As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. (Mill, On Liberty)
INTRODUCTION
In chapter 3 of On Liberty, Mill introduces the concept of ‘experiments in living’, with the goal of presenting a progressive alternative to what he saw as a declining culture. The notion of experiments in living is notable for several reasons: first, it offers a clearer conception of his claims of utilitarian progressivism than he argues for in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism. Experiments in livingFootnote 1 are meant to provide the engine of social progress: not only do we have the opportunity for improving our cultural and moral condition, but we can also better discover why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful. Second, these experiments help define and justify the negative freedoms of individuals. Individuals are to be free to engage in those experiments that do not harm others, and we are to encourage them to do so because we look forward to the possibility of society benefiting from their innovations. Third, experiments in living, and the individuality that they promote, make us worthy objects of moral contemplation, as they differentiate us from mere automatons. Experimentation forces us to flex our moral muscles in a way that conformity simply does not. In virtue of trying out a different way of living than is common in one's society, one is forced to think more carefully about one's choices. They deviate from the defaults, and so require consideration. This encourages us not only to contemplate our new way of life, but also to reflect on our social and political arrangements.
Mill offers us a vision of political legitimacy that stems precisely from regular, robust challenges to the existing social and political arrangement. We become worthy moral agents in so far as we are able to participate in, or at least appreciate, the creation of alternative conceptions of how individuals can interact with society. The structure of Mill's reasoning departs substantially from our contemporary accounts of public reason. Rather than grounding political justification on shared political reasons, here we come to justify our political culture on the basis of our ability to reject consensus views and try something else. In fact, it is precisely shared conceptions of the right or the good that Mill wants us to be wary of. Mill's reversal of the structure of political justification – where we are on firmer justificatory ground when fewer people share the same conception of the good – presents a new way of thinking about political justification in an increasingly diverse world. In fact, this line of thinking suggests that increasing diversity, rather than being a challenge to political justification, is in fact an advantage, as it increases our ability to conduct a range of experiments in living that help us better understand the nature of successful social arrangements.
Though I will claim that the structure of Mill's reasoning promotes a broad range of experiments in living, I will go well beyond the content of what Mill himself argues. In particular, I argue that experiments in living can offer both an exploration of different conceptions of the Good, but also, particularly in the case of larger-scale social experiments of living, an exploration of different conceptions of Right. Experiments in living serve as engines of social discovery, by allowing diverse populations to develop new ways of living with one another. These experiments embody a potentially new set of justificatory reasons – ones that become apparent in virtue of the fact that they bubble up from a diverse population with a plurality of values and perspectives. Most importantly, the experiments happen through time – rather than an instantiation of public reason that occurs at a particular moment in time, the process of experiments in living is continuous. It is the dynamic of experiments in a diverse population happening through time that allows us to formulate an alternative structure of justification, apart from public reason. This form of justification not only can be more adaptable than public reason to changes in our social environment, but also can be the engine for further normative change.
While I engage in expanding and generalizing on the structure of Mill's account, far beyond how Mill used experiments in living, I remain focused on the concerns that motivated Mill's position. In fact, I will argue that versions of these concerns are latent in the justificatory strategy of contemporary public reason. Mill argues that democracies tend towards mediocrity because they aggregate the opinions of mediocre people. What's worse, these people are also uncreative, and as such, he claims, see no value in originality. This leads such societies to be mired in stasis – uncritically retaining social structures that perhaps were at one time justifiable choices, but are no longer useful. What is especially problematic is the fact that it is not because the people themselves are inherently mediocre, but rather the formal and informal institutions around that have limited their ability to flourish as individuals, or appreciate and encourage the flourishing of those around them. This is thus a problem of social arrangements. Institutions, whether formal or informal, can conspire to degrade and diminish what individuals might be capable of by denying them opportunities to take on the challenge of developing a plan of life. While I do not want to claim that public reason generates mediocre citizens in the sense that Mill discusses, I do want to claim that public reason can inadvertently narrow political discussion, and can lead us to focus only on the justification of existing political structures, rather than on seeking out improvements.Footnote 2 Public reason by design narrows the set of acceptable reasons to those that are public, but cannot ensure that what remains is a comprehensive set of reasons capable of representing the complexity of our public life. To put it bluntly, public reason must assume from the beginning that we already know the relevant considerations of justice in order to delve into justification. The Millian account I offer in its place suggests that it's very likely that we do not yet know all of the relevant considerations of justice, and instead offers a mechanism for trying to uncover them. In doing so, we are all tasked with this exploration, and have greater reason to develop our higher faculties to participate in such a search.
