J UST LOV E
J UST LOV E T R A NSFOR M I NG CI V IC V I RT U E
Ann Mongoven
I n di a na U n i v e r si t y Pr e s s Bloomington & Indianapolis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Mongoven, Ann, date Just love : transforming civic virtue / Ann Mongoven. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35325-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22090-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Social ethics. 2. Social values. 3. Moral conditions. I. Title. HM665.M636 2009 179’.9—dc22 2009006762 1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10 09
To the most extraordinary “ordinary heroes” of my life, my family and friends
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ·
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Part I. Mad about MADD 1 Invisible Heroes: Mad about MADD
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3
2 New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues ·
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Part II. The Dilemma of Impartiality 3 The Dilemma of Impartiality: Legacy of the Bishop and the Chambermaid · 73 4 Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Part III. Resolving the Dilemma: Impartiality-as-Practice and the Transformation of Civic Virtue 5 Saving the Baby from the Bathwater: A Turn to Practice
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6 Impartiality-as-Practice: The Lesson of Ordinary Moral Heroes · 203 7 Just Love: The Transformation of Civic Virtue · Appendix: Case Studies · 313 Notes · 365 References · 387 Index · 403
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a book about the power of ordinary heroes, and I am grateful to many heroes in my life who played crucial roles in its writing. Although it is customary to acknowledge institutional supporters and scholarly colleagues first, and personal supporters afterwards, I invert that order here. Of course, that deviation from tradition is not due to any lack of appreciation for either the considerable institutional support that enabled, or the remarkable scholars who informed, this project. Rather, it is in the spirit of the book to highlight the ethical import of caring labor that is sometimes taken for granted. Such caring labor is as essential to academic life as to civic life. My family schooled me in virtues long before “virtue theory” became a trajectory of scholarly revival. Thanks to all of you for supporting my academic quests: Edward Mongoven, Judith Schroeder, Mary and Tom Conroy, Patrick and Tracy Mongoven, Miki Weisstein, Eric and Fei Weisstein, Cecily and Bob Jenkins, Tony Weisstein and Jerry White, Richard and Jo Stelmach, and in loving memory of Carmen Kostner Mongoven. My daughter Kelsey Kai-Yuan Mongoven, age nine, deserves thanks not only for giving up playtime while sections were being completed and for searching pages for space breaks, but also for being a patient teacher of mothering. My scholarly interest in friendship was sparked as much by the blessing of my friends as by trends in contemporary ethical theory. As the saying goes, a friend who helps you move is a true friend indeed. Several ix
friends packed my house around me during three different moves while I was completing some stage of the manuscript: Donetta Cothran, Gretchen Horlacher, Rebecca Manring, Pam Kellett, Barbara Buhr, Maricel Cruz, Kerry and Kara Skora. Friends and family also provided child care during the writing, a gift to my daughter as well as to myself. Special thanks for child care to Dad, Judy, Xiu-Ying Dong, Mary and Tom, Donetta, Gretchen, Judy Andre, Bill and Peggy Diedrich, Char Muffitt, and Kathleen Lavey. Certain friends encouraged me to continue with this manuscript during difficult periods: Donetta when I suffered a medical setback; Thomas Grubb when I was editing in Japan far from my usual scholarly circles. Shu-Ming Chang and Heidi Doherty sustained final manuscript preparation. Many friends reached across geographic distance to cheerlead the project: Feng-Bang Lee, Michele Mack, Cynthia Martin, ZhaoYu Wan, Tammy Martin, Xiao-Ling Huang Early, Laura Pan Luo, Sylvia Griss. I am fortunate that my circle of personal and professional friends overlap. Special thanks to Helen Benet-Goodman, whose collegiality nurtured my soul and this project throughout its development. Friend and stepmother Judy generously invested her editorial acumen in the manuscript. Roz Lasker and Phil Lee reminded me to maintain the connection between my exploration of ethical theory and my practical interests in bioethical policy. In scholarly arenas, I am grateful for extensive institutional and personal support that enabled this project. A Jacob Javits Fellowship supported much of my graduate school training, while a University of Virginia Dissertation fellowship supported the first stages of this project in my Ph.D. dissertation. I owe gratitude beyond words to my dissertation director and great mentor James F. Childress, whose life as a teacher-scholar embodies the unity of virtue, character, and principles. I am grateful that my dissertation committee viewed scholarship as an adventure. Special thanks to committee members Larry Bouchard, Daniel Westberg, and Patricia Werhane. David Little’s smiling piques contributed to my thinking. Gene Rogers’s engagement spurred me on. Supporters of my Asian interests, especially Paul Groner and Ronald Dimberg, contributed to my evolving desire to articulate a conception of civic virtue adequately supple for a pluralistic democracy.
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Graduate school colleagues—Aline Kalbian, Margaret Mohrmann, Felicia Cohn, George Randels, Jessica Pierce, Cecilia Moore, Sidney Brown, Mark Hanson, Jeffrey Greenman, Robert Tuttle, John Portmann, and Jeff Reynolds—pressed me intellectually in ways that gave birth to this project. Special thanks to Richard Brown, who wrapped editorial advice in personal encouragement. Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics sponsored my participation in its 1997–98 cross-disciplinary seminar on civic virtue, the forum that first galvanized my interest in “transforming” civic virtue. I am grateful to facilitators Christopher Kulp and Philip Kain and to seminar co-participants for our conversations: Don Beggs, June Carbone, Jane L. Curry, Mickey Edwards, Nicholas F. Gier, John P. Langan, Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Mike Meyer, Larry Nelson, Helen Popper, Brad Wilburn. I owe special thanks to two featured guests of the seminar, Robert Audi and William Galston, who generously read and commented on drafts of this manuscript. Harvard Divinity School awarded me a Women’s Studies in Religion fellowship during the 1999–2000 academic year, an opportunity that fostered my vision for this book. I am particularly grateful to program director Anne Braude and to co-fellows Susan Sered, Amy Hollywood, Ulrike Strasser, and Gail Sutherland. Conversations with Karen King, Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Leila Ahmed, Ralph Potter, Arthur Dyck, and J. Bryan Hehir contributed to my arguments. I thank the divinity students in my “Just Love” seminar, whose conversations directly catalyzed my writing. Participation in a 2002 manuscript workshop sponsored by the University of Virginia PEW–funded Center on Religion and Democracy enabled constructive scholarly dialogue. Thanks to Center director and co-director James Davison Hunter and Joseph E. Davis, workshop facilitator Charles Mathewes, co-participants Pamela Haas Cochran, Eric Gregory, Paul Lichterman, and Brett Wilmot, and workshop assistant Shelley Reese. I spent the 2004–2005 academic year in Japan, exploring cross-cultural issues in bioethics with the support of an Abe Fellowship from the Japan Foundation for Global Partnership, hosted by Tokyo University’s 21st Century COE Project on Death and Life Studies. That year was not supposed to have anything to do with this book, but as it turned out, it did.
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The distance proved clarifying, reminding me why I felt it important to unmask culturally and religiously specific origins of conventional accounts of civic virtue. I am particularly grateful for conversations about Japanese perceptions of friendship and sacrifice with my fellowship mentor, Susumu Shimazono, and with Miyako Takahashi. Throughout my years on the faculty of religious studies at Indiana University, I benefited from the support of colleagues. David Smith, Richard Miller, Mary-Jo Weaver, and Constance Furey were careful readers and enthusiastic conversation partners. Stephen Stein and Robert Orsi supported my research as department chairs. I am particularly grateful to the graduate students in the “Track I Ethics” monthly colloquiums who provided astute feedback on draft chapters, especially Lisa Sideris, Mark Graham, Jennifer Girod, Mark Wilson, David Cockerham, and Mark King. Daniel Conkle and Susan Williams in the Law School, and Karen Hanson in the Philosophy Department were valued conversationalists. Holly Folk provided excellent research assistance. My current colleagues at Michigan State University energized final editing. I particularly benefited from Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences Director Tom Tomlinson’s support, Libby BogdanLovis’s “fresh eyes,” Judy Andre’s editorial assistance, Peggy Anderson’s computer skills, and Hilde Lindemann’s practical guidance through the publication process. Several colleagues in the Society of Christian Ethics encouraged work related to this book. Jeffrey Stout and William Werpehowski first sparked my interest in conceptions of love and justice when I was an undergraduate, as did Paul Ramsey whom I thank posthumously. Paul Lauritzen, Cristina Traina, Christine Gudorf, and Patricia Beattie Jung were valued conversation partners. I am grateful to many parties who contributed to revising and editing the manuscript. Four enthusiastic reviewers provided constructive critiques that improved the book: Andrew Flescher, Lisa Tessman, William Kabasenche, and an anonymous reviewer for Indiana University Press. The manuscript benefited from several editors before submission: Judy Schroeder, Judy Granbois, and Dawn Martin. The editorial staff at Indiana University Press wonderfully nurtured the project to press. Special thanks to editorial director Robert Sloan for
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his support, to Elizabeth Yoder for her elegant copyediting, to Miki Bird for her management of the editorial process, and to Anne Clemmer and Chandra Mevis for administrative support. Chris Corneal, a fine arts professor at Michigan State University, created the innovative cover design after taking time to distill the main arguments of the book. To all of these heroes, my thanks.
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PART I MAD ABOUT MADD
1
INVISIBLE HEROES: MAD ABOUT MADD
Twenty years ago the thirteen-year-old daughter of suburban California housewife Candy Lightner was killed by a drunk driver. Mrs. Lightner was distraught to learn that the driver had been on the road despite having an extensive record of driving while intoxicated. Rather than simply wallow in her grief and anger, she founded an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving—MADD. The group’s membership grew not only by the addition of others who had lost children but also by an appeal to mothers as such. Currently, more than 400 chapters of MADD volunteers work within all fifty states and countless smaller localities. The organization operates at multiple levels of community: sponsoring educational initiatives in schools to prevent children from growing up to become adults who drink and drive; participating in driver re-education programs for drivers who have been disciplined or put on probation; pressing local media for coverage of drunk driving; and lobbying for state and national legislation to make the penalties for drunk driving more severe. The relationship between the work of MADD and reductions in drunk driving fatalities has been publicly acknowledged. For example, in October 2000, when President Bill Clinton signed legislation mandating lower maximum blood alcohol levels to establish drunk driving, he credited the work of MADD.1 On the face of it, there is something heroic about the work of MADD, something heroic about the transformation of a personal tragedy to public service in its history.2 MADD is but one of many grassroots movements in 3
which personal experience is nobly turned outward for the benefit of the community at large. The Anti-Defamation League—an organization that like MADD is the subject of a case study at the conclusion of this book— draws upon Jewish experience of genocidal anti-Semitism in the Holocaust to create public educational programs against all group hates. When former First Lady Betty Ford made her personal struggle against substance abuse a public story, she embodied the commitment of preexisting community organizations and also spawned new ones. In these organizations, former substance abusers offer support to recovering addicts as well as community education on substance abuse prevention and treatment. Public mentoring of the experienced to the inexperienced occurs when someone who has struggled with mental illness (or supported an affected love one) works a late-night shift on a mental-health-emergency hotline, when parents surprised to learn that their son or daughter is homosexual receive social support at a meeting of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), or the La Leche League sends an experienced nurser to the home of a new mother who has requested breast-feeding assistance. The list of people, movements, and organizations that convert personal moral experience into constructive public capital could go on and on. Yet the heroism of MADD and groups like it seems invisible in current discussions of civic virtue. Paradoxically, these discussions almost universally lament a perceived loss of civic virtue that is associated with losses of public civility and civic-mindedness, a family of related terms. Thus a mythological narrative of “the Fall” underlies current writing on civic virtue. T H E FA L L NA R R AT I V E OF C I V IC V I RT U E Social commentators participating in the fall narrative speculate on how we lost the civic virtue of some earlier golden age and they challenge us to recapture it. Significantly, the fall narrative is presumed by writers with perspectives from different fields—sociologists, political theorists, religious studies scholars. It is equally presumed by thinkers who otherwise occupy very different positions on the political spectrum or who are variously labeled by political theorists as “liberals,” “communitarians,” “civic republicans,” or “cultural conservatives.” Most straightforwardly, the “fall” 4
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is perceived as an actual fall in levels of civic virtue among the citizenry. Alternatively, the fall is described as a retreat from public discourse about civic virtue—a retreat that, it is feared, will inevitably erode civic virtue itself. The following excerpts from contemporary literature demonstrate the rhetorical force of the fall narrative. Alasdair MacIntyre’s aptly titled After Virtue laments the modern underappreciation of how cultivated virtues shape moral life, dramatically equating the fall from virtue with a new Dark Ages (MacIntyre 1984, 263). In their national best-seller Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues claim: Madison and the other founders [believed] our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. . . . The tension between private interest and public good is never freely resolved in any society. But in a free republic, it is the task of the citizen, whether ruler or ruled, to cultivate civic virtue in order to mitigate the tension and render it manageable. . . . As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important throughout most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. (1996, 270)
Joan Williams notes the pervasiveness of a sense of decline in civic virtue even among those who disagree on what constitutes such virtue or what indicators best measure it: Substantial numbers on both the Right and the Left agree that something is amiss, something linked with selfishness and materialism. Cultural conservatives decry a lack of values and focus on the “breakdown of the family,” drugs, pornography, and abortion. Progressives focus on conspicuous consumption, rising infant mortality rates, homelessness, and other symbols and realities of the human cost of income redistribution in the favor of the wealthy. But both sides are deeply troubled by America’s loss of commitment to values other than self-interest, and both agree on the need for a vision of the public good. (1992, 310)3
The fall narrative is presumed in Amitai Etzioni’s ardent appeals to shore up America’s civic-mindedness with attention to social and political virtues: “We do require a set of social virtues, some basic settled values, that we as a community endorse and actively affirm. . . . Our society is suffering from a severe case of deficient we-ness and the values only communities can properly uphold” (1993, 25). Invisible Heroes
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Even those who overtly contest the fall narrative implicitly presume some validity, as so-called liberal virtue theorists like Steven Macedo demonstrate: What is lost, allegedly, is the possibility of a moral community, a common devotion to shared values, and citizen virtues, with the attendant risks of stability problems and legitimation crises. . . . Liberals can reclaim a language which supposedly lies beyond the bounds of liberal politics, the language of virtue, citizenship, community, and human flourishing. (1991, 254; emphasis added)
Similarly, William Galston describes the fall of virtue from the radar of liberal political theory as an orthodoxy that he and other dissenters challenge.4 So-called communitarian thinkers also reinforce the fall narrative even while questioning it. For example, Michael Sandel, who explicitly challenges the nostalgia of the fall narrative, envisions his project in terms of “an attempt to revitalize the civic strand of freedom” and the “recrudescence of virtue,” projects that entail “reviving the political economy of citizenship” (1996, 317, 324, 329; emphasis added). That the breadth of the fall narrative extends beyond any ivory tower was vividly demonstrated by the 1992 presidential election, in which revived attention to civic virtue marked the campaigns of both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Both candidates called for a renewal of character in the citizenry. (In Clinton’s case, this call was linked to his description as a “New Democrat.”)5 Both presumed a fall from which we are called to redemption, a fall in the character of citizenship. Both Bush and Clinton formally sought the counsel of advisors who were thickly engaged in debates about the constitution of civic virtue: in Bush’s case, former Secretary of Education and ardent campaigner William Bennett, who subsequently authored The Children’s Book of Virtues (1995); in Clinton’s case, William Galston, a political theorist with published arguments for “liberal” civic virtue (Galston 1991). Following the election, Galston was appointed as a domestic policy advisor to Clinton.6 In the years since, conversations about civic virtue have remained commonplace in op-ed pieces as well as academic journals, in radio call-in shows as well as election campaigns. In response to the perceived fall, many simply reassert the need for civic virtue, presuming its nature to be obvious. More reflective thinkers 6
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attempt to articulate theoretical criteria constitutive of civic virtue. I write as both a beneficiary and a critic of the burgeoning reflective conversation on civic virtue. In it I find many provocative starting points. Yet no contemporary account seems wholly satisfactory to me, because none adequately explains the civic virtue of MADD.
M A D A B OU T M A DD: OR DI NA RY H E ROE S A S A S TA RT I NG P OI N T FOR R E F L EC T ION ON C I V IC V I RT U E This book begins with my getting mad about MADD. “Mad about MADD” is a double shorthand. It both signals my discontent and employs “MADD” to represent not only its namesake organization but also the many civic movements that transform personal experience into positive civic perspective. I challenge readers to consider the puzzling disjuncture between the heroism of civic models like MADD and their invisibility in conversations on civic virtue. Healing this disjuncture requires changes in our understanding of civic virtue. My proposal is that civic virtue be redefined by considering ordinary moral heroes in our midst. My argument is two-pronged. First, civic virtue, clearly, has not fallen off the planet of our political world. If we prevent the fall narrative from obscuring our vision, we discover that exemplary citizens are cultivating civic virtue right under our noses. Second, reflection on examples set by those ordinary moral heroes forces us to reconceptualize civic virtue. Such examples defy conventional descriptions of what civic virtue is—of what cultivated moral habits constitute civic virtue. A robust articulation of the accomplishment of these ordinary heroes is a crucial first step toward fostering civic virtue. Similarly, such an articulation may help us to identify civic vices or villains that have remained unquestioned for too long, protected in the shadows of wrongful accounts of civic virtue. My basic aim is to convince readers of the need for transformed conceptions of civic virtue. This book is intended as an invitation to a public conversation on civic virtue. Since my strategy looks to ordinary moral heroes to elucidate civic virtue, the invitation is especially geared to ordinary people—in whom the extraordinary is inevitably found. Of course, the book is also geared to scholars of political theory, gender theory, religious Invisible Heroes
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studies, and cultural studies, but its invitation to them is a humbling one. It requests that they position themselves as students of, rather than teachers of, ordinary moral heroes. The book particularly invites caretakers (of children, lovers, parents, friends, neighbors) into the conversation on civic virtue not only by drawing on the contemporary literature tagged “ethics of care” but also by appealing to the experience of ordinary caretakers. Since the publication of Carol Gilligan’s best-seller In a Different Voice in 1981, the term “ethics of care” has been prominent in ethical discourse. Gilligan contrasted a moral vocabulary she called “care” to a socially dominant moral vocabulary tagged “justice” and noted a gender pattern in which more women than men described ethical challenges in terms of care. According to Gilligan, the primary difference between the two moral outlooks is that justice reasoners begin from a stance of moral independence, a stance in which rules protecting liberty seem a natural starting point for ethics, and the moral skills of intimacy can be attained only through moral maturation. In contrast, care reasoners begin from a stance of moral relationality to others, a stance in which providing active care to others seems a natural starting point for ethics, and the development of a moral identity independent of one’s relational associations can be attained only through moral maturation. Gilligan cautioned that neither care nor justice is an inherently superior moral framework, but rather both entail characteristic strengths and weaknesses. While some explorers of care rejected that caution, celebrating care and suggesting its superiority, most who followed have developed one or several of the following critical perspectives: (1) an exploration of the relevance of care to particular areas of ethical thought; (2) a critique of care, further articulating ethical challenges of care as a moral perspective; (3) a challenge to conventional boundaries, which ascribe justice as a regulatory ideal for public life and care for private life; (4) an effort to integrate care and justice in a more comprehensive ethical approach; or (5) a questioning of whether the justice/care axis of discussion itself has become overly limiting of other moral vocabularies. In Christian theological ethics, a parallel conversation has occurred in which feminist theologians have questioned whether different patterns of sin may be associated with care and justice frameworks.7 My argument goes beyond the theoretical literature on care, actively seeking the input of people who tangibly care for children or other 8
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dependents, of people who do the hard practical work of maintaining bonds of family and friendship. Throughout, I acknowledge that historically and presently, such caretakers have been and continue to be disproportionately—though not exclusively—women. Of course, to acknowledge this underlying gender pattern is not to argue that the moral work of care should be “women’s work.” But frankness about the gender patterning is necessary in order to ask the right questions about whose civic work has been wrongly taken for granted, and what kind of work that is; or conversely, to ask whose civic work and what kinds of work have been overextolled. And of course, since gender patterning transcends biological sex, men as well as women turn out to be taken for granted.8 In other words, current conversation on civic virtue may overreward women who adopt civic stances that are culturally coded as masculine and underacknowledge men who engage in caring labor. But significantly, women are disproportionately engaged in kinds of labor that the fall narrative of civic virtue renders invisible. Traditional gender biases have not only labeled caring a “private” activity, but they have also contrasted women’s participation in such “private” activity to men’s participation in “public” activity.9 This bifurcation continues to disconnect the moral lessons of care from conceptions of civic virtue, even as the associated gender valences are superficially questioned. Thus an organization like MADD, which bridges the realms of maternal care and public life, confounds established categories by which civic virtue is understood. I contend that it is the established categories that must be changed. T WO PROBL E M AT IC I DE OL O GI E S: GE N DE R A N D R E L IGION To launch my transformation of civic virtue, I explore historical and cultural factors that catalyze current calls to civic virtue and show that some of those influences simultaneously render the civic virtue of organizations like MADD invisible. In a curious way, current conversation on civic virtue is hamstrung. It recognizes the need for more attention to civic virtue, but it fails to recognize cultural factors that threaten the vitality—indeed, the coherence—of the term. Transformers of civic virtue must face the combined weight of two linked ideologies that together have narrowed the terrain of civic virtue such that there is little ground on which to stand: Invisible Heroes
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an ideology of gender, and a religious ideology (both analyzed in more historical detail in chapter 2). The first is an ideology of gender that, following Joan Williams (2000), I call “domesticity.” Domesticity is a conceptual system that sharply distinguishes home labor from market and civic labor. It defines domestic labor, associated with femininity, as emotional labor to be governed by affection; and market and civic labor, associated with masculinity, to be governed by competition and rational civic commitment. Of course, domesticity is being challenged on many practical and theoretical fronts, but my contention is that it continues to shape conceptions of civic virtue, though its legacy is unacknowledged. Domesticity defines the socially constructed boundary of public and private along gender lines. Just as problematically, it also defines the civic realm as devoid of passion—dependent on a pristine rationality aimed at the public good. The problem with such a conceptual schema is that it cannot account for what, in the absence of some appropriate passion, could initially motivate a civically minded stance. It also cannot account for what a citizen may learn “rationally” from her care for particular others and the relevance that might have for visions of public good. The second problematic ideology is religious, with Christian roots and, increasingly, Christian critics. Its influence on contemporary conceptions of civic virtue is ironic, since the rhetoric of civic virtue demands that religious commitments of the citizen, like all “private” commitments, be suppressed when the citizen speaks and acts qua citizen. Yet in fact, this very dictate has religious roots. It derives from a celebration of sacrifice for the stranger-neighbor that came to dominate interpretations of agape, or Christian neighbor love, during the same period in the Enlightenment in which distinctively modern conceptions of civic virtue crystallized. This interpretation pitted agapic love for the stranger against the personal loves of the Christian—whereas older, classical interpretations of love in Christianity had sought the integration of personal loves and universal loves. The modern interpretation of agape severed biblically linked conceptions of love and justice in paradoxical ways. On the one hand, love came to be viewed as a natural affection that governed home and hearth; justice, as a more strenuous ethical demand for political community. On the other hand, Christian neighbor love (agape) was conceived as the basis for justice to the stranger, while it was deemed increasingly irrelevant—or 10
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even antithetical—to intimate settings where the colloquial word “love” was most frequently employed. This celebration of disinterested love went hand in hand with a stress on universal moral ideals as the foundation of civic life. What I will call the ideology of agape became intertwined with the ideology of gender: stringently universalistic interpretations of agape bolstered the gendered moral division of labor defined by domesticity. Both becoming a virtuous citizen and becoming a universal lover became deemed dependent on the rational suppression of personal commitments, whether those commitments were to particular persons or to particular subcommunities. Being a woman, or doing “women’s work,” inherently disadvantaged one from attaining agapic love or civic virtue so defined. Of course, the problem of this dually ideological schema goes far beyond inequality of admission into the elevated category for women and caretakers. The conceptual categories themselves became grossly distorted, as both agape and civic virtue came to be understood as completely divorced from ordinary practices of care and nurture among families, friends, or other particular communities. A first step toward transforming civic virtue, then, is to unmask the disingenuousness of a rhetoric of civic virtue that on the surface is nongendered but that under the surface is deeply gendered, that on the surface is highly secular but that under the surface is deeply religious.
T H E SPI R A L OF DIC HOTOM I E S I N C ON T E M P OR A RY P OL I T IC A L T H E ORY Biases against women and caretakers, generated by dual ideologies of gender and religion, both participate in and are influenced by a spiral of related dichotomies that fragment contemporary political theory. Many so-called liberals and communitarians continue to separate along this series of poles, despite their oft-articulated frustration with the bipolar framework. For a generation now, American political theory has been shaped by conversation between liberals and communitarians, and by those who call for new frameworks that bypass the polarity between the two. Liberalism refers to the tradition of political theory that has largely shaped the experiment of American democracy: a tradition that emphasizes individual freedom to pursue diverse conceptions of the good life. Invisible Heroes
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Contemporary liberals maintain an emphasis on individual freedom as they struggle with inherent democratic tensions between freedom and equality. The communitarian movement challenges the liberal tradition for having a too-atomized conception of the human individual, a tooprocedural conception of political life, and a too-self-deceptive conception of liberal “neutrality” toward diverse citizens’ ideas of the good life. Communitarians explore the importance of membership in civic communities that are less diffuse than that of the state, such as families, churches, clubs, and neighborhoods. While it has been linked with certain theorists, the term “communitarian” is often employed loosely, indicating a critique of liberal individualism rather than a comprehensive alternative political theory.10 Amid contemporary tensions between liberalism and communitarianism, many citizens whose civic stance defies the bipolar framework have difficulty garnering political attention, though they may be the ones most in need of being seen and heard. In short, political theory is cast as a series of “either-or” choices that allow women and caretakers to fall through the definitional cracks. Currently, political theorists debate whether the political self is prior to its chosen ends or whether that self is constituted by its discovered ends.11 But true civic virtue must allow people whose identity is wedded to particular histories and goals nonetheless to be critical of those histories and goals and to be critically open to the histories and goals of others. Political theorists debate whether the project of citizen formation is one of judgment or self-discovery.12 But true civic virtue must demand that citizens know themselves well enough to make judgments on both themselves and others and that they leave their self-identity open to ongoing revision in the light of judgment by themselves and others. Political theorists debate whether an increase in public reasonableness or an increase in public passion is needed to revitalize civic life.13 But true civic virtue must cultivate citizens both passionate enough to make civic commitments and reasonable enough to be transformed by the civic commitments of others. Political theorists debate the priority of care and justice as ethical ideals.14 But true civic virtue must mutually relate the moral skills of caring for particular others to the moral skills of broad political fairness. Political theorists debate whether the freedom of a multicultural democratic polity is primarily a freedom from certain kinds of impositions on the 12
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individual or a freedom for a certain kind of creative civic commitment.15 But true civic virtue must encourage the use and maintenance of freedom “from” to facilitate freedom “for.” Political theorists debate the relative priority of civic virtue (positive citizen character traits), and civil society (positive civil milieus).16 But true civic virtue must fortify civil society, while healthy civil society must facilitate the development of civic virtue. The culturally prevalent though politically denied Christian ideology that portrays love as a zero-sum contest between personal and universal loves reinforces these fault lines and their implicit gendering. Disturbingly, the entire spiral of dichotomies supports entrenched, though challenged, cultural ideals of masculinity and femininity. It is commonly women whose identities are taken to be more given than chosen; whose very selves are assumed to be defined by their relational responsibilities more than by their deliberated judgments; whose fundamental challenge is taken to be discovering, rather than creating, their true nature; whose temperaments are assumed to be more passionate than reasonable; and whose commitments to the details of care for particular others are seen as obstructing their ability to see large issues of justice. While naive optimists may think such caricatures of masculinity and femininity are long outdated, the tenacity of related conceptual dichotomies attests to their real, if unembraced, influence. So one metaphorical way to cast current debate in political theory is to question whether politics should become more masculine or more feminine in order to be redeemed. If the explicit articulation of that underlying question causes many to bristle (as I think it should), then not only are many proposed “answers” in contemporary political theory problematic, but the axes of questioning are misguided. The entire spiral of dichotomies must be transcended in order to formulate a workable conception of civic virtue. Somehow, the “either-ors” must be changed to “both-ands.”
T R A NSCE N DI NG T H E SPI R A L OF DIC HOTOM I E S: DE- GE N DE R I NG C I V IC V I RT U E A S A “R E L IGIOUS ” I M PE R AT I V E If transformed civic virtue is to bridge dichotomies between selves-priorto-ends and selves-constituted-by-ends, between judgment and self-disInvisible Heroes
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covery, public reasonableness and public passion, freedom from and freedom for, justice and care, civic virtue and civil society, liberalism and communitarianism, then it must also transcend problematic cultural coding of masculinity and femininity. In short, it must be de-gendered. In the course of this book, I speak of the necessary de-gendering of civic virtue in two ways. One way is straightforwardly literal. “Women’s work” (whether performed by women or men) and its civic contributions has been taken for granted or ignored in conventional accounts of civic virtue. De-gendered civic virtue must make that work and its political contribution visible while maintaining a critical moral stance on such work. At the same time, civic efforts seemingly motivated by a dispassionate concern for strangers must not be privileged, for such efforts may be misguided or even unjust. They demand the same level of public critical appraisal, for as the saying goes, the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. The second way in which I speak of de-gendering civic virtue is metaphorical. “De-gendering” will serve as a catchphrase to describe transcendence of the entire series of linked dichotomies that a new account of civic virtue must accomplish. That series of linked dichotomies must no longer be allowed to define questions regarding what constitutes civic virtue or who is civically virtuous. Since the problem of gendered civic virtue is religious, de-gendering civic virtue must necessarily also be religious. But whereas the problem of civic virtue lies in an unrecognized connection to thick religious ideology, the solution may be more thinly religious. (By “thick,” I mean indebted to particular institutionalized religious traditions or particular theological interpretations of human anthropology; by “thin,” I mean the structurally religious quest of integrating moral norms coherently and comprehensively.) The solution must be “religious,” at least metaphorically, in that it must redescribe the relationship between different kinds of human loves. Ultimately, it must describe this relationship between loves in such a way as to make the civic virtue of MADD visible. It need not, as current conceptions of civic virtue do, imply one thickly religious answer to the question of relationship between loves. Rather, it must seek to describe such relationships plausibly enough to resonate with many life experiences, generally enough to be informed by multiple thick religious frameworks, and structurally enough to be relevant to political reflection. Thus, many forums that explore the relationship between different loves 14
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may be relevant to political theory: not just pristinely secular forums, but religious forums; not just pristinely philosophical forums, but art, literature, and other mediums of aesthetic reflection.
ROA DM A P FOR T H E A RGU M E N T OF T H E B O OK Before outlining my argument, I note that different reading strategies may be appropriate to different kinds of readers. Parts I and III together summarize my view of the problem of civic virtue and my proposed solution. Readers can get an overall sense of my argument by reading those parts. In part I, chapter 2 historically and philosophically fleshes out the ideologies of gender and religion first introduced in chapter 1. The two sections at the end of the chapter provide a critical segue between my account of the problem and my proposed constructive solution in part III. Part II of the book is a more scholarly section elaborating how entrenched the problems identified in part I remain in contemporary political theory. That section may be of more detailed interest to scholars engaged with the theorists addressed than to other readers. Headings flag terms and concepts that become important counterpoints to my reconstructive argument in part III. The book closes with three case studies, each designed to highlight civic heroes or expose civic vices that remain invisible in conventional accounts of civic virtue but that become apparent in my transformed account. Conceptually, I begin my transformation of civic virtue by considering factors underlying revived interest in civic virtue as a moral category. I introduce some promising contributions to the burgeoning conversation on civic virtue but demonstrate that none adequately accounts for the accomplishment of MADD’s founders. My investigation highlights the extent to which popular accounts of civic virtue presume a discredited conception of impartiality as a public ideal. Demanding that citizens adopt an “impartial standpoint” on public matters, this outdated conception defines impartiality in opposition to the personal commitments of the citizen. Thus the heroism of MADD is defined away, and commentators on civic virtue miss the heroes in their midst. Because it ignores limits of human finitude, I call the problematic conception of an impartial standpoint idolatrous. I argue that the rift between MADD’s service and the conversation on civic virtue can be healed only Invisible Heroes
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by reassessing conceptions of public impartiality in light of an ethic of care. The result is neither the rejection of impartiality as an ideal nor the uncritical romanticization of care. Rather, I propose a reconceptualization of appropriate public impartiality and an associated transformation of civic virtue. Impartiality should be viewed as a moral practice rather than as an imaginative standpoint. This practice explicitly links appropriate partiality—that is, highly personal care—with appropriate impartiality. Thus it demonstrates how people can turn what they learn morally in their personal lives toward public good rather than presuming that public stances demand the suppression of personal commitments. At the same time, the practice of impartiality enables the reflexivity by which public norms can challenge or transform personal commitments. With impartiality properly understood as a practice, new virtues suggest themselves as constitutive of civic virtue. Impartiality itself becomes seen as a “linchpin” virtue, its cultivation connected to other civic virtues. Virtues of conceptual translation, structurally modeled on virtues of linguistic translation, are foundational to this family of virtues. The linguistic translator faces the challenge of comprehending multiple languages. The citizen in a multicultural democracy faces the challenge of comprehending multiple moral languages—even if expressed in a common tongue. The model of translation redefines traditional cardinal virtues of patience, humility, and prudence in an overtly political context. In particular, I argue for a redefinition of humility as self-restraint and a redefinition of courage as “disciplined vulnerability.” Disciplined vulnerability describes the character trait that allows a conceptual translator to accept for the moment—rather than to deny or to force-fittingly resolve—what at first appears untranslatable. It allows one to live with disjunctures in one’s political landscape because certain experiences, discourses, or actions by others do not fit into one’s previously established moral vocabulary. Over time, the disciplined vulnerable citizen may shape a new moral language that incorporates the erstwhile disjuncture as part of its linguistic structure. But the virtue itself weighs against overly hasty resolutions that deny the force of the initially untranslatable. Disciplined vulnerability contrasts both with liberal focus on moral autonomy and with communitarian focus on the moral authority of traditions. The cultivator of this virtue is neither an atomized individual nor a member of a particular community. Rather, she is a citizen-individual in 16
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relationship to many overlapping communities, some evolving rather than established, some inchoate rather than institutionalized, some in tension with others. The courage of cultivated vulnerability allows this citizen to interrogate personal and civic moral commitments through analogical interplay among themselves and among the commitments of others. Conventional accounts of civic virtue correctly intuit that self-restraint in some way relates to citizen virtue. But rather than giving any prudential account of self-restraint as a cultivated moral habit, they “proceduralize” restraint. They suggest rules about how virtuous citizens should speak in public, restricting not only legitimate topics but also legitimate vocabularies for public discourse. That approach “loses virtue” even within an ostensibly virtue-based account, while it too narrowly describes the boundaries of the political in ways that inherently favor and disfavor some citizens. A transformed account of civic virtue demands that self-restraint be seen as a character trait, not as a set of discursive rules. As a corollary, the selfrestrained citizen is aware of discourse as evolving. Self-restraint entails a reflectiveness on the power dynamics of different kinds of discourses. It weighs against the desire to control the terms of discourse itself. It does not ask citizens to begin speaking in moral languages accessible to all, but poses accessibility as a longer-term goal. It allows the disciplined vulnerable citizen to accept being part of conversations that are not wholly transparent, so that transparency achieved over time will include as many citizens as possible. The articulation of these virtues integrates metaphors of visual perception and oral/aural discourse, both of which inform contemporary ethical theory, though currently as two separate critical vocabularies. These virtues promote a truly comprehensive “reflective equilibrium” that is also a “perceptive equilibrium.”17 In other words, they foster a mutual reinforcement between ethical theory and practice, and among the diverse kinds of ethical practices in which citizens engage. They allow citizens to pursue reflective equilibrium without the self-deception that is sometimes facilitated by overly rigid conceptions of public/private boundaries. They distinguish civic virtue from a facile conception of civility, since they demand engagement with, rather than dismissal of, citizen stances that at first shock, confuse, or affront. Yet simultaneously, they weigh against generally combative approaches to civic life. In short, these virtues allow one to engage in a reflective ordering of loves. Invisible Heroes
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The related transformations of impartiality and civic virtue redirect spotlights on our political life in two ways. They highlight the accomplishment of groups like MADD, which is obscured by the fall narrative of civic virtue. But they also call into question the civic value of certain organizations or policies that have long remained unquestioned. For example, they may recast widespread policies to promote organ donation and transplantation as suspect forms of disordered love, lacking adequate justice to particular persons and groups. In religious terms, the transformation of civic virtue rejects a dichotomized view of love and justice in favor of a dialectical portrayal of their relationship. Instead of pitting citizen justice against personal love, it challenges virtuous citizens to cultivate just love for their political community.
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NEW CALLS FOR CIVIC VIRTUE, AND CALLS FOR NEW CIVIC VIRTUES
As chapter 1 elaborated, a pervasive fall narrative obscures the civic virtue of citizens like MADD’s founders. This mythology eulogizes the widespread cultivation of citizen virtue in some past golden age, lamenting a loss of civic character since then. The prevalence of the fall narrative raises two preliminary questions: First, what real malaise underlies the nostalgia of the fall narrative? Second, why is the language of “virtue”—a language that would have seemed quaint and prudish only a generation ago—enjoying a simultaneous renaissance in moral theory and popular culture? These two preliminary questions helpfully frame an introduction to the contemporary conversation on civic virtue. Nostalgia for a golden age impedes reflection on what civic virtue may mean in our times and obscures the real “here-and-now” civic heroism of organizations like MADD. Yet nostalgia, even false nostalgia, often reveals important information about communal values. Nostalgia signals a shared sense of something of value that is perceived to be missing. What does the fall narrative of civic virtue suggest is missing? It suggests longings for two missing values: a place for the public, and explicit attention to the character of citizens. Both of these should be understood in the broadest terms. A PL AC E FOR T H E PU BL IC While it is a mistake to believe that the golden age intimated by the fall narrative was a real historical period, the mythological importance of that 19
golden age is highly significant. The golden age seems to have offered a secure place for the public: space for a person to define herself as a citizen and to define her relationship to others, including strangers, as citizenry. This space for the public is in one sense a physical space, a place where citizens who may have no bond other than citizenship meet. Thus, many contemporary advocates of renewed civic virtue lament what they consider to be the decline in the number or quality of physical venues where the public meets as public: neighborhood parks, town halls, public schools. Others bemoan the dwindling of so-called intermediary institutions: voluntary associations such as Rotary clubs or church communities that give place for civic activity. In such places, people meet not only as business leaders or co-religionists, for example, but also as citizens. Of course, concern for the purported loss of intermediate institutions raises crucial questions about what kinds of intermediate institutions are acknowledged as “civic” organizations and why. (Why Rotary, but not MADD?) The longed-for public space is not only physical or institutional but also metaphorical. Many commentators focus on it as a space within discourse.1 Driving both the fall narrative and the renaissance of attention to civic virtue, then, is a widespread malaise with public discourse in our society. Many complain that public discourse increasingly resembles a giant episode of Crossfire, with everyone shouting and no one listening. Electoral candidates move from criticizing their opponents’ positions to attacking them as people. Paid lobbyists with enormous vested interests dictate the terms of many supposedly public debates. Commentators such as linguist Deborah Tannen note that metaphors of battle undergird conceptions of public argument in our society: The war on drugs, the war on cancer, the battle of the sexes, politicians’ turf battles—in the argument culture, war metaphors pervade our talk and shape our thinking. Nearly everything is framed as a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern. . . . Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition over-weighted. (1998, 4) 2
This metaphorical grid both demonstrates and perpetuates a combative sense of political life. Public discourse becomes a battleground in which people who understand their interests fight for them in zero-sum games. Politics becomes a field on which agonistic contests are played by people who know their game well. 20
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Amid the backdrop of such negativity there is even disagreement about what counts as public discourse in the first place. Is it public discourse when, with invited reporters along, the AIDS advocacy group ACT-UP tramples the communion bread at a public mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral? Is it public discourse when demonstrators dressed as sea turtles block the entrance of the World Trade Association meeting place in Seattle? My point is not to condemn such tactics. In fact, I will criticize conceptions of civic virtue that would discourage such emotional, symbolic forms of protest. Here I simply propose that the atmosphere of conflict in more conventional venues of discourse dramatically influences popular interpretation of such events. In some ways, the intended shock of these protests is muted by the generally combative public atmosphere. Yet, paradoxically, some people may perceive that shock as more threatening because of the pervasive tenor of public conflict. In public discourse framed by metaphors of battle, there seems to be no safe place for the citizen who feels genuinely confused by the complexity of public issues, who acknowledges any ignorance, whose allegiances are multivalent or strained by internal tension. There is no forum for discourse aimed at genuine edification. There is no safe place in discourse to sort things out. In such an environment, it is not surprising that laments about the “uncivil” public have become commonplace among columnists, commentators, and ordinary citizens. Sometimes, then, the appeal for civic virtue is conflated with an appeal for public “civility.” But what public civility means or demands, and what virtues it entails, remain open to debate. As Tannen worries, “‘civility’ suggests a superficial, pinky-in-the-air veneer of politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over toast” (1998, 3). Thus a careful exploration of civic virtue must explore the connection between civic virtue and the atmosphere of public discourse without equating civic virtue with a facile notion of civility.
AT T E N T ION TO MOR A L CH A R AC T E R The second longing expressed in the fall narrative is a longing for explicit attention to questions of moral character. In the mythical golden age, there seems to have been some consensus on who exemplified virtues of citizenship and what those virtues were. There were recognizable models New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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for aspiring citizens to imitate in their civic life. There were, in short, clear heroes. Ironically, then, while the fall narrative problematically obscures real “here-and-now heroes” such as MADD, it also expresses a longing for heroes. By asking where all the heroes have gone, the fall narrative highlights the lacuna of attention to questions of civic character in much modern political theory. This is not merely an omission, but rather it is a consequence of certain tenets in the tradition of political liberalism to which we are heirs. Historically, liberalism was sparked by negative as well as positive catalysts, particularly by weariness with catastrophic religious warfare between Catholics and Protestants that marked the birth of modernism in seventeenthcentury Europe. This weariness prompted the search for bases of political life more narrowly circumscribed than comprehensive worldviews. Liberalism was designed to allow people to live together peaceably with others who they thought were going to hell. In an important sense, then, questions of character in the citizenry were deliberately deflected. Such deflection is embodied in the procedural focus of modern liberalism, which is characterized by an emphasis on fair laws, institutions, and policies to govern public life, coupled with a stated neutrality toward the different worldviews of its citizens. Liberal neutrality implies a reluctance to judge their characters save when they transgress the limiting laws, procedures, and policies. However, the history and goals of liberalism are complex. Ironically, or perhaps precisely because of the deliberate deflection of worldview, early modernism also sparked a revival of discussion about civic virtue. This revival presumed that certain virtues of citizenship must be desirable, even among citizens who were going to hell after this life. It presumed that freedom from enforced religious orthodoxy provided freedom for a different sort of public commitment. Some contemporary revivers of civic virtue consider themselves heirs to this so-called civic republicanism, which was closely linked to the birth of liberalism. In general, the term civic republicanism denotes an emphasis on what Isaiah Berlin (1969) termed freedom for, rather than an emphasis on freedom from, in the interpretation of liberty. Nevertheless, the term is a loose one. Some use it with nostalgic reference to certain communities deemed to have achieved widespread civic virtue: ancient Athens, or Renaissance Florence, or the earliest period of liberal history itself. Others use it more ideally, to denote an ethos of communal orientation and voluntary political participation. 22
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The longing of the fall narrative is not merely for civic heroes but for a discussion of what traits of character render them admirable. This is dramatized in Michael Sandel’s version of the fall narrative. Sandel’s tale is particularly sophisticated because he readily admits that the golden age never really existed (1996, 6). Instead, Sandel is fascinated that the appeal to a golden age crosscuts discussions of civic virtue in various historical epochs. He interprets the resilience of nostalgia in discussions of civic virtue as sensitivity to its fragility. Sandel is bemused by the lamentation over lost civic virtue expressed by founders of the American republic such as John Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush. Adams’s remarks, quoted by Sandel, could well be ripped from the past and plagiarized by a contemporary editorial columnist: Virtue and simplicity of manners are indispensably necessary in a republic among all orders and degrees of men. But there is so much rascality, so much venality and corruption, avarice and ambition, such a rage for profit and commerce among all ranks and degrees of men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public virtue enough to support a republic.
Sandel emphasizes that pessimism about civic virtue was one of the driving forces for a Constitutional Convention. Some founders viewed the Constitution as a necessary response to a negative impetus rather than as an ingenious response to a positive challenge. These framers considered the Constitution an instrument to govern a people whose political virtue was otherwise inadequate for governance (1996, 126–30). From Sandel’s point of view, then, the fall is not an absolute decline in civic virtue, with the meaning of that term presumed obvious. For him, the real fall is that somewhere along the way Americans stopped explicitly talking about civic virtue altogether. This mistake he refers to simultaneously as the “triumph and travail of the procedural republic” (1996, 274–316). According to Sandel, since the virtues that support democratic public life are both ambiguous in content and fragile in constitution, they demand continual public discussion as part of the democratic project.
T H E R E DIS C OV E R E D V I RT U E S OF V I RT U E The perceived need to reconsider public-mindedness noted by Sandel is now widely shared among political theorists and the general public. That New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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this exploration is frequently framed as a quest for civic virtue is highly significant. A generation ago the term “virtue” was rarely encountered in classrooms, political campaigns, or other public forums. What does the term connote, and why has it risen to the fore in discussion of public values? Contemporary discussions of civic virtue participate in a wider recovery of virtue as an ethical category.3 Virtue was the predominant concern of classical Greek ethics, a concern that through the heritage of the Greeks influenced subsequent Roman and Christian thought. In classical times, virtues were widely understood to be disciplined moral habits that, when cultivated appropriately, result in settled positive character traits.4 A virtue was thought to strike an appropriate mean between two excessive habits. For example, courage was the virtuous mean between cowardliness and brazen foolhardiness. The highest ethical aim was the full integration of virtues in an ideally good life. That integration marked virtue in its singular sense; conversely, the good life was defined by that integration. Significantly, people’s lives were assumed to be the fodder of ethics—the unit of analysis. Attention to virtue now crosscuts religious and philosophical ethics, political theory, and popular culture. Increasingly, appeals are made to reconsider lives as lived—rather than principles or theorems—as the basic currency of ethical reflection. The current renaissance of virtue was born out of widespread discontent with rule-based approaches to ethics. Such rule-based approaches include deontology and utilitarianism, two modes of ethical thinking that eclipsed others for several centuries after the Enlightenment. Both deontology and utilitarianism seek to articulate and defend universal principles of morality that should be affirmed by all reasonable people, regardless of religious or cultural background. Deontology, particularly in its Kantian form, proposes universalizability as the test of ethical maxims. Only principles that one could wish universalized are considered truly ethical.5 Utilitarianism proposes consequentialist prediction as the test of ethical maxims. Only those principles that in general promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number are considered truly ethical.6 In the last fifty years, deontology and utilitarianism have lost favor in the midst of general questioning of principle-based ethics. Methodological challenges have been launched not only by virtue theorists but by revivers 24
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of casuistry, promoters of narrative ethics, and postmodern deconstructionists.7 Critics claim that principle-based approaches to ethics are overly minimalist. Ethical life, they insist, must be about more than playing by certain rules. They further argue that continued disagreement about the justification of deontological and utilitarian principles proves that the game of such justification cannot be part and parcel of ethics. The pessimism about rule-based ethics coincides with the emergence of postmodernism. Postmodernism demarks a family of intellectual traditions that play on the unstable, multivalent qualities of language to expose both the particular power differentials and the denial of real difference that are often masked by universal categories.8 Postmodernists highlight the historical and contingent nature of conceptions of rationality and the social struggles that underlie their solidification. They emphasize that universal rules and procedures can entrench de facto winners and losers through a guise of fairness. The cogency of that critique suggests a turn to concrete experience in ethical reflection. It suggests the value of considering thick accounts of virtue in all their particularity rather than speculating some “least common denominator” of ethical nature that transcends historical and cultural particularity. At the same time, virtue-based approaches to ethics strive to discern general traits of moral greatness that emerge out of richly considered ethical traditions and lives as lived.9 The turn to virtue thus may be an attempt to forge a middle way between the perceived arrogance of deductive universalism on the one hand, and the dearth of positive moral infrastructure in postmodernism’s unending spiral of deconstruction on the other. Thus, the fundamental questions of virtue ethics have regained ascendancy: What kind of person do I, or we, want to be? How have others answered that question and what can be learned from their answers? How do I, or we, actually attain the desired character? What moral habits are necessary, and how can they be cultivated? Since the tradition of political liberalism is historically indebted to both deontology and utilitarianism, it is not surprising that its contemporary criticism structurally parallels that of deontology and utilitarianism. Liberalism has become procedural in focus, asking what principles can govern procedures that fairly generate either the structure of public institutions or the content of public decision-making. Like those discontented New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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with principle-based ethics more generally, critics of liberalism assail this focus as minimalist. Like those who question the supposed universality of deontological or utilitarian principles, the critics of liberalism question the supposed neutrality of liberal procedure—its purported openness and accessibility to citizens with various conceptions of the good life.10 The interminability of debates about the justification of its root principles and procedures similarly affects assessments of liberalism: their very end lessness leads critics to suggest that such justification cannot be the essence of liberal political life.11 Thus the question of civic virtue arises: What kind of citizens should we be, in order, practically, to maintain a polity that allows for the simultaneous pursuit of various conceptions of the good life? How can I transform myself, or teach my children, to become such a citizen? Current interest in civic virtue thus invokes a classical ideal to address modern problems. For the classical thinkers, civic virtue denoted that subset of cultivated moral habits and associated character traits that allowed one to be a good citizen in the political community. This subset of general virtues facilitated the political cooperation of citizens in the activities of public discourse and governance. Thus the singular term, civic virtue, encapsulates an overall sense of character that results from the cultivation of more specific identifiable political virtues, plural. Aristotle called this integration of political virtues civic friendship. Friendship itself was a virtue for Aristotle: a practiced moral habit that results in the settled character trait of friendliness (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 8). Curiously, while many contemporaries seek to revive the language of civic virtue, few seek to revive the language of civic friendship, despite the classical linkage of the two. Of course, the notion of civic virtue as a subset of overall virtue changes significantly in a modern context. In modern multicultural democracies, one cannot presume any unified “thick” conception of the good life among the citizenry. In other words, one cannot presume any agreement on the full integration of virtues that mark an ideally good life, a presumption that is at the root of classical thought. In fact, one of the basic commitments of the multicultural democratic state is the commitment to allow various pursuits of the good to coexist and flourish. In the current context, then, the critical question of civic virtue is this: Are there any general virtues of citizenship—cultivated moral habits that result in settled character 26
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traits—that are desirable for all citizens, regardless of their thick conceptions of the good life and the more idiosyncratic virtues intrinsic to their conception of the good life? In other words, are there virtues that contribute to the very possibility of democratic life in a multicultural polity? This challenge is both similar to and significantly different from its framing by the classical Greeks. It is similar in its concern for cultivated moral habits that result in desirable character traits. It is different in imagining that such traits might be definable separate from a more unified conception of goodness. The quest to define “the” good life singularly understood is now rightly presumed arrogant. In contemporary thought, one mean sought by civic virtue may lie between the extremes of “the syndrome of civic privatism,” and an evangelical zeal to enforce one’s personal view of the good as a political quest.12 The contemporary challenge of civic virtue is also both similar to and different from other articulated challenges to liberal democracy. Exemplified by John Rawls and his commentators, liberal theorists have sought to define a “thin” content of goodness—a shared sense of justice—that might be expected to be shared by holders of all legitimate “thick” conceptions of the good life. Theorists addressing civic virtue similarly question whether there is something that ought to be shared, morally, among a multicultural polity. However, their concern is not whether there is any overlapping subset among conceptions of the good, but rather whether there is any overlapping subset among ideals of character. They query whether certain character traits are desirable for all citizens in a pluralist polity. This question can be posed either to complement efforts at defining a thin theory of the good, as it is by liberal proponents of civic virtues; or it can be posed by critics of liberal paradigms who reject a priori attempts to define parameters of justice. Significantly, then, the question of what constitutes civic virtue has become a shared one that bridges work by contemporary liberals, communitarian critics of liberalism, and a variety of thinkers exploring the complex notion of civil society—that is, the layers of civic associations that are in some sense “public” without being “state.”
