Virtue for Pluralists

Andrew Sabl

Political philosophy was once dominated by discussion of the virtues of character and their importance to the good life and the good society. Contemporary political philosophers, however, following the towering influence of John Rawls, have primarily focused on a single virtue of institutions: justice, while mostly avoiding discussions of the good life. As a result, political philosophy lacks a unified account of the virtues of institutions and the virtues of character. More importantly, we lack an understanding of the connection between the just society and the good life. This article begins to mend this broken seam. The central argument is that the virtues of character require institutions, while good institutions enable persons to live together virtuously. Institutions are a necessary precondition for the moral agency required by the virtues. But good institutions enable virtue to grow, while helping to constrain the moral excesses of vice. On this view, justice emerges primarily as a virtue of character, not institutions. The just person balances conformity to existing institutional norms with practically wise reforms that serve the common good. The just society and the good life are linked through the common good of virtuous activity within the shared institutions of a political community.

Communitarians often complain that liberal political thought offers us no moral ideal, no conception of the moral virtues, no view of a life well lived. As a result, they say, liberalism makes a genuine sense of community impossible. A true community, they argue, requires a common view of the good life. Without such a conception, it is impossible for men and women to find their happiness in common affairs rather than individual affairs. Without it, there are no grounds upon which to ask people to sacrifice for the common good. Without it, political and social life degenerates into atomism and anomie. Against this view, political theorists such as Judith Shklar, Stephen Macedo, William Galston, Rogers Smith, and George Kateb have argued that liberalism does have a distinctive moral ideal and an accompanying set of liberal virtues. Liberal regimes, they say, inculcate a particular, and demanding, set of virtues. Liberalism demands that citizens be tolerant and that they be principled, reasonable, and active participants in their political life. This paper calls for a new understanding of both liberal virtues and what I will call communitarian or substantive virtues. In it, I make four claims. First, the liberal virtues are not sufficient. Liberal virtues, and the view of liberalism that emphasizes these virtues, cannot define a satisfactory form of communal life. For these virtues, like the moral philosophy of liberalism itself, are largely procedural in nature. They tell us, in general, how to conduct our common life. But they do not tell us what ends we should seek together. Without common ends, however, human beings will often have little reason to actively exercise the liberal virtues. A failure to exercise liberal virtues, however, will ultimately lead to their atrophy. This will result, in part, from simple disuse. The deeper problem, however, is that the individualism of life in the liberal democracies often rewards liberal vices rather than liberal virtues. Unless we temper that individualism by encouraging men and women to find at least part of their own good in common ends, the virtue of our citizens will always be threatened. To live a life devoted to some common good is to accept not only procedural virtues but substantive or communitarian virtues, virtues that are necessary to the life of a community that aims at particular ends. My second claim is that both procedural and substantive virtues can be sustained only in strong local communities. The kinds of shared human ends necessary to the creation of virtuous citizens are not likely to be found in a liberal political community as a whole. Those who seek to restore civic virtue in America and the other liberal democracies must look, instead, to a revival and expansion of local, participatory communities in which men and women work together in pursuit of common ends. Civic virtue can, and will only, be created in local organizations of all kinds: religious, ethno-national, vocational, and recreational as well as political associations. These strong local communities will teach particular understanding of both substantive and procedural virtues. On my view, then, all virtue is, like politics itself, local. My third claim is that, in a pluralistic, liberal community, the procedural and substantive virtues inculcated in strong local communities will be very different from those found in non- or pre-liberal regimes. Given the nature of liberal regimes, they will be necessarily shaped by liberal expectations about the central role of individual initiative, autonomy, and responsibility in our common life. To put the point another way, a revival of a more communitarian form of life will not and can not lead us back to a pre-modern conception of either morality or community. I agree with Macintyre that there is much to be learned from the Aristotelian tradition. Yet, a contemporary conception of substantive virtues will not be able to address the circumstances of our lives, nor gain a large following, if it is not very different from the pre-liberal ideas. In the contemporary world, the virtues cannot be defined solely in terms of the ends of particular communities or of the roles that people play in these communities. For our communal identity is often chosen not inherited. And people can be members of more than one strong community. Thus among the most important virtues are those that enable men and women to reflectively choose and balance their commitments to the common goods of different communities. In making these choices, men and women will necessarily begin to acquire the procedural virtues. My fourth claim is that, the substantive virtues inculcated in strong local communities together with the realities of liberal politics, are likely to further encourage people to accept liberal, procedural virtues. Some strong local communities will undoubtedly arise that reject modern views of all kinds. These local communities will often be tied to larger, anti-modern, and, at times, intolerant political and social movements. But the distinctive features of the substantive virtues found in a liberal community, together with the necessity of forming broad coalitions in a pluralistic polity, will favor the emergence of substantive political and social ideals that recognize the intrinsic value of the liberal procedural virtues. Moreover, the stronger local communities are, the less likely it will be that intolerant movements arise. Finally, my fifth claim is that a pluralistic liberal political community broadly committed to the liberal virtues and composed of strong local communities committed to substantive virtues will, itself, realize a liberal ideal. It will be a community that is, in the words of Rawls, a social union of social unions. This ideal goes back to the work of von Humboldt and Mill. It holds that a liberal community composed of strong local communities can, at its best, encourage both individuality and community, both tradition and innovation, both engagement in one’s own way of life and an appreciation for other ways as well, both procedural and (a variety of) substantive virtues. This ideal is the one truly common end of liberalism. But it is not an ideal at which we can directly aim. The task of the liberal state is to create the political and social conditions under which a plurality of strong local communities can flourish. It is these communities, and the interaction between them, that can sustain both communitarian and liberal virtues, both the narrow ends of each group and the broader ends of a liberal way of life.

Journal of Moral Philosophy http://mpj.sagepub.com Virtue for Pluralists Andrew Sabl Journal of Moral Philosophy 2005; 2; 207 DOI: 10.1177/1740468105054446 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mpj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/207 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Journal of Moral Philosophy can be found at: Email Alerts: http://mpj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://mpj.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. [JMP 2.2 (2005) 207-235] DOI: 10.1177/1740468105054446 Virtue for Pluralists ANDREW SABL* UCLA Department of Public Policy 3250 Public Policy Building Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656 USA sabl@ucla.edu Liberal or democratic virtue theories have successfully spread the idea that liberal democracies cannot flourish unless their citizens have certain qualities of mind and character. Such theories cannot agree, however, on what those qualities are. This article attempts to explain and solve this problem. It proposes distinguishing between core virtues, necessary for the actual survival of liberal democracies, and ideal virtues, which promote “progress” according to a given conception of what liberal democracies ought to be about and which values they should most embody. Beyond this, it portrays the relevant virtues as pluralistic (not everyone need have the same ones) and episodic (different virtues are relevant at different times and under different circumstances). It then applies this framework to some key issues of political action and motivation: acts of loyalty and dissent express different aspects of a common response to moral pluralism, and the virtues of citizens differ fundamentally in origin and nature from those of professional politicians. Finally, it suggests more briefly that questions of civil religion, patriotic mobilization in times of war, civic courage, and selfish versus altruistic motives for public action can profit from being seen in this new way. ugustine wrote of time that he knew what it was as long as nobody asked. Talk of the virtues needed by liberal democratic citizens has a similar flavor.1 It is now common to admit that liberal and democratic societies A * I would like to thank for their invaluable comments Julia Annas, Benjamin Berger, Suzanne Dovi, William Galston, Bryan Garsten, Donald Moon, Philip Pettit, Lawrence Solum, and Jeffrey Tulis, as well as audiences at the University of Arizona Political Science department colloquium and the annual meetings of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics and the American Political Science Association. The paper has seen multiple drafts; I sincerely apologize if I have left anyone out. 1. I use the term ‘liberal democratic’ to reflect disagreement among various theorists as to whether liberal democracy, and the virtues that sustain it, should be thought of as primarily liberal or primarily democratic (however defined). There are excellent reasons for distinguishing the two. But since most of the theorists discussed below do not systematically © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 208 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) need, in order to continue, citizens motivated by something different from an impersonal and intellectual attachment to Good or Right on the one hand, and naked and narrow self-interest on the other. But to ask what this something might be is to court immediate disagreement. In our discussions of virtue we tend to replicate, explicitly or implicitly, our controversial views of which aspects of liberal democracy are most worth defending—and, implicitly, which we find flawed, embarrassing, destined for the dustbin of liberal history. Even theorists writing in broad sympathy—critics would say an unduly narrow and unreflective sympathy—for the United States’ version of liberal democracy can be led by their idiosyncratic views of what that polity stands for to very different, even contradictory, lists of the virtues that sustain it (see Table, below). William Galston, fearing above all ‘barbarization and tribalization’,2 stresses the bourgeois and integrative virtues. Stephen Macedo, concerned with fighting the authoritarian virtues (‘quiet obedience, deference, unquestioned devotion, and humility’), stresses an unabashedly Millian or anti-traditionalist liberalism that ‘holds out the promise, or the threat, of making all the world like California’, praises openness to eccentric lifestyle choices, and explicitly calls family and career duties into doubt.3 Amy Gutmann assumes a Deweyan, progressive ideal, whereby the worth of liberal democracy lies in a constant and collective rational examination of all social practices, so that those that can no longer be defended may be exposed and discarded. Her view of liberalism stresses neither diversity nor nonconformity but the virtues conducive to ‘rational understanding’ and ‘rational deliberation’, which alone make possible ‘collective self-determination’ and progress through reason.4 And Michael Walzer’s vision of liberal democracy is deliberately a bit subversive: by arguing that participation and patriotism stand in tension with civility and toleration, he wants to suggest a democratic socialist amendment of liberalism that would tip the balance a bit more toward the former set of virtues.5 Predictably, each theorist, depending on which parts of liberal democracy she most prizes, stresses those virtues—and only those virtues—that promote those parts. Macedo’s virtues are those of Mill and Faust; Galston’s, bourgeois and oriented towards self-restraint; Gutmann’s, cognitive, involving openness of mind and an attitude of respect towards those who disagree; and Walzer’s, civic and assertive to an extent that he acknowledges is in tension with liberal peace. do so (with exceptions, some mentioned below), I shall tend to keep ‘liberal democratic’, however awkward, as the adjective. 