of directed change. So, the ideal professor (assuming some measure of agreement of what that would be) directs real professors to improve their act. And this is true whether or not an ideal professor could be reached. Similarly with pure moral acts: the unattainable ideal might still be useful as a way of reforming how we act morally. This of course does not necessarily mean that blood should be spilled over the pursuit of an ideal, for the question remains of whether the ideal is valuable, for what purpose, and how it should be ranked against other incompatible projects of change.