IS C I V IC V I RT U E I N NO C E N T ? The quest to define civic virtue is pervasive, even among thinkers who otherwise radically disagree in their political agendas. But it is certainly New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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not a universally endorsed quest. Paradoxically, renewed attention to civic virtue seems both a necessity and a danger of our times. Some conception of civic virtue seems necessary to articulate how citizens with various conceptions of the good life can interact with each other politically. But critics warn that specific conceptions of civic virtue may clandestinely favor some conceptions of the good life over others. Unreflective calls for civic virtue could marginalize, rather than empower, many citizens. Is Ci v ic V i rt u e E xclusi v e? Just as the promise of the term “civic virtue” may be linked to its classical roots, so its dangers may originate there as well. While contemporary revivers of civic virtue clearly hope to recall positive classical ideals, critics of renewed appeals to civic virtue stress the less-than-ideal social context that generated classical ideals.13 The connection to classical philosophy directly links the term “civic virtue” to the two longings expressed in the fall narrative: the longing for a place for the public, and the desire to explicitly consider desirable traits of character. The classical Greeks clearly conceived the polis to be both a physical and a discursive place for citizens to meet. They constructed public places to accommodate discussion among co-citizens and espoused public argument explicitly for the sake of edification. They articulated character traits of good citizens and lauded public heroes who were deemed to embody such traits. But critics worry that the Greeks did so within a context of political exclusivity, homogeneity, and insularity. Athens in the time of Aristotle typifies the exclusivity of concern. It was a patriarchal, slave-based society in which only a small group of males within the total population, defined by heredity, were considered citizens. Aristotle himself articulated the basic distinction between household and polis that continues to infect Western political theory, implying that women and children are not part of the political community (Politics, Book 1). Thus, those who invoke the classical language of civic virtue take on the burdens as well as the promises of history. They must make persuasive arguments that specified ideals of civic virtue can be workable in political communities that are less exclusive and homogeneous than those in which civic virtue was originally expounded, 28
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or those later communities that continued to trumpet the term without challenging gender, racial, or class injustices. Is Ci v ic V i rt u e Ci v i l? Ironically, the appeal to develop civic virtue that transcends particular political alignments has been divisive. The language of virtue is itself controversial. Some argue that there is an obvious need to go beyond the discussion of particular political issues in order to consider character traits of good citizenship. Desirable traits are those that could facilitate productive discourse about, or creative resolution of, specific political issues. Yet others legitimately fear that the language of virtue can be employed as a restraint, with those failing or refusing to accord to conceptions of virtue labeled not only unvirtuous but implicitly noncitizens. The frequent linkage of civic virtue to notions of civility can contribute to such dismissiveness. Civility, with its connotations of manners and courtesy, might seem an obvious component of civic virtue sought as a tonic to the uncivil public. Certainly, a public in which no one is willing to politely encounter or listen to citizen-strangers is unlikely to flourish. But civility has a long history of manipulation. It has often been raised as a shield of the privileged to shut out the demands of the exploited. As Judith Martin (Miss Manners) has famously observed, civility understood as etiquette deliberately seeks to mask some genuine emotions for the sake of cooperation (1985). One shakes hands in the receiving line, even if with an internalized grimace. An oversimplistic extension of civility, understood as etiquette, to political ideals of civic virtue dangerously suggests that suppression of passion is itself characteristic of civic virtue. But passions may have legitimate moral grounds. Anger, sarcasm, and parody may be appropriate ethical responses to a variety of situations, but their passionate display is often labeled uncivil. Historically, suffragettes, civil rights protesters, anti-war demonstrators, feminists, homosexual rights advocates, environmentalists, and others with profound critiques of the status quo have been summarily dismissed as “uncivil.” The dismissive potential of appeals to public civility remains visible at the highest levels of government. In 1999, committee chair Senator Jesse Helms ordered security to remove ten congresswomen who had come to a Senate hearing to lobby for an international treaty against gender discrimination, New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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reprimanding them for “unladylike conduct.”14 At its worst, the frequent association of civic virtue and public civility could unfurl a banner under which a tyranny of civility marginalizes important voices. The relationship between civic virtue and civic activity is also disputed. Some claim that a decline in civic virtue lies behind the eclipse of many so-called intermediary institutions—community organizations that act as political forums between the level of individual and state. Yet others celebrate rather than mourn this change in the political landscape, claiming that the intermediate institutions of declining vitality—from churches to Rotary Clubs—are often themselves exclusive. (My argument will call into question what “counts” as an intermediary institution. Why Rotary Club, but not MADD?) So while many call for renewed attention to civic virtue, others balk at the rejuvenation of the term. Is Ci v ic V i rt u e Ge n de r e d? Of the critics of civic virtue, none are more vociferous than those who express concerns related to gender issues. Historically, civic virtue has been a masculine virtue. Indeed, the term “virtue” itself etymologically relates to “virility.” From ancient Greece to the founding of the American Republic, civic virtue was assumed to be a character trait of men and was defined in reference to male experience in societies with severe sex discrimination. Because of its association with masculinity, civic virtue became one of the conceptual categories that perpetuated rigid dichotomies severing the household from the political realm. Civic virtue has masculine overtones first and foremost because of its long-standing association with military virtues. In the words of Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The problem with civic virtue can be stated succinctly: that virtue is armed” (1988, 47–55).15 The ancient Greeks considered military courage a paradigm of civic virtue. The thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau demonstrates the lingering influence of the military model through the Enlightenment. Rousseau advocated civil religion as a forum in which to develop civic virtue among the citizenry. Significantly, for Rousseau, civil religion was an explicit substitute for war. This replacement was intended to be totalizing and authoritarian even if not martial. Rousseau considered dissent from civil religion or ritual as the equivalent of civic draft-dodging (Social Contract, Book 8, 30
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chap. 4). Thus, Rousseau might be viewed as “the exception that proves the rule” of civic virtue’s association with martial valor. The association between battlefield service and civic virtue is problematic for several reasons. It downplays the virtues of peacemakers, failing to recognize violent solutions to conflict as intrinsic tragedies. It marginalizes the worldview of those who define such tragedies as de facto moral failures. It deflects attention from the civic virtues of women, who at least historically have not participated in battle, and who arguably are more actively schooled in nonviolent virtues, particularly in virtues of communication. (This is not to argue that women are either naturally less violent or naturally more communicative than men, only to acknowledge that women and men continue to be socialized differently in ways that are relevant to discussions of virtue.) Complex tensions arose when the martial undertones of civic virtue diffused into liberal political theory’s desire to avoid war. The association with battle may underlie the pervasive idea that civic virtue is defined by one’s willingness to sacrifice one’s intimate associations for the sake of the public good. As we shall see, this problematic notion is supported by various other developments in the history of the term. Early liberalism had to negotiate other tensions relevant to the interpretation of virtue as well. Virtue traditions, from the time of the classical Greeks onward, aimed at nothing short of human excellence. Liberalism by its nature gives up on excellence, either because the definition of moral excellence is contested, or because the pursuit of excellence comes at too great a cost and risks too much coercion, or both. Liberalism seeks to form a “good enough” polity to allow all individuals to try, and some to succeed, at developing their own personal excellences. Yet war-avoiding tolerance and a good-enough polity may entail thicker rather than thinner virtues among citizens. In Peter Berkowitz’s terms, liberalism inherently begs an “embarrassment over virtue”: When it comes to virtue, liberalism finds itself in a bind. At its core, liberalism is a doctrine that aims to secure the conditions of personal freedom for all through limited constitutional government. In the liberal tradition, personal freedom or individual liberty is originally understood in opposition to dependence on the arbitrary will of other human beings or submission to the rule of capricious laws. However, freedom on this understanding does not occur spontaneously or arise necessarily; it is created
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and maintained by human beings, and to actualize it, citizens and officeholders must exercise a range of basic virtues. Moreover, because of the limitations which liberalism places on the state, liberal regimes depend on virtues they cannot, left to their own devices, summon easily or cultivate vigorously. Liberalism’s dependence on even a modest degree of virtue can be embarrassing because liberalism must restrain itself from taking all the necessary steps to insure that citizens will develop the virtues necessary to sustain it. This embarrassment over virtue is less a virtue among liberals than the beginning of wisdom about the problem of character as it arises in liberalism. (1999, 189)
While a variety of contemporaries assume that the tradition of political liberalism vanquished virtue, others stress the complex conceptual relationship between virtue and freedom in early liberal thought. According to Berkowitz, the Enlightenment giants whose thought continues to ground modern liberalism were far more sophisticated than their contemporary heirs in acknowledging the necessary marriage between virtue and judgment, or between virtue and constitutionalism. Thus, Thomas Hobbes developed enlightened self-interest into prudential virtue. John Locke emphasized the crucial civic role of parents who must school their children in virtues that enable self-government. Even Immanuel Kant—despite his rigid distinction between prudential morality and genuine goodness— acknowledged character traits necessary to enact what the will recognizes as good. And J. S. Mill grounded true liberty in disciplines of character that allow individuality to be understood as a full personal flourishing. All of these thinkers assumed some connection between personal virtue and the ability to pursue common goods. At the same time, differences in those accounts of virtue—some prudential, some perfectionist, some geared to other-regard, some to individual flourishing—are vast. They testify to a time of transition and fluidity in concepts of virtue. This complex, evolving nexus of interpretation opened up new possibilities for the gendering of civic virtue. Figures of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment developed notably countervailing strands in the history of civic virtue when they identified character traits now culturally coded feminine as intrinsic to civic virtue.16 In particular, they marked sympathy as the linchpin of public virtue. Adam Smith’s ideal ethical spectator became so through an elaborate extension of felt sentiments: In order to produce this concord, as nature teaches spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this 32
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last in some measure to assume those of the spectators. . . . As they are constantly considering what they themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is as constantly led to imagine in what manner he could be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation. As their sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with their eyes. 17
Yet dueling with and ultimately vanquishing the so-called “moral sense tradition” was a competing view. The competing view sought wide-ranging benevolence through a suppression rather than an extension of felt sentiments. According to Joan Tronto—a contemporary reviver of the moral sense tradition—the more cosmopolitan eighteenth-century life became, the more daunting seemed the task of extending sympathy (1993, 50–52). The desire for an ethical “short-cut” favored rationalist accounts of civic virtue. These accounts claimed that reason should properly suppress passion, allowing ethical agents to deduce ethical norms that apply to all. The association of civic virtue with rational dispassion was associated not only with challenges of increasing cosmopolitanism but also with certain developments in modern science. Immanuel Kant’s deductive ethical universalism was modeled on the thought experiments of Newtonian physics, experiments that allowed the physicist to deduce laws of nature without observing or interacting with the whole of nature. Earlynineteenth-century utilitarianism adopted an inductive ethical approach from pioneers of modern biology such as Francis Bacon. Thus Jeremy Bentham characterized moral sympathy as a danger because it could distort the utilitarian calculus of ethical consequences in which every party should count as one and only one. Sympathy could lead one to treat one’s loved ones as more than one, thus distorting the inductive prediction of consequences. What both deductive and inductive modern science shared was a strong subject/object conceptual distinction, a distinction drawn between the scientist studying the world and the world that was studied. Both deontological and consequentialist ethical thinkers influenced by modern science urged a cultivated emotional detachment to insulate the ethical subject from the ethical data. They sought to make ethics itself an “objective” science. Ultimately, civic virtue became defined by the reasoned restraint of passion in public, in contrast to sentimental effusion associated with the New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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private womanly world of the home. Civic virtue was thus re-gendered as masculine rather than being de-gendered. This re-gendering hypermasculinized civic virtue to the extent that the concept became practically unworkable. The instability of the term at this time, including its unstable gendering, marks the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century as a particularly significant period in the biography of civic virtue. Beneath the flowery accolades heaped upon civic virtue in the rhetoric of civic republicans of the time, the tensions of this instability spiraled toward incoherence. T WO I DE OL O GI E S ; M U LT I PL E I RON I E S Two conceptual changes during this period, interweaving with economic changes that progressively moved production outside the home, synergized in ways that ultimately would defeat the coherence of civic virtue. These changes were the simultaneous evolutions of a gendered conception of public and private spheres, and a Christian emphasis on radically disinterested love of neighbor. Of course, both of these changes had earlier roots. The theological contests of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, and the period of state formation that followed, had initiated multiple changes that affected the social construction of public and private, understandings of gender roles, and theological interpretations of love. But the resulting social constellation that crystallized at the end of the eighteenth century in conjunction with the early beginnings of industrialization ultimately rendered the notion of civic virtue incoherent. A n I de ol o gy of Ge n de r : T h e R ise of D om e s t ici t y Joan Williams (2000) describes this cultural period as the advent of “domesticity,” her code word for a gendered moral division of labor and an associated division of socially constructed categories of public and private that became entrenched in American life. Domesticity would drastically affect the interpretation of civic virtue. While domesticity began to be discernible during the eighteenth century, it solidified in the nineteenth century. Evolving simultaneously with market capitalism, domesticity defined the realms of reproduction and production to be distinct. “Before then,” writes Williams, “market work 34
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and family work were not sharply separated in space or time” (2000, 1). This novel distinction redefined the family as an emotional rather than an economic unit. Gendering became central to defining and maintaining the distinction. Women were accorded the nurturing work of caring for children and husbands at home. Within the context of developing market capitalism, men were expected to compete in the harsh world of production outside the home and then be humanized by the feminine touch at home. The division of productive and reproductive labor engendered a moral division of labor that became equated with conceptions of male and female essential natures: In eighteenth-century Europe and early nineteenth-century America, a striking rearrangement of gender identities and stereotypes occurred. To men were assigned all the character traits associated with competition: ambition, authority, power, vigor, calculation, instrumentalism, logic, and single-mindedness. To women were assigned all the traits associated with cooperation: gentleness, sensitivity, expressivism, altruism, empathy, personalism, and tenderness. (Williams 2000, 23; quoting historian Christine Stansell)
While domesticity remains so entrenched that many assume it reflects “nature,” or the way things always have been, Williams draws on a number of cultural historians to demonstrate how relatively new, and socially constructed, is the system of domesticity. To some extent the feminization of virtue was a discomfited effort to retain virtue in an age in which self-interest was increasingly accepted as the regulatory mechanism of public life. Williams quotes an early-nineteenth-century New England pastor: It is at home where man . . . seeks a refuge from the vexations and embarrassments of business, an enchanting repose from exertion, a relaxation from care by the interchange of affection; where some of his finest sympathies, tastes, and moral and religious feelings are formed and nourished— where is the treasury of pure and disinterested love, such as seldom found in the busy walks of a selfish and calculating world. (2000, 31)
The contemporary sociologist Christopher Lasch (1977), attesting to the ideal of home as a “haven in a heartless world,” demonstrates the continued traction of this view. The resilience of domesticity may relate to its rhetorical translation of power hierarchies into emotional terms. Evolving in tandem with liberal New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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notions of equality, domesticity became defended as itself embodying equality. The separate spheres of men and women were described as equal but different, with each gender reigning in his or her sphere. Conventions that gave decision-making power or inordinate economic resources to men—conventions that had previously been defended by bald appeal to God-ordained hierarchies—now became defended as emotional achievements. A striking example detailed by Williams is the convention of wives moving with their husbands. In earlier epochs, common law had decreed it a right of husbands that their wives would accompany them should they choose to relocate. With the advent of domesticity, the law actually gave women more power to resist coerced relocation. At the same time, accounts of feminine virtue heavily exhorted women to make personal sacrifices such as relocation for the sake of husband and family. Sociological data today indicate that women are still much more likely than men to move for the sake of a spouse’s career or educational goals. Yet while “selfish” women who refuse may remain the butt of gossip for “holding their husbands or family back,” the change in rhetoric allows the gendered pattern to be dismissed. If it is considered an emotional accomplishment for women to make such sacrifices for their loved ones, then it is also considered voluntary. The transformation of raw hierarchy into emotional sentiment dramatically affected household labor. As Williams bluntly says: “Domestic ideology turned labor into love” (2000, 117). According to Williams, this transformation allowed remnants of coverture, “the common-law system that defined the family property as belonging to the husband,” to be retained despite explicit disavowal: “Coverture began as an integral part of patriarchy, the starkly hierarchical gender ideology that preceded domesticity. . . . In a society that considered women inferior, it was natural to vest ownership in husbands, who were seen as having the wisdom to manage the family’s economic life” (2000, 116). Under the social system of domesticity, household economy no longer was discussed as such, and a husband’s “right” to his wife’s household labor was redescribed as the receipt of his wife’s affection. Thus the nineteenth-century Married Women’s Property Acts (MWPAs), passed throughout the United States and ostensibly ending coverture, were limited in both scope and effect. They were limited in scope because they 36
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entitled wives only to wages earned or property derived from their participation in the labor market, not to full joint ownership of all family property. Champions of the latter position such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, arguing that home labor was indeed labor that enabled the holding of family property, lost sway to the redescription of labor as love (2000, 117). The MWPA laws were limited in effect because with labor defined as love, the “sacrifice” of the fruits of wives’ labor was portrayed as emotional maturity even when not legally demanded. Williams demonstrates that coverture went underground rather than being buried. The redescriptions involved in coverture’s disguise distinguished personal relationships such as those within the family from contractual relationships that mark the economic world. Indeed, the refusal to link work in the home to socioeconomic entitlements was defended as a moral protection of the home itself, to free it from the stain of market values.18 Of course, this was the ideal of an emerging middle class. In poor families, women as well as men needed to engage in market labor. In the richest families, a wider hospitality ethic and noblesse oblige balanced the emerging focus on the nuclear family that corresponded with a gendered division of moral labor. Domesticity both built upon and molded interpretations of social contract theory.19 In Carole Pateman’s words, the social contract presumed a sexual contract: In theory, liberalism and patriarchalism stand irrevocably opposed to each other. Liberalism is an individualistic, egalitarian, conventionalist doctrine; patriarchalism claims that hierarchical relations of subordination necessarily follow from the natural characteristics of men and women. In fact, the two doctrines were successfully reconciled through the answer given by the contract theorists in the seventeenth century to the subversive question of who counted as free and equal individuals. The conflict with the patriarchalists did not extend to women or conjugal relations; the latter were excluded from individualist arguments and the battle was fought out over the relation of adult sons to their fathers. (1987, 105–106)
Thus, claims Pateman, the term “fraternity” for citizenship should be understood literally. Both the state and civil society were conceived as realms populated by adult “brothers” (107–108).20 Both were defined by social contracts distinguished from the sexual contract that governed family life. Social contract theory itself, then, has bolstered the problematic notion that women are closer to nature and men to culture.21 New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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Domesticity continues to pervade American economic, cultural, and legal life. Unquestioned assumptions of domesticity are implicated in the glass ceiling, substandard day care, welfare policies that presume that women should be caregivers and then punish them for being caregivers, overly narrow identifications of male identity with work outside the home, and communications breakdowns between men and women who are schooled in different virtues. Coverture-gone-underground also results in starkly gendered results of divorce in the United States: divorce tends to dramatically lower the financial status of women and children, but not of men. Given the resilience of domesticity in other areas of cultural life, reflective rehabilitators of civic virtue must question its legacy among the ideals they trumpet. This is all the more true given domesticity’s proven track record in rhetorically redefining power hierarchies as emotional achievements, rendering those hierarchies subtly protected. Thus it is essential to consider how civic virtue fared during the advent of domesticity, and how it may be implicated. Domesticity dictated a dramatic gender reversal for the category of virtue, generally. Virtue lost its virility as emotional perception, responsiveness, and cultivation were relegated to spheres of life coded feminine. Virtue became associated with “virtuous wives,” women overflowing with maternal nurturance and restrained by sexual and emotional loyalty to their husbands. (Perhaps such gender caricatures underlie the rejection of virtue as a quaint and prudish category in the previous generation, before its provocative contemporary revival.) Most significantly, domesticity emasculated the legacy of the Scottish moral sense theorists. It defined their exhortation to attend to one’s sentiments as a feminine concern. Through its rigid dichotomies, it denied the very connection the moral sense theorists sought to foster: the connection between emotional perception in personal and political realms of life. The emasculation of the moral sense tradition was so thorough that most American schoolchildren today know only half of Adam Smith’s corpus. They know him as the author of Wealth of Nations and a founding father of market capitalism, not as the author of The Moral Sentiments and a thinker who considered cultivation of sympathy essential to community. They might be surprised to learn that in Smith’s mind, the two works were linked. To keep Smith a man, domesticity demanded the suppression of 38
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one side of his work and the distortion of another side. The emasculation of the moral sense tradition has repercussions in contemporary political theory, in which feminist political theorists disproportionately engage in efforts to recover that tradition.22 Yet an outward cultivation of perceptive sympathy must in some way be related to the accomplishment of civic virtue. A n I de ol o gy of R e l igion: C h r is t i a n N e igh bor L ov e a s Disi n t er e st e d Sacr i f ici a l L ov e Domesticity became entrenched in tandem with a certain interpretation of agape, Christian love of neighbor. (The term, which comes from classical Greek, means “to love like God loves.” It was later Latinized as caritas, charity.) Like domesticity, this conception was a relatively new one, although it quickly came to be viewed as orthodoxy, particularly among certain politically powerful Protestant denominations. If domesticity contributed to the feminization of virtue, it contributed to the masculinization of neighbor love. For much of the Christian tradition, the challenge of love was considered to be its comprehensiveness. The task of the theologian was to explain structural connections between different kinds of loves, from passionate personal loves of spouses or parents to the love of the stranger or enemy demanded by Jesus, all of which were understood to be transformed by Christian commitments. This formulation of love’s challenge was common to Christian theologians across epochs and continents, from Augustine in fourth-century North Africa to Thomas Aquinas in medieval Italy. It continued to organize Protestant Reformation theology in the sixteenth century, even amid the stark view of human sinfulness emphasized by Martin Luther and John Calvin. For them, realistic assessment of human sin meant the process of integrating loves would necessarily be more fractured and fraught with danger, more in need of restraint against self-deception, and more marked by approximation than by accomplishment. But such integration, albeit imperfect in a sinful world, was still a recognizable goal. In modern theology of the post-Enlightenment period, the challenge of Christian love came to be perceived as its antagonism to “natural” loves: erotic love and friendship. Of course it was domesticity itself that made New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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such loves seem natural, and also naturally associated with women—since women were culturally constrained to realms defined by such attachments. Indeed, this also marks a role reversal for friendship, as compared to classical times when friendship was a manly virtue. Aristotle, in fact, doubted that women had the intellectual capacities necessary to be a friend. The re-gendering of friendship as feminine may explain the relative neglect of civic friendship in calls for the renewal of civic virtue, although in classical thought the two concepts were closely linked. Changes in Christian views of love were influenced not only by domesticity but also by the rise of modern science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific theories of the preceding centuries’ “scientific revolution” were solidified in popular culture and scientific training. Those theories presumed a strong separation between the scientific enquirer (subject) and the data studied (object), resulting in a view of strict scientific “objectivity.” Pressed to respond defensively to the increasing cultural power of secular science, Christian theology increasingly likened Christian neighbor love to the concept of detached scientific objectivity. (This connection will be discussed again in chapter 5 to initiate my reconstructive argument.) Increasingly, theologians demanded that, to be like Jesus, Christians were called to radically self-sacrificing, disinterested love. “Disinterested” has two important senses: disinterested lovers should be disinterested in the particular qualities of the beloved (since they are called to love all); and such lovers should be disinterested in receiving any “return” on their love. They must be willing to love anyone without hope of reciprocation. For convenience, I label the relevant contrast between premodern and modern theology as “comprehensive” versus “antagonistic” interpretations of Christian neighbor love. Comprehensive approaches presume that there is a connection between different kinds of proper loving, from the most personal loves to the broadest neighbor loves. Antagonistic approaches presume that neighbor love is antagonistic toward certain lesser, natural loves. The dramatic transition between these conceptions of love is embodied by the chasm between eighteenth-century Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler and nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran theologian Søren Kierkegaard, both of whom had wide influence in American as well as in European theological circles. Butler tried to shore up the comprehensive conception in the midst of social pressures working toward its erosion, 40
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including the advent of domesticity and the empowerment of secular science. Kierkegaard most clearly articulated the modern antagonistic conception of Christian neighbor love. Butler denied that Christian neighbor love is rendered practically impossible by compulsions of self-love, defending the possibility of agape against the inevitability of hedonism. The very fact that Butler felt a need for such a defense is telling of the times. No longer was the biblical command “Love your neighbor as yourself” interpreted to presume appropriate self-love as a proper ethical starting point. Increasingly, it was interpreted to presume a great divide between self and neighbor love. The developing notion of a distinct, competitive economic sphere may well have contributed to this sense of divided loves. In such a framework, love for particular others such as spouses, friends, or children becomes a problem: are such loves closer to (bad) self-love or (good) neighbor love? Butler rejected that question by reaffirming the classical comprehensive conception of the theological challenge, albeit using the new Enlightenment language of “benevolence,” which he equated with charity, or neighbor love. Butler rejected a dichotomy between self-love and pursuit of other loves because the pursuit of self-love does not necessarily make one happy: “People may love themselves with the most entire and unbounded affection, and yet be extremely miserable” (1969, 367). Happiness comes indirectly from the gratification of other goods, including the good of loving others. In effect, Butler recognized the complex mutuality between lover and beloved: “That any affection tends to the happiness of another, does not hinder its tending to one’s own happiness too” (369). Butler understood benevolence as a virtue: a cultivated habit of concern for fellow creatures that resulted from reasoned discipline of passions for the other. This virtue was a classical Aristotelian mean: excessive love of particular others, or inadequate love of particular others, were both vices that could block its accomplishment. Particular affections were, for him, a central middle term between proper self-love and benevolence: Benevolence. . . . will lead us to consider both the distant consequences as well as the immediate tendency of an action; it will teach us that the care of some persons, suppose children and families, is particularly committed to our charge by nature and Providence, as also that there are other circumstances, suppose friendship . . . which require that we do good to some, preferably to others. Reason, considered merely subservient to New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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benevolence, as assisting to produce the greatest good, will teach us to have particular regard to these relations and circumstances, because it is plainly good for the world that they should be so regarded. (1969, 374)
Here Butler resists not only increasingly dichotomous portrayals of selflove and other-love among contemporary theologians but also the tendency in contemporaneously emerging utilitarian thought to distrust sympathy for particular others because it might distort efforts to consider social good.23 For Butler, Christian charity was not altogether different from friendship; rather, benevolence was friendship expanded to its broadest scope. Because he believed that appropriately disciplined passion governed all love from self-love to benevolence and that all right love contributed to personal happiness, Butler rejected the evolving language of “disinterested love”: “Therefore to those who are shocked to hear virtue [of benevolence] spoken of as disinterested, it may be allowed that it is indeed absurd to speak of it thus” (1969, 369). A century later, the polemic of Søren Kierkegaard smashed the defenses Butler so painstakingly built around classical conceptions of neighbor love. For Kierkegaard, it was not absurd to conceive of commanded neighbor love as “disinterested.” Rather, Christianity was absurd (a word he used frequently as a badge of valor) to demand such love. But it did demand it, and thus it demanded that Christians be willing to be “fools in the eyes of the world.” For Kierkegaard, the classical Christian conception of the challenge of love, the challenge of integrating loves, must be rejected as a remnant of paganism. All loves had to be categorized as selfish (and thus bad) or agapic and thus good. Particular love of family and friends got relegated to the category of selfish loves: One should rather take pains to clarify the point . . . that Christianity has thrust erotic love and friendship from the throne, the love rooted in mood and inclination, preferential love, in order to establish spiritual love in its place, love to one’s neighbor, a love which in all earnestness and truth is inwardly more tender in the union of two persons than erotic love is and more faithful in the sincerity of close relationship than the most famous friendship. One must rather take pains to make very clear that the praise of erotic love and friendship belong[s] to paganism, that the poet really belongs to paganism since his task belongs to it—in order with the sure spirit of conviction to give to Christianity what belongs to Christianity, love of one’s neighbor, of which love not a trace is found in paganism. (1962, 58) 42
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Kierkegaard’s break from Butler is grounded on his singularly negative view of self-love, which taints relationships of intimacy to particular others: Erotic love and friendship are preferential and the passion of preference. Christian love is self-renunciation’s love. . . . Love and friendship are the very height of self-feeling, the I intoxicated in the other-I. . . . At the peak of love and selfishness, the two really become one self, one I . . . a new selfish self. (65, 68; emphasis Kierkegaard’s)
While Kierkegaard certainly challenged the bourgeois vestment of the Danish Lutheran church, he may have succumbed more to the social pressures of his time than he allowed, or than did his implied nemesis, Butler. If Kierkegaard’s Christianity was foolish, its absurdity had curious affinities to emerging rationalist traditions that demanded that ethical thinking suppress emotions and sacrifice intimacy. Just as rationalist traditions made ethics an incoherent ideal for home life, so too Kierkegaard’s conception of Christian love was defined over and against the home. Some interpreters of Kierkegaard believe his polemic against erotic love and friendship was intended to pave the way for a retrieval of those loves in a transformed agapic context rather than a straightforward condemnation of those loves against the standard of agape.24 But the rhetoric itself redefines the challenge of Christian love: now a challenge of resistance to certain forms of love rather than an appropriate integration of all kinds of love. If Christianity was uncomfortable with the accommodation to self-interest in the developing market realm, Kierkegaard responded by staunchly rejecting that self-interest while continuing to contrast it to the affection of private relations. Thus, instead of home affection balancing market rapaciousness, a view of totally disinterested love was contrasted to home affections. In contrast to the New England pastor who located love in the home, Kierkegaard gave love back its virility at the price of intimacy. A M a rt y r C om pl e x for C i v ic V i rt u e? While Kierkegaard took his audience as the church, his thought implies a radical transformation of sacrificial ideals for the civic public. Martial models of sacrifice underlying classical conceptions of civic virtue had become complicated by Enlightenment reaction against war, yet they still held considerable sway. Now sacrifice itself could be redefined and thus reclaimed as an essential element of civic love. The home became New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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defined as the realm of feminine sacrifice for particular others; through such sacrifice, a loving wife or mother could block the devolution of her love for family into pure self-love. The civic realm became defined as the moral space for the greatest sacrifice of all: the sacrifice of, not for, one’s particular loved ones, the place where one acts as a disinterested lover of all. Civic man would sacrifice not his body on the battlefield, but instead his particular attachments in the public sphere. Jesus’ crucifixion became identified as a paradigm that informed both kinds of sacrifice—sacrifice in the home and of the home—and particularly elevated the latter. In the interpretation of civic virtue, Butler lost and Kierkegaard won. The resulting paradigm infused notions of civic love with a not-so-subtle martyr complex. Kierkegaard’s theology directly influenced American theological and political thought through the mediation of Swedish theologian Anders Nygren (1890–1978), who was widely read in the United States.25 Through this lineage, the classic Lutheran conception of a split moral realm, church and world, became grafted onto a split conception of the nature of love itself. Reinhold Niebuhr, who achieved a status rarely rivaled as an American public intellectual in the mid-twentieth century, welded this theological split onto the modern social structure of domesticity. Niebuhr (1892–1971) was not only a professor of Christian ethics but also an advisor to four presidents, a noted public opinion columnist, and one recognized founder of a branch of political science called “realism.” Niebuhr reacted against the social gospel movement that had thrived earlier in the century.26 From his point of view, that movement’s desire to translate Christian neighbor love directly into institutional political life was naive. The horrors of world wars and economic depression, Niebuhr reasoned, dictated a more realistic theology. His “realism,” unfortunately, presumed that domesticity is reality—and thus made it more real. Niebuhr follows Kierkegaard in defining Christian love as self-sacrifice. But he rejects Kierkegaard’s claim that the Christian must simply dare to be absurd in the eyes of the world. Instead, Niebuhr’s complex theological anthropology led him to a view of “approximated” love. He defines two kinds of approximate love: mutual love and justice, which bifurcate precisely along the axis of domesticity. Niebuhr views the transcendent as a force that may intersect history as a tangent intersects a graph. The pointillon contact between history and 44
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the transcendent, exemplified by the incarnation of Jesus, allows the transcendent to clarify ultimate norms—without allowing history to actualize those norms. Therefore, for Niebuhr it is impossible to “live the kingdom” in human history. True love, which he defines as self-sacrifice, will always result in martyrdom in the sinful world, just as it did for Jesus. Thus the paradox: “Love is the impossible possibility.”27 For Niebuhr, it is unrealistic to strive for simple imitation of such love in the world. However, since the transcendent and the historical are not completely disconnected, but intersected, Niebuhr claims there is a dialectical relationship between the two. This allows agape to “complete” other forms of love. More specifically, Niebuhr claims agapic motivations elevate otherwise selfish or competitive relationships, though true agape will never be realized. In intimate relations, Niebuhr thinks agapic motivation can lead to the approximation of love known as mutual love. In the broader political realm, agapic motivation can lead to justice, which is always imperfect and relative. Niebuhr’s understanding of mutual love and justice uncritically presumes the socially constructed boundaries of public/private defined by domesticity. Indeed, the title of his book Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) is premised on his view that larger social groups are inherently less moral than smaller ones. In context, Niebuhr seeks to pose his view of justice against the rapaciousness of unfettered market capitalism. But in effect he also poses domesticity’s “heartless world” over and against personal relationships in the home. Conceiving of political life as the constant evolving competition between subgroups, Niebuhr advocates a chastened commitment to justice, rather than love, in the political realm. This justice seeks the checking of powers against each other to avoid any one group achieving idolatrous power. Niebuhr uses the intriguing language of “paradoxical” and “dialectic” to describe the general relationship between love and justice. But in his description of the political realm, the two become virtually disconnected. Realistic justice aims at equality and freedom, not love. “Thus according to Niebuhr sacrificial love is the operating norm for personal life; justice, the standard for social life” (Andolsen 1981, 71). In several ways, Niebuhr’s formulations complete the conceptual disembowelment of civic virtue. His welding of a theological view of love onto the conceptual grid of domesticity hardens the distinction between New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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private life and political life that civic virtue seeks to bridge. It also cements implicit gender distinctions: the kind of mutual love homemakers, for example, might attain is different in kind from the kind of political justice civic man might attain. Most basically, Niebuhr’s retention of an ideal norm of self-sacrifice for political life, combined with his rejection of that norm’s actual possibility, renders the cultivation of civic virtue an impossible task. For Niebuhr, the challenge of political life becomes strategic realism in checking powers of injustice, not the cultivation of virtues that are transformative of the citizen as well as of the body politic. The extent of Niebuhr’s continued influence is evident even in the formulations of his contemporary theological critics. Stephen Pope’s recent elegant argument for the “inclusiveness of agape,” an argument for a return to classical, comprehensive understandings of agape, begins from the premise that different kinds of loves have come to be seen as antagonistic in Christian ethics. Pope’s synthesis of various interpretations of agape poses the integration of different kinds of love as both a goal and a challenge for contemporary Christian ethics (1997, 353–79). While Gene Outka (1972) challenges Niebuhr’s dim view of self-love and his implicit assumption that conflict is the defining feature of human social existence, Outka continues to cast intimate relationships as a challenge to Christian love. For Outka, such relationships may tempt against agape-as-equalregard, his favored formulation, which presses for a widely inclusive ethic. While Outka emphasizes how egalitarian concepts of agape may inform appropriate mutuality, he is less interested in how appropriate mutuality may inform agape. Even “Christian sectarian” critics of Niebuhr are so called precisely because they reject his framework. Thus, for example, Christian pacifist and virtue theorist Stanley Hauerwas—who argues that Christians should consider themselves “resident aliens” in American political culture—is frequently cast as a sectarian who wishes to insulate Christianity from political life. Hauerwas explicitly rejects this charge, arguing that Christian witness as he understands it has great relevance to the wider secular political community. He and co-author William H. Willimon explicitly frame their defense against accusations of sectarianism in reference to Niebuhr, calling Niebuhr’s political theory “a form of idolatry, public church” (Hauerwas and Willimon 1989, 31). Despite his articulateness, Hauerwas fails to escape the label of sectarianism ascribed to him because he rejects 46
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the dominant Niebuhrian association between Christianity and one approach to political theory. The political marginalization of groups committed to some form of “witness,” whether thickly or thinly religious, has great implications for civic virtue. Like Hauerwas’s theological critics, conventional secular exponents of civic virtue assume that witness is outside politics. Thus they seek to articulate virtues consciously aimed at citizen formation, rather than considering whether virtues cultivated for other reasons may turn out to have political significance. Yet openness to the latter possibility might be essential if civic virtue is to be made coherent in a multicultural community that does not presume one unified view of the good life. Openness to the latter possibility might be essential if civic virtue is not to be defined as a preconceived limit on diversity. While feminist Christian theologians incessantly criticize Niebuhr’s failure to consider the need for justice in intimate relationships or the real relevance of love for political life, they continue to describe their complaints in reference to his categories of love and justice, public and private.28 Recasting the categories themselves is recognized to be an uphill challenge. Because of Niebuhr’s acute awareness of selfishness, especially corporate selfishness, where economics and government are concerned he reduced agape to a remote star. . . . Feminist work on the meaning of love presents a serious challenge to the dominant view of twentieth-century American ethicists. . . . Agape [appropriately] re-defined. . . . cannot be a norm applicable only in one sphere of life. It must serve as a norm for political and economic life as well as family life. (Andolsen 1981, 71, 79; emphasis added)
Niebuhr differentiated individual and group behavior primarily on the ground that the checks that serve to limit natural selfishness in personal situations do not exist, or at least not as strongly, in social situations. While he acknowledged that egoism rears its head in individual relations such as the family, he felt that there was a qualitative difference in favor of such individual relationships. While many attack Niebuhr’s assessment of social relations as the problem with his comparison, I would suggest that, in addition, he idealized individual relations. In the years since Niebuhr composed the bulk of his writings, we have learned a great deal more about the workings of the family. Millions of New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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children in this country alone have suffered from parental abuse. Thousands have died from it. Wife- and husband-beating are common occurrences. . . . The existence of this degree of sinfulness in individual relationships is not recognized in Niebuhr’s work. . . . And yet more and more we are coming to learn through history, sociology, and psychology that the family and other individual relationships cannot be understood separately from social relationships. (Gudorf 1985) 29
While feminist theologians continue straining against Niebuhr’s categories, they collectively develop one theme that challenges Kierkegaard’s influence at its core. They reject the definition of agape as self-sacrifice. Instead, they propose mutuality as the defining feature of Christian love, one that provides an ethical norm for all kinds of human love. They reject the proposition that true love always seeks no return, insisting that true love seeks the establishment of reciprocal community. Thus they reject antagonistic interpretations of agape and revive the classical quest to articulate a comprehensive interpretation. This revolt is so profound, and its implications for civic virtue so far-reaching, that it will be discussed in more detail in following chapters. Inadequately challenging the received categories of public and private, feminist theologians have elaborated their rejection of sacrificial ideals more concretely for personal than for political loves. They have investigated issues such as parenting, domestic violence, eating disorders, and gender inequalities in sexual giving and sexual satisfaction.30 But just as unhealthy self-sacrifice may prove—contra Niebuhr—depressingly possible rather than impossible in the home, so too it may in the body politic. Since the incoherence of civic virtue derives from a simultaneous acceptance (of the moral norm) and rejection (of the actual possibility) of sacrificial ideals, feminist critique raises challenges for the reconsideration of public loves as well. It raises challenges for the transformation of civic virtue. Christian conceptions of love have had and continue to have broad cultural influence beyond thickly Christian circles. Civic virtue is likely to remain an incoherent ideal as long as true love is assumed to be sacrificial love; as long as love is viewed as too stringent an ideal to be practically relevant to political life; as long as different kinds of human loves, ranging from the most intimate to the most political, are defined as categorically different from each other. These notions are widely accepted in contemporary political theory, with inadequate recognition that they are rooted in one particular lineage of Christian theology. 48
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T H E L EGAC Y OF DUA L I DE OL O GI E S: I RON I E S OF C I V IC V I RT U E The simultaneous evolution of both an emphasis on radically disinterested love and a rigid gendered conception of public and private “spheres” spawned a series of related ironies that acts both as an organizing parameter for and as an outstanding challenge to my own reconstructive argument. The first irony is that the liberal tendency to demand suppression of one’s personal commitments in public life, including religious commitments, was itself indebted to a thickly religious ideal—albeit one that is hotly contested within the Christian tradition from which it partially derived. The second irony is that such a detached view of love paradoxically both structured public norms and weighed against love as a public norm. On the one hand, love of the public became associated with a sacrifice of private interests. On the other hand, love became viewed as an impossible ideal for the competitive realm of production, a realm in which it was more realistic to hold avarice in check than to cultivate virtuous humanism. Love and justice became polarized concepts, with love sentimentalized as an ideal for home and hearth, while justice was seen as the necessary moral restraint for the public realm. This led to the third irony: a gender reversal for the general category of virtue. Virtue became more coherent in the private realm that was culturally coded as feminine. The manly category of classical virtue lost ground to a focus on “feminine virtue” and “virtuous wives,” women whose specific virtues included chastity, loving tenderness, and loyalty to family. To prevent itself from being emasculated, civic virtue had to define itself in radical contrast to such feminine virtue. So the connotation of civic virtue as a dispassionate suppression of personal attachments became even more entrenched. In the context of an ideology of separate gender spheres that generally feminized virtue, civic virtue became hyper-masculinized. Taking for granted the affective passions necessary for intimate family life, proponents of civic virtue focused on its decorous emotional restraint. This emotional restraint was to allow room for reasoned public argument and to prevent personal rapaciousness from clouding consideration of the common good. Civic virtue, then, presumed a gendered moral division of labor that associated emotions with femaleness and household life. New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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I ron i e s L e a d t o I ron i e s: Ci v ic V i rt u e a n d Fa m i ly Va lu e s The lingering legacy of domesticity causes an ironic tension in the current revival of attention to civic virtue. On the one hand, a concern for “family values” across the political spectrum is clearly one impetus to the turn to virtue in political discourse. On the other hand, the historical linkage of civic virtue with dichotomized views of private and public life discourages careful attention to the relationship between personal character traits and creative citizenship. In this age in which marriage and divorce patterns are changing, in which geographic mobility is increasing, in which women demand a share of personal fulfillment undefined by their family relationships, in which economic pressures as well as changing gender roles constrain stay-at-home parenting among middle-class families (it always was a rarity among lower classes), in which consumer pressures are brought to bear on children in many forms of popular culture—in this age, the accomplishment of well-raised children can no longer be taken for granted by political theory. Negative stimuli such as shocking childhood addiction and suicide rates combine with positive stimuli, particularly public revaluing of the ethical work of care, to redirect attention to the fact that citizens begin as children. But the implications of that redirection remain undeveloped. The term civic virtue, with its implication of lifelong learning and cultivation, seems to point to connections between personal character traits and political virtues. It seems to invite discussion of which personal character traits might be relevant to citizenship and how their cultivation could be encouraged. It raises questions about whether there may be positive or negative spillover from the development of people, generally, to the development of citizens, more particularly. Yet at the same time, the term itself stands in the way of such investigations because embedded in its history are presumptions that define public life in opposition to private life. Thus, “add-civic-virtue-and-stir” approaches (those that advocate simply adding increased emphasis on civic virtue to dominant liberal political theory) are unlikely to be successful. Such approaches tend toward two diametrically opposed but axially related excesses. On the one hand, some accounts too directly relate conventional structures of home life to civic virtue. These accounts neglect the extent to which the social construction of domesticity has negatively 50
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influenced the operative conception of private life. They thus mistake social structures (the nuclear family, heterosexual marriage, stay-at-home mothers, etc.) for social virtues, whereas true virtues might crosscut multiple social structures, embracing various private views of the good. Alternatively, other accounts too quickly assume that public virtues are radically different from private ones. Under such accounts, how one treats one’s spouse, children, and ethnic or religious community becomes irrelevant to civic virtue because, after all, the civically virtuous should cultivate wider political visions apart from such commitments. Developers of such accounts seem unembarrassed by the implication that a wife-beater could be a paragon of civic virtue. Both excesses presume the system of domesticity. Both dramatically take for granted the work of caregivers, disproportionately women. Both fail to dissolve the ironies that rendered civic virtue an incoherent category in the first place. Neither successfully de-genders the term. Truly reviving civic virtue poses dramatic challenges that, if met, will radically, not marginally, change political theory and political life. I ron i e s L e a d t o I ron i e s: Ci v ic V i rt u e a n d Ci v i l Soci et y Taking for granted their wives’ role in nurturing both themselves and their children, male citizens assumed that civic virtue was aimed at building “free” associations outside the family that would work toward the common good. First articulated and celebrated by the keen French observer Alexis de Tocqueville in his descriptions of early-nineteenth-century American life, the capacity for voluntary civic association is once again the subject of concerted attention in American political theory.31 Like Tocqueville, many contemporary political scientists believe that civil society is important precisely because it lies between the realm of family and state. MADD, however, does not seem the voluntary association that either Tocqueville or his contemporary heirs have in mind. In a technical sense, MADD members choose to associate freely and voluntarily as equal citizens. But their mission is tied to unchosen tragedies, nonvoluntary obligations to care for particular loved ones, and the dependence and vulnerability of those loved ones, especially children. MADD defies the stark distinction between home and political community that the rhetoric New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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of “free, voluntary” civic associations presumes. In fact, the conceptual infrastructure within which the call to revive civil society occurs is the infrastructure of domesticity—a schema that obfuscates how families, civic associations, and the state may be mutually formative. Significantly, the decline of civic virtue in political theory occurred in tandem with the rise of attention to civil society. Many assume the terms linked, and indeed they were in the writings of early civic republicans. However, increasingly, civil society became a focus that displaced civic virtue. If civic virtue seemed an increasingly impossible ideal, civil society seemed an increasingly necessary mediator between public rapaciousness and private affection. Tocqueville called civic associations “free institutions” that “recall to each citizen constantly and in a thousand ways that he lives in society” (2000, 485, 488). While many contemporary commentators assume civic virtue and civil society are connected, some dissidents articulate why, in fact, there is tension between the two. Gerard Hauser (1989) claims that civic virtue and civil society, as alternative political quests, emerged out of different historical epochs that presume different priorities of citizen allegiance. Hauser focuses on the “down sides” of the classical Greek communities that first generated ideals of civic virtue: they were exclusive, martially oriented, and demanded that citizenship be one’s primary identity. In contrast, the developing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modern communities that increasingly focused on civil society were trading societies that embraced difference and border negotiations between different groups. Civil society provided the very terrain for such negotiation, a terrain that allows for multiple overlapping discourses to define, albeit never homogeneously, public opinion: The public sphere is not merely conceptual but has a specific historical referent linked to the Enlightenment’s emerging condition and theory of civil society. I will contend that civil society poses an alternative model to civic virtue, and that the civil society model requires revising our understanding of the public sphere’s discursive character. Finally, I will maintain that civil society suggests the public sphere, contrary to our understanding of it as a single discursive domain, is composed of nested arenas, with a reticulate structure. (Hauser 1998, 21)32
For Hauser, the frequent linkage of the two terms, civic virtue and civil society, is ironic because it ignores major differences in the rhetorical structures that rendered each coherent. 52
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Yet both of these rhetorics could stretch themselves around domesticity: civic virtue, demanding the sacrifice of home to citizenship; civil society, posing itself as the mediator between home and citizenship. Civil society may have provided a more livable ethical turf than the sacrificial altar of civic virtue, but it still provided such a haven by defining itself against intimate associations, even if not demanding their utter sacrifice. Civil society was the crucial ethical terrain between family and state, crucial because it was neither of those—the one perceived as too passionate, the other as too demanding. Once again, the citizenship of those who concretely care for children, the ill, or other dependents was assumed to be second-class citizenship. (In fact, for women it was not defined as citizenship at all until the success of the suffrage movement in the twentieth century.) But as Hauser suggests, empirical observation of civil society may lead to questioning the tripartite conception of home, civil society, and state. MADD, for example, does not fit. Another dissident who questions the easy fit between civic virtue and civil society is Daniel Bell. Bell notes the presumption (Tocqueville’s legacy) that “one must look for such [civically virtuous] groups in civil society, the realm between the family and the state” (1998, 240). Yet in fact, he argues, some forms of civil society facilitate civic vices rather than civic virtues. At the same time, contra liberal assumptions, the state-at-large may appropriately facilitate the development of civic virtue. (Bell himself does not consider whether family, the other pole of conventional contrast to civil society, may appropriately facilitate civic virtue.) Bell develops two examples to challenge dominant assumptions. First, he considers residential community associations (RCAs) that have been formed by various suburban developments. He argues that RCAs often pull residents away from participation in broader community. In terms of security, recreation, and so forth, the RCA often works to insulate the residential community from the broader polity. Second, he considers the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). Bell claims the NPS, in which volunteers outnumber paid employees by five to one, successfully facilitates the cultivation of civic virtue even though it is a large federal bureaucracy. Significantly, the NPS preserves civic memory as well as natural preserves, since it maintains historical sites. Bell emphasizes that this mission, to be done well, may actually entail limiting, rather than encouraging, free association. Appropriate limits may include zoning limits or limits on commercial New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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activity (such as T-shirt sales) to maintain a proper atmosphere at the site (1998, 242–63). These complications suggest that the relationship between civic virtue and civil society may be less straightforward than is often assumed. Of course, it may be difficult to consider what kinds of civil societies are good for democracy without a sense of the civic virtues one hopes will be cultivated there. At the same time, it may be difficult to articulate concrete virtues without imagining what kinds of settings could promote them. Currently, the focus of American political theory is in transition. During the early to mid-1990s, civic virtue was an explicit emphasis; but since then, civil society has overtaken civic virtue as a focal point of discussion. This transition may not be the natural evolution many assume it to be. Rather, given the historical tension between civic virtue and civil society as alternative ideals, this change might simply indicate a failure of the conversation on civic virtue. Moreover, it might portend the failure of the conversation on civil society. That conversation is unlikely to be successful if it too easily presumes what kinds of civil societies are relevant (Rotary Club, but not MADD; neighborhood associations, not the National Park Service), or if it too presumptuously assumes that civil society automatically promotes civic virtue. The focus of my argument is civic virtue. But I propose that civic virtue must be explored in ways that revise terms of discussion about civil society. The fact that—despite tensions between them—both terms are implicated in domesticity may give a starting point for re-evaluation. Neither interpretations of civic virtue nor of civil society that take for granted the work of caregivers will suffice any longer; nor will interpretations of civic virtue and civil society that fail to consider how family, civil society, and state are mutually formative rather than pristinely distinct. Contemporary political theorists advance civil society over and against the retreat of civic virtue. But neither term is likely to be victorious if it does not begin to cooperate, rather than compete, with the other.
T R A NSFOR M I NG C I V IC V I RT U E : A C ONS T RUC T I V E C H A L L E NGE Because incoherent norms of civic virtue are tied to two problematic ideologies, one of gender and the other of religion, transforming civic virtue 54
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will entail challenging those ideologies. While such a challenge is daunting, it underlies the promise of transformed civic virtue. A transformed interpretation of civic virtue will promote fairer gender relations in civic life. It will consider raising children well a political investment, not merely “an expensive private hobby.”33 It will provide a workable conception of just love for citizens—one that acknowledges the relevance of passion to politics but also demands the appropriate restraint provided by justice, itself understood as a virtue. It will promote a more sophisticated conversation on the complex relationship between civic virtue and civil society. And it will articulate the civic virtue of MADD that is obscured in the fall narratives of civic virtue. Aga i ns t a n I de ol o gy of Ge n de r : T r a nsfor m e d C i v ic V i rt u e a s N e c e s si t y, No t N e m e sis , for F e m i n ism I consider the critique of civic virtue from gender standpoints to be weighty without being devastating. Civic virtue is only one of a host of seemingly laudable terms that in fact has participated in patriarchy. A now timehonored strategy of feminism is to retrieve the critical power of terms that have become complicit. This critical retrieval can be accomplished through the willful “accenting” of positive strands among the complex and competing layered strands of meaning surrounding the term.34 For example, feminist political theorists and historians have demonstrated how the buzzwords of liberty and equality were used to undermine women’s position in liberal society, and how these terms have been tied to the same dichotomized view of household and political life that burdens conceptions of civic virtue. Ideologies of freedom and equality could serve to deflect attention from actual lack of freedom or equality—including, historically, chattel slavery and the political disenfranchisement of one sex. Retrieving the critical ideals of these terms by addressing the actual conditions that render people unfree or unequal has become a pivotal strategy for many feminists, from the suffragettes of a century ago to contemporary advocates. I am urging a similar critical retrieval of civic virtue.35 This critical retrieval could be positive for the history of feminism as well as for the history of civic virtue. Among the many strands of AngloAmerican feminism are two commonly designated as “liberal feminism” and “the ethic of care.” Liberal feminism has focused on opening “public” New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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positions to women and extending public conceptions of fairness and merit to women in educational, professional, and governmental positions. Care ethics has lamented the devaluation of “private” work traditionally done by women—which is not to say that only women should do such work—the hard work of nurturing intimate associations, including children, romantic partners, families, sick or elderly, and friends. Accordingly, care ethics has focused on highlighting the moral challenges and accomplishments of such caring labor. This division within feminism reflects not only positive differences of focus between liberal feminists and proponents of care but also the negative heritage of the ideology of domesticity. The divide between liberal feminism and the ethics of care presumes the dichotomized view of public and private life defined by that ideology, even as feminists within both strands try to call those socially constructed boundaries into question. The oft-repeated feminist invocations that justice and fairness should be demanded in intimate relationships and that caring should have public import could be given increased traction by a transformed conception of civic virtue that engages in critical retrieval while remaining sensitive to “gender baggage” in the history of the term. Some such critical retrieval is necessary in order to applaud how the “private” cares of mothers inspired the transformations accomplished by MADD in the public realms of school, courts, and legislatures. Aga i ns t a n I de ol o gy of R e l igion: T r a nsfor m e d C i v ic V i rt u e a n d t h e N e e d for a Nonse c ta r i a n V i e w of L ov e Since dominant conceptions of civic virtue have become infused with a martyr complex that derives historically from one interpretation of Christian neighbor love, it will not do to proclaim civic virtue a secular concern. To be transformed, civic virtue must be disentangled from the overcelebration of sacrifice that makes it a martyr’s ideal rather than an ideal for ordinary citizens. It must be disentangled from an implicit view of disinterested love that suggests that citizenship demands alienation from all one’s other loves. Thickly religious conversationalists can help here. Because the interpretation of agape that infuses dominant understandings of civic virtue is contested within Christianity itself, Christian critics often directly cut to the chase in challenging related distortions. In developing my argument, 56
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I draw on Christian critics who criticize political distortions inherent in antagonistic conceptions of agape and give political reasons for reconsidering comprehensive interpretations. I draw heavily but not exclusively on feminist Christian theologians, since they most consciously connect the two ideologies at stake in the transformation of civic virtue: ideologies of religion and of gender. While thick religious conversationalists provide critical resources, ultimately the transformation of civic virtue must be only thinly religious. It must be “religious,” at least metaphorically, in presenting an ordered schema that relates different kinds of human commitments. But this religiosity must be “thin” in that, unlike conventional understandings of civic virtue, it must not be the legacy of one particular religious lineage. Transformed civic virtue must articulate a conceptual relationship between one’s most intimate and most broadly communal commitments that makes civic sense to people with many, or no, religious backgrounds. Transformed civic virtue must elaborate a conceptual relationship between love and justice that makes sense to people formed by various religious and cultural traditions. It must explain how love, understood as passionate appreciation for the unique in particular others, and justice, understood as fairness to multiple others, inform each other. Ultimately, civic virtue must be understood as a set of cultivated moral habits that allows such appropriate connections to be maintained. Rather than bifurcating love and justice along the axis of domesticity, the moral habits of transformed civic virtue must enable just love of fellow citizens.
C ON T E M P OR A RY T H E OR IS T S OF C I V IC V I RT U E : S T I L L M IS SI NG M A DD As this chapter has emphasized, the contemporary renewal of interest in civic virtue crosscuts diverse theorists in American political theory. This elasticity points to the great promise of a return to virtue in political life. Perhaps even if overlapping consensus on moral goods is elusive, an overlapping consensus on ideals of political character might be forged and might support democratic civic activity in a diverse society. In chapter 4 I look more closely at three groups of theorists who are reviving civic virtue as a moral category: liberal virtue theorists, communitarians (a label that overlaps with that of civic republicans), and select New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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theorists of civil society. Here I simply gesture toward the important strides made by each while emphasizing that none of their accounts explains the civic virtue of MADD. Liberal virtue theorists such as William Galston (1991) and Stephen Macedo (1991, 2000) highlight the inadequately acknowledged virtues that are necessary for political liberalism to function. They consider what kinds of virtues, or cultivated character traits, are necessary for citizens to become economically independent and intellectually reflective. Rejecting the idea that liberalism is neutral toward conceptions of the good, they seek ways to promote tolerance itself as a liberal virtue—albeit one that must recognize limits to toleration when central goods of liberalism are seriously threatened. While liberal theorists underscore that moral autonomy itself depends on the cultivation of virtue, they fail to question the extent to which autonomy should be accepted as definitive of citizenship. Communitarians appropriating traditions of civic republicanism criticize the voluntarist account of moral agency that survives liberal additions of civic virtue. Michael Sandel (1981, 1996), the paradigm of this view, encourages a more complex view of socially formed selves (a view often shorthanded as “the social self”). Whereas liberal virtue theorists (correctly) intuit that market capitalism depends on the cultivation of certain virtues that they wish to promote, Sandel (correctly) intuits that market capitalism may threaten important civic virtues. He focuses on virtues that facilitate commitment to a certain place, virtues that could support literal and metaphorical space for the public—other than shopping malls. Sandel worries about the denigration of care that remains entrenched in political and economic life. His work emphasizes that family, church, and neighborhood are important moral starting points of community. However, his concern to protect their place in the public sometimes leaves them protected from appropriate moral critique. Theorists of civil society are, like Sandel, concerned about what kinds of intermediate communities (communities between the level of individual and state) can foster civic virtue. However, they focus on different kinds of intermediate communities. Whereas civic republicans tend to focus on communities of place, many theorists of civil society focus on communities of choice. Benjamin Barber (1998) typifies this group in his indebtedness to Tocqueville—in particular, to Tocqueville’s celebration of voluntary associations. Barber eloquently articulates the civic importance of such 58
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associations. But there is a disjunction between his account of the problems impeding cultivation of civic virtue, which includes insightful analyses of gender inequities and stress on family life, and his proposed solution. It is not clear how the increased involvement in voluntary associations that he advocates can transform nonvoluntary relationships in family life, given that Barber defines the two in contradistinction to each other. All of these theorists—liberal virtue theorists, revivers of civic republicanism, advocates of civil society—point in promising directions. They all participate in a recovery of virtue that refuses to disconnect persons from citizens. They all challenge the excesses of a highly dichotomized conception of public and private and, to some extent, the presumptions of domesticity that underlie that conception. Yet all are adversely influenced by lingering ideologies of gender and religion that survive “between the lines” of their accounts. None of them, nor any combination of them, articulate the civic accomplishment of MADD and its founders. This failure raises a number of warning flags: Who is being taken for granted in the invisibility of MADD’s founders? Mothers? Caregivers? Women? Children? MADD is not well characterized by liberal virtues. Its work is premised, not on independence and autonomy, but on dependence—particularly the dependence of children—and human vulnerability. MADD is not concerned about redressing premature limits on toleration but about redressing belated limitation of tolerance on activities that threaten life itself. If liberal virtues do not seem adequate to explain MADD’s civic value, neither do those implicitly proposed by communitarians, civic republicans, or advocates of civil society. MADD does not seem to be either the community of place held up as a forum of virtue by Sandel, nor the pristinely voluntary association lauded by Barber. (Certainly, it was the cruelest un-choice that launched the founders’ civic action.) Getting mad about MADD suggests turning to the critics of contemporary efforts to revive civic virtue. Can their warnings make sense of MADD’s puzzling invisibility? If so, can their insights be used to constructively modify, rather than to contest, the return to virtue?
S TA RT I NG W I T H T H E C R I T IC S The most vociferous critics of renewed calls for civic virtue actually suggest the most promising starting points for reconstructive formulations, since New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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they admit rather than ignore the ironies of civic virtue. In a series of classic essays, Iris Marion Young leads critics who condemn the language of civic virtue because they find it hopelessly wedded to political ideologies that have suppressed difference and marginalized many. 36 Her criticisms are particularly astute in relation to my project, since she sensitively considers gender issues that are neglected in conversations about civic virtue, and she adroitly considers how the history of the term may taint calls for its renewal. Most importantly, she notes how the ideologies of gender and religion that rendered civic virtue incoherent have become encapsulated in a conception of public impartiality. Ultimately, I reject Young’s rejection of civic virtue. But her crystallization of impartiality as a key background category proves crucial not only to skeptics but to those like myself who wish to revitalize civic virtue. Her diagnosis of a mutually destructive relationship between wrongheaded views of impartiality and wrongheaded views of civic-mindedness suggests that more constructive notions of impartiality and civic virtue must also be developed in tandem. Young situates her specific comments on impartiality and civic character within her broader call for a “politics of difference”: a politics that begins by adequately recognizing real differences among the citizenry. A feminist and political theorist greatly influenced by European postmodernism, she explores how ideals of community come to deny these differences. She fears that the longing for community “participates in what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence and Adorno calls the logic of identity, a metaphysics that denies difference.” This metaphysics “consists in a desire to get things together in unity, to formulate a representation of the whole, a totality . . . a desire to bring things into unity generates a logic of hierarchical opposition. Any move to define an identity, a closed totality, always depends on excluding some elements” (1990a, 302–303). According to Young, liberalism and communitarianism turn out to be flip sides of the same coin in their joint clinging to a metaphysics of presence that denies difference. Liberal individualism denies difference in positing individuals as self-sufficient entities “leveled” under a common “measure” of rights. Communitarianism denies difference by conceiving of selves in relation to some identification with a common totality. Both fall prey to a nostalgia-for-what-was-never, the “desire for selves that are transparent to one another.” Feminists, according to Young, must resist 60
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the metaphysics of presence and extol a “politics beyond community” that celebrates difference, a “politics of difference” (1990a, 299, 301). While she sympathizes with those who are exasperated by so-called interest group politics and the lack of civility in contemporary public life, Young criticizes the tradition of civic republicanism that they seek to revive in response. She emphasizes that the publicly spirited “fraternity” extolled by early civic republicans was anchored in a dangerously detached conception of “universal citizenship” that presumes a heavily gendered separation of private and public life: “Feminists in particular have analyzed how the discourse that links the civic public with fraternity is not merely metaphorical” (1990a, 301). Young laments that “universal citizenship” is often presumed to mean not only that everyone can be a citizen but also that “citizenship transcends particularity and difference.” What she calls “citizenshipas-generality” implicates communitarian as well as liberal visions, since communitarian citizens are thought to unite with some common group identity. Young argues that the general point of view demanded by universal citizenship thus holds the “tradition of civic republicanism in critical tension with the individualist contract theory of Hobbes and Locke” (1990a, 253). The polar tension between their respective foci on community and the individual derives from their shared metaphysics of presence. Both civic republicanism and social contract theory depend on a desire for illusory personal transparency that denies real difference in order to cling to that illusion. I m pa rt i a l i t y: C a n ’t L i v e w i t h I t . . . Young’s unique contribution is the explicit connection she draws between modern language and images of public impartiality, and prevalent notions of civic spirit. She argues that the dangerous mythology of universal citizenship, or citizenship-as-generality, is perpetuated by pervasive contemporary imagery of “an impartial standpoint” for public morality. This imagery defines impartiality as detachment from particular desires and perspectives. Young points out that exhortations for citizens to be more “civic-minded” are linked, explicitly or implicitly, to calls for impartiality so understood. This conception demands that when acting qua citizen, the citizen set aside more particular attachments to family, friends, coreligionists, sharers of an ethnic heritage, and so forth. Young’s analysis New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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demonstrates how, through the language of “impartiality,” contemporary calls for renewed civic virtue are connected to the same historical ironies of gender and religion that hamstrung it in the first place. No wonder it is difficult to revitalize the term. Young relentlessly demonstrates how ideals of civic character parasitic on the now conventional notion of impartiality replicate a series of problematic dichotomies: reason/affectivity, public/private, male/female. She particularly decries the dichotomized portrayal of reason and emotion that she claims robs politics of its motivating passion and distorts political rationality: Modern ethics defines impartiality as the hallmark of moral reason. . . . Impartiality names a point of view of reason that stands apart from any interests or desires. Not to be partial means being able to see the whole. . . . The impartial moral reasoner thus stands outside of and above the situation about which he or she reasons. (1987, 60)
She claims that such “deontological reason” denies difference in two ways, by denying the “irreducible specificity of situations” and by denying the “difference among moral subjects” (1987, 61). One can see large wholes only by standing back so far that the parts become invisible. It becomes a dangerous projection of fantasy to believe the outline seen is the true whole. Because it has encoded the dichotomies of domesticity, says Young, the “traditional public realm of universal citizenship has operated to exclude persons associated with the body and feeling—especially women, Blacks, American Indians, and Jews” (1990b, 97). An ideal of universality has become a mechanism for exclusion. Young stresses how the ideal of impartiality functions as an ideology by “supporting the idea of the neutral state,” “legitimizing bureaucratic authority,” and “hypostatizing the point of view of privileged groups into a universal position” (1990, 112). Young presciently sees that these problems contribute to an overly narrow construal of politics altogether. They support what she calls a “distributive paradigm,” in which politics is about having rather than doing (1990b, chap. 1). Young fears that this model of politics masks forms of oppression such as racism and domestic violence that distort distribution. Moreover, distribution narrowly conceived is not the only challenge of community. When distribution is the perceived object of politics, politics itself becomes conceived as the mere instrument of distribution—rather 62 · Mad about MADD
than as the creative intersubjectivity that sustains community in imaginative ways. Young’s insights succinctly summarize how modern conceptions of impartiality are linked to the incoherence of civic virtue and to the challenges of its renewal. Virtue as cultivated habit demands emotional participation, while impartiality defined as detached universal citizenship demands emotional repression. Virtue as cultivated habit demands a lived connection between public and private life, while impartiality demands severance. Citizen virtue must be relevant to citizens of all genders, but presumed definitions of impartiality revere traits culturally coded as masculine—detachment, omniscience, ability to generalize—rather than the ability to become entranced by the unique. Young’s criticisms clearly relate to the invisibility of organizations like MADD in the fall narrative of civic virtue. MADD members explicitly connect their political vision to their personal interest as “mothers.” Moreover, the emotional affectivity of their work is highlighted in their name, which is both an acronym and a homonym of “mad.” MADD’s multipronged efforts to transform education, law enforcement, and legislation regarding drunk driving are not encompassed by a distributive paradigm of political life. MADD’s activities do not advocate how to cut some distributive pie. In short, MADD defies the impartial stance widely presumed to be a prerequisite of citizen virtues. . . . C a n ’t L i v e w i t hou t I t Rejecting impartiality as a public ideal altogether, Young celebrates the vision of a politics that acknowledges group differences through conversation in a “wild” and “playful” public discourse. She rightfully points out that social groups defined by self-association and identification not only may have particular “selfish” interests to advance but may share nonselfish conceptions of justice and community that enrich wider public consideration of those terms. Young’s response to the problems she identifies is to reject impartiality as an ideal rather than to reconceptualize it.37 However, without any alternative conception, her own constructive efforts fall short. She rejects not only the presumption of a universal point of view but also the legitimacy of forging “shared subjectivities,” a project she views as itself denying New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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difference.38 In so doing, she deconstructs community to the point that there is no plank upon which to stand. She cannot explain why one should want to live with, much less listen or talk to, anyone in her visionary city of difference, if shared subjectivities are to have no place in the conversation. (What will be left to discuss? Simply lists of differences?) As anyone who has observed lovers or children can attest, passion and play can be forums for cruelty as well as for edification. Politics needs not only the restoration of passion and play, but also moral standards by which to judge them. Young cites the public parading of masked puppets as an example of the playful politics she extols. Undoubtedly her example was inspired by the renowned antimilitarist troupe “Bread and Puppets.”39 But the Ku Klux Klan also sponsors playful parades of costumed participants, and there is little in Young’s argument by which to distinguish the public value of one over the other. Some conception of public impartiality, understood as critical fair-mindedness, seems necessary. There is no reason that forged “shared subjectivities” must exclude difference. Consider, for example, Shaker Heights, Ohio, a community whose shared subjectivities include pride in the neighborhood’s racial integration and confidence in the moral value of integration. This shared subjectivity has given “impartial” standards to various political debates in that community as particular zoning, school, and development policies are considered in relationship to how they will affect racial integration. Or consider New York City, where appreciation of multi-ethnicity is a shared subjectivity reflected in such things as the annual ethnic food festival. Young’s later book, Inclusion and Democracy (2000), tacitly acknowledges the lack of a constructive alternative in her earlier writings on impartiality. In this book, she begins to articulate a positive vision of democratic reflection. Her “politics of inclusion” elaborates how an interest in the connection between identity and politics need not reinforce parochially understood “identity politics.” Young “disengages group difference from identity by suggesting that social groups do not themselves have substantive unified identities, but rather are constituted through differentiated relations” (2000, 99). This conceptual clarification allows her to explore how social difference can be a political resource. She urges sharing of cultural narratives among citizens with diverse histories, and renewed appreciation for rhetoric as a form of political discourse. Young provocatively suggests the facilitation of inclusion as the test of civic orientation, 64
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redressing not only “external exclusion” (structural exclusion of some from the participatory process) but more insidious “internal exclusion” (2000, 53–57). Internal exclusion isolates marginalized people within the participatory process because “their experiences as relevant to the issues under discussion are so different from others in the public that their views are discounted” (2000, 55). Ultimately, Young locates the hope of inclusive democracy in a diverse civil public. Young’s discourse on inclusion suggests positive constructive directions in response to her critique of impartiality. But it also highlights the intractable problem she faces trying to develop a politics of inclusion while rejecting impartiality as a relevant ideal altogether. Could not some exclusion be important to the encouragement of inclusion? And if so, how does one morally negotiate that? What kinds of moral skills and dispositions enable one to share cultural narratives and facilitate inclusion? Young shies away from a consideration of the character traits necessary to answer such questions. Her writings explicitly demonstrate a movement that I have claimed is implicit in the broader conversation on civic virtue: the move from a focus on civic virtue to an alternative focus on civil society. That movement ultimately accepts a dichotomy between civic virtue and civil society that must be bridged in order to resolve the ironies of civic virtue. Young’s insights detail how entrenched conceptions of impartiality are wrongheaded in ways that discourage robust understandings of civic virtue. Her failures demonstrate that the solution cannot be a total rejection of impartiality as a political ideal. Some articulation of “impartiality,” understood as critical fair-mindedness, seems necessary for inclusive political life. Thus the dilemma of impartiality: can’t live with it; can’t live without it. The tension of this dilemma, so starkly illustrated in Young’s work, crosscuts a family of contemporary conversations among feminists, postmodernists, communitarians, and discourse theorists. I propose that if we can neither live with nor without impartiality, we must change it. We must consider more specifically what it is we can’t live with, and what it is we can’t live without. We must, so to speak, rescue the baby from the bathwater. Since the entrenched conception of impartiality acts as a linchpin connecting the nexus of ironies impeding a constructive account of civic virtue, revising that conception will allow us to unravel the ironies. The reclamation of impartiality is the first step toward a transformed understanding of civic virtue. New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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C A N ’ T L I V E W I T H I T; C A N ’ T L I V E W I T HOU T I T: T H E DI L E M M A OF I M PA RT I A L I T Y I N H IS TOR IC A L PE R SPEC T I V E The conception of impartiality that Young persuasively links to ideals of civic virtue has been a hallmark of Western political ethics for three hundred years. In general, impartiality is the ability to give due consideration to all interest holders. Of course, how one conceives that ability is exactly what is at stake. In modern political ethics, spatial metaphors have been employed to describe an impartial standpoint that would imaginatively afford a clear perspective on the full range of interest holders. These include the so-called God’s-eye point of view; the Archimedean point; the standpoint of the archangel; or the “impartial standpoint,” the symbol that so vexes Young. Another pervasive metaphor has been that of the “impartial judge.” The term “impartiality” has been used to describe the appropriate organization of political institutions: institutions that resist skewing to serve the special interests of subgroups. It has also been used to describe the appropriate stance of the citizen reasoner when called upon to make decisions for the common good. In this sense, appropriately impartial citizens are those who can speak and reason as citizens on questions of public good, separating themselves momentarily from the pull of potentially distorting particular attachments such as family, religious belief, class, or ethnicity. They can thus act according to general moral norms, applying the same assessments to relevant general classes of people, or according to universal moral principles, acting consistently similarly in similar situations. (Generality and universality are often confusingly conflated in articulations of impartiality.)40 Contemporary conversations questioning the stress on impartiality have moved beyond raising doubts about whether it is actually possible to attain the ideal, to a more radical questioning of the ideal itself. Young joins many contemporary ethical thinkers who question aloud whether impartiality might be a wrongheaded ideal altogether. Why, these radical questioners query, should imaginative detachment from others foster wide engagement with others? Since the Enlightenment, impartiality has been explicated through the use of a lineage of hypothetical cases that I tag the “stranger-versus-loved66
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one” cases, or SVLO cases. In all renditions, these hypothetical cases pit the interest of a loved one against the interest of a stranger in some dire scenario. William Godwin founded this lineage in the eighteenth century by questioning whether one ought rescue one’s mother or a humanitarian archbishop if both were burning in the flames of a fire. The good impartialist, according to Godwin, ought to realize that the mother does not deserve special consideration just because she is your mother. Obvious parallels remain in the most recent descendant of this lineage, a case in which Bernard Williams (1981) asks whether one should rescue a stranger or one’s spouse first if both are drowning. Significantly, critics of impartiality as well as its defenders assume the appropriateness of the SVLO cases as prisms for reflection on impartiality. For example, Williams uses his case to philosophically applaud the philosophically naive man who plunges in unhesitatingly after his wife. Williams’s scenario neatly calls attention to a constellation of arguments on impartiality that are reproduced in contemporary political theory. Strikingly, the images, metaphors, and arguments of otherwise fierce opponents all presume that the stranger-versus-loved-one cases conceptually explicate the meaning of impartiality. Not only do impartialists (defenders of impartiality understood as a universalist ideal) and partialists (critics of impartiality who explore the importance of intimate, particular, and unique relationships in the moral life) construct SVLO cases to press their arguments,41 but also liberals and communitarian critics of liberalism presume the construction of those cases in their overtly political arguments about how to structure a just society. Moreover, I argue, political theorists attempting to revive civic virtue also presume the definitional axis of the SVLO cases. This, it turns out, is the fatal flaw that prevents an array of diverse thinkers from adequately recognizing the heroism of MADD. Two features of current conversation about impartiality are noteworthy. First, by assuming the definitional validity of the SVLO cases, otherwise diverse argument partners agree that impartiality is a “standpoint,” a vantage point—even if imaginary—for a certain kind of broad perception. Second, they assume that an impartial standpoint ultimately defines a choice between a stress on impartial, universal norms or on close personal attachments. Related conversations have been tagged the “partiality/impartiality debates,” where participants have been labeled “impartialists” New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues
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and “partialists,” depending on whether they ultimately prioritize impartial norms or personal relationships. Both partialists and impartialists question the labeling, since there seems something false about the choice between partiality and impartiality, after all.42 Most people assume that both universal moral norms and healthy close personal relationships are important in moral life. Certainly, the logically inverse implication of the SVLO cases is rarely argued: that liars and cheats have the most fulfilling personal relationships! Few partialists accept the characterization of themselves as defenders of the parochial, and few impartialists admit having no concern about people’s close personal relationships. Yet impartialists and partialists continue to differ in characteristic ways such that the labels make sense. Underlying the stubborn resistance of the labels is the conversationalists’ joint appeal to a “standpoint of impartiality,” as defined by the SVLO cases, and their divergent defense of the ethical turf on one side or another of that standpoint. Given their interest in the moral import of relationships that are close, personal, and highly affective, feminists are radically suspicious of impartiality as that ideal is portrayed in the stranger-versus-loved-one cases.43 Thus, several contemporary feminists join Williams in calling for a rejection of impartiality as an ideal.44 However, the dilemma of impartiality is particularly prickly for feminists. With no ideal of impartiality, it would seem impossible to condemn patriarchy. The accusation of patriarchy is the charge that certain institutions are not appropriately impartial among the sexes or are inappropriately partial to one sex. Impartiality, understood as critical fair-mindedness, is necessary to get not only feminist, but any critical agendas off the ground. Is there any way to save the baby, a pragmatic conception of impartiality as critical fair-mindedness, while draining the bathwater, the legacy of the SVLO cases? A first step may be to gain a clearer sense of what, in fact, is problematic in the SVLO cases and the extent to which their legacy still drives much of political theory. In the next two chapters, I elaborate that, focusing first on political theory generally (chapter 3) and then on the conversation about civic virtue more specifically (chapter 4). The “standpoint view” of impartiality entrenched in the SVLO cases perpetuates the ideologies of gender and religion that hamstrung civic virtue. The dichotomy between personal and political life that the standpoint delineates blocks 68
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the very ethical intersection that civic virtue seeks to navigate. After all, “civic virtue” implies the goal of cultivating personal character traits to support healthy political involvement. As long as impartiality is framed in terms of the SVLO cases, virtue will be lost. In chapters 5 and 6, I propose an alternative way of conceiving impartiality. I argue that impartiality should be considered a moral practice, itself a virtue, rather than a proverbial “standpoint.” Impartiality-as-practice articulates critical fair-mindedness that does not demand sacrifice of the citizens’ loved ones on the public altar and does not render the hard work of caring for particular others politically moot. At the same time, it demands that close personal relationships be subject to universal norms that derive from the communal practice of impartiality. Impartiality-aspractice transcends the confines of the SVLO cases and thus the ideologies of gender and religion that have plagued civic virtue.