2. William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 236. 3. Stephen P. Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1990), p. 278. 4. Amy P. Gutmann, ‘Undemocratic Education’, in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 71-88 (74-79). 5. Michael Walzer, ‘Civility and Civic Virtue in Contemporary America’ (1974), in idem, Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 54-72 (70-72). Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 209 It has been widely noted that all these theorists have something in common: they regard virtue as primarily instrumental, not intrinsic. Whatever joy is supposed to result from acting like a liberal citizen, the virtues that conduce to such action are prized not because they are joyful but because they help us do our liberal and democratic duties. We are supposed to act like good liberal democrats even when this is no fun. To deny this is to turn liberalism into something else: civic humanism or participatory democracy, or some other political form in which political participation is given a notfully-liberal priority over other choices and pursuits. Only in such a nonliberal polity can loving politics for its own sake become a crucial virtue. To the extent that they reject the world of Aristotelian perfectionism and summa bona, the liberal-democratic virtue theorists are describing distinctively modern virtues.6 In addition, all accounts of liberal virtue must reject to some degree the doctrine of liberal neutrality. If liberal democratic citizens, or most of them, must act a certain way and have a certain type of character in order to sustain the society that should be sustained, these ways and that character are in some sense better, more desirable, than others. Some ideologies (like Nazism) cannot be seriously practiced in liberal society but only played at; others, like those of unreflective or hierarchical religious communities, may have claims to toleration but not to social endorsement by authorities committed to democratic ideals.7 All theorists of liberal democratic virtue name their anti-liberal or anti-democratic enemies, with varying degrees of glee. 6. As noted by Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., Civic Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 213. This also means that political theory discussions of the liberaldemocratic virtues have essentially nothing in common with the recent revival of virtue ethics—a fact often missed, to great confusion. While the ‘virtue’ of ‘virtue ethics’ refers to the classical virtues (Aristotle, Stoic, or something else), which are supposed to conduce to the good or happiness of human beings generally, discussions of ‘virtue’ in contemporary political theory almost always follow the tradition of Machiavelli, Mandeville, and Montesquieu in proclaiming that the virtues good for the polity, and relevant in a political discussion, are quite independent of the human virtues (which may or may not remain relevant in other spheres). This is not to say that one has to regard the classical or Christian virtues as contrary or dangerous to the civic virtues that are good for liberal democracy. (For that view see Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Sophrosune: How a Virtue Can Become Socially Disruptive’, in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Euhling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein [eds.], Midwest Studies in Philosophy. XIII: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], pp. 1-11; Stanley Hauerwas, ‘The Difference of Virtue and the Difference It Makes: Courage Exemplified’, in Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn [eds.], Seedbeds of Virtue: Sources of Competence, Character, and Citizenship in American Society [Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1995], pp. 201-20.) That question is beyond the scope of this paper, though I admit to some skepticism towards the view that the classical and Christian virtues have any chance of becoming attractive to more than a tiny minority of any contemporary polity. 7. See, respectively, Macedo, Liberal Virtues, p. 260; Gutmann, ‘Undemocratic Education’, pp. 79-83. Galston’s rejection of neutrality is of course the most famous: see Liberal Purposes, esp. chapters 1, 4, and 5. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 210 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) Table 1. Liberal democratic virtue: four versions (paraphrases except for direct quotations marked as such) Galston8 Macedo9 For citizens: • courage (to fight in defense of country) • law-abidingness • loyalty (to society’s core principles) • independence • a work ethic • ‘moderate delay of gratification’ • (economic) adaptability • respect for others’ rights • enough judgment to assess politicians • restraint: not demanding too much of government For leaders: • patience • ‘capacity to forge a sense of common purpose’ • ability to resist the temptation to demagoguery (pandering to the short term) • strong persuasive skills to shrink ‘the gap between popular preference and wise action’ For both: • the habits of persuasion (speech and listening) • resistance to hypocrisy: a desire to put principles into practice Explicitly denies: • ‘duty to partici-pate actively…to systematically subordinate personal interest to the public good’ • tolerance • respect for rights • respect for persons • ability to ‘put oneself in the shoes of others’ • sympathy with others’ projects and commitments, leading to ‘self-examination, self-criticism, and experimentation’ • ‘critical detachment’ • friendliness and openness to strangers 8. 9. 10. 11. Gutmann10 • honesty • industriousness • ‘insight’ (as opposed to ‘insensitivity’) • ‘kindness’ (as opposed to ‘cruelty’) • toleration (especially religious toleration) • ‘mutual respect for reasonable differences of moral opinion’, i.e. ‘willingness and (In limit or maximally ability to accord due intellectual and developed case:) moral regard to • autonomy, ‘selfmastery’, ‘self-control’ reasonable points of view that we cannot • ‘attachment…and ourselves accept as even altruistic regard correct’ for one’s fellow • nonviolence citizens’ • ‘the ability to • commitment to ‘public argument’ and a deliberate and refusal to accept public therefore to participate in acts that cannot be conscious social justified reproduction…to Political virtues: defend…personal (necessary to some degree for all citizens): and political • judicial: impartiality commitments, and revise those that are • legislative: indefensible’ sympathy, dialogue, compromise [No distinct • executive: ability, political or after thought, to act leadership virtues decisively, neither noted] dithering nor being swayed by others Walzer11 (explicitly attempts an ‘exhaustive’ list of ‘common expectations’ of ‘citizens in general but also of American citizens in particular, members of a liberal democracy’) • ‘commitment or loyalty…to the republic’— ‘patriotism’ in this sense. • willingness to ‘defend [one’s] country’ in war (not unconditionally) • ‘lawabidingness’ and ‘decorum’ or ‘civility’ • ‘toleran[ce]’ or ‘toleration’ • ‘active participation in political life’ Galston, Liberal Purposes, pp. 221-27. Macedo, Liberal Virtues, pp. 266ff. Gutmann, ‘Undemocratic Education’, pp. 74-79. Walzer, ‘Civility and Civic Virtue’, pp. 54-72. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 211 This paper makes three further claims that will try to enrich liberal virtue theory by illuminating its current state, explaining the sources of the disagreements that plague it, and fleshing out both its uses and its limitations. First: liberal-democratic virtue theorists ought to, but often do not, distinguish between the core virtues needed for liberal democracy literally to survive, and the ideal virtues needed for it to do maximally well—i.e. achieve certain values prized by the theorist in question but not necessarily by other theorists or the mass of citizens. At some point, every liberal democratic virtue theorist stops talking about what helps liberal democracy survive and talks of what makes it ‘flourish’ or ‘thrive’; avoids the slow build-up of ‘pathologies’ that endanger it; is necessary for its possessing ‘moral and political strength’; or makes for a ‘vibrant’ democracy, a ‘successful’ nation, the survival ‘and progress’ of a democratic people.12 Once one describes the body politic this way, in terms of its health (or welfare), judgments rapidly become more debatable than they would if one talked merely of its survival.13 The statements, ‘The patient is dead’, ‘The patient is gravely ill’ and ‘The patient has not maximized her physical and mental health’ involve decreasing degrees of certainty. At their best, the virtue theorists explicitly distinguish between necessary, core virtues and desirable, ideal ones.14 But the temptation is great to elide the difference. Some writers assert that a value, goal or virtue is part of the core when few in fact believe in it and many liberal democracies get along without it.15 Others rightly claim that there is wide agreement on liberal and democratic norms involving elections and rights but then slip casually and with insufficient argument into the assertion that a wider ideal (such as deliberation, or participation) is part of this core of agreement, or necessary to it.16 Still others simply gloss over the distinction between the minimal set of virtues that lets liberal democracies survive and the larger set that makes 12. See respectively Macedo, Liberal Virtues, p. 266 and Stephen P. Macedo, ‘Transformative Constitutionalism and the Case of Religion: Defending the Moderate Hegemony of Liberalism’, Political Theory 26.1 (February 1998), pp. 56-80 (58, 59, 65); Galston, Liberal Purposes, p. 217; Gutmann, ‘Undemocratic Education’, p. 80; Stephen L. Carter, Integrity (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997), pp. 59, 230; idem, Civility (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), p. 209. 13. As pointed out by Richard Flathman in his reply to Macedo, ‘It All Depends...on How one Understands Liberalism’, Political Theory 26.1 (February 1998), pp. 81-84 (82). 14. Exemplary in this respect are Spragens, Civic Liberalism, pp. xii, 128, 222; Stephen P. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 10-11, and to some extent Richard Flathman, Willful Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 211. The latter two authors, however, maintain the distinction inconsistently. 15. An example is Gutmann’s use of the Deweyan ideal of ‘conscious social reproduction’, in ‘Undemocratic Education’, pp. 41-47. 16. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust: compare pp. 173 and 327 n. 17 to pp. 174 and 197, where dissent from a deliberative interpretation of liberal democracy is associated with opposition to liberal democracy itself. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 212 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) them flourish according to a particular ideal.17 Often, the asserted relationship is simply left vague: the precise relationship between what makes liberal democracy simply viable and what makes it maximally attractive is left insufficiently specified. By paying attention to the core/ideal distinction, we can recognize the real force of claims that certain minimal virtues are needed if democracies are to remain stable, while becoming less tempted to use this language of necessity in support of political programs and citizen dispositions that are perfectly valid but by no means matters of survival. This brings up the second thesis, that virtues should be seen pluralistically. If we are viewing virtues instrumentally, there is every reason to morally allow, and empirically expect, that different political jobs or positions will call for different sets of virtues. Different politicians should be seen as embodying different virtues—partly because no single role can accomplish all that we want politicians to perform; partly because politicians, like all people, are different from one another and legitimately seek positions that fit comfortably with those differences; and partly because politicians differ in the constituencies, institutions, and social forces to whom they are responsible. More relevant to this paper, the virtues of citizens, often assumed to be roughly congruent to those of politicians, need not be so at all: the health of the polity simply turns much more directly on what those active in politics do and why they do it than on the actions and dispositions of the average citizen—whose entire absence from politics might not even be noticed. Finally, political virtues are episodic. Lay political commentary commonly notes that different leaders are suited to different times; Machiavelli praised republics (as opposed to principalities) for maximizing our flexibility in this regard.18 In current terms, the same insight can be seen as a corollary of the last two points. Each distinct conception of liberal democracy may be partisan or even eccentric most of the time, but crucial in a particular kind of crisis. Walzer has stressed that even ‘modern’ societies, in which politics lacks primacy most of the time for most citizens, call for ‘ancient’, participatory kinds of citizenship ‘at least intermittently’ in the context of movements that may expand the scope or the content of civic rights and entitlements.19 For similar reasons, Sharon Krause has written of ‘liberal democracy’s need for heroic qualities of character—if only on occasion and only in a few’.20 We might add that qualities that may not be ‘heroic’ but are still unusual, specialized, and non-universal are also needed on occasion for just the same reason. 17. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, pp. x, 7, 20, 132, 151; Carter, Integrity, pp. 59, 238; idem, Civility, pp. 209, 282. 18. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1531]), pp. 239-41. 19. Michael Walzer, ‘Citizenship’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211-19 (217-18). 20. Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 11; compare pp. xii, 185. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 213 1. Pluralism as Partisanship: Necessary Cores vs. Optional Ideals Discerning Core Virtues: Empiricism, Consensus, and Overlapping Intuitionism It is easy to imagine that some citizen virtues could be necessary for the survival of liberal democracy, while others might be less necessary but conducive to its perfection or flourishing. It is harder to find a method of distinguishing the two. Those who see liberal-democratic virtue theory as a purely empirical hypothesis must expose their theories to standards of social-science reasoning and proof that they probably cannot meet. Those who assert as their core those virtues that most citizens actually regard as important beg important questions about why this should be the standard, as well as ignoring the disagreement on specifics that agreement on abstract concepts usually masks. I shall argue instead for a forensic standard analogous to that of courtroom arguments: the best available guide to the core is a study of which arguments are repeatedly made, by many advocates, and never rebutted. (i) Empirical hypotheses. Galston describes his list of liberal virtues as those ‘instrumental to the preservation and operation of the liberal polity’. And he means ‘instrumental’ in the sense of concrete causality: these are matters ‘not of logical entailments within liberal theory, but rather of empirical hypotheses concerning the relationship between social institutions and individual character’. While ‘not every citizen must possess these virtues’, ‘most citizens must’ (emphasis added). He admits that his evidence to support the hypotheses is ‘at most fragmentary’, and that ‘an adequate test…would require a far more systematic historical and comparative inquiry’.21 This surely qualifies as a sober, non-ideological criterion for discerning the core liberal virtues. Andrew Lister has argued that Galston proposes this test precisely to transcend both the controversies of communitarian virtue theories grounded in accounts of the good life and the problems of accommodating diverse visions of the good that characterize (for instance) John Rawls’s ‘reasonable pluralism’ and its ‘burdens of judgment’.22 But the turn to pure empiricism raises more questions than first appear. It is hard to measure empirically the ‘preservation and operation’ of a democratic polity, especially a stable one. If we could operationalize this variable, it would be even harder to measure the other variable—citizen virtues—since these are by hypothesis neither expressed attitudes nor overt behaviors but inner states. If we could operationalize both virtue and liberal-democratic stability, the questions of causal inference that would have to be addressed in order to draw firm conclusions are (Lister notes) familiar to social science but more fraught than most 21. Galston, Liberal Purposes, pp. 228, 220. 22. Andrew Lister, ‘Understanding the Burdens of Judgment: Moral Pluralism, Causal Ambiguity, and the Limits of Consequentialist Public Reason’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001). Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 214 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) theorists tend to realize.23 Finally, we might add, ‘systematic historical and comparative inquiry’ might lead us to be much more wary of even ‘commonsense’ American assumptions than one might think; the habits and practices that undergird (or at least coexist with) stable democracy in Switzerland, Japan, or Costa Rica are often shockingly unfamiliar to US observers. Given these difficulties, it is not surprising that Galston’s work does not consist of the same undertaking that he seems to promise. Instead of showing how liberal virtues are necessary for democracy, his empirical evidence argues for the claim that certain social institutions have a harmful effect on the liberal virtues—especially the bourgeois virtues of responsibility or independence, which Galston famously argues to be undermined by single-parent families.24 The specification of these virtues is itself controversial. In particular, Galston’s version of individualism implicitly makes the ‘bourgeois’ assumption that individuals should regard themselves as responsible for their own economic futures rather than the social-democratic assumption that individuals are at the mercy of large impersonal forces and require social guarantees if real choice is to be possible.25 But even stipulating that current family policies harm independence, the point at issue was supposed to be that this in turn would harm the prospects of liberal democracy. For this causal claim Galston nowhere provides any evidence.26 This is perhaps because such evidence seems unlikely to exist: while the liberal democracies differ drastically in their family policies and structures, none seems in danger of collapse or even serious damage to their operation—unless one means by the latter the kind of controversial and non-instrumental value judgment that the empirical view of virtues was supposed to sidestep. (ii) Overlapping values. Perhaps in view of these difficulties, Stephen Carter bases his account of the democratic virtues on an existing social consensus 23. Lister, ‘Understanding the Burdens of Judgment’, chapters 4–6, contains an excellent account of this. 24. William A. Galston, ‘Causes of Declining Well-Being Among U.S. Children’, Aspen Quarterly 5.1 (Winter 1993), pp. 52-77; idem, ‘Divorce American Style’, Public Interest (Summer 1996), pp. 12-26. 25. Different assessments of whether the traditional family entails more or less ‘dependence’ for women than state welfare schemes produce also come into play. See Iris Marion Young, ‘Mothers, Citizenship, and Independence: A Critique of Pure Family Values’, in her Intersecting Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 114-33, and Lister, ‘Understanding the Burdens of Judgment’, chapter 6. I would claim that while Young is right to question Galston’s assumptions about the virtues of paid work, she fails to consider that most of his points could be sustained if we talked instead about expecting from every citizen socially useful work. This might even lead us to consider government payments for precisely the neglected home care workers—especially women—on whose behalf Young wishes to criticize Galston’s traditional values. 26. This is true even in the article that appears to promise a direct causal argument for the effects of family structure on politics: William A. Galston, ‘A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family’, The Responsive Community 1.1 (Winter 1990), pp. 14-26. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 215 rather than on empirical causal effects. What he calls ‘the American Core’ is based on ‘a core set of moral understanding…that most of us accept’, including ‘trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, caring, fairness, and citizenship’.27 At this level of generality, few would object to the list. The problem is that disputes over the good life do not take place at this level of generality. Once these virtues were further specified, heated controversies would immediately result: ‘responsibility’ comes in both a conservative version stressing a willingness to own up to one’s actions and answer for them, and a progressive version stressing the practice of ‘paying attention’ to the ‘hurt’ caused by ‘thoughtless habit and ill-considered convention’.28 That ‘fairness’ (i.e. justice) and ‘citizenship’ can be constructed in different, even opposite ways should not need demonstration. Likewise, Carter’s attempt to place the Golden Rule and an ‘ethic of loving one’s neighbor’ into the Core29 might track a description of American values and ‘Judeo-Christian’ values generally if not for Thomas Nagel’s reminder that ‘mere altruism…does not provide a common standpoint from which everyone can reach the same conclusions’ but ‘generates as many conflicting standpoints as there are conceptions of the good’.30 A teenaged libertine might be persuaded to endorse sexual promiscuity as a good for others if he likes it for himself—but this is not the application of the Golden Rule that Carter would want taught in schools. (iii) I would therefore recommend a forensic theory of the core virtues. Those virtues are likely to be necessary for the operation of liberal democracy that several authors claim to be necessary and none seriously contests. The unrebutted claim that liberal democracies could not get on without these virtues will represent ‘common sense’ in both its literal meaning (overlapping intuitions) and its usual meaning (something so obvious that it is hard to think of a serious objection). Accounts of these virtues will tend to be unrebutted because they rest on causal mechanisms—relating their absence to democratic collapse—that are so clear that they seem obvious (but are, for that reason, not always noted). Core Virtues The core virtues, on this account, will be few. I have been able to find only three. 27. Carter, Integrity, pp. 60-61. Carter takes these six virtues from Michael Josephson’s ‘“six pillars” of good character’; the list has been endorsed by ‘some three hundred American communities’ (p. 60). Carter implies that he would also like to teach other virtues, including respect for property and letting others act as they will ‘in the privacy of their own homes’, but admits that these would be ‘more controversial’. 28. Lee Siegel, ‘How to Raise a Good Liberal’, Atlantic Monthly 227.1 (January 1996), pp. 104-108, citing competing books of virtues by William Bennett on the one hand and Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl on the other. 29. Carter, Integrity, p. 238. 30. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 164. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 216 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) (i) Toleration. Tolerance or toleration is often called the central virtue of liberal democracy.31 The above authors do not dissent from this: it appears in all their lists.32 It can of course be defined in many ways. But the spirit of overlapping intuition should favor Galston’s minimalist definition, which rejects the equality of all life plans, endorses ‘the proposition that some ways of life can be known to be superior to others’, but still seeks to base personal conduct on the idea that ‘the pursuit of the better course should be (and in many cases has to be) a consequence of education or persuasion rather than of coercion’.33 The opposite of toleration in this sense is not mere narrowness of mind, but a propensity to use force to make others recognize one’s own superiority. If this propensity were prevalent, liberal democracy not only would quickly deteriorate but would not currently exist. (ii) Nonviolence. This appears explicitly only in Gutmann’s list, but would seem directly analogous to toleration: those prone to settle political disputes by force endanger the polity for obvious Hobbesian reasons. (Those who think fear of state coercion alone can solve this problem certainly depart from Hobbes, who wanted the authority of the sovereign and the priority of peace to be thoroughly internalized.) Self-defense being a different matter, perhaps we should adopt instead Stephen Carter’s more specific condemnation of ‘violence based on difference’ and ‘violence resulting from a closed mind’.34 In any case, while an attachment to the peaceful resolution of disputes may seem too obvious to be worth mentioning, the danger posed to society by people who lack it is neither trivial nor unknown. (iii) Democratic sportsmanship. This is perhaps a strange term for a simple concept: democratic citizens must be good losers, willing to accept with good grace and no loss of commitment to the polity that the democratic game will not always go their way. The ethos of continuous democratic consent and 31. Some moral philosophers contest this claim, or even doubt whether toleration plays much of a role in contemporary societies (see several of the essays in David Heyd [ed.], Toleration: An Elusive Virtue [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996]). But this is only because they narrow the meaning of ‘toleration’ so strictly that many of the functions’ common-sense attributes to toleration are assigned by these authors to other virtues. If one likes, one can call the core virtue ‘that complex of attitudes, virtues, and behaviors that ordinary usage commonly but sloppily refers to with the single name “toleration”’. I would like to use ‘tolerance’ for the attitude or sentiment and ‘toleration’ for the practice or policy. But as this usage seems to be eccentric, I shall not press it. 32. Robert Paul Wolff calls tolerance (which he places in all capitals) ‘the virtue of the modern pluralist democracy which has emerged in contemporary America...that state of mind and condition of society which enables a pluralist democracy to function well and to realize the ideal of pluralism’—even as he opposes virulently both the state of mind and the pluralist form of democracy. This makes clear that one can attribute instrumental virtues even to those whose ends one opposes. Robert Paul Wolff, ‘Beyond Tolerance’, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 3-4. 33. Galston, Liberal Purposes, p. 222. 34. Carter, Integrity, p. 238. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 217 dissent rests, says Judith Shklar, on the (accurate) belief among those who feel wronged by legal change that ‘on some other issue and on some other day their preferences and beliefs will prevail. You win some and you lose some’.35 And Stephen Carter, putting this in virtue language (but with a very Shklarian tone of self-restraint) calls on us to resist ‘the temptation…to place all our causes beyond the reach of democratic politics, lest some future majority disturb our work’.36 Again, this may seem obvious—and would hardly be worth noting, if not for the tendency of many arguments in contemporary ‘democratic theory’ to lead solely to a list of things that should not be subject to majority decision. But democratic sportsmanship, however awkward the name, remains unrebutted as a core virtue, and Carter is surely right that if we lose it altogether we literally ‘cease to be a democracy’.37 It is no accident that commitment to it was once a hallmark of tests for democratic attitudes. To the extent that contemporary democratic theorists lack this virtue, we should perhaps seriously re-examine our own commitment to the political regime we live under. This is a short list, and—I would argue—a more or less complete one. Other allegedly core virtues are either combinations of those above38 or may simply not be as necessary to the survival and operation of democracy as their proponents (perhaps thoughtlessly) claim. These latter virtues will conduce to a particular ideal: a vision or view of democratic citizenship, which makes liberal democracy more exciting to contemplate and easier to make sacrifices for, but not something that must animate and drive most citizens in common most of the time. Pluralism and Ideal Virtues These separate ideals will operate pluralistically in at least two senses. First, they are matters on which reasonable liberal-democratic citizens can disagree. They may mirror the religious and moral disagreements that Rawls and his followers call matters of ‘reasonable pluralism’.39 But even if we doubt the relevance of such pluralism to virtue theory—for instance, if we follow Bayle in suspecting that citizens’ behavior is related loosely at best to their moral and religious beliefs40—these ideal virtues will be pluralistic in the sense of 35. Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 122. 36. Carter, Integrity, p. 221. 37. Carter, Integrity, p. 221. 38. E.g. minimal legalism, the lack of a propensity to engage in revenge or honor killings rather than appealing to the law for redress. See e.g. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1820]), pp. 129-31. 39. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 35-38, 58-66. 40. Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert Bartlett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), Eighth Letter, §§133-60, pp. 165-99. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 218 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) being relative to a particular ethos or social position (or both). For instance, while Judith Shklar is widely seen as naming hypocrisy as a liberal virtue (or at least no vice), her gestures in this direction are restricted to a particular sort of case. Someone like Benjamin Franklin needed hypocrisy because he combined extraordinary talents in every area of endeavor with a desire to take a strong public role.41 If he had been either less of a genius or less of a joiner, he could have lived without hypocrisy; there is nothing illiberal or undemocratic about either the frank mediocrity or the Newtonian genius who lives as something of a recluse with contempt for most people (and is demonstrably no less useful to the public or to liberalism for all that).42 In general, those for whom a combination of personal qualities, social position, and prevailing ideology makes their relation to the general democratic ethos something of a problem will find distinct social ideals invaluable aids, as professionals need their special codes and training in how to follow them. Others will not need them, nor will society miss their not living by them. Finally, though this gets complicated, the pluralism of virtue ideals can operate at a meta-level. Civility is a core democratic virtue, which governs how we should deal with our disagreements on other virtues, if and only if one regards ‘shared moral norms’ and being ‘morally united’ as the necessary basis for social cohesion, and ‘moral disunity [as] the ultimate destroyer of any polity, even ours’.43 But to ask what on earth is so impressive about agreement and unity? When we are told that we need—all the millions of us—a national purpose, that even a ‘damnable ideology’ is more effective than none, we may well ask, ‘Why?’ and ‘Effective for what?’ Why do we need an ‘identity’ as a people? Just what means are to be used to achieve it?44 is to challenge the very foundations of civility and to suggest that the nonChristian liberal’s virtue when faced with disagreement is a combination of frank acknowledgement of the disagreement and a strong preference for 41. ‘That a public man should try to make himself acceptable to his fellow citizens did not strike Franklin as despicable; on the contrary, he carefully taught himself to hide much of his native character…. Persuasion is not natural; it requires a great deal of effort, and in a man as superior to his fellows as Franklin was, it takes exactly what he described. It was a mark of Franklin’s intelligence that he always knew what was called for and could do what he thought right’. Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press [Belknap Press], 1984), pp. 72, 73 (emphasis added in both cases). 42. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, p. 85, recognizes that an anti-hypocritical attitude can be functional for those prone to either political isolation or a salutary if annoying brand of moral critique. For an excellent brief account of Franklin’s determination throughout his life to combine genius with extreme sociability see Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 43. See Carter, Civility, p. 50. Carter adduces both sociological (Parsons, Durkheim) and theological (J.C. Murray) sources for this claim—but of course both are controversial. 44. Judith N. Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1964]), pp. 100-101. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 219 leaving alone. The virtue of civility stands or falls with the proposition that citizens of a liberal democratic polity ‘are to look on our society as a community’45 devoted to moral education—as opposed to aiming merely at peace, toleration, and leaving more stringent ideals to the hurly-burly of social debate and individual choice. Occasional Inspiration and the Value of Ideals Each ideal remains a glittering project, attractive at least to some. As such, each is a fit subject for partisan and ideological battle. To the extent that one ideal succeeds in such a battle, it will become increasingly prevalent or popular as a rationale for liberal democracy (but still one among many). If its popularity becomes nearly universal, it will become part of a new core—perhaps of virtues appropriate to what will then seem a new regime, as toleration is a core virtue in liberal democracies but not theocratic empires. There is nothing wrong with seeing liberalism and/or democracy as a project, and surely both liberal and democratic polities must allow a broad scope to those who advocate, within a basic scheme of rights and respect for diversity, various accounts of what the liberal democratic project should be. But there is disagreement about what the project is, and we should admit that the basic institutions of liberal democracy demonstrably go on, without perishing, even when many purported liberal virtues are absent. One should also admit, however, that some liberal and democratic ideal is probably required for accomplishing any serious political task. We can disagree on what makes for the richest form of liberal democracy while agreeing that a politics that stood for only peace and toleration would be too thin to attract our allegiance and too shallow to inspire action. A politics based only on the core would be too lukewarm towards politics all the time, and would lack the unusual insights and sources of motivation that liberal democracy needs at particular times. The liberal-virtue approach to motivation thus lies between the neutralist claim that citizens need only observe one another’s rights and the civic republican claim that all must be actively attached to an ideal of what the republic is all about. No single ideal is in fact uniquely deserving of praise, nor is belief in any one of them a necessary object of public consensus. But it still may be useful, if politicians are to face the checks that only a moderately active citizenry can ensure, for most citizens to be animated by what each in turn perceives to be both a desirable ideal and one that is widely shared. (It is natural in a democracy for the perception that an ideal is popular to confer psychological force and moral prestige.) What does not matter so much for this purpose is whether the ideal is in fact either desirable or the object of consensus. To paraphrase what President Eisenhower said of religion,46 citizens will not take an interest in 45. Carter, Integrity, p. 237. 