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Private Lives and Public Virtues: The Idea of a Liberal Community1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David McCabe
David McCabe*
Affiliation:
Colgate University, Hamilton, NY13346-1398, USA
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Extract

Ever since Immanuel Kant suggested that ‘the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils’ so long as citizens’ selfish tendencies worked to counterbalance one another (Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ Hans Reiss, ed., Kant's Political Writing [New York: Cambridge University Press 1970], 112), critics have complained that liberalism is indifferent to individual character and, worse still, is predicated on the notion that citizens ought to be concerned primarily with their private interests and little, if at all, with the public weal. Lately, this line of criticism has been pressed with renewed force by theorists who argue that liberal states can flourish only if citizens develop the distinctive virtues that, ‘taken together … constitute a disposition to foster, support, and participate in liberal political institutions,’ but that liberal states committed to neutrality with respect to the good cannot realistically expect their citizens to develop these virtues.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 1998 , pp. 557 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1998

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References

2 The quotation is from Jones, David ‘A Pragmatic Defense of Some Liberal Civic Virtues,’ Southern journal of Philosophy 30, 2 (1992) 77–92, at 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jones does not advance the overall criticism I am considering here. That criticism may be described, following Taylor, Charles ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,’ Rosenblum, Nancy ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989) 159–82Google Scholar, as falling into the tradition of civic humanism. That tradition, however, is by no means exclusively communitarian, if by communitarian one has in mind either an emphasis on selves as partially constituted by their communal ties or a belief that the highest form of human flourishing is found in communal endeavors. It includes Machiavelli, for example, who understood participation in the civic realm as valuable chiefly in protecting the sphere of negative liberty that liberal neutralists champion. See Skinner, Quentin ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty,’ Rorty, Richard Schneewind, J.B. and Skinner, Quentin eds., Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984) 193–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar, both on this point and, more generally, on the tradition in political thought that seeks to combine the importance of individual liberal freedoms with responsibility to the civitas. This point is worth noting because while the sustainability critique that I consider in this essay stresses the importance of allegiance to the political community, it is not communitarian in either of the two senses mentioned above, though some who press the critique also endorse one or both of those positions. One could choose to label as communitarian any political theory that stresses the importance of community, but on this reading even Rawls's A Theory of Justice would qualify as communitarian (see §79ff.). In any case, the important thing is the arguments, not the labels, and in this paper I consider arguments advanced by both so-called liberals and so-called communitarians.

3 Jones offers these four as a general scheme for classifying the civic virtues conducive to the flourishing of liberal states. Others worth mentioning include a commitment to reason-giving in public debate, a willingness to resolve such debate on the basis of the best reasons, openness to new ideas and approaches, and a recognition of human beings’ fallibilism. Attempts to identify the liberal civic virtues can also be found in Macedo, Stephen Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon 1990) chap. 7Google Scholar and Galston, William Liberal Purposes (New York: Cambridge University Press 1991) chap. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A full enumeration of such virtues would include not only those traits that lead citizens to support liberal political institutions, but also those that lead them, in their social interactions, to treat other citizens with civility and respect.

4 Thomas Spragens, for example, suggests that ‘some of the most essential limitations and imperatives of the liberal state prevent it from undertaking a comprehensive effort to shore up some of its enabling condition …. A “corrupt” culture can place great burdens on the viability of liberal government and can possibly undermine it altogether. A citizenry without public spirit, without self-restraint, and without intelligence accords ill with the demands of effective self-governance’ (Spragens, Thomas A. Jr., ‘Reconstructing Liberal Theory: Reason and Culture,’ D'Amico, Alfonso J. ed., Liberals on Liberalism [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1986), 43)Google Scholar. William Galston offers a similar warning: ‘My claim is that the operation of liberal institutions is affected in important ways by the character of citizens (and leaders), and that at some point, the attenuation of individual virtue will create pathologies with which liberal political contrivances, however technically perfect their design, simply cannot cope’ (217).