I will proceed by first providing an account of what Mill saw to be the basic problem he was addressing – the extensive pressure to fit in with the crowd, and how this bred mediocrity. I will connect this to worries about the structure of political justification in public reason. I will then move on to a presentation of Mill's experiments in living. I close by arguing that a generalization of Mill's basic argument can offer us a more robust path to political justification stemming from experiments in living.
HOMOGENEITY AND STASIS: UNDERMINING DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY
Mill argued that a homogenized population creates social and individual ills. ‘The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary’ (p. 205). An overly powerful reliance on custom, Mill argues, robs a population of its history and its future. History is lost, as there is no evidence of it – no mark of the struggles that led to the adoption of the existing customs. There are no vestiges of the ideas and ways of living that were abandoned in favour of the current system (p. 205). This means that something is lost from the stored wisdom of prior experience.
Let us examine why we might be concerned about losing these old ways and ideas, even if they were abandoned for good reason. Social arrangements are undergirded by a way of conceiving of the world, and living within it. These ways of conceiving of the world, or perspectives, can be understood as basic units of justification. Perspectives provide us with filters on the world – they tell us what is important, and what we can ignore.Footnote 3 Because of this filtering, they also offer us similarity rankings: they tell us which practices are close to our own, and which are quite different.Footnote 4 Having access to a variety of perspectives is valuable precisely because any given one is only going to be successful over a limited range of cases. In fact, it is a theorem that no single perspective can always be the best.Footnote 5 Because of this, a perspective that justified a failed social arrangement at some other moment in history might now point us to the best social arrangement. That is, perspectives we have abandoned can, in different circumstances, become useful anew. If the underlying conditions have changed, we have no reason to believe that our prevailing perspective is capable of providing us with the best solution. What's worse, if we all share the same perspective, we will be unable to see that we are stuck in a sub-optimal outcome. If we, quite reasonably, have a somewhat conservative impulse, and are only willing to shift in small steps from our current social arrangement, for fear that too large a change will upend our social order, what small steps we take are still detemined by the perspectives that we bring to the table – they provide the measure for assessing similarity. We share the same reasons, and those reasons are reinforced, either through deliberationFootnote 6 or through non-deliberative, habitual conformity to the supported practices. Shared perspectives can in fact make it easier for social norms to take hold, further normatively entrenching certain practices, even if they are no longer good solutions to the problems we face.Footnote 7 Perspectival diversity, on the other hand, would give us two immediate benefits. First, we would gain the ability to better reflect on our epistemic assumptions, helping us to see where our reasoning might lead us astray. This can come from deliberation across perspectives, or even simply from becoming aware that others view the world differently. Just finding out that one's world-view and associated assumptions are not universal can bring about significant reflection. Second, we would have access to a wider stock of salient alternative ways of living from which to choose. Combined, these benefits would reduce our tendency to get stuck in sub-optimal social arrangements, and would give us the means of justifying changes when they are needed.
Mill provides the kernel of a similar argument in chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, where he compares social norms to nautical maps in defence of the practicability of utilitarianism. Each represents a way of storing previously accumulated knowledge that one can later refine and improve (p. 113). Having only one star to follow would make navigation rather difficult. But being able to draw from a variety of celestial arrangements across many different maps gives us more ability to get where we want to go, regardless of where that might be.
Pressure for everyone to be the same makes it very difficult for change – and improvement – to take place. Mill notes that change can happen if it is roughly simultaneous – clothing fashion is an example of this. Once or twice a year, clothing fads change, and people all rush to adopt the new look (p. 205). But these shifts are, in a way, further evidence of the underlying problem. This is evidenced by the fact that those who stick to a previous style are criticized for being out of style, and those who dress completely differently are looked on with some suspicion or derision. The nature of the difficulty is not that people are against change, per se, but rather that they are not comfortable with being different from others, nor are they comfortable with others being different from them. However, a consequence of this attitude is that change becomes extremely difficult to accomplish, as it can only happen under fairly constrained circumstances. It is for this reason that change normally occurs only in morally and politically unimportant areas, like popular taste in music or clothing. Things that might be actually characterized as social improvements, like conceptions of how to live one's life, are not as open to change because they are difficult or impossible to switch to all at once. In these more substantive arenas, there is a greater social inertia. So, we find ourselves with social stagnation in those areas where it is most costly.