46. ‘[O]ur government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judo-[sic]Christian concept, but it Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 220 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) their civic duties unless motivated by a deeply held ideal of liberal democracy—and it does not matter which ideal it is. What is universally desirable, and the necessary object of consensus, is only the core. Objections: Plural Values and Partial Recognition Instrumental arguments for belief are commonly accused of being selfdefeating, incoherent, or elitist. The argument for incoherence denies that one can consistently live by an ideal while simultaneously believing that other ideals are equally good for civic purposes and have just as much to recommend them. The argument for self-defeat is even simpler: if it comes to be commonly believed that ideals are instrumentally rather than intrinsically valuable, the motivating force of those ideals will be lost or reduced. Because of these concerns, it may be supposed that the above argument will be made esoterically—call it ‘government house pluralism’47—so as not to undermine the forces it regards as salutary. But this could be regarded as both distastefully elitist and practically unsustainable. These arguments are often applied against moral theories, especially Sidgwick’s utilitarianism, which he himself thought should be esoteric lest useful moral norms be undermined by knowing their true grounds (and exceptions).48 But they have less force when applied to conceptions of virtue. For the latter concern not universal moral principles but accounts of many different ways of acting, all of which are salutary compared to having only the core liberal virtues, but none of which is compulsory. There is therefore no reason to suppose that the core-ideal distinction is self-undermining. The advocates of experiments in living, ideological campaigns, or moral movements know perfectly well that their preferred way of acting is not to everyone’s taste: the knowledge that this is so, and that minds must be changed by example, adds to the motivating force of the ideal rather than diminishing it.49 Similarly, there is no incoherence. There may be something strange about asserting a factual belief in a pluralistic mode. To believe a fact is, at least on some accounts of the matter, to believe in its truth. One could even make the same claim regarding religious or moral principles that one regards as valid for all and applying to all.50 But to believe it desirable that people should must be a religion that all men are created equal’. ‘President-Elect Says Soviet Demoted Zhukov Because of Their Friendship’, New York Times, 23 December 1952, p. 16. 47. Compare Bernard Williams, ‘The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics’, in idem, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 153-71. 48. Henry, Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1982 [1907]), Book IV, chapter 5, §3, pp. 485-92. 49. In contrast, willingness to uphold the core—to defend the polity against imminent and violent threats to its survival—really might be undermined by a thoroughly relativist attitude towards the goodness of the core. 50. ‘[T]o put the point simply, to say you believe something is to assert that you believe it is true; and to assert that something is true is necessarily to assert –or at least to imply— Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 221 pursue a certain way of acting because such action is instrumentally conducive to the instantiation of democracy that one finds most compelling (and that one admits is not required as a matter of duty) need not involve any transcendent truth claims at all. On the contrary, such beliefs are likely to involve too much historical relativity and sociological uncertainty for that—in addition to the possibility of normative dissent.51 For these reasons, the doctrine need not be esoteric either, not only because what moral theorists say has little influence on public attitudes anyway (though that is also true), but because it is demonstrably possible, indeed very common, to advocate a partisan position on how life should be lived while being very glad that not everybody is required to think the same thing. Here again, the contrast with religion is revealing. To the extent that the saving of souls is at issue, the religious believer may be required on some level to think that the world would be better if all believed. (Christian charity, at any rate, rules out the proposition that some should go to Hell so that believers may be confirmed in their faith.) But belief in a combination of political positions and characteristic ways of living that go with them—in conservative Republicanism, say, or Green politics—is fully compatible with the conviction that the polity as a whole would go worse if there were no opposing ideas in the field. Even the (generally mistaken) belief that one’s preferred ideal embodies an all-but-universal-consensus can typically be worded in pluralistic terms: one’s opponents are ‘outside the mainstream’ or ‘fringe’ rather than evil, dangerous, or fifth columnists. Pluralistic politics is grounded in the difference between wanting more people in the polity to recognize (and more important, follow) one’s preferred way of life and demanding, or even hoping, that everyone do so. that other people who are interested in believing the truth should believe it too. Hence, to affirm something is necessarily to prescribe it, at least implicitly’. Steven D. Smith, ‘Barnette’s Big Blunder’, Chicago-Kent Law Review 78 (2003), pp. 625-67 (630). Though matters are obviously more complicated, one can grant the point for the moment given that it does not apply to the argument here. 51. There are, of course, accounts of the virtues—especially religious and/or classical ones—that do not see the virtues in functional terms. Each of these might well be incompatible with the theoretical scheme described here. But then, religious and classical accounts are often more or less self-consciously outside the liberal-democratic virtue debate as glossed here: that is, they resist, often angrily, the idea that the virtues should be valued even in part for their social utility, and often go out of their way to stress the conflicts between (the religious) virtues and getting along with others. See, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), chapter 3; idem, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), chapter 3. Whether a given account of virtue is a threat to the liberal-democratic pluralism of ways of life depends on the level of political coercion that is contemplated. One should make sure that there are core violations before condemning even marginally liberal virtue theories too quickly. The search for a society based on moral consensus is harmless, and can even have salutary effects, as long as its advocates respond nonviolently and tolerantly when brought the news that this quixotic project continues to fail. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 222 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) 2. Pluralism and Circumstance: The Time for Loyalty and the Time for Dissent It is difficult for most moral theories to explain why both loyalty and dissent can be virtuous. If we stress the priority of moral principles, it seems that dissent is always required, because every existing polity condones massive departures from the moral principles that most prevalent philosophical systems contain. If, on the other hand, we stress the need to put aside personal moral views, for the sake either of peace (Hobbes) or shared and deep identities (modern communitarians), deference to the sovereign, or the popular ethos, seems always required—and dissent allowable only to the accidental extent that the sovereign, or the ethos, happens to allow it. Contemporary moral pluralism provides a way out. Because every existing polity represents a compromise that balances incommensurable values, loyalty represents neither an excessive fear of strife nor a communitarian attraction to conformity but merely tough-mindedness and self-restraint. We should often accept the imperfection of existing moral compromises out of a recognition that ‘perfect’ political instantiations of the one or two principles that attract each of us most are almost certainly impossible and quite probably (considered at a distance) undesirable. But dissent then makes sense for exactly the same reason. If every polity is based on some balance between incommensurable values, there is nothing wrong with claiming that the existing balance is flawed. The status quo can give too much weight to one value and not enough to another, or may slight a given value altogether. To the extent that the latter is the case, it could be that the constitutional identity of a given polity ought to change quite fundamentally—and from a liberaldemocratic perspective there is no reason to oppose its doing so. It is not easy to keep both these truths in mind at once. The moral-pluralist approach to politics typically comes in ‘conservative’ forms, stressing loyalty, and ‘radical’ forms, stressing dissent. In the former camp we could place Hume and possibly Oakeshott; in the latter, Thomas Nagel and Harold Laski. But the cases of William Galston and Michael Walzer can serve as illustration. Putting them together reveals that liberal pluralism has resources for appreciating both loyalty and dissent. Loyalty, at first glance, seems illiberal. Some civic republicans, for example Charles Taylor, would say that any account of common virtues and common commitments that is ‘thick’ enough to recognize the dependence of free societies on the patriotism or solidarity that motivates their defense will be too thick to be compatible with liberal theories that stress the sufficiency of fair procedures.52 Neither Galston nor Walzer, however, intends to take the 52. Charles Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Nancy L. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 159-82. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 223 republican plunge. Galston defines loyalty, along with courage and lawabidingness, as a matter of what the collectivity pragmatically needs rather than what the individual deeply feels. Loyalty is, for him, one of the minimal ‘requisites of every political community’, not a sign of special solidarity— republican, democratic, or otherwise.53 Likewise, Walzer mentions willingness to fight in wars, as well as a more general loyalty to the republic, as something Americans rightly expect of one another—while maintaining, both in the same piece and in a direct reply to other work by Taylor, that the United States (as a nation of diverse immigrants very unlike Taylor’s Québec) lacks a common project.54 But if loyalty is not a matter of constitutive identity, it may appear to be ideal rather than core. A universal propensity to loyal service may be noble, at least according to some ideologies, but is it really necessary for a liberal democracy’s survival? An answer must start by recognizing that neither Galston’s defense of loyalty nor Walzer’s is either chauvinistic or antimodern. Galston’s case for loyalty draws on a skeptical, Berlinian moral pluralism; Walzer’s, on a less explicitly Berlinian but equally relativistic search for the preconditions for democratic persuasion given a particular society’s values. Galston’s argument for loyalty is particularly striking in its resemblance to arguments usually thought to entail liberal irony. Galston grants, in fact stresses, that because every society must strike moral compromises that it cannot fully defend, the common values on which minimal cohesion relies cannot survive rational or critical assessment ‘all the way down’. If this is so, a public norm in favor of constant critical re-examination will have only negative results: it will alienate typical citizens and cause them to withdraw allegiance, without pointing towards a solution that is ‘better’ than the original either pragmatically or morally. A kind of pluralist liberalism that refuses to regard public institutions and public deliberation as ‘architechtonic’ or automatically prior to private and social ends ‘tend[s] over time to satisfy more of the legitimate needs of [such regimes’] public and to generate more unforced, sustained loyalty than do other forms of political association’.55 Galston postulates as a matter of ‘philosophical anthropology’ that human beings come in very diverse types, such that no single set of purposes, imposed society-wide, will allow more than a small fraction to obtain ‘flourishing and satisfaction’.56 (The further assumption, implicit in all of Galston’s work and explicit in his attack on Gutmann and Thompson’s aspiration to ‘moral progress’, is that a norm of democratic deliberation cannot normally narrow this 53. Galston, Liberal Purposes, p. 221. 