5 Sandel, Michael ‘The Political Theory of the Procedural Republic,’ Revue de metaphysique et de morale 93 (1988) 57–68Google Scholar, refers to proceduralism; Barber, Benjamin Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984)Google Scholar to realist politics; and Sunstein, Cass ‘Beyond the Republican Revival,’ Yale Law Journal 97 (1988) 1539-90 to pluralismCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The case of Madison exemplifies the risks of over-simplifying the relationship between the bare fact of competing interests and the importance of civic virtues. While Federalist 10 does stress the importance of having a sufficiently large number of competing factions, and Federalist 51 endorses the ‘policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives,’ Madison clearly believed that a nation of individuals committed only to the selfish pursuit of private interest would not flourish: ‘I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea’ (quoted in James T. Kloppenberg, ‘The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Discourse,’ The Journal of American History 74, I [1987]9-33, at 27). See also Federalist 84 for the importance of virtue in citizens.

7 Jones offers a similar argument in ‘A Pragmatic Defense of Some Liberal Civic Virtues.’

8 According to Charles Taylor, ‘the underlying reasoning of the [civic humanist] thesis … is that the disciplines that would be externally imposed by fear under a despotism have to be self-imposed in its absence, and only patriotic identification can provide the motivation’ (171).

9 I say ‘seems to be based’ because many of those who criticize liberal neutrality take it as self-evident that the neutral state can have no place for the notion of the common good and so don't bother with arguments to support this position. The argument I provide in the text captures what I take to be the general argument underlying this position, examples of which can be seen in the work of both Sullivan and Barber.

10 Some critics of liberal states might also be arguing that the enormous diversity regarding citizens’ conceptions of the good in modem liberal states means that such states will not be able to invoke a collective common good that will appeal to all citizens. This is a different criticism from the one I am considering here, which deals not with the appeal of the collective common good in neutral states but with the possibility of its existing at all. I take up the question of the appeal of the neutral state's common good in Section IV below.

11 Contemporary liberals who regard autonomy as simply one conception of the good among others will object that my attempt to spell out the common good of neutral states in terms of the value of autonomy is self-defeating. In their eyes, the liberal state's commitment to neutrality flows not from autonomy but from the principle of treating all individuals with equal respect, and this, they claim, requires that liberal states not privilege autonomy. This objection seems to me wrong-headed for this reason: All advocates of liberal neutrality agree that political principles must give equal respect to each person. The crucial question is, what is involved in treating someone with respect? Now if one claims (as any liberal must) that brainwashing and psychologically coercing children into pursuing certain conceptions of the good violates the principle of equal respect, one thereby endorses the value of all persons’ freely choosing for themselves the sorts of lives they shall lead. This capacity of choosing for oneself a conception of the good, in accordance with values one reflectively endorses, is in large part what the ideal of autonomy is about, and since no liberal can countenance the sort of brainwashing and coercion just mentioned, no liberal can be neutral on the value of autonomy.

The view I'm defending does have substantially different consequences for the practice of a liberal state than does that articulated by those who want to jettison liberalism's connection to autonomy. On my view, which grounds neutrality in autonomy, the liberal state may attempt to promote certain virtues or capacities that are valuable to citizens who will be autonomously forming and pursuing conceptions of the good. This does not mean that the liberal state may try to steer citizens towards particular conceptions of the good; it does mean, however, that it may try to help them get to the point where they can make autonomous decisions. In aiming for the latter liberal states may somewhat achieve the former, but so long as the intention is not to direct citizens to particular conceptions, liberal neutrality (understood in terms of neutrality of justification, not neutrality of effect) is preserved. An extended discussion of these issues can be found in my ‘Outline for a Defense of an Unreconstructed Liberalism’ (Journal of Social Philosophy 29, 1 [1998] 63-80).

12 See Kymlicka, Will Liberalism, Community and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar and Tamir, Yael Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The importance of a cultural context from within which one exercises one's autonomy is a recurring theme in the work of Charles Taylor.