Strikingly, Mill's view on the structure of social inertia and the possibilities for social change are extremely well supported by contemporary theory. Bicchieri's account of social norms argues that social norms are Nash equilibria. They are held in place by each individual's conditional preference to follow the norm, so long as her expectations that others also follow the norm and expect her to do so are met.Footnote 8 Because of this, change can only happen all at once: by definition, no one can unilaterally deviate from a Nash equilibrium and be better off. Such behaviour change would be easier if the norm were not further supported by other values. Mill's reliance on fashion as an example of norms that shift with some frequency is matched in the contemporary literature on social norms as well.Footnote 9 We can also find many examples of societies with deeply entrenched, harmful, but widely agreed-upon social norms, where change is extremely difficult and must happen simultaneously. Foot-binding lasted for centuries in China, female genital cutting has resisted many efforts at abandonment, and unequal gender roles are common everywhere.
Social ill is only part of the problem as Mill sees it – the lack of support for individuality stifles human nature as well. ‘He who lets the world . . . choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation . . . Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model’ (p. 196). A society that views individuality as a negative is bound to at least try to enforce conformity by whatever mechanism it sees fit. As such, the individuals in this society will look to avoid punishment and seek to conform to the mould as is expected of them. But in doing so, individuals lose what makes them uniquely human – the ability to develop and exercise one's higher faculties, as represented by the choice of a plan of life. By actively making choices about who one is and wants to be, one is forced to rely on, and improve, one's higher faculties. It creates the opportunity to try something new, learn from mistakes, and develop one's talents to be able to cope better with problems in the future. Put more simply, making substantive choices encourages individual autonomy. But a passive receiver of social roles has very little reason to develop intellectually. The socially created mould has already been constructed, so the individual has no difficult choices to make. He can focus on clothing instead.Footnote 10
So we find that the ‘despotism of custom’, whether or not it is legally sanctioned, stifles individual expression and development. This in turn further reinforces the despotism of culture, as undeveloped people will both lack the ability to see the benefits of doing something different (if they are capable of such imagination), and lack the ability actually to do something different. These constraints, and the associated arrested development of the faculties, lead individuals to have only weak preferences, which will be largely controlled by the behaviour of the wider population. ‘The general average of mankind are not only moderate in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations; they have no tastes or wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual’ (p. 204). It is this cycle of mediocrity with which Mill is most concerned. A mediocre society shapes the preferences of individuals to be interested primarily in conformity, and those individuals, once moulded by these influences, then help to reinforce this mediocrity in others through their participation in social norms that encourage homogeneity. Each component of this system reinforces the others, which results in a system that is very difficult to get out of. What's worse, a system of democratic rule is then in a sense subverted: if everyone shares the same weak preferences for homogeneity, a democratic state can never progress. The will of the people is represented in a loose sense, but certainly not in the sense of Mill's notion of individuals as competent judges. That is, the people are not in a position to evaluate adequately their preferences between higher and lower pleasures, as they have not developed their capacities. Because of this, a democratic order that fails to ensure the individual autonomy of its citzens is not liberty promoting, as the necessary conditions for a well-functioning democracy are not obtained. This problem led Mill to develop his account of experiments in living, as a means to better enable these preconditions.