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PART II THE DILEMMA OF IMPARTIALITY
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THE DILEMMA OF IMPARTIALITY: LEGACY OF THE BISHOP AND THE CHAMBERMAID
The conventional ideal of impartiality can’t be lived with because it demands superhuman detachment from one’s personal commitments, dismisses the ethical relevance of such commitments, and obfuscates real differences between citizens. On the other hand, it can’t be lived without because some notion of critical fair-mindedness is required for political life. Although the suspect lineage of the stranger-versus-loved-one (SVLO) cases seems on the face of it to encapsulate the biases of gender and religion that rendered civic virtue incoherent, both impartialist and partialist ethical reasoners continue to presume that they elucidate impartiality. Many partialists complain that the resulting view of impartiality is unattainable. This critique is insightful but inadequate. It is insightful because it calls attention to the chasm between the ideal of impartiality and the reality of how one might, pragmatically, cultivate that ideal. But it is inadequate in two ways: it fails to recognize the confusion in the ideal itself, and it fails to recognize that partialist ethical approaches often fall prey to the same confusion. What is impartiality? The failure of the SVLO cases to answer that question clearly has enormous ramifications, since the cases continue to infiltrate political theory. Thus, pervasive understandings of impartiality in political theory are ambiguous. 73
T H E BISHOP A N D T H E CH A M BE R M A I D: C ON F USION A M I D T H E F L A M E S Many problematic conflations are built into the very structure of the SVLO cases. Impartiality as a structural form of reasoning is conflated with impartiality perceived as a substantive moral norm. The distinction between universality and generality is unhelpfully blurred, and thus their relationship to impartiality remains unclear. Moral justification is conflated with moral motivation, despite critical differences between them. Impartiality itself is conflated with impersonality and dispassion. This formulation structurally precludes moral distillation of “reflective equilibrium,” a stable balance between moral experience and ethical reflection. It precludes any connection between the “heroes” of the cases and ordinary moral heroes such as MADD. Since Godwin’s case, first articulated in eighteenth-century England, is an “impartialist” vignette most frequently cited by contemporary “partialist” opponents, a careful analysis of that scenario can elucidate how SVLO cases skew both impartialist and partialist moral argument.1 Recall that Godwin asks readers to imagine they can save only one of two potential victims from a fire. The two caught in the flames are a well-known humanitarian archbishop and the rescuer’s chambermaid. Which ought be saved? Clearly, the archbishop, according to Godwin, who goes on to insist that the archbishop would remain the correct choice even if the chambermaid were the rescuer’s wife, mother, or benefactor: “Of what consequence is it that they are mine? What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?” (Godwin 1926). I m pa rt i a l i t y: For m, Su b sta nce , or Bot h? Godwin’s partialist attackers assume his scenario demonstrates that impartiality precludes considering certain persons as special because of our particular relationship with them. Marcia Baron (1991) calls this assumption into question, wondering what Godwin’s answer would be if the alternative were between saving two chambermaids, one of whom was the rescuer’s mother and the other a stranger. Presumably, the rescuer would be free to save her mother, since the overall social utility of the two potential victims would be roughly equal. 74
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Baron claims that in the end Godwin’s disdain for the pronoun “my” derives from his utilitarian sense of promoting the general good, not from a governing view of impartiality. (Contemporary partialists reproduce the conflation when they cite rigid utilitarians such as Peter Singer [1994] or Jonathan Glover [1977] as typical, rather than extreme, proponents of impartiality.) One could press Baron’s point by asking whether certain interpretations of impartiality might demand tossing a coin to choose the lucky rescuee—if, for example, the rescuer’s worldview demanded respect for the inherent sanctity of life rather than for aggregate utility. As Baron notes, it matters what question one asks from an impartial perspective. Thus, defenders of impartiality stress that requirements of impartial ethical justification do not, in fact, demand detachment from personal loves as a superior mode of living. Thomas Hill protests that: impartiality . . . is part of an ideal for moral legislation, or general debate about moral principles and values; it is not a recommended way of life. Unfortunately, some philosophers, including Kant, seem at times to conflate this ideal with another idea, which does not logically follow . . . the idea that in facing the moral choices of daily life we should constantly strive . . . to free ourselves of particular attachments, and to ignore the distinguishing features of individuals. Even from an impartial perspective, which gives no special advantage to interests because they are one’s own, one can see good reasons for principles such as “Be compassionate,” “Take responsibility, within limits, for your family, your country, and yourself,” “Don’t face concrete problems as if they were mathematical puzzles, but restructure them with sensitivity and find a caring solution.” (1987, 131–32)
Baron restates Hill’s point by invoking a distinction between “level 1” justification (the level of ethical principles) and “level 2” justification (“the level at which principles are chosen or affirmed”). She claims that many partialists assume that impartialists demand impartiality at both level 1 and level 2, while most so-called impartialists only require it at level 2. Principles at level 1 that invoke partial obligations to certain kinds of others might be accorded impartial assent at level 2 (1991, 843–44). While the distinction between justificatory levels may be a helpful nuance, even that distinction presumes an overly narrow “principlist” approach to ethics. Impartiality as critical fair-mindedness might prompt an appropriate spontaneous response to others by moral agents who never engage in reflection or articulation of principles.2 It might play a role in discerning the morally relevant particulars of a situation, or in deciding The Dilemma of Impartiality
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which generally recognized principles are relevant, or in arbitrating perceived conflicts between moral principles. In short, it might invoke habits and virtues as well as principles. On the one hand, then, a clear discussion of impartiality should distinguish the quest for impartiality from other ethical values that specify the positive ethical goods or negative ethical burdens to be impartially distributed. This distinction allows that what proper impartiality actually governs may vary with the nature of ethical relationships, role responsibilities, and particular situations—the possibility that Godwin denies.3 On the other hand, partialist insistence that visions of impartiality inherently have normative implications must be taken seriously. As Godwin’s case itself demonstrates, notions of what it means to be impartial may be wedded subconsciously to substantive notions of the good. Ironically, we may simply weave our deepest biases into the speculative thinking by which we try to remove biases. Ge n e r a l i t y, U n i v e r sa l i t y, I m pa rt i a l i t y By simultaneously focusing on his disdain for the “my” and his assumption of the archbishop’s extraordinary social utility, Godwin blurs the moral relevance of universality and generality, and thus their relationship to impartiality. Is the problem for Godwin the specificity of the chambermaid, “my” wife or mother, and thus the particularity of my feelings for her? In other words, is the problem with a moral pull to my mother the fact that I cannot generalize it to others, even to other mothers? (If so, why is Godwin unconcerned with the specificity of the archbishop in the case as he constructed it—the Archbishop of Cambray, a noted humanitarian?) Or is the problem that one could not will to universalize that everyone in such situations save her mother? Godwin fails to distinguish the two questions.4 Let us consider the first possibility (the one Baron rejects): that Godwin objects to the specificity of the rescuer’s feelings for her mother. Imagine a third party reflecting on the Godwin case. This third party knows only that one victim is the potential rescuer’s archbishop and the other her mother. In other words, this moral reasoner assesses the case in reference to general categories. Who should be saved? A Confucian respondent to Godwin’s case might well advocate for the chambermaid, based on her membership in the general class of parents, 76
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while failing to see any special moral relevance in the category of archbishop. While Godwin assumed it is an issue of impartiality to choose the archbishop, he would have difficulty in maintaining that against the Confucian. The Confucian is not gripped by any “my.” Moreover, the Confucian could be quite “impartial” in applying his conclusion, arguing that any rescuer should favor her parent over her archbishop. The confusion of generality and impartiality wrongly casts aspersions on personal loves while protecting all sorts of assumptions from critical reflection. In this case, for example, the partiality of the rescuer toward her specific mother has proven to be unassailable without additional, and contested, conceptions of a comprehensive good. Moreover, one might want to press whether archbishops as a class or mothers as a class deserve the standing granted them by Godwin or the Confucian, respectively. Could Godwin be slighting the work of motherhood? Could the Confucian be slighting the work of archbishophood? Could either of them be mistaken about the relevance of those categories to the situation at hand? Godwin and the hypothetical Confucian disagree precisely on the relevant general categories. Marilyn Friedman argues directly against generality as an adequate criterion for impartiality. She criticizes what she formulates as the “neutrality condition” of impartial justification, which correlates to “generality” as that term is used by R. M. Hare, Adrian Piper, and others.5 According to Friedman, the neutrality condition dictates that impartial reasons, in addition to applying to all within the relevant domain, must also “lack essential reference to particular or specifiable persons” (1993, 27–33). Generality as a proposed criterion for impartiality questions the power of the “my” per se. Friedman finds generality problematic as a criterion for impartiality not only because the particularity of one’s relationship to another might legitimately dictate moral demands, but even more ominously, she notes that “biases against whole groups of persons” survive generality requirements. Even if moral reasons were facially neutral, that is, lacking any essential reference to any individual persons or social groups, it would still be possible for the acceptance or advocacy of those reasons to manifest covert biases. Reasons can be couched in terms which are universal and neutral, yet still advance special interests. Certain “facts” make this possible, for The Dilemma of Impartiality
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example, facts about the traits that correlate highly with certain types of persons, facts about preexisting social inequalities, and facts about the terms that merely seem, but are not genuinely, neutral. (1993, 29)
Much effort in fighting gender-based oppression is directed at discerning the subtle covert biases in programs, policies, and justifications that are phrased in general, or neutral, terms. Such covert biases may lie behind phenomena such as the “glass ceiling” in corporate management, or the gender imbalance among tenured academics, or the relative dearth of women on police forces. One concrete example of covert bias might be upper-arm-strength requirements for police. Proponents of the requirement argue that the criteria are general, neutral, and thus fair. Of course, given the physical differences between average men and women, it is usually more difficult for women to meet the strength requirements. Whether the requirements thus encourage legitimate or illegitimate gender bias depends on information external to the given justification itself. It depends on whether upper-arm strength is an important factor in competent police work. Much evidence casts doubt on this unstated assumption, from the preponderance of guns on the street to various studies suggesting that communicative skills may be more critical to effective policing. Let us return to the second possibility teased out of Godwin’s case: that Godwin really objects to failures to universalize moral norms. In this case, Godwin ultimately would abandon his diatribe against the “my” and would try to convince the Confucian that filial piety is the wrong universal ethical principle. In other words, Godwin would ultimately favor universalizability as definitive of impartiality rather than generality. Yet both Godwin and the Confucian might will for their solutions to be universalized. There seems to be something impartial in their internal consistency, though they disagree on the norm they attempt to apply universally. Similarly, two people with different assessments of the moral worth of a law might agree that a particular judge applies the law to relevant parties impartially.6 Only a monistic ethical thinker—someone who is convinced that one ethical value is higher in priority than all others—could completely equate impartiality with universalizability. (While such thinkers, act utilitarians and rigid Kantians alike, seem to be out of favor with the general public, 78
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they are the favorite straw men for partialist attack.)7 Ethical thinkers who acknowledge the possibility of tension between multiple ethical goods cannot relate the two terms so simply. If morality sometimes demands deciding between goods, then proper impartiality must aid in those decisions.8 Thus, neither generality nor universalizability appears to capture impartiality adequately. The conflation of the three terms contributes both to an undue suspicion of personalism and to a too-easy acceptance of reasons that are cast in general or universal terms. Certainly, though, there is insight to the intuition that impartiality somehow interrelates to the ability to generalize and universalize appropriately, even if it is not the same thing. Proper generalization is necessary in order to treat similar cases similarly. And it is common sense to expect that impartiality warn against habitually granting ourselves and our loved ones exceptions to universal moral norms. A clear conceptualization of impartiality should suggest more precisely how impartiality as critical fair-mindedness relates to generalization and universalization. Mot i v e a n d J ust i f ic at ion Another distinction frequently glossed over in the impartiality/partiality debates is that between ethical motivation and ethical justification. Motivations are not logically required to be the same as their impartial justification in order to be ethically healthy. To consider this, let us return to the Godwin case, assuming one of Godwin’s given possibilities—that the chambermaid is the spouse of the would-be rescuer. Suppose that the rescuer does indeed favor the loved one. Would it be clear that only the pull of the “my” is at work, and that this precludes impartial justification? Perhaps not. The rescuer could argue along Kantian lines that the special marital vows she made to care for her spouse not only justify but demand that she save him first. In Kantian terms, the saving of the loved one would be the perfect duty demanded in this situation to uphold the imperfect duty to keep promises. Yet within the Kantian framework, the duty to uphold promises is itself derived on impartialist grounds, grounds generally applicable and irrespective of particular others. Of course, partialists would point out that it was a partial love that prompted our rescuer to make her marital vows in the first place. Moreover, they might add, it is unlikely that anyone faced with this situation The Dilemma of Impartiality
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would stop to perform the thought experiment demanded by the categorical imperative (Kant’s theoretical test of universalizability). More than likely, the rescuer would immediately and unreflectively pursue the rescue of her husband, motivated by her love for him. And, canons of philosophy to the contrary, that might be a good thing. Bernard Williams (1981) advances such an argument when he constructs his contemporary hypothetical case that is clearly descendent from Godwin’s, albeit in reaction to it. Williams removes the utilitarian cast of the case by making the operating question whether to rescue one’s spouse (“wife,” in his version) or a stranger, both of whom are drowning. Wryly, Williams queries whether anyone who actually asks that question has not had “one thought too many.” For Williams, something is deeply troubling if the immediate motive of the actor is not an overwhelming instinct to save the spouse (“wife”). But there is no inherent conflict between a felt motive of affection and an “impartial” conception of duties to spouse. The clearest enemy of some partialists thus may not be a theoretical conception of impartiality but rather the Kantian dictum that only duty, impartially defined, is a morally good motive. Feminists in particular bristle at this suggestion, conflicting as it does with their sense of emotion as cognitive, their stress on the moral training of emotion, and their insistence that any generalized ethical principles should support the real moral knowledge gained in everyday experience.9 The conflation of motivation and justification not only can render affective motives unduly suspicious but also can facilitate covert biases that should be ethically suspect. Pernicious motivations can be hidden behind seemingly impartial justifications. I nst it u t ions , Rol e s , a n d Pr ac t ice s: L ay e r s of S o c i a l L i f e Alasdair MacIntyre questions what lies behind Williams’s assertion that “This is my wife” should be an adequate justification for her rescue. He wonders whether the stress is only on the “my,” or also on “wife.” MacIntyre notes that the unique institutional role of marriage in our society might be the unelaborated reason why a distant moral observer might readily accept “this is my wife” as an adequate reason (1983, 122). In this case, it may be 80
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precisely because the agent’s inclinations are so aligned with an accepted cooperative social structure that the question of justification seems silly. MacIntyre thus laments the structure of the typical hypothetical dilemmas, which present society on a simple two-level model: the individual with his or her personal loves, and society-at-large. Missing are all the rich layers of institutional life that comprise communal life as we know it. In Williams’s example, the importance of marriage as an institution is perhaps inextricable from the presumed affection of the actor toward his spouse. So Williams himself evades consideration of any institutional ramifications of his case. But questions of appropriate partiality and impartiality arise in the context of all sorts of institutions, practices, or social roles, virtually all of which disappear in the loved-one-versus-stranger cases. To consider this, imagine that the fire department arrives on the scene of Godwin’s case, or the coast guard on the scene of Williams’s. We might expect both the most rigid utilitarian and the most sincere filial pietist to agree that the firemen or coast guard patrol should rescue first whichever victim they come upon first—even if some hysterical bystander is screaming that the victim over yonder is the archbishop or “my wife.” Yet neither Godwin’s nor Williams’s framework offers any explanation of this striking consensus, which derives from the agreed-upon social role of the fire department and coast guard. The consensus on the role of the coast guard and the fire department rests on a presumed but unacknowledged understanding of the importance of trust in ethical life.10 The SVLO scenarios ignore the social structuring of bases for communal trust. Marilyn Friedman recognizes that this omission cuts across both impartialists and partialists who structure debate around the stranger/beloved cases: Hypothetical disasters abound as thought experiments in these discussions. The moral world of mainstream ethics is a nightmare of plane crashes, train wrecks, and sinking ships. Wives and children drown in this literature at an alarming rate. The non-feminist impartiality critics never acknowledge how infrequent these emergencies are in daily moral life, nor, therefore, how infrequent is the need to sacrifice someone else’s wife to save one’s own. And for these infrequent occasions, the non-feminist impartiality critics never discuss the possibility of investing our moral energies in efforts to reduce beforehand those breathtaking contests for survival and love—for example, by better federal regulation of airline safety. (1993, 71)11
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While Friedman calls necessary attention to the gendering of the cases, which typically involve a male rescuer and female victims, the focus of her comments is the very structure of the SVLO cases. The cases impede thinking about how to organize moral life in ways that minimize zero-sum contests between obligations. R e f l e c t i v e E qu i l i br i u m : Bl ow i ng u p t h e Br i d ge s? The forced dilemmas of the stranger-versus-loved-one cases not only underattend impartiality as a challenge of everyday life, but because this lineage of cases equates impartiality with generality and universalizability, conflates motivation and justification, and ignores multiple levels of ethical reflection, it also presents impartiality in opposition to felt emotions. Thus, the challenge of ethics comes to be seen as making the hard choice for the impartial over the beloved, rather than as constructing a world where the two are balanced and mutually informative. These cases structurally preclude the moral pull to “reflective equilibrium,” if that is defined in any of the following ways: as mutual reinforcement between ethical theory and lived experience; as dynamic balance between the level of theoretical justification and the level of specific ethical principles; as a compatibility between ethical motivation and justification; or as a reciprocity between healthy political structures and personal flourishing.12 In fact, the structure of the SVLO cases may prevent us from noticing reflective disequilibrium. A healthy view of impartiality ought help us to organize our moral lives to facilitate reflective equilibrium rather than to fracture our lives into competing compartments. L e s s ons Lessons from the archbishop and the chambermaid warn us not to confuse impartial justification with the content of moral norms; not to oversimplify the relationship between impartiality, generality, and universality; not to equate ethical justification and motivation; and not to preclude structurally the moral pull to reflective equilibrium. In short, they warn us not to identify the “impartial” with the “impersonal,” for the extent of overlap between those two notions is one of the questions to be addressed. A pragmatic ideal of critical fair-mindedness must avoid these errors. 82
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Yet the structure of the SVLO cases continues to pervade political theory. In the remainder of this chapter, I demonstrate the extent to which the ghosts of the bishop and the chambermaid continue to haunt. The “standpoint” view of impartiality is accepted by both liberal political theorists and their partialist critics. Contemporary liberal political theory perpetuates the legacy of the SVLO cases through its use of “ideal agents” as instructors in political impartiality. Partialists such as “integrity theorists” and “communitarians” fail to escape the parameters of the SVLO cases. They alternately argue for either personal integrity or communal traditions to trump impartiality, without adequately questioning how impartiality is conceived in the first place. The conversation between Williams and MacIntyre on the hypothetical drowning case succinctly captures dueling tendencies among partialists: they focus exclusively either on the personal or on the institutional aspects of one’s emotional commitments—only on the “my,” or only on the “wife.” In healthy ethical life, there should be some connection between the two. Some feminist developers of care ethics have (mistakenly) rallied to the partialist side of the impartialist/partialist tug-of-war. But to a great extent, feminists have been equal opportunity critics of both impartialists and partialists. This is not surprising, since the common ground between the two camps—the SVLO cases and the resulting conception of impartiality-as-standpoint—presumes disdain for caring labor. The double-edged feminist critique offers starting points for the development of an alternative view of impartiality. Since feminists do not clearly align themselves along the axes of the SVLO cases, I do not treat them as a separate group in this chapter. Rather, in later chapters I incorporate work by a number of feminist critics in my own proposed reconceptualization of impartiality.
L E S S T H A N I DE A L AGE N T S The forced dilemmas and the conceptual conflations of the SVLO cases have been worked into received political theory, which presumes the equation of the impersonal and the impartial. That equation is summarized in Thomas Nagel’s introduction to his book Equality and Partiality: Ethics, and the ethical basis of political theory, have to be understood as arising from a division in each individual between two standpoints, the personal and the impersonal. . . . The Dilemma of Impartiality
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The impersonal standpoint in each of us produces, I shall claim, a powerful demand for universal impartiality and equality, while the personal standpoint gives rise to individualistic motives and requirements which present obstacles to the pursuit and idealization of such ideals. (1991, 3–4)
In his opening sentences, Nagel sweeps away all the ethical turf between self and universal. Impartiality is rendered irrelevant for negotiating the complex social terrain between the two—which itself is rendered politically irrelevant. Such forced antagonism between the impartial and the impersonal has been perpetuated in liberal political theory by the use of imaginary ideal agents. Spokesmen for both the deontological and the utilitarian philosophical traditions, as well as for the social contract tradition in political theory, have advocated imaginary ideal agents as instructors in appropriate political impartiality. These agents, it turns out, are ideal precisely in equating impartiality with impersonality and in triumphing impartiality over personal attachments. Two general types of ideal agents merit conceptual distinction, although they are often hybridized among both their advocates and their critics: “omniscient” models and “essential” models.13 Both omniscient and essential approaches are advanced in response to the presumed need for the moral agent to imagine herself in the “shoes” of others. They address two related moral challenges: the challenge of gathering and assessing morally relevant information, and the challenge of resisting morally inappropriate biases. The omniscient agent trumps the first challenge. Imagined as an ideal moral deliberator, the omniscient agent eliminates ignorance by attaining a standpoint revealing all relevant information and by having perfect means-to-end reasoning. The essential agent trumps the second challenge. Imagined as an abstracted human moral core, the essential agent eliminates bias by definitional insulation from potential sources of bias. The essential agent lacks certain individuating features of personhood such as race, class, or knowledge of particular attachments. The essential agent is, in a sense, “stripped down” to what are considered her most basic moral attributes. Advocates of ideal agents argue that the closer a person can, through imagination, asymptotically approach the perspective of the ideal agent, the more “impartial” she will be. Margaret Urban Walker 84
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summarizes the imagination of ideal agents as “strategies of transcendence [omniscient agents] or encapsulation [essential agents]” (1991, 763). Omniscient agents equate impartiality with universality; essential agents equate it with neutrality/generality. Hybrid agents equate it with some combination of the two. Clearly, the vantage point of an omniscient agent would facilitate any utilitarian calculus, since all people, along with their pleasures and pains, could be viewed in a moment’s glance. Historically, though, the metaphorical imagery of the omniscient agent has been associated particularly strongly with deontological thought. The omniscient observer can compile all perspectives into one standpoint and thus fully comprehend what norms are universalizable duties. Two underlying presumptions merit attention. The first is the assumption that everyone’s perspective counts equally, implying that equal attention to all is a goal of impartiality. The second is the assumption that the compiled standpoints will in fact converge upon universals clear to someone with adequate breadth of vision. Oft-invoked images of omniscient agents in philosophical literature include the God’s-eye point of view, the archangel, the point of view of the universe, the ideal observer, and the impartial or third-person spectator.14 In contrast, essential agents highlight neutrality as definitional of impartiality. The presumption is that the impartial agent must begin from a stance of “neutrality” toward other people’s varied interests. Therefore, the essential agent limits her moral perspective to those factors most generally shared by all humans. Essential strategies are often associated with contractarian approaches in political theory. Implicitly, hypothetical contractors must negotiate political ground rules with those who are actually unknowns. This pushes them to weigh those features considered most generally associated with moral personhood in deriving impartial rules. The impartiality of the essential agent has been correlated with the purported neutrality of political liberalism toward varied views of the good life. Here again, the presumption is that all should be treated equally, and the thought experiments of the contractarian tradition—from the state of nature to the original position—are defined to enforce such equality.15 The first, and perhaps most purely “essential” agents were the hypothetical men in the pre-political “state of nature” imagined by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Dilemma of Impartiality
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In contemporary political theory, John Rawls’s infamous “original position” is a hybrid that integrates aspects of both omniscient and essential models.16 The parties in the original position are ideal agents deriving the principles of justice for a fair society. Each party is rational, mutually disinterested in the others, and knows the general facts of society. However, insulated by a voluntarily donned imaginative “veil of ignorance,” he does not know “his place in society, his class position or social status . . . his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities” (1971, 12).17 The contractors in the original position are omniscient in that they are aware of the general facts of society. Rawls writes as if this is a mundane accomplishment, the real imaginary feat of the original position being the veil of ignorance. But certainly, for most of us, attaining a grasp on the general facts of our society remains an ongoing, never completed challenge. The parties in the original position are rendered essential by the imagined “veil of ignorance,” which hides from them the particularities of their social place. They know only that they have some overall conception of a good life, the particulars of which are hidden from them, and that they share with all others the desire for primary goods of rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, and self-respect (1971, 62, 442). Rawls argues that parties in such an original position would affirm two principles of justice, prioritizing the first. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all. (1971, 60)
Unlike some moral theorists who use idealized strategies, Rawls does not claim the principles derived from the original position to be definitive for morality—only for the construction of the “basic structures of society.” He assumes that within the framework set by these basic structures, broader theories of comprehensive morality will coexist, bump, and compete. Stressing that the principles of justice derived in the original position represent a broad “overlapping consensus” among diverse comprehensive moralities, Rawls skirts the question of how much their regulative priority shapes or limits the development of comprehensive moral views. 86
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Critics of ideal agents often underappreciate both the imaginative aspects that are entailed in such strategies and the moral challenges to which they respond. Yet their critiques are radically challenging. In short, critics ask how models that have lost their humanity can be models for humans. Ideal agents presume the same problematic conflation of universality, generality, and impartiality that is evident in the SVLO cases. They also presume that the goal of impartiality is equal regard to all. Given human finitude, one might wonder whether, alternatively, impartiality ought to help people decide on whom to focus their moral energies, since (unlike ideal agents), they cannot focus on them all. Or one might wonder whether impartiality should articulate a critical fair-mindedness that rightfully constrains intimate as well as political relationships. Om n is ci e nce: Is I t A l l I t ’s C r ack e d u p t o Be? The desire for an omniscient vantage point responds to a legitimate moral urge, the challenge of expanding one’s perception of morally relevant information. However, metaphors of omniscience obstruct rather than facilitate the human achievement of expansive perception in several ways. I consider the “God’s-eye point of view” as paradigmatic of metaphors for omniscience in the literature on impartiality, exploring it here as a quasisecular metaphor of all-seeingness. The quest for an omniscient viewpoint begins with the intuitive notion that impartiality requires us to imagine the position of others as they are affected by our actions. However, rather than acknowledge the epistemic challenges of expanding this imaginative role-playing outward to encompass ever-wider populations, the metaphorical imagery encourages a naively wishful shortcut. The tendency toward the shortcut is clear in the historical development of metaphors of omniscience as well as in the metaphors themselves. One might expect that the more religious language—“the God’s-eye point of view,” “the standpoint of an archangel”—historically preceded the secularized versions of ideal agents such as “the impartial spectator.” In fact, the reverse is true. The earliest versions of idealized agents were offered by the eighteenth-century moral sense theorists, who questioned the then pervasive view that morality was the will of God, knowable through The Dilemma of Impartiality
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both revelation and reason. Their “impartial observers” were much less “ideal” than archangels, since their impetus to an appropriately impartial perspective began in their own felt moral sentiments and reverberated outward through the socialized correction of sentiments. As moral sense theory waned, the appeal of an ever-burgeoning secularized belief in universal human reason promised metaphysical support for the desired shortcut to an omniscient viewpoint. The compilation of multiple views no longer seemed to demand successful encounters with multiple others, but rather it could be properly envisioned through speculative Reason. Given the history behind it, the phrase “God’s-eye point of view” may be understood as a metaphor for such speculative Reason. The flight to the shortcut remains evident in contemporary thinkers. Lawrence Kohlberg describes the attention to others’ position demanded by impartiality as engagement in “moral musical chairs,” a wonderfully rich metaphor (1981, 199). However, Kohlberg’s equation of universalizable rules with both justice and the highest stages of moral reasoning proceeds quite independently of any actual wearying in actual games of moral musical chairs. Similarly, R. M. Hare discusses in great detail the actual challenges of trying to imagine being in a particular other’s moral situation (1981, esp. chap. 7). In addition to the problem of motivation—we do not always wish to empathize—there are problems of trying to understand another’s inner mind, which is an even more complex challenge than the demanding task of understanding “the situation.” But then he offers the standpoint of the archangel as one that can bypass the tedium of actual interpersonal comparisons: “The most that human beings can ask for, when they are trying to do the best critical thinking they can, is some way of approximating, perhaps not at all fully, the thought processes of an archangel” (1981, 122).18 Peculiarly, the quest for the omniscient moral standpoint has long survived the intensive contemporary criticism of the underlying Kantian metaphysics with its notion of “pure mind” and “pure object.” If only we could imagine the viewpoint of the “archangel” who hovers above it all, we need not go through all the trouble to learn the specific needs, wants, desires, fears, and vulnerabilities of all those specific others. Several problems challenge universalization through the use of omniscient agents: the problem of underdescription, the problem of overwhelming information, and the problem of judgment-less empathy. 88
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The problem of underdescription applies equally to Hare’s archangel and to Rawls’s assumption that his contractors know “the general facts of society”: First, what we know about the standpoints of most other persons underdescribes those standpoints. . . . [M]ost of the people whose standpoints we have to consider for the purposes of normative theory are strangers known to us only under limited circumstantial descriptions that underdescribe the standpoints of the persons involved. (Friedman 1993, 21)
Can an affluent white suburban property holder really imagine what it is like to be an African American renter living in an inner-city area? Can someone with Blue Cross Gold Plan imagine the insecurity faced by the uninsured? Can men in our society who have never been sexually harassed imagine what women endure when they face such harassment? Can the able-bodied imagine what it would be like to be blind, deaf, or wheelchair bound? And, more fantastically, could someone simultaneously imagine all such differences and more? Faced with the demand to strive for the omniscient viewpoint, what would ensure that the deliberating agent who has never been touched by such situations would even realize they were part of what needed serious imagining? One of the greatest dangers of urging imaginative bolts to ideal standpoints is that people might actually come to believe they have gotten there. Marilyn Friedman stresses that there is no independent criterion by which mortal humans could know how closely or distantly they approach the asymptote of ideal viewing (1993, 19). This lack of any gauge for one’s success renders universalization an impracticable ideal. The omniscient standpoint may be impractical in another way: it conceals primary moral challenges of impartiality that humans face even if God does not. Suppose the moral agent could imaginatively bolt to an omniscient viewpoint. What would she do with all the information so encompassed? Unlike God, human moral agents are limited in the amount of information they can handle without mentally short-circuiting. Writes Margaret Urban Walker: The image of the God’s eye responds to the real problem of limited information in a particularly uninstructive way. The divine viewpoint is a pointlessly extravagant expression of the ideal of fully adequate information, for moral agents do not need to know the state of every leaf and sparrow, and there is the real problem of how much raw information it is The Dilemma of Impartiality
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possible and optimal for a human agent to attempt to ponder in pursuit of a morally adequate view. (1991, 764)
Earthly people are confounded not only by incomplete information but by the daunting challenge of discerning the morally relevant in a neverending barrage of information, a challenge unaddressed by metaphors of the God’s-eye view. Moreover, God and archangels—at least as conceived in the religious tradition that so heavily influenced liberal philosophy—bring no moral debts to their processes of deliberation. Strategies of omniscience thus ignore the relevance of personal or social transgression and historical rivalries. They ignore legitimate quests for reconciliation, remedy, forgiveness. If a given person or group is in pain, it may not be adequate to incorporate that pain into my compiled empathy. If I, or my group, has caused or contributed to that pain, something more may be owed. As Margaret Urban Walker points out, while a mundane matter for humans, it would seem a joke to say of God’s pursuit of a certain course, “well, she or he will have to live with that . . .” (1991, 765). These practical problems intersect with a central theoretical limitation on strategies of omniscience. The universalization of omniscient agents attempts to extend human empathy to all. But the extension of empathy without constant critical judgment would be ethically unhealthy even if it were possible. “There is an important difference between those motives which are merely unfamiliar and those motives which seem corrupt or despicable,” writes Marilyn Friedman. “Should the victim of a brutal rape be, thus, required to adopt the standpoint of the rapist?” (1993, 22–23). We rightfully may decline to extend imaginative empathy to Ku Klux Klan members or child molesters. Refusing to empathize can be a morally courageous act that requires perceptive moral discrimination. In personal relationships, lack of such courageous discrimination results in “women who love too much.” There is no reason to expect that wider political life would be any better off without judgment of empathy. In short, pursuing a metaphorical God’s-eye point of view in political theory may entail a secular analogue to pride as that sin is envisioned within Christian theological traditions: the failure to recognize human limits that make one unlike God. Conversely, the drawbacks of the presumed view of God as a model for secular political life are among several 90
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stimuli causing contemporary Christian theologians to question that view of God (see chapter 5). V e i l i ng: I s Et h ic a l Pu r da h Mode st y or Dis gu ise? Unlike omniscient agents, essential agents needn’t be superhuman in the breadth of their vision of and empathy toward others. Still, cognitive miracles are required of them and thus render them, too, an impractical ideal. Also similarly, the ideal itself may be less ideal than often assumed. How do we in fact know that we have successfully weeded out our particulars from moral reasoning when we attempt abstraction? An astute teacher presenting Rawls’s theory of justice graphically illustrated this problem when he asked students to put paper bags over their heads to simulate the original position’s “veil of ignorance.”19 (Did the students really not know who they were once the bags were donned?) Marilyn Friedman succinctly notes that the “veil of ignorance” would also have to be a “veil of influence” to be successful (1993, 24).20 Biases, including morally pernicious ones, can survive general formulation. This problem can be seen in a circular twist to the development of John Rawls’s thought. In his more historicist writings subsequent to the original Theory of Justice, Rawls concedes that the original position is not meant to model some pristine moral state, a bona fide metaphysical Archimedean point, but rather it concisely articulates certain core values that are embedded in Western liberal democratic tradition. “Justice as fairness . . . tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation. Justice as fairness is a political [not metaphysical] conception in part because it starts from within a certain political tradition” (1985, 225; emphasis added).21 The paradox here is that the “veil of ignorance” in the original position is developed as a model of ethical impartiality-qua-neutrality, but Rawls admits that it really is not neutral after all. The veil of ignorance serves as a veil of influence—a point that may be missed precisely because the historically latent ideals governing the construction of the hypothetical case are widely accepted in liberal society. Rawls may be correct to claim that his theory ought to be interpreted as “political, not metaphysical.” No one appreciates more than his critics The Dilemma of Impartiality
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the contribution he has made by articulating latent ideals in American political culture so vividly in his formulation of the original position. But he misses a logical problem between his admission of the qualified nature of neutrality in the original position and the rest of his theory. Rawls’s claim for the priority of the principles of justice cannot withstand his admission of the cultural-historical factors in the construction of the original position. Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium” is constrained because after the original position is appropriately conceived, the knowledge of principles derived from it “may suggest further reflections that lead us to revise our considered judgements”; but he does not allow for the reverse, that considered judgments could call into question the principles of justice (1971, 49). That constraint becomes indefensible once Rawls admits the original position as a cultural/historical construct. In effect, Rawls’s constraint on reflective equilibrium protects those moral assumptions that are the most culturally pervasive from critical scrutiny. But in advance of scrutiny, there is no reason to affirm those presuppositions as correct and good— or “right.” Moreover, the culture and history of a people may legitimately change and evolve; there is no reason to expect “latent political ideals” to remain constant. If the original position is political and not metaphysical, there is no reason for it to be protected from reflexive critique. Feminists, advocates for racial and ethnic minorities, and communitarians unite in suggesting that even if we could successfully imaginatively abstract ourselves from our particulars, the result would be paralyzing rather than enabling. A lack of knowledge about one’s particulars would block not only morally illicit biases but also morally positive attachments that give us moral identity, reason for living, and incentive for public discourse in the first place. If the willful amnesia of the essential agent is successful, then not only pernicious moral discriminations will be lost but also the positive moral perspectives that one develops through one’s particular life experience. Ov e rge n e r a l i z i ng “E c onom ic M a n ” Emulating essential agents, moral reasoners may not only suppress morally relevant perspectives, underattend the moral relevance of differences among people, and lack adequate criteria for success, but they also may
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err by assuming the wrong generalities of human agency to be paramount. This is an especially troubling danger, since it would fundamentally skew the entire exercise. Underlying the celebration of essential agents is a questionable assumption of “economic man” as the paradigm of what it means to be human.22 The assumption of economic man is clear in the “original position” of contract theory, the state of nature as variously imagined by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Contemporary essential agents are descendants of those first savage contractors. Despite varying degrees of optimism and pessimism, the early contractarians all envisioned the subjects of political organization to be isolated adult men competing for resources: from Hobbes’s anxious brutes, to Locke’s Swiss and Indian in the woods of America, to Rousseau’s noble savages. Hobbes actually announces his ignoring what the others simply ignore. He explicitly imagines that the state of “nature” somehow arose without sexual reproduction or child rearing: “Let us consider men . . . as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement with each other” (1972, 205). Feminists in particular wonder what indeed is natural about such a world: “This is a strange world; it is one in which individuals have grown up before they have been born; in which boys are men before they have been children; a world where neither mother, nor sister, nor wife exists” (Benhabib 1992, 157). It is also a world where love, friendship—even among men—and business cooperation do not exist. All such things are hypothetically defined to be less natural than self-interested competition. John Rawls’s veil of ignorance may hide the very economic man who emerged from the woods of the contractarian tradition’s earlier thought experiments. Economic man peeks out from the veil when Rawls occasionally lapses into the language of bargaining or game theory to characterize the parties in the original position, for example, when he says that “the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain” (1971, 12; emphasis added). Sometimes Rawls argues that the construction of the original position forecloses the need for bargaining, but this implies that bargaining for advantage is somehow the primordial human state that the commitment to justice checks:
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We can, to make the circumstances [of the original position] more vivid, imagine that the parties are required to communicate with each other through a referee as intermediary. . . . But such a referee is actually superfluous, assuming that the deliberations of the parties are similar. Thus there follows the very important consequence that the parties have no basis for bargaining in the usual sense. (139)
Economic man may be ensconced in the original position most fundamentally by the assumption that the parties in the original position are “mutually disinterested.” Rawls claims this characterization accords with his “thin” metaphysical approach, his desire to assume as little as possible to initiate reflection on justice (18). He also claims that the “combination of mutual disinterest with the veil of ignorance achieves the same purpose as benevolence. For this combination of conditions forces each person in the original position to take the good of others into account” (148). Certainly, there is something paradoxical about translating mutual disinterest into empathy. But more question-begging is the felt necessity of the assumption of mutual disinterest, given that Rawls prides himself on his philosophical modesty. In the first place, human experience refutes the proposition that mutual disinterest is a basic starting point for human moral identity. After all, a central claim of those developing the ethics of care is that many moral reasoners cannot make sense of themselves as mutually disinterested. Few loving parents, for example, can imagine themselves as mutually disinterested from their children. Rawls’s assumption of mutual interest may be tied to his choice of “heads of households” as the relevant agents to devise basic principles of justice. (Certainly, he intends only to presume their disinterest toward other heads of households, not necessarily toward their own, albeit unknown, households?) This choice inherently disadvantages the perspectives of caregivers and children in the process by which principles of justice are discerned. It seems driven more by the legacy of domesticity than by the internal logic of Rawls’s theory. (Why should a veil of ignorance demand only that heads of households imagine being heads of different households, rather than demanding they imagine not being heads of households? Why assume that households have clear “heads” at all?) Even more fundamentally, the assumption of mutual disinterestedness is question-begging by its sheer superfluousness: why could not the veil of ignorance itself suffice to shield moral reasoners from undue 94
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favoring of themselves or their loved ones in formulating the rules of justice? Why must they begin from a presumption of no interest in others, rather than simply from an ignorance of the others in whom they are interested?23 Alternatively, one could imagine considering affection for and wellbeing of beloveds as one of the primary goods that all the original parties desire. Conceivably, such goods are as generally important to humans as income and self-respect, which Rawls recognizes as primary goods. Including them in the list of primary goods might involve “thinner” assumptions than Rawls’s own approach. The superfluousness of the assumption of mutual disinterest suggests that Rawls may unwittingly privilege certain aspects of being human—those characteristic of “economic man” rather than those characteristic of “carers”—in his derivation of justice. Valorizing the ethical work of care entails radically calling into question a central tenet of the social contract tradition: the notion that the subjects of political life are “rational contractors.” The wrongful exclusiveness of economic man in political theory results from a double mistake: the mistake of defining public impartiality by criteria of generality, and then of picking the wrong generalization as relevant. Those who question the insidiousness of economic man in political theory play the role of the Confucian interrogator in the Godwin case. Several feminists challenge what Rawls, along with many other contractarians, assumes is incontrovertible: that principles of justice are those that would be assented to by “free and equal parties concerned to further their own interest” (1971, 11). They lament that this renders the unfree and unequal somehow outside the realm of justice, when one might have thought their vulnerability ought to render them particularly important subjects of justice. The contract model ignores how rational contractors, who actually do not sprout like mushrooms but are born irrational and dependent infants, ever become rational contractors. T h e I ron y of S ol o C onse nsus Both essential and omniscient ideal agents lack historicity. Ahistoricity characterizes the gaze of the omniscient agent, who sees the moral universe at once; and ahistoricity characterizes the very being of the essential agent, who has been created precisely by abstracting from historical The Dilemma of Impartiality
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particulars. Here the strategies of omniscience and essentialism complement each other: either through compilation or through encapsulation, the moral views of all persons are assumed to converge. Thus the singular moral agent is conceived as capable of attaining the insight of genuine consensus through solo thought experiment. With intended irony, I tag this notion “solo consensus.” M i n i m i z i ng Di ff e r e nce The irony of solo consensus bears out Iris Young’s accusation: that conventional models of impartiality minimize the moral relevance of differences between people. Omniscient agents minimize difference by attempting to compile all views into one standpoint; essential agents strip their differences from view in the paring process that creates them. Seyla Benhabib (1992) succinctly describes this problem when she claims that conventional models of “the moral point of view” consider only the “generalized” other and not the “concrete” other. Benhabib targets both omniscient and essential strategies under the label “universalistic” models, while focusing her critique on the original position. She articulates a dramatic irony: “According to Kohlberg and Rawls, moral reciprocity involves the capacity to imaginatively take the place of the other, but under conditions of the “veil of ignorance,” the other as different from the self disappears. . . . Differences are not denied, they become irrelevant” (1992, 161).24 Benhabib describes this erased plurality as the problem of “definitional identity” or “substitutionalist universalism.” Definitional identity occurs through a substitution because one actually substitutes one’s self for the other in deciding norms of behavior toward the other. Benhabib does not wish to deny the importance of tending to “the generalized other,” which she considers a necessary but insufficient aspect of moral reasoning. However, she argues that the failure of ideal models to consider the concrete as well as the generalized other both presumes and generates morally corrupt stances. Ideal models deflect attention from the ethical task of critical needs assessment because “substitutionalist” selves are presumed to have the same needs. They thus generate a suspicion of caregivers, whose everyday work most directly defies the idealized viewpoint. 96
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Both omniscient and essential agents ignore the task of moral perception, a discipline demanded by encounter with concrete others. In the face of overwhelming amounts of information, dialogue, gesture, and nuance that may be subtle as well as vast, deliberators employing metaphors of omniscience simply pretend that they see everything morally relevant at once. Deliberators relying on essential metaphors stick their heads in the sand and pretend that all those details must be irrelevant, simply because they are onerous. Thus, essential models invoke language of screening and reduction rather than acknowledging the discernment, sorting, and reconsideration of morally relevant details that is inherent in critical fairmindedness in everyday morality. Monol o gic a l R e a s on i ng: T h i n k i ng “For” R at h e r t h a n “W i t h ” Many criticisms of ideal agents are inseparable from the very form of moral reasoning entailed: the individual thought experiment. Feminists and discourse theorists lament the “monological” nature of such approaches and instead press toward dialogical methods to ground the development of impartiality.25 This critique is advanced through various colorful metaphors. Seyla Benhabib likens essential agents to “geometricians in different rooms who, reasoning alone for themselves, all arrive at the same solution to the problem” (1992, 163). Margaret Urban Walker concisely articulates the problem of monological thinking when she notes that ideal agents think “for,” not “with,” others (1991, 768–69). Their insulation from real others is disturbing when one considers how often, in everyday life, input from others helps people to bypass ethical distortions and to make critical needs assessments. Monological models of impartiality ignore the fact that the most critical masters of many human practices have become masters by incorporating perspectives of others to constantly adjust, focus, and fine-tune their perspective. The best doctors consult with colleagues and encourage patients to get second opinions. The best lawyers engage in moot courts within their firm before taking a big case to trial. The best journalists have honed interviewing skills to obtain and sort relevant information from others. The best philosophers—even the best Kantian philosophers—read The Dilemma of Impartiality
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the work of and correspond with fellow philosophers as they grapple with ideas. And best friends may correct each other in the most subtle ways: from tasting each others’ sauces and recommending the pinch of another spice, to highlighting positive or negative details of a lover’s attentions that the beloved has distortedly repressed from notice. Challenging monological models of impartiality, critics question the connection between “impartiality” and “autonomy” that is assumed in liberal theory. Critical moral knowledge may depend not only on one’s recognition of oneself as a self-legislating originator of valid moral claims but also on sensitively accepted vulnerability—the acknowledgment that the other may grasp me in ways that legitimately transform my view of the world.26 Understood as critical fair-mindedness, impartiality may demand that the moral reasoner delicately integrate two aspects of human agency: recognition of a self who is self-legislator, not exhausted by her social roles (what is lacking in “women who love too much”); and openness to being grasped by others in ways that dizzyingly set the moral world spinning, demanding reorientation. In everyday life, perspectives for moral critique emerge from interactions with others that are unpredictable and uncontrollable by a singular moral reasoner. Thus, critics of monological thought experiments insist that real dialogue with real persons plays a role in fostering impartiality. They suggest a critical linkage between the appropriate reconceptualization of impartiality and calls for “discourse ethics” or “dialogical politics.” T h e Fa i l ed Mode st y of t h e “Disi n t e r e st e d J u d ge” One ideal agent is more down-to-earth than archangels and more whole than those behind a veil of ignorance: the “disinterested judge.” Despite its greater modesty, this archetype nonetheless proves problematic. Its failure suggests that we must reject the quest for ideal agents altogether. The “disinterested judge” offers many improvements over more radically idealized models. In the first place, judges are real people; conversely, real people are judges. Moreover, both the “omniscient” and “essential” aspects of the disinterested judge do not strain credulity. The judge in criminal or civil court is not expected to see the moral globe at once, but only to know the relevant body of law that governs the case. Similarly, the 98
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judge is not expected to be “neutral” among all persons and their interests, but only to have no attachment to the interests of particular plaintiffs and defendants whose cases she hears. While the judge is guided by the generalities of the law, the particularities of specific cases must necessarily instruct decisions as to when general criteria of the law have been met. The associated process of discernment demands a dialogical interaction not envisioned for radically ideal agents. The judge is dependent on a process of questioning and testimony that involves many others—plaintiffs, defendants, prosecutors, defense counsel—to reach an impartial verdict. Despite the improvement it offers over archangels, the model of the disinterested judge proves inadequate for a general understanding of critical fair-mindedness. In the first place, the conflict-of-interest stipulation that demands that a judge be unattached personally to plaintiffs and defendants is a special role-related requirement rather than a general norm of impartiality. Many of the others to whom we owe fairness are those to whom we are intimately attached. The model of the disinterested judge perpetuates the misguided notion that impartiality is not a relevant norm for close personal relationships. Moreover, the dialogical process of the courtroom is severely constrained compared to other processes of moral enquiry precisely because the governing questions are known in advance: Did the defendant commit such-and-such a crime, which is defined in such-and-such a way? Did the plaintiff suffer demonstrable damages of such-and-such type? These questions give ultimate criteria for what will count as relevant or irrelevant information. One of the judge’s primary jobs is to confine prosecutors and defendants alike to relevant information, with relevancy defined according to predetermined legal questions. Of course, legal standards of relevance themselves evolve culturally over time, but they function as stable standards for the considerations of specific cases.27 However, in the murkier moral world outside the courtroom, deciding the critical questions and what information is relevant to them cannot be known in advance. The moral process of discerning them evolves dialectically: certain information, details, or conversations strike one, prompting certain questions; those questions press one to notice other details in other conversations; they prompt new or reformulated questions, and so on. The unboundedness of the moral domain is a moral challenge to critical fairmindedness that must be accepted rather than artificially defined away. The Dilemma of Impartiality
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R E F USI NG TO OV E R I DE A L I Z E I DE A L AGE N T S: P OSI T I V E DI R EC T IONS I N C ON T E M P OR A RY N E O -K A N T I A NS Given the indebtedness of ideal strategies to Kantian ethics, some critics aim their harshest critiques at Kantians. However, a number of contemporary neo-Kantians reappropriate the Kantian tradition in ways that are sensitive to the force of those criticisms. Several of these neo-Kantians are women who are in dialogue with theorists exploring the ethics of care: Marcia Baron (1991), Adrian Piper (1987 and 1991), and Barbara Herman (1983 and 1991). By integrating insights of the Kantian tradition with an appreciation for the role of close personal relationships in moral life, these reformers challenge the dichotomized labels “partialist” and “impartialist.” Ultimately, they offer a more processive account of impartiality than the “God’s-eye point of view.” Baron, Piper, and Hermann are aptly called neo-Kantians not only because of their avowed indebtedness to Kant but because they insist on impartiality, the primacy of moral duty, and universal principles as essential to morality. Nonetheless, in mining such terms these women challenge dominant interpretations of Kantian categories. Their elaboration of impartiality rejects dichotomies between rationality and desire. It also integrates Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of morality by insisting on the regulative priority of impartiality while suggesting that impartiality takes on characteristics of an Aristotelian virtue, a mean between extremes. While they (certainly with some warrant) consider themselves correcting caricatures of Kant, they also offer innovative re-castings of the Kantian tradition. Their thought presses beyond the legacy of the SVLO cases, but incompletely. These neo-Kantians insist that impartiality is a meta-ethical concept, not a substantive moral norm. That insistence is particularly clear in the work of Baron, who claims (good) impartiality at “level 2” moral reflection, “the level at which principles are chosen and affirmed,” is consistent with partial relationships at “level 1,” the level of lived experience” (1991, 843). For all three, the distinction is essential to making impartiality applicable to diverse kinds of relationships, thus resonating with moral intuitions in everyday life. For Piper, “strict impartiality” means paying attention
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to “proper” attributes only (1991, 727). For Herman, it is treating all as rational and autonomous agents, and treating similar cases similarly (1991, 775–77). Of course, what it means for an attribute to be properly relevant or for a given case to be similar or different will depend on actual situations, and these theorists recognize that deliberative challenges are involved in determining such assessments. These thinkers acutely recognize that conventional interpretations of impartiality entail not only undue suspicion of partial affections but also undue romanticism of partial attachments. If impartiality is to embody a conception of critical fair-mindedness, they reason, it must apply in all kinds of human relationships, including relationships among intimates. As Herman emphasizes, natural relationships can be forums of abuse as well as of tenderness (1991, 788). Moreover, Baron stresses, even lovingly motivated judgments can be seriously misguided: “A loving parent may see his overweight child as adorably plump and fail to see that the child has a problem and needs his parents’ help. More serious, a mother may fail to detect signs that her lover or her father is molesting her daughter” (1991, 853). A definition of impartiality that offers no redress for such moral misperception is, from their point of view, obviously flawed. In fact, their collective effort to explain impartiality as a norm for close personal relationships is their biggest challenge to the legacy of the SVLO cases. Each of these thinkers seeks to defeat arguments that impartiality as an ethical norm ignores or blindsides attention to perception as a moral challenge. Explicitly or implicitly, they respond to Lawrence Blum, whom they fault for equating impartiality and indiscriminacy, and for contrasting impartiality with sympathy and compassion.28 In doing so, each moves toward a processive view of impartiality that challenges the coherence of the dominant metaphor for understanding impartiality, that of an impartial “standpoint.” Baron moves from an “impersonalist” stance that demands taking an “outsider’s view” on loved ones sometimes, but not always, to a suggestion that time—rather than distance—provides a prism for compassionate impartiality toward oneself and loved ones: A partialist may not object to trying to view the matter at a distance, if this amounts to asking “How will I feel about this in five years?” but might if it amounts to trying to take an impersonal perspective. (1991, 853)
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Herman and Piper more fully develop accounts of a moral process in which compassion and impartiality mutually inform each other, a process Herman calls “a deliberative field model of moral reasoning” and Piper calls “modal imagination.” What is striking about these accounts is their integration of Kantian stress on the importance of moral duty, a hallmark of deontological ethics, and Aristotelian characterization of ever-evolving practical moral reasoning. Herman rejects conceptions that pit impartiality against “the immediacy of connection” one feels for particular others: “And when impartiality wins, it is not only at the expense of what I most care about, it provides no deliberative space even to acknowledge my concerns” (1991, 783). According to her, this is an inaccurate model of Kantian deliberation. It fails to recognize that humans are active, not passive, with respect to their desires and that humans modify their ends in the light of other ends. Aiming to restore that Aristotelian insight to Kantianism, Herman simultaneously seeks to defeat what she considers Hume’s related excess: his suggestion that reasons may be built into desires. In Herman’s deliberative field model, one’s various moral and nonmoral claims are not inherently competing, but rather shape each other. “It is not that I care about my son and therefore when interests are to be weighed his weigh more. Rather, because I care about my son—his interests (his good) are part of my good, the good as I see it” (1991, 783). An agent’s deliberative field contains: everything that gives one reasons. Thus, in addition to interests and attachments, there are also grounds of obligation, principles of prudential rationality, and, depending on the individual, a more or less complex conception of the Good. Not everything that may seek a place on my deliberative field is good for me to have there: bad habits, destructive relationships, incompatible goals and projects. And if there is a real question about what enters (or remains) on the deliberative field—this is often a question about ends—the conditions for accepting desire or interests as ends may (and often will) shape the result. (783)
Since moral principles have helped shape one’s partial attachments and vice versa, Herman assumes that all-or-nothing duels between morality and personal attachments are rare. Hermann presents impartial rational principles as “limiting conditions” to the otherwise open-ended deliberation of the moral agent. Rather 102
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than portraying them as “trump cards” against personal attachments, she claims they are secondary motives. Secondary motives constrain the partial motives that give reasons for acting and without which duty would have no locomotion. Her deliberative field model questions language of “natural” relationships precisely because there is no pristine “natural” relationship that has not been shaped by other moral commitments. Unfortunately, Herman does not press her rejection of “the natural” to its logical conclusions. She still gives “impartial” principles regulative priority over other commitments in the deliberative field (implausibly claiming that regulative priority does not imply “value priority”).29 While her account of deliberation is more satisfying than “the God’s-eye point of view,” Herman fails to acknowledge that partial attachments might serve as limiting conditions to universal principles. She overoptimistically assumes a proper derivation of universal principles, unskewed by inappropriate cultural bias. Consider the abolitionists’ rejection of the reigning universal principles of their day. Those principles were perceived to be governed by universal norms of respect for property and motivated by duty-against-emotion that demanded respect for property laws even among those with emotional reactions against slavery. It is difficult to explain the courage of the abolitionists as a moral accomplishment according to Herman’s model. To say universal principles of the day were wrong is to beg questions about the model. Adrian Piper more radically challenges the parameters of the SVLO cases, ultimately articulating compassion as a structural virtue rather than as a spontaneous feeling. Her strategy is to demonstrate an intrinsic connection between impartiality and compassion: she claims that compassion is essential to strict impartiality (judging in respect to appropriate attributes only), and that true compassion is characterized by strict impartiality. This dialectic is essential to “modal imagination,” the ability to imagine the possible as well as the actual, a capacity fundamental to “trying on other’s shoes” (1987, 726, 737). Finding interaction with real others necessary to modal imagination, Piper claims that compassion is constituted by three distinguishable responses: “empathetic understanding of the other’s condition,” “sympathetic fellow-feeling in reactions,” and “consequent disposition to render aid/mercy.” Such compassion demands “a disposition to impartiality of treatment” so that compassion to the other is “symmetrical,” that is, The Dilemma of Impartiality
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proportional to the compassion-worthy attributes of a person or situation (743, 746). Provocatively, Piper suggests that compassion is a classical virtue, a cultivated habit that marks a mean between moral extremes and generates a certain disposition of character. She claims that compassion’s “symmetrical” imaginative involvement with the other’s inner states checks asymmetrical involvement that pushes the agent to one of two morally dangerous poles: self-absorption or vicarious self-possession. Significantly, these excesses correlate with “justice” and “care” moral orientations as those have been explored by Carol Gilligan and others. Against the SVLO cases, Piper assumes impartiality is the cultivation of symmetrical empathy for intimates and strangers alike, not arbitration between empathy for intimates and empathy for strangers. According to Piper, conversationalist Lawrence Blum wrongly dichotomizes impartiality and compassion because he assumes that impartiality demands giving equal weight to all. But with Piper’s definition of strict impartiality, judgment by proper attributes only, the imaginative involvement of symmetrical compassion demands impartiality, which may mean giving more attention to the more needy. Piper joins Baron and Herman in rejecting the notion that impartiality demands equal attention to all—one of the basic presumptions of the SVLO cases—without rejecting impartiality as a relevant moral norm. Piper argues that, in addition to compassion, other social virtues such as friendship and justice demand strict impartiality between one’s own and others’ inner states. She comes tantalizingly close to suggesting that impartiality itself is a virtue, not a “standpoint,” a snapshot view of the moral landscape, or a limit principle. In the end, the promising movement of the neo-Kantians toward a more processive view of impartiality is thwarted by their incomplete rejection of the parameters of the SVLO cases. Baron’s periodic reversions to “impersonality” and “outsider perspectives” to describe impartiality remain in tension with her portrayal of time as a critical prism that does not demand such impersonality. Herman’s model uses impartial principles to regulate partial attachments in a way that she does not allow to be reciprocated. Her “limit principles” are not “limited.” While Piper’s explicit turn to the language of virtue offers the greatest promise, she sidesteps important challenges that must be met to press her account toward 104
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a comprehensive description of impartiality as a virtue. She evades the logical force of her requirement that the moral agent feel equal sympathy for both a friend and a stranger suffering equally. To be consistent, Piper should argue either that the common tendency of people to feel greater compassion for suffering friends than for suffering strangers is a moral weakness (reinforcing the presumptions of the SVLO cases), or alternatively, that compassion for friends has the potential to inform, not just to thwart, the development of compassion for strangers. Despite their failure to transcend the limits of the SVLO cases completely, the neo-Kantians suggest important directions for the development of a pragmatic, processive conception of impartiality as critical fair-mindedness.