13 There have been other attempts at outlining the liberal common good in ways that satisfy neutrality. Will Kymlicka, for example, in his response to communitarian critiques, suggests that the liberal common good is what results from a fair process of combining existing preferences and conceptions of the good that individual citizens hold, and he contrasts this with the way of arriving at a common good that begins with a perfectionist standard by which existing preferences are to be evaluated to determine if they have any claim to satisfaction in the first place. Thus he writes, ‘in a liberal society, the common good is the result of a process of combining preferences, all of which are counted equally (if consistent with the principles of justice),’ and therefore ‘in a liberal society the common good is adjusted to fit the pattern of preferences and conceptions of the good held by individuals’ (76, 77). I am not sure how far the common good Kymlicka describes is consistent with my argument, because I am not sure what he means by saying that the common good is ‘adjusted to fit’ individuals’ conceptions of the good. If he means that the state may take action because a majority of citizens favor it for reasons relating to their distinctive conceptions of the good, his notion of the common good might appear incompatible with the one I have outlined. This way of interpreting his proposal could be reconciled with the collective model I describe, however, if one could show that citizens would have good reasons, not grounded in their particular conceptions of the good, to sanction citizens’ relying on such conceptions when certain matters not involving essential issues of justice were up for debate. (John Rawls has recently argued for something like this division in distinguishing the constitutional essentials of a liberal regime from other, less foundational issues it may take up.) The key idea here is that the appropriateness of voting one's private preferences would be agreed to from a viewpoint that privileges no conceptions of the good. One could call what results from this sort of voting ‘the public interest,’ in order to distinguish it from the common good that is understood independently of citizens’ particular conceptions, and one could then claim that it is in the common good that there be mechanisms for determining the public interest.

14 An even more ominous conclusion is reached by Benjamin Barber, who argues that the excessive emphasis on individualism in liberalism helps explain the rise of fascism in the twentieth century (see Strong1s Democracy, chap. 5).

15 For a further indication of the ambiguity that attends the contrast between the mere ‘procedural’ and more substantive ideals, consider a legal system which places a high value on such things as trial by a jury of one's peers, guarantee of defense counsel, opportunity to confront one's accusers, etc. Shall we say that these are mere procedural guarantees to secure justice, in the manner of means to ends, or should we say instead that in some way they constitute part of the definition of what justice is for an accused person? The fact that the latter answer seems at least partly correct shows that there is not always a clear delineation between the procedural and the substantive.

16 Thus he suggests that what defines patriotism is ‘a kind of loyalty to a particular nation which only those possessing that particular nationality can exhibit’ (4).

17 The issue is muddied somewhat by Macintyre's reference to ‘the particular nationality’ that citizens possess. If possessing this nationality is determined by factors like the color of one's skin or the birthplace of one's ancestors, then it may be hard to reconcile this sort of allegiance with the principles of liberalism, at least in the United States. But a shared nationality can be created by other factors as well: by knowing that one's fellow citizens share a common commitment to a distinctive political community privileging certain ideals and principles, for example, or by living together through difficult historical periods and attempting collectively to come to terms with them (think of the way in which events like McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Era, or Vietnam serve to bind together Americans).

18 ‘Patriotism has to be a loyalty that is in some respects unconditional, so in just those respects rational criticism is ruled out’ (Macintyre, 13).

19 Perhaps at some future time when these ideals are honored by all countries on the globe there will be less reason for liberal citizens to feel a distinct patriotic bond to their own nation, because their nation would no longer be different from others. I hope I am not alone in saying, however, that such a diminution of patriotic fervor would be a small price to pay should such a future ever present itself.

20 I have concentrated on the United States for a few reasons. First, the most influential recent advocates of neutrality have been American philosophers (i.e. Rawls, Larmore, Dworkin, and Bruce Ackerman), and the influence of neutrality on approaches to law and public policy in the U.S. has been enormous. Also, the United States has seemed to many to exemplify the sorts of sustainability problem that I am discussing here.

