The Good and the Best

Too often calls for utopian social change serve as a device for conserving the status quo, because they pose objectives that are beyond what is feasible to implement and devalue reachable marginal improvement. As Voltaire famously remarked: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’. In this paper I suggest that being realistic about social change means seriously committing to realize it. I argue that social change should be conceived and evaluated in terms of a course of action rather than merely an ideal end-state. End-states must be assessed in conjunction with the means they require, other consequences they imply, and their likelihood of success (i.e. as a course of action). These additional three elements give rise to three distinct failures of being realistic about social change: the fanatic who does not consider the cost of means, the saint who does not consider the benefit of end-states, and the naïve who does not consider likelihood of success. Similar failures can be construed as empirical mistakes in giving the course of action due consideration: the ineffective actor (who fails to acquire available knowledge of means), the wishful thinker (whose knowledge of consequences is distorted by preferences) and the self-deceiver (whose knowledge of end-states is distorted by his preferences). Being realistic about social change – I conclude - does not mean that we should not be ambitious in what we propose, but that we should avoid these six fallacies if we truly care about realizing it.