PARALLELS WITH PUBLIC REASON LIBERALISM
Public reason liberalism, while still at a very safe distance from the mediocrity that Mill argues against, still does share a few key features of the constraining societies that he discusses. In particular, public reason liberalism, by (well-intentioned) design, limits the acceptable range of reasons that one can offer in debate. This is meant to prevent more or less private or associational reasons, like ones founded on comprehensive moral doctrines that are not universally shared, from dominating or distorting discussion. Rousseau's general will, Rawls's original position, or even Rawls's allowable reasons in the overlapping consensus in Political Liberalism are all examples of a public reason model in which the discussion is artifiically constrained to a supposed shared perspective of the citizens. The public reason story claims that we can reason qua citizen, and that this is a well-defined, shared conception of how we ought to relate to one another in the public sphere. For now, let's put aside the worry that there might not be such a shared conception,Footnote 11 and instead grant that there is an identifiable, shared perspective of individuals as citizens. We can immediately see a version of Mill's worry here: in our public sphere reasoning about justice, we are forced to conform to a single perspective. Deviations from this view are punished – at the very least, reasons generated from outside of the perspective are ignored. What's worse, privileging the ‘citizen’ perspective creates an aura of neutrality around only this perspective. All other views must be biased by definition. Offering reasons that stem from alternative perspectives will result in bias, even if they bring to light issues that can't be easily discussed within the public reason framework.Footnote 12 Individuals become stifled in public reason frameworks precisely because those frameworks are designed to limit the range of debate. Advocates of public reason might well simply say that what I see as a problem, they see as a valuable feature: we shouldn't have to accept views that liberalism has already dismissed. But I think that implicit in this sort of response is a key assumption, one that shapes the justificatory programme that public reason liberalism is engaged in: that the underlying social/environmental/technological conditions have remained and will continue to remain relatively constant. The public reason advocate, by assuming stability, believes that eliminated perspectives will remain uninformative on questions of justice, if they were uninformative before.Footnote 13
Mill's defence of free speech offers the template for how, even if this assumption of stability proves to be true, it is crucial that we still do not close the debate. For our development as full moral agents, we must be able to understand the arguments in favour of our own positions, and why opposing views are mistaken. Public reason liberalism just assumes that we are having a discussion within a constrained set of reasonable liberal doctrines, and for that reason blocks other accounts. Even if we are generally sympathetic to such liberal doctrines, it behooves us to contend regularly with other views, if only to better understand our own. But if the ground is shifting beneath us enough to make us worry that our perspective may be missing key features of the world around us, then those opposing perspectives are precisely what we need to get a better handle on what has changed, and how we must respond.
The system of justification in public reason, in so far as it is designed to be internal to liberalism itself, can only serve to justify our liberal institutions. Most importantly, besides offering a regulative ideal at which to aim, public reason liberalism cannot offer a compelling account of how we chould change as society changes. Though this perhaps seems counter-intuitive, as liberalism is often considered a progressive force for justifying socio-political changes, liberalism suffers from a limited set of inputs. This problem stems from two reasons. First, public reason liberalism is limited to our reasoning qua citizens: there is only a constrained set of admissible reasons available. But further, and perhaps most crucially, public reason is ultimately about justification, not about discovery. Public reason is interested in identifying acceptable institutions, not in trying out new ones and learning about them. This distinction has its roots in the philosophy of science, but can be usefully exported to the political realm.
DISCOVERY AND JUSTIFICATION
Reichenbach was the first to formulate the distinction between these two contexts. ‘The objective relation from the given entities to the solution, and the subjective way of finding it, are clearly separated for problems of a deductive character; we must learn to make the same distinction for the problem of the inductive relation from facts to theories.’Footnote 14 Kurt Baier brought out a similar distinction of justification versus deliberation in moral reasoning.Footnote 15 This distinction between discovery and justification does make sense for a number of reasons. How one comes up with a new idea is entirely separate from whether that idea can be justified. The process of justification disregards how something was discovered, and instead focuses on whether the discovery holds up to justificatory scrutiny. The logic of justification allows us to focus only on the final products of reason: we can determine how well the evidence supports one hypothesis over another, and we can ask whether a theory is internally coherent, or has consequences that conflict with other theories for which we have evidence. We can grasp these questions, and we have become very adept at developing solutions to them. Justification works very well when we have a clear question and empirical evidence that we can use as an input into our evaluation of the hypothesis.
The challenge for justification, on the other hand, is that it cannot be of much help when we lack sufficient evidence to make reliable judgements, we are unsure of what evidence to gather, or worse, we are not yet sure what kinds of questions we should ask. Within this set of worries, we have secondary concerns: how should scientists organize themselves to best collect evidence? What incentives ought they be responsive to? How do we learn to ask new questions and develop new areas of science? Largely in response to questions like these, in recent years, philosophy of science has begun to see a resurgence of interest in the context of discovery. This has been particularly evident in examinations of the division of cognitive labour in science.Footnote 16 These papers on the division of cognitive labour have nothing to do with justifying theories – they are focused on how we might generate theories more successfully. The logic of discovery, as the name implies, focuses our attention on the crucial procedures, questions and evidence that must be examined when we are first coming to understand a problem domain.
