Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology”

Posted: Wed, Nov 19, 2025

I’d like to use Mills’ paper to pull together two strands of thought:

How an understanding of the ethical relevance of knowledge/ignorance broadly and conceptual frameworks in particular comes back to challenge normative ethical theorizing (case ⇔ theory).
How this challenge motivates a different way of doing ethics that recognizes the normative relevance of social reality (armchair ⇔ socially engaged).

Mills’ account of ideal vs. nonideal approaches to ethics.

Does not map neatly onto our case/theory + armchair/socially engaged contrasts: Mills’ distinction is not one of starting points.
The way I read him, Mills deals instead with the background assumptions guiding our theorizing once we get started.

Abstraction vs. Idealization

Theory requires abstraction. What Mills finds problematic is not abstraction per se; it is what and how much the theory abstracts away.

An abstract but non-idealizing model represents a typical X: No two snowflakes are alike; no actual snowflake may turn out to be a typical snowflake, in which case abstraction can be helpful.
An idealizing model represents what an exemplary X works: An ideal workplace is not a typical one.

Mills’ list of idealizing assumptions guiding normative ethical theory (pp. 168–69).

This matters because conceptual frameworks matter.
Lesson from structural gaslighting: Inadequate conceptual frameworks literally block crucial things from view.

Doing away with idealizing assumptions both challenges taken-for-granted concepts in normative ethics and introduces new ones.

Mills’ examples (pp. 176–77): Purity, autonomy, colorblindness, alienation, exploitation, etc.

Ideal theorists:

Get into the headspace of an undifferentiated individual with undifferentiated race, gender, class, ability, etc., who lives in an ideal society with an ideal economic system, an ideal justice system, ideal distribution of resources, ideal families, ideal schools, …
Then apply either utilitarianism or Kantian ethics to analyze school uniforms: Should we have them? For what purposes? What dress codes should we have?

Non-ideal theorists: Use this time to read and then discuss pp. 7–8, 10, 12–13, 18, 21–22, and 26 of this 2018 National Women’s Law Center report, Dress Coded: Black Girls, Bodies, and Bias in D.C. Schools.

Ideal theory is ideological: It serves the interests of dominant groups.

The particular experiences, perspectives, and concerns of dominant groups are misrepresented as universal and privileged as default.
Norms of prestige and respectability in philosophy select for ideal theory and exclude marginalized groups from the discipline so that ideal theory goes unchallenged.
Social injustice becomes deviations from the ideal, with the ideal (but not typical) passing as representative of social reality.