What’s Wrong with Dysfunctional Institutions? The Philosophical Grounding of Functional Normativity

What’s wrong with dysfunctional institutions? The philosophical grounding of functional normativity We intuitively think that failure to discharge a function is bad. A knife that does not cut is a bad knife, a heart that does not pump blood is a bad heart (Hardcastle 2002). Can this reasoning be applied to institutions? And what are the advantages, if any, of doing so? First, the paper grounds this intuition about functions, drawing from philosophy of biology. Functional attributions are selective (i.e. not every feature count as a function), naturalistic (i.e. they are compatible with our scientific view of the world), objective (i.e. they do not depend on the observer’s intention), and normative (i.e. they provide ground for evaluation) (Burelli 2019). The paper will argue that functional normativity so understood can also be found in the social world of institutions (Pettit 1996), albeit with a considerably heavier epistemic burden. Second, the paper suggests that functional considerations may provide unique reasons to assess institutions and evaluate their legitimacy. Some think that legitimacy derives from justice (Rawls 1993), democracy (Christiano 2008), or human rights (Buchanan 2007). Functions may provide more ecumenical reasons, insofar as they do not directly depend on moral values that are increasingly subject to political disagreement. Others believe instead that the legitimacy of particular institutions is mainly a matter of consent, either from a realist perspective (Horton 2012) or from a moralist perspective (Simmons 1999). This argument makes the justification of the duty to obey flimsy, as it is highly vulnerable to the pluralism of individual dispositions. Functional justifications are not as conditional as consent because they do not rely on citizens having the relative interest.