PA RT I NG F ROM PA RT I A L IS T S So-called “partialists” share the desire to jettison, or de-prioritize, impartiality as a regulative idea in order to acknowledge the legitimate force of personal attachments in moral life. Of course, it is misleading to speak of partialists as one critical cohort. Such a characterization obscures major differences between partialists. Their critiques differ, and so do their weaknesses. Those closer to liberal presuppositions of autonomous selves tend, problematically, to assume proprietary conceptions of intimacy, with intimate loves somehow “belonging” to the lover who chooses them. They also tend to romanticize close personal relationships, unwarrantedly assuming their moral tenderness. Those at the other end of the spectrum, who adopt a more communal notion of moral selfhood, tend to overly quickly accept conventional social institutions, with inadequate attention to the oppressions worked into the fabric of those institutions. I focus on two groups of partialists who endorse different conceptions of “social selves”: integrity theorists, and communitarians.30 While they remain stymied by the SVLO cases, their perspectives offer important insights that begin to push past the “partiality/impartiality” framework. I n t e gr i t y T h e or ists One lineage has elucidated the perceived threat of dominant impartial models to conceptions of personal integrity. Bernard Williams is the patriarch of this lineage. His pioneering essays raise devastating questions: The Dilemma of Impartiality
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Is the utilitarian and deontological presumption that we should consider other’s projects and attachments to have the same moral weight as our own not self-annihilating? How can one be true to oneself if one does not in fact morally prioritize those highly particular, non-universalizable attachments that give one a “reason for living?” What should one do if the demands of impartial morality conflict with a personal project the loss of which would destroy one’s particular character, particular reasons for living, particular integrity?31 The response of integrity theorists, including Williams (1981), Jeffrey Blustein (1991), and Lynne McFall (1987), includes the following elements: that every person has particular commitments that are for that person “identity-conferring”; that these identity-conferring “ground projects” are central to a person’s character; and that these commitments entail certain things that a person cannot imagine doing or, alternatively, ceasing to do, lest the person lose him or herself. Shaping a life in which one’s ground projects cohere comfortably is a complex moral challenge. A person’s “ground projects” need not be selfish; personal emotional attachments to particular others, such as family commitments or friendship, may be unselfish and yet not impartial ground projects. In general, claim the integrity theorists, we rightfully ascribe non-instrumental, “non-personal” value to the objects of our love, whether those objects are particular people, institutions, our own integrity, or universal moral principles. We appropriately see both our friends and our moral norms as having intrinsic value apart from our connection to them. The integrity theorists stress the unique irreplaceability of particular others and particular attachments in our lives and thus, conversely, the barrenness of lives unanchored by any particular intimacies.32 Jeffrey Blustein’s criticism of Kantian rationalism centers on its failure to recognize the radical irreplaceability of persons, a failure revealed by Kant’s equation of human dignity with the rationality that is shared across the species (1991, 209). Focusing on irreplaceability as it is made manifest by grieving for a dead loved one, Blustein celebrates the “particular stylization” of more universally valued traits that individuals embody.33 (We may all appreciate wit, and many may be witty, but no one is witty in exactly the same way as Aunt Flo.) What makes an individual irreplaceable is not only her particular stylizations but the fact that one has a shared history with her. 106
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As a group, integrity theorists explore many connections between personal identity, reasons for moral action, and self-knowledge. Williams stresses that our particular attachments impel our daily routines of work and living. We work hard in particular careers for our particular families; we devote creative energy to particular clubs and causes; and we socialize with particular friends. Without these particulars, claims Williams, we would be rendered paralyzed, lacking motivation for action of any kind. Certainly, few people get out of bed in the morning simply for “goodness,” “rightness,” “utility,” or “virtue.” Blustein notes how our identity-conferring commitments, particularly those to other people with whom we are intimate, promote self-knowledge: Relationships of personal love and friendship are especially important in providing means to the achievement of an enlightened self-concept. Friends and loved ones . . . see themselves in one another, and discover and measure their strengths and weaknesses in one another, through the continual and sensitive feedback each gives the other. This mutual monitoring, based on prolonged and deep familiarity, is perhaps the most potent source of objectivity about ourselves available to us. (1991, 56)
Modern moral philosophy, he claims, underappreciates the extent to which particular relationships make us who we are. “For many of us,” writes Lynne McFall, “friendship is an identity-conferring commitment. If we betrayed a friend in order to advance our careers, we could not ‘live with’ ourselves; we would not be the same persons we thought we were. This is what it means to have a ‘core’” (1987, 13). For any moral agent, commitments to multiple ground projects compete and demand trade-offs. Thus, the construction of a unified and coherent life confronts the agent as a challenge. Integrity theorists converge on coherence as a definition of integrity. The ground projects of a person of integrity cohere. Since ground projects are identity-conferring, failure to achieve such coherence may be identity-shattering. Coherence of a life is not a simple matter. As McFall notes, it demands an affective “first-person” acceptance of one’s commitments, coherence between commitments and action, coherence between commitments and motivation, and consistency (1987, 8). Both McFall and Blustein discuss the inherent tension between the richness of a life, in terms of the number of goods and commitments embraced, and “unity” defined as consistency. The Dilemma of Impartiality
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Integrity becomes an impoverished concept if it is applied only to consistency, with no consideration of richness. At the same time, human limits constrain the richness of commitments that a person can handle without risking spiraling dissolution. Williams refers to the drive for coherence among one’s ground projects as “scalar negotiation.” “Scalar” means that “psychological connectedness . . . admits of degrees” (1981, 6). When a person’s mix of ground projects come under duress over time, there may be infinite possibilities of complex scalar negotiation that lie between the extremes of complete integrity, defined by coherence and consistency among all the person’s ground projects, and the complete loss of integrity, defined as the capitulation of one or more identity-conferring ground projects. By defining integrity as coherence among personal ground projects, integrity theorists give philosophical flesh to popular parlance about seeking “balance” in one’s life. Scalar negotiation might mean, for example, that one day I must stay home from work to care for my sick child, while another day I must hire a babysitter outside business hours to meet a professional deadline. Despite many resonances with everyday moral challenges, the account of integrity offered by these theorists inadequately challenges the legacy of the forced SVLO cases. This is most clear in Williams’s stark conclusion that personal integrity may simply clash with “impartial” public morality. Williams believes there are built-in limits to the process of scalar negotiation when one’s integrity comes under duress from impartial morality, since public morality does not grant special value to an individual’s ground projects. As Williams poses it, the potential dilemma between impartial morality and personal integrity may at times become so extreme that integrity must win out lest morality become a suicide tonic. But one may wonder why scalar negotiation does not include negotiation between public impartiality and personal integrity. The sensitivity of the integrity theorists to the “social self” is ultimately one-sided. While they rightly insist that a person’s primary attachments, including personal relationships, are “identity-conferring,” their notion of the relationship between a person and her primary attachments is surprisingly insulated. My ground projects define me; thus I am not an atomized self. But my ground projects are mine; thus with my ground project I am, in one way, an atomized unit. The tendency to view people’s particular commitments 108 ·
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as possessions of the individual distorts the thought of the integrity theorists in many ways. This disturbing tendency is evident in Williams’s language of “ground projects” as he applies that to personal relationships as well as to professions, hobbies, or institutions. “Projects” are generally undertakings that are chosen, directed, and managed toward some foreseen end. Commitments conceived as projects lose any sense of the ability to seize us, any sense of radical open-endedness, any sense of their capacity to transform our ends. However, in reality those dizzying potentials mark most intense attachments, especially personal relationships. The illusion of insulation results in inattention to the ways in which a ground project may naturally spill over into broadly “impartial” concerns, and vice versa. Consider the person who falls in love with an immigrant to her affluent country. On a visit to his homeland, she observes poverty more abject than she has ever witnessed before and is galvanized by this experience to become extensively involved in Oxfam.34 The involvement in Oxfam may be simultaneously a sensitivity to her lover, a response to some impartial moral dictum—“all people should have basic necessities”—and also a new personal ground project. Or, alternatively, imagine the idealistic young person who goes to work for Oxfam because of her adherence to some “impartial” standard of justice by which the world’s current skewed distribution of resources is condemned. On an extended overseas business trip for Oxfam, she meets and falls in love with a man from a poor country. Her commitment to him becomes a new personal ground project. Partialists and impartialists alike are not completely remiss to worry whether her love affair could ever become at odds with her impartially justified concerns for food distribution. (In the time-honored tradition of extreme hypotheticals, they could imagine a famine in which she can nourish him and his family adequately only by stealing Oxfam supplies headed to even more dire victims of the famine.) But certainly they miss something important in not entertaining the real possibility, and natural healthiness, of mutual reinforcement. That his people have suffered so may reinvigorate her commitment to new norms of international distributive justice. Such a mutual reinforcement seems to be the genuine sense of “reflective equilibrium.” However, integrity theorists deny the possibility of such reflective equilibrium as personal ground projects are pitted against The Dilemma of Impartiality
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impartial morality (Williams), or as personal morality is pitted against social morality (McFall). These dichotomies buttress rather than challenge traditional social constructions of the boundary between public and private. In fact, the integrity theorists maintain the formulation of the SVLO cases as definitive of impartiality. And their turning the tables to side with the chambermaid rather than with the archbishop does not radically challenge gender biases in the construction of the SVLO cases themselves. Consider Williams’s famous example of moral luck, a hypothetical painter based on Gauguin (1981, 20–39). Williams suggests that the painter’s decision to abandon his family for exotic, art-inspiring voyages becomes justified by the moral luck of his subsequent artistic greatness. For Williams, Gauguin’s abandonment of his family was justified ex post facto for the preservation of his personal integrity against the threatening force of impartial morality. Certainly, feminists and child care advocates alike must carefully scrutinize any philosophical rationalization of “dead-beat dads.” There is something quite disturbing about the Gauguin example in an age when the excuse “I had to leave to be true to myself” is more readily accepted of men than of woman. Would Williams or his readers so easily condone his justification by moral luck if the artist who abandoned spouse and children were a woman?35 Is it not problematic to think of ground projects such as children as possessions—possessions that can be traded away for the sake of one’s overall “integrity?” By perceiving Gauguin’s plight as a dilemma between personal integrity and impartial morality, Williams allows the (over)indulged artist to prematurely curtail the delicate process of internal negotiation between scalar ground projects that Williams’s own analysis so helpfully details. Certainly, for the painter the pull of the marriage and children is not only the impartial norm that fathers be true to their families, but it is also the “identity-conferring” reality that these are his wife and his children. Did Gauguin investigate whether there was some way he could be artistically productive without abandoning his family? Did he fully imagine all the possibilities that might allow this? Williams’s dilemmatic formulation (integrity versus impartial morality) actually facilitates an escape from the rigors of personal integrity as he defines them. Should the reader who accepts Williams’s defense of Gauguin thus call into question general norms that require men to be loyal to their wives 110
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and to support their children? Williams thinks not. But why not? Only because he presumes the conflict between personal integrity and impartial morality can he dismiss the question so quickly. If the attainment of reflective equilibrium is embraced as a necessary challenge of ethical life, the approval of Gauguin, combined with the desire to keep the “impartial” norm of parental duty, stands as a problem. Consider the plight of the wife whom the hypothetical artist leaves behind. Let us assume that, unlike her husband, she sees the care of their children as an identity-conferring ground project, one she cannot abandon without destroying her very self. Let us further assume that the children are young, and that having been engrossed in their care for some time, she has no immediately lucrative job prospects. How will she both financially support them and provide them adequate time and attention by herself? If she has affluent and/or generous family and friends, perhaps she could ask them for financial or hands-on assistance. If not, she may be dependent on public “charity”—or at least publicly supported day care—to provide for them. While her husband conveniently views his integrity as opposed to impartial morality, he has rendered her integrity acutely dependent on some impartial public morality. Integrity theorists too quickly accept moral tragedy as an explanation of troubling outcomes because they inappropriately conceive moral tragedy. What is the source of moral tragedy? If, as integrity theorists maintain, it is the root conflict between personal integrity and “impartial” or “social” morality, then reflective equilibrium is precluded. By implication, then, all perceived disjunctures between the personal and the political simply can be accepted as the inevitable result of moral tragedy. Feminist and neo-Aristotelian commentators, by contrast, have defined moral tragedy as resulting from the multiplicity of moral goods and personal commitments, in addition to people’s lack of control over factors that affect realization of perceived goods. Even in the absence of tragic conflicts on the scale of Aeschylean tragedy (in which desirable actions are mutually exclusive), there are zero-sum situations in which if I devote more energy to this worthy cause, I will have less for that; if I spend more time with this child, I will have less for that one. The tragic limit here is human finitude itself. Negotiating an appropriate balance among such competing moral goods is an ongoing moral challenge akin to Williams’s internal “negotiation.” Moral theories that do not concede The Dilemma of Impartiality
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this complexity along with its inevitable poignancies and losses are suspect by feminists.36 However, these critics assume that general tensions between impartial norms and partial commitments (unlike tensions between one’s multiply embraced personal commitments) suggest potentially passable, humanly constructed roadblocks in the moral landscape rather than any natural constraint of moral geography. Such disjunctures ought to provoke deconstructive and reconstructive reflection rather than tragic negotiation, since there should be a reciprocity between accepted general norms and the broad flourishing of varied partial attachments. The tragic limit here is not human finitude but the limits of inherited cultural institutions or the limits of human imagination. For feminists, discordance between impartial norms and partial commitments—reflective disequilibrium—is a de facto indication of structural problems in human society. Certainly the great critical edge of feminism is its revelation of many such discordances whose abrasion previously went unnoticed because they were camouflaged as part of the “natural” landscape. This critical edge has allowed phenomena such as wife beating and the glass ceiling to be recognized as social problems in the first place. It hardly seems adequate to congratulate beaten wives for maintaining their integrity to personal ground projects against impartial norms. An improved conception of political impartiality should facilitate, not obstruct, efforts to achieve reflective equilibrium. It should demand wariness toward the overhasty acceptance of moral tragedy. Similarly, it should strive to minimize moral tragedy to its ineradicable level in human institutions. C om m u n i ta r i a ns If integrity theorists ultimately underappreciate the social nature of the self, some communitarians over-succumb to it. Of course, “communitarianism” is a broad term that refers to diffuse movements both in philosophy and in practical political life. Nevertheless, certain thinkers are widely considered standard-bearers for “communitarianism”: While there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that distinguish full-fledged communitarian thinkers from others who advocate community, there is considerable agreement about which of our contemporaries are in fact major communitarian thinkers. 112
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Two names are always included in discussions of communitarian thinking today: Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel. A third name that is usually included is that of Charles Taylor. (Phillips 1993, 4)37
Others often noted as communitarians include Michael Walzer, who continually explores linkages between membership in sociocultural groups, identity, and political activity; and sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who has become a spokesman for communitarianism in the popular press as well as in scholarly publications.38 These thinkers all connect philosophical questioning of the individualistic assumptions of modern political theory to calls for the revitalization of communal institutions. The overlap and tension between feminism and communitarianism is particularly relevant to considering the challenge of de-gendering civic virtue. While many feminists are suspicious of communitarianism, philosophically, they have much in common. Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey (1993) neatly summarize the rich intersection between feminism and communitarianism: a grass-roots approach to political involvement; “anti-individualism,” with its accompanying focus on transforming social relationships; stress on “ideals of solidarity and reciprocity”; a “commitment to public goods”; consideration of “the embodied subject”; an interest in social groups of various kinds; and an “interpretivism” that “blurs the divide” between prescription and description, or between argument and rhetoric (117–29). Both feminists and communitarians challenge the notion of politics defined as the public-at-large versus private individual desire. Both are sensitive to the political implications of “culture,” with culture recognized as a diffuse, complex, and institutionally multilayered phenomenon. However, feminists object that communitarians are selective in their recognition of this complexity. Feminists particularly decry what Frazer and Lacey call the “invisibility of gender” in communitarian thought: Like liberal theorists, advocates of communitarianism have had little to say about women or women’s oppression. Gender remains a conceptual irrelevance for communitarian political theory; it is either ignored, or gestured at in a way which assumes the gender issues can be incorporated without conceptual modification. . . . Our analysis . . . has suggested that this has to do not (just) with failings of political commitment on the part of individual theorists but with conceptual, structural features of communitarian theory. (1993, 158–59) The Dilemma of Impartiality
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In addition to the “invisibility of gender,” other sorts of unquestioned traditionalism are embodied in organizations lauded by communitarians. Race- and class-based oppressions survive, along with dubious gender patterns in families, churches, neighborhoods, and ethnically related civic organizations celebrated by communitarians. Marilyn Friedman schematizes feminist criticism, objecting to excessive focus on “communities of place” as opposed to “communities of voluntary association” (1993, 231–55). While communitarians tend to focus on the formative powers of those social nexuses into which one is born, Friedman wishes to explore the potential of chosen communities created by those who dare to imagine them. Without reifying Friedman’s distinction, one may question the relative inattention among communitarians to social support provided by the La Leche League, gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, environmental lobbies, and so forth, as compared to family, church, and neighborhood. One may question why MADD is not what most communitarians seem to be thinking of when they speak of community. Feminists fear that many communitarians confuse the social nature of the self with “conventionalism.”39 Rather than attempt an overview of the diffuse communitarian movement, I focus on two central figures: Alasdair MacIntyre in this chapter, and Michael Sandel in the next. (Because Sandel explicitly takes up civic virtue, I address him with other contemporary theorists of civic virtue.) MacIntyre serves as a paradigm for me in two ways. First, he provides a negative paradigm that demonstrates the resiliency of gender distortions even in what seems a radical critique of impartiality-as-standpoint. Second, he provides a positive paradigm in his movement toward an alternative conception of impartiality. Of all communitarians, MacIntyre has provoked particularly vehement objection in feminist circles.40 Thus, his writings provide an example of the threat to appropriate impartiality that feminists perceive in communitarianism. Feminist critics suspect that MacIntyre’s rejection of universal rationality has overflowed into a complete rejection of impartiality as an ideal of critical fair-mindedness. I will argue that while several examples from MacIntyre’s writings support the feminist diatribe against him, the charge that he rejects any sense of impartiality in favor of conventionalism is inaccurate. MacIntyre’s richly complex thought is often oversimplified by critics. His presen114
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tation of “tradition-bound” rationality sometimes does appear to be “hide-bound” as well. But MacIntyre expresses deep ambivalence about the prospect of moral transformation, and within this ambivalence lie resources for reconceiving impartiality as well as for uncritical nostalgia. MacIntyre’s two invaluable contributions are his exploration of moral “practices” and his conception of “translation” between moral practices. He innovatively seeks to revive appreciation for moral practices and their role in defining moral virtues. In chapters 5 and 6, I argue that looking to practitioners is the appropriate strategy by which to redefine impartiality. Regrettably, MacIntyre generally takes up practices as if they are independent of practitioners. Ironically, this results in a theory-heavy anti-theory account. MacIntyre’s moral agents are lorded over, not by impartial moral principles, but by enormous historical traditions. Moral Practices Borrowing from the moral thought of Aristotle, MacIntyre defines a “practice” as an activity whose internal ends define recognizable excellences: By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve the standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially constitutive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (1984, 187)
MacIntyre argues that not only are things like woodworking, medicine, and farming “practices” by this definition, but so are whole traditions of moral reasoning (such as Marxism, Augustinian or Thomistic Christianity, etc.). MacIntyre makes a fundamental move toward reconceptualizing impartiality when he articulates how a moral practice, as opposed to a “standpoint,” provides criteria for moral judgment. In so doing, he radically calls into question a presumption of the SVLO cases shared by many partialists as well as conventional impartialists: that “impartiality” demands a perspective detached from one’s identity-conferring commitments. Practices presume goods internal to the practice, just as a craft implies standards of craftsmanship intrinsic to the craft, and these goods stand apart from the performance of any particular practitioner (1984, 187–203). Just as an The Dilemma of Impartiality
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ardent violinist may be judged out of tune despite her passion for playing, so a person who affectively identifies with a moral tradition-qua-practice may be judged short of the mark by that tradition’s own standards. Thus, MacIntyre insists, the internal goods of their own identity-conferring traditions may provide nonsubjective benchmarks by which people can assess their moral failings. MacIntyre refutes the criticism that this approach leaves the values of traditions themselves immune from critique. He claims that rejecting a “standpoint” approach does not entail an embrace of relativism because traditions—in their quest for coherence amongst their internal goods— may come, over time, to reject claims that they formerly advanced. Encounters with other traditions may catalyze this process. Thus, MacIntyre also disputes the “perspectivists,” who assume that no ultimate truth claim may vanquish another. The perspectivist fails to realize the central importance of truth claims within traditions of moral inquiry. The importance ascribed to truth claims within traditions pushes toward resolution of tensions that develop internally or from external duress, even if resolution demands a conversion experience that radically alters the tradition. By MacIntyre’s account, the ideal agents that dominate conventional discussions of impartiality achieve a false coherence by artificially separating themselves from the very stresses and strains that demand resolution.41 MacIntyre shares with the integrity theorists a focus on “coherence” as an ongoing moral challenge. However, he applies the notion of a quest for coherence not to individuals, but to historical communities and traditions of moral reasoning. Using Williams’s terminology, MacIntyre attempts to give an account of the scalar negotiation of traditions. MacIntyre describes how traditions of moral reasoning are “identityconferring,” just as the integrity theorists describe one’s personal relationships as identity-conferring. He emphasizes that the “internal ends” (intrinsic aims) of traditions are accorded value by participants separately from their own personal involvement, just as the integrity theorists emphasize that people consider their loved ones to have value independently of themselves. MacIntyre describes the forging of coherence among the internal ends of a practice as a moral challenge, just as the integrity theorists describe the forging of coherence among one’s personal ground projects as a moral challenge. He elaborates how the efforts of a tradition to resolve 116
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internal tensions and externally encountered duress prompt transformation, the resolution of moral “epistemological crises.”42 If the integrity theorists sensitively elucidate the process of personal scalar negotiation while puzzlingly maintaining a rigid “standpoint” of public morality, MacIntyre sensitively elucidates the transformation of traditions while puzzlingly ignoring scalar negotiation among the individuals and smaller communities that make up a tradition. MacIntyre views these individuals and subcommunities as bearers of tradition rather than as moral negotiators of coherence in their own right. Integrity theorists ignore implications of social practices in their focus on personal integrity; MacIntyre ignores challenges of personal integrity in his focus on social practices. The tension between coherence and richness of a life explored by integrity theorists also provides perspective on MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s nostalgic conservatism is most evident when he seems to favor coherence per se. Thus at times he disturbingly extols communities whose coherence derives from cultural insulation and rigid social roles. Feminists rightfully claim that MacIntyre’s “model” communities demonstrate at best an insensitivity to oppression or at worst a longing for the clarity of social roles that comes only at the expense of such oppression. Thus, many readers understandably cringe when MacIntyre celebrates the classical Greek polis (in which both women and non-Athenians had slave status); traditional Catholic communities on the most remote of Ireland’s outlying islands; Orthodox sectors of Judaism and Greek Byzantine Christianity; and tight Protestant small-town communities of the American South (1984, 252). What MacIntyre finds admirable in such communities is their “narrative unity,” their sense of themselves as bearers of a tradition, and their cohesive moral language that recognizes developed virtues as integral to the good life. But are there no moral tensions within such communities? Of course there are. Are these the only types of communities that could demonstrate narrative unity? Of course not. Translation among Moral Traditions Fortunately, MacIntyre does not always confuse moral coherence with cultural insulation. At times he suggests an appreciation for the richness of a tradition and implies that “coherence” at its best holds together the fullest possible mix of legitimate moral values, shared activities, and worthy The Dilemma of Impartiality
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goals. Thus, despite his consistently negative language for cross-traditional encounters (“rival traditions,” “competing traditions,” “epistemological crises”), he concedes that such encounters may push traditions to identify and resolve their internal incoherence more creatively than would have been possible without the encounter.43 Accordingly, he explores the process of linguistic translation as a model of moral critique. This provocative paradigm has been strangely ignored by contemporary invokers of “dialogical politics.” MacIntyre’s appreciation for coherence-amidst-richness is also evident in his choice of heroes—for example, Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas systematically melded Aristotelian and Augustinian worldviews generally presumed incompatible before his medieval synthesis (MacIntyre 1988, 164–82, 183–208). In moving past a “standpoint” conception of public impartiality, MacIntyre presents an array of critical conceptual tools that taken together might urge reconsideration of politics “from the ground up.” Nonetheless he resists that project in favor of an approach that is as “top-down” as that of any classical liberal theorist. MacIntyre severs the traditional “private” domain from his consideration by taking up practices so grand in scale as to be named by “isms”: Aristotelianism, Thomism, Marxism, liberalism. MacIntyre’s top-downism derives from his regrettable tendency to push the tension between coherence and richness toward coherence-per-se, and from his unsatisfactory resolution of two related tensions in his thought: tensions in his view of language and in his conception of moral freedom. The combined effect of these tensions and their problematic resolutions is to present an unrealistically monolithic view of moral traditions. MacIntyre’s basic struggle between the value of coherence-per-se and the value of coherence-amidst-richness is supported and mirrored by tensions in his view of language. He sometimes suggests an almost Platonic notion of language in which language has some intrinsic value apart from its use. On the other hand, he sometimes emphasizes that evolving “language in use” is the very vehicle of tradition-bound rationality. By alternating between one and then the other of those views of language, MacIntyre stresses the evolutionary capacities of moral traditions while at the same time dichotomizing “coherent” older moral languages and “incoherent, fragmentary” modern moral languages.44 In so doing, he misses Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s insight that all language is fragmentary and evolving, and that all language is multivalent, with various language users overlaying 118
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values on terms in common usage.45 (Consider the multiple senses of the term “feminism” in current usage.) Taking the multivalence of contemporary moral discourse as a symptom of the problem, MacIntyre fails to explore it as the resource his translation model might otherwise suggest that it is. Thus MacIntyre’s longing for homogeneity causes him to underattend to the moral relevance of everyday moral parlance among ordinary folks. He fails to launch an exploration of popular cultural symbols, though such symbols would seem to be embedded in common “practices” and “traditions” and could even serve as prisms to bring into focus the values of those practices. His traditions of moral reasoning strive for coherence through translation among classical texts, not through coffeehouse banter or shared films and fiction among their practitioners. Indeed, the texts and traditions themselves become MacIntyre’s moral agents—rather than people. MacIntyre’s inattention to the ordinary is also revealed by his obsession with periods in the life of moral traditions that might be tagged “epistemological crises.” These are periods in which the tradition faces such extreme internal or external duress that a radical change in conceptual paradigm is demanded by the pull toward coherence. While MacIntyre seeks to demonstrate the possibility of critique among inevitably traditionbound moral agents, he unduly limits the moral freedom of the agent by focusing on such “epistemological crises”—which, after all, can only be identified as such by historical hindsight. He diverts attention from the process by which traditions evolve in the long periods between epistemological crises and from the resources that nourish moral pioneers who are, so to speak, ahead of their time in embracing new paradigms.46 The combined effects of these tensions within MacIntyre’s thought and his tendency to push them toward a simplistic, nostalgic sense of “narrative unity” result in inadequate attention to the complexity of moral traditions. Margaret Mohrmann argues that MacIntyre inadequately explores the complexity of moral life for people simultaneously enmeshed in a variety of traditions: MacIntyre’s theory is an extended play on the metaphor of borrowing, portraying thinkers situated within parallel modes of thought who, from time to time, dip into each other’s ideological storehouses for useful concepts and terms. . . . MacIntyre occasionally notes that persons can The Dilemma of Impartiality
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and do inhabit more than one tradition of reasoning fully and simultaneously. . . . However, his theoretical model of translation relies for its coherence on the assumption that humans reason within only one such tradition. The faultiness—or better, the unreality—of that assumption markedly constricts the theory’s utility. MacIntyre does not speak of, nor offer a model for, the sort of reasoning that represents constant and mostly unconscious “translation” among the rational traditions at play within one individual. (1995a, 219, including note 8)47
MacIntyre’s continual reversion to a monolithic conception of traditions and his tendency to consider individuals as bearers of traditions rather than as moral negotiators in their own right obscure his most penetrating insights and dull the critical edge of his project. He maintains the condescension toward personal life of the SVLO cases even as he moves past their abstract conception of impartiality. He replaces the tyranny of abstract principle with the tyranny of moral traditions. There is no room for the grieving parents who founded MADD on his playing field of grand traditions. But like the other sophisticated commentators who ultimately fail to escape the legacy of the bishop and the chambermaid, MacIntyre offers crucial starting points for the reconceptualization of impartiality. In fact, I argue that by extending his structural appreciation of moral practices to practices of care, thus joining the greatest insights of integrity theorists and communitarians, impartiality can finally be rescued from the rescue cases. Much can be gained by pressing MacIntyre away from coherenceper-se toward coherence-amidst-richness. Much can be gained by applying MacIntyre’s notions of the rationality of practices and the necessity of translation among them to the realms of ordinary life that he ignores. I de ol o gi e s of Ge n de r a n d R e l igion: R e pr ise Integrity theorists and communitarians enrich our notions of what individuals and communities are without adequately calling into question the assumed polarity between them. Integrity theorists underappreciate the social nature of the self when they consider the process of “scalar negotiation” among one’s personal commitments as a challenge that stands apart from the norms of the wider community. In effect, they simply reverse the 120
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sacrifice presumed by antagonistic conceptions of love: they are willing to sacrifice political norms for personal integrity rather than the reverse. Communitarians like MacIntyre capitulate too much of an individual’s moral freedom to the “social self” when they focus on communal norms without attending to the many persons and personal relationships that comprise those communities. The result can be a nostalgia that insulates communal norms from the press for personal integrity and that takes caring labor for granted just as much as the political liberalism to which it is opposed. Yet feminist celebration of communities of choice, as opposed to communities of birth, is a dissatisfying response that presumes the same opposition between identity and judgment. Excesses of both integrity theory and communitarianism preserve a false dichotomy between impartiality and partiality. Both hobble critical fair-mindedness and the drive for moral coherence in reflective equilibrium. Neither finally articulates a notion of impartiality that transcends the ideologies of gender and religion that rendered civic virtue incoherent.
A PROM I SI NG C ONSE NSUS A MONG S T R A NGE BE DF E L L OWS Although the legacy of the bishop and the chambermaid lingers, impartialists and partialists alike increasingly strain against the false dichotomy imposed by the SVLO cases. They increasingly try to shed their own labels. In the thought of contemporary neo-Kantians, integrity theorists, and communitarians—otherwise strange bedfellows who define themselves in opposition to each other—there are two striking similarities. First, there is an effort to move from completely ideological accounts of impartiality to a consideration of experiential moral deliberation. Neo-Kantians consider the complexity of people’s “deliberative fields”; integrity theorists consider the “scalar negotiation” of people trying to maintain coherence among multiple personal attachments; and communitarians consider the socially embodied rationality of moral communities or traditions. Second, there is a movement, albeit incomplete, to consider impartiality in processive terms. Each of these groups is interested in how people, or moral communities, become appropriately critical by engaging with multiple commitments over time. The Dilemma of Impartiality
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This overlapping consensus deserves special consideration precisely because it crosscuts such otherwise varied philosophical sparring partners. In chapters 5 and 6, I press this consensus further to explode the boundaries of the SVLO cases. I develop a pragmatic account of impartiality-aspractice, in contrast to the impartiality-as-standpoint that derives from those cases. First, however, I turn to contemporary literature on civic virtue in order to show how civic virtue falls between the cracks of the dichotomy between impartiality and partiality that remains the entrenched legacy of the bishop and the chambermaid. In short, impartiality-as-standpoint loses virtue.
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4
IMPARTIALITY-AS-STANDPOINT AND LOST (AGAIN) VIRTUE
In this chapter, I return more fully to the contemporary theorists of civic virtue briefly introduced in chapter 2. I argue that the lingering false dichotomy between partialist and impartialist moral theory subtly but dangerously replicates itself in their work. This explains the invisibility of people like MADD’s founders in the fall narrative of civic virtue. Ultimately, it explains an otherwise puzzling feature of contemporary literature on civic virtue: the loss of virtue amid calls for its retrieval. Few theorists who seek to renew civic virtue actually articulate structural virtues—that is, cultivated moral habits that result in settled character traits—of the good citizen. Although many begin by criticizing democratic procedure, institutions, or law as inadequate, they eventually retreat to those same foci. Although their collective failures launched this project, these are all theorists whom I admire, and to whom my own argument is indebted. They are not only astute critics and nimble thinkers but also courageous pioneers who have invited the public to a renewed conversation about citizenship. By presuming that personal character traits have political relevance, they overtly challenge the legacy of the stranger-versus-loved-one cases. However, that suspect legacy continues to influence their accounts. Certain theorists can be characterized as “impartialist” and others as “partialist,” and the ability to make that classification is the root of the problem. The result is a pervasive failure to articulate civic virtues as cultivated moral habits, despite the rhetoric of virtue. More positively, some theorists do propose specific virtues. Usually these imply a movement, 123
albeit incomplete, toward a view of impartiality-as-practice. However, in many cases to press that movement toward completion would challenge the virtues proposed. For convenience, relevant theorists can be divided into three categories: liberal (impartialist) virtue theorists; communitarian (partialist) virtue theorists; and explorers of civil society. While the labels “liberal” and “communitarian” are commonly employed in reference to the first two groups, I prefer to distinguish them as impartialist and partialist virtue theorists. Excavating the nexus of partiality, impartiality, and civic virtue in their accounts may help to explain the stubborn persistence of the liberal/communitarian axis despite their own efforts to deconstruct it. The last category substantively overlaps the first two, since explorers of civil society differ as to whether they focus on voluntary associations (liberal-impartialist), or communities of birth and place (communitarianpartialist) as the civil society of relevance. I address William Galston, Stephen Macedo, Robert Audi, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson as liberal proponents of civic virtue, with Kent Greenawalt as a critical interlocutor; Amitai Etzioni and Michael Sandel as communitarian proponents; and Benjamin Barber as a thinker embodying long-standing tension between political quests for civic virtue and for civil society. Despite many profound insights, these thinkers fail to articulate the civic virtue of MADD. They fail in unique ways, but two crosscutting similarities link their failures: they continue to presume the “standpoint” view of partiality, and they exacerbate gender problems. Each failure in some way shortchanges the ethical work of caretakers, disproportionately women. Public/private boundaries continue to be defined in highly gendered terms. The gendering of civic virtue is left intact, although degendering the term is essential for its constructive transformation. Given the linkage between ideologies of gender and religion detailed in previous chapters, these failures are connected to conceptions of love and justice with distinctly Christian roots. However, this may be surprising to the theorists themselves, since none of them consider themselves religious thinkers—and some consider themselves protectors of the public against the prospect of coercive religious hegemony. The crosscutting failures underlie the greatest irony of all: that virtue gets lost again amidst calls for its retrieval! This problem is true for both “impartialist” and “partialist” proponents of civic virtue for different 124
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reasons. Excessively impartialist thinkers are prone to fall into the very procedural focus they criticize. Excessively partialist thinkers are prone to romanticize certain kinds of local communities, inadequately critiquing care provided by those communities. They thus veer toward an institutional rather than a virtue-based focus. Theorists addressing “civil society” tend to see it either in partialist terms, focusing on communities of place, or impartialist terms, focusing on voluntary associations. In all cases, virtue falls between the cracks opened by the false dichotomy between impartiality and partiality.
L O S T V I RT U E (I): L I BE R A L (I M PA RT I A L I S T) AC C OU N T S OF C I V IC V I RT U E Some critics of excessive procedural focus in democratic theory seem hardpressed to avoid falling into that trap themselves. This problem is notably true of liberal theorists of civic virtue. While Stephen Macedo and William Galston self-identify as liberal virtue theorists, I also categorize Robert Audi and co-authors Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson as such. Audi is less simply so categorized, since he traces various intersecting grounds for civic virtue, only one of which is the liberal tradition of political theory. Others include historical and religious conceptions of civic virtue. Yet Audi characterizes his view as permeated with “liberal faith,” perhaps because he seeks an overlapping consensus on a conception of civic virtue itself. This goal is typical of the liberal virtue theorists, who presume that liberal virtues are rooted in a widely shared partial view of the good. Gutmann and Thompson characterize themselves as theorists of deliberation rather than of virtue. But they describe their proposed “rational deliberation” as a necessary support for liberal institutions. And it seems natural to question what kind of person one would have to be to deliberate in the way they recommend. (Who, implicitly, is being held up as virtuous in this model, and who is not?) Liberal virtue theorists get caught in an ironic vicious circle. First, civic virtue is invoked in order to redress excessive procedural focus in liberal political theory. But then virtue is defined as the disciplined willingness to follow the author’s proposed procedural rules for public discourse. Those who object to those rules become suspect as unvirtuous, rather than being recognized as having different operating conceptions of civic virtue. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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This reasoning defines not only a vicious circle but a small circle: politics is presumed to be defined by disagreement; virtue, then, is about how to disagree well. The virtues necessary to articulate evolving public issues or to maintain ways of life that act as public witness lie outside the circle altogether. Of course, this vicious circle is subtle, and it is embedded in accounts that otherwise have much to offer. Each of these theorists explicitly struggles against metaphysically detached conceptions of impartiality, seeking to redress associated procedural excess in contemporary liberal political theory. Each explicitly rejects the “neutrality” thesis that poses the liberal political tradition as a neutral arbiter among wider conceptions of the good. Each claims some important relationship between private and public moral transformation. Each presents his or her modified liberalism as a mean between extremes and thus a virtue. Each, however, ultimately retreats to proceduralist approaches, particularly by advocating what I call “restricted justification” in public reason-giving. L i be r a l i sm a s a Non-N eu t r a l M e a n All these thinkers begin to work against idolatrous conceptions of impartiality by rejecting the so-called neutrality thesis assumed by many liberal political theorists: the portrayal of liberalism as a neutral arbiter among bumping, bruising, and overlapping conceptions of the good life. Indeed, the shocking effect of the term “liberal virtue” when first coined depended on the critique of an impartial moral standpoint. If there is no impartial standpoint from which to view the political landscape, then the proposition that liberalism is neutral with respect to different views of the good life becomes appropriately suspect. By implication, one needs liberal virtues, because there is no standpoint outside the thick brouhaha of political life to serve as a criterion for justification and because liberalism presumes certain goods that warrant the support of cultivated moral habits. Gutmann and Thompson (1996) typify the dual rejection of unsustainable conceptions of impartiality on the one hand, and the neutrality thesis on the other. They decry “impartiality-understood-as-universalizability” as itself a “comprehensive view” of the moral life—while liberalism purports to defend a diverse public from the political grip of comprehensive views. For this group, rejecting the neutrality thesis is important not only 126
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to avoid metaphysical dishonesty but also for constructive reasons. For Stephen Macedo and William Galston, the articulation of “what liberalism stands for” (Macedo) or “liberal purposes” (Galston) demonstrates that liberalism seeks to advance certain goods, whose deliberate “thinness” is nonetheless substantial.1 Thin is thick, so to speak. For Macedo, widespread recognition that “private citizenship,” that is, limited state power over private lives, is an implied liberal good marks an important truth that nonetheless has threatened to obscure “the more active, public side of liberalism” he seeks to revive (1991, 39). He claims that liberalism stands for private citizenship and public reasonableness. Seeking a liberalism stripped of neutral pretensions yet maintaining self-restraints on citizen comportment, Macedo, Galston, and Gutmann and Thompson all suggest that liberalism itself is best understood as a mean between an overly thin, procedural conception of democracy and an overly thick conception that places comprehensive views of the good life on the table for public debate. There is striking overlap between their provocative portrayals of the liberal mean. For William Galston, the desired mean must refute arguments that either “such accounts [of goods] are ‘so thin’ as to be vacuous for purposes of either moral policy or social policy, or ‘so thick’ as to be unduly restrictive and unduly responsive to liberty and diversity” (1991, 177). Similarly, Stephen Macedo’s preferred term “transformative liberalism” is explicitly designed to represent a mean between two dangerous extremes: the excessive poles of “comprehensive” liberalism and “modus vivendi” liberalism (2000, 219). The latter understands liberal conventions as “battle fatigue,” “mere peace—that is, a truce backed not by shared principles but only a balance of power.” On the other extreme, comprehensive liberals begin from a premise that liberalism “rests on unacknowledged truth” to “reject the strategy of avoidance in favor of a strategy of engagement: they would invite our deepest disagreements onto the political stage to be grappled with directly” (2000, 212–13, 215). Macedo’s “transformative liberalism” (a term he loosely associates with Rawls’s term “political liberalism”) is the appropriate mean. Unlike the comprehensive liberal, the transformative liberal realizes that “political liberalism does not leave comprehensive questions aside altogether, but that is not the same as asserting a particular view of the whole truth. Any liberalism assumes a certain range of answers to many ultimate questions.” Unlike the “modus vivendi” or the “comprehensive” liberal, Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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the transformative liberal realizes that liberal tradition must demonstrate how people at uneasy peace “could move toward a more principled order” (2000, 213, 215). The transformative liberal realizes his embraced politics are literally transformative, so that for Macedo private citizenship and public reason are linked. Public reasons will demand and foster private transformation, and vice versa. Gutmann and Thompson propose their “deliberative democracy” as the appropriate mean between comprehensive liberalism and modus vivendi liberalism. They claim that increased attention to the character of what they call “rational deliberation” is necessary because, even taken together, proceduralism and constitutionalism (protected minority rights) are inadequate to foster the resolution of moral disagreements or the ability to live with many disagreements unresolved. For them, rational deliberation provides the third leg of an “otherwise unstable stool,” thus stabilizing their “deliberative democracy.” They propose the primary characteristics of rational deliberation to be reciprocity, publicity, and accountability (1996, 52). Gutmann and Thompson present reciprocity as the “leading” principle because it “shapes” the others (1996, 52). By extending ethical norms of mutuality to forums of public discourse, Gutmann and Thompson integrate care perspectives with liberalism’s traditional justice orientation. They define reciprocity as the demand for mutually acceptable—rather than either mutually advantageous or universally justifiable—public reasons in citizen debate. According to Gutmann and Thompson, this demand critically balances deliberative democracy between the extremes of a mere modus vivendi (which would be content with mutually advantageous reasons) or a veiled comprehensive view of the good (which would seek to provide universally justifiable reasons). Significantly, they associate the latter rejected extreme with “impartiality” (1996, 17).2 A critique of idealized impartiality, combined with an associated rejection of the neutrality thesis, drives the impetus of these liberal theorists toward discussing virtue. Since the liberal state does embrace certain goods, it should discuss what virtues of citizenship can support such goods. In light of this recognition, all of them suggest that some reconfiguring of public and private is in order. Thus, they might well reject my characterization of them as “impartialist.” Yet I contend that their accounts remain haunted by ghosts of the bishop and the chambermaid. 128
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Ghosts of t h e Bishop a n d t h e Ch a m be r m a i d: (To o) R e st r ic t e d J ust i f ic at ion The ghosts appear most visibly in these authors’ shared assumption that politics is the negotiation of disagreement and in their corresponding emphasis on discourse and rules for discourse in their accounts of civic virtue. Most significantly, all of these theorists require that public justification (public reason-giving on a matter of policy debate) be made in terms accessible to all, and all of them ground their accounts of civic virtue on that criterion. The retreat toward the erstwhile-rejected view of impartiality is particularly clear in Gutmann and Thompson’s account. Having distinguished their principle of reciprocity from extreme impartiality, they then define it in terms of accessible reason-giving precisely in order to “resemble impartiality”: In its most general form reciprocity involves “making a proportionate return for good received.” This is a basic moral concept, but it has special force in democratic politics. . . . The “good received” is that you make your claims on terms that I can accept in principle. The “proportionate return” is that I make my claims on terms you can accept in principle. Deliberative democracy shares with prudence this basic concept of mutual exchange but gives it moral content that formally resembles impartiality. (1996, 55)
Resorting to universally accessible terms as a shortcut, these theorists eviscerate their pioneering proposal for tangible mutuality in actual public discourse. Because the demand for justification on least-commondenominator terms presumes an impartial standpoint, their “resembled impartiality” becomes impossible to distinguish from its identical twin, their rejected “extreme impartiality.” By the workings of some mysterious cosmic law, least-common-denominator views are presumed more capable of asymptotically approaching the viewpoint of “God” (though not God because the proponents are good liberals!). On the face of it, it seems odd to admit that there are no pristinely neutral rules of discourse, but then to insist that everyone follow the rules we used to call neutral, employing the kinds of language we used to call neutral. Since liberal virtue theorists admit and defend thick presumptions of liberal goods, one might expect them to defend conventional liberal rules of discourse, if at all, in reference to those goods. But instead they too quickly presume that their rules for public justification support their Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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proposed goods. All of these theorists wish to maintain restricted justification while rejecting the neutrality thesis, a project I claim fails. Can the moral aims of neutrality survive the metaphysical defeat of neutrality? These theorists all attempt to argue a sophisticated “yes” answer to that question. But they dangerously conflate two issues: what kind of questions are legitimate to put on the public table, versus what kinds of answers can be given to legitimate public questions. For example, insisting that part of the liberal mean should be an unwillingness to discuss, as a political issue, whether there is an afterlife is different from insisting that citizens not appeal to their own view of the afterlife when they address a legitimately political issue (such as capital punishment or organ donation). I follow Kent Greenawalt in arguing a “cautious no,” that the moral aims of neutrality cannot survive the metaphysical defeat of neutrality and that thus the proposed restraints on public justification are excessive. (I consider goals of neutrality inherently linked to the idolatrous conception of impartiality-as-standpoint. This is why I am content to let go of “neutrality,” although not the broader term “impartiality,” which I argue has non-idolatrous senses as well.) This “no” is cautious in that it does not reject the importance of constraints on engagement altogether. But it looks at such constraints in terms of virtues, cultivated perceptive habits, rather than in terms of rules. However, my biggest stake is in questioning the scope of the question itself. Is there a moral imperative for the citizen arguing in the public square to provide reasons accessible to all affected by the policy in question? Ultimately, I argue that whether one replies with a “sophisticated yes” or a “cautious no,” the associated account of civic virtue remains incomplete. The biggest problem with the “sophisticated yes” is not that it differs from my own answer. It is that the implications that have been assumed to follow from that answer do not. Even if not wrongheaded, these theorists’ account of public justification is much too narrow a plank on which to build a robust conception of civic virtue. The image that springs to mind is that of Chinese acrobats building a teetering tower of objects atop one raised chair. Perhaps because those who answer “yes” too quickly correlate that answer with civic virtue, many who answer “no” wrongly reject civic virtue as a hopelessly outdated moral category. Their consideration of civic virtue stops with the “no.” This position, too, is problematic, and it misses the timely 130
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cultural cogency of the return to virtue in political rhetoric. The “partialist” thinkers in the next section of this chapter are exceptions: despite their implied “no” answer, they are very interested in exploring civic virtue. The Sophisticated “Yes” The “yes” of liberal virtue theorists is “sophisticated” in several ways: in its portrayal of public justification as a mean between extremes; in its (modest) challenge to socially constructed norms of public and private; and in its recognition of the costs of restricted justification. Stephen Macedo is particularly explicit in adumbrating the sophistication of his “yes.” He distinguishes his call for restricted justification from the “procedural flight” he criticizes. Correspondingly, he distinguishes “reticent liberals,” the evasive liberals who conflate liberal toleration—the reluctance to disallow any pursuits of a conception of good save those that threaten the overlapping consensus of liberalism itself—with a protective withholding of their own real views on contested goods. After all, claims Macedo, “while public justification is a form of respect for persons, lack of candor is a form of disrespect” (1991, 67). Reticent liberalism is promoted by what Macedo considers the overly convenient division of labor proposed by some liberal theorists—including Rawls at his worst (though on other points Macedo clearly places himself within the discourse of the later Rawls). This division of labor neatly separates theory construction, the stage at which one sets aside personal views of comprehensive goods in order to construct an operative theory of justice, and a second, political stage, in which one’s “religious and other personal commitments are re-engaged” in a political arena constrained by the constructed theory. Reticent liberalism, Macedo claims, depends on an overly dichotomized view of private and public. The stretched dichotomy pushes such liberalism to vitiate its own moral claims to existence: “Must political theory be silent at the crucial moment of deciding the merits of liberalism?” (1991, 67). Moreover, reticent liberalism hides the truth about liberal formativeness and coerciveness: It is one thing to seek reasons that are widely accessible and acceptable, quite another to refuse to spell out the broad and deep implications that basic political principles and institutions have. . . . Liberal political principles do not “stay on the surface,” and their consequences can not be confined to a particular sphere of our lives. (63) Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Macedo’s restricted public justification mediates “in effect, between philosophy and the citizenry; representing philosophy to citizens and citizens to philosophy.” Rather than “paying lip-service to the public/private distinction and a simplistic idea of liberal neutrality” that “obfuscate[s] what is at stake in political issues and risk[s] distorting our practices,” he insists: “Public justification involves not a rigid segmentation of public and private, but a process of negotiation between shared public values and each person’s entire set of private values. . . . Public justification is not a means only, but also an end in itself: being a self-critical reason-giver is the best way of being a liberal and a good way (a liberal must suppose) of living a life” (1991, 67, 63, 49, 51). At the end of the day, though, Macedo avoids answering an obvious question: Does the call to restricted justification protect the reticent liberal just as much as it encourages braver subjects of personal and political transformation? William Galston and Robert Audi are particularly self-reflective about the costs and the coerciveness of maintaining the call for restricted public justification in terms accessible to all. Both acknowledge that, for the religious person, faith tenets may substantially orient rationality itself. Therefore, the call for restricted public justification may not only restrain public reasons but may also limit the ability of some citizens to reason publicly. Thus for Audi (1997), it is important to restrict only reasons that cannot be made comprehensible to others, rather than religious beliefs or worldview claims more generally.3 He prefers to use the term “comprehensibility,” rather than the more commonly employed term “accessibility,” to designate the criterion for restriction. This nuance is very important. “Comprehensibility” does not mean the given reason must be immediately accessible, only ultimately comprehensible. It therefore suggests that not only the givers but the receivers of publicly stated reasons may have obligations to strive for eventual comprehensibility rather than to exclude some citizens from serious public consideration overly quickly. Yet despite this nuance in his extended account, Audi often uses the unhelpful shorthand “secular justification” for his principle of restricted justification. Galston (1991) harshly criticizes Gutmann and Thompson for failing to acknowledge the coerciveness of their account of rational deliberation and for failing to note that the requirement of restricted justification may take some of the most prescient moral views off the table. For example, 132
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Galston notes that most early abolitionists not only failed to meet the requirement of restricted justification, but they had to fail. For most of the abolitionists’ contemporaries, there was nothing accessible about the idea of racial equality—an idea that Galston claims could only be asserted as a matter of religious or quasi-religious faith, since the brutal oppression of slavery itself suppressed much of the empirical evidence to support the claim (1991, 113–15). Despite this devastating critique, Galston does not abandon restricted public justification. He thinks that although the price of restricted public justification is high, it must be paid. It is a price paid for liberal goods that come with a cost and exclude some other goods that might be real goods. Certainly it is also a price that should be acknowledged, not hidden from the accounts. Taken together, Audi and Galston suggest that rather than a sharp line between accessibility and non-accessibility, there may be a spectrum of accessibility. In many ranges of that spectrum, relative accessibility might be convertible to relative comprehensibility through public discourse itself, as Gutmann and Macedo have intimated in response to critics.4 Ultimately, though, this final sophistication calls into question the “yes” itself. Despite aspirations to the contrary, these theorists’ shared account of restricted public justification reifies dichotomies that the call for civic virtue was intended to transcend: bifurcated senses of personal and political life, and of reason and passion. Religious life becomes the subject of “accommodation,” language that implies a tolerated immaturity—rather than any recognition that religious communities might foster positive transformative visions relevant to the broader community. Not only does this view of public justification exclude many from the public, but just as problematically, it fails to elaborate the de facto civic virtue of those who do excel at offering widely accessible public reasons. Ghosts of the Bishop and the Chambermaid: Dichotomizing Reason and Emotion The stricture on public justification bans passion from the public domain. Passionately felt emotion is not accessible as a reason to all; therefore, it is made suspect as a starting point for political discourse. The retrenchment to a dichotomized view of rationality versus emotion is particularly evident Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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in Gutmann and Thompson’s emphasis on “rational deliberation,” their key buzzword for what is needed in deliberative democracy. Can passion ever cognitively integrate with rational deliberation? Apparently it might, on their account, but generally as a last resort. This position is clear in their analysis of Senator Carole Moseley Braun’s threatened filibuster of a “routine” spending reappropriation bill that included an amendment renewing the patent of the insignia of the Daughters of the Confederacy, which she considered a symbol of slavery. (The insignia included an image of the Confederate flag.) Moseley Braun was the only African American member of the Senate at the time. Gutmann and Thompson treat this case under the rubric of “whether deliberative democracy is elitist”—whether it favors advantaged citizens—while recognizing that questions about the relationship between reason and emotion may be endemic (1996, 134–37). Gutmann and Thompson want to allow that there was public merit to the histrionic, tear-filled speech in which Moseley Braun threatened the filibuster, a speech in which she portrayed the issue as “beyond consensus” because the insignia was “a moral outrage,” an “insult” to herself and all African Americans. Moseley Braun’s high drama succeeded in getting the amendment, previously not even on the Senate’s radar screen, defeated. Gutmann and Thompson present a multi-tiered defense of Moseley Braun (it is the presumed need for defense that I highlight). First, they argue that her speech was actually reasoned in their terms: Deliberation itself does not always have to take the form of reasoned arguments of the kind that philosophers are inclined to favor. Moseley Braun’s speech may have been impassioned, but it made substantive points, to which members could respond with their own arguments. As one account put it, Moseley Braun “matched reason to passion.” (1996, 136)
This account strikingly presumes that passion and reason are distinct categories that nonetheless may be matched on occasion. It is also striking in the extent to which it grates against the tenor of Moseley Braun’s action. Did Moseley Braun really wish her colleagues to begin responding to her speech in reasoned tones, or was her dramatic plea more in the shape of a rhetorical question, framed to preclude rather than invite varied answers? On the face of it, she did not seem to meet the requirements of restrained public justification. The impetus of Moseley Braun’s speech was that it did not matter what the proposed reasons for the 134
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renewal were, and that it did not matter whether everyone understood why she and other African Americans were so affronted by the insignia. They were, and that was enough reason for her to filibuster if the amendment was not removed. Gutmann and Thompson tacitly acknowledge the weakness of their argument that Moseley Braun was just doing rational deliberation in impassioned drag. Thus, they add the defense that her strategy was necessary as a last resort. She had nobly first tried “conventional political methods” to have the amendment addressed in committee; only when she was denied due consideration there did she resort to her public performance. “Even extreme nondeliberative methods may be justified as necessary steps to deliberation. The Senate had never taken this issue seriously in the past and was on the verge of treating it as routine once again” (1996, 125). Certainly, this analysis is odd, not only because the characterization of her tactics here as “nondeliberative” conflicts with their previous argument that they really were deliberative, but more notably because this argument allows the camel’s nose in the tent: if nondeliberative methods may be necessary to launch deliberation, what is sacred about rational deliberation in the first place? Is last resort what makes Moseley Braun’s impassioned stand morally praiseworthy? Would it have mattered morally if she had turned to emotional drama earlier than her “high noon” timing? I doubt it. Certainly part of the moral appropriateness of Moseley Braun’s protest was the fit between her traumatized demeanor and her moral claim: the claim that the confederate insignia hurt her, and many like her. This hurt was raw; it was historical; it was not changeable by rational deliberation. Moseley Braun virtually dared any listener to suggest that hurt was less important than any other consideration that could be articulated. Gutmann and Thompson’s rational deliberation, and restricted public justification more generally, fall prey to a broader criticism of rule-based ethics often advanced by feminist critics. Recourse to moral rules can displace the moral relevance of harm and hurt. It would be a distortion akin to a children’s game if elaborate discussions of the rules were allowed to distract us from the fact that someone just got hurt. Indeed, it is a cognitive mistake to become inured to people getting hurt. Gutmann and Thompson’s proposed “matching” of passion and reason does not adequately acknowledge the problem of the dichotomy in their original formulation of rational deliberation. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Ghosts of the Bishop and the Chambermaid: Haunting without Protecting Of course some, like Audi and Galston, claim that these haunting echoes of the ghosts of the bishop and chambermaid must be tolerated to protect certain goods worth the price. The desired protection is from a thick ly religious or other comprehensive view of the good that infiltrates public discourse and institutions to the point where liberal goods are threatened. None of the theorists simplistically demand their restrained public justification as a requirement of the constitutional separation of church and state. On the contrary, all explicitly recognize the distinction between state support of religion, which is prohibited by the Second Amendment, and conventions of discourse. They all recognize that one does not transgress the law when one speaks publicly in terms of one’s non-liberal attachments, and that liberal law in fact protects just such speech. For them, the needed constraint is indeed the constraint of virtue—liberal political life will tolerate you if you break the rules of restricted public justification but will call you unvirtuous if you do. And this response is not just “a slap with a wet noodle”: liberal institutions, particularly schools (Macedo), should cultivate the habit of arguing in accord with the stated principles of public justification. The carrot-and-stick approach of civic education and subtle shaming should ensure that a necessary quorum of the citizenry follows the rules. However, this renders the costs of restricted public justification so high as to conflict with the stated rejection of neutrality and the call for a reshaping of public-private boundaries. Worse yet, the high price of the fortification of restricted publication fails to protect political life from the feared incursions. To argue that is not to deny the difficulty of line-drawing to contain what is legitimately feared: either the outright violation of constitutional separation of church and state, or more subtle hegemonies in which the dominance of one comprehensive worldview de facto limits the possibilities of public deliberation. Neither is it to pretend that such issues will easily resolve themselves if we let go of the last vestige of the neutrality thesis by relaxing the demand for reasons accessible to all as a starting point for public deliberation. Rather, it is simply to point out that the ghosts of the bishop and the chambermaid have dramatically failed to offer protection against such dangers. There is little point in feeding hungry ghosts that haunt without protecting the household. 136
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Cases in which constitutionality itself is in contention best illustrate this point. Consider the many states that maintain so-called blue laws, which prohibit duly licensed sellers from selling liquor on Sundays. Remarkably, these laws have been justified by appeal to civic purposes unrelated to religiosity and thus held constitutional in several test cases. 5 For those who question whether the coincidence between dry days and the Christian Sabbath really is mere coincidence, a vexing question is raised. Could it be that conventions of restricted public justification have not only allowed, but actually encouraged, the veiling of religious interests to the point where important church/state questions become invisible? At the end of the day, can Stephen Macedo’s insightful analysis of the value of candor survive his retention of restricted public justification? The requirement of restricted public justification is subject to the same critiques to which other aspects of liberal neutrality have been subjected and to which, save in this case, liberal virtue theorists have acceded. The pretense of neutrality can allow the formative and coercive power of liberalism itself to remain invisible. It can also veil hegemonic conceptions of the good in liberal guise. My contention is that, at best, the ghosts have failed to offer the coveted protections. At worst, they may be unbolting the door while we sleep. Allowing, or even encouraging, people to enter public debate with their true starting points may make public justification more transparent. Starting points need not be ending points. Perhaps those whose support for blue laws really begins with the argument “people should be in church Sunday” may be pressed, through the jostling of public deliberation, to articulate broadly civic goods at stake in those laws. But so much rides on that “perhaps”—including the very constitutionality of the laws, let alone their desirability—that they ought not be excused from that demand altogether, allowed to bypass it by simply announcing the politic endpoint as their “public reason.” The obvious possibility that restricted public justification valorizes parochially motivated manipulation as well as broadly sympathetic virtue is enough to call it into question. One might rather claim it an important virtue to be willing to reveal one’s real reasons even if they are not immediately viewable as part of an overlapping consensus for civic ends, and then to leave it to a public deliberative process that one cannot control to determine whether they can become part of such a consensus. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Ghosts of the Bishop and Chambermaid: Obscuring Virtues of Discourse Perhaps the biggest problem with the stress on restricted justification is that it obscures the real civic virtue of citizens who have become good at giving accessible reasons. Such citizens have mastered a subtle process of ongoing discernment and translation, enabling them to articulate crosscutting parameters from a variety of messier conversations. In fact, they have mastered some important aspects of impartiality-as-practice, though the rule of restricted public justification presumes the idolatry of impartiality-as-standpoint. They may have cultivated virtues that allow them to pursue Gutmann and Thompson’s ideal of mutuality in discourses of justification, an appropriate ideal that is not well supported by restricted justification. Sometimes that mastery may be reflected in a new synthesis of moral languages or reasons from the public mix. Martin Luther King Jr.’s tight weaving of biblical metaphors for justice with deontological claims provides a particularly elegant example—an example in which the linkage itself may have expanded “comprehensibility.” Consider just one stitch of this weave from his 1963 speech, I Have a Dream: I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South.