21 See Dworkin, Ronald ‘The Curse of Money,’ New York Review of Books 43, 16 (1996) 19–24Google Scholar, for a clear and up-to-date analysis of the problem of money in American politics.

22 Defenses of liberal neutrality that do not proceed via autonomy will face similar challenges in relating liberalism's fundamental values to public policy. These difficulties may account for the urge to see neutrality simply as a policy for preserving peace in the face of pluralism. But this modus vivendi approach has two serious drawbacks. First, it makes the neutrality principle contingent and subject to revision depending on the relative fortunes of different citizens banded together in pursuit of particular conceptions of the good, and thus may encourage adherents of particular conceptions of the good to increase their political power in order to make themselves strong enough to impose their own conception without threatening stability. (The Christian Coalition in the United States may be following just such a strategy.) Second, advocates of the modus vivendi view must remain open to tolerating little or no education for children in various sub-communities so long as this does not threaten political stability. But the willingness to tolerate this is, as I argued earlier, fundamentally anti-liberal.

23 Though the issue merits much fuller discussion, I will briefly mention three areas of concern. First, I do not believe Rawls has convincingly made the case that the sustainability problems affecting liberal states are rooted predominately in citizens’ commitments to competing comprehensive views. Second, Rawls's new approach is less helpful in identifying the just economic distribution of a liberal state and, in general, less strongly committed to the difference principle (cf. Young, Iris Marion ‘Rawls's Political Liberalism,’ Journal of Political Philosophy 3, 2 [1995] 181–90)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If as I believe the problem of maintaining citizens’ allegiance to the state is greatly exacerbated by ongoing economic disparities that begin to appear systemic, then Rawls's newfound hesitance on matters of economic justice will serve only to defer important stability issues. Finally, Rawls appears to believe that there will be significant numbers in liberal society who do not accept autonomy as a comprehensive personal ideal, but who can agree on its importance as a political ideal. But this distinction raises a host of problems, for in important areas of public debate the personal and the political are often inseparable. For example, to many skeptical of traditional liberalism, questions over whether homosexuals should be legally entitled to marry or to adopt children cannot be resolved on the basis of political ideals alone, but inevitably involve their comprehensive views about what sorts of lives are valuable. Rawls's argument to them must thus make some sort of appeal as to why their assessments of homosexuality should not be the basis of political action. But it is not clear why such skeptics would be any more persuaded by an argument that was ‘political not metaphysical’ than by an argument grounded in the ideal of autonomy, for the former would require that they allow a political ideal to outweigh values implied by their comprehensive views. Rawls's effort to explain, without begging the question, how political ideals might outweigh opposing values grounded in comprehensive views (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 139-40)Google Scholar remains singularly unconvincing within the body of his impressive work.

24 Thomas Spragens asserts, ‘The logic and the conditions of participation in the discourse “discipline” those “selfish propensities” whose correction and restraint Mill rightly insisted to be important’ (51). My claim is that the constraint of neutrality encourages this process.

25 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson make a similar point about their principles of preclusion and accommodation, which are intended to guide public dialogue: ‘The principles aim not mainly at style and rhetoric, but at attitude and conduct as manifested in public actions’ (Gutmann, Amy and Thompson, Dennis ‘Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,’ in Douglass, R.B. Mara, G.M. and Richardson, H.S. eds., Liberalism and the Good [New York: Routledge 1990] 125–47, at 136)Google Scholar. While they offer these principles as an advance over the principle of neutrality, I would suggest that their argument offers an excellent model for applying the principle of neutrality. Part of the reason that they oppose their principles to the neutrality principle, I think, is that they regard the neutrality principle as one that forbids moral evaluations from entering into public debate. On the reading of neutrality that I have offered here, no such prohibition is implied in neutrality. A neutral state can still make sense of debate about what is the fairest or most equitable way of resolving conflicts, and in doing this it will have to rely on moral considerations. This does not mean, however, that it will have to invoke a conception of the good life.