What Reichenbach made clear in the context of the philosophy of science can help us think through the analogous issue in political philosophy. Justification, whether it is about scientific theories or political decisions, relies on the final products of reason: in philosophy of science, we consider a hypothesis in light of a fixed set of evidence. In normative justification, we rely on a fixed set of admissable reasons. What's left as an assumption, however, is that we have a fully adequate set of admissable reasons. An artificially narrowed set of reasons may lead us to ‘justified’ positions that we would not endorse given a wider set of available reasons. Justification can only be a relation held between the justified action or principle and the set of reasons considered. But if the set of reasons is too narrow, we should not expect the justified principle to be robustly justifiable, in the sense of being justifiable with a broader set of admissible reasons. However, the justification relation, by its very nature, cannot speak to this issue. This is in some sense a deeper problem in normative justification than it is in scientific justification, as in scientific contexts we have much broader agreement about what constitutes evidence for a given hypothesis, and statistical techniques to provide us with a sense of whether we have gathered an adequate amount of evidence such that we can be confident in a justification. In the context of normative justification, we do not have such luxuries. Yet, public reason justification begins with the premise that we can identify the set of admissible reasons upfront. This ought to give us pause: despite good reasons to think that we do not have adequate exposure to the relevant set of reasons, we enter into a justification process and treat those results as normatively significant. Discovery is instead the context for exploring new possibilities. Discovery is the means by which we can enrich our evidentiary set. I argue it is the mechanism that we ought to employ to ensure that our process of normative justification does not get unmoored. Yet we devote very little attention to the process of discovery in political philosophy.
As we will see, Mill's approach to experiments in living offer us an account of social discovery. On this kind of account, justification becomes subsumed under iterated discovery, which includes a permanent competition of perspectives. Those ways of living that survive the widespread scrutiny are justified in so far as other ways of living fail to displace them in the marketplace of ideas. This is a more thoroughly empiricist (and evolutionary) model of political justification – rather than point to a regulative ideal, and compare ourselves against that a priori standard, we try things out, and see what works in our circumstances. Mill's approach embraces experiments not as a secondary part of a justifying account, but as a central element of democratic legitimacy.
EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING
Mill conceives of experiments in living as a way to express and endorse individuality. Let us look at each of these ideas in turn. First, if we consider them as an expression, we notice that experiments in living presuppose some individual beliefs or preferences that are different from what is normal and customary. Further, they must be something more than the ‘weak’ preferences that Mill discusses, as they are substantial enough to be acted upon, since they put the individual out of the mainstream. So for experiments in living to be possible, it must be the case that there exists a subset of the population which has suitably strong preferences for something different from existing social practices These preferences lead to action in so far as they suggest different ways of living one's life. Mill never explicitly offers a range of possible examples of experiments in living, probably because he saw them as being precisely those ways of life for which it is difficult presently to imagine. One can imagine a mild case being something like taking up painting, or perhaps work on a hobby of some kind. This same conception is also supposed to lead into more substantive changes, such as alternative family structures. On a larger scale, one could view a kibbutz or other communal multi-family social arrangements as possibilities. This concept, then, can be seen as ranging over cases that vary not only in the particulars of their content, but also along how many individuals are involved. In so far as they are expressive acts or projects, it would appear to be a requirement that the collective experiments demand the endorsement of all those involved, or at least all adults involved. This idea naturally relates to the basic liberal programme that Mill is espousing throughout his writing – in this way, it would not be appropriate for someone to ‘experiment’ with slavery of the kind we saw in the United States, though perhaps one would be able to if the ‘slave’ consented to the arrangement, and was eligible to withdraw his or her endorsement and thus end the experiment at any time.
There is another limit to these experiments, which Mill notes as soon as he begins his discussion, which is that these experiments must have their costs fully internalized. ‘[People] should be free to act upon their opinions – to carry these out in their lives without hindrance . . . so long as it is at their own risk and peril’ (p. 193). Actions are not as benign as free speech, as actions are much more likely to cause harm to others. Just as slavery is not a valid experiment in living, neither is something like arson. One could, if one so chose, buy a large tract of land, build houses on it, keep them empty, and then burn them at will, so long as it isn't followed by an attempt to defraud an insurance company. But in most cases, arson is something clearly not allowed by the doctrine of experiments in living, as supported by the principle of liberty.