King’s public prose is particularly noteworthy not only because of its widely recognized social contribution but also because it has been frequently invoked in the literature on restricted justification. Richard John Neuhaus opens his book The Naked Public Square (1984) with the charge 138
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that currently vogue political theory would bar King from the public stage, since his rhetoric is laden with biblical imagery that is not accessible to all. Of course, whether that is true depends on what, precisely, the call to restricted justification would restrict. (Any religious appeal or metaphorical borrowings from religious traditions? Or only appeals to religious authority? Religious doctrine—and if so, how defined? And so forth.) Certainly it is critical to articulate the personal and political virtues that would allow King’s accomplishment of discernment, translation, and synthesis. One of the claims of this book is that theoretical accounts of civic virtue must be able to articulate civic virtues that quietly flourish despite the rhetoric of the fall. Failure to do so risks taking those virtues, and the virtuous, for granted. And taking something for granted can lead to its erosion. A satisfying account of civic virtue may have to relinquish misplaced emphasis on the rule of restricted public justification in order to highlight the virtues necessary for widely accessible reason-giving. The Cautious “No” Kent Greenawalt (1988, 1995) presses toward a “cautious no” answer to the question of whether some vestige of neutrality, the requirement of restricted public justification, must be retained in liberal democracy. His answer is cautious in that it does not reject the relevance of self-restraint to political cooperation, but rather it problematizes the encapsulation of necessary restraint by the simple rule of restricted public justification. Although Greenawalt himself does not portray his argument this way, I claim that he moves toward considering appropriate political self-restraint as a complex virtue rather than as a rule-governed activity. This movement is necessary to appreciate the civic virtue of someone who does, in fact, articulate widely accessible public reasons. Good givers of accessible reasons might be “restrained” in several senses other than those encompassed by the rule of restricted justification. They might be restrained in deciding when, or how much, to appeal to their particular view of ultimate goods in public debate. They might be restrained in listening to and considering the array of positions on the table, and in integrating an understanding of them in any position they subsequently advance. I both sketch and press Greenawalt’s cautious “no,” ultimately diverging from him in two ways. Greenawalt presents his argument as rejecting Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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a simple rule in favor of a prima facie principlist approach. (A prima facie principle is understood as a binding principle unless it comes into conflict with another prima facie binding principle, which is possible in a tragic moral world. In that case, a genuine dilemma results, and one principle must be overridden for the sake of the other.)6 In fact, Greenawalt fails to articulate a set of prima facie principles governing justificatory restraint, a necessary failure set up by his own recognition of complexity. I take this complexity to press toward an account of prudential reasoning—virtue— rather than even a multi-tiered rule-based account such as that offered by principlism. Secondly, I differ from Greenawalt in motivation, and thus I differ in degree rather than in kind regarding his call for self-restraint in public justification. Greenawalt sees himself as philosophically bolstering a healthy status quo. He thinks generally good but not universally binding conventions of justificatory restriction have developed in our society. I am more concerned than he about voices that may be marginalized by the conventions that have developed, and thus I want to loosen conventions of restraint more than he does—without denying that some form of appropriate discursive restraint is a political virtue. Greenawalt initiates his reflection by noting an irony: the call for restricted public justification problematizes reasons that are clearly tied to moral visions more than reasons that are crassly selfish. Yet the call for what Macedo calls “transformative liberalism,” and the call to reconsider civic virtue in the first place, imply that politics ought not to be seen solely as a battleground for narrow self-interest. There is something odd about presuming from the outset that reasons like “the value my religion places on monogamous marriage makes me favor policy X” are less politically desirable than reasons such as “I will make more money with policy X.” Greenawalt moves from this irony to consider a host of relevant distinctions. First, he notes the significant differences between accounts of what is to be restricted in restricted public justification. It matters a great deal, according to Greenawalt, whether the call is to restrict religious grounds, or some but not all religious grounds, or grounds based on nonreligious as well as religious comprehensive moral perspectives, or grounds based on controversial ideas of the good, or grounds of non-accessibility (1995, 23–50). Greenawalt finds the latter the most compelling case, though ultimately he argues against it. It also matters greatly when and where 140
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one calls for the restriction: only at the level of “fundamental issues”— his characterization of Rawls—or when one advocates a public legislative position, or when one speaks in the body politic broadly understood? (Greenawalt finds even the purportedly narrow Rawlsian restriction problematic.) It also matters who are called to restrict themselves: ordinary citizens, or citizen elites, or legislators, or executive branch personnel, or the judiciary. (Greenawalt argues for significantly different role obligations, but he also assumes there should be some continuity of approach across all spectrums of the citizenry.) While all these differences in fact matter greatly, these categories are often conflated in discussion of restricted public justification. Restraint without Rules? Having elucidated the complexity of issues surrounding calls for restricted public justification, Greenawalt concludes that no simple rule is adequate to the task of arbitrating that complexity (1995, chaps. 11–15). That is his “no” answer to the question of whether certain kinds of grounds, particularly non-accessible grounds, ought be restricted. Yet he does not therefore conclude that the idea of justificatory restraint is completely misguided. He assumes that in general it is good to give reasons that are accessible to those who would be affected by what you advocate. This is the cautionary in his “cautious no.” Ultimately, Greenawalt rejects even the proposed rules that he finds most plausible: that non-accessible grounds should be restricted from public justification, or that such restriction should occur at the level of “fundamentals” (the formulation of constitutional principles and democratic procedures) even if not in broader public discourse. He considers the first epistemically impossible and the second unfair. The first is epistemically impossible because it is difficult to sort out one’s most formative intuitions and beliefs from one’s more explicit reasoning. Moreover, what is accessible to one citizen may not be to another. (Some find complex mathematical equations inaccessible, but of course that is not the kind of grounds anyone is arguing to restrict.) The second is unfair because restriction “at the level of fundamentals” necessarily disfavors citizens whose worldviews are less common. More of their reasons will be inaccessible to their fellow citizens, but Greenawalt doubts that they are less deserving of participation in forming democratic structures. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Yet issues of restraint remain for Greenawalt. He rejects arguments for “no restraint,” claiming that the actual fulfillment of citizen roles requires restraint. In his view, it is best to give accessible reasons when they are available. If one’s attachment to a particular policy is so linked to one’s comprehensive commitments that one cannot imagine severing them in public justification, efforts at pairing or translating are laudable. Here, pairing is understood as paralleling one’s religious rationale with a more widely accessible one; and translation, as trying to explain a religious, or comprehensively grounded position in other terms as well. Such pairing, Greenawalt implies, is where Martin Luther King Jr. excelled. (I suggest that while recognizing the contribution of such translation is a step forward, Greenawalt still inadequately acknowledges King’s accomplishment. King’s completely interwoven pairings might be viewed, not as a best-effort accommodation of epistemic limits, but rather as a creative new weave in which all the intertwined threads strengthened the fabric of the dream.) Greenawalt also posits restraints of candor. He follows Rawls in demanding that people be honest about their religious views even if reasons they put forward are more widely accessible secular reasons. For example, a Catholic who made a secular public argument for restrictions on abortion could be asked whether she has religious objections to abortion and should answer honestly. (Both Rawls and Greenawalt gloss over the extent to which the restraints they endorse would weigh against such public questioning, rendering the demand for an honest answer moot.) Restraint has role and institutional implications as well, for Greenawalt. He thinks it is generally better for legislators, judges, or even quasi-public leaders not to be religious clerics. Again, though, a straightforward rule is inadequate. Greenawalt applauds the public contributions of Martin Luther King Jr., even though he thinks it would have been preferable, contra-fact, had a non-minister King appeared when a King was needed! (1988, 227). My point here is not to ridicule Greenawalt for the limits of his analysis. His forthrightness about how proposed rules for discourse—including his more flexible rules—generate counterintuitive results pushes construal past rule-based accounts. It presses toward the recovery of lost virtue. Greenawalt also, perhaps more thoroughly than any other thinker engaged with these issues, emphasizes that one’s reasons may lack transparency even to oneself. This recognition is double-edged, in his account. On the one hand, neither political theory nor political convention should 142
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require that people know themselves better than they really do. On the other hand, political life itself should rightly press citizens to ongoing self-reflection and interrogation about their reasons. One of Greenawalt’s concerns about simple rules for restricted justification is that they could weigh against such self-reflective processes. Certainly, one reason that people can be either genuinely perplexed or self-deceptive about their reasons is that the idea of a “comprehensive view of the good,” a pivotal conception of liberal thought, is really just a heuristic device. No one really has a hermetically sealed, comprehensive view of the good. Even Amish culture, the favorite example of an illiberal citizen group employed by liberal civic virtue theorists, reveals itself upon close inspection to be a complex negotiation of competing tensions.7 The idea of a comprehensive view of the good is a helpful heuristic device for political theory. It distinguishes more overarching views of goodness from particular political questions, thus allowing consideration of the relationship between the two. It rests on the true insight that some views of the good are more comprehensive than others. But the concept overreaches when it is mistaken for a description of reality rather than a heuristic device and when rules for discourse are predicated on the fantastical presumption that people really do have neatly comprehensive views of the good. Greenawalt himself fails to see the ultimate destination toward which his account presses. Despite his goal, he never manages to adumbrate a family of prima facie principles for discourse or to describe his “exceptions” as resulting from dilemmatic clashes between such principles. Rather, he describes such a complex nexus of circumstantial considerations that a system of rules, even a sophisticated system of rules on the principlist model, fails to serve. His unwitting devastation of rule-based approaches invites the possibility that processes of public reason-giving are properly governed by cultivated virtue.8 What cultivated personal habits allow good citizens to foster discourse that progresses to greater and greater degrees of mutuality and accessibility among diverse participants? Pushing Greenawalt to his logical conclusion, lost virtue, integrates his dual insistence on retaining a conception of restraint while allowing multiple exceptions to any proposed rule better than does his own principlist rubric. It also accommodates the desire of liberal virtue theorists that public justification be dialectically related Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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to genuine private reflectiveness. A virtue account could give Greenawalt the added resource of time. Rather than seeing issues of justification as a set of flexible rules with innumerable exceptions due to circumstance, one would see issues of justification as a consideration of citizen-engagers over time. What would be critical would not be whose arguments are deemed “accessible” in one snapshot moment of time, but rather how various citizens in the conversation respond to each other, how they help or hinder transformations from less to more accessible or—in Audi’s terms—from accessible to comprehensible. Recovering virtue reveals the question “Should citizens restrict public justification to widely accessible reasons?” to be too narrow. Certainly, virtues of discourse must be relevant to civic virtue. But such virtues must encompass how people listen as well as how people speak, how people respond as well as how they justify, how much they reveal themselves as well as how much they open others. Speaking of virtues of discourse rather than rules for discourse also enables a more direct consideration of the ends of discourse, or of strategies of discourse. The questions become what virtues might support what ends of a given discourse, or what ends are presumed by what strategies of discourse, or how to negotiate multiple ends. For example, Greenawalt suggests that thickly religious appeals, including appeals to religious authority, might be more justifiable in very homogeneous regions where many share the same religious heritage. He bases that on the conventional notion of accessibility: thickly religious arguments might be more widely accessible in some areas than others. But if one end of citizen virtue is to maintain the possibility of multiple flourishing conceptions of the good life, then more restraint of religious reason-giving might be demanded of virtuous citizens in a homogeneous area. The minority to whom the religious reasons are inaccessible de facto become more marginalized than their counterparts in a more diverse community. There are trade-offs here, trade-offs not well negotiated by rules. Greenawalt is hampered by his failure to develop his ideas to their logical conclusion. He is also forced largely to remain within the presumption that disagreement defines politics—his opponents’ defined domain of politics. The conversation should not remain there, regardless of whether one advances a “sophisticated yes” or “cautious no” stance on restricted justification. 144
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Mistaking the Part for the Whole While negotiating disagreement is certainly an important element of political life, it is not the whole of political life. Mistaking the part for the whole significantly flaws liberal literature on civic virtue. The equation of disagreement with politics is clear even in some of the most celebrated titles of this literature: Democracy and Disagreement (Gutmann and Thompson 1996); Diversity and Distrust (Macedo 2000). Certainly, one reason that liberal virtue theorists lose virtue and cling to procedures for discourse is because of this mistake.9 Formulating disagreement as the stuff of politics obscures important political acts of citizens and the virtues that enable such acts. How, after all, are disagreements formulated in the first place? How are citizens to respond when commonplace practices conflict with widely agreed-upon consensus ideals? Is there nothing civic about such challenges? (I discuss these points and some of the examples in the following paragraphs in greater detail in chapter 7, when I present my own transformation of civic virtue.) What kind of prescience is needed to be the molder of an issue—to put something on the public agenda that was not there before? What kind of perception and creativity allowed the organizers of the first Earth Day, in 1970, to politicize concern for environmental degradation before tensions between development and sustainability were perceived as endemic to political life? What kind of virtue enabled MADD, an organization spawned by grieving parents, to make drunk driving visible as a political issue where before it had been largely accepted, viewed as idiosyncratic tragic incidents? (Certainly, disagreement is not the best way to characterize the problem to which MADD responded. Who, after all, thinks drunk driving is a good thing?) What kind of perception allowed various assaults against African Americans to be seen as political rather than personal attacks, and various assaults against different kinds of vulnerable minorities to be seen as sharing features warranting the label “hate crimes”? Currently, there is controversy over how the public should respond to hate crimes. But the common understanding that hate crimes exist and that they follow certain patterns is a civic accomplishment that predates the disagreements about appropriate response. Sometimes it takes a certain kind of citizen virtue to perceive gaps between consensus ideals and actual practice. In the United States by the Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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1960s, the medical consensus that breast-feeding was the best nutrition for infants coexisted with the widely accepted lapse of that practice. Certainly, there were many factors, social and economic, that allowed the gulf between knowledge and practice to continue. But the vocation of the La Leche League, an organization with religious roots but broadly political missions, almost single-handedly brought the latent disagreement to life.10 The accomplishments of the La Leche League—its paired experiencednursers-to-new-moms mentoring programs; its galvanization of medical organizations to promote breast-feeding; its press on insurers to cover lactation support as a basic expense of childbirth; its moral pressure on employers to provide structural support for breast-feeding; its challenge of laws that prevent breast-feeding under the rubric of public nudity—are not well characterized as negotiations of disagreement. The League’s accomplishments have been calls for institutional consistency on a matter of increasing public moral agreement, an agreement it helped foster. An account of civic virtue that fails to identify this accomplishment, let alone invite conversation elaborating associated virtues, is severely limited. Civic Witness? The presumption that politics equals disagreement, combined with restrictive rules for public justification, makes “witness” an irrelevant category for civic virtue. Ways of speaking, rather than ways of living, become the sole subject matter of politics—and civic virtue. A family of thinkers who began from the premise that the narrow procedural focus of modern liberalism must be widened appear to have broadened its bounds by inches rather than by whole playing fields. Yet the relevance of witness might seem to go hand in hand with a refocus on virtue. Who is living good lives? Good lives as citizens? Good lives that might speak to citizenship in some way? Might there be mentors other than the philosophical deliberative reasoners so admired by liberal virtue theorists? (Despite their stress on discourse, some liberal virtue theorists answer affirmatively, and I address their proposed non-discourse virtues in the next section.) The domination of discourse in political theory makes verbal articulateness a core political virtue. I think articulateness is indeed a political virtue, but it is not the core political virtue. (This book makes the case 146 ·
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that reconceptualized impartiality plays that role.) To make it so obscures from sight important witnesses that embody other relevant political virtues. For example, consider someone who rides a bicycle or takes public transportation to work out of concern for air quality and global warming, though driving a car is not only economically possible but more convenient. Whether or not this person stutters when asked why she does this, it is an important political witness as well as a personal lifestyle choice. Whether or not her neighbors ever explicitly ask her why she is pedaling away in a rainstorm, seeing her do so marks a witness. Her pedaling, alternately shivering or sweaty, ought not be excluded from civic virtue by definition. The colonialism of discourse also precludes considering that dedication to a comprehensive good may develop certain political virtues even if allegiance to that good clashes with some recognized liberal goods. I pursue this further in chapter 7 when I discuss Amish civic virtue. My own development of a transformed account of civic virtue is in part an attempt to articulate virtues invited by Greenawalt’s cautious “no.” But it is more importantly an attempt to broaden the terrain of civic virtue, regardless of one’s answer to the question of restricted justification. There are a variety of virtues of discourse that are not the same as rules of discourse. Moreover, robust conceptions of civic virtue must allow for the testimony of witness, resisting the colonialism of discourse in political life. Ot h e r I m pa rt i a l ist E xce s s: T h e M a l igna nc y of “E c onom ic M a n ” The consensus on restricted justification among liberal virtue theorists ultimately betrays their desire to broaden liberalism beyond a procedural focus. This betrayal is not complete: liberal virtue theorists do propose thick virtues, moral habits that they wish to promote for citizens. But impartialist excesses skew their lists of virtues as well. Their proposed virtues continue to presume that civic life is marked by independence, production, voluntariness, and choice, rather than by dependence, reproduction, involuntariness, or constraints on choice demanded by virtue itself. These excesses constrain reflection on the complex relationships between personal and citizenly virtues. They also continue the implicit gendering of civic virtue, ignoring or taking for granted the work of those who care for Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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the young, the old, the sick, or anyone else unable to stand alone, produce market goods, and exercise self-choice over life plan. A Circular Irony: Caregivers as the Foundation of, but Disqualified from, Civic Virtue Ostensibly, the turn to virtue among liberal theorists developed in reaction to excessive faith in self-interest and market capitalism as sufficient props for liberal life. Yet the presumption that a citizen equals “economic man” remains disturbingly entrenched in their thought. Virginia Held (1993) coined the term “economic man” to link two problematic points: the exclusive modeling of political life on economic life; and the deeply gendered presumptions underlying such modeling, the legacy of domesticity. “Economic man” is characterized by the voluntary choices he makes, by his rational self-contracting, and by his production of market goods. Galston (1991) exemplifies a dangerous circular irony in this regard. He proclaims the need for political virtue to redress the civic insufficiency of the market, but then he closely aligns civic virtue with “virtues of the liberal economy.” For Galston, virtues of the liberal economy include organizational (labor?) virtues such as “punctuality, reliability, civility toward co-workers, and a willingness to work within established frameworks,” that should be cultivated in healthy tension with entrepreneurial (management?) virtues such as imagination, initiative, drive, and determination. Galston implies that organizational and entrepreneurial virtues are not limited to business but may act as metaphorical labels for related families of civic virtues. Significant insights flow from Galston’s innovative metaphorical connection between business virtues and civic virtues. While the circularity of his account prevents him from articulating civic virtues that could check market excess or undemocratic tendencies of market capitalism, his recognition that market capitalism itself depends on the cultivation of virtue is crucially important. Another contribution is the acknowledgment that desirable civic virtues may be in tension with each other. Just as in business life, there may be tension between “labor” virtues of fitting oneself into an organization and “entrepreneurial” virtues of imagination and innovation, so parallel civic virtues may be in tension. The attainment of civic-virtue-in-the-singular, then, may demand balancing and trade-offs 148
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as well as integration. And some people who never attain that balance may nonetheless exemplify a subset of competing virtues to a high degree that is socially valuable. Ultimately, Galston is limited by his presumption of “economic man” as citizen. Independence and self-support are primary virtues for Galston, because they are tied to the ability to perform in business, and to the organizational and entrepreneurial virtues understood civically. Certainly others (such as communitarians in the next section of this chapter) claim the inverse: that the challenge of civic virtue is to counteract certain trends of market capitalism, particularly the colonialism of consumer understandings of the self in civic life. Galston seems to have a durably tin ear for such critique. Bracketing the question of whether market capitalism is civically benevolent, it is troubling to consider what kinds of virtues are obscured by the metaphors of organizational and entrepreneurial virtues: virtues modeled on artistic creativity; or, particularly important for my purposes, virtues of caring for particular others, including parental, filial, or friendly virtues. Galston continues the presumption of domesticity and its associated moral division of labor between production and reproduction, identifying production as more relevant to civic life. This dichotomy is maintained despite Galston’s explicit acknowledgment of the relationship between good child rearing and good citizenship: “My focus is on what must be a key objective of our society: raising children who are prepared—intellectually, morally, physically, emotionally—to take their place as law abiding and independent members of the community” (1991, 285). Galston’s concern that child rearing enable independent adults is compelling. It is also not merely “academic” but rather is informed by his participation in empirical research on child rearing. But several problems are evident in the way Galston links his concerns for economically independent families with civic virtue. Galston supports his claim of independence as a virtue, not by unpacking the virtue involved—the cultivated moral habits that enable independence—but rather by switching to an institutional focus: the importance of two-parent families (1991, 283–87). Several other commentators on civic virtue, both individual and institutional, have also focused on the importance of preserving two-parent heterosexual marriage as the structural framework for child rearing.11 While Galston is careful to use Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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gender-inclusive language, he clearly presumes the value of a stay-at-home parent for young children. In actuality, most married stay-at-home parents are women. The switch to an institutional focus lets traditional families off the hook much too easily. Certainly, even two-parent families with one stayat-home parent may do a better or worse job at citizen formation of their children. What makes some better, and some worse? The substitution of institution for virtue evades this question entirely. Moreover, the switch to an institutional focus takes for granted the civic importance of caring labor. That is ironic, since Galston explicitly seeks to validate such work. But his preferred formulation contains an internal negation of care’s civic import. He claims the stay-at-home mother does the civically important work of raising children to be economically independent and thus civically virtuous—unlike herself! By making herself economically dependent in order to do such civically important work, she disqualifies herself from attaining the articulated virtue. In fact, Galston’s formulation continues Rawls’s problematic presumption that subjects of the political realm are “heads of households” (1971). His reliance on business metaphors to articulate civic virtues maintains the presumption of citizens as “rational contractors” as well as the gendered conceptual split between production and reproduction. Real civic valuation of the hard work of parenting calls into question equations between virtues of production and civic virtue. As a category, civic virtue may radically challenge social contract theory rather than being graftable onto it. The positive insights of Galston’s business metaphors and of his conception of virtues-in-tension need significant supplementation. Since all metaphors both highlight and obscure some features of what is analogized, transformed civic virtue must be able to encompass a variety of metaphors for citizenship. The Continuing Supremacy of Tolerance and Choice The presumptions of “economic man” are also discernible in another questionable emphasis of liberal virtue theory: the continued stress on tolerance and openness to choice as civic virtues, even as the neutrality thesis is rejected. This emphasis wrongly presumes that overly fierce commitments, rather than inadequate commitments, threaten civic virtue. 150
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Stephen Macedo best exemplifies this excess. Macedo structures his discussion of civic virtues according to the constitutional branches of government: he elaborates judicial virtues (“impartiality”), legislative virtues (“the breadth of sympathies that develops after we come to respect the rights of those with whom we disagree”), and executive virtues (those “that empower one, having judged and reflected, to resolve, act, and persevere”) (1991, 275). These formulations are understood metaphorically, depicting virtues that all citizens should inculcate and harmonize. Certainly, there is a brilliant innovation here: Macedo interprets the constitutional separation of powers not only as a check against civic vice—as the framers did—but also as implicitly modeling an integration of virtues that should be cultivated by all good citizens. But Macedo’s constitutional metaphors also obscure. Civic virtues once again become associated only with impersonal models connected to institutions. The problem is the exclusive choice of institutional metaphors, which downplays the civic potential of personal virtues such as filiality and friendliness. In addition, Macedo reifies the presumed dichotomy between partiality and impartiality through his substantive understanding of impartiality, which he equates with judicial virtue. This is precisely the “standpoint” view of impartiality that conflates impersonality and impartiality: “The judicial virtues are those that allow people to stand back from their personal commitments and projects and judge them from an impersonal view” (1991, 275; emphasis added). Macedo’s final conclusion degenerates into a celebration of perpetual openness to change and tolerance of others’ choices. The connection between such celebration and a still-gendered conception of civic virtue becomes clear in his anecdote of the banker-turned-monk: By encouraging tolerance or even sympathy for a wide array of lifestyles and eccentricities, liberalism creates a community in which it is possible to decide next week that I might quit my career in banking, leave my wife and children, and join a Buddhist cult. Life in a liberal society is a smorgasbord confronting us with an exciting array of possibilities. (1991, 278)
One can almost hear him sigh proudly, “Only in America!” The banker-monk is another rendition of the problematic understanding of integrity discussed in the last chapter, an updated version of Bernard Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Williams’s Gauguin. He is also a Californian caricature of the rational contractor. He defines and redefines himself through his choices—he is no longer defined by marriage and parenthood, a past choice, but by his currently embraced monastic vows. (His story demonstrates the conceptual ripple effect of presuming “economic man” the model of citizenship: the choices of choice-defined “economic man” need not be narrowly economic ones.) Liberal virtues are extolled for allowing his choice to be socially accepted. But should it be socially accepted if his ex-wife and children are now impoverished? If now all the tasks of civic formation of the children, as well as all other concrete tasks of parenting, fall on the ex-wife? Certainly the ex-banker’s Zen mind is an unlikely candidate for civic canonization from the perspective of those he abandoned. To them, the authenticity of his choice to leave them might not seem the measure of civic virtue at all. Galston’s preoccupation that people stay married and Macedo’s lack of concern that they do are really flip sides of the same coin. Both take for granted the work of caregivers, failing to consider adequately the civic import of that work. So Galston does not mind that his model “parent” (mother?) is definitionally excluded from the civic virtue she inculcates in her children (sons?). So Macedo does not worry about the civic formation of the children abandoned by the banker-turned-monk, apparently taking for granted that their mother will tend to that. In both cases, both the presumption of “economic man” as the subject of politics and the maintenance of “domesticity-gone-underground” distort their account of civic virtues. The oversimplistic celebration of tolerance defies the rejection of neutrality emphasized by Macedo and other liberal virtue theorists. If neutrality is to be rejected because liberalism does indeed promote some visions of the good over others, because it is indeed intolerant of some ways of life, and because it is indeed coercive in ways necessary to promote liberal goods, then questions of tolerance must be reframed accordingly. How is liberalism intolerant now? Are current intolerances the right ones, and the most limited ones, in order to support liberal goods and to promote the development of specified civic virtues? Is more than tolerance ever required? For example, Michael Sandel claims, surely virtuous homosexual citizens want more than “toleration” (1996, 103– 108)? 152
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My analysis has focused on Liberal Virtues (1991) because it is Macedo’s most direct engagement with civic virtue, but his later Diversity and Distrust (2000) suggests a more complex view of toleration. The focus of Diversity and Distrust is the civic import of education. The book seems driven by Macedo’s discomfort with some implications of his own stress on tolerance. Indeed, an explicit goal of the book is to show that the diversity of embraced goods in different traditions within a multicultural polity offers more resources for public life than homogeneity ever could. That suggests tolerance as inadequate civic virtue: somehow civic virtue must encourage the discernment of political goods, and of overlapping conceptions of civic virtue, among multiple conceptions of the good. Yet ultimately, Macedo continues to judge civic education of the schools— public, private, and parochial—primarily by their willingness to endorse tolerance and openness to change. Transformed civic virtue may demand engagement with other moral visions, not just toleration. Virtues enabling such engagement may be courageous precisely because they result in moral challenges to choices of selfdirection. The discernment to identify appropriate limits of toleration, and to maximize the extent to which discouragement of civic vices might be accomplished by persuasion rather than by coercion, is itself a civic virtue. The rejection of the neutrality thesis logically challenges the sufficiency of toleration as a civic virtue, a challenge Macedo evades by continuing to privilege impartialist moral stances.
LOST VIRTUE II: COMMUNITARIAN (PARTIALIST) ACCOU NTS OF CIV IC V IRTUE Virtue also gets lost in what I call “partialist” accounts of civic virtue. Communitarian thinkers, like their liberal counterparts, fail to appreciate the falseness of the dichotomy between partiality and impartiality. However, they privilege the opposite side of the false dichotomy. Thus they privilege processes of self and community discovery, rather than judgment, as citizenly tasks, severing those two from their rightful mutuality. Subcommunities and communal institutions tend to displace virtue in their discussions. At their best, though, they point in promising directions that suggest key linkages between discovery and judgment, liberty and community, appropriate partiality and appropriate impartiality, civic virtue and civil society. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Amitai Etzioni and Michael Sandel are often considered founding fathers of contemporary communitarianism. Etzioni is recognized not only for his writings but also for his tireless successful efforts to catalyze public conversation on related issues. His appeal to civic virtue points to both the promise and the danger of partialist accounts. He relentlessly highlights important connections between citizen virtues and self-formation in substate communities. But he too-optimistically assumes that the multiplicity of such associations will itself redress moral excesses within certain subcommunities.12 Absent some articulation of the moral skills required for this mutual correction to occur, there is no reason to expect critical moral reflectiveness—as opposed to fractured moral schizophrenia—to result from such multiple membership. My comments focus on Michael Sandel, because I consider his account in Democracy’s Discontent (1996) the most sophisticated among still ultimately “partialist” accounts. Here Sandel moves from his critique of voluntarist conceptions of human agency, first articulated in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), to a fuller historical account of the rise of “procedural liberalism,” intertwined with an effort to revive what Sandel calls “civic republicanism.” The book culminates with Sandel’s constructive “search for a public philosophy.” Undoubtedly, Sandel’s greatest accomplishment is to elucidate why “add and stir” approaches to reviving civic virtue will never do. In each of the diverse analyses in the book—of religious freedom, family life, toleration, economic life—Sandel historically traces how the increasingly pervasive conception of the “un-encumbered self” has rendered discussion of civic formation incoherent. (The “un-encumbered self” is Sandel’s term for a view of self as self-directed-chooser that he feels underlies contemporary liberalism.) While liberal virtue theorists see themselves as challenging the “un-encumbered self”—through their recognition that liberalism is non-neutral and depends on character formation—Sandel’s thesis implies they still largely presume the unencumbered self. They have come to see formation of the unencumbered self as a project of virtue, rather than more radically questioning that view of self. In the course of articulating the eclipse of citizen formation from public consciousness, Sandel offers multiple contributions: his historical analysis of the relationship between economic changes and accounts of civic virtue; his recognition of the denigration of care that can be sparked by 154
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liberal paradigms; his acknowledgment of the complexity of social selves with multiple roles and memberships; his critique of cosmopolitanism for failing to recognize the moral importance of appropriate partiality; his real-world-now examples of civic efforts he wishes to applaud. Yet Sandel himself fails to offer a constructive account of civic virtue. In an overreaction to voluntarist notions of the self, he implicitly rejects not only idolatrous, but any conceptions of public impartiality. Instead, he becomes the defender of role-defined selves against consumer-selves; the defender of the local against the cosmopolitan; the defender of the neighborhood against the polis. He becomes the defender of partial moral commitments against impartiality, maintaining the false dichotomy. T h e C ol on i a l i sm of t h e U n e nc u m be r e d Se l f Sandel radically challenges that what he calls the “un-encumbered” self is “political, not metaphysical” (John Rawls’s famous phrase). Rather, Sandel argues that this view of self increasingly defines actual economic, family, and civic life and thus crowds out the conceptual space to speak of either personal or political formation.13 Sandel brilliantly links a philosophical critique of voluntarist conceptions of human agency to a historical examination of the relationship between economic life and citizen virtue, challenging the liberal virtue theorists’ too-easy acceptance of “economic man.” According to Sandel, conceiving people as created by the cumulative total of their free choices obscures the non-chosen formative influences that affect character development. Therefore, a concern for civic virtue becomes superfluous, an old-fashioned quirk in the face of supposedly “realistic” accounts of the citizen-as-consumer. Sandel notes the dramatic contrast between how economic debates are cast now, and how they were cast throughout much of American history: In contemporary American politics, most of our economic arguments revolve around two considerations: prosperity and fairness. . . . So familiar are these ways of justifying economic policy that they might seem to exhaust the possibilities. But our debates about economic policy have not always focused solely on the size and distribution of the national product. Throughout much of American history, they have also addressed a different question, namely, what economic arrangements are hospitable Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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to self-government? Along with prosperity and fairness, the civic consequences of economic policy have often loomed large in American political discourse. (1996, 124)
Sandel details the implications of this sea change for several issues. For example, through painstaking attention to Supreme Court cases, common law, and historical rhetoric, Sandel demonstrates how anti-monopoly efforts, first cast largely in terms of preserving democracy and capacities for civic virtue, came to be viewed almost exclusively as maximizing consumer benefit. Sandel’s history of economic debates suggests the magnitude of the challenge faced by revivers of civic virtue, who must recast entrenched terms of discourse in order to make room for civic virtue. Sandel also notes the friction between liberal stress on self-direction and civic virtue through his analysis of changes in family law, particularly the development of “no-fault” divorce laws. For Sandel, no-fault divorce provides a paradigm case of the non-neutrality of liberal frameworks. Nofault divorce brings the assumptions of the liberal self into family law: “Its effect was to bracket the moral considerations that traditionally governed the law of divorce. . . . The new law brackets marital roles as well as fault” (1996, 109). Sandel acknowledges some accomplishments of the change in divorce law: The removal of fault as grounds for divorce has spared couples the pain and the humiliation of airing their disputes in public, and spared the courts the sordid task of assessing guilt in broken marriages. The advent of gender neutrality does away with outmoded assumptions about the roles of husbands and wives and gives legal recognition to the ideal of sexual equality. (110–11)
But Sandel focuses on the damage wrought by discarding not only fault but also role considerations—and how the burden of that damage falls disproportionately on women. In Joan Williams’s terms, he recognizes “domesticity-gone-underground” in the differential economic effect of no-fault divorce on men and women. While Williams emphasizes how the construal of work in the home as “love” disadvantages women, Sandel emphasizes how the liberal insistence on viewing selves as unencumbered by roles disadvantages women: By treating all persons as bearers of a self independent of its roles, the new law fails to respect mothers and homemakers of traditional marriages 156
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whose identity is constituted by their roles, who have lived their married lives as situated selves. By insisting on self-sufficiency after divorce, it penalizes women whose economic reliance on their husbands expressed the mutual dependence of traditional marital roles. Her care for her children and home enabled him to pursue a career. But when the marriage dissolves, he has the career, with its income and status, while she has the children and a sudden need to enter a labor market that rewards the skills she has foregone while making his career possible. . . . For the women whose identity is tied to family rather than career, the injury goes beyond the risk of economic hardship should her marriage end in divorce. By failing to reward women’s unpaid contributions to child-rearing, homemaking, and husband’s career, the new law of divorce devalues those contributions and erodes the significance of the roles they reflect. . . . The new arrangements . . . [are] not neutral among conceptions of the good, but favorable to certain visions of family life, inhospitable to others. (1996, 113–14)
Of course, for Sandel, the law both reflects and facilitates a change in how actual families function. Its development parallels a doubling of the divorce rate, increased numbers of financially or emotionally cast-off children, and empirically documented tendencies for people to conceive of children primarily as a burden (1996, 118). Real dependency flies in the face of the myth of the unencumbered self. Therefore, it is viewed as a threat by those with that view of self. Sandel implies a vicious circle in the thought of liberal virtue theorists: since the ideal of the self is unencumbered, therefore desirable civic formation is that which unencumbers people. Whereas Galston fails to see the irony of praising stay-at-home moms for making their children independent, unlike themselves, Sandel begs the question of how civic virtue may rely on the appropriate valuing of dependent relationships. For example, he worries that one deleterious effect of current divorce practice is to discourage parents from full-time stay-at-home parenting, because it induces such severe financial vulnerability. With a view of the unencumbered self operative in political life, those who spend their energies raising children are not only economically disadvantaged, but they are also defined as outside the bounds of civic virtue. Certainly this is ironic, since few activities could have a more direct effect on citizen formation. Sandel leaves readers with a stark challenge. He suggests that renewed attention to civic virtue could become coherent only in the midst of a multipronged resistance to the colonialism of the “unencumbered self.” One Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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cannot just add civic virtue and stir: either civic virtue will be dissolved by other elements in the mix, or it will cause other elements to explode. T h e N e igh bor ho od I n or Ov e r t h e P ol is? While Sandel makes a cogent case for the necessarily radical task of revaluing citizen formation, his gestures toward a constructive view of civic virtue are less coherent. His focus on constitutional interpretation and legal developments, which allows him to document the historical ascendancy of the unencumbered self, lays little foundation for a constructive account of citizen virtue. His sensitivity to gender issues is troublingly selective: while he insightfully critiques gender inequities generated by the unencumbered self, he fails to consider the gendering of civic virtue in the tradition of civic republicanism to which he appeals. At times he lapses into what Iris Young calls a “metaphysics of presence,” a nostalgia for community on a smaller scale.14 At his best, Sandel considers the civic possibilities of multiply overlapping communities whose members have multiple identities. At his worst, he simply defends ethical partiality against the idolatrous view of impartiality underlying the unencumbered view of the self. Law as an analytical prism pays off for Sandel because it is a conservative institution, institutionally crystallizing changes in worldview that have percolated in common culture for some time. Of course, Sandel’s point is that law is both reactive and prescriptive. But to make room for attention to civic formation in democratic culture, Sandel needs more than law. He needs to articulate the changes in citizen character that might allow a future legal scholar to trace a transformation from thinly procedural liberalism to a legal infrastructure conducive to civic formation. In short, he needs virtue. Sandel’s appeal to “civic republicanism” to combat the colonialism of the unencumbered self is more rhetorical than historical. He uses the term to refer to a consciousness about citizen formation that he thinks marked an earlier era, a consciousness that he contrasts to the “triumph and travail of the procedural republic.” Unlike his analysis of the unencumbered self, which explores how thoroughly that concept became institutionalized, Sandel’s appeal to civic republicanism operates simply as a heuristic contrast to the unencumbered self. Whereas the unencumbered self may choose to participate in politics, the republican self must share in self-rule, 158 ·
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which requires deliberation with others about the common good. This “cannot be accomplished solely through the capacity to choose one’s ends and to respect others’ rights to do the same.” Republican political theory denies procedural liberalism’s priority of the right over the good, instead interpreting rights “in the light of a particular conception of the good society—the self-governing republic.” Whereas “on the liberal view, liberty is defined in opposition to democracy, as a constraint to self-government. On the republican view, liberty is understood as a consequence of selfgovernment” (1996, 25–26). Sandel’s heuristic use of civic republicanism allows him to avoid considering how historical republican traditions developed in tandem with domesticity’s gendered moral division of labor. For example, Sandel fails to challenge the gender constructions presumed by Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, heroes of his for recognizing the relationship between economic life and democratic virtues. Sandel portrays the violence of role-stripping as the primary assault on civic virtue. He fails to consider adequately the violence of role-enforcing, which was historically linked to both civic republicanism and the eclipse of civic virtue from public consciousness. This blind spot renders Sandel’s critique of family law ironic. The same dichotomous view of love and justice that disadvantages women in contemporary divorce court historically disadvantaged civic virtue. Gender injustices of contemporary divorce reflect not a simple triumph of the unencumbered self, but rather the rhetorical layering of that view of self over heavily gendered social roles. Those gender roles are the very ones that hypermasculinized civic virtue. The patterns at stake are those that defined civic virtue as the character necessary for impossible love: love that loves most broadly by loving most dispassionately; love that maintains a focus on the common good in a political realm defined as selfish. They are the patterns that chained ideologies of gender to religious ideologies of sacrifice to fence out civic virtue as a conceptual category. If Sandel followed the tail of his analysis of family law, he would find it wagging the dog of civic republicanism. Sandel cannot have it both ways. If reflective citizens should consider the extent to which the unencumbered self is actually more than a heuristic device (Rawls’s contested formulation), then they should also consider the extent to which the republican self is more than a heuristic device (Sandel’s should-be-contested formulation). Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Sandel is most honest about this problem in the setup of his final, constructive chapter, “In Search of a Public Philosophy.” He admits that many of his critics contend that a return to republican understandings is not only impossible but undesirable. It is impossible because the scale of social interaction has changed so dramatically, but it is also undesirable because it tends toward exclusivity or coercion. If certain virtues are considered necessarily supportive of shared rule, then republicans may tend either toward limiting citizenship to those who have them, or toward coercing citizens to develop them. Sandel thinks the latter more dangerous in our times because “the task of forging common citizenship among a vast and disparate people invites more strenuous forms of soulcraft [than was necessary in Aristotle’s homogeneous and undemocratic polis]” (1996, 319). But Sandel thinks that danger can be avoided by recognizing the common good to which civic virtue strains, not as a unitary given, but as a formative project. Contemporary republicans should renounce Rousseau’s coercive agenda of transforming a citizen’s nature to fit a corporate identity, in favor of Tocqueville’s “more clamorous than consensual” view of republican formation. Following Tocqueville, Sandel turns to the terrain of complex civil society as the forming ground of civic virtue. This turn is linked to his concern that increasing economic inequality is a threat to civic virtue. For Sandel, ever-widening income disparities threaten not only distributive justice but also the conditions of civic virtue. The income gap makes citizen formation seem a luxury to the struggling poor and an unnecessary expense of energy for the rich, who increasingly buy out of public services such as education, transportation, and security. The result is an erosion of the very places where people of different classes may come together as citizens: public schools, parks, libraries, and so forth. Sandel’s heroes thus become those who renew such venues. In particular, he singles out three heroes: community development corporations, “sprawlbusters,” and the New Urbanism. Community development corporations are “nonprofit corporations designed to give low-income communities a voice in shaping their economic destinies” (1996, 333). “Sprawlbusters” are citizen groups who oppose Wal-Mart-style development, which erodes public space in favor of commercial space. The New Urbanism is a community planning movement that seeks to turn from the “retreat to private life” that has characterized the development of much of suburbia. New Urbanism attempts to offer “the virtues of traditional 160
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towns” to larger communities by integrating “housing, parks, and schools in walking distance of shops, civic services, jobs, and public transportation” (336). A core idea is that residential life should be physically structured around public space. Certainly, these organizations and movements are laudatory, and Sandel’s articulation of them follows my own request that efforts to transform civic virtue begin with the real accomplishment of real civic heroes. But Sandel’s account of his heroes presumes rather than articulates the virtues they depend upon and foster. His thinking replicates an overall trend in contemporary political theory: to move from an invocation of civic virtue to an analysis of civil society, inadequately exploring connections or tensions between them. Sandel tantalizingly suggests that the appropriate linkage between the two depends on the negotiation of multiple identities and roles by the citizen-reasoner: Most of us find ourselves claimed, at one time or another, by a wide range of different communities, some overlapping, others contending. When obligations conflict, there is no way of deciding in advance, once and for all, which should prevail. Deciding which of one’s identities is properly engaged—as a parent or a professional, follower of one faith or partisan of a cause, citizen of one’s country or citizen of the world—is a matter of moral reflection and political deliberation that will vary according to the issue at stake. The best deliberation will attend to the content of the claims, their relative moral weight, and their role in the narratives by which the participants make sense of their lives. (344)
Thus, the civic virtue “distinctive to our time” is: “the capacity to negotiate our way among the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting obligations that claim us, and to live with the tension to which multiple loyalties give rise” (350; emphasis added). For Sandel, this civic virtue is, like all classical virtues, a mean. It balances two opposite extremes of vice: the fundamentalism of those who “cannot abide by the ambiguity associated with divided sovereignty and multiply-encumbered selves” and the drift to incoherence of those who are “unable to weave the various strands of their identity into a coherent whole” (350). But Sandel shies from the full implication of that when he repeatedly poses the challenge of civic virtue as the defense of partial commitments against the colonialism of impartial norms. Despite his erstwhile resistance, Sandel repeatedly yields to a dichotomous view of Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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partiality and impartiality, rooting for the underdog (partiality) instead of exposing the dichotomy itself as false. So Sandel lampoons cosmopolitan ethical visions for advancing “a universal disposition to friendliness,” while thinking particular friendships are unnecessary. Yet he misses the opportunity to discuss how personal friendships, particularly the friendships structured by his preferred civil society, might foster a wider disposition to friendliness. Sandel acknowledges that “at their best, local solidarities gesture beyond themselves toward broader horizons of moral concern. . . . The cosmopolitan ethic is wrong, not for asserting that we have certain obligations to humanity as a whole but rather for insisting that the more universal communities we inhabit must always take precedence over more particular communities” (343). Yet his own examples all extol those who defend the neighborhood against the polis. None are examples of how a forged conception of common good boomerangs to question some of the particular communities that generated it. Sandel ends his book proclaiming the primacy of the particular and the local: The global media and markets that shape our lives beckon us to a world beyond boundaries and belonging. But the civic resources we need to master these forces, or at least to contend with them, are still to be found in the places and stories, memories and meanings, incidents and identities, that situate us in the world and give our lives their moral particularity. (349)
Ultimately, he is more worried about the civic erosion caused by the Mrs. Jellybys in the polis than by beaten wives in the neighborhood.15 This trump card for partial commitments allows Sandel to escape elaboration of the virtues that might support the process of negotiation among multiple memberships that he more helpfully identifies as civic virtue. Therefore, Sandel’s candid acknowledgment that he fails to provide a description of civic virtue is not only a recognition of complexity, as he characterizes it, but also a disappointment: As the reigning political agenda invites disagreement about the meaning of neutrality, rights, and truly voluntary choice, a political agenda informed by civic concerns would invite disagreement about the meaning of virtue and the forms of self-government that are possible in our time. (338)
While it is true that a turn to virtue will not resolve—but rather will redefine—complexities, the tentative articulation of actual virtues could 162
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advance the understanding of these complexities. Certainly, the articulation of theories of justice and rights has provided infrastructure for broader discussion of the inherent complexity of those terms. At the end of the day, virtue remains elusive in Sandel’s thought. Yet Sandel’s failures as well his successes point to criteria for the transformation of civic virtue. Transformed civic virtue must provide a mean between excesses of both role-stripping and role-enforcing conceptions of citizenship (and thus a mean between liberal and communitarian virtue theorists). It must pursue Sandel’s insights regarding the negotiation of multiple social memberships in order to explain the connection between robust localism and appropriate cosmopolitanism, rather than pitting them against each other.
L O S T V I RT U E (I I I): T H E R ET R E AT OF C I V IC V I RT U E T O T H E A DVA NC E OF C I V I L S O C I E T Y: C ON F USE D E N E M I E S A N D T H E DA NGE R OF F R I E N DLY F I R E While calls for renewal of civic virtue and civil society are often made in tandem, as they are by Sandel, I highlight tensions between the two. The historical ironies that damned civic virtue are the same that gave rise to an emphasis on civil society: the associations of civic society became viewed as a forum of restraint for the otherwise dangerous characters of competitive, greedy men. Certainly, creative efforts to revitalize democracy will appropriately link consideration of citizen virtues and the kinds of associations that sustain them. Indeed, the very category of civic society challenges a pristinely dichotomous portrayal of public and private, impartial and partial. Yet the turn to civil society instead of civic virtue in contemporary conversation threatens to support, rather than heal, the old tension. If Sandel’s account veers toward a partialist account of civil society, Benjamin Barber’s veers toward an impartialist one. Barber is a good choice for the same reason Sandel was in the previous section: he is particularly sophisticated; his replication of problematic assumptions is subtle; and his creativity points in promising constructive directions. Moreover, his account mounts a dual-pronged critique against both impartialist and partialist virtue theorists. Ultimately, however, his understanding of civil society as voluntary associations inadequately transcends the dichotomy. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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While Barber focuses on civil society, not civic virtue, his account is laden with implications for the transformation of civic virtue. I draw from A Place for Us (1998), the book that most directly unpacks his call to civil society. Barber’s fundamental proposal is that civil society be understood as a third forum of political life, distinct from both the market and government. This tripartite conceptual schema inherently challenges a singular public/private distinction. His proposal of civil society as strong democracy rather than as either the market or the community is intended to challenge both liberal (which he calls libertarian) and communitarian definitions of civil society: My three beats are the domains of state, civil society, and market (or politics, society, and economy), but I shall count them out against the two beats of public and private; the traditional polarized setting that treats state and individual, power and liberty, as adversaries. Of the three versions of civil society [libertarian, communitarian, and his preferred strong democratic], the first two tend to mirror the simple dichotomy of power and liberty; that is to say, civil society is thought of largely as a private domain in distinction to the public domain of the state. . . . By assuming that civil society is simply a way of talking about the private, and leaving aside its public features, neither the libertarian nor the communitarian model serves as effectively as it might to make the revitalizing of civil society a condition for taming markets, civilizing society, and democratizing government. (1998, 16)
According to Barber, libertarian models make the mistake of equating civil society with market choice, while communitarian models mistake it for community, generally: Libertarians think of community as play space for private individuals and for the voluntary and contractual associations they choose to contract into, and treat it as little more than a condition for solitude. Communitarians, on the other hand, think of civil society as a zone where people interact and are embedded in communities, and they treat it as the condition for all social bonding. . . . If the defining actor of civil society in the libertarian model is, in the founding phase, the rights-bearing rebel, and in established democracies, the rights-bearing consumer, in the communitarian model he is the clansmen: the bondsman tied to community by birth, blood, and bathos. Citizenship here takes on a cultural feel and marks its territory by exclusion rather than inclusion. (1998, 24)
While Barber notes affinities between his “strong democracy” and Sandel’s “civic republicanism,” he appropriately criticizes Sandel for failing 164
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to distinguish adequately between the ideal of civic republicanism and what he calls “ascriptive” appeals to community—appeals to community either as it is or, more likely, as it was. Barber underscores both the promise and perils of historical appeals to civic republicanism: while civic republicanism flourished amidst gross gender, race, and class inequalities (thus the danger of nostalgia for it), those who were enabled to be citizens in such a social world—property-holding white males—had richer democratic lives (thus the insight of the nostalgia). For Barber, the challenge is retrieving the richer model of citizenship without exclusion. Barber notes that two kinds of colonialism arise out of the bifurcation of public and private, only one of which is elucidated by Sandel: Ironically, while both communitarian and libertarian versions of civil associations polarize state and individual (or state and community) in the name of the wall between public and private, they tend in both cases to colonize the “other side.” People who think of themselves primarily or exclusively as economic beings—consumers and producers—start thinking about government exclusively as a servicer of client needs; people who think of themselves primarily or exclusively in terms of their ethnic or tribal identity start thinking about government as a repository for their identity. In effect, they colonize public space with their private identities. (1998, 29)
For Barber, recognizing civil society as neither state nor private is key to resisting both kinds of colonialism. This project entails not so much creating new kinds of associations as revisioning the ones citizens already have: To imagine how a vigorous, civic republican, civil society looks, we may want to think about the actual places Americans occupy as they go about their daily lives, when they are engaged neither in politics (voting, jury service, paying taxes) nor in commerce (working for pay, producing, shopping, consuming). Such activities include going to church or synagogue or mosque, doing volunteer work, participating in a civic association, supporting a philanthropy, joining a fraternal organization, contributing to a charity, working in a parent-teacher group or neighborhood watch or hospital fund-raising society, or joining with neighbors to clean up a local park and, of course, engaging in family affairs. (1998, 48)16
Barber’s analysis calls into question certain foci of conversations on civic virtue—for example, attention to voting as a citizen responsibility. Barber certainly concurs that voting is important in a democratic polity. In fact, he questions a society in which work is demanded (as in the Welfare Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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Reform Act) but voting is not. However, he claims not only that voting is too minimal a task to exhaust citizen responsibility but also that it is not in the realm of life we should focus on: the sphere of civil society. Barber’s conception of civil society as the crucial buffer between state and market, the space for citizenship, allows him to articulate several forums of citizenship-through-civil-society. He considers the positive role of trade unions and business associations in promoting living wages, job security, safe working conditions, and safe products. He regards the role of the arts as seedbeds of civic imagination, which is linked to aesthetic imagination—arguing that the arts be state-supported and that artists be considered citizens, not aliens. Like the new urbanists, he thinks about what kind of public spaces are necessary for the development of civil society. He ponders the role of the media, whose freedom from state and market in the buffer of civil society not only entails privileges but demands responsibilities. He regards civility as more than protocol, a robust ideal that would change not only how citizens speak but how they listen—and what they refuse to listen to (negative campaigning, character assassination, scandal-mongering). One of Barber’s greatest contributions is his attention to time as well as place in the consideration of civil society and, by implication, civic virtue. Indeed, his stress on time—how the lack of it now impedes civil society, how necessary it is to reviving civil society—is so heavy that the book might well have been titled Time and Place for Us. Drawing on Josef Pieper’s pivotal work, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1999), Barber considers leisure time itself a measure of social capital.17 Barber fears that amidst a perceived erosion of civil society the market has a disproportionate appetite for time (overworked workers despite the productivity gains of high technology), just as it has a disproportionate appetite for space (commercial malls versus public parks). Barber invites readers to consider not only the time civic activity takes but also who is most likely to have that time. The irony is that those who may have the time for it are those who are denigrated or bypassed in conventional models of civic virtue: stay-at-home parents, the unemployed, the retired elderly. Barber pays laudable attention to gender and caring labor in his critiques of libertarian and communitarian excesses, though his definition of civil society ultimately betrays this insight. For example, he notes how market idolatry has elevated economic production as a virtue, while increases 166
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in efficiency decrease the need for economic producers. Thus the paradox of “sacralizing work” amidst “enforced leisure” (1998, 135). The need for increased attention to reproductive work (child rearing) and citizenly work (civil associations) is lost amidst a frenetic drive for too many workers to engage in too little productive work, a drive exacerbated by benefit systems that fail to recognize the value of other kinds of work. Barber underscores that women and children lose disproportionately in this valuing system. So does democracy, which is more starved for well-reared children and healthy civil society than it is for widgets. For Barber, the change in conception of welfare—from enabling care to enabling work outside the home—is emblematic of misplaced support: the state supports the already colonialist market, when it is civil society that needs to be shored up. Those least able to compete in the market are forced to scrounge for the dwindling pool of jobs, disallowing their energies where those energies might have the biggest impact: in the care of their own children or in their participation in some avenue of civil society requested as a condition of their economic support. By contrast, his model program is President Clinton’s Youth Service Corps program, because Clinton refused to identify the service as either governmental or private, and named the development of a citizen-perspective a primary goal of the program. Ba r be r’s I m pa rt i a l ist E xce s s: Ci v i l So ci et y a s Volu n ta ry A s s o ci at ions In his definition of civil society, Barber betrays the implications of his gender critique, however, drawing lines that exclude much of personal life from relevance to public affairs. He emphasizes that, like the state, civil society is open and public; like the private (market) sector, it is voluntary and noncoercive (1998, 35). But this stress on voluntary associations as the definition of civil society reinforces home and family life as nonpolitical domains. Barber admittedly waffles on this point, trying to explain why family and religion are relevant to civil society despite his seemingly exclusionary definition. But his resolution is to consider family and religion healthy components of civil society the more they look like voluntary associations. Here he misses an insight of Sandel: the distortion caused by the malignancy of contractarian models of selfhood into all areas of human social life. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue
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To the extent that he considers family and religious associations as themselves simply voluntary associations, Barber deflects attention from the virtue of loyalty needed to sustain such institutions when choosing to leave might be easier. Similarly, he deflects attention from the virtues that allow patterns of family and religious life to be reflected upon critically and modified, so that they become more voluntary over time, even if never easily characterized as a choice. In real life, there is a spectrum of relative voluntariness or nonvoluntariness in our associations rather than a clear split between voluntary and nonvoluntary ones. If civil society—the terrain that fosters civic virtue—is made up of voluntary associations, then it seems to exclude the founders of MADD, who felt themselves to have no choice. Put differently, that model of civil society cannot explain the virtue of MADD’s founders’ going from no choice—the tragic death of a child—to choice for a certain kind of voluntary association. One can imagine many other organizations that share the feature of discovery-to-choice: Alcoholics Anonymous; Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG); support groups for sufferers of various illnesses, including mental illnesses. Barber’s ultimately impartialist definition of civil society contributes to fall narratives of civic virtue that lament decreased attendance in Rotary Clubs without noticing the work of MADD. Taken together, Barber and Sandel exemplify two polar excesses in discussions of civil society: partialist excesses (Sandel) that assume that ascriptive communities of place are the stuff of civil society, and impartialist excesses (Barber) that assume that voluntary associations are the stuff of civil society. A transformed account of civic virtue must highlight the necessary reflexivity that could connect received communities of place and chosen communities of association, and could connect moral lessons from unchosen relationships to endorsed political agendas, and vice versa. A transformed account should press toward simultaneous discussion of civic virtues and the forums in which they develop rather than maintaining a separation that triumphs one over the other as the heart of politics.
C ONC LUSION: A M E A N DE M A N DS R EJ EC T I NG I M PA RT I A L I T Y-A S-S TA N DP OI N T Liberal (impartialist) and communitarian (partialist) virtue theorists, as well as those who develop conceptual models of civil society, offer much 168
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to the project of transforming civic virtue. This is particularly true when taken together, for each astutely responds to the other’s excesses. Sandel’s sustained critique of the “un-encumbered self” suggests that liberal virtue theorists have too quickly tried to “add civic virtue and stir,” failing to realize the extent to which the conceptual structure of virtue challenges other assumptions of contemporary liberal thought. But if communitarians insist that civic virtue, taken seriously, may challenge current structures of political and economic life, liberal virtue theorists retort that even the institutions of political and economic life that we most wish to affirm need the support of civic virtue. Liberal virtue theorists also challenge communitarians by demanding that political virtue promote self-reflectiveness as well as democratic viability. Despite the promise of their joint conversation, both liberal virtue theorists and communitarians continue to fissure along the impartiality/partiality axis defined by idolatrous conceptions of impartiality. Barber proposes the “strong democracy” of his conception of civil society to resolve that polarity. Ultimately, though, he defines civil society in decidedly impartialist terms, as freely chosen voluntary associations. The difference between Sandel and Barber, both of whom seek to revive civil society, embodies in microcosm a wider split in the literature on civil society: civil society is envisioned either as ascriptive communities (in partialist terms) or as voluntary associations (in impartialist terms), but not both. The same conceptual dichotomy that hampers discussion of civic virtue hampers discussion of civil society. Ultimately, the solution to the problem must be to reconceptualize impartiality and partiality in nondichotomous ways, rather than to change the subject back and forth from civic virtue to civil society every time one bumps into the limits of the dichotomy. The latter tactic is a bit like turning round and round to redress the fact that one’s shirt is inside out.
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PART III R ESOLVING THE DILEMMA: IMPARTIALITY-ASPR ACTICE AND THE TR ANSFOR MATION OF CIVIC VIRTUE
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SAVING THE BABY FROM THE BATHWATER: A TURN TO PRACTICE
The standpoint conception of impartiality is so entrenched that it is presumed not only by its philosophical defenders but also by its critics. While the dichotomy between partiality and impartiality is ultimately a false one, it is nonetheless an influential one. Political theory is thus hamstrung between detached, unattainable views of impartiality and rejections of impartiality that leave no standard for critical fair-mindedness in political life. The space for civic virtue is thus eclipsed. A transformed conception of impartiality must leave behind, once and for all, the distorted legacy of the stranger-versus-loved-one cases. It must give up on the notion of a pristine standpoint of impartiality—if even an imagined one—in favor of a more attainable ideal. The baby that it must save from the bathwater is the very notion of political fair-mindedness, which must be articulated anew in a pragmatic way. Instead of trying to define a metaphysical concept of impartiality, we might rather consider who around us seems to be acting with critical fairmindedness and how they are going about it. In this chapter, I explain why a turn to practice seems so promising. Such a turn has resolved conceptual dilemmas that are structurally similar to the dilemma of impartiality: the dilemma of objectivity in science, and the dilemma of love in Christian theology. In the following chapter, I will develop a full account of impartiality as a moral practice. This account articulates a practical conception of political fair-mindedness while avoiding the pitfalls of impartiality-as-standpoint. 173
M ISE RY L OV E S C OM PA N Y Faced with a “can’t live with it; can’t live without it” dilemma regarding its long-standing ideal of impartiality, American political theory finds itself in good company. Both science and Christian theology have recently found themselves in “can’t live with it; can’t live without it” positions regarding cherished ideals. There are striking parallels between dilemmas faced by scientists reevaluating norms of objectivity in science, by theologians reevaluating norms of love in Christian ethics, and by political theorists reevaluating norms of impartiality in the political realm. These parallels reflect historical cross-influences among scientific notions of objectivity, theological conceptions of love, and political conceptions of impartiality. Science and Christian theology have more successfully resolved their dilemmas than has political theory. Thus, their resolutions may suggest a way out of the dilemma of impartiality. The cross-fertilization of these three ideals and their relevance to civic virtue were outlined in chapter 1. While a detailed description of historical relationships between them is beyond the scope of my argument, two points are noteworthy. First, conceptions of “hard” objectivity in science, “strict” impartiality in political theory, and “disinterested” Christian neighbor love attained supremacy at the same point in the Enlightenment. Second, their simultaneous rise is linked to the series of ironies that eclipsed civic virtue. My focus here is on the contemporary dilemma in which each of the terms has become enmeshed. What connects the contemporary dilemmas regarding the parallel ideals of scientific objectivity, Christian love, and political impartiality? How have science and Christianity negotiated the prongs of their dilemmas? What might their negotiations suggest for resolving the dilemma of impartiality in political theory? Figure 5.1 suggests answers to those questions. Looking across the chart, we find that in each case current questioning of the conventional ideal results from a certain form of “idolatry.” I use this term to represent a denial of human finitude that is embedded in each ideal. The idolatry is marked by an excessive rigidity: severe conceptual splits between knowledge and passion, and between subject and object. In each column, the idolatry represents a “sin of pride”: the denial of the scientist, lover, or 174
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Figure 5.1. Parallel Dilemmas in Science, Christian Theology, and Political Ethics Field
Science
Christian Theology
Political Ethics
Ideal
Objectivity
Love “Agape” Commanded neighbor love
Impartiality
Idolatry of Ideal Pure Observation Knowledge/passion split. Subject independent of object.
Disinterested, all-encompassing, sacrificial love
Impartiality as detached standpoint (“Archimedean Point”)
Fear of Rejecting Ideal: “Soppy Subjectivism”
Seeing what one wants in the data
Parochialism of love
Parochialism of interest consideration
Reclamation Look to practice/ practitioners.
Look at real scientists and how they work.
Look at “real” God (of scripture and tradition) and real lovers (“saints”).
Look at real practitioners of impartiality?
Recognition of knowledge/passion connections. Processive, relational approach.
Standards of coherence deriving from communities of practice.
Reconsideration of God/ Israel relationship; Trinitarianism; heroes of Christian tradition. Sacrifice understood in context of mutuality. Special loves as “schools” for broader loves.
A promising resolution to the dilemma of impartiality.
(Not yet accomplished)
citizen’s inescapable emotional relationship with that which is studied, loved, or considered. In each case, this sin of pride generates a series of false dichotomies. The idolatry of objectivity in science is faith in pure observation. The idolatry of love in Christian theology is the call for disinterested love that is all-encompassing, completely self-sacrificial, and lacking any desire for reciprocation. The idolatry of impartiality in politics is the conception of an Archimedean Point, a point from which the citizen can (if even imaginatively) view the political landscape unencumbered by any personal biases. In each case the idolatrous view has become increasingly untenable, the sin of pride underlying it increasingly exposed in public critique. While the term “disinterested love” may stand out as a particularly ironic oxymoron, in fact the truly disinterested scientist and the truly disinterested citizen would be as impotent as the disinterested lover. Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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The chart explains why proposals to correct the idolatry by rejecting idolized norms have also been untenable. Just as there is a common core to the idolatries of objectivity, love, and impartiality, so there is a common core to warnings against dropping these ideals. In each case, the legitimate fear of rejecting the norm altogether could be tagged the fear of “soppy subjectivism.” The soppy subjectivist scientist, absent any coherent norm of objectivity, sees what she wants to see in the data. The soppy subjectivist lover, absent any norm of love as radically other-encompassing, uncritically limits her energies to parochial loves, which themselves remain unjudged. The soppy subjectivist citizen, absent any norm of impartiality, engages in parochial interest consideration—considering politics an avenue for advancing narrow self-interest rather than a forum for discernment of the common good. The complaint against crude “interest group politics” is a complaint against soppy subjectivism. A horizontal reading of the chart suggests that science and Christian theology are ahead of political theory in resolving their dilemmas. Just as we see parallels across the columns between the challenged ideals, so too we see parallels in resolutions that successfully negotiate the associated dilemmas. Both science and Christian theology have made a critical move to reclaim the babies while throwing out the bathwaters of their ideals: they have observed actual practitioners. Contemporary philosophers of science ask how historical communities of scientists develop standards of scientific judgment. Contemporary Christian theologians ask how the God of their revelation actually loves, and how notable lovers—saints with both capital and small s—actually love. Yet no parallel move seems to have been accomplished in political theory. How, in fact, do actual “impartial” citizens develop and abide by criteria of public fair-mindedness? The tactics by which science and Christian theology have negotiated their dilemmas may be suggestive for political theory. My accounts of the resolutions in philosophy of science and in Christian theological ethics must necessarily be selective. In each case, I draw on a few commentators representing broader trends that offer conceptual parallels to political theorists struggling with the dilemma of impartiality. My two accounts are not equal in detail. I pay greater attention to Christian theology, in part because of my own training in religious studies and in part because theologians’ attention to caring practices offers a particularly
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direct analogy to political theory. But my overarching focus is on the structural resonances that crosscut both strategies of resolution.