54. Walzer, ‘Civility and Civic Virtue’, p. 69; Michael Walzer, ‘Comment’, in Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 99-103. 55. William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 4. 56. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, pp. 59-60. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 224 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) diversity.57) In this way, Galston reasons backwards from the goodness of loyalty—of people identifying themselves with government’s purposes instead of feeling them an imposition—to the goodness of pluralism. Given human diversity as it irreducibly is, only a constitution based on systematic recognition of diversity can ensure loyalty. But the converse is also true: only the virtue of loyalty can, claims Galston, sustain such a constitution. If moral pluralism is true—if the values that rightly strike us as important are indeed all real and no single one is overriding—an extra increment of rational inquiry will not always yield improvement in our governing institutions or the moral premises that underlie them. In such a case, all constitutions are (as Galston says) value compromises, and embody with a degree of arbitrariness a persistent tendency to stress some values and slight others. If this picture is right, skepticism towards loyalty, a propensity constantly to call the balance of constitutional compromises into question, will always be tempting but rarely productive. The existing balance will always be subject to criticism, since it has no unique rational basis, but the response to such criticisms will be that, given inevitable tradeoffs, the consensus of our society has been to keep certain harms in place as the price of the goods we treasure. Constitutionalism, in fact, can be defined as ‘the selection of preferred goods and values’. Given ‘no single rationally compelling solution’ among value conflicts, ‘the incapacity of human reason to resolve fully many clashes among worthy values means that authoritative mechanisms for resolving disputes remain indispensable’. It is not true that we would need no government if men were angels.58 Loyalty is thus a response to the fact that good people disagree on fundamentals and must still live together. Galston stresses that this need not imply either automatic conservatism or the impossibility of making demonstrable improvements in the status quo.59 But the pluralist view of constitutionalism does make radical opposition to existing value compromises harder to justify: it entails a sort of theoretical counterpart of ‘loyal opposition’. Galston envisions ‘skeptical questioning’ of ‘principles of public culture’ as taking a few definable forms. (He seems to intend his statements as normative, though they sometimes take the form of predictions.) One may suggest that some principles are absurd applied to specific cases: for instance, a value of moral responsibility should not be imposed on the mentally disabled. One may claim incoherence: when two principles conflict in particular cases, we ‘may have no choice but to think for ourselves’. Or one may (here Galston seems to apply a form of ‘reflective equilibrium’, without using the phrase) say that applying the public culture in a certain case is morally outrageous, though intellectually coherent. In egregious cases, ‘universal ordinary morality’ can be appealed to against public 57. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, pp. 119-20. 58. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, pp. 66-69; quotation on p. 68. 59. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, p. 90. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 225 principles.60 What is missing, intentionally, is radical questioning of the whole scheme. Pluralism makes this kind of questioning almost incoherent: to say that the American, British, or Australian constitution is morally bad is to provoke the response, ‘and what can you demonstrate to be better’? Given that all constitutions embody some values and slight others, no fairly decent one can be bad in an absolute sense. We now get an idea of what Galstonian loyalty might look like: a prima facie attachment to existing value compromises, not out of an illusion that they are unimpeachable or even wise, but out of recognition that proposed reforms will not make things perfect. Respect for ‘the ensemble of practical principles that gives each political community its distinct identity’61 is, we might say, like acceptance of the set of rules that currently constitute a sport or game. Every sport and game showcases some human excellences and neglects others, but achieving proficiency in anything requires accepting the rules of a given game rather than trying to create a new game that is supposed, unrealistically, to embody all potentially valuable activities.62 Balance in one’s life (to build on Galston’s point) would then be achieved by choosing the activities that express one’s talents (as a diverse polity allows, by allowing a huge range of pursuits); engaging in different activities so that a variety of faculties are developed; and in some cases urging reforms of an activity that still leave it recognizably itself, as playing chess with time limits affects the quality and tenor of play but not the basic strategy. Disloyalty could then be a sign that one does not recognize the limits of self and world enough to benefit from the playing of any game. Even taking Galston as sympathetically as possible, and granting his pluralist analysis, the link between pluralism and loyalty still seems too weak. One can recognize the need for value compromises, even the provisional worth of each of many possible attempts to strike such compromises, without endorsing every possible compromise as representing the best balance or even necessarily a good one. The former involves basic democratic respect and a respect for political limits; the latter, too much unwarranted faith. First, the list of values stressed by a particular society may be (unlike the rules of chess) controversial. Galston mentions a list of American values that includes ‘a kind of social egalitarianism, libertarianism, commitment to equal opportunity and personal responsibility, and mistrust of authority (including government authority)’.63 He leaves out altogether democracy (the assumption that all should have equal political power), and Millian or creative individualism. 60. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, pp. 77-78. 61. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, p. 77. 62. Compare Macedo, ‘Transformative Constitutionalism’, p. 75: ‘It is likely that no political order, including our own, can be a home to all good things’. 63. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, p. 77. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 226 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) Theorists can of course disagree about how to specify American values— such disagreement being the whole point of the ‘core’/’ideal’ distinction—but the disagreement presents a practical problem here. We might say that loyalty is asserted to be part of the core but its specification necessarily involves an ideal. For loyalty, if it is to guide action and not be a mere word, must always be loyalty to something; to demand loyalty is to demand allegiance to the prevalent balance of values understood in a certain way that is specific, and therefore controversial.64 Those wanting to be ‘loyal Americans’ (or Britons, or French citizens) might be genuinely perplexed about what this means. But this being the case, loyalty starts to seem either dangerous rather than useful to democratic preservation—or else useful as a means to (productive) ferment rather than stability. For loyalty might motivate different sets of citizens who are motivated by loyalty to act vigorously in defense of different and clashing stories of what the polity is supposed to stand for. And each set of citizens so motivated might in fact believe that it, rather than its opponents, best understands the need to keep a proper balance. Second, Galston’s opposition to hypocrisy in Liberal Purposes stands in tension with his defense of loyalty in his later work. The civil rights movement claimed that taking ‘social egalitarianism’ seriously entailed radical, not incremental, revisions to how Americans understood liberty and suspicion of government. The Galstonian possibility of claiming ‘incoherence’—which provokes the conclusion, always reluctant, that we must ‘think for ourselves’— does not capture the force of moments of civic agitation, which bring up very different kinds of charges. The Civil Rights and women’s movements have claimed not that existing value compromises did not help us strike a constitutional balance, but that they did strike a balance that was morally indefensible and yet had been long tolerated (even cherished). Finally, the list of values that we recognize as part of the balance can change over time. All moral traditions are selectively chosen from the store of past opinions—and have to be, if they are to respond to new social conditions and the value claims to which they give rise. What we mean by individualism is not what nineteenth-century liberals meant. Liberals have come to accept government regulation of business practices, old age pensions, and greater or lesser amounts of welfare as consistent with liberty, and had they not done so we would probably not now enjoy a liberal regime. 64. The larger point here is that when virtues are understood instrumentally, the claim that a virtue is desirable will always be associated with the claim that a certain value should govern the polity (at least in part). Citizens must have quality x so that the polity can live by value y (or display characteristic z—which in turn is desirable only by the yardstick of y). It can even be tempting to give virtues the same names as values: a society devoted to glory needs glorious citizens, and so on. But in fact, as various advocates of a ‘division of moral labor’ have noted (e.g. Nagel, Equality and Partiality, chapter 6), this does not follow. A highly egalitarian society can operate by letting the state redistribute while individuals, as long as they pay taxes, look out mostly for themselves. It is magical thinking to suppose that a society’s collective decisions must track the virtues citizens try to live by. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 227 The price of liberty is eternal accommodation—not loyalty to a set of compromises that no longer serves us well. In general: in the course of defending loyalty to current constitutions and value balances, Galston conflates two claims: (1) that conflicts of value are unavoidable: only a fanatic or a malcontent abjures compromise and demands satisfaction in all spheres; and (2) that all the major moral arguments in our society that currently involve value clashes reflect such wise and necessary compromise. The latter seems unlikely in the extreme: our capacity for selfdelusion and willful blindness in the face of uncomfortable claims is too vast. And because it is vast, claims to loyalty only take us so far: loyalty to sagacious balancing is consistent with radical claims that some aspects of the polity are not well balanced at all. Walzer’s loyalty is quite different. It is loyalty not to a set of value compromises but ‘to the republic’—patriotism—and his definition of patriotism is so relativistic as to strain the bounds of that virtue. His story of what patriotism means (not quite an argument) seems more a matter of logical entailment than of moral judgment. To be a citizen of a polity is to be attached to what the polity regards as the requirements of citizenship. For Walzer this is, famously, relative: civic rights and duties vary across eras, social conditions, and cultural traditions. Loyalty to Athens meant support for a common public culture; loyalty to America means support for freedom of religion.65 Less famously, loyalty for Walzer is to a great extent optional: those truly alienated from mainstream political institutions should be allowed voluntarily to enter a lesser civic status, akin to resident alienship, whereby they would renounce temporarily or permanently both some of their rights (voting) and some of their obligations (in particular, military service).66 The argument is almost tautological: every patriot is a patriot (though not everyone need be one). One pays one’s loyalty, or not, and takes one’s choice. Both aspects of Walzer’s loyalty seem to be driven by consent. Individually, I may accept or reject the terms of normal democratic citizenship; collectively, each society works out over time what those terms are. Michael Hardimon has claimed, following Hegel, that duty to the State is a ‘noncontractual’ role obligation, not a matter of choice.67 Walzer rejects this. For him, citizenship and collective duty are matters of choice. His loyalty resembles Hardimon’s cases of contractual role obligations: no one is required to become a lawyer, but to choose lawyering (or citizenship) is to accept a role with obligations partly set by others. 65. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 79 et passim. 66. Michael Walzer, ‘Political Alienation and Military Service’, in idem, Obligations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 99-119. The text summary oversimplifies: Walzer is troubled by the conclusion and offers it very tentatively. 67. Michael Hardimon, ‘Role Obligations’, Journal of Philosophy 91.7 (1994), pp. 333-63. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 228 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) Walzer’s apparent relativism, his call for all critics to be ‘connected’ to the values of the society towards which they make claims, has been widely attacked for not recognizing the possible claims of universal values and for assuming more consensus within each society than in fact exists.68 Yet Walzer’s point, we must remember, is about virtues and obligations, not the ultimate source of moral truth. And turning to the question of what citizens ought to do gives the relativism more sense. There are limits to what counts as good citizenship: even a religious dissenter must, if he or she wants political influence (and not just to be left alone), engage with more widely held views. The demand that critics address widely held values does not rule out either revolution or withdrawal. It merely limits what people may do while claiming the prerogatives of those who play politics by the rules. The question, then, is how much loyalty is required of a dissenter who wants neither the status of the citizen-politician nor that of the revolutionary nor that of the one who withdraws—who wants to claim all the status of a citizen but not all of the shared meanings thereof. Here Walzer’s theory seems to be silent, and calls for development along the lines of what Nancy Rosenblum calls ‘shifting involvements’.69 We should allow that citizens may alternate periods of hibernation or exile, when their alienation from common values places them beyond the scope of political influence, with periods of intense involvement when the polity changes moods and is open to new value claims. In fact, it is citizens who take public affairs most seriously—no doubt more seriously than most, too seriously for their commitment to be widely shared—who are likely to alternate in this way. We should not try to drive them into either the conformist loyalty that would dull their dissent or the permanent exile that would deprive us of their voice. But with shifting involvements might come shifting civic honor. Those who proclaim alienation from common values effectively proclaim a willingness to have their opinions trade at a discount among those who uphold those values. In the terms of this paper, both loyalty and dissent would then be both pluralistic and episodic. Each would be only one virtue among many; they could not easily be displayed by the same person at the same time but both could easily be present in the polity at the same time, and differentially prevalent at different times. Finally, both loyalty and dissent might be virtues that must be reigned in out of respect for core virtues. The loyalist is likely to be more cognizant of regime values and more committed to them than the average, largely apathetic citizen, while those most eager to take society in a new direction might be those least able to appeal to a broad mass of citizens who are less committed than dissenters are to departures from their ordinary lives. 68. See, e.g., Susan Moller Okin, ‘Whose Traditions? Which Understandings?’ in her Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), pp. 41-73. 69. Nancy Rosenblum, Another Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 138-51. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 229 3. Pluralism and Position: Why the Civic Virtues are not Political As noted above, virtue theories often fail to distinguish between the needs of liberal democracy and its highest aspirations, between core virtues and ideal virtues. Despite their usual (and proper) caveats, liberal virtue theorists still in general want to argue that if many or most citizens fail to act, or think, in accordance with a certain quite demanding ideal, we shall all be doomed. But of course they disagree about what that ideal is: bourgeois or nonconformist, aggressive in dissent or deliberative in seeking consensus. All these ideals have something attractive about them. Yet there is little evidence that most people in any democracy uphold any of these ideals or the virtues that sustain them—let alone that most people in every democracy uphold the same ideals and practice the same virtues (which is what the argument would seem to imply is necessary). And yet, stable liberal democracies rarely in fact collapse except through conquest—and rarely even then, unless their commitment to liberal democracy was demonstrably fragile or short-lived in the first place. This argument seems a clear refutation of all liberal virtue theories. In fact it is too clear; it begs an explanation of why very serious thinkers have presented their lists of virtues as necessary in the face of such allegedly obvious evidence to the contrary. What explains the disjuncture is that all the liberal virtue theorists are in fact on to something important about the role of habituation, education, and socially reinforced action in liberal democratic life. The places where the ideals intersect—on values such as honesty, industriousness, toleration and nonviolence—provide key insights into what liberal democracy really does need; and the ideals that lie outside this intersection provide insights into what liberal democrats may legitimately disagree and argue about. More can be said, however, both about the origins of core liberal democratic virtues and about their substance—as well as about the place of more stringent ideals. To the extent that moral philosophers are partisans of particular ideals, they can be tempted to portray the virtues of ordinary citizens as very similar to those of people who are politically active and consciously committed to an ideal. But liberal theories of virtue ought to differ from those of civic humanists precisely by assuming that political engagement is not normally a duty for everyone. People have their own lives to lead. The core, in fact, is mostly derived from our private and social rather than our public and political duties. Even when the core virtues govern political actions, they can be seen as the application to politics of private virtues that almost all people recognize when in spheres other than politics. The virtues that all liberal democratic theorists prize in the private realm involve some version of sympathy, toleration, self-restraint, common-sense groundedness in reality, and self-reliance. These go together in many different combinations, all of which represent ways of being a decent human being who shows Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 230 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) concern for others and a sense of one’s own fallibility. Beyond the core, liberal democratic citizens can differ in many ways: they can be good speakers or good listeners; good at telling others when they have been careless or rude, or tactful in the face of provocative and difficult people; sympathetic and eager to help at the cost of being nosy, or respectful of others’ privacy at the cost of being relatively uninvolved.70 Many types of private individuals can be good friends, coworkers, lovers, parents, or siblings—while still respecting in their own way the special duties that come from each of these roles (arrogant self-obsession being bad social behavior on almost all accounts). Pace Aristotle, we do not strive to excel in all possible private virtues, for we know that many of them are psychologically incompatible with one another. Nor do we expect this uniformity in those we interact with socially. We are free to choose our friends and associates, and to judge others privately as we please. But we rarely (when we think about it) think it is wrong, or even undesirable, for there to be people in the world very different from the ones we personally like or love.71 The same can be, and is, true of citizens. The polity can benefit from both partisans and impartial judges, nor can the same people normally be both— 70. Even attempts at defining civic virtues in a minimalist manner sometimes fall into the trap of endorsing one from each of these pairs of incompatible virtues at the cost of the other. Thus Nancy Rosenblum, by saying that liberal democratic society requires an ‘easy spontaneity’ that embodies ‘a rejection of deference, a habitual disregard for social and economic standing, ethnic and cultural differences’ (Membership and Morals [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998], pp. 350-51), more or less calls undemocratic (or at least a bad citizen) anyone who cares about multiculturalism and cultural sensitivities, has been taught to respect his or her elders, or is simply shy. (‘Those incapable of exhibiting these dispositions in mundane affairs put themselves outside the pale of liberal democratic society’ [p. 351].) She has presented her ideal of no-nonsense personal interactions as if it were the core of liberal democracy, ignoring the possibility, which the rest of her book would seem to entail, that there is more than one way of being a good liberal democrat. Compare Spragens’s praise of ‘forthrightness, candor, sincerity, and dedication to the truth’ as ‘moral deliberative virtues’ (Civic Liberalism, p. 226)—leaving out, wrongly in my opinion, tact (on which see Mark Philp, ‘Economising on Truth in Democratic Public Life’, paper delivered before the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA). Similarly, Rosenblum’s call for citizens to have thick skins and not multiply slights (Membership and Morals, p. 353, and similarly Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, p. 224) seems part of an ideal of loud and vigorous argument, not a core: liberal democracy can survive if, as in the United States, many citizens find blunt disagreement distasteful and prefer more quiet and the appearance of consensus. Even those who like loud and vigorous argument might note that the virtue of thick-skinnedness cuts both ways: perhaps the burden should be on speakers to refuse to be silenced by charges that their speech is offensive. As elsewhere, the more sociological complexity exists on such questions, the less plausibly they are part of the core. 71. The words about violations of relationship duties—’bad mother’, ‘henpecked husband’, ‘cad’—are largely in abeyance, because we now tend to acknowledge many good ways of being a good mother, husband (or ‘life partner’), or lover. We trot out such old-fashioned words—or some of them, anyway—only in extreme cases or to be facetious. And rightly so. It is a good thing that a word like ‘boorish’ is applied only to extremely rude and disgusting behavior, not (as formerly) to all those whose behavior falls short of an aristocratic norm. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 231 except at different times of their lives, reflecting a slow and durable change in their character. We benefit as well from having both impatient agitators and patient negotiators, instinctive compromisers and insistent purists. There remain extremes of fanaticism, megalomania, intolerance, and the like that benefit no one. But even here, people whose actions and ideals betray the liberal-democratic core may have good ideas (as the Communist Party defended African-Americans’ civil rights when few others in the United States took those rights seriously). As long as they remain outsiders and lack direct influence as political actors, even those who seem to lack all liberal virtues can perform a service as outside critics. A surprising number of citizen duties remain. A minimal standard of public involvement seems analogous to private sociability. The most heroic and public-spirited accounts of the duty to vote are the least persuasive given the modesty of the act and the costs, likely to be trivial, of abstaining. That someone always votes, and sometimes does more (a letter, a march, a petition), represents not stern civic virtue but the public analogue of the private praise ‘gets along well with others’. Never taking a political interest in fellow citizens is like never taking an interest in one’s co-workers or fellow students, simply doing one’s job in silence and then going home. Such behavior in private is tolerated but not praised; it reflects the lack of a common sympathy that is within the reach of all. We resent such sullen behavior in others (and set up our schools and families to overcome it) because small acts of sympathy and occasional aid are a comfort to everyone and cost the doer little. Regular non-voting and political non-involvement, when these result from indifference to public affairs rather than principled opposition, should be regarded the same way. Their wrongness has nothing to do with a requirement to love the polity; what non-voting reveals is simply callousness towards what happens to other people whom one is for the moment regarding as fellow citizens.72 Someone who would never march for a fellow citizen’s rights is like someone who would never smile at a child. Some social (but not very ‘political’) duties involving mutual accommodation likewise accord with private analogies. Responding to social strife by moving further away or building high gates is much like responding to an act of betrayal by taking a serious vow never to have real friends again. The conclusions to be drawn are appropriately limited. While some engagement with others is a normal human duty, we are no more required to listen to all conceivable claims and mix with all conceivable social subgroups than we are required to invite everyone in town (or a random selection) over for dinner. 72. Compare the account of civic friendship as ‘neighborliness’ in Spragens, Civic Liberalism. Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green have found that the only voter-mobilization method that substantially increases turnout is face-to-face canvassing. ‘The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment’, American Political Science Review 94.3 (September 2000), pp. 653-63. Gerber and Green cite prior evidence that various kinds of volunteerism likewise depend on face-to-face appeals. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 232 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) Most of the truly political virtues remain specialized, professional, and chosen, rather than general, expected of all, and mandatory. The claim attributed to Louis Brandeis73 that the highest democratic office is that of citizen cannot be taken very seriously. To pretend that citizenship is an extremely high office is to mock both the liberal freedom to pay little attention to politics and the serious work done by real political officers—not to mention political theorists, whose work has little meaning unless we can articulate more systematic and coherent accounts of democratic ideals than ordinary citizens generally need to. 4. Conclusions Pluralistic theories largely deserve their reputation for fuzziness. All too often, their main conclusions tend to approximate ‘lots of different things matter’ and ‘it all depends’. The current argument, however, entails something a bit firmer. If the above arguments regarding the core-ideal distinction, the relativity of liberal virtues to circumstance, and the distinction between political and private democratic virtues are right, some concrete conclusions follow and some widely-held views are ruled out. These conclusions will necessarily be brief and speculative, but I hope suggestive. Why Some Virtues are Illiberal: Pluralism vs. Civil Religion vs. Laicism If the core-ideal distinction is right, then civil religions—whether theistic or secular—are never necessary or even useful to liberal democracy. Anti-clericals and determined republicans often draw from the history of intolerant religion the lesson that the State must socialize all citizens into a common, civic, and secular morality that will destroy the social power of religion by providing an alternative ideal. The core-ideal scheme, in contrast, preserves a liberal distinction between private and public rather than demanding that private ideals be refashioned in a public image. The way to combat the wars between different ideals is to demand that each transform itself slightly (though radically in historical terms) so as to include a core of toleration and nonviolence. As long as a person’s ideal of behavior does not preach coercive interference with others’ ideals, it may be allowed to continue and people are entitled to derive both their private and political motives for action from it. This cuts both ways; it is true of religious and anti-religious ideals alike. Both reverence and irreverence are part of permissible ideals, but a liberal democracy (as opposed to a moralistic Republic) should recognize that neither is necessary for the polity’s survival. Moral and useful citizens, not to mention private persons, can draw inspiration from either one—or even both, with inner confusion or at different times. 73. I have been unable to find an exact citation and suspect it is apocryphal. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 233 Monism and Pluralism: Primus in War, Pares in Peace Civic republicans often complain that a citizenry that lacks a common national ideal will be unlikely to defend liberal democracy against its enemies. Liberals characteristically deny this, by asserting that liberalism itself provides sufficient motivation, by ignoring the possibility of enemies, or by denying the question of motivation altogether. We would do better to admit the point but deny the significance that civic republicans place on it. In wartime, at least in serious wars requiring total mobilization and the marginalization of civilian pursuits, the sacrifices involved tend to require, and foster, either a narrowing of moral pluralism or a wholesale denial of it. The compromises of liberal constitutionalism are narrowed into one dimension. The dimension is ‘democracy’ vs. ‘dictatorship’ if we are lucky, as sort of occurred in the Second World War (and even that involved a ‘democratic’ alliance with Stalin). Most of the time, we begin to define ourselves in ethnic terms as well, with predictable costs to ethnic minorities who share the ‘enemy’s’ characteristics. Civic republicanism, with its inevitable (though hotly denied) implications that some citizens are more fully part of a common cultural project than others, may be an unfortunate phase through which even liberal societies must pass in times of great peril. To say that the virtues of liberal democrats involve division of moral labor and are episodic is not to say that either the work that needs doing or the times that call for it are always pretty. Perhaps we need a few who ignore moral and cultural pluralism, and define the wartime spirit in ethnic terms, to set the tone in wartime (Churchill was like this, and the United States leaders who interned Japanese-Americans more like this than they realized). But we will then need several decades of peace afterwards to expose and make amends for the crimes that such leaders condoned in their zeal to inspire the monistic virtues of temporary necessity. Madison noted that the threat of war or revolution produced ‘enthusiastic confidence of the people in their patriotic leaders’ and ‘stifled the ordinary diversity of opinions on great national questions’.74 But he least of all saw the extraordinary model of loyalty in wartime as something to be pursued in times of peace. The concord that extreme threat makes possible is dangerous precisely because it is impressive. Peace should remain our usual preference, both for its own sake and because it calls for a contingent and moderate core of virtues, retaining respect for diversity. Radical Courage: A Virtue for Liberal Democracy, Not In It Hannah Arendt claims that ‘courage is one of the cardinal political virtues’.75 Contemporary moral philosophy tends to doubt that it is a virtue at all: 74. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, no. 49 (attributed to Mason) (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1992 [1788]), pp. 254-58 (256). 75. Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’ in her Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 156. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 234 JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 2.2 (2005) courage is an adverbial quality, praiseworthy only if what one dares to do is itself moral. Both sides are right. Arendt’s praise of courage rests on the assumption that ‘modern’ thought takes place ‘between past and future’, when ‘tradition has worn thinner and thinner’, and we are left without moral or institutional resources to guide us.76 In such circumstances, even liberals must surely valorize courage, perhaps even the reckless and arrogant courage that seeks to found new institutions on sheer will or virtú. For courageous activists are then the only hope for establishing decent institutions in the future given that liberal democracy’s opponents are likely to be reckless and violent. Weber’s prophetic call for liberals to follow Luther’s rather arrogant ‘here I stand; I can do no other’ was made, remember, before an audience that had seen communists and ultranationalists a few months earlier competing for power through massacres.77 But these are not ‘modern’ conditions of politics and thought, only those of continental Europeans between the World Wars. In the United States and Britain, where constitutional traditions are rarely challenged radically and tend to grow stronger over time, moral philosophers will in these circumstances rightly (but also provincially) regard courage as double-edged and unnecessarily romantic. Courage of the radical kind, the kind that looks for miracles and thrives on them,78 is a virtue for those hoping to found a liberal democracy, not those who already live in one. When political institutions are stable, an excessive love of risk and glory is a danger to the polity. There is no contradiction in saying that Paine and Harrington were right about civic virtue in 1776, but Hobbes was right in 1995. Private Virtues, Public Benefits One common way of seeing liberal virtue theory is an attempt to split the difference between the economistic idea that people have selfish motivations that institutions must turn to the public good through incentives, and the neo-Kantian demand (not Kant’s) that society be founded on a normative consensus rooted in a moral psychology of cooperation. Sometimes, however, the splitting seems arbitrary and ad hoc. A simple assertion that ‘we need some virtue but not as much as the ancients thought’ is likely to be rooted more in hope than in demonstration. But the core/ideal distinction implies instead a fairly specific division of labor. Institutions must of course create incentives. The precise mechanisms by which they do this are likely to represent a degree of political science that is opaque to the average citizen, and a set of moral ends that are distinct from those of the polity’s constituent members—especially given the need to 76. Hannah Arendt, ‘Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future’, in Between Past and Future, p. 14 and pp. 3-15 passim. 77. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 127. 78. Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’ pp. 170-71. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. SABL Virtue for Pluralists 235 accommodate different groups, each of which sincerely believes it knows how people ought best to live. On the other hand, institutions themselves will crumble unless citizens have the core virtues that support them. When partisans of various ideals stop valuing nonviolence and toleration, and stop congratulating the police for arresting terrorists, no system of incentives can survive. Someone once said that liberal democracy is based on pretending to take our ends less seriously than we do. The virtues of pretending are required by the core. The ideal virtues that each of us seeks to cultivate in herself and others are those that help us keep our seriousness. Downloaded from http://mpj.sagepub.com at UCLA COLLEGE SERIALS/YRL on January 30, 2008 © 2005 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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