The cases of slavery and arson thus allow us to see the contours of the programme. Though experiments in living can be seen as expressive of one's preferences, they also suggest that there are some preferences that are illegitimate.Footnote 17 That is, preferences that are in conflict with the basic rights of others are not in accordance with Mill's principle of liberty. In so far as they are actionable preferences rather than simply preferences that give rise to speech acts, they are not eligible for consideration. This is a fairly minimal restriction, however. Many of those behaviours that are proscribed by social norms are eligible for experimentation, so long as they do not cause harm to parties other than the willing participants in the experiment itself. As we have already seen, however, Mill assumes that prevailing social norms and customs will be natural buffers against change. In fact, norms should be viewed as expressions of general, stable preferences. As previously discussed, they are to be understood as carriers of past wisdom and experience. Just as it does in the law, precedent ought to help guide our decisions. However, the ability to express one's preferences when they deviate from the norm is of fundamental importance. It is here that we can then examine the second way to understand experiments in living – as endorsements of individuality.
Whereas expressions of individuality are centred on the individual herself, endorsements of individuality come from others. This distinction is meant to allow us to consider the institutional role that experiments in living play. Since Mill diagnoses a two-part problem – that individuals have no strong preferences, and that society discourages them whenever they are in conflict with standing ‘social preferences’ – his account aims to address both sides of the problem. We have already seen the way in which experiments in living can foster individual growth. Now we turn to investigate how experiments in living can be viewed as a social tool.
Mill can be seen as solving the second half of his problem by cutting off the social inertia generated by strong social norms or overbearing legislation. The promotion of experiments in living is a method by which a society can have some means institutionally to support the development of individuality and the cultivation of one's capacities. If the society endorses the concept of experiments in living as at least something that is acceptable, this immediately limits the power of prevailing social norms. While people may not agree with the particular deviation, and can express their discontent, they have less authority to claim that the deviation is wrong in virtue of the fact that it is a deviation. In Bicchieri's language, while empirical expectations might largely be retained, normative expectations will drain away. This form of endorsement is not about the content of any particular experiment, but rather the idea that various experiments can take place. This is essential to prevent epistemic closure in a community, wherein it will no longer engage with beliefs, values and perspectives that it does not already espouse.
THE PRIMACY OF DISCOVERY AND EXPERIMENTATION FOR POLITICAL JUSTIFICATION IN A CHANGING WORLD
The core idea in Mill's conception of experiments in living is that societies – even societies that were previously well-functioning – can become stagnant once a monoculture arises. Once we constrain what is permissibly discussed and disputed, we lose our understanding of why certain perspectives were able to become dominant in the first place. Once entrenched, a single perspective (or a limited set of related perspectives) can become blinders. We can fail to recognize when conditions have changed, and even if we do, we may not have the tools at our disposal to be appropriately responsive to those changes.
Furthermore, when we focus on an internal account of political justification, we may not even be in a position of being able to ask the right kinds of questions. We may have established a regulative ideal at which we aim, but perhaps that regulative ideal is only contextually ideal. We may continue to aim at it not realizing that our circumstances have changed, and we should rather be aiming for something else. So long as we are all in the thrall of a single way of reasoning about justice, and focused on using the reasons available to us to justify our regulative ideal and the institutions that lead us towards it, we will not be able to tell when we need new perspectives or new evidence. We accidentally blind ourselves to the possibilities of a changing landscape.
Mill's solution, which I have sought to generalize and expand upon, offers an inversion of the typical account of political discovery and justification. Discovery becomes essential on Mill's account, as experiments in living are tools of the discovery process. The process of iterated discovery itself becomes a method of justification. Autonomous individuals, internalizing their costs within the group participating in the experiments, offer each other examples about possible ways of living. These ways of living may embody different perspectives on how we should live together in society. Those experiments that are able to survive and persist can claim some legitimacy. Thus legitimacy is the product of institutional evolution. Justification of social and political structures and institutions does not come from limitations on what was initially allowable, but rather comes from demonstrations of value.
This constant, iterated process of discovery is uniquely well suited to the challenge of an increasingly diverse, changing world. We do not have to concern ourselves about correctly identifying the a priori principles that will best match our changing circumstances. Instead, we can learn about an appropriate conception of justice for the changing world through our attempts to determine acceptable normative social arrangements within it. On this kind of account, the experimentation and observation of new ways of living and novel ways of looking at the world offer us a procedural account of justification. They may not immediately grant us the same conclusions that public reason offers, but when they do, those conclusions are on much firmer ground.Footnote 18