N EG OT I AT I NG T H E DI L E M M A OF OBJ EC T I V I T Y I N S C I E NC E In contemporary history and philosophy of science, the groundbreaking work of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi introduced a shift to practice that favors observing practitioners over idealistic accounts. This shift highlights several structural features that will prove valuable for reconceptualizing impartiality: (1) a social constructionist conception of “objectivity,” which defines objectivity as a scientific practice, as opposed to a metaphysical conception of objectivity; (2) an understanding of scientists’ emotionally laden motivations, including an understanding of the role of tacit knowledge and belief, as opposed to a stress on scientists’ emotional detachment from their work; and (3) an appreciation for how “idolatrous” understandings of objectivity allow distorted gender biases to continue in scientific culture. In the middle of the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn radically challenged “positivistic” accounts of science. Logical positivism portrays scientific enterprise as wholly empirical, and the knowledge gained to be descriptive of the actual world, unmediated by human values or conceptions. Thus, the positivist considers the realms of scientific fact and human value as radically distinct. Kuhn condemned the preoccupation of positivists with “the logical structure of the products of scientific research” rather than with the “dynamic process by which scientific knowledge is acquired” (1970, 1). Instead, Kuhn favored a holistic, social approach that seeks to understand the social context of scientific beliefs now considered defunct. Kuhn sometimes called his approach “integral,” since it seeks to understand the historical integrity of scientific accounts in their own time. Such integral respect for now outdated scientific accounts contrasts with dismissive presumptions that science advances by continually stripping away irrational superstitions. Kuhn became fascinated by the complex social processes that underlie radical changes in accepted scientific paradigms: so-called scientific revolutions. He described his understanding of those events in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first
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published in 1962. For our purposes, what is important is the redefinition of objectivity implied by Kuhn’s approach. Kuhn could account for paradigm shifts that occur in science only by considering the paradigms themselves as worldviews. For Kuhn, such paradigms were constellations of beliefs rather than purely empirical dicta that succeeded to the extent that beliefs were weeded out. Paradigms include complex “disciplinary matrixes” through which scientists share “commitments” (equated to “firm convictions”), including methodological, instrumental, and “quasi-metaphysical” commitments that shape ways of seeing the world. While not objective in an absolute sense, these paradigms enable scientific endeavors, even endeavors that produce anomalies that ultimately challenge the original paradigm. Much of Kuhn’s book focuses on historical periods in which perceived anomalies challenged scientific paradigms, and on the scientists who responded by initiating paradigm shifts—Copernicus, Newton, and others. Kuhn concludes that scientific revolutions are best viewed as changes of worldview. For Kuhn, scientific paradigms—while not objective in an absolute sense —are objective with a small o. They provide pragmatic standards for working scientists beyond the whim of the scientist herself. They are, in Aristotelian terms, internal goods of the practice of science. Alasdair MacIntyre’s succinct definition of internal goods and their relationship to social practices, including science, bears repeating: By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill, but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a social practice; architecture is. . . . So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry, and biology. (1984, 187; emphasis added)
Thus, “objective” standards of science are not external realities affixed to the “world itself,” but rather they are goals defined internally by the practice of science. It is because these ends are not external that scientific paradigms may shift. It is because such explanatory paradigms are internal 178
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ends of the practice that science would be unimaginable without them, even if they shift. Whereas Kuhn demythologizes the notion of scientific objectivity without rendering the concept moot, Michael Polanyi demythologizes the notion of detached scientific motivation without rendering the interests of the scientist solely “subjective.” Polanyi explores the underlying passion, presumed in what he describes as a scientist’s choice to commit herself to a theorem. All knowledge, according to Polanyi, has “tacit” elements, elements that cannot be articulated and that derive from the relationship between knower and known. This is true for even the most mundane knowledge, such as how to ride a bike (Polanyi’s paradigm example): for who could articulate all the mechanics involved in turning a corner on one’s bike? “Into every act of knowing there enters a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that coefficient is not mere imperfection, but a necessary component of all knowledge” (1958, 312). Science, like all human activities, depends on tacit knowing, and tacit knowledge substantially shapes what Polanyi calls the “commitment” of the scientist. Polanyi deliberately associates this term with connotations of entrusting oneself. Thus he makes an analogy between personal relationships and the “marriage” between a scientist and the theorem in which she believes. Ultimately, the commitment of a scientist is a personal choice based upon belief—belief so integrated with personal tacit knowledge that it is perceived as impersonally given: “Underlying the assent to science and the pursuit of discovery in science is the belief in scientific premises to which the adherents and cultivators of science must unquestioningly assent” (1964, 31; emphasis added). It is precisely because the belief rests on tacit knowledge that the believer does not recognize it as a belief, but rather focuses on the practice of science that the belief allows. Therefore, “the premises of science cannot be explicitly formulated, and can be found authentically manifested only in the practice of science, as maintained by the tradition of science” (1964, 31). For Polanyi, the connection between scientific commitment, passionate tacit knowing, and belief does not render the motivations of the scientist “subjective.” What Polanyi calls the “universal intent” of the investigator prevents the personal commitment of the scientist from becoming mere subjective whim. A polar relationship between personal Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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commitment and universal intent enables both, ultimately subjecting the scientist herself to standards that she perceives as impersonal. These standards can indeed act impersonally—even if they are really complexly formed by the interaction of universal intent and personal commitment among the scientific community more broadly: “The personal comes into existence by asserting universal intent, and the universal is constituted by being accepted as the impersonal term of this personal commitment” (1958, 308). Taken together, Kuhn and Polanyi deconstruct the idea that personal emotional commitment and historical/cultural influences “compromise” science. Instead, they present both as necessary to enable science. Kuhn and Polanyi remove the negative cast of the term “biases”: only scientists with personal and cultural “biases” can function! In the social sciences, structurally parallel work suggests that some personal and cultural “biases” are necessary to begin a process of interpretation (for example, of a text)—even a process of interpretation that ultimately questions the initial bias.1 Kuhn and Polanyi redefine in parallel ways both the objectivity of the scientific community and the integrity of character of individual scientists. Rather than buttressing science on what they consider a false dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, they locate the possibility of science in intersubjectivity: the relationship between scientists and their passionately studied subjects, and the relationship of scientists to each other within a community of practitioners. Feminist philosophers of science have drawn upon both Kuhn’s and Polanyi’s insights to challenge gender biases in dominant conventions of science. They claim that the seeming neutrality of scientific “objectivity” has actually cloaked invidious gender biases in the practice of science— biases that have hurt science itself. Their analysis is structurally relevant to gender critics of impartiality, who similarly fear such cloaked gender bias and its negative effect on politics. Historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller offers a particularly clear articulation of this critique. Keller challenges the “belief, rather than the reality” (emphasis hers) in an “unconscious mythology” of scientific objectivity that defines erotic passion as the antithesis of science and fosters a cultural association between science and masculinity. Encapsulated by the metaphor of the “hard” sciences, this gendered conception of science 180
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discourages women from science and feminizes men who prefer “softer” studies. It also creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates a disproportionately emotionally restrained population among scientists (1985, 76–80). According to Keller, the celebration of such a masculine scientific culture discourages important questions about the quality of the science it (literally) engenders. Creative play may be an important element of scientific experimentation, but the association of objectivity and masculinity tends to discourage playfulness as a virtue of scientists. (Note the parallel to Iris M. Young’s critique regarding the lack of playfulness in political life, discussed in chapter 2.) Moreover, loving attention to particulars may be as important to scientific discovery as abstraction of universals. Keller describes the plant scientist Barbara McClintock as a scientist who has succeeded because she defies idolatrous mythologies of objectivity. McClintock, a Nobel laureate, articulated genetic transposition on the basis of her work with corn plants. McClintock, who criticizes contemporary research culture for lacking humility, presents the challenge of the scientist as “listening to the material.” The scientist must make difference understandable, which cannot be done by making difference disappear. Thus, she decries the focus on numbers and classification in modern science. McClintock conceptualized genetic transposition (genetic recombination and migration) by paying passionate attention to what others described as the “aberrations,” the corn kernels that did not “fit” expected genetic patterns. In other words, McClintock’s data were what the other scientists rejected as outside the data. Keller notes the strongly relational, as opposed to relationship-denying, language with which McClintock describes her science: “McClintock is not here speaking of relations to other humans, but the parallels are nonetheless compelling. In the relationship she describes with plants, as in human relations, respect for difference constitutes a claim not only on our interest but on our capacity for empathy—in short, the highest form of love: love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference” (1985, 174). An idolatrous view of objectivity may not only impede scientific developments that depend on apprehension of particulars but may also mask egregious social biases in tenets that are portrayed as “objective.” Here again feminist philosophers of science have led important charges. A simultaneously amusing and troubling example is the work of Emily Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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Martin, who demonstrates the extent to which cultural ascriptions of masculine activism and feminine passivity infect “scientific” descriptions of human ovum and sperm. Martin relentlessly documents how scientific textbooks describe ova as dependent, passive, degenerating, and in need of rescue, while sperm are described as independent, active, energetic, and the rescuers: The egg . . . does not move or journey, but passively “is transported,” is “swept,” or even “drifts” along the fallopian tube. In contrast, sperm are small, “streamlined,” and invariably active. They “deliver” their genes to the egg, “activate the developmental program of the egg,” and have a “velocity” that is often remarked upon. Their tails are “strong” and efficiently powered. . . . [and can] “propel semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina.” (1991, 488)
In contrast to the perceived passivity of the egg, “a dormant bride awaiting her mate’s magic kiss,” sperm “have a mission . . . in quest of the ovum.” . . . “Survivors” “assault” the egg, and the successful candidates “surround the prize.” Part of the urgency of this journey, in more scientific terms, is that “once released from the supportive environment of the ovary, an egg will die within hours unless it is rescued by a sperm.” The wording stresses the fragility and dependency of the egg, even though the same text acknowledges elsewhere that sperm also live only for a few hours. (488)
This fairy-tale-masqueraded-as-science has serious implications. The ascription of such caricatured social conceptions of gender to human reproductive processes might explain a lingering tendency toward belated testing of the male partner in fertility treatment. Or it might explain why only embarrassingly recently have fertility scientists begun to understand the role of the ovum lining in facilitating sperm penetration. How could such distortion persist in contemporary scientific textbooks? In Polanyi’s terms, the problem is that refusal to acknowledge how scientific exploration depends on tacit knowledge has precluded sensitive reflection on that tacit knowledge. A science that defines itself as free from social biases is unlikely to put much effort into evaluating its inevitable social biases. (Partialist critics of impartiality-as-standpoint lament the same kind of blind spot in political theory.) Social constructionist accounts of objectivity as offered by Kuhn, Polanyi, and feminist critics encourage evaluation of tacit knowledge. These 182
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accounts of objectivity insist that communal scientific norms can avoid both the excesses of idolatrous objectivity and soppy subjectivism by providing pragmatic standards of objectivity that are continually open to revision and critique. Keller proposes that developments in quantum physics suggest a moral model for scientific objectivity. She suggests that just as quantum physics portrays a processive account of physical reality, so the intersubjectivity from which non-idolatrous objectivity arises should be viewed processively: Of particular interest among recent developments within science is the growing interest among physicists of a process description of reality—a move inspired by, perhaps even necessitated, by quantum mechanics. In these descriptions, object reality acquires a dynamic character, akin to the more fluid concept of autonomy emerging from psychoanalysis. (1985, 93)
Keller tantalizingly posits that appropriate intersubjectivity in matter at the molecular level models an appropriate intersubjectivity in human relationships, personal autonomy deriving from appropriate dynamic relation to others. By redescribing objectivity as a practice of science, contemporary philosophers of science dissolve some of the same false dichotomies that challenge accounts of political impartiality and civic virtue: objective/subjective, reason/passion, male/female, individual/community. In philosophy of science, the turn to practice and the exposition of tacit knowledge defeated the idolatrous account of objectivity while retaining a pragmatic account of objectivity. N EG OT I AT I NG T H E DI L E M M A I N C H R IS T I A N T H E OL O G Y: F ROM DISI N T E R E S T E D, SAC R I F IC I A L L OV E TO E M B ODI E D M U T UA L L OV E In an attempt to redress universalist excesses in modern Christian theology, many contemporary theologians—including liberation theologians, process theologians, feminist theologians, and others—reconsider models of love. Particularly, they reconsider the ideal of agape, commanded Christian neighbor love. Seeking to connect practical moral experience to theological exploration, these theologians look to practitioners—the God of their revelation and the saints of their traditions—to question how they cultivate great love. And their answer is: not with a “God’s-eye point of view.” Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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Just as a turn to practitioners in science challenges idolatrous conceptions of objectivity that deny the relationship between the subject who studies and the object of study, so a turn to practitioners in Christian theology challenges idolatrous conceptions of neighbor love that deny the relationship between lover and beloved. Just as philosophers of science reject a metaphysical view of objectivity in favor of a view of objectivity as practice, so contemporary theologians reject a metaphysical view of love in favor of a view of love as practice. Just as philosophers of science expose the emotional commitment of great scientists, contemporary theologians expose the emotional commitment of great lovers. Just as philosophers of science expose gender distortions in idolatrous conceptions of objectivity, so contemporary theologians expose gender distortions in idolatrous conceptions of love. And just as negotiations of the dilemma of objectivity among scientists may be important for nonscientists to consider, so too negotiations of the dilemma of love among theologians may be important for non-Christians to consider. Since the dilemma influences secular political theory, so too might its resolution. Looking to divine and saintly practitioners, reconstructive theologians depict a complex relationship among love of self, love of particular others, love of broader community, and love of perceived divinity. They move from an interpretation of a passionate, incarnational God, who is constituted by relational mutuality, to a view of agape that revalues selflove, erotic love, and love of particular others. Like many of their premodern forebears, these theologians perceive the challenge of agape to be the integration of various loves, rather than the categorical elevation of some loves over others. However, their comprehensive view of love is not simply a return to premodern sources. A contemporary sensitivity to gender issues as well as a commitment to reflection on moral experience guides their selective retrieval and creative reworking of biblical, doctrinal, and historical sources. Ethical norms that flow from their revised conception of God challenge conceptual dichotomies that lie at the root of modern “antagonistic” interpretations of agape: contrasts between reason and emotion, between erotic love and commanded love, between love for particular others and love for neighbor in general, between love and justice. This challenge is dramatically evident in some of the titles of this literature: Our Passion for Justice (Carter Heyward, 1984), A Passion for Friends (Janice Raymond, 184 · Resolving the Dilemma
1986), Fierce Tenderness (Mary Hunt, 1994), Friends of God and Prophets (Elizabeth Johnson, 1998), Choosing to Feel (Diana Fritz Cates, 1997), Sensuous Spirituality (Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, 1992), Eros for the Other (Wendy Farley, 1996). Significantly, the dichotomies challenged are the same ones that underlie the “standpoint” view of impartiality. “G od” v e r sus t h e I d ol at ry of L ov e Since for Christians the God of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and Christian New Testament is the ultimate standard of love, reconstructive theologians demand new looks at an old God. This God, they claim, does not suppress particular passionate loves but rather touches the world through such loves. The God they describe is not characterized by physical and emotional detachment from the world or by associated moral autonomy. Their perceived God—mysteriously internally constituted by a divine mutuality—seeks mutual relationship with the world, is incarnated in the world, and thus voluntarily renders Godself vulnerable through participation in the processes of the world. Voluntary vulnerability, rather than autonomous detachment, characterizes the loving stance of God so described. Reconstructive theologians question whether a God who had a “chosen people” and one “beloved son” is best portrayed as a detached judge who suppresses particular intimacies in order to love the whole. They reexplore connections between Israel’s and Jesus’ special chosenness and the universal overflow of God’s love in the Christian story. In the scriptural narrative, God’s special loves, not suppression of them, become vehicles for divine grace. Contemporary South and Central American liberation theologians stress God’s special love for the enslaved in the exodus narrative and Jesus’ special love for the poor in the New Testament gospels. They translate this into a political cry for Christians to exercise a “preferential option for the poor.”2 To live this option demands a certain form of social practice, which liberation theologians label “praxis.” Praxis connotes a dialectic between theory (whether biblical narrative or relevant secular theory such as Marxism) and practice.3 Liberation praxis demands that lived experience, including experiences of inequality and oppression, inform biblical interpretation, and that biblical interpretation inform practical social Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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life. Feminist and ecologically oriented liberation theologians broaden understandings of oppression by extending the liberation paradigm to women and to the earth itself, considering both oppressed and in need of freeing.4 Jesus’ particular associations have also received new scrutiny. For example, contemporary Protestant theologian Sallie McFague (1987) moves from the specific associations of Jesus in the biblical narrative to a theology of radical inclusiveness. For McFague, Jesus’ particular care for particular others was constituted by hospitality to the marginalized: table fellowship offered to the tax collector, the poor, the prostitute. Jesus, according to McFague, embodies God’s care as metaphorical mother, lover, and friend. From the particularities of Jesus’ care to particular others, including the outcasts of his day, one can surmise that God calls people to a radical inclusiveness in their own community. McFague’s use of the metaphors “mother, lover, and friend” to describe divinely inclusive love dramatically challenges antagonistic conceptions of agape, and highlights the extent to which the God of Christian narrative engages in ethical work now culturally coded feminine. Reconstructive theologians question whether the special loves of God or Jesus can be appropriately characterized as “disinterested.” The scriptural God is often very interested in the beloved—in both senses of the term disdained by antagonistic interpreters of agape. God may be interested in the particular qualities of the beloved. Although the narrative gives no reason why God chose Israel, after making that choice, God cares passionately that the Israelites reject idolatry and that they be just. Moreover, God clearly desires a return of divinely offered love. God expects the chosen’s proper response to divine liberation to be covenantal commitment to God, including worship of God. God even becomes angry when that response is not forthcoming. Reconstructive theologians emphasize that divine passion as well as divine reason are integral to “God,” who transcends the dichotomous portrayal of reason and emotion in modern ethics.5 Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza is one of many scholars who, on biblical grounds, contest equations of “God” with “Reason.” She emphasizes the feminine gendering of “Sophia,” divine “wisdom” pervading the world, in the Hebrew Bible. Given cultural associations between women and emotionality in both biblical and contemporary times, Schussler Fiorenza claims this gendering 186
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inherently challenges a dichotomous view that would contrast divine wisdom to passion, or even divine masculinity to femininity. Schussler Fiorenza is intrigued by early Christian interpretations of Jesus as the incarnation of Sophia. Such interpretations etymologically linked God’s divine “reason” with Jesus’ “passion,” a traditional term for Jesus’ ordeal at crucifixion.6 Catholic theologians have been at the forefront of a Trinitarian revival, re-exploring the doctrine of the Trinity to highlight the emotional affectivity and mutual flow of energy internally constitutive of a triune God. A God thus described is ontologically incapable of “detachment.” Elizabeth Johnson reclaims Trinitarian metaphors in order to stress relationality as the fundamental mystery of God. Through incarnation and grace (the second and third “persons” of the traditional metaphor of trinity), claims Johnson, God the giver becomes God the gift. Only because God is internally constituted by living relationality can God communicate God’s own being to creatures, what Johnson refers to as “radical proximity” (1998, 197–211). Quoting liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, Johnson exclaims: “In the beginning was communion!” (208). Communion cannot be reduced to an Archimedean point. So-called process theologians also emphasize the ongoing creation of self inherent to a God in relationship with creation. Building on the foundational work of Alfred North Whitehead (who coined the term “process theology” in the 1920s) and Teilhard de Chardin, process theologians describe all reality as a process.7 They suggest that metaphysics—explanation of ultimate reality—must focus on process rather than ideal forms or principles, since only change is constant in the world. Process, in the physical and cultural world, is always complex, evolving, and characterized by patterns that define relative stability even though nothing is permanently stable. While the Enlightenment theologians who trumpeted disinterested love were influenced by the scientific ethos of Newtonian physics and Baconian biology, contemporary process theologians are humbled by evolutionary theory. If all reality is process, they reason, then God can be real, and can be really transformative, only if God, too, is at least partially constituted by a process. For process theologians, God is acted upon by the world as well as vice versa. God participates in the world, influencing it through the persuasion of love, but not determinatively. As with any other complex interactive process, no causal agent completely controls Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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the process. “The character of the world is influenced by God, but it is not determined by him, and the world in its turn contributes novelty and richness to the divine experience.”8 In effect, process theologians seek to answer classic Christian questions about how or why God gave humans free will, or why there is evil in a world created by a good God, through metaphors of process from contemporary science. Since love structurally requires intersubjectivity, God’s love for the world renders God vulnerable to and interdependent with the world, rather than autonomous and independent. It renders God “the great companion,” “the fellow-sufferer who understands” (Whitehead 1929, 97). Process theology centrally challenges the view of God from which the metaphor of a “God’s eye point-of-view” derived.9 The God of process theology is defined by temporal participation in the world rather than by spatial detachment from the world. God’s compassion for the world entails a voluntary vulnerability to the world and a willingness to act in the world through loving persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians join a chorus of others who renew attention to Christian conceptions of God’s “incarnation.” These otherwise varied thinkers all consider what it means to see the world itself as an (incomplete) embodiment of God’s creativity and Jesus as an incarnation of God. For them, God’s desire for embodiment in order to relate to the world— not a perceived “bodylessness”—testifies to God’s great love. As Christine Gudorf writes: The anti-body, anti-sexual attitudes which have predominated through most of Christian history are at curious odds with Christian insistence that Jesus Christ was fully human, born of a human mother, suffered bodily pain and death, and was bodily resurrected. One would expect that Christians, compared to other world religions, would be clearest about the goodness of the body and most accepting of embodied expressions of love. (1994, 11)
Appreciation for God’s incarnation may be the foundation of Christian sacramental practice, argues Susan Ross, since that practice symbolizes the potential for divine revelation in and through the physical world (1993, 1998). An incarnational understanding of God may condemn environmental exploitation that is hard to identify as sin in contexts that conceptually pit the physical against the spiritual. Thus Sallie McFague argues that, in an age of environmental crisis, “Christianity’s most distinctive belief,” that 188 · Resolving the Dilemma
“divine reality is always mediated through the world,” demands that the Chalcedonian formula expressing Jesus as fully divine and fully human must be “appropriately radicalized” so that “the mediation . . . is expanded to include the whole cosmos” (1993, 134). An emphasis on incarnate God renders God’s love an embodied, rather than a disembodied, moral example for these theologians. From (R e)n ew(ed) U n de r sta n di ngs of G od to (R e)n ew(ed) H u m a n mode l s Moving from their renewed understandings of God to renewed models for human ethics, contemporary theologians move from an incarnate God, to an embodied human ethic; from a God who loves Godself in Trinitarian mystery, to a view of appropriate human self-love; from a God who loves the world through processive participation, to a view of human love as a responsive practice; from a God who touches the world through particular fierce attachments, to a renewed appreciation for human erotic love, friendship, and parental love. They move from a God constituted by mutuality and desirous of mutuality with the world, to an endorsement of mutuality as the norm for human love. In so doing, they radically question the celebration of sacrifice that remains entrenched in much modern theology and that continues to distort understandings of civic virtue. An Incarnational God: An Embodied Ethic Corresponding to their emphasis on the incarnation of God, reconstructive theologians emphasize the importance of embodiment to human ethical knowledge. People know what they know, including what they know ethically, only through the experience of their bodies. They also learn through the care of the uniquely embodied beings of those they love. In contemporary theology, portrayals of the challenge of love as “spirit versus flesh” are increasingly viewed as a failure to appreciate not only the human condition but also God’s incarnational drive. At the same time, rigid “physicalism” of the kind that defines cultural gender roles by bodily function is also rejected. Correspondingly, the social formation of the body is recognized.10 In the words of Lisa Sowle Cahill: Current interest in the body seems to take one of two directions: affirmation of the body as constitutive of personhood or deconstruction of the Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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body as produced by social discourse. Different as those two streams seem, both flow from the Enlightenment, and their courses may not lie far apart. Both react against Enlightenment reason as universal and abstract; and against the modern scientific ideal of control over nature, including the body. Those who insist that the body is the environment of the mind—that embodiedness is constitutive of human consciousness—are correcting a tendency to see thought in ahistorical, and morality in intellectualistic or voluntaristic terms. (1996, 73)
To avoid excesses of both spirit/flesh dualism or narrow physicalism, theologians focus on the role of the body in relationship: the body as intrinsic mediator of self- or other-knowledge, even if the body does not completely define self or other. Cahill refers to this as attention to “the body—in context.”11 Self-love as a Positive Challenge A theological understanding of the body as a site of revelation and transformation, combined with an interpretation of God as self-loving through the mystery of Trinity, leads contemporary theologians to question negative interpretations of self-love. Rather than interpreting the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself as a condemnation of self-love, they interpret it as validating appropriate self-love, which then must be extended to others.12 While theologians who take sacrifice to be definitive of agape presume self-love is a given, reconstructive theologians recognize self-love as an accomplishment. In theological terms, self-love may be a response to felt receipt of God’s love; conversely, an adequately strong self-identity may be necessary to have any personal relationship with God. In human terms, appropriate self-love may be particularly challenging for people who have suffered abusive childhoods, who find themselves socially defined by their care for others, or who are oppressed by racism, sexism, or class dynamics. In a classic article that pioneered gender considerations in Christian theology a generation ago, Valerie Saiving Goldstein questions whether the sin of self-diffuseness, as opposed to the sin of excessive self-assertiveness, might be more typical of women than of men. For the temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptation of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms of sin— “feminine” not because they are confined to women or because women are incapable of sinning in other ways but because they are outgrowths 190
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of the basic feminine character structure—have a quality that can never be encompassed by terms such as “pride” and “will to power.” They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence. (1960, 108–109)
Contemporary feminist theologians question the gender essentialism in Saiving Goldstein’s account (“basic feminine character structure”), while nonetheless applauding her perception of gendered patterns of sin. Even if the gendered patterns result from complex socialization, they remain evident. Saiving Goldstein emphasizes that notions of sin and love are logically correlative. Thus she worries about colonialism of “masculinist” pairings of sin and love in Christianity. That colonialism ensures that people with feminine patterns called to “repent” (to sacrifice more, to be more humble) are actually having their particular character weaknesses reinforced by the tradition—which makes it easier for those with masculine sinning patterns to sin against them! (For a worst case scenario, imagine the battered wife listening to a Sunday sermon praising as model Christians those willing to give without thought of return, even of their own bodies.) For many people, disproportionately women, true repentance may mean less willingness to sacrifice and more shoring up of their own “organizing center.” The Rehabilitation of Erotic Love A relational and processive view of God challenges the contrast between agape and erotic love and the associated conceptual dichotomy between reason and passion that has developed in modernity. Numerous contemporary theologians highlight saints of Christian history who idealize an integration of, rather than an antagonism between, such loves. For example, several feminist theologians explore medieval female mystics, noting the erotic terms in which they understood their relationship to God. For the mystics, it was often their passionately felt—indeed, even sexually charged—love of God that led them to open themselves to a wide variety of others.13 While some critical theologians look to past saints for passionate models of love, others articulate visions for present-day saints-with-small-s. Episcopal priest Carter Heyward considers passion for justice—a drive Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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toward and from God—erotic in its desirousness. She quotes poet Adrienne Rich, “Till now we had not touched our strength,” to propose that an increased comfort with human touching is a necessary prerequisite to quests for justice (1984, 123).14 Heyward correlates inappropriate repression of emotional and physical tenderness among particular intimates with inappropriate social repression such as racism and sexism (conversely, with inappropriate acceptance of such injustices). Both kinds of repression, from her perspective, deny the incarnational understanding of love that she considers the core of Christianity. Without passion, one cannot have passion for justice. Numerous feminist theologians argue that friendship and virtually all personal loves—including nonsexual ones—have an erotic dimension. This is true because one desires the friend or beloved as a person rather than merely admiring certain traits of the person.15 Desire for the person may, however, demand that one explore new ethical terrains just because they are important to the person desired. Particular Loves as Schools for Wider Loves Passion for particular others may be a necessary starting point to discern moral truths, distinguishing them from personal subjectivity. Wendy Farley posits “eros for the other” as the key to retaining truth in a pluralistic world. Following Iris Murdoch’s formulation of truth itself as a practice, Farley claims that “the struggle for truth requires a practice or practices that order one toward others in their unique beauty and suffering, practices that permit the exteriority of reality to be acknowledged. Only when this exteriority is acknowledged can one begin to enter into truthful relationship to others” (1996, 190). Thus, just as for Polanyi it is the personal commitment of the scientist to the practice of science that allows objectivity to emerge, so for Farley it is the practice of eros, love for particular unique others, that allows larger contours of reality to emerge. For her, love for a unique other is not “selfish” (Kierkegaard’s formulation), but rather it is key to the revelation of world beyond self. In general, reconstructive theologians hark back to fourth-century St. Augustine’s consideration of special relationships as both gifts from God and schools for wider loves.16 They emphasize connections between special loves and the commanded love of neighbor-qua-neighbor, reacting 192
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against the “idolatrous” view that would define those loves in contrast to each other. Questioning what makes a saint a saint, they answer that often it is the ability to cultivate broad loves from highly personal sprouts, inspiring the outward expansion of community. This practiced expansion begins in the embodied uniqueness of the saint and reverberates through an appreciation of others’ embodied uniqueness. Friendship with, Not against, God Elizabeth Johnson (1992), reviving the metaphor of a “communion of saints,” claims that what makes a saint a saint is literally friendship expanded. The friendship of saintly communion begins with friendship for particular others, which includes memory of deceased particular others. This allows the love of even those whose names have been erased by history or patriarchy to live on in communal memory. Ultimately, such friendship can cross distance and time, resulting in a full “communion of saints” sharing friendship with each other and with God. In general, the razing of a stark wall between intimate and agapic loves paves the way for new theological investigations of personal loves such as friendship and parenting. Since both friendship and parenting have been (questionably) feminized in modern Christianity, in contrast to the (hard, masculine?) love of the stranger-neighbor, these examples also suggest how theological conceptions of love-as-practice can combat gender distortions in idolatrous conceptions of love. Rejecting the modern Christian polemic against friendship, numerous contemporary theologians investigate the linchpin role that friendship plays in moral community. Gilbert Meilaender helpfully summarizes the modern contrasts between friendship and agape that contemporary theologians question or render more complex: Philia [friendship] is clearly a preferential bond in which we are drawn by what is attractive or noteworthy in the friend; agape is to be nonpreferential, like the love of the Father in heaven who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). Philia is, in addition, a mutual bond, marked by the inner reciprocities of love; agape is to be shown even to the enemy, who, of course, can not be expected to return such love. Philia is recognized to be subject to change; agape is to be characterized by the same fidelity which God shows his covenant. Philia was the noblest thing in all the world in an age in which
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“civic friendship” was a widely shared ideal; agape has dominated our understanding of love in a world in which the sphere of politics has been desacralized by the search of a restless heart for a suprahistorical resting place in God. Philia was the pre-eminent bond in a world in which work was of relatively little personal significance; agape helped shape a world in which vocation was seen as a supremely important form of service to the neighbor. (1981, 3)
Some contemporary critics argue that these dichotomies are false; others— such as Meilaender himself—argue that the tensions may be ethically creative rather than vicious. Among theologians renewing friendship as a moral category, some revive Thomas Aquinas’s notion of friendship with God, a moral ideal that envisions the possibility of friendship crossing power boundaries.17 Others investigate the role of friendship in traditions of spiritual friendship that flourished in medieval monastic communities.18 Many stress the emotional education that friendship uniquely affords, and thus its transformative power. Indeed, at least one refers to friendship as a “sacrament” (Hunt 1994). Others celebrate the power of friendship to unite the marginalized and enable new kinds of communities.19 Such outward reverberation of friendship from personal starting points can embolden a “theology of risk,” Protestant theologian Sharon Welch’s phrase for the quest for justice that begins in personal friendship or vicarious friendship through literature (1990). A theology of risk demands identification with the underside. Welch developed a theology of risk in response to racial injustice after being touched by personal friendships with African American women and the power of African American literature (she herself is an economically privileged white woman). Welch not only celebrates the potential of friendship to unite the marginalized but also to connect the marginalized to the privileged. She thus challenges the assumption of idolatrous impartiality that all political “interest groups” are interest groups in the negative sense of that term. All positive transformative social movements must begin as befriended “interest groups.” These theological explorations challenge conceptions of friendship as chosen and preferential, instead emphasizing the extent to which friendship may be experienced as an unchosen gift that points one in surprising new spiritual directions. The Christian theological revival of friendship may have important political ramifications: classical notions of civic virtue 194
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thrived when friendship was considered the foundation of the political state. Similarly, civic virtue became incoherent when friendship became defined as irrelevant to political life. Parenting: Erotic Parental Friendship with Children Recent theological work on parenting also exemplifies a view of love that is more organic than antagonistic conceptions of agape, yet not naive about the reality of parental sin. Theological conversationalists celebrate the appropriately restrained eroticism of parenting, the sensuous enjoyment of physical contact with one’s child (Traina 1998); propose friendship as a relevant moral norm for parenting (Cates 1997); elaborate general lessons about love taught by young children to their parents, including joy in the present and resistance to commodification (Miller-McLemore 1991); and argue that both biological and “social” motherhood enable the survival of oppressed communities (Eugene 1989; D. Williams 1993). Yet each of these conversationalists describes how their articulation of parental love provides standards of critique for distorted parent-child relationships as well. (In the next chapter, I integrate structural, as opposed to thickly theological, points from this literature with secular literature in an extended example of the analogical interplay between parenting and politics.) Call to Covenant Rather than emphasizing how neighbor love is categorically different from intimate loves, all these theologians consider what links such loves. One result is the revival of so-called “covenantal ethics.” Advocates of covenantal ethics argue that all human ethics should be modeled on God’s call to covenant. Using the Exodus story of God’s covenant at Sinai as structural foundation, William May outlines four features of covenantal bonds: The primary religious covenant includes . . . first, an original gift between the soon-to-be-covenanted partners (the deliverance of the people from Egypt); second, a promise based on the original or anticipated gift (the vows at Mt. Sinai). These two aspects of covenant, taken together, alter the being of the covenanted people (God “marks the forehead” of the Jews forever) so that fidelity to the covenant defines their subsequent life. Third, the covenanted people accept an inclusive set of ritual and moral Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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obligations by which they will live. These commands are both specific enough to make the future duties to Israel concrete . . . , yet summary enough to require fidelity to intent as well as to the letter. (1983, 108–109)
These features contrast to contractual obligations in significant ways: Contract and covenant, materially considered, appear to be first cousins; they both concern an agreement and exchange between parties. But in spirit, contract and covenant differ markedly. Contracts are external; covenants are internal to the people involved. . . . The notion of contract suppresses the gift element in human relationships. [T]he contractualist approach tends to reduce . . . obligation to self-interested minimalism. . . . Contracts cut deeper into personal integrity. A contract has limited duration, but the religious covenant imposes change on all moments. . . . Covenants also have a gratuitous, growing edge to them that springs from this ontological change and builds relationships. (118–20)
In short, the indebtedness of covenantal commitment renders it more open-ended and transformative than contractual obligation. The theological stress on covenant implies limits to social contract theory as a foundation of political life, challenging the entrenched marriage between social contract theory and domesticity. Whereas a strong emphasis on contract as the basis of political ethics necessarily obscures the political relevance of non-contractual human relationships such as erotic love, friendship, or parent-child relationships, a covenantal emphasis suggests that all these realms of relationship should be linked by the structure of covenantal commitment itself. Renewers of covenant explore constructive ethical ramifications of that metaphor for personal commitments such as marriage, professional relationships, or communal relationships more generally.20 At the same time, they recognize limits to the metaphor. The biblical God-Israel relationship on which covenant is modeled is certainly not an egalitarian one, and the God of the story, no less than the Israelites, has flighty moments—which on God’s side can result in punishing jealousy. Few have voiced concern for covenantal metaphors as explicitly as religious critics of domestic violence, who worry that ideals of permanence associated with covenant may press women to remain in abusive relationships.21 Yet selectively reconstructive theologians emphasize the call to mutuality at the heart of covenant and suggest that the “down side” of covenantal motifs may be a severable connection to excessive sacrificial ideals. 196
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Mutuality, Not Sacrifice, as a Criterion of Love All the theologians who turn to practice share a stress on the ethical importance of mutual love. Since they interpret God to model mutual love, amid Godself and in relation to the world, mutuality becomes their ultimate norm for all kinds of love. In effect, they consider mutuality the internal end of the practice of love. They recognize the experience of receiving love as well as giving love to be crucial for moral formation and argue that appropriate “give and take” in certain kinds of relationships are important bases for the development of appropriate mutuality in other kinds of relationship. By resisting a dichotomy between intimate loves and agape, and by emphasizing mutuality as the internal end of the practice of love, reconstructive theologians radically challenge both the equation of sacrifice and love that infects modern interpretations of civic virtue and the associated dichotomy between love and justice that has become institutionalized in political life. They insist that even the ethical value of sacrifice should be judged against a norm of mutuality. They imply that there may be an appropriate conceptual “mutuality” between love and justice. Christine Gudorf elegantly encapsulates the shift in emphasis that makes sacrifice something to be justified rather than celebrated. Gudorf reflects on her experience as the adoptive parent of profoundly ill and handicapped boys to critique the influential theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. She cannot make sense either of the view that agape is disinterested and sacrificial or of the proposal that such agape properly motivates lesser mutual loves. In her case, it was the passionate desire for mutuality with her sons that allowed her to make the sacrifices necessary for their care, sacrifices that ultimately enabled mutuality with them. In Gudorf’s lived experience, mutuality was really the motivator for and the result of sacrifice, not vice versa (1985, 191). Theologians who challenge the equation of love and sacrifice raise again one of the most basic questions of Christian theology: Why did Jesus die, willingly according to Christian belief? Not, they answer, in order to celebrate sacrifice per se. Rather, they situate Jesus’ self-sacrifice in the context of a quest for relational mutuality between God and humanity. For them, what made Jesus great was not his sacrifice itself but rather its faithful purposefulness. Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself to maintain human-God bonds—not because sacrifice is good, but because those bonds Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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are good. According to feminist theologians, to lose sight of that purposefulness is wrongly to render Jesus a masochist.22 The Christian paradigm of love-as-sacrifice that participates in modern ironies of civic virtue is increasingly challenged by critics within the Christian tradition itself. Mutuality between Love and Justice? Contemporary reconstructive theology resists the dichotomy of love and justice embedded in domesticity and the extreme sacrificial ideal on which it depends. Thus, reconstructive theology faces a metaphorical challenge: what ways of speaking express a more appropriately complex relationship between love and justice? Emerging from this literature is a promising conception of a dynamic, dialectical relationship. The turn to practitioners that challenges dichotomous portrayals also warns against simply equating love and justice. That equation is the central feature of Joseph Fletcher’s account of “situation ethics” (1966). Fletcher’s equation of love and justice results in an act-utilitarian interpretation of the love command: in any situation, act to maximize benefit to those affected by the case. This approach to love affords no perspective for critique of institutions, agents, social conventions, or other factors beyond the case level. The contemporary re-evaluation of agape renders the term deliberately ambiguous—in Stephen Pope’s terms, deliberately inclusive (1997). It includes both love of particular others and broad neighbor love. What both kinds of love share is commitment to persons as such. But simple equation of such multivalent love with justice inevitably downplays either the uniqueness of a beloved individual (and thus the potential for individual uniqueness to inform conceptions of justice), or the universal features of justice that might offer critical norms for personal as well as public loves. It inevitably confuses the commitment to persons that fuels agape at all levels with ethical principles that support such love, erasing the critical tension between them that allows for ongoing ethical analysis and revision. An equation conceptually disallows what practitioners actually accomplish: a polar mutual informing between the uniqueness of love and the generality of justice. Several twentieth-century American theological giants provide resources for constructive metaphorical play, while the “turn to practice” itself provides a critical prism for theologians to evaluate them. While Reinhold Niebuhr (1964) ultimately places “love” outside human history, thus 198
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fracturing rather than facilitating moral critique, his relational metaphors suggest more positive formulations than he accomplishes. He helpfully uses the language of “dialectic” in his description of love and justice. He also creatively employs two-way algebraic metaphors in which love pushes toward the unreachable asymptote of agape, while justice “approximates” or “approaches” love. Paul Ramsey’s metaphors of love “transforming” or “pushing” justice (1962) elegantly capture one vector in the dialectic of love and justice, but fail to note the reverse motion. Yet the reverse direction is implied in several of Ramsey’s foci, including his heavily deontological circumscription of covenantal love for dependents or vulnerables—classes for which he demonstrates special interest. For Ramsey, there are some things you can never do to another, even out of loving motivations. (For example, he does not think parents can ethically consent to non-therapeutic medical research on their children.) As Ramsey’s own work often suggests, although his metaphors do not, sometimes justice pushes love.23 In revelation history, this is reflected in the continual linkage of calls to justice and to the covenant. Justice to one another structures love for each other, and for God. Emile Brunner (1937) goes too far the other way. In relegating love to the “interstices” of justice, he denies that love can and ought to mold public institutions. His construction inadequately challenges domesticity. Love’s role in public is limited because it is out of the private domain to which domesticity assigns it. (Presumably Brunner does not want love only in the “interstices” of home life, though one might also worry whether justice is relegated to the interstices there.) Timothy Jackson’s recently coined metaphor, “the priority of love” over justice (2003), responds eloquently to the weaknesses of Brunner’s theological view and also to the overemphasis on procedural justice in Rawlsian liberalism. But ultimately it too is a problematically one-way metaphor. Paul Tillich’s proposal in Love, Power, and Justice (1954), that love and justice are united in a dynamic polar relationship, is a particularly promising description. It maintains a critical tension between the pull of particularity in special loves and the general norms of love that derive from many experiences of loving, so that the two can be mutually informative. This conceptual “yin-yang” recognizes that love and justice are necessarily in a continuously transforming polar relationship whose dynamism nonetheless tends toward a (reflective?) equilibrium. Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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Like Polanyi’s polarity between the personal commitment of the scientist and the universal intent of the scientific community, a polarity between love and justice allows them to transform each other continuously—in ways that are obstructed either by a rigid dichotomy between the two or by the collapse of the two into one category. T h e Secu l a r R e l eva nce of Ch r ist i a n T h e ol o gic a l R e-i n t e r pr etat ion of L ov e Christian re-interpretation of love is highly relevant, though not directly transferable, to secular conversations about the relationship between justice and care. Secular “care” is not the same thing as Christian love. “Ethics of care” are generally interpreted in terms of caring for particular others. Christians interpret love as commanded neighbor love, with internal disagreement about whether that is an extension of particular love (care) or different in kind. Yet to the extent that agape, regardless how interpreted, entails commitments to persons rather than to norms or institutions, crude comparisons are suggestive. Disdain for dependence, a fear of emotional life, and a resentment of the vulnerability entailed by attaching oneself to unique and irreplaceable others underlie both the rejection of love as a norm for political life in Christian theology and the political devaluation of care in secular ethics. Since, historically, those two excesses are thickly related, perhaps their redresses might be as well. Of course, in a multicultural policy one would not wish to replace a religious ideal cloaked in secular veil with another thickly religious ideal. But given their shared commitment to integrate moral experience with theological thinking, the re-interpreters’ view of love may be more anthropologically based and less uniquely dependent on religious justification than the sacrificial ideal currently governing conceptions of civic virtue. It is a natural law view, not a divine-law-against-nature view.24 While it is difficult, absent religious ideals, to explain why radical sacrifice is necessarily a good thing, many people of diverse backgrounds have experiences of mutuality, or the lack thereof, in various kinds of relationships. Many draw on those experiences to articulate their views of healthy or unhealthy relationships, or their sense of personal transformation, or their sense of political purpose. The challenge of maintaining appropriately mutual relationships or the frustration of enduring non-mutual ones could be morally informative, whether one believes in a god-constituted200
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by-mutuality or any god at all. Not only saints may have their sense of themselves or their community challenged by an unexpected friendship or by the needs of their children. And even saints should not be required to forcibly separate those moral challenges from their political life.
T U R N I NG TO PR AC T I T ION E R S: T H E PROM ISE FOR POL I T IC A L T H EORY A turn to practice provides parallel resolutions of the dilemma of objectivity in science and the dilemma of love in Christian theology. Such a turn to practice may also provide a resolution for the dilemma of impartiality in political theory. This is true for several reasons. First, while the idolatrous ideal of political impartiality has come under harsh attack from numerous parties for a generation, the move to considering practitioners seems puzzlingly underdeveloped. Second, just as science has bypassed a subjective/ objective dichotomy while retaining a sense of objectivity as pragmatic scientific standards, and just as Christian theology has re-understood love in terms that bypass a dichotomy between neighbor love and intimate love, what seems called for is a conception of impartiality as critical fair-mindedness that bypasses a dichotomy between public and private. Third, just as the resolutions in science and Christian theology have clarified the necessary role of emotional commitment in objective science or in agapic loving, so too we need a conception of impartiality that acknowledges the emotional commitment necessary to citizenly critical fair-mindedness. Finally, there is an important distinction to be made between theorizing about practice and practice itself. Decades after the Kuhnian revolution, many scientists continue to believe their science investigates the world-as-it-is, unmediated by human beliefs. That is, they continue to act upon an idolatrous conception of objectivity. Similarly, in the midst of radical reinterpretation in Christian theology, many clerics or lay believers continue to talk about perfect love as both dispassionate and radically sacrificing. In other words, they continue to act upon an idolatrous conception of love. Even critics who have helped resolve the dilemmas may find themselves unreflectively slipping into linguistic or conceptual patterns indebted to the idolatrous view. That, I argued in earlier chapters, is evident Saving the Baby from the Bathwater
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in the conversation on civic virtue. Even theorists who have explicitly rejected the idolatrous view of impartiality unreflectively incorporate it into their conception of civic virtue. Looking to practitioners, then, must be not only a strategy to jolt us out of a conceptual dilemma but also a way of redirecting our actual politics so that rejected ideals do not survive unrecognized in actual discourse and practice.
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6
IMPARTIALITY-AS-PRACTICE: THE LESSON OF ORDINARY MORAL HEROES
We have seen the structural parallelism between the dilemma of objectivity in science, the dilemma of love in Christian theology, and the dilemma of impartiality in political theory. In each case, a central ideal of the tradition came to be viewed as a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” ideal. Science and Christian theology have resolved their dilemmas by turning to the observation of practitioners to articulate pragmatic ideals of objectivity and love rather than trying to elaborate metaphysical definitions of those ideals. I propose that political ethics could benefit from imitating the resolution of the other two traditions. What positive reclamations of “impartiality” might result if we look to practitioners? What practitioners can we identify who seem to be capturing the intuitive good of impartiality as critical fair-mindedness, while avoiding idolatry? Can we articulate the internal goods of their practice that might be the “baby,” rather than the “bathwater,” of impartiality? A striking irony is immediately apparent when this project is undertaken as a constructive challenge. In philosophical circles, the concept of impartiality is under concerted attack, but in everyday life people continue to appeal to some commonsensical notion of impartiality and to assume its coherence. The coherence of lay notions of impartiality is particularly clear if we consider perceived failures of impartiality. In everyday life, parents with an obvious favorite child, teachers with an obvious pet, T-ball coaches 203
who give some teammates far more playing time than others, the bride who chooses only three of a group of four close friends to be bridesmaids because the fourth is not very pretty, are all widely criticized for a failure to be impartial. Is it possible to articulate the inverse positive ideal implied in such recognized failures? If one strives for such articulation, the flaw of the stranger-versusloved-one cases is clarified by contrast. The practitioners of impartiality that we can most readily observe are the ordinary moral heroes of our lives—good parents, teachers, coaches, friends. In everyday cases of parents who appropriately arbitrate attention among multiple children, teachers who appropriately arbitrate attention and encouragement among students, and friends who arbitrate energies among friends, the moral accomplishment is decidedly not a Solomonic resolution of SVLO tensions. It is the attainment of critical fair-mindedness among passionate loves. Might that moral accomplishment—what I call “personal impartiality”— be a first step toward the attainment of fair-mindedness among strangers? Could it be the “tacit knowledge” that underlies all wider senses of impartiality? How might its accomplishment by ordinary heroes in their personal lives suggest political ideals of impartiality that could arbitrate relationships among strangers? While even young children understand ideals of personal impartiality—such as when they whisper “teacher’s pet” under their breath—philosophers and political theorists fail to see that impartiality is at stake in such judgments because they have defined impartiality as irrelevant to personal realms. Significantly, those realms are the ones in which young future citizens will first be formed morally.
OR DI NA RY MOR A L H E ROE S: FOU R C ON T R A S T S T O T H E S V L O C A SE S The paradox of ordinary moral heroes makes them the ideal starting point for reconsidering impartiality. They are ordinary because we may encounter them in daily life. They are heroes because they inspire us in profound ways. They provide lifelong, pervasive influences on one’s worldview. They are, in fact, the starting point for moral education of the citizen. Before a citizen can read about Archimedean points or debate what constitutes appropriate public justification, she learns from ordinary moral heroes 204
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what it means to listen attentively, to deliberate choices, to arbitrate and negotiate tensions, and to be fair. Certainly, one of the great oddities of conventional accounts of impartiality is that they ignore how one could ever learn to be impartial—how one could grow from being a child to being a citizen. In the words of Margaret Urban Walker, what seems called for but curiously absent in philosophical discussions of impartiality is a “moral pragmatics”: “A moral ideal needs an implementation, a way of bringing it into contact with actual possibilities and practices of moral reflection and argument. . . . Yet philosophical discussions of impartial thinking seem lax, where not actually reductive, with respect to this” (1991, 759). Ordinary moral heroes press the promising direction that crosscuts otherwise diverse recent scholarship on impartiality, the move toward a processive account. The conception of impartiality that can be teased from observation of practitioners differs from that of the stranger-versus-lovedone cases in four crucial ways: (1) whereas the SVLO cases conflate impartiality and impersonality, ordinary moral heroes demonstrate that impartiality is not the same thing as impersonality; (2) whereas the SVLO cases suggest that impartiality demands the removal of all biases, ordinary moral heroes prove it demands only the removal of inappropriate biases; (3) whereas the SVLO cases insist that impartiality give equal attention to all, ordinary moral heroes suggest that impartiality requires adequate attention to each; and (4) whereas the lineage of the SVLO cases portrays impartiality as a standpoint, ordinary moral heroes prove that it is better understood as a disciplined moral practice. Each of these contrasts deserves further elaboration. I m pa rt i a l i t y I s No t I m pe r s ona l i t y An improved conception of impartiality must counteract the tendency to equate the “impartial” with the “impersonal.” That conflation wrongly insulates personal relationships from criticism based on general impartial norms, or even based on some less universalizable form of appropriate impartiality. It also wrongly assumes that one’s personal loves afford no relevant perspective on generalized impersonal norms. Both errors are strikingly counterintuitive to caretakers who demonstrate critical fair-mindedness. Consider the task of child rearing. Of course parents tend to be partial to their own children. Moreover, parents may Impartiality-as-Practice
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show appropriate partiality to one of their several children in response to that child’s needs. For example, parents may spend more time assisting the child who has a learning disability with her homework. Certainly, though, parenting multiple children demands a certain form of appropriate impartiality. Parents who have an obvious favorite among their children (one who seems capriciously favored with greater time, love, and resources than the others) are widely criticized. Both the unfavored and the favored children may suffer disproportionately to the difference in allocation. The disfavored suffers loss of self-esteem; the favored suffers by coming to expect too much for herself from the world and by becoming inured to inadequate attention to others.1 Appropriate impartiality of parents is crucial, yet obviously it is neither impersonal nor detached. It can be achieved only by the appropriate perception and consideration of particulars, for it may indeed be challenging to determine when a response to individualized needs pushes beyond needs toward negative favoritism. The baby of the family needs special attention because of her young age, but overdoing such attention will result in a spoiled child. Parental impartiality, then, demands a critical needs assessment among children. This assessment must not only identify the children’s physical, emotional, and educational needs—distinguishing those needs from less essential or over-indulgent “wants”—but also make judgments about standards of adequacy for meeting those needs.2 Such critical needs assessment is an internal end of parenting. Significantly, the highly personal impartiality for which particular parents strive seems relevant to the wider world. For example, feminists criticize the well-documented worldwide misallocation of resources between male and female children as an institutionalized form of inappropriate parental partiality, one that undergirds systematic gender-based oppression. Of course, such gendered allocations are accepted as normal in many cultural contexts, but parenting’s internal end of critical needs assessment provides grounds for critique. Honed reflection on these grounds can cut in several ways. Just as feminists in affluent countries criticize severely gendered allocations of resources among children in poorer countries, so moral commentators from poorer countries decry the dramatic difference in basic resources among children in rich and poor countries. Both kinds of critique depend, ultimately, on a recognition of parental 206
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critical needs assessment, and both presume that norms of impartiality are relevant to parenting. Friendship, too, demands a form of impartiality that remains personal, depends on critical needs assessment, and determines adequacy in the context of finitude. Impartiality is necessary both to be a good friend to the friend in need and to be a friend to more than one person. Friends seek each others’ perspective in their quest to remove distortions in their own thinking, from “Does this style really look good on me?” to “Who are you going to vote for and why?” Friends may rationalize abandonment when they suspend impartial judgment “because this is my friend.” Consider the courage to tell a friend, “I’m worried that you are drinking too much.” To claim that the underlying impartiality is personal denotes more than the close link between the drinker and her friend. It suggests something about the judgment itself. The friend’s conclusion is undoubtedly based not only on generalized norms about drinking but also on observation about how this specific person’s drinking habits have intensified and what specific negative effects have resulted in her life. Such an impartial criticism may carry special weight precisely because it is delivered by a friend. The message may be more openly considered because the receiver knows it is delivered in a caring context by someone who knows her very well and because she cannot deny the specific, personal negative consequences that the critic cites. The power of highly personal impartiality is the basis for the success of intervention techniques in substance abuse. These techniques rely on family or friends of the substance abuser, who together confront the abuser with their concerns—beseeching the abuser to recognize the problem and get help. Substance abuse is a public as well as a private problem, and intervention techniques have been integrated into a variety of drug treatment institutions and public programs. Without impartiality in personal forums, it would be impossible to have multiple friendships or group friendships. Few would not agree that it is morally acceptable to have special friends with whom one is more intimate. In fact, people suspect the genuineness of anyone who tries to be “best friend” to all. However, even intensely personal group atmospheres demand a certain impartiality. Consider a scenario in which a person lunches with two friends, one of whom is a closer friend than the other. Would we not criticize the two closer friends if the tenor of the lunch Impartiality-as-Practice
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conversation constantly raises to the fore their greater closeness—if they continually laugh at private jokes, exchange knowing glances whose referents are unknown to the third, engage in lengthy two-way exchanges in which the presence of the third becomes superfluous? Conversely, we might morally admire the two closer friends should their awareness of the third’s vulnerability prompt them to make special efforts for her inclusion. Here personal impartiality might demand partial attention to the more distant friend. Significantly, the absence of this impartially-demandedpartiality could preclude the possibility that over time the third friend might become as intimate as the others. Similar sensitivities might be demanded to encompass the possibility that a stranger could become a friend. Much can be gained through philosophical reflection on the moral adepts who are personally engaged with the people to whom they maintain critical impartiality—in Margaret Urban Walker’s words, “the close friend, loving parent, concerned teacher, perceptive advisor, gifted counselor, seasoned psychoanalyst, shrewd sociological observer, trained anthropological field worker” or even the “beloved corner bartender” (1991, 763). Lamenting the tendency of conventional models to promote a thinking for the other rather than a thinking with the other, she decries the overuse of the third person in moral philosophy. Whereas conventional moral philosophy has considered the challenge of impartiality to be moving from a first person (subjective) to third person (objective) view, Walker proposes the second person as a starting point for reflection in impartiality: The second person is a position largely neglected in moral philosophy. This shows up especially clearly in the way philosophers do talk about “taking the other’s position.” What this means typically is to construct for (by?) yourself the other’s point of view. This can take rigorous gametheoretic forms or the more usual ones of temporarily trying out somebody’s “shoes.” (These dress rehearsals are almost always described as “imaginatively” performed; it is virtually never suggested that I might concretely sample somebody’s burdens or woes.) What’s really involved is thinking for others. These round-robins of role-taking are tournaments of monological reasoning. One might not guess from the frequency of the theme of each of us “thinking for” all the others that a great deal of our best evidence about how it is with others requires talking with and listening to them. That asking, telling, repeating, mutually clarifying, mulling over, and checking back are the most dependable, accessible, and efficient devices for finding out how it is with others (a home truth for successful 208 ·
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teachers, managers, marriage counselors, spiritual advisors, and other perceptive souls) could not be guessed from reading most moral philosophy. (1991, 768)
But taking the grammatical second person seriously does not mean taking the literal second person uncritically. Significantly, “personal impartiality” does not preclude the application of generally maintained moral norms within personal relationships. In fact, it often demands just that. For example, many feminists have decried the tendency to gloss over widespread practices of marital or date rape, wife-beating, child abuse, and incest because they are “private” or “personal” matters, while the same activities are clearly labeled as crimes when committed among strangers. Theorists sensitive to the complexity of “personal impartiality” must explain a paradox: personal impartiality both recognizes unique features of intimate relationships and morally constrains the development of unique features of relationships—in accord with the ethical equivalent of scientific “universal intent.” They must explain the intuition that people have greater moral leeway with personal intimates, without granting cartes blanches to personal intimates. Marcia Baron (1991, 847–49) suggests a direction for such an explanation when she disputes John Deigh’s assertion that impartiality is an inappropriate norm for personal relationships. Deigh (1989) describes a case in which you borrow without permission the car of your roommate, a good friend, to rescue your sister who is stranded in a strange and presumably dangerous part of town. Not only does Deigh claim it is permissible to take the car, but he also claims that should your roommate later object, you would see that you were mistaken about your friendship with your roommate. A true friend should not resent your action. Baron suggests that while it might be acceptable to borrow the car, it is not because general norms regarding the use of private property do not apply or are not binding with friends. It is because you may know your roommate well enough to guess how she would negotiate the case—how she would respond if you were able to ask permission and how she would assess your inability to do so in the situation. Baron implies that different information might change the guesswork. (For example, if you knew your roommate once had a car wrecked by a friend, that knowledge might weigh against borrowing the car without permission despite the special circumstances. It might matter if the trip could be made by an inexpensive Impartiality-as-Practice
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cab ride, versus a situation where no alternative transportation is available.) In a sense, the guess is an educated guess about with what kinds of sharing the friend is comfortable. It is an acting hypothesis of a tacit agreement. Should you guess wrong, Baron rightly argues it would be downright insulting to assume that your roommate is not a good friend. Baron imagines the accused friend’s reply: It would not be so bad, if you had tried to tell me that you thought it was understood that you could use my car without first getting permission in a situation like this. I don’t think it was understood at all; but what really bothers me is your suggestion that if I believe that moral requirements or prohibitions are to be taken as seriously in our conduct vis-à-vis each other as elsewhere, then that must mean our friendship isn’t as close as you thought it was. . . . We may come to permit things of each other that we wouldn’t permit of mere acquaintances—certain kinds of teasing, some nosiness, certain requests for favors. . . . But it’s not that in any good, close friendship one can assume that any or all these things are permitted. Rather, what is permitted depends on the particular people and the particular relationship. When it is permitted, it is not simply because we’re close but because we happen to be comfortable with a particular form of sharing. (1991, 849)
Your roommate ought not be assumed a bad friend. You simply guessed wrongly about her willingness to participate in the tacit agreement. This moral error is less egregious than pretending that her agreement is not morally required because of your closeness, the implication of Deigh’s view. The former marks a misunderstanding; the latter marks the abuse of a friend. To see the folly of assuming the irrelevance of impartial norms in personal relationships, one need only imagine the roommate who constantly helps herself to all one’s personal belongings. While personal impartiality insists that general norms be respected in personal relationships, it can also call generally accepted principles into question. It may be precisely one’s close attachment to someone that brings into focus a previously unseen oppression or the moral blind spots of accepted principles and practice. For example, teachers in socioeconomically deprived areas have played a critical role by identifying cultural biases in aptitude tests. When students the teachers knew to be bright consistently did poorly on the tests, the teachers questioned the impartiality of the tests. 210
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In effect, personal impartiality is akin to Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” in the philosophy of science. It is moral knowledge that may not be recognized as such precisely because it is so foundational to the practitioner’s conscious ethical formulations. It is a starting point for further moral reflection, but it is not the actual starting point of moral experience. In fact, it is always a tentative, or intermediate, end point—based on cumulative but never complete interaction and reflection. Personal impartiality, then, is a moral skill that requires interaction with actual others over time, keen perception, appropriate consideration of general moral norms, and imaginative speculation. Certainly, anyone can intuitively recognize the moral accomplishment of the ordinary moral heroes who have cultivated personal impartiality—the good parents, teachers, therapists, and friends. Yet the wrongful equation of the impersonal and the impartial that permeates conventional political theory prevents their accomplishments from informing public life. Sundering that wrongful equation causes a spiral effect that unravels a multitude of other problematic presumptions. I m pa rt i a l i t y Se ek s t h e R e mova l , No t of A l l Bi a se s , bu t of I na ppropr i at e Bi a se s The legacy of the bishop and the chambermaid perpetuates the notion that an impartial standpoint, even if only an imaginative heuristic device, seeks to insulate the ethical or political agent from all biases. While political theorists such as Sandel (1992) articulate theoretical problems with what Thomas Nagel (1986) ironically terms “the view from nowhere,” ordinary moral heroes offer a more pragmatically embodied critique that points to constructive reformulation of the task at hand. It would be morally unfathomable to urge parents to avoid all biases toward their children, or teachers all biases toward their students! Yet, it is coherent to speak of the appropriately impartial parent or teacher. In contemporary hermeneutics, philosophy, science, and Christian theology, blanket prejudice against prejudice is being debunked without giving up on critical ideals. Whether discussed as “foregrounding” by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975), as “tacit knowledge” by Michael Polanyi (1958, 1966), or as “special loves” in Christian theology, recognition is given to the crucial epistemological role played by preconceived notions Impartiality-as-Practice
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(pre-judgments, prejudices) or passionate commitment to a particular theorem or person. While some of one’s prejudices may turn out to be errors—factually or morally wrong—to have no prejudices at all would be paralyzing. These prejudices supply both the ethical motivation and the epistemological starting point to engage further. (Of course, my admiration for contemporary revivers of civic virtue is that they do capitalize on these insights to some extent. My critique of them is that they do not do so thoroughly enough.) Yet clearly not all biases are morally good ones, and impartiality must aim to sort out morally enabling from morally disabling ones. The work of Marilyn Friedman and Annette Baier is conceptually helpful in this regard. Friedman emphasizes lack of “inappropriate bias”—and the absence of “distortion” associated with inappropriate bias—as the essence of impartiality.3 Correctly perceiving and suppressing such biases are the ethical tasks of impartiality. Baier (1995) elaborates the role of moral “prejudices,” a term she uses non-pejoratively. Prejudices in this sense may encapsulate years of lived moral wisdom and may be instrumental in identifying issues for philosophical reflection. Yet prejudices may incorporate inappropriate as well as appropriate bias. Thus the tasks of identifying, evaluating, and approving or revising moral prejudices continually confront the moral agent as a deliberative project. The distinction between “inappropriate bias” and bias per se, or between prejudice and morally skewed prejudice, makes sense of basic intuitions about impartiality as a moral norm. Certainly, it would be odd to condemn parents’ fierce attachment to their children or friends’ attuned sensitivity to each other along with racism, sexism, or other vicious partialities, all in the name of impartiality. Conceiving impartiality as the removal of inappropriate bias builds a firewall between pragmatic and idolatrous notions of impartiality. It also retains the core sense in which “impartiality” is intuitive as an ideal of ordinary morality. Everyone—not only philosophers!—has participated in, observed, and been the beneficiary or the victim of moral treatment he or she considers unfairly biased by the partial attachments of the actor. The notion of inappropriate bias might correlate with ingrained insensitivities of an individual, so-called mental blocks (for example, the chronic freeloader’s insensitivity to the expense and effort of hospitality).
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Inappropriate bias is also coherent in the context of defined personal relationships, for example, when one excuses as “cute” eccentricities that are actually the rude excesses of a friend. Similarly, it is coherent in the workplace, for example, when an employer promotes or fails to promote workers of a certain gender, race, or religion disproportionately to their performance. It is equally applicable in the broad community politic, for example, when electoral districts are gerrymandered to favor whichever political party has the power to redraw them. Just as the negative task of removing inappropriate bias cuts across both personal and political settings, so too does the corollary positive task of forging appropriate trust. Annette Baier links the rehabilitation of prejudice both to personal relationships and to the social capital of appropriate trust.4 Both linkages are important to understanding the foundational role of personal impartiality in moral life. Whereas conventional moral philosophy fears the negative bias of close friends, perceived as antithetical to impartiality, Baier (1989) celebrates the “proper bias” of close friends. It allows them to give each other the benefit of the doubt—to probe an initially offensive comment, for example, rather than assume it was deliberately hurtful. This proper bias of friendship weighs against premature dismissiveness and refuses to see the maintenance of the friendship itself as a neutral moral activity. This is not to say that all trusting proves warranted: “Exploitation and conspiracy, as much as justice and fellowship, thrive better in an atmosphere of trust. There are immoral as well as moral trust relationships, and trust-busting can be a morally proper goal” (Baier 1990, 279–80). Friendship, even when let down, becomes a primary training ground for what Baier terms “prudential trusting.” For Baier, the central question of ethics, surprisingly rarely directly addressed in moral philosophy, is “Whom should I trust, in what way, and why?” (279). The question is dilemmatic in that habits of trust demand critical reflectiveness, but unending reflectiveness on our habits of trust will destroy the very possibility of trust. According to Baier, the negotiation of the dilemma lies in an Aristotelian account of prudential trusting tied to character evaluation and habits of assessment. The skill required for this negotiation depends on “having been helped to develop it in some earlier relationship of mutual trust. . . . [L]earning what to notice is at the same time learning what not to notice”
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(279). Baier’s account of socialization into prudential trusting explains why people who were abused by primary caretakers as young children may be haunted all their lives by the inability to establish appropriately trusting relationships. Baier notes that most, but not all, betrayals of trust are more clearly related to character flaws in the betrayer than to particularities of the specific betrayal. As an example, she considers the gossip-prone friend whose love of gossip may push her toward revelation of a secret more than the intrinsic delicacy of the secret. Thus, one way to trust wisely without having “too many” thoughts on the matter is to reflect on the character of one’s friends and acquaintances. Astute character evaluation of others does not threaten our relationships in the same way that questioning each act of implicit trust between parties would. Following Baier’s example, there may be moral wisdom in the red flag that goes up when one begins to tell a secret to the gossip-prone friend. However, distrustful thoughts of the same friend may be thoughts too many when what is entrusted is shared property or shared projects. Just as personal impartiality directly relates to the development of prudential trusting in intimate relationships, political impartiality must relate to the development of prudential trusting among citizens. Framing impartiality as the removal of inappropriate, rather than of all biases, may lead us to ask whether there is not some “proper bias” of citizens that is structurally akin to Baier’s “proper bias” of friends—a proper bias that enables trust without demanding naive trust. I m pa rt i a l i t y Se e k s A de quat e At t e n t ion t o E ac h, no t E qua l At t e n t ion t o A l l Care is not well practiced, nor is prudential trust well developed, by formalized “equal attention to all.” The formality of that construction precludes attention to unique needs, unique vulnerabilities, limits of energy and resources, and related questions of adequacy. To cite a previous example, parents who give rigidly equal homework assistance to all their children even though one has a learning disability certainly ought not be praised as exemplars of impartiality. But the conception of impartiality as a detached standpoint, and the lingering legacy of the SLVO cases, presume that equal attention to all characterizes impartiality. Indeed, idolatrous conceptions 214
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of impartiality define intimate relationships to be outside the bounds of impartial ideals precisely because intimates inevitably give unequal attention to each other as compared to strangers. Yet if, properly understood, impartiality does not demand equal consideration of all, certainly it must demand “giving people their due”—a classical conception of justice.5 Margaret Urban Walker (1989) articulates the impartiality of ordinary moral heroes as their capacity for giving “adequate consideration to each.” Impartial parents give adequate attention, in absolute and in relative terms, to each of their multiple children. Impartial teachers give adequate attention to each of their multiple students. An appropriately impartial host gives adequate attention to each of her guests. Attention to the “each” in this formulation highlights the deliberation necessary to assess the outward ripple effects of our actions. A focus on “adequacy” suggests the positive task of determining how much of our limited moral energy to invest in particular others in addition to the negative task of removing inappropriate biases. Walker contrasts “adequate consideration of each” to the classic invocation “the equal consideration of all.” What crosscuts the two, according to Walker, is the core ethical insight that everyone “ought count for at least one” (1989, 758). There is a provocative dual sense to “at least” here. On the one hand, Walker suggests theory “could never run ramshackle over the notion that each person’s interests count, morally” (758). On the other hand, her “at least” implies the legitimacy of sometimes counting the needs of a certain other as more important than just another “one.” That might be because of the moral agent’s relationship to the other: this not a child; but my child, or this is not a person, but my friend. Or it might be because of the other’s special needs. This student may need more assistance from the teacher to learn multiplication tables than that student. By allowing that specific needs of specific others may influence appropriate impartiality, the goal of adequate attention promotes “giving each his or her due.” Similarly, it responds to Seyla Benhabib’s concisely stated demand that impartiality acknowledge the “concrete” as well as the “generalized” other.6 Formulating the goal of impartiality as adequate attention to each offers appropriate practical elasticity. In any given situation, the determination of who counts as an “each” and what counts as “adequate” confronts the agent as a deliberative task. Impartiality-as-Practice
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The adequate attention to each offered by ordinary moral heroes is thus broader than the oft-assumed platitude “equal consideration of all.” Another way of framing this concept is to suggest that equal consideration of all fosters adequate attention to each, which will sometimes be unequal attention. However, that implied distinction between formal and actual equality obscures the malignancy of formal equality in idolatrous conceptions of impartiality. Detached conceptions of impartiality lead the equal consideration of all to be interpreted as equal attention to all. In some situations, adequate attention to each might be ensured by equal attention to all; in others, it might not. For example, in a musical audition impartiality might demand that all auditioners get either equivalent time, format, or choice in what to play. Of course, that does not mean that in music lessons the teacher must give all students the same format or choices, regardless of their particular strengths and weaknesses. In some situations the equal consideration of all clearly violates the adequate consideration of each. Consider, for example, the teacher who gives precisely equal time to her students, even though one child in the class has a learning disability and another student is struggling with English as a second language; or the physician who gives equal time to patients on bedside rounds, regardless of their condition. As with other aspects of personal impartiality, the adequacy criterion immediately hints at unresolved challenges in public life. In politics, too, tensions are at play between the implied standards of adequate attention to each or equal consideration of all. In political life, the difference between the two standards may be confusing for two reasons. Because of the celebration of egalitarianism in American public life, positions are often advanced in terms of equal consideration even though they implicitly invoke the adequacy criterion. Moreover, in some contemporary public debates the very issue is which of the two criteria should govern. In some situations adequate attention to each may well demand equal consideration of all. For example, consider the structure of voting in a democratic society and the importance of the ideal of one person, one vote. Anything less than equal consideration of all would result in some people being radically favored or disfavored in public conversations to determine all other “adequates” and all other “each’s.” That is why charges of district gerrymandering are so serious, so emotionally laden, and so bitterly contested. 216 ·
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Yet even in voting practice we tacitly acknowledge that sometimes equal consideration of all fails to give adequate attention to each. Thus, at the federal level, all states elect two senators regardless of population. Strict adherence to population-based voting, strict equal consideration of all, would block rural regions from an effective voice in national policymaking. Truly equal consideration of all might weigh against spending public funds on improved handicapped access, since the number of taxpayers who benefit is small, though their need is great. Here egalitarian language masks an implicit appeal to the adequacy criterion. The “equal access” requested by advocates for the handicapped does not come about by “equal consideration of all,” but rather by special consideration of people with special needs. Yet this “unequal” consideration has an equalizing effect, allowing handicapped people the professional and personal opportunities enjoyed by others. Explicit appeal to the adequacy criterion could constructively address feminist complaints that formal notions of equality may entrench inequality.7 The vigorous debate over affirmative action may be explored in relation to my proposed definition of impartiality. Advocates of affirmative action argue that, given lingering social discrimination that hinders minorities and women, affirmative action is needed to give adequate attention to each. Some opponents of affirmative action argue that “the equal consideration of all” is definitive of public impartiality, and thus impartiality is violated, de facto, by affirmative action programs. Other opponents argue that discrimination has been surpassed to the degree that now adequate attention to each is best ensured by equal consideration of all. Still other opponents argue that affirmative action programs give special consideration to the wrong “each’s” (for example, to the most affluent minorities and women). Advocates of affirmative action rarely acknowledge the important difference among opponents: that some reject while some accept impartiality understood as the adequate attention to each. The adequacy criterion excludes certain positions from the discussion of impartiality. Some deontological and consequentialist ethical thinkers insist on “equal consideration of all” as definitive of all truly impartial norms and thus would decry the adequacy criterion as an erosion of impartiality. They include Kantians who insist on pure universalizability of action and act-utilitarians who maintain that every ethical decision must Impartiality-as-Practice
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maximize the greatest good for the greatest number. But most people struggling with the notion of impartiality, even most deontologists and consequentialists, are not advocates of rigid Kantian or act-utilitarian positions. Pragmatically, the adequacy criterion moves the conversation from the extremes to the center. Since the impartiality/partiality debates have been impoverished by the preponderance of “straw” argument partners, a move to the center is a necessary corrective.8 Conceptually, adequacy itself is a notion that deserves increased attention. Given our limited moral energies, we cannot escape from considerations of adequacy in everyday life. Just as an idolatrous denial of finitude underlies absolute conceptions of objectivity in science or completely disinterested love in Christian theology, so too it underlies conventional models of impartiality. By raising questions of adequacy to the fore, impartiality-as-practice redresses this problem. Moreover, adequacy may be a necessary norm if ideals of impartiality are to be tied to a global ethic.9 When defined conventionally as generality, equal regard, or even universalizability, impartiality fails to ensure attention to global concern or to issues of the common good. Norms that apply to all, independently of particular needs, or that attempt to consider the interests of each affected person equally, allow for personal behaviors whose cumulative effect threatens the common good. Such conceptions of impartiality implicitly consider the overall good as a sum of individual goods, though experience tells us that both positive and negative externalities may transcend any simple summation of interests. The notion of “adequacy” may allow explicit consideration of limits not only on people’s moral energy but also on natural resources. In short, a conception of impartiality is just inadequate without adequacy. I m pa rt i a l i t y Is Not a Sta n dp oi n t ; It Is Mor a l Pr ac t ice Ordinary moral heroes develop perceptive practices of care that remove inappropriate biases, inculcate prudential trusting, and result in adequate attention to each. Their personal impartiality both derives from and sustains the ongoing cultivation of their practice of care and trust. This disciplined moral practice is utterly betrayed by the common but distorted metaphor of “the impartial standpoint.” 218
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Because the impartial standpoint is perceived as a point of retreat from one’s thick emotional commitments, the “standpoint” view of impartiality presumes and perpetuates the dichotomy between reason and emotion in moral philosophy. That renders it blind to the moral resources developed by ordinary moral heroes, who are passionately engaged with those to whom they demonstrate critical fair-mindedness. The common move in contemporary liberal theory—to acknowledge the standpoint as an imaginative heuristic device rather than as a metaphysical reality—fails to address this lacuna. Conversely, those who reject the view from such a standpoint as morally in adequate, without questioning the notion of a standpoint per se, too quickly dismiss impartiality as a norm for personal relationships.10 Reflection on ordinary moral heroes suggests that the notion of a “point” is fundamentally wrong. The effort to attain such a standpoint is doomed from the start, since no such pristine vantage point is humanly possible. Moreover, the pretense that there is such a standpoint has been morally harmful, excusing inadequate attention to moral particulars and to the development of perceptive habits, while neutralizing moral pulls to genuine reflective equilibrium. At the same time, many who correctly denounce both the political and the metaphysical incoherence of the “impartial standpoint” evade developing necessary norms of impartiality, since they mistakenly equate impartiality with the unhelpful metaphor of the “standpoint.” If contemporary Christian theology no longer expects even God to view the world with a “God’s-eye point of view,” then certainly secular politics can stop asking human citizens to do so. If even the God of biblical narrative achieves grounds for judgment through participatory relationships over time, then certainly it is no shame for humans to do so. If even the greatest scientists learn about the physical world through their communally mediated relationship with it, then even the greatest ethical agent might learn about the moral world through their community-mediated relationships with real people. In chapter 3, I elaborated the tentative moves toward a processive account of impartiality under development in various philosophical circles. By pressing these accounts to full-fledged appreciation of impartiality as practice, ordinary moral heroes give some much-needed remedial help to the philosophical “experts.” The term “process” appropriately acknowledges Impartiality-as-Practice
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that perception over time is essential to impartiality. The fuller term “practice” more robustly suggests the disciplined, deliberate cultivation of a moral virtue over time. Whereas the standpoint conception perceives impartiality as a “snapshot panoramic view” of the moral world, the alternative conception of practice presumes a “videotape” approach. Whereas impartiality-as-standpoint presumes that spatial distance affords critical perspective, impartiality-as-practice stresses how observation of oneself and one’s personal attachments over time affords critical perspective. This practice, properly encouraged in a variety of social forums, will have the cumulative effect of widening one’s moral horizons toward the unreachable asymptote of a panoramic view. Recognizing the impartiality of ordinary moral heroes entails a complete rejection of the language and imagery of an impartial “standpoint.” Alternatively, ordinary moral heroes elaborate impartiality as a moral practice. This practice is simultaneously rational, affective, reflective, and imaginative. It distinguishes the impersonal from the impartial, drawing lessons from the mix of partiality and impartiality that characterizes real, morally full lives.
T H E PR AC T IC E OF I M PA RT I A L I T Y: M ICRO - A N D M ACRO -L EV E L S Critical fair-mindedness in one’s most intimate relationships is the first step toward fully political impartiality. Ordinary moral heroes reveal such personal impartiality as the “tacit knowledge” that is unrecognized as such because it is so foundational. If moral life begins with the experience of care, then that experience, rather than the intellectual pull of grand “isms,” is the starting point for developing critical fair-mindedness. But starting points are not end points. Impartiality-as-practice distinguishes between a healthy recognition of care’s foundational role and a dangerous romanticism of care. Such romanticism fails to acknowledge that characteristic kinds of moral excess, as well as characteristic kinds of impartiality, may develop in “caring” relationships. Impartiality-aspractice not only enables personal relationships to critique political life but also enables political life to critique distorted care in personal relationships or distorted social conventions of care. It develops a double-edged critical perspective. 220
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This double-edged potential for critique results from the drive for coherence among multiple levels of reflection. Impartiality-as-practice may be clarified by exploring two levels of the practice, a “micro-” and a “macro-” level, and by investigating the complex process of analogical reasoning that connects them. Micro-practices of impartiality develop types of critical fair-mindedness characteristic of particular practices of care: parenting, friendship, marriage, teaching, coaching, medicine, professional care of business clients, and so forth. The “macro-practice” of impartiality is the second-order process by which the tacit knowledge of personal impartiality can be pressed outward to inform broader realms of social life, and vice versa. This macro-practice is cultivated through analogical engagement between various micro-practices of impartiality and the cumulative capacity for critical fair-mindedness that comes through such analogical engagement. The ultimate extension of this analogical process marks fully political impartiality. Norms distilled through the macro-practice of political impartiality may then reflexively critique practices of care. These two levels structurally correspond to Alasdair MacIntyre’s dual project, describing internal ends of practices (1984) and the translation process among practices (1988).11 However, reflective analysis of care explores moral practices and the analogical translation among those practices in realms of life peculiarly ignored by MacIntyre. Whereas MacIntyre focuses on the grand moral practices that end in “isms”—Marxism, Thomism, liberalism—everyone’s first moral practice is the experience of being cared for by others and caring for others. As much as the practice of any grand “ism,” the practice of care is governed by internal ends that are constitutive of the practice, while tensions between those ends may press the evolution of the practice. If care is an accomplishment that seems “natural” because it is often (but certainly not always) attained in real relationships, then all the more reason to explore it for moral lessons rather than to dismiss it as irrelevant to political justice. Through cultivated habits of analogical reasoning, moral agents can recognize structural similarities and differences between distinct micropractices of impartiality (including distinct caring practices), and draw second-order “impartial” conclusions from the analogies or dis-analogies. Once the idolatrous conception of impartiality-as-standpoint is refuted, Impartiality-as-Practice
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there is nothing to block this process of analogical reasoning from the fullest political extension.
T H E M ICRO -L E V E L OF I M PA RT I A L I T Y: C A R E A S A PR AC T IC E Ordinary moral heroes reveal that impartiality must be practiced because partiality must be practiced. Appropriate partiality, not only appropriate impartiality, is a moral accomplishment. Care for particular others is itself a complex moral practice. It is developed and honed over time in particular relationships, a cultivation that demands a continual back-andforth between the moral pulls of partiality and the moral constraints of impartiality. To describe care as a practice is to emphasize what care is not. And what care is not, rather than what it is, proves the basis of wrongfully perceived tensions between impartiality and care. In the first place, care is not subjective or devoid of judgment. Rather, the internal ends of care can be gleaned from the practice itself. These internal ends provide standards for the moral evaluation of care. Because care is governed by internal ends, it is not capricious but is the object of moral agency. It is not passive but entails action to promote those ends.12 Second, care is not limited to the particular. Most people have had experiences of being cared for and of caring deeply. Moreover, a variety of social conventions presume widespread practices of care. These conventions are a primary mechanism through which the benefits and burdens of care are distributed. That is no less true just because political philosophy often ignores social practices of care, focusing instead on law and political procedure. Third, care is not distinguishable from moral realms governed by duty, but itself generates moral duties. Finally, care is not a feeling but has a cognitive dimension. Care links reason and emotion in a synthetic moral process. T h e Pr ac t ic e of C a r e I s G ov e r n e d by I n t e r na l E n ds The philosophical disdain for care, perceived as a spontaneous feeling, flies in the face of the experience of ordinary moral heroes. They develop consistent practices of care that moderate as well as motivate feelings. Care has internal ends that guide both feeling and action in the well-practiced 222 ·
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caregiver. Structurally, impartiality itself is the internal end of care: the provision of undistorted adequate attention to each—be that in intimate, familial, friendly, or neighborhood circles, or in the public square. But what that means, more precisely, will vary both among different practices of care and among different unique individuals giving and receiving care. Distinct practices of care also have distinctive ends of care. The internal ends of the practice of teaching differ from those of doctoring, and the internal ends of teaching math differ from those of teaching reading. It is because each practice has specific internal ends that we are able to find fault with a doctor whose carelessness with sterilization sickens a child or worry about the pedagogical challenge entailed by declining math and reading skills among children. Caring practices are complex, and internal tensions among various ends may press for creative, coherent moral resolution. Thus, for example, teaching’s internal ends of encouragement and evaluation may sometimes be in tension, and the appropriately “impartial” teacher must balance those ends through the kinds of exercises assigned and approaches to grading. Like all classical virtues, the personal impartiality sought within specific practices of care has the general form of a mean between extremes. The mean may reflect a balance between two competing ends of the practice, such as the mean between encouragement and evaluation reached by the creative teacher. Or it may reflect a balance between two opposite excesses that threaten the internal ends of the practice. The teacher of young children who strives to balance playtime and structured activities seeks this kind of mean. C a r e a s “Ge n e r a l” a s w e l l a s “Pa rt ic u l a r”: Pr ac t ic e s a n d C on v e n t ions of C a r e Because the internal ends of caring practices provide an infrastructure for critique, it is a mistake to think that care is indelibly particular and thus to simplistically contrast it to the general force of justice. Certainly, the accomplishment of care demands attention to the unique features of unique individuals in unique situations. But caricatures contrasting the generality of justice and the particularity of care are themselves heirs of the strangerversus-loved-one cases. Justice demands attention to the particular as well Impartiality-as-Practice
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as to universal norms in order to treat similar cases similarly: in a court of law, for example, judge and jurors are charged with considering the specifics of the case as well as the law of the land. Conversely, practices of partiality have general implications. Caring relationships are not freefloating. Rather, they are undergirded by conventions of partiality—or social practices of partiality. Social conventions of care create widespread expectations for spouses to specially attend to spouses, parents to their children, adult children to their elderly parents, friends to friends, and so forth. Of course, conventions range in degree of formality. For example, the law in many states assigns spouses the inheritance when a married person dies without a will, an unusually formal institutionalization of practices of partiality. But less formalized conventions may carry as much weight, for example, the simple expectation that adult children are primarily responsible for elderly parents.13 Marilyn Friedman (1993) defends the moral pressures entailed in such social conventions. For example, she claims it is better to care for an elderly parent out of social duty than to neglect him. Significantly, no one may be constrained by universal principle to care for frail old men. Thus, conventions of partiality protect not only vulnerable individuals but also whole classes of vulnerable people who would be left vulnerable by impartialist moral theory. Friedman draws on Robert Goodin’s extensive work on protecting the vulnerable to conclude that such protection is the ultimate aim of conventions of partiality.14 While conventions of partiality demand critical moral reflection (lest the attentiveness of the beaten wife be mistaken for moral heroism), wholesale rejection of such conventions would be disastrous. Such rejection loosens any constraint on what might be called “care freeloaders.” Once conventions dictate the assignment of partial attention, people outside the conventional relationships are less likely to assume burdens of caring for those in need. Consider that a frail elderly person with negligent grown children may be more vulnerable—and more lonely—than a childless one. Neighbors and other non-family members may both notice and attend to needs of the childless elderly person that they wrongly assume are being met by children of the neglected elderly parent. Non-family members who do attend the neglected elderly parent may resent the failure of the children to do so or may be overburdened if they are simultaneously caring for their 224
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own elderly parent. Conventions of a partiality serve as the primary social mechanism for allocating the responsibilities of care. Their uncritical erosion can make many vulnerable people more vulnerable, or many people more vulnerable, or “care freeloaders” more freeloading. The profundity of Friedman’s point, that conventions of partiality play as great a role in protecting the vulnerable as any impartial principle, is especially striking if vulnerability is considered in its fullest spectrum. There are vulnerabilities of age, which particularly affect children and the elderly. There are vulnerabilities of resources, which particularly affect the poor. There are vulnerabilities of social discrimination, which particularly affect women, racial minorities, and homosexuals. And there are vulnerabilities that all may face at various times in their lives, vulnerabilities of temporary illness, grief, depression, loneliness, boredom, or weariness. Despite its mundaneness, the last type of vulnerability must not be forgotten, for it suggests a connection between the protection of the vulnerable and other, less minimalist goals of practices of partiality. In our care for those we love partially, we not only protect them from vulnerability to boredom, but we forge fulfilling projects with them. We may not so much protect them from grief as make grief bearable by grieving with them, a process that includes listening to and honoring their narrative history with lost loved ones. We try not only to bolster their weaknesses but also to affirm their strengths, special talents, and accomplishments. Thus it is not only through the efforts we put into our particular loves but also through social conventions of partiality that we celebrate what Jeffrey Blustein (1991) articulates as “the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of persons.” This celebration testifies to a profound truth about human beings, the truth of everyone’s uniqueness that can otherwise be “sanded down” by ideal viewpoints and general principles. Conventions of care socialize the effort to provide adequate attention to each. They provide socially for the protection of the vulnerable, and they institutionalize socially the recognition of human uniqueness, the irreplaceability of persons. Of course, practices of partiality cannot be affirmed simply because there are real partial affections among the given parties or groups. Partiality has the potential to exacerbate vulnerability or to violate the appreciation of human uniqueness and worth as well as the potential to support the vulnerable and dignify uniqueness. Yet those internal ends of the practice Impartiality-as-Practice
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of care provide moral criteria by which to critique particular affections or social practices of care. Consider that a dark twist in the facts of the case could call into question Friedman’s praise for an adult child who cares for an elderly parent out a sense of social duty. Given her emphasis on mutuality as a moral norm, Friedman seems to assume a case in which the parent was a good-faith parent when he was rearing his daughter, even if they share few interests or little friendship as adults. However, social conventions of partiality seem less defensible, indeed cruel, if one hypothetically considers a case in which the elderly parent was neglectful or abusive. In that case, social conventions of partiality pressure the abused to care for her abuser. They make a vulnerable person more vulnerable and magnify the glaring gap between giving and taking in the relationship. Given the depressing prevalence of spouse and child abuse, the fairness of many conventions of partiality may depend on more widely enforced norms of mutuality than currently prevail. Group as well as individual patterns are vulnerable to critique on such grounds. Certainly contemporary feminism has appropriately called into question whether cultural conventions of partiality unfairly allocate the benefits and burdens of care among women and men. When partiality is used to insulate the group with which one identifies from moral critique, it is always problematic. For example, “my country, right or wrong” can give a carte blanche for the utter destruction of faraway vulnerables in an unjust war. When women love and care for the men who beat them, something is wrong morally. The promising renewal of friendship in moral theory risks excess if it fails to emphasize the need for moral evaluation of friendship. Romanticization of friendship could mask the viciousness of street gangs, just as romanticization of erotic love can mask the viciousness of domestic violence. Duties of partiality must be balanced by other moral duties—including impartial duties (which are ultimately distilled from a complex mix of partial duties). While the general importance of social conventions of care must be recognized, these conventions themselves must be subject to critical reflection. Such reflection is discouraged by contemporary political theory, which ignores conventions of care altogether. Particular affections, or social practices of care, that fail to protect the vulnerable or to honor the uniqueness of individuals are ethically distorted. Even within the practice of partiality, then, there is a dialectic between appropriate partiality and appropriate impartiality. 226
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T h e Pr ac t ic e of C a r e for Pa rt ic u l a r Ot h e r s Is a Mor a l Du t y Because practices of partiality are not mere personal indulgences but rather aim at internal ends of care and institutionalize the protection of the vulnerable, partial “pulls” are deeply moral pulls. In fact, obligations of care are moral duties. In dominant strands of moral and political philosophy, motivations of duty and affection are strongly contrasted. Duty is taken to be the proper motivation for deriving and observing impartial norms in the political realm. Feeling is taken to be the natural de facto motivation for maintaining personal relationships. Ordinary moral heroes dramatically challenge this distinction. They often correctly perceive their obligation to those in their care as a duty. Here again, ordinary parlance is strikingly dissonant with philosophical parlance. Ordinary moral heroes often speak of “doing one’s duty,” not in reference to universal moral rules but in reference to duties to intimates: the adult child making changes to her schedule, her locale, or her home in order to care for an ill elderly parent; the teacher making extra time to help a struggling student with her multiplication tables; the friend making time for lunch with a grieving friend in the midst of a busy day. Duties of partiality may be “negative duties,” moral limits to behavior within the relationship, or they may be “positive duties” that respond to unique needs or talents of the other person. The former applies specifically to the task of judgment in close personal relationships. In this sense “doing one’s duty” may refer, for example, to parental discipline. The parent who enforces a well-earned grounding despite protest may be “doing her duty.” Duties of self-care may place ultimate limits on a relationship. A woman who flees a violent marriage may correctly perceive her severing of the relationship as a “duty” to herself. Negative duties of care, limits to behavior in intimate relationships, are essential to prevent what Marilyn Friedman (1993) calls “privileges of hurting.” They are necessary to prevent care for others from becoming a blank check to others. The work of contemporary neo-Kantians who emphasize that motives of duty should constrain all human relationships is a helpful corrective here.15 It is a corrective not only to lingering impartialist excess in political theory but also to the unhelpful romanticization of care Impartiality-as-Practice
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by some critics of such excess. Parties on both sides of the problematic partialist/impartialist dichotomy mistakenly reserve the concept of duty for relationships between strangers, with disastrous political effect. That may explain why, in the midst of a “war on terror,” deaths and injuries due to domestic violence (which for Americans far surpass casualties of international terrorism) rarely make the front page or the nightly news. Negative duties of care that are appropriately acknowledged by ordinary heroes deserve social reinforcement that is sorely lacking. Duties of care respond not only to ethical limits but also to ethical possibilities. In this sense, duty may be a felt motivation of the parent tightening her financial belt to pay for music lessons for her eager child, or the grandparent babysitting so a tired parent can go on a weekend retreat. Positive duties of care respond to unique potentials of the other or provide the other with specific resources or encouragement to promote self-expression. Marilyn Friedman begins her development of a reflexively critical conception of care by defending the primacy of duty as a moral motive. This defense is typical of impartialist thinkers, but Friedman targets it differently. She applies the notion of motivation by duty not to the derivation of impartial principles, as is generally the case in deontological ethics, but rather to the actual carrying out of practices of care. In caring relationships as well as in rule-based ethics, she insists, “duties of behavior” are prior to “duties of feeling” (1993, 48–49). Unlike overly sentimentalized views of care, this priority is enabling, according to Friedman. It is enabling because in some relationships, and in most relationships at some time, “a sense of duty may be the only attitude available to motivate the required caretaking. . . . The lack of spontaneous compassion . . . does not diminish the caretaking responsibility and may engender additional responsibilities of self-control so that one’s behavior does not reveal the lack of affection. Attitudes of loving concern, then, are not owed to all our intimates at all times” (48). Du t i e s of C a r e I n t e rc on n e c t, Not C on t r a s t w i t h, A f f e c t ionat e F e e l i ng s While Friedman’s retort to those who dismiss care as matter of capricious feeling is well taken, her emphasis on the “priority” of duty misses an 228 ·
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opportunity to elaborate how duty and feeling may appropriately interrelate in well-practiced care. Duties of care may be connected to narratives laden with feeling even if feeling is lacking for a certain act. Moreover, they may provide a moral structure that allows for the long-term cultivation of appropriate feeling in the relationship. Marriage vows are interesting in this light. They create duties that are inadequately appreciated if considered merely as specific renditions of the universal maxim to keep promises. For in addition, marriage vows make explicit the connection between duties derived from partiality and the maintenance of appropriate affection. What is striking about the marriage promise is that partners vow they will love each other even when they are most unlovable.16 In effect, the partners formalize Friedman’s proposal in the context of their relationship—agreeing to take duties of behavior as prior to duties of feeling. It is essential to marriage as an institution that this priority be so. Moreover, in particularly difficult moments of particular marriages, that priority is essential to the continuance of the marriage. Over time, the duties of behavior intrinsic to the vow can become vehicles for the appropriate modification of desires necessary to stabilize the marriage. But to claim that makes the motive of duty victor over motives of feelings oversimplifies and unduly dichotomizes. The vow creates awesome duties—duties that at times cut against powerful feelings. Yet the vow is undergirded by a narrative history of affection, and the associated duties themselves become infrastructure for the long-term maintenance of that affection. Aga i nst t h e C on ta i n m e n t of C a r e The recognition of care as a duty-regulated practice explodes the containment of care, disowning the legacy of the SVLO cases in contemporary political theory and practice. It provides the conceptual structure within which to elaborate the intuitive accomplishment of ordinary moral heroes who demonstrate “personal impartiality.” These heroes creatively and consistently manage to advance internal ends of their caring practices, despite tensions between those ends and despite temptations of excess defined by those ends. Acknowledging care as a practice challenges any conception of “reflective equilibrium” that systematically weights perceived duties of principle over perceived duties of care. Therefore it challenges any simplistic dichotomy between justice and care. Impartiality-as-Practice
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C a r e a s For m of Pr ac t ic a l R e a s on i ng: V i rt u e(s) of C a r e Practices of care, or practices of partiality, demand what Aristotle calls practical moral reasoning (prudence). They are the forums in which personal impartiality is developed. The “tacit knowledge” of personal impartiality is itself a virtue, a cultivated moral habit that enables internal ends of care to be accomplished. The virtue of personal impartiality is supported by the infrastructure of socialized practices of care. The polar relationship between the personal virtue and the socialized practice—like the polar relationship between personal commitment and universal intent in Polanyi’s philosophy of science—provides perspective for their mutual critique. With care conceived as a practice, impartiality can no longer remain detached from real needs, desires, and interests. As Joan Tronto (1993, 106) emphasizes, the very end of care is “providing an integrated, holistic way to meet concrete needs”—in my terms, providing adequate attention to each. Care as a practice of practical reason fosters the development of character traits necessary for such assessment: “attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness” (1993, 127). Tronto notes that virtue does not thrive in isolation but that rather, a family of interrelated virtues is required to support the practice of care. Personal impartiality demands virtues of perception: sensitivity to what affects one’s loved ones, how one’s loved ones are changing, what is irreducibly unique about them, what features they share with others, their character strengths and weaknesses. It also demands virtues of communication (for convenience I call these “communicative virtues”). Such virtues include a willingness not only to listen to, but to hear, the loved other. Listening is necessary, but not sufficient, for hearing. Hearing means listening to what one would prefer to ignore. Hearing means listening to what may be left between spoken lines. Hearing means noticing and processing symbolic communication. Communicative virtues demand speaking in ways that invite, rather than foreclose, continued conversation. The prudence of personal impartiality demands patience—not only patience with the loved other, who will fail as well as succeed, irritate as well as please. It also demands patience with the practice of the virtue itself, 230
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with the time and deliberative effort it takes to be appropriately impartial toward those with whom one is passionately engaged. It demands patience with the process of revision, when new perceptions of the other seem to conflict with old. It demands patience with the incompleteness of one’s own interpretive horizons on the other.17 Such patience can be supported procedurally, as when a teacher reads exams “blind,” or a manager commits to regular meetings with a subordinate employee. Thus partialists who completely reject procedural approaches, as much as impartialists who reduced impartiality to a procedure, miss connections between procedure and practice. But such procedure is only one part of a necessarily larger practice. Imagination is also necessary for personal impartiality. One must be able to imagine what kinds of encounters, shared activities, procedures, can expand one’s horizon on the beloved. Imagination-as-virtue is not the gift of rare artists but a practiced habit. The parents who devise ageappropriate games for their child exhibit this kind of imagination. Most crucially, personal impartiality demands a disciplined vulnerability toward the loved one. Whereas conventional accounts of impartiality presume that the most autonomous moral agent will be the most impartial, ordinary moral heroes turn that on its head. One cannot practice personal impartiality without opening oneself to having one’s views of the world changed by the beloved. The teacher in a poverty-stricken area who questions the aptitude test, the meat-eating parents confronted by an adolescent who converts to vegetarianism, the male manager who believes sexual harassment in the workplace to be rare until his daughters experience it—all must confront moral data that would be evaded by a flight to autonomy. Acceptance of such vulnerability is just a starting point, but it is a necessary one. Indeed, the virtues associated with personal impartiality do not make its accomplishment easy. They identify structural means between polar excesses that are exceedingly hard to achieve in practice. Disciplined, vulnerable moral heroes hit the mean between those who refuse to allow their loved ones to challenge their world and those who overly indulge their loved ones. Appropriately patient moral heroes hit the mean between those who judge too quickly and those who refuse to judge. The cultivation of such virtues is arduous, with improvement marked by “nearer misses” from the perfect mean as time goes on. Impartiality-as-Practice
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As the next section will elaborate, the family of virtues demanded by personal impartiality is suggestive of more broadly political virtues. With Joan Tronto, I claim that care as a practice can inform the practices of democratic citizenship. If through the practices of giving and receiving care we were to become adept at caring, I suggest that not only would be have become more caring and moral people, but we would also have become better citizens in a democracy. The qualities of attentiveness, of responsibility, of competence, or responsiveness, need not be restricted to the immediate objects of our care, but can also inform our practices as citizens. They direct us to a politics in which there is, at center, a public discussion of needs, and an honest appraisal of the intersection of needs and interests. (1993, 167–68)
Personal impartiality is the tacit knowledge that launches a more complex, second-order practice of political impartiality—and the virtues of personal impartiality structurally parallel those that are necessary for political impartiality. In political life, too, we need to link virtues of perception to communicative virtues. We need a new kind of prudence, patience, and disciplined vulnerability among citizens. F ROM M IC RO - TO M AC RO -PR AC T IC E S OF I M PA RT I A L I T Y: T H E DI A L EC T IC OF PA RT I A L I T Y A N D I M PA RT I A L I T Y E X PA N DE D In personal relationships, a dialectic ties partial affections to impartial standards dictated by the ends of care, akin to the dialectic between personal commitment and universal intent in Polanyi’s philosophy of science. In wider political life, the dialectic between partiality and impartiality extends through the analogical engagement between different micropractices of care. Most citizens participate in diverse micro-practices of care in their multiple social roles: they may simultaneously be parents and friends, doctors and teachers, coaches and club presidents. They may also participate in others’ micro-practices vicariously through conversation, literature, or media. The second-order analogical practice of impartiality ultimately solidifies respect for the stranger. Respect for strangers is supported, not by an impossible imaginative ability to separate all citizens from their passionate cares, but rather by a pragmatic imaginative ability to consider how important strangers’ duties of care are to themselves. 232
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Through the course of the ongoing dialectic, particular partial attachments become subject to generalized norms of respect that have derived from that analogical imagination. Analogical reasoning in moral theory has most frequently been associated with casuistry, the art of reflection on moral cases, moving from more to less certain moral conclusions by considering similarities and differences among cases. Recently, case-based casuistry has enjoyed a renaissance. The perceived dilemmas of contemporary medical ethics have demanded casuistry at the bedside and in policy-making arenas, renewing appreciation for casuistry as a necessary art. A widely read contemporary book by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry (1988), moves from the proven record of casuistry in modern bioethics to a theoretical defense of casuistry as a method of moral reasoning.18 Nonetheless, casuistry faces serious criticisms:19 (1) Casuistry may exacerbate overly individualistic tendencies of modern ethics. The consideration of individual “cases” as standing on their own may parallel liberal assumptions that view persons as “free-standing.” (2) By focusing at the case-level, casuistry may underattend to pervasive cultural assumptions that underlie what comes to be seen as “a case.” Casuistry may be complacent toward, rather than critical of, broadly interwoven cultural structures and institutions. It may insulate the most entrenched institutions and assumptions from reflexive critique. (3) Because of this insulation, and because casuistry is propelled by the need to make decisions in cases at hand, casuistry cannot offer visionary pictures of “where we want to go.” However, in proposing that the macro-practice of impartiality operates through the extension of analogical reasoning, I apply analogical reasoning not to cases but to practices, and ultimately to the mega-practices called moral traditions. Many of the drawbacks of casuistry listed above are, in fact, limits of case-based reasoning, not limits of analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning applied to practices can prompt reflection on the very historical and cultural factors that allow us to see, or fail to see, a case as a case. “Abstraction” in the practice of impartiality thus may not demand “detachment” but may, more accurately, reflect a level of practical reasoning that grapples with the trading, caressing, bumping, and bruising that occurs among various micro-practices of impartiality. Through analogical reasoning, the internal ends and virtues of one practice of impartiality Impartiality-as-Practice
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may be found relevant to another. Through the ultimate extension of such analogical reasoning, whole practices and their previously accepted ends may be called into question. My account of impartiality, then, complements various contemporary efforts to broaden analogical method in ethics.20 If wrongful equations of the impartial with the impersonal are erased and a static view of impartiality as standpoint bypassed, there is nothing to prevent micro-practices of impartiality from informing politics at the broadest level, or vice versa. A na l o gic a l I n t e r pl ay bet w e e n Pr ac t ice s of I m pa rt i a l i t y As many contemporary theorists intimate, the simultaneous engagement in multiple personal, professional, and social roles offers citizens analogical prisms for reflexive moral critique. However, it is unduly sanguine to assume that the mere existence of such role differences ensures reflexive critique. At the extreme, everyone knows people who live with outright moral schizophrenia rather than engage in the moral effort of such analogical reflection: the policeman who beats his wife; the citizen who relies on criteria from the just war tradition to judge military actions of all countries except her own; the protective father of adolescent daughters who has sexual affairs with minors; the anti-tax crusading legislator who lobbies for pork projects in her district; the parent who rails publicly against the “homosexual agenda” while quietly reassuring herself that her gay son is an exception, a good citizen. Certainly not just the worst offenders, but all citizens, at times resist moral friction rather than face up to reflective disequilibrium that radically challenges the organization of their lives. Moreover, idolatrous views of impartiality foster the development of moral calluses that desensitize one to such friction by implying that the moral norms governing private and public life are necessarily different in kind. The prevalent view that civic virtue demands at least a detachment from one’s personal loves and at most the sacrifice one’s personal loves excuses much troubling moral friction as necessary pain. Both the conceptual resources and the personal virtues that enable analogical grappling between micro-practices therefore deserve articulation. 234
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Adroitness at such analogical engagement should be recognized as an accomplishment of civic virtue rather than as a natural given. This accomplishment depends on keen comparisons between internal ends of various practices and creative grappling with overlap or tensions between them.21 Sissela Bok’s classic Lying (1979) provides one detailed example of the complex interplay between practices that may either promote or undermine impartiality. Bok’s approach illustrates several aspects of what I call impartiality-as-practice. She taps into the multiplicity of perspectives available to moral reasoners when she asks readers, as a starting point, to recall various mundane situations in which they have been the liar and the deceived. She considers truth and deception in a variety of social practices, including child rearing, medicine, scientific research, and politics. Bok uses internal ends of practices to evaluate the moral value of truth or deception. She claims practices of truth-telling generally aim to promote social cooperation. Specific practices have more specific internal ends, promoting specific kinds of social cooperation. For example, Bok notes how the tendency toward positive exaggeration in recommendation letters undermines the practice of writing such letters. Truly extraordinary candidates come to look just like the others, and highly qualified applicants appear less qualified if their recommender uses honest rather than hyperbolic description. In the end, the usefulness of the practice is corrupted. Similarly, the falsification of medical research data, lies to one’s spouse to enable sexual infidelity, grade inflation at universities, academic plagiarism, the fabrication of stories or sources in journalism, police cover-ups, and distortions in the account of a politician’s voting record all undermine internal ends of the respective practices. By considering truth and deception in various social practices, Bok is able to articulate a moral norm that crosscuts all the practices: the “principle of veracity” (1979, 32–33). This principle entails a presumption against lying, places the burden of proof on the liar, and constrains the consideration of lying to situations in which all truthful options have been ruled out. Bok demonstrates how impartiality-as-practice crosses conventional boundaries between public and private. Moving back and forth between highly personal, institutional, and political examples of practices and their frequently associated deceptions, Bok demonstrates the crosscutting presumption of the principle of Impartiality-as-Practice
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veracity. In addition, she argues that the principle’s erosion in any area of social life tends to facilitate its erosion in others. Published on the heels of the Watergate scandal, Bok’s book provocatively implied a connection between political lies that scandalized the public and mundane practices of deception routinely accepted by the same public. More recently, public furor over the Enron bankruptcy generated a similar analogical back-and-forth, considering accounting practices in business, private, and public life. The Enron case raised general questions about what constitutes appropriate impartiality of accountants. It prompted analyses of internal ends of accounting and of distinctive ends in different kinds of organizations. Commentators on the Enron case alternately emphasized how Enron’s bookkeeping obstructed basic internal aims of accounting as a practice (the publicly transparent assessment of financial assets and liabilities); how common Enron-style accounting strategies are in the business world; how many private citizens take Enron-like risks in their personal finances; and how the federal budget process engages in some of the same misleading practices that characterized Enron’s bookkeeping.22 Some criticized the federal government for failing to include itself within the orbit of new legislation demanding tougher standards for business accounting and tougher sanctions for violators. In this case, the analogical practice of impartiality led to new business standards, a new criminal code, and increased criticism of the federal budget process. It may also have encouraged a number of private citizens to reconsider their approach to personal finances and investment. C u lt u r a l T r a di t ions a n d t h e Pr ac t ice of I m pa rt i a l i t y As the practice of impartiality is extended outward through analogical reasoning, whole cultural traditions may be the “practitioners” of particular practices of impartiality that inform the overall process. (This is a critical insight of Alasdair MacIntyre, one that ought not be ignored because MacIntyre portrays an overly static view of traditions and an overly ruptured account of the process of impartiality.) Intellectual, cultural, or religious traditions may act as moral practices. Public standards of impartiality may emerge from the drive for coherence within and among evolving traditions with passionately partial commitments. 236
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Consider the activities of the Anti-Defamation League, which are taken up in more detail in a case study at the end of this book. This organization was founded by Jews in response to the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust. ADL members speak not as ideal observers but as inheritors of a specific religious tradition that demands certain universals in moral behavior and as victims (or moral heirs to victims) of a particular political atrocity with particular religious, political, and historical roots. From the experience of European Jewry in the Holocaust, the ADL fosters a particular sensitivity to the dangers of bigotry and genocide, and to the possibility that bigotry may escalate to genocide. Through analogical reasoning, the ADL has identified non-Jewish victims or potential victims of bigotry and extends empathy to them as fellow sufferers of similar evils. Most recently, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the ADL has become a primary actor in efforts to prevent and punish increased assaults against American Muslims. To use Friedman’s language, ADL is engaged in a practice of partiality to protect certain kinds of vulnerables: those vulnerable to racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination. But this practice of partiality informs the development of impartial standards that define bigotry in action and indicate early warning signs of future genocidal violence. The ADL has played a critical role in getting legislation passed in the United States that demands creation of national records tracking crimes whose motive seems to be “group-hate.”23 The designation of crimes as hate crimes has raised public awareness of the extent of such group-hates in our society as common patterns emerge among incidents previously considered idiosyncratic. Thus, the partial commitments of one organization were critical in shaping evidence to convince the public of an increasingly recognized problem. The contributions of the ADL suggest that the history of Judaism provides special resources for certain kinds of moral discernment, particularly the moral discernment of group-hates, their political manipulation, and their potential to escalate. Thus the ADL was one of the first organizations in the United States to call developing events in Bosnia “genocide,” to warn of the full-scale ethnic violence that was to come, and to urge intervention to protect Bosnian Muslims.24 Long before the wider public took seriously the potential for outright ethnic massacre that indeed came to pass, the ADL reasoned that burning mosques looked very much like Impartiality-as-Practice
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burning synagogues. In this example, the tragedy of the ADL’s predictive accuracy itself attests to the impartiality they offered from the perspective of their particular religious history. Acknowledging an appropriate dialectic between partiality and impartiality in the important civic work of the ADL does not render the goals of the organization easy to discern and accomplish or make them immune from criticism (see the case study for further discussion of this complexity). But significantly, the civic role of the organization is defined away altogether by the standpoint view of impartiality and idolatrous conceptions of civic virtue. The ADL’s civic “base camp” lies on the very conceptual terrain that is cordoned off by ideal observers and conventions of restricted justification: a particular religious and historical identity. Pu bl ic I m pa rt i a l i t y C a n I n for m M a n y Pr ac t ice s With the artificial barrier of the “standpoint” view of impartiality razed, not only can micro-practices of impartiality provide standards for wider political impartiality, but the converse can also be encouraged. For example, a drive for moral coherence currently challenges long-standing social conventions (themselves a legacy of domesticity) that treat domestic violence less seriously than violence against strangers. In recent years a number of legislative initiatives and changes in police or judicial procedures have demanded that similarities between domestic violence and other kinds of violent assault be recognized. One measure of this change is the sweeping amendment of state rape statutes over the last generation. In most states a generation ago, rape was statutorily defined to exclude spouses, so there was no legal recourse for marital rape. Now the vast majority of states define rape solely by the coerciveness of the assault, not by who commits it, so that a man is legally prohibited from raping his wife as well as his neighbor. Standards of public impartiality are being applied appropriately to practices of care that were formerly insulated from such norms. Advocates for victims of domestic violence stress that this process is at an early stage. The media, for example, routinely continue to treat cases of stranger-to-stranger assault as more newsworthy than cases of familial assault. Certainly, political liberalism has, at its historical best, facilitated critical confrontation of ethical inconsistencies revealed by the analogical 238
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practice of impartiality. People oppressed because of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation have strained against reflective disequilibrium between the political rhetoric of liberty and equality, and their own experience of discrimination. Thus the abolition movement, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the homosexual rights movement all challenged social practices by exposing gaps between liberal ideals and daily life in the community.25 M U LT I L EV E L DI A L EC T IC BET W E E N PA RT I A L I T Y A N D I M PA RT I A L I T Y: PA R E N T I NG A N D P OL I T IC S An extended example can demonstrate the reflexive practice of impartiality among various levels of ethical reflection. Whereas conventional political theory renders perspectives of the most dependent and those who care for them politically moot, impartiality-as-practice recognizes such perspectives as important building blocks of political life. Since those engaged in the direct care of young children have been among the most politically marginalized by idolatrous conceptions of impartiality and civic virtue, they provide a politically illuminating example of impartiality-aspractice. I integrate my own analysis with several contemporary theorists who explore political implications of parenting, or “mothering.”26 These thinkers analyze parenting as, in my terms, a micro-practice of impartiality. They demonstrate how the internal ends of parenting can guide efforts to give adequate attention to each. They show how parental impartiality informs the macro-practice of political impartiality. Under duress, the internal ends of parenting can reveal reflective disequilibrium that challenges social and political structures. At the same time, impartial public norms can reflexively critique particular parents or practices of parenting. While their work collectively elaborates the political nature of parenting, it also suggests that no single micro-practice of care is sufficient to ground a fully political conception of impartiality. Pa r e n t i ng a s On e M ic ro -Pr ac t ic e of C a r e: T h e I n t e r na l E n d s a n d V i rt u e s of Pa r e n t i ng While there are many effective styles of parenting, internal ends of parenting define parameters of good parenting. Sara Ruddick seeks to describe, Impartiality-as-Practice
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“from a philosophical perspective, the thinking that grows out of the work mothers do.”27 Ruddick painstakingly de-constructs the most taken-forgranted practical reasoning of all—one so dismissed as “natural” that it is labeled maternal “instinct.” She shows maternal “instinct” to be really “maternal thinking,” a disciplined process of practical reasoning. Her work shows how internal ends structure the practice of parenting and how they guide the personal impartiality that good parents, over time, attain. According to Ruddick, three ends of child rearing—preservation, growth, and acceptability of children—guide the practice of maternal thinking (1995, 61). These identifiable ends allow people to recognize good mothering without romanticizing it—for the same ends provide criteria for bad mothering. They provide criteria for improvement, incidental failure, and setbacks. Maternal thinking is neither disconnected from nor completely defined by passionate affections of parents toward their children, passions that may include rage and disappointment as well as love and tenderness. Maternal love provides impetus to the practice of maternal thinking, while the practice forces decisions that attenuate the pendulum of emotions that inform the practice. In the course of one day, a mother may feel she is willing to die to save her child and that she is willing to kill her child to retrieve some life she has lost to child rearing. But what she does in the course of that day is “small” actions to protect and train in a way that allows the child to develop toward increasing independence. The personal impartiality of good mothering is tied to developed habits of perception and to practiced attentiveness in verbal and nonverbal interactions with children. Good mothers are proactively perceptive to dangers that threaten preservation, growth, and acceptability. For example, good mothers will attend to, rather than ignore, early warning signs of adolescent substance abuse, risky sexual behavior, or depression. The internal goods of mothering are associated with certain virtues. In other words, the general virtues of personal impartiality have distinctly parental forms. Ruddick’s analysis of these virtues parallels classical Aristotelian definitions of virtue. In effect, she describes parental virtues as means that are both habits and character dispositions. The maternal goods of preservation, growth, and acceptability demand a moderate mean between over-control and inattentiveness.28 Pursuing these goods astutely fosters certain dispositions of character.29 Ruddick claims that the work of 240
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training a child, properly engaged, promotes virtues of humility, cheerfulness, and openness to change. The internal goods of parental thinking provide no easy how-to. In fact, these internal goods may at times conflict with each other, or there may be trade-offs between short-term and long-term gains in advancing any one internal good. Preservation and growth, for example, often conflict when children wish to engage in new activities that press them developmentally. Allowing the child to participate may pose physical or psychological dangers, while participation, even unsuccessful participation, may have much to teach the child. Even when parents are perceptive to questions of appropriate timing, tensions are endemic: It sometimes seems as if a mother helps create the very fragilities—the moral, mental, and psychological capacities—she needs then to protect. She helps a child learn to climb stairs and then has to keep him from falling down; she encourages the child to walk to school alone but then must warn her against strangers and cars; she urges him to travel farther and make new friends and then worries about potentially harmful playmates. As her task enlarges, it also remains constant: to keep safe whatever is vulnerable and valuable in the child—not only her body, but her mind, spirit, and developing conscience. (Ruddick 1995, 80)
The goal of “acceptability” is inherently fraught with tension. Ruddick stresses that parents seek to make their children acceptable in an admittedly imperfect society, while also hoping their children’s lives will make acceptable an improved society. If a son is getting beaten up by neighborhood bullies, should his parents teach him to fight back or extol the virtue of somehow remaining “above it all” in the midst of his bruises? Should his parents simply insist he is a bigger “man” by avoiding the confrontations while the bullies pursue him even more on account of his perceived cowardice? (1995, 91). Of course tensions of “acceptability” are particularly taut for mothers in marginalized social groups. For example, mothers of color face the dilemma of trying to make their children acceptable in a social world that remains racist while giving their children the message that racism is wrong. Virtues of parenting themselves may clash with other virtues prized by contemporary market culture. By stressing how children teach and guide their parents, Bonnie Miller-McLemore (1991) redresses Ruddick’s exclusive focus on parents as the relevant agents. She claims that children Impartiality-as-Practice
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resist commodification, and that their unhurried delight in being challenges both the frenetic pace and the focus on production in work-oriented culture. Thus the parent who develops virtues of parenting, such as the ability to play “with, rather than ahead” of children, necessarily places herself in tension with other values of the community (1991, 21). She is, in effect, in “virtue disequilibrium.” The practical reasoning of maternal thinking is tension-filled and demands unhappy tradeoffs. Maternal virtue is “burdened virtue.”30 Yet the internal goods of parenting guide even the negotiations of tension. These goods define the limits of trade-offs. They also offer the vision of a life in which preservation, growth, and acceptability are simultaneously possible. Pe r s ona l I m pa rt i a l i t y of Pa r e n ts I n for m s P ol i t ic a l I m pa rt i a l i t y The internal ends of parenting and their associated virtues often directly implicate wider political norms, institutions, and practices. Parental impartiality highlights political, economic, or social structures that threaten the preservation and growth of children. Parental impartiality challenges legacies of the SVLO cases and of domesticity by rejecting overcelebrations of sacrifice and by questioning metaphors for citizenship that deny citizens were ever children. Parental Impartiality Can Directly Catalyze Political Involvement Ruddick elaborates how the desire to preserve and train children necessarily affects a mother’s stance toward her physical home, neighborhood, and broader community: Mothers extend their care to the homes they maintain, purchasing, borrowing, maintaining tools, cleaning and harmonizing a space. . . . Shelter and kinship, the physical home and the social household, are usually part of a larger social-physical community. There is nothing romantic about the extension of mother’s activity from keeping a safe home to making their neighborhoods safe. No one is surprised when mother petitions for traffic cops at school crossings or drive drug dealers off the block. If children are threatened, mothers join together, in all varieties of causes, to protect the neighborhoods they have made. 242
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Maternal care may extend as widely as the community on which growing children depend for their projects and affections. (1995, 80)
Regrettably, Ruddick leaps from the most local of political settings, the neighborhood school in need of crossing guards, to the most global, her consideration of international militarism. Yet her analysis could enhance an appreciation for how mothering might constructively influence politics in more intermediate settings, or how it might facilitate connections between multiple levels of political life. In short, her analysis helps to articulate the intuition that Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a civic hero. Its heroism is its appropriate extension of maternal impartiality outward toward the full community. The founders of MADD did not engage in an imaginative exercise to separate citizens from their attachments as is extolled in idolatrous accounts of impartiality. Rather, they exercised the kind of imagination required for impartiality-as-practice: the ability to imagine the moral weight of others’ passionate loves for them. They did not want other families to experience the searing loss of a child as they had experienced. It was by seeing fellow citizens as fellow parents that they correctly interpreted their loss as a public danger, not as just a private tragedy. Drunk driving is a capricious threat to the preservative practice of mothers, so mothers qua mothers organized to oppose it. The acronym MADD, phonetically indistinguishable from “mad,” implies that the passionate affections of mothering are intrinsic to the political action that defines the organization. The fight against drunk driving has prompted the engagement of MADD members in various educational and political endeavors: sponsoring films, speakers, and workshops on drunk driving at schools; pushing local media to publish the names of those arrested for driving while intoxicated; lobbying for tougher state and federal laws and associated penalties for drunk driving; counseling drunk driving offenders in order to prevent recidivism. There is no limit to the political relevance of personal impartiality. Elaborating a practice of mothering defined by certain aims, Ruddick goes on to mount a critique of international militarism. Significantly, Ruddick is not a pacifist and supports the maintenance of a standing army in order to advance preservative goals of parenting. Yet she draws on maternal practice to criticize particular strategies of modern militarism, especially Impartiality-as-Practice
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the maintenance of large nuclear arsenals. According to Ruddick, modern militarism depends on the capacity to destroy civilian populations and considers bodies, even children’s bodies, as means to ends. It dehumanizes these bodies through language that highlights the action of weapons rather than the fates of people, thus describing dead children as “collateral damage.” The ends of such militarism, reasons Ruddick, are antithetical to the ends of mothering: protecting and nurturing children. In effect, she suggests that a mother living in a society as militarized as ours faces reflective disequilibrium. Since militarism makes a mockery of the work of mothers, claims Ruddick, it must be opposed by mothers. Undue Sacrificial Ideals Impede Parental Impartiality-as-Practice The recognition of care as a practice structurally checks the undue glorification of sacrifice that has long marred conceptions of impartiality and civic virtue. Ruddick inverts wartime propaganda that portrays the mother’s sacrifice of her child as an ultimate act of patriotism. Instead, she proposes the values of mothering as standards against which sacrifices of war, military strategies, and particular wars must be justified. For her, the willingness to fight at times or in ways that do not honor the value of maternal work is a paradigm of the “citizen-who-loves-too-much” complex. Similarly, womanist (African American feminist) literature assails glorifications of sacrifice that impedes the outward extension of maternal thinking.31 As Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes, African American mothers are often lauded for “indomitable” strength, for their magical ability to create something out of nothing, and for their enduring in exploitative cultural and economic contexts (1995, 117–35). But Collins argues that appropriate admiration for their strength in adversity risks spilling over to excess, which glorifies the undue sacrifices that are required of them to care for their charges in the midst of want. The injustice of that want should be the moral focus. Collins joins other womanists in questioning “the mythology of the Mammy.”32 In short, cults of sacrifice tend to short-circuit both the critical needs assessment that grounds personal impartiality and the analogical reasoning that extends it to evaluation of public policies or institutions that distribute social resources and burdens. Glorification of sacrifice suppresses 244
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reflective processes that aim for a society in which self-consuming sacrifice is not necessary. Parental Impartiality Can Promote the Survival of Marginalized Communities Indeed, in positing survival as an ultimate moral goal for individuals, beloveds, and communities, womanists directly invert sacrificial ideals that underlie conventional accounts of civic virtue.33 The virtuous citizen may not be the one who sacrifices for the just public but the one who survives—and helps others survive—amid public injustice. Womanist literature redresses two criticisms of Ruddick’s account: that she focuses too much on individual mothers and on the power they have over their choices.34 Alternatively, womanists focus on communities of mothers and the constraints on their power from structural injustice. While injustice impedes parenting, fraying the resource base and social cohesion necessary for parenting, maternal care can be a positive response to injustice. Thus Toinette Eugene (1989) ironically borrows the line from an African American spiritual, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” to entitle an article discussing how central mothering is to black communities. Several womanists stress the role of motherly figures who are not biological mothers—Collins calls them “other-mothers”—in community survival. These mother-figures not only help to care for children but also to meet community needs through leadership in church or civic organizations. In effect, they extend maternal thinking to the community itself. They help vulnerable communities negotiate complex tensions between preservation, acceptability, and growth. Thus “Mother” is an honorific title in many African American social settings.35 The Practice of Parental Impartiality Challenges Common Metaphors in Political Theory Parental practice reveals the prevalent metaphor of citizen-as-rationalcontractor to be at best an incomplete, and at worst an unreal, view of moral selves. This metaphor ignores the caring, raising, and resources necessary for citizens to become independent: “Behind the picture of free and equal self-sufficient citizens governing themselves have been actual families from whom these citizens received care and replenishment,” writes Impartiality-as-Practice
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Virginia Held (1993, 163). The central place accorded negative liberty in liberal history becomes problematic if one considers the moral experience of childhood or child rearing. To become free, all people at some point need more than to be left alone. In actual lives, people must be enveloped in webs of care and trust before they can begin to contract, buy, and sell. Since the vulnerabilities of infancy and childhood are particularly acute, Held proposes the relationship between “mothering persons” and children as a socially primary bond. She suggests that the facilitation of children’s physical, emotional, and moral flourishing should be the ultimate standard by which political institutions are judged. The political advocacy of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) presumes this stance: one activity of the CDF is the collection and dissemination of information on childhood poverty, abuse, and addiction rates. The CDF considers many of these statistics to be de facto indictments of American political life.36 The work of the CDF, like Held’s theoretical work, shows the dramatic potential for practices of partiality to inform impartial principles. We have all been exposed to the practice of partiality, at least as one-time children and perhaps as child rearers or as family, friends, or neighbors of child rearers. This practice demands recognition of children’s radical vulnerabilities. Such recognition presses for social support of child rearing. From the point of view of an abstract agent, this reasoning may be dangerously circular. After all, child rearing is not every citizen’s chosen project. From the point of view of caregivers, this “circularity” may be reflective equilibrium among citizens who have all been children. While Held helpfully exposes the exclusivity of the metaphor of citizen-as-rational-contractor, her response is also dangerously exclusive. She proposes the bond between child and “mothering person” as the basic root of political society. Her focus on parenting as a political practice neglects the dangers of that exclusivity. She ignores both characteristic excesses that impede good parenting and their political corollaries. For example, she ignores the danger of paternalism, in the insidious sense of that word, that can result from taking children as the model of citizen. My own extended analysis of one micro-practice of care, parenting, is neither to claim its importance over others nor to argue for its foundational status in political life. Rather, my goal is to elaborate one among many examples of connections that link personal micro-practices of impartiality to public macro-practices. 246 ·
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T h e M icro -Pr ac t ice of Pa r e n ta l I m pa rt i a l i t y a n d Ot h e r M icro -Pr ac t ice s Of course, parents are not only parents but may also be friends, spouses, lovers, professionals, workers, property-owners or tenants, avid pursuers of hobbies, local office-holders or volunteers, and citizens. These aspects of life properly inform each other morally through an analogical process. Parenting analogically engages with other micro-practices in the broader macro-practice of impartiality. Consider as an example a person who is simultaneously a mother, wife, friend to several close friends, clinical psychologist, and professor of clinical psychology. Many of the micro-practices in which this person engages might inform each other.37 Yet there are obvious dangers if serious differences in these practices of impartiality are not recognized. In the course of directing therapy, this person may come to question whether certain patterns of manipulative behavior that she helps expose among clients might be subtly operative in her own parenting, marriage or friendships. From comparing these forums, she may come to general conclusions about certain types of actions, for example, the real moral danger of “little white lies.” She may draw on her experience as mother to young adults the same age as her students in deciding how much oversight and leeway to provide her therapists-in-training. However, she risks moral failures if she underattends differences in the various practices of impartiality she inculcates. Her students may appreciate her sensitivity to their struggles— undoubtedly indebted to her years as mother—while legitimately resenting any overly maternal gestures that seem to highlight their personal bond at the expense of attention to their professional association. Dis-analogies as well as analogies among micro-practices of impartiality thus demand attention and, when properly reflected upon, can be morally informative. The complex interplay among micro-practices of impartiality can reveal crosscutting generalizations and suggest universalizable moral truths —that is, they generate the macro-practice of impartiality. As Bok (1979) suggests, our mother/spouse/friend/therapist/teacher might come to endorse the principle of veracity as a result of moral experience in all her diverse moral practices. Moreover, that principle may be institutionalized in some of those practices, for example, in the codes governing patient protection endorsed by her psychologists’ professional association. Impartiality-as-Practice
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Sometimes the internal ends of several micro-practices of impartiality overlap. If not obscured by idolatrous conceptions that pit the personal against the political, such “overlapping consensus” may be as politically enabling as overlapping consensus on ethical principles—the more common usage of the term. Consider, for example, broad public support for the school lunch program. Perspectives from the practices of parenting, teaching, and medicine converge upon the importance of nutrition to childhood development. T h e Di a l e c t ic a l R et u r n: P ol i t ic a l I m pa rt i a l i t y I n for m s Pr ac t ice s of Pa r e n t i ng Practices of parenting inform political life in robust ways that are not acknowledged, or are outright discouraged, by idolatrous views of impartiality. But the practice of impartiality is an ethical two-way street. It also constrains parenting by impartial norms. Parenting can press the force of impartial norms on parents in new ways. Moreover, impartial principles distilled through an analogical process can critique particular parents or practices of parenting. Not only impartial principles but the community itself can mediate or moderate parental excess. The Practice of Parental Impartiality Subjects Parents to Broader Impartial Norms Just as the internal ends of parenting may push parents to question previously accepted social norms, so too they may push parents to reconsider the practical force of valid impartial norms. Recall the example of the meat-eating parents confronted by their teenage child’s vegetarian conversion. The parents who respond to the vegetarian adolescent by unreflectively punishing her, perhaps immediately forbidding any social activity until she eats a plate of beef, fail to demonstrate appropriate parental patience and vulnerability. By so failing, they miss the chance to practice impartiality toward her—for example, by trying to assess the seriousness of her decision. Is this a fad like the bell-bottoms, or a principled moral stance? Significantly, they also miss the chance to extend personal impartiality outward toward fuller moral questioning. Should they reevaluate their eating habits? In order to respond to their child, these parents may 248
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be required to address issues such as how animals are raised and slaughtered for meat, how land use and population sustainability relate to eating habits, and so forth. They may be forced to ask whether their own eating habits support or violate general norms of humaneness or ecology that they consciously wish to uphold. Their disciplined vulnerability may require a new level of reflectiveness about moral issues surrounding dietary choices. Parental virtue demands a willingness on the part of parents to open themselves to new moral questions in response to their children. But parental impartiality does not provide any easy answers in response. If the meat-eating parents do acknowledge the possibility that their daughter’s vegetarianism is a morally principled stance, what should they do? Should they change family meals? Or should they buy her a vegetarian cookbook and let her cook for herself? What may be most striking about the example of the adolescent vegetarian is its sheer mundaneness. Most parents—or friends, or lovers— readily acknowledge that their beloved has opened them to new moral ideas in surprising ways. But conventional political theory is based solely on the opposite possibility: that such loves insulate the parent, friend, or lover from broader moral claims, wrapping them in a parochial moral cocoon. However the parents respond, their appropriate vulnerability must remain disciplined. General norms from socialized practices of parenting must continue to inform their reflection. Supporting the daughter’s desire to eat tofu instead of hamburger is different from letting her live on a vegetarian diet of Tater Tots. Disjunctive perceptions will continue to pose moral challenges. If she is refusing Mom’s signature roast while eating Big Macs with her boyfriend, should she be given less leeway at home or encouraged to discuss her concerns about meat-eating with her boyfriend more openly? Is the inconsistency sheer adolescent flightiness, or a bowing to peer pressure? However their child eats, it must be in ways that promote physical preservation and growth, two basic internal ends of parenting. In an age of simultaneous prevalent obesity and eating disorders, not only what children eat, but how much, may pose challenges to parents attempting to encourage virtuous means. Collectively, parental influence on children’s Impartiality-as-Practice
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eating habits has enormous consequences for agriculture, economic life, and public health. Impartial Principles and the Community Itself May Restrain Parental Excess Virtues are not solely individual attainments but are developed through complex interaction between the cultivator of the virtue, the mediation of communal role models, and the restraining force of impartial principles distilled from the macro-practice of impartiality. Cristina Traina’s provocative analysis of maternal eroticism (1998) directly addresses the relationship between personal virtues of parenting and community mediation of parenting. In my terms, she elaborates how failures of parental virtue can promote excesses in wider social practices of parenting and, conversely, how the community of parents appropriately constrains parental virtue. Traina works within a Christian theological framework, but my focus is the structure of virtue implied in her account. Traina affirms the moral value of delight in the physical sensuousness of parenting: the release of milk in a suckled breast, the caress of a cuddling toddler, or the physical bond of a family huddled under the quilt during a dramatic thunderstorm. Combating what she considers oversimplistic contrasts between erotic love and parental love, and between ethical duty and embodiment, she emphasizes maternal eroticism as appropriate motivation of and reward for the hard work of parenting. Yet she starkly confronts excesses that result when delight in physical contact with children becomes “a demonic distortion” characterized by a desire for control—a distortion “soberly recounted [by] statistics revealing endlessly rationalized, unrepented sexual exploitation” (1998, 192). In effect, Traina presents appropriate “restrained maternal eroticism” as the mean between an unhealthy disembodiment of parenting and the physical or sexual abuse of children. She suggests that the latter is related to the former: that the suppression of the erotic in Christianity and wider popular culture causes the pendulum to swing from one excess to its polar opposite, from widespread physical detachment from children to widespread physical abuse of children. Tantalizingly, she implies that freer cultural expression of appropriate parent-child eroticism could reduce, not increase, rates of sexual abuse. 250
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Personal virtue, of course, cannot be solely relied upon to protect children from abuse. The impartial principle, distilled from the macropractice of impartiality, that identifies sexual intimacy with children as an inherent abuse of power is binding on parents and relatives. Taken seriously, this principle demands aggressive community response to abuse. The frequent reluctance of observers to report suspicions of incest is a tragic legacy of domesticity, which severs home life from justice as a regulative norm. Response to abuse is not solely (but also) a matter of law enforcement. Traina emphasizes communal example and communal deliberation to promote appropriate parental restraint: The key to resolving the tension [between our capacities for moral virtue and perversity] may lie in an . . . epistemology of communal grace. . . . [F]ailed generative knowing results in a temptation for abuse only when no one else relieves the burden, helps [one] rethink, distracts [one] temporarily. Isolated reflection on isolated maternity quickly loses its perspective and grows demonic. When other people share the task of caring, thinking, or even laughing, equilibrium is restored. The lesson is that the power to discern and negotiate among goods is a communal power. (1998, 193)
Parental virtue is not only a disposition of individuals but a legacy of communities. Communal restraint is both carrot and stick: both positive modeling and coercive enforcement of minimal acceptable boundaries for parental behavior. Parenting and Politics: Two-Way Influence While idolatrous impartiality implies that parenting is irrelevant to citizenship, impartiality-as-practice highlights the potential for parenting, along with diverse other moral practices, to inform political life and vice versa. Although impartial norms of the community can always be challenged through analogical interplay with specific practices of care, no such practice is morally insulated from the force of the community’s stable impartial norms. There is more than tragic humor at stake in the wellpublicized arrest of a high-ranking MADD official on charges of drunk driving, defined by legal standards that she helped to institutionalize. The case poignantly demonstrates the reflexive capability of impartiality-aspractice. Impartiality-as-Practice
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I m pa rt i a l i t y-a s-Pr ac t ice R e c o gn i z e d a n d Su ppr e s se d i n t h e P ol i t ic a l T r a di t ion While the idolatrous conception of an impartial standpoint has suppressed the political contributions of impartiality-as-practice, various forums in political life presume its cogency. Public hearing processes, from county councils to the highly formalized hearing processes of the U.S. Congress, depend on a practice of impartiality to inform policy decisions. Witnesses are not asked to adopt an imaginative standpoint that somehow encompasses the interests of all. Rather, a variety of practitioners adept at a variety of specific practices of impartiality are invited to testify. Thus, for example, a congressional hearing on Medicare reform might include testimony from health care professionals, economists, philosophers, Medicare recipients and their families, and advocates from consumer organizations or organizations supporting the elderly. The lawmakers presume that the analogical consideration of these different testimonies, representing different kinds of cultivated impartialities, will inform an appropriately impartial policy decision. In broader public discourse, the insights of the public hearing process are often undermined by the idolatries of impartiality-as-standpoint. These idolatries lead many to presume simultaneously both the ideal and the impossibility of impartiality-as-standpoint, so that real politics becomes viewed solely as an agonistic contest where battles of self-interest are fought. The agonistic portrayal of political life precludes the possibility that citizens could genuinely use public discourse to edify, to help educate themselves on policy options or choices. This error leads to the dismissal of those who explicitly speak from the perspective of an identified micropractice of care as “parochial,” or as representing “an interest group.” For example, in the case of Medicare reform, the AARP becomes cast as one interest group among many, a lobby for the financial interests of the elderly. (Indeed, the equation of advocacy with “lobbying” demonstrates the agonistic view.) Lost is the recognition that the AARP has cultivated a particular practice of partiality with the internal end of protecting its membership from the vulnerabilities of aging. Of course, the distortions of idolatrous impartiality can become selffulfilling prophecies. When all practices of partiality are dismissed as narrow self-interest and all who engage in public advocacy are described as 252
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lobbyists, there may be many more lobbyists than advocates. Politics may come more and more to resemble a battle, and less and less an educational forum. The proliferation of war metaphors for politics both reflects and promotes the agonistic view. From parents organizing volunteer crossing guards to the congressional hearing process, the practice of impartiality is, paradoxically, both visibly accomplished and rendered invisible. Political theory and discursive conventions deny the importance of, while taking for granted, its accomplishment. To honor its achievement in ways that encourage its development, the “standpoint” metaphor for impartiality should be permanently retired.
C ONC E P T UA L AC C OM PL ISH M E N T S OF I M PA RT I A L I T Y-A S-PR AC T IC E Impartiality-as-practice is fundamentally a practical accomplishment. It is the accomplishment of ordinary moral heroes who develop disciplined practices of partiality and impartiality, who engage in vicarious experience made possible by the analogical interplay among those practices, and who extend that interplay to the broadest levels of political life. At the same time, impartiality-as-practice is a conceptual accomplishment. Understanding impartiality as a practice attenuates many problems in received political theory. It explodes the containment of care, expanding ethical principlism to include duties of care and thus promoting truly reflexive reflective equilibrium. It encourages more dialogical politics while extending the sense of dialogue beyond verbal discourse. T h e E x pa nsion of Pr i m a Faci e Pr i nci pl ism The recognition of duties, not just feelings, of care enables crucial conceptual expansions of ethical principlism and reflective equilibrium. (Recall that principlism posits multiple principles of ethical life that are normally binding but that may sometimes conflict in a tragic world.) Impartialityas-standpoint considers distinctive features of relationships as details to guide the application of moral principles. Indeed, “applied ethics” is a commonly used term for practical ethics. In contrast, impartiality-aspractice brings duties of partiality into the mix of prima facie obligations Impartiality-as-Practice
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themselves. Thus they can influence the formation of moral principles, enabling truly reflexive reflective equilibrium. Once duties of partiality are recognized as such, the language of prima facie obligations from the principlist tradition should apply as much to duties of partiality as to any other moral duties.38 Just as two ethical principles we normally wish to uphold may conflict in a given situation, so too duties of partiality may conflict with generalized principles or with each other. Duties of partiality cannot be absolute; they must be prima facie, binding in the absence of such conflict. It is not clear in advance whether general norms or partial duties trump in cases of conflict. For example, the beaten wife may be morally remiss if she fails to realize that universal principles demanding respect for bodily integrity override her prima facie duty to care for her husband. In other cases, duties of partiality may trump: in a severely skewed and exploitative economic system, it may be morally laudable for a poor parent to steal in order to feed her children. In some cases, the tension itself reveals cracks in the social system designed to protect the vulnerable. In the contemporary United States, surveys reveal that physicians are most likely to lie in clinical practice in order to receive insurance coverage for a patient who otherwise might forgo recommended treatment.39 When prima facie duties of care conflict with other prima facie duties, the conflict itself should prompt critical reflection on the social conventions that undergird both duties of partiality and “impartial” principles. Such conflict is reflective disequilibrium, though it has been inadequately recognized as such in conventional political theory. There, the moral friction of such disequilibrium is evaded by the disproportionate initial weighting of universal theory over particular attachments or experience. Thus the conflict is wrongly dismissed as private indulgence versus public duty. Recognizing duties of care to have the same status as other kinds of moral principles is a first step toward repairing the bridges of reflective equilibrium that have been blown up by impartiality-as-standpoint. R e f l e c t i v e E qu i l i br i u m : Pe rce p t i v e a s W e l l a s R e f l e c t i v e , Hor i z on ta l a s W e l l a s V e rt ic a l “Reflective equilibrium,” Rawls’s creative term, denotes a stable moral understanding in which one’s particular experiences, ethical principles, 254
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and comprehensive view of the good all mutually support each other. But moral theory has too long presumed a disjuncture between the development of universal moral theory and the project of reflective equilibrium, wrongly viewed as a subsequent project. The problem goes beyond any one theorist: the presumption that there is greater certainty at more abstract levels of moral reflection permeates much modern ethical thought. Yet Rawls’s account is particularly illuminating because the suppression of personal experience is particularly explicit. It occurs at two points. First, the heuristic original position from which rational contractors derive the first principles of justice behind a veil of ignorance is deliberately insulated from particular experiences of care. Second, Rawls defines “considered judgments” at the most specific tier of moral reasoning to exclude those marked by perplexity or emotional passion (1971, 47). The exclusion is emphasized in Norman Daniels’s “independence criterion,” which requires that in reflective equilibrium the background theories should show that the [intermediate] moral principles . . . are more acceptable than alternative principles on grounds to some degree independent of . . . [their] match with relevant considered moral judgements. . . . . . . Some interesting, nontrivial portions of the set of considered moral judgments that constrains the background theories and of the set that constrains moral principles should be disjoint. (1979)
Such rigidity insulates reflective equilibrium from challenges of perception that attend particular human relationships. It also eliminates consideration of how conventions of care, in addition to articulations of moral principles, might distill from the back-and-forth between levels of moral life. Purportedly “higher” levels of abstract moral reasoning become disproportionately weighted. Recognizing duties and conventions of care as themselves prima facie moral obligations allows the moral lessons of care in at the door of theory formation. It thus makes perceptions of perplexity or passionate commitment—exactly what is omitted in the Rawlsian account—an essential element of reflective equilibrium. Perceptive as Well as Reflective Martha Nussbaum, rejecting the theory-heaviness in prevalent conceptions of reflective equilibrium, satirically suggests the goal of “perceptive Impartiality-as-Practice
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equilibrium” as an alternative formulation.40 She develops an illuminating Aristotelian account of perception to challenge conventional models of reflective equilibrium. Ultimately, her account is unsatisfying because it fails to integrate perceptive and reflective equilibrium, though the disjuncture between them is an unfortunate legacy of the SVLO cases. But Nussbaum’s account dramatically poses the challenge of incorporating virtues of perception into theoretical conceptions of moral balance. According to Nussbaum, perception demands “the priority of the particular” (1990, 66–75). Consideration of particulars depends on emotional formation, openness to surprise, and moral imagination—all of which are repressed in overly theoretical models of reflective equilibrium. She claims that perception is “grasped by insight through experience”; it is a “non-inferential, non-deductive ability to recognize the salient features of a complex situation”; it is subject to the “cognitive guidance of the emotion”; it imaginatively engages in selective discrimination and recombination of particulars, “linking particulars without dispensing with their particularity” (68, 74, 186, 78). Rejecting modern distinctions between the “moral” and the “aesthetic,” Nussbaum focuses on the aesthetic quality of perception. In perceptive equilibrium, rather than being suppressed, concrete perceptions “hang together beautifully” (183, quoting Henry James). Because such an equilibrium demands acute attentiveness to relevant particulars, Nussbaum seeks instruction from the literary imaginations of great novelists rather than from theoretical models. Nussbaum doubts that “perceptive equilibrium” can simply be combined with “reflective equilibrium,” because she thinks reflective equilibrium presumes a Kantian stance toward morality that inherently opposes the vulnerability and passivity necessary for perception. She sometimes poses “loving perception” and the “moral point of view” as exclusive stances between which one inevitably “oscillates.” However, at other times she seems uncomfortable with her own formulation, and she suggests that great literature may link the two stances.41 Nussbaum’s ambivalence here results from her uncritical acceptance of “standpoint” language to express “impartial” morality: “the moral point of view.” Seyla Benhabib criticizes neo-Aristotelians such as Nussbaum for emphasizing perception at the expense of moral judgment regulated by
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procedural universals (1992, 53–55). As Benhabib emphasizes, finely attuned perception may be used to manipulate and exploit others as well as to accord them respect or care. Yet at its best, Nussbaum’s account implies a synthesis between perception and judgment. Her portrayal of imaginative perception as a jazz musician’s elegant improvisation—creative but bound by certain forms of scale and rhythm—calls into question her insistence on the “priority of the particular” and instead suggests a more infused, dialectical relationship between perception, structured judgment, and imaginative response (1990, 155). Nussbaum acknowledges that appropriate generalization and the development of stable but revisable intermediate principles are part of the moral process. She encourages the distillation of rebuttable universals. However, contra Rawls, she stresses that perception of ethical particulars is an intrinsic part of, rather than separate from, those moral tasks.42 Nussbaum could profitably expand her account of Aristotelian perception if she more explicitly discussed the relationship between Aristotle’s teleology (orientation to ends) and his emphasis on discernment of particulars. The teleological aspect of Aristotelian perception pushes him to consideration of moral practices, rather than viewing particulars as free-floating. Internal goods of moral practices provide criteria for the discrimination of “salient features” in a given situation. Sara Ruddick, for example, describes how the preservative goals of mothering encourage mothers to develop a keen perception of potential dangers to children, including sharp objects, accessible poisons, suspicious strangers, and public policies that render children more susceptible to military draft.43 Impartiality-as-practice guides what Nussbaum calls “active passivity” and the “discernment that rests with perception” (1990, 184 and 55, quoting Aristotle). It elaborates why perception of particulars is not capricious. Connecting Nussbaum’s emphasis on “perceptive equilibrium” to social practices meets Seyla Benhabib’s demand to attend both the “generalized” and the “concrete” other. The concreteness of the other always leaves room for surprises, while the connection between duties of partiality and universal moral goals (such as adequate attention to each) provides structure for the creativity of perception. Truly perceptive equilibrium incorporates “duties of partiality” into the moral balance
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that is sought. Duties of partiality demand attention to unique particulars as people wrestle with universal moral challenges: what it means to support a child, help a loved one die with dignity, keep an elderly parent independent for as long as possible, help a friend through a troubled time.44 Perplexity or passionately felt commitments are not distinct from “considered judgments” in the manner Rawls contends. Affective commitments to particular persons can foster appropriate questioning of long-accepted principles or practice. Moreover, the dynamism of reflective equilibrium occurs not only in the exchange between levels of moral reasoning but also within levels. For example, a daughter’s rage may demand that a father reevaluate his delight in pornography, an indulgence he formerly considered benign. Attentiveness to particulars can transform what we hold to be relevant considered judgments, just as relatively stable principles can help us to evaluate a specific situation. If duties of partiality and affective particular judgments that arise from them are allowed into the process of reflective equilibrium, attention is redirected to the significance of particulars originally unseen or ignored. A deliberate synthesis of perceptive and reflective equilibrium might be viewed not as a rejection of universalistic morality but rather as the repair of incoherence within Kantian morality itself. That is the characterization offered by Benhabib. She insists that since attention to the “concrete other” is essential to determine which cases are similar, the quest for moral universals should recognize perception as a crucial moral task. Perception demands attuned, particularized conversation as a precondition to the “reversibility of perspectives” (the ability to imagine being in someone else’s shoes), since “when we disagree morally . . . we do not only disagree about the principles involved; very often we disagree because what I see as a lack of generosity on your part you construe as your legitimate right to do something; we disagree because what you see as jealousy on my part I view as my desire to have more of your attention” (1992, 163). Perceptive and reflective equilibrium are linked, according to Benhabib, because interpretive skills are necessary for the reversibility of perspectives demanded by universalistic norms, while judgment guided by moral principles is necessary to prevent interpretive skills from becoming tools of manipulation (54).
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Virginia Held summarizes the complete reflexivity of perception and reflection that is sought: “Moral inquiry is an ongoing process. . . . [I]t should be seen as a process of continual adjustment of theory in the light of experience, as well as of particular judgments and actions in the light of theory” (1993, 28–29). An understanding of impartiality as a practice rather than as standpoint allows for this reflexivity by refusing to cordon off realms of morality that are insulated from each other. Fully Reflexive With this improved understanding, conflicts between duties of partiality and impartial principles can readily be seen as challenges to reflective equilibrium rather than as suspect temptations of private desire against public duty. Recurrent conflicts should be more troubling than isolated ones, signaling a failure in the social conventions that structure practices of partiality and related perceptions of universal duties. Impartiality-aspractice demands that moral agents distinguish moral tragedy (inherent conflicts between multiple moral goods) from reflective disequilibrium (socially constructed ethical conflicts that can be resolved through ethical adjustment). An example from the history of welfare policy is illustrative. For some time, policy-makers had been aware of widespread deception by welfare recipients who either worked without reporting earnings or deliberately sabotaged prospects for employment. The most common reason given for such tactics was well known: the felt need to preserve Medicaid insurance coverage for the welfare parent’s children. Generally, full-time employment entailed loss of eligibility for Medicaid; yet many entry-level jobs do not provide health insurance. Until the 1996 welfare reform, this pattern was not recognized as reflective disequilibrium. Welfare parents who engaged in such deception, significantly usually “moms,” were considered lazy and were resented for putting their “personal interest” (children!) ahead of their “public duty.” Public policy focused on catching the deceivers—and failed miserably. In the 1996 welfare reform, the pattern of deception for insurance was belatedly recognized as reflective disequilibrium. A response was designed to heal the breech between personal and political practices of impartiality. Welfare recipients beginning employment now may still receive Medicaid Impartiality-as-Practice
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Figure 6.1. John Rawls’s Reflective Equilibrium
Comprehensive Moral Theory
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insurance during a transition period if their entry-level position does not provide insurance. The otherwise puzzlingly long delay in addressing the insurance issue relates to idolatrous views of public impartiality. Welfare moms were simply caught in the latest rendition of SVLO cases. But when duties of care are recognized as prima facie obligations, the pattern of deception-for-insurance becomes apparent as reflective disequilibrium. The need for structural redress is illumined rather than veiled. The welfare recipients’ rightful perception of conflict is allowed political weight, which may change other perceptions. Addressing this disequilibrium may lead to recognition of others. In fact, the insurance conundrum reveals grating tensions between two dually embraced goals of welfare: to assist poor single parents to care for their children, and to help poor single parents to become economically independent. It suggests balancing these goals as a complex aim of public policy. Moreover, it raises questions about why the two goals are often at odds, and about what social changes could make them less so. The basic Rawlsian conception of reflective equilibrium is visually portrayed in figure 6.1. The shorter arrows going in one direction, as compared 260
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Figure 6.2. Overlapping Consensus
CITIZEN ONE
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Comprehensive Moral Theory
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Considered Judgments/ Particular Situations
Considered Judgments/ Particular Situations
to the other, signal Rawls’s two constraints that prevent moral experience from challenging principle and theory formation as much as vice versa. With an understanding of impartiality-as-practice, these arrows would be equal in length, fully two directional. Moreover, the middle level of moral reasoning would be expanded to include practices of care as well as moral principles. Horizontal as Well as Vertical Reflective Equilibrium In addition to increasing reflexivity between levels of moral reasoning, impartiality-as-practice expands the conceptual terrain of reflective equilibrium. It balances not only levels of moral reasoning (from the more particular to the more abstract) but also different ways of moral knowing —rendering reflective equilibrium a communal as well as an individual accomplishment. Reflective equilibrium is often seen as an individual “vertical” project: one must bring into line one’s own comprehensive view of the good, general principles that support that good, and considered judgments of particular situations. Dynamism between the levels should allow us to fine-tune at Impartiality-as-Practice
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Figure 6.3. Norman Daniels’s “Wide Reflective Equilibrium”
Relevant Background Theory 1
Relevant Background Theory 2
Relevant Background Theory 3
Set of Moral Principles
Set of Considered Judgments
each level. Thus deontologists, divine command theorists, utilitarians, subscribers to an ethic of care—all might have their own vertical diagram of reflective equilibrium, topped by their particular comprehensive view of the good (the categorical imperative, the principle of utility, God’s will, care, etc.)45 Many theorists note that while these vertical views of reflective equilibrium indicate profound moral disagreement at the top level, they demonstrate considerable overlap at the intermediate level.46 The overlap allows for significant consensus in the midst of moral pluralism. Thus, for example, deontologists, utilitarians, and feminists may agree on the importance of veracity as a general moral principle, though justificatory reasons will differ (duty defined by the categorical imperative, greatest good for the greatest number, the facilitation of appropriate trust, etc.). Such “overlapping consensus,” to use Rawls’s term, may allow for shared agreements that regulate much social and political morality. Figure 6.2 schematically portrays such overlapping consensus. The fact of overlapping consensus is often considered a pragmatic boon that allows for the development of moral consensus despite never-ending argument about the best comprehensive view of the good and without impeding that argument. But since different comprehensive views often
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embody different kinds of moral reasoning, overlapping consensus might more radically call into question our acceptance of that never-ending argument on its inherited terms. Norman Daniels’s portrayal of “wide reflective equilibrium” ostensibly seeks to invite such questioning but nonetheless remains essentially vertical. Daniels considers reflective equilibrium as a balance “for a given individual at a given time” that is defined by an “ordered triple” between that person’s “set of considered judgments,” “set of moral principles,” and “set of relevant background theories” (1979, 258, 281). But as figure 6.3 shows, Daniels emphasizes that the top “tier” of an ordered triple may in fact encompass many moral theories. In effect, Daniels stresses a double understanding in the understanding of “overlapping consensus”: that agreement on intermediary principles occurs not only among citizens but also within citizens who may partially embrace seemingly conflicting comprehensive views of the good. However, the Rawlsian constrictions he maintains on the influence of moral perplexity, particular moral experience, and practices of care do not provide enough “upward flow” to explain how a process of reflective equilibrium may press toward integration or modification of those comprehensive views. Grappling with that lacuna, Daniels suggests a fourth level of reflection “contain[ing] the body of social theory relevant to testing level one principles (and level three theories) for feasibility” (1979, 260). But certainly that level cannot be portrayed simply as a vertical extension of an ordered triple. At the end of his now classic article, Daniels questions, without exploring, the relationship between reflective equilibrium and moral practice: My account of wide reflective equilibrium has not provided . . . an obvious analogue to the role of experimentation in science. Some story about moral practice and what we can learn from it, and not just about moral thought experiments, seems to be needed. That is, we would need to examine the sense in which moral theories guide moral practice and result in social experimentation. (281)
Impartiality-as-practice achieves that goal, enabling the directional vector Daniels shortchanged to consider how moral practice can guide moral theories. By including moral practices and equalizing the mutual pressures between theory and experience, it resolves the tension between Impartiality-as-Practice
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Figure 6.4. Reflective Equilibrium, Impartiality-as-Practice (Fully reflexive, horizontal as well as vertical)
Comprehensive moral theory 1
Comprehensive moral theory 2
Comprehensive moral theory 3
Duties/conventions of care; General principles
Duties/conventions of care; General principles
Duties/conventions of care; General principles
Considered judgments/ particular situations
Considered judgments/ particular situations
Considered judgments/ particular situations
vertical, individually oriented diagrams of reflective equilibrium and simultaneous recognition of overlapping consensus among a community of diverse citizens. Impartiality-as-practice suggests horizontal equilibrium as an ethical goal, the forging of dynamic balance between different ways of moral knowing that operate amidst and between ethical theories.47 The analogical reasoning that operates at the micro, macro, and intermediate levels of impartiality-as-practice might connect different ways of moral knowing that are more or less pronounced in specific practices of partiality and impartiality, including those that underlie grand moral theories. Certainly, prominent comprehensive moral theories are more heavily indebted to certain practices of impartiality—utilitarianism to the empirical sciences, deontology to Newtonian physics, care ethics to practices of caring such as child rearing and friendship, and so forth. Ultimately, the analogical practice of impartiality may serve as connective tissue between moral truths arrived at experientially, intuitively, inductively, deductively. It underlies the observation that few people outside archetypes in moral theory are adequately characterized as pristine Kantian deontologists, utilitarians, caregivers, or other ethical archetypes. 264
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Conceived accordingly, reflective equilibrium can be considered as both a social and an individual accomplishment. The “back and forth” occurs both among different traditions of practice in a moral community and within one individual’s moral reflection. In the latter case, communal resources are still needed to inform the horizontal linkages across different vertical modes of moral knowing—which are linked to different webs of social practices. Figure 6.4 visually represents the expanded reflective equilibrium enabled by a conception of impartiality-as-practice. Duties of partiality and conventions of care are added to the “middle tier” of reflection, “prima facie practices” to be accorded the same ethical weight as prima facie principles. Reflexivity among each ordered triple is achieved by removing the constraints that insulate theory formation from, or sever moral principles from, challenges percolating from the level of practical moral experience. Horizontal as well as vertical reflexivity is unlimited. By incorporating caring practices and their habituated perception, impartiality-as-practice encourages us to maintain not only vertical reflective equilibrium—consistency between levels of specificity of moral maxim or action—but also horizontal reflective equilibrium, the integration of different ways of moral knowing. These moral ways of knowing may be “ands” rather than “ors.” Di a l o gic a l Dis c ou r se , a n d Dis c ou r se beyon d Di a l o gu e The re-diagramming of reflective equilibrium makes explicit some presumptions underlying the call for “dialogical politics” that is being made by many critics of contemporary public discourse. It gives philosophical flesh to the intuition that we need more genuine engagement between citizens in public life for public discourse to flourish. Impartiality-as-practice recognizes that to perceive with moral clarity citizens need the perspectives of others. It suggests that accepted vulnerability rather than fortified autonomy might be key to the role of citizen. With no Archimedean standpoint to retreat to, citizens must learn the perspective of others from them, constantly wary of the danger of underdescription. Listening to ordinary moral heroes, to others experienced at various practices of impartiality, to groups whose partial attachments may bespeak “impartial” Impartiality-as-Practice
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truths, we may vicariously expand the resources by which as a collective we assess needs, forge shared subjectivities, and attempt to give adequate attention to each. Citizens may therefore do the greatest service not by trying to speak “as citizens,” separating their political arguments from the particularities of their own attachments. Rather, they may insist that they are speaking as citizens when they speak as complex social selves, as masters at some practices of impartiality, apprentices at others, and reflectors on many more through a willingness to engage in the analogical macro-practice of impartiality. Impartiality-as-practice reveals conventions of restricted justification in public discourse to be restrictions on the process of reflective equilibrium itself. Restricted justification alienates citizens who feel disallowed from discussing their most cherished commitments in public. In addition, it removes necessary resources from the practice of impartiality in public life, since the practice of impartiality requires a dialectic between partiality and impartiality at all levels of reflection. Impartialityas-practice elucidates why the call for ethics in many different voices need not invoke naive relativism but can, on the contrary, enable strong moral judgments. Of course, those who worry that ideal standpoints render the vulnerable invisible should also worry that dialogical politics could render the vulnerable mute. A stress on dialogue must not become an excuse to ignore those who cannot speak. That is why adepts at various practices of care— adepts for whom the good of identifiable vulnerables has become intertwined with their own good—must play a vital role in dialogical politics. That is why listening to the partial may be essential to political impartiality, to the achievement of adequate consideration of each. In fact, the consideration of impartiality as a practice broadens the concept of “discourse” to include ways of life as well as articulated arguments. It works against what I call “an elitism of the articulate,” by allowing actual practices of care and commitment to become fodder for political reflection. Thus it links two prevalent families of metaphors employed by contemporary moral theorists: metaphors of seeing, and metaphors of hearing/speaking.48 One may have to listen carefully to learn where to focus one’s moral gaze. Conversely, one may have to look perceptively to know what to listen to, or to know what is missing from the conversation. The interrelated political virtues that I propose support impartiality-as266
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practice, elaborated in the next chapter, share the tendency to link ethical metaphors of seeing, hearing, and speaking.
C ONC LUSION: A DI A L E C T IC OF C A R E A N D J US T IC E Just as observation of practitioners resolves the dilemma of objectivity in science, and just as observation of practitioners resolves the dilemma of love in Christian theology, so observation of practitioners resolves the dilemma of impartiality in political theory. The resulting view of impartiality-as-practice avoids the idolatrous excesses that couldn’t be lived with, while providing a pragmatic understanding of impartiality—what cannot be lived without. Once care is recognized as a practice, and the analogical macropractice of impartiality is examined, a dialectic becomes evident between practices of partiality and norms of impartiality, between care and justice. This dialectic structurally parallels the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity elaborated by contemporary philosophers of science, and the dialectic between particular loves and commanded neighbor love elaborated by contemporary Christian theologians. “Care” and “justice,” among other moral perspectives, must balance and inform each other in a stable reflective equilibrium. Understanding the relationship between care and justice as dialectical avoids two excesses: that of the SVLO cases, which defines them as dichotomous and in conflict; and that of those who collapse the two, either excusing affectionate care from general norms or insulating general norms from the experience of care. Care and justice are not the same thing. Yet their difference is characterized by the complementary inversion of a common tension. Care attends to what is unique in particular others in order to attain general goals of caring practices. Justice focuses on features of generality in ethical life in order to organize particular affections. Both are necessary to give adequate attention to each, and they inform and constrain each other. Transcending the dichotomy between justice and care dissolves many related dichotomies, the collective heirs of domesticity and of idolatrous conceptions of love. Most significantly, it redresses the two ideologies that have hamstrung civic virtue: the ideologies of gender and religion. Impartiality-as-Practice
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Rather than being removed from public purview as either a private consumer choice or a form of love too pure to be tainted by political association, care becomes recognized as civic work. Reason and emotion become linked allies, rather than combative enemies, in the practice of impartiality. The gender caricatures at stake in demands for a more rational politics (“masculine”) or for a more playful, passionate politics (“feminine”) are revealed as such. Reason without passion lacks motivation and cognitive starting points. Passionate play without reason can become manipulation, the political equivalent of “S and M.” We need passionate, playful, and rational politics. The dialectic between justice and care also heals ironic gender caricatures within feminism.49 Several theorists use the labels “feminine” and “feminist” to differentiate two general approaches to ethics both commonly tagged “feminist.”50 “Feminine” (emotional?) ethics stresses how traditions of moral philosophy have failed to reflect the moral experience of women, urges a distinctive women’s voice, and advocates care, compassion, and communication as central stresses of that voice. “Feminist” (rational?) ethics is more overtly political, arguing for the transformation of patriarchal conventions and suggesting strategies for such transformation. “Feminine” ethics has been closely associated with so-called ethics of care, and “feminist” ethics with liberal feminism. While this distinction provides an accurate typology of much feminist literature, it ultimately must be overcome through the practice of impartiality itself. The “feminine” wisdom often extolled as the “ethic of care” can and must inform the aggressive, positive transformation of political life. Conversely, that transformation can and must render caring more critical, and it must make caring a less politically dangerous and taken-forgranted activity. Metaphorically speaking, impartiality-as-practice affirms that feminists can be feminine and vice versa. The continuing rift between the ethics of care and liberal feminism turns out to be just another legacy of the SVLO cases. Impartiality-as-practice not only de-genders notions of critical fairmindedness but also secularizes related conceptions of love. It thus rescues impartiality from the unhelpful martyr’s complex associated with idolatrous accounts. The equation of love and sacrifice institutionalized in the SVLO lineage must be recognized for what it is: the hijacking of political life by one thickly religious comprehensive view of the good. While my 268
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development of impartiality-as-practice is structurally informed by Christian critics of that Christian view of love, it is also informed by many other influences in the philosophy of science, gender theory, ethical theory, and moral experience. It is built from an overlapping consensus on conceptions of critical fair-mindedness rather than being covertly aligned with a single religious worldview. This secularization of impartiality frees love from the restraints of an extreme view of love. It allows us to insist on the relevance of justice to all areas of life rather than presuming that love’s sacrificial bent renders justice a superfluous concept in “loving” contexts. It also allows us to ask meaningfully what it means to love the public political community rather than to assume that love is irrelevant to political life. This resolves an incoherence in the idolatrous concept of impartiality, which presents the suppression of passion as the necessary passion to motivate political commitment. The analogical practice of impartiality links many of the categories so uncomfortably dichotomized in contemporary political theory, providing a conceptual axis outside the liberal/communitarian framework. It presumes that political morality demands both discovering one’s identity and choosing one’s own ends. It recognizes that true freedom allows one adequate freedom from constraint and adequate freedom for the opportunity to contribute to communally negotiated visions of the common good. By exploding the containment of care, it provides what sociologist Nina Eliasoph (1998) calls the missing “category for politics,” a conceptual turf on which citizens may stand to consider connections between their most passionate particular commitments and their political visions.51 K e e pi ng “Pa rt i a l” i n “I m pa rt i a l” By recasting impartiality as an unending discipline of practical reasoning rather than as a standpoint, impartiality-as-practice denies the ancestry of the archbishop and the chambermaid. Since impartiality-as-practice challenges assumptions of “impartiality” as that term has gained prominence in philosophical literature, a question of terminology is raised. Is it appropriate to retain the term “impartiality,” rather than coining a new term? I think it is. Impartiality-as-practice philosophically elucidates the wisdom of everyday usage of the term “impartiality.” Many ordinary folks Impartiality-as-Practice
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seem to think there is a coherent notion of impartiality that demands neither impersonality nor detachment: teachers attempting to grade fairly, parents attempting to discipline children fairly, friends attempting to allocate their energies fairly. The philosophical elevation of the ordinary is needed to combat the converse, the tendency for detached philosophical models of impartiality to become self-fulfilling prophecies influencing ordinary life. In fact, the cognitive dissonance between popular and philosophical uses of the term is one indication of the reflective disequilibrium that must be corrected by reconceptualizing impartiality. Moreover, the root word partial is in the word impartial. If impartiality-as-practice accurately describes the dialectic between partiality and impartiality in the process by which we give adequate attention to each, then etymologically that is just right. I m pa rt i a l i t y-a s-Pr ac t ice a n d t h e T r a nsfor m at ion of C i v ic V i rt u e By redescribing impartiality as a practice, I have in effect redescribed it as a virtue: a cultivated moral habit. Articulating this practice is the fundamental first step in a wider transformation of civic virtue. In the following chapter, I consider impartiality-as-practice as a linchpin political virtue and then ask what virtues, or family of virtues, support this practice. Political impartiality itself is the internal end of a practice that structures the cultivation of related virtues. It demands public corollaries of many of the virtues of personal impartiality: perceptive and communicative virtues, and virtues necessary to embrace a disciplined vulnerability toward others. Most generally, it demands virtues of conceptual translation that facilitate the fullest extension of the analogical practice of impartiality. The articulation of these virtues, plural, embodies a transformed conception of civic virtue, singular. The practice of these virtues enables just love among citizens.
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7
JUST LOVE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF CIVIC VIRTUE
In this concluding chapter, I elaborate the implications of impartialityas-practice for conceptions of civic virtue. My goal is not to provide an airtight definition of civic virtue but to counter distortions in conventional views and to redirect discourse in productive ways. I aim to foster renewed appreciation for the practical lessons offered by real civic heroes. These heroes are not merely ghosts from some past golden age. They are among us now in ordinary communal life. At the same time, a transformed conception of civic virtue exposes civic vices that have been flourishing quietly without adequate critique. This book focuses on appreciating real political virtues of ordinary heroes. But it also aims to increase ethical scrutiny of policies advocated by appeal to an “impartial standpoint” or to sacrificial ideals, and to question their relationship to civic virtue. Rhetoric can be manipulated to cloak positions adopted for the most crassly selfish reasons as “impartialist” or sacrificial arguments. Just as problematically, practices adopted because of genuinely “altruistic” motivations may be unjust, harming because they ignore unique needs of unique others or because they err in the assessment of needs and wants. The development of my argument has questioned several features of democratic life on related grounds: law (blue laws, divorce law); the public framing of ethical issues (pornography framed solely as an issue of free speech and censorship rather than an issue of sensitivity to harm and development of virtue); and the presumed virtues of political 271
life (the defense of restricted justification as some citizens’ rationalization of their own worst vice). In other areas of public life, recent developments imply a rejection of sacrificial ideals of civic virtue, while few comment on that theoretical undertone. For example, a generation ago the norm in American adoption practice was to require permanent severing of bonds between the birth mother and the child. Relinquishing those bonds was portrayed as a noble sacrifice for the good of all. Individuals and charitable institutions who facilitated adoptions on those terms often were considered paragons of civic virtue. It took many social changes, from the feminist movement to the deconstructionist movement in philosophy, to question the power dynamics at play, the emotional harms that could result to birth parents and children, and the unacknowledged motivation to keep adoption from disrupting traditional structures of family life. Now it is commonplace to recognize injustices in adoptive practices that pressure unwilling but resource-strapped parents into adoption or that demand the relinquishment of all birth parents’ bonds as a condition of adoption (though some may choose such relinquishment). Similarly, there has been increased recognition that genuinely felt concern of social welfare professionals is not immune from racial, ethnic, or class bias. Yet little attention has been paid to how still-prevalent accounts of civic virtue made past questionable adoptive practices seem unambiguously nobly loving. One case study at the end of this book addresses in more detail an arena in which conventional “idolatrous” accounts of impartiality and civic virtue are particularly explicit, and particularly distorting: organ donation policy. The starting point for a transformation of civic virtue is a revised conception of impartiality as a moral practice, a practice that politically values caring labor and offers a dialectical view of the relationship between love and justice. That reorientation de-genders civic virtue, resisting conceptions that define political virtue in association with socially constructed views of masculinity and in opposition to socially constructed views of femininity. It underscores not only that passionate personal commitments can inform conceptions of public justice but also that how one fulfills passionate commitments may inform how one fulfills citizenship commitments. The family with adolescent children that allows turn-taking at dinner to express alternate views on a family decision may be model272 · Resolving the Dilemma
ing virtues and procedures relevant to democratic life. So too does the friend who can make diverse guests feel comfortable together at a social event. Such a transformation also secularizes civic virtue. Ironically, the secularization ultimately allows for more sophisticated appreciation of the constructive ways that religious practice can interrelate with civic virtue. (Of course, there also can be destructive interrelationships, but those have been too exclusively emphasized by accounts of civic virtue tied to idolatrous conceptions of impartiality.) By exposing the influences that shaped modern demands for virtuous citizens to detach their political life from their religious practices, transformed civic virtue recognizes that boundaries between religious and secular life are both fluid and complex. Religious moorings do not inherently disqualify individuals or organizations from civic virtue, and secular beneficence should not be privileged as a virtuous motivation in political life. Just as religious commitments can drive civic cultivation, so too can secular beneficence be misguided, ill-informed, or dismissive of important perspectives. Transformed civic virtue allows us to recognize both good and bad role models of civic virtue that have been obscured by the excesses of conventional theoretical accounts. It presses us to elucidate citizen habits that are intrinsic to democratic practice. Transformed civic virtue also encourages us to look for positive models in venues that are either ignored or denigrated by the false nostalgia of conventional accounts—in home and family life, in personal friendships, and in religious communities.
R E- OR I E N T I NG C A R DI NA L V I RT U E S TO T H E G OA L OF DE MO CR AC Y The practice of impartiality relies on prudential analogical reasoning to connect personal and political moral habits in infinitely recombinant, open-ended ways. By so doing, impartiality acts as both an umbrella political virtue, encompassing within its breadth a family of civic virtues, and also as a linchpin virtue, connecting various perceptive and communicative virtues. Impartiality-as-practice sketches a family of civic virtues, plural, whose simultaneous cultivation marks civic virtue, singular—the ideal integration of political virtues. At the same time, it recognizes ideal civic Just Love
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virtue to be a heuristic device. Since endemic tensions exist among certain kinds of civic virtues, a perfect integration may be impossible for any one person to attain. On my account, civic virtue is a pragmatic, not a perfectionist ideal. The virtuous democratic polity is one in which an adequate number of citizens embody diverse civic virtues and in which most citizens attain a workable, if imperfect, integration of civic virtues. The articulation of impartiality as both moral practice and umbrella virtue adumbrates the relevance of so-called cardinal virtues for democratic political life. First articulated by the classical Greeks and later modified by both early and later Latin Christian thinkers, cardinal virtues are moral habits that are particularly important to a virtuous life: prudence, courage, temperance, and justice itself.1 These habits are understood to be means between polar opposite excesses that are moral vices. Closely associated with temperance are senses of patience, humility, liberality, and moderation. Closely associated with courage is a sense of fortitude. Since all of those moral terms are analyzed in the 2000-year-old conversation on cardinal virtues, it could be misleading to interpret “four” in the catchphrase “four cardinal virtues” too literally. While this family of terms has consistently framed conversations on cardinal virtue, the substance of the terms and the understanding of associated means has changed over time as the overarching goal of virtue has changed. For example, the ancient Greeks typically located courage in martial contexts, as a mean between cowardliness and foolhardiness on the battlefield. The appropriate mean was defined in terms of military success as the end. The medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas retained the notion of courage as a cardinal virtue and as a mean, but his understanding of the content of the virtue was transformed by his Christian understanding of the ends of humanity.2 Taking a spiritual order as the internal end of courage, he bypassed classical examples of battlefield courage to explain several examples of nonmilitary courage: visiting a sick friend despite risks of contagion or continuing on a duty-bound journey despite risks of travel.3 In the context of contemporary multicultural democracy, the vocabulary of “courage” raises questions about what particular democratic goals demand what kind of fortitude, what excesses obstruct those goals, and what virtuous means sustain them. The transformation of civic virtue encourages citizens to reconsider how the substantive meanings of courage, 274 · Resolving the Dilemma
patience, humility, and moderation should be understood if the ultimate end to which they are oriented is healthy multicultural democratic functioning. It also questions what “intermediate ends” may be intrinsic to democracy and what virtues support them. Many classic virtue theorists, but particularly Aquinas, elaborated the notion of “intermediate ends”: smaller moral goals that must first be met as intermediate steps toward larger ones. Often elaborating intermediate as well as ultimate ends facilitates discussion of the virtues required to sustain one’s moral goals. In my transformed conception of civic virtue, impartiality-as-practice constitutes prudence, or practical reasoning, which sustains a mean between a moral focus on one’s most intimate and one’s broadest associations. It requires certain kinds of patience, humility, and moderation, which, in my account, become redefined as both virtues of democratic discourse and virtues that allow for the broadening of “discourse” to include perceptive attention to ways of life. These virtues can be elucidated best in respect to one intermediate end of democratic life: conceptual translation among moral visions. The ability of citizens to translate among competing and overlapping moral visions is crucial to the forging of democratic consensus and to the delineation of appropriate limits on citizen behavior—limits that preserve the possibility of democracy itself, while otherwise allowing the greatest possible leeway for citizens to pursue alternative accounts of “the good.” T h e V i rt uous C i t i z e n a s C once p t ua l T r a nsl ator My proposal of impartiality-as-practice draws significantly on Alasdair MacIntyre’s insightful analogy between linguistic translation and conceptual translation among moral practices (1984). Impartiality demands that a citizen translate not only between moral practices in which she herself engages but also between vicariously experienced moral practices of others. Distinct internal ends of different practices press diverse practices to highlight different areas of moral landscape, or to embody different values, or to subject the practitioner to different kinds of criteria for success. Engaging in a new moral practice, actually or vicariously—like learning a new language—forces one to see the world in a new way. While MacIntyre’s unhelpful nostalgia for older or insularly homogeneous moral practices leads him to emphasize the difficulty of “learning Just Love
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another [moral] language as a second first language,” citizens more optimistically exploring civic virtue should consider not only the possibility of doing so but also the virtues demonstrated by those who do. Moreover, such citizens should recognize the value, as well as the limits, of incomplete mastery of another moral language.4 For just as a workable but nonfluent competence in another language may open new worlds to the traveler, so too workable but nonfluent competence in another moral practice may be informative to the citizen-reasoner. While the limits of nonfluency certainly must be recognized, in reality few recognize those limits as acutely as those who struggle to gain a workable competence. It is much easier for those who never study another language to minimize what can be “lost in translation.” Moreover, the refusal to engage because of unrealistically perfectionist ideals of translation is as problematic as other retreats from democratic life. (“I will never be able to understand all the science, so I cannot participate in public conversations about global warming or come to any conclusion about related policy issues.”) The root of the metaphor “conceptual translation” provides a good starting point for articulating the family of virtues associated with impartiality. To learn another linguistic language as a second first language, the translator must develop certain kinds of cardinal virtues—the patience to learn grammatical patterns and vocabulary, the prudence to balance literal and more poetic translation, the pragmatism to separate translation and judgment, and the courage and humility to bear the shock of the untranslatable. All of those virtues have analogous parallels for the conceptual translation demanded of the virtuous citizen. Be a r i ng t h e Sho c k of t h e I n i t i a l ly U n t r a nsl ata bl e Influential methodological literature addressing comparative ethics (the comparison of ethical worldviews) stresses the importance of “bridgehead” concepts, moral concepts that crosscut moral cultures, languages, religions, and practices.5 Such bridgeheads may indeed provide structural axes for democratic discourse in a multicultural democracy. However, in the actual process of learning about another culture, language, or moral practice, recognizing bridgeheads may be a relatively late stage of 276
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understanding. Moreover, the temptation exists to project bridgeheads— assume that moral concepts that orient one’s own life must exist in the alternate moral language or practice. An understanding of impartiality-as-practice does not deny the importance of bridgehead concepts as foundations for overlapping consensus. However, its root analogy between linguistic translation and conceptual translation highlights a different, indeed, opposite aspect of analogical reasoning: the challenge of addressing what simply does not translate. I call this “bearing the shock of the initially untranslatable.” Any beginning student of a foreign language has the experience of being stopped short by vocabulary or grammatical features that are simply untranslatable into her native tongue. Those chasms in translation are not merely stumbling blocks but rather crucial clues into the conceptual world of the foreign language. They signal places where the new language has developed a conceptual framework that is not shared with the native tongue. Struggles of translation are necessarily undertaken by students of a non-gendered language attempting to master a highly gendered one, or by students from temperate climates trying to understand the nuances of the multiple Inuit terms for snow, or by students who speak non-tonal languages studying a tonal one, or by translators forced to design some word or phrase for a concept that has no literal translation. The resort to phonetic borrowing of certain terms may demonstrate the insightful end of such a struggle and may transform the native language. Thus, for example, the transliteration “ch’i” for Chinese notions of internal body energy is increasingly incorporated into colloquial English. Strikingly, while linguistic translators recognize that wrestling with untranslatability is an unavoidable and formative feature of learning a new language, many political theorists and lay citizens lack the courage to face untranslatability among moral languages—and the challenge to their own conceptual world entailed by it. Thus, they engage in a Quixotic quest to insulate political discourse from the reality of untranslatability. That response is particularly true of the liberal virtue theorists who demand restricted justification precisely to avoid chasms of translation. Imagine a linguistic translator who demanded that every facet of a second-language text that does not have a direct translation in the end language simply be dropped! That strategy would not only render the translation incoherent but would also eviscerate mutuality between the two languages that are Just Love
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engaging with each other. Like the “ugly American” traveling overseas who resents the difficulty encountered by non-English speakers speaking to her, the liberal political theorist resents the inability of citizens with different moral languages to articulate them in her terms, without realizing the hubris entailed.6 It is not sufficient to argue against restricted justification because of the drawbacks elaborated in previous chapters, but rather it is important to recognize the positive value of the willingness to bear the shock of the untranslatable. For the linguistic translator, the willingness to endure a period of intense confusion catalyzed by that shock necessarily precedes any fuller understanding. The shock induces an effort to distill clues lurking in the language that surrounds the untranslatable phrase, clues that can be tapped for orientation. Ultimately, frontal engagement with the sequence of untranslatability, confusion, and lateral mining can reveal the different internal ends of the alternate moral language or practice. Only a citizen willing to bear the shock of the initially untranslatable may eventually glean understanding of another citizen’s different moral language, the practices that underlie it, and their internal ends. The effort to do so is not only an outreach to the other but also a fundamental aspect of the citizen’s quest for clarity and consistency in her own pursuit of a good life. Perhaps MacIntyre’s greatest contribution is his articulation of the connection between confronting the initially untranslatable in others’ moral reasoning and realizing internal frictions in one’s own. Given the potential for moral development that it offers, this dual process need not be thought of in the negative terms with which he casts it (“competing traditions,” “rival” forms of moral reasoning, “epistemological crisis”). While it can be disorienting, it is usually not a crisis to bear the shock of the initially untranslatable. Rather, it is a consistent and valuable feature of moral life, and particularly of democratic life. When it does induce crisis, often it is a morally needed one that facilitates the two-way arrow of impartiality-as-practice (fig. 6.4). For example, during the civil rights era, demands for racial justice were initially incomprehensible to many powerful white citizens. But when civil rights protesters turned American rhetoric of freedom and equality against entrenched practices of segregation, they forced segregationists to confront reflective disequilibrium in their own moral lives—since the segregationists considered themselves grounded by egalitarian and meritocratic ideals. 278 · Resolving the Dilemma
Dis ci pl i n e d V u l n e r a bi l i t y: V i rt u e s of C ou r age , H u m i l i t y, Fr i e n dsh i p, a n d Pat i e nc e R e de f i n e d The courage to bear the shock of untranslatability rather than retreating from it entails a virtue of humility that I call “disciplined vulnerability.” It is humble in that it refuses to presume that what is untranslatable must necessarily be morally inferior. It induces vulnerability because it requires the citizen to be open to the possibility that what is initially untranslatable may have moral insight. Yet it also requires discipline: it does not suspend judgment indefinitely, and it remains perceptive to the possibility of manipulation by others. Disciplined vulnerability is a political analogue of the virtue of personal friendship that enables compassion to develop between friends. In her analysis of friendship’s compassion, Diana Fritz Cates (1997) calls the personal virtue “complacency,” which she distinguishes from passivity.7 Cates seeks to elaborate in contemporary terms Aristotle’s characterization of friends as “other selves.” In particular, she seeks to explain the paradox that viewing a friend as “another self” requires both a willingness to be engrossed by the other’s perceptions and a continued awareness of separateness from the friend, a realization that the friend’s perceptions are not wholly one’s own and vice versa. The balance between identity and separation, and the willingness to bear the tension between them, allow for moral choice in whether and how to respond to the friend and in how to judge the perceptions of the friend. Thus Cates speaks of “choosing to feel” compassion. For her, this choice is the conscious development of certain moral habits. Compassion’s complacency depends on appropriate self-love and appropriate esteem for other particular loves. Our attentiveness to our own bodies enables us to vicariously share the pain of a sick friend, our love for our own children enables us to vicariously share the distress of a friend’s inability to provide for her children, and so forth. We can recognize the importance of a friend’s passions because we have our own. Virtues of friendship enable us to bear the discomfort, disorientation, or confusion of vicarious sharing for the sake of the friendship, rather than withdrawing. The complacency of compassion may demand a delay, though not an indefinite one, between vicarious experience of the friend’s perception and Just Love
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judgment. Understanding how the friend feels may be crucial to response even if one ultimately judges the friend’s perception to be inadequate or distorted. However, indefinite refusal to judge the friend’s perception can result in a morally paralyzing loss of self, a failure to offer the friend valuable alternative perspectives, or the “blank check” problem by which one allows another too much control over one’s own emotional energies. Like all virtues, friendly compassion is a mean between extremes: between complete insulation of oneself from the other and complete vicarious selfpossession by the other. Disciplined vulnerability, the political virtue analogous to the complacency of friendship, is also a mean between two extremes. One extreme is the habit of retreating from any shocks of untranslatability: assuming other speakers or practitioners of other moral practices must be ethically inferior since their internal ends do not directly translate into familiar terms. That is the extreme of overly quick judgment (an extreme that is institutionalized in liberal calls for restricted justification). The opposite extreme is the habit of compartmentalization, whereby the citizen bears the shock by putting what is untranslatable into a “different” category, where it can be left alone. In this vein, a common but corrosive habit is to define what is challenging to one’s politics as nonpolitical. That is the tactic by which the most fundamental challenge of human community, child rearing, has been defined as irrelevant to politics in much of the liberal tradition. It is the tactic that has enabled persistent blocks to genuine reflective equilibrium. It is the extreme of perpetually delayed judgment. While disciplined vulnerability may demand a pragmatic separation of translation and judgment (without pretending that interpretation and judgment are cleanly separable), it does not avoid judgment. In effect, the founders of MADD demanded that the law finally engage with a deflected shock of untranslatability: the enormous difference between the moral weight placed on the cost of drunk driving by victims and by the laws of that time. The founders refused to compartmentalize, refused to assume that the disjuncture meant that their overwhelming grief should be considered merely a personal matter. At the same time, disciplined vulnerability in the face of the untranslatable often requires a pragmatic suspension of judgment until the orienting clues in the discourse or practice surrounding the untranslatable can be mined for understanding. Thus it is closely connected with another civic 280 ·
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virtue, the patience to participate in discourses or practices over which one will never exercise complete control. Often these discourses overlap in personal and political life, rendering such patience essential to the outward extension of impartiality-as-practice. The meat-eating mother confronted with the defiant announcement of her daughter’s vegetarian conversion discussed in the previous chapter may have to begin an extensive process of reorientation before deciding on an appropriate response. This process may include not only further conversation with her daughter but also consideration of other sources of information about food choices. She may have to fight the self-protective desire to assume immediately that the daughter’s stance is an unreflected fad or a simple act of adolescent rebellion. Ultimately, her response not only will have inherently political overtones but will also model civic as well as family virtues or vices. Focusing on the disciplined vulnerability of the virtuous citizen who is willing to bear the shock of the untranslatable marks a significant departure from the bifurcated foci of liberalism and communitarianism. Liberalism focuses on the autonomous moral agency of the citizen, perceived as an individual chooser of her own ends. Communitarianism focuses on the importance of traditions of communal authority such as family, religious community, ethnic association, and neighborhood, in the moral formation of citizens. Liberalism defines the citizen as chooser, and communitarianism defines the citizen as molded. In contrast, disciplined vulnerability describes the virtue of a citizen who is not completely free to choose her ends because she is open to having her ends transformed by the moral pressures of others. At the same time, she is not simply passive before traditions of communal authority, but rather she negotiates among multiple sources of authority (the friction between them often generates the shock of untranslatability). Ultimately, she draws upon her disciplined vulnerability to make moral choices and negotiate trade-offs. The disciplined vulnerable citizen becomes comfortable being neither autonomous chooser nor molded product of identifiable moral traditions. In this way, too, the cultivation of disciplined vulnerability marks a mean between extremes. In general, disciplined vulnerability grants to other citizens a (rebuttable) presumption of political friendship. Many features of American political life structurally acknowledge the possibility that the unknown Just Love
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other could be an enemy or could threaten one’s material interests. That possibility is counteracted by emphases on constitutional separation of powers, on a bill of rights, on citizens’ access to litigation. However, American political life has provided less infrastructure to actualize the possibility that the unknown other may be a potential friend. In effect, it is left up to citizens’ civic virtue to render possible the maturation of potential political friendships into actual ones. V i rt u e s of P ol i t ic a l F r i e n dsh i p: Gu i de d by t h e I n t e r na l E n d of R e c i pro c i t y Friendship is marked not only by Cates’s “complacency” of personal friendship or by the disciplined vulnerability of political friendships but also by a desire for mutuality between friends. The value placed on reciprocity is a crucial insight of recent liberal virtue theory. “Reciprocity” denotes recognition that other citizens’ perspectives deserve as much influence in political processes as one’s own and that citizens hope to receive something of value in the political back-and-forth. That hope undergirds the rigors required by conceptual translation. Unfortunately, liberal virtue theory unwittingly sabotages its own efforts to foster reciprocity by continuing to rely on procedures embodying a sacrificial view of love that casts suspicion on quests for mutuality. Such sabotage is particularly apparent in Gutmann and Thompson’s ironic insistence on the rule of restricted justification in order to approximate mutuality. A fuller appreciation of the risks and rigors of political mutuality requires articulating virtues that support reciprocity. That effort will change, not negate, reflection on procedural support. Procedures can be developed to provide infrastructure for the virtues. By aiming at the widest inclusion of others in political conversation, virtues of reciprocity also help citizens discern when it is morally appropriate to exclude others. Broadening Considerations of Procedural Support No procedural rules can guarantee reciprocity absent a citizenry with the virtue to seek reciprocity. Yet procedures can help to invite and maintain reciprocity among citizens who do seek it. The rule of restricted justification is the wrong procedure, ironically attempting to guarantee inclusion by excluding certain kinds of speech, speakers, and public witnesses. It 282 ·
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asks all citizens to have a martyr complex—but some more so than others. The appropriate redress for that excess is not to abandon reflection on procedural support but to consider alternative kinds of procedural support. Just as lack of any organizing procedure can cloud transparency or create mayhem in a family or professional setting, so too in political life. More helpful procedures may be those that signal welcome or encourage inclusion—civic rituals that emphasize the desire to include many perspectives. Iris Young provocatively suggests procedural attention to greeting, rhetoric, and narrative in her own attempt to broaden what is meant both by “procedure” and by democratic “deliberation.” Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Charles Taylor, she argues that recognition of the other as such necessarily precedes any consideration of arguments by the other, and thus structured form of political greeting are very important.8 (Here politics may have much to learn from religious communities who build greeting into their routine practices—the invited turn to pew neighbor for greeting before a service, the ritualized embraces of the “sign of peace,” the triangular hand gesture of blessing offered the co-practitioner in many Eastern traditions.) Young also proposes procedural forums that encourage first-person storytelling as well as formal argumentation, since such sharing is an important vehicle for moral deliberation that can include citizens unskilled at formal argumentation. Her suggestions merit more detailed exploration than I can give here because they provide one response to an invitation that I suggest is crucial to the transformation of civic virtue: the invitation to consider supportive procedural infrastructure more broadly than has been typical in liberal political theory. The internal goal of facilitating reciprocity can help negotiate challenging trade-offs in the design of procedures. For example, the city council in my hometown imposed a time stricture on public comments at council meetings. The previous policy of unlimited public comment had been sorely tested in several preceding meetings on contentious issues, meetings that went on into the wee hours of the morning. While unlimited public comment seems, theoretically, very democratic, its actual effect was to exclude all citizens who could not stay at City Hall until 2 am. The time stricture was designed to make stating comments and listening to comments more practicable for more people. To request that each commenter take no more than five minutes is different than to suggest each Just Love
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commenter speak in terms that will be immediately accessible to everyone in the audience. Freeing “Restraint”: Toward a Transformed Understanding of Moderation Disciplined vulnerability demands a habituated restraint in political discourse. But it is neither the restraint of self-bracketing from passionate commitments nor the procedural restraint of restricted justification. It is the restraint necessary to maintain the quest for citizenly reciprocity: to remain attentive within political forums that may be confusing or cacophonous, to withhold judgment until adequate understanding has been gleaned from complex and competing sources, to remain within political conversations whose direction is not controllable by any one party. It is the restraint necessary to allow for wide inclusion of diverse others. Reciprocity demands a willingness to listen as well as to speak in democratic life. Certainly, there may be a relationship between how one speaks and how one listens. The conversation hog is rarely a good listener. But people who speak in many different styles, or who speak through many different kinds of practices, may be good listeners. Disciplined vulnerability is a virtue of political hospitality. It is embodied by civic hosts and hostesses who continue to do the hard work of political listening even when that is fatiguing and even when it demands processing much more than a media sound-byte. Listening has a metaphorical as well as a literal sense here. Civic listening entails noticing moral projects or ways of life that may both complement and challenge one’s own as well as listening in formal political discourse. The demands of mutuality as an internal end of political friendship link visual and aural metaphors that are being provocatively developed in political theory, but generally separately. One conversation, indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, focuses on “language games” and thus on “discourse ethics.” The other, indebted to the revival of classical Greek philosophy, focuses on perception as a moral task.9 Yet a certain trained receptiveness is necessary both to listen to others in actual discourse and to notice visible signs, even subtle or emergent ones, of human flourishing or social stress within one’s overlapping communities. That trained receptiveness links ethical foci on modes of discourse and on so-called 284
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natural law, that is, on the limits and resources that constrain or enable human development. Certainly, the cultivation of political listening deserves more exploration than I can give it here. But a first step is to recognize the lacuna of attention to this virtue that has been generated by idolatrous accounts of impartiality-as-standpoint. Listening to people’s thick partial perspectives seems a simultaneously superfluous and cumbersome effort if citizens are imagined as able to bolt to impartial standpoints. The restraints of discourse needed to promote citizenly reciprocity may be less constraints on the kinds of reasons to which people may appeal than constraints on when and how they voice them. When to interject into an ongoing conversation, when to use humor or sarcasm, when to use one’s conversational time for questioning others—all these prudential considerations dramatically influence the possibility of democratic discourse but are rarely commented upon in political theory. Physical violence intrinsically violates the internal end of reciprocity. Nonviolent forms of deliberately abrasive protest that are effective when calibrated may become self-defeating if they become the norm. Their normalization calls into question the genuineness of any desire for mutual exchange. Yet the most deliberately disconcerting protestors can still seek mutuality by connecting their symbolic upheaval to invitations for further exchange. For example, the AIDS advocacy group Act-Up not only publicly trampled Catholic communion at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral but met extensively with New York’s Catholic leaders to discuss AIDS prevention policies. ActUp not only played dead in front of the National Institutes of Health but also urged specific policy changes to expedite AIDS drug testing, several of which were subsequently enacted. Sometimes Act-Up staged a disruptive public drama because its plea for a meeting with relevant officials was at first rebuffed. But certainly Act-Up would have been less effective, less virtuous, if it had never allowed for reciprocal conversation by those targeted in its protests. Judgments about when a form of protest crosses a line that prevents reciprocity are difficult to draw and may be disputed even among political allies—as they were within Act-Up itself. But “rational” political conversation structured by rules of restricted discourse can also fail to invite reciprocity. (In fact, it fails by design, I have argued.) Political conversations Just Love
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constrained by conventional liberal strictures should not be presumed to embody reciprocity. And Act-Up should not be presumed civically unvirtuous just because it acted up. Reciprocity as a Criterion of Exclusion Taken as an internal end of political engagement, reciprocity encourages wide engagement even with political arguments expressed as acts of protest or symbolic assault. At the same time, it provides a criterion for determining limits of citizenly engagement. It fleshes out the liberal adage that “only the intolerant should not be tolerated”: only those who seek to obstruct citizenly reciprocity should be refused citizenly reciprocity. In some circumstances, resistance to those who undermine citizen reciprocity demands outright legal exclusion for the protection of others (the liberal focus in terms of “toleration”), but often it may be effected by political ritual shunning that has powerful effect. It may be a moral imperative to decline to respond to the Ku Klux Klan. Wrongheaded views of impartiality undoubtedly have contributed to a lack of political will to engage in such ritual shunning. Consider, for example, the talk show that gives equal time to Holocaust deniers on an episode otherwise dedicated to testaments from Holocaust survivors, all in the name of “impartiality.” A cautious and discerning will to shun genuine obstructionists of citizenly reciprocity sometimes may be demanded by civic virtue. Unfortunately, the corresponding vice is disturbingly common in contemporary political life: the ritual shunning, or even outright political exclusion, of citizens whose political practices do aim for reciprocity but who hold controversial views. Such over-exclusion can take several forms. Some citizens close their ears to all the political views of fellow citizens who express opposing views on any one issue that is important to them. Vocal anti-abortionists, for example, may find themselves discouraged from running for the zoning board or other public positions that have nothing to do with abortion. Intolerance of civil disobedience is another common form of overexclusion. While the willingness to bear stated legal penalties reveals the value placed on reciprocity by those who engage in civil disobedience, that is not always recognized by public response. When penalties for 286
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trespassing at military venues are dramatically increased for nonviolent anti-war protesters, or when the bones of people blocking a logging truck or an abortion clinic are broken by police despite their nonresistance, there ought to be public outrage among citizens of all views on the respective political issues—rather than whispered refrains of “serves them right.” The overuse of structural or ritual exclusion is a dangerous practice that results from the problematizing of dissent in conventional views of civic virtue. V i rt u e s of Dis se n t i n Pu bl ic L i f e Disciplined vulnerability in the face of the untranslatable is thus closely related to virtues of dissent in democratic life. While democratic theorists and lay citizens alike trumpet the vital role of dissent in democracy, conventional views of civic virtue subtly problemize many forms of dissent.10 Misguided conceptions of the impartial standpoint confer upon contingent consensuses the aura of transcendent rationality. Prevalent associations of civic virtue with suppression of passion, with rational argumentation, and with restricted justification result in the wrongful equation of civic virtue with banal civility. That equation casts undue suspicion on those who protest with passionate but peaceful symbolic theatrics. The post 9/11 rhetoric of some federal officials that associated dissent (against reduced civil liberties, against the war in Afghanistan, against the war in Iraq) with a lack of patriotism was a new and unusually explicit variation on an old theme. Those officials moved crudely from the felt vulnerability of the nation after the attacks to a denigration of the political virtue of disciplined vulnerability. While the danger of their rhetoric has been well recognized by many critics, few have commented on the legacy underlying it—a legacy that associates dissent with a lack of civic virtue. Only in retrospect can conventional views of civic virtue grant grudging respect to suffragettes or lunch-counter-sitters who accomplished now widely lauded civic goals by flouting those conventional conceptions of civic virtue. Troublingly, conventional views grant such grudging historical respect without acknowledging that history may view kindly today’s “uncivil” protesters. In fact, dissent that most seriously questions the status quo often must take the form of a symbolic assault in order for the excluded to demand inclusion and for the complacent to be shaken out of their usual Just Love
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way of seeing the world. Disciplined vulnerable citizens bear the shock of that assault with the rebuttable presumption that the dissenter is offering a serious moral vision, even if it is not immediately understandable to them. Postmodern theorists who extol symbolic forms of protest as a kind of civic “play” rightfully recognize their importance and rightly seek to counteract metaphors of battle to describe such dissent.11 At the same time, those theorists fail to consider adequately that by design the targets of such protests may experience them as disorienting and frightening. It is overly dismissive of the experience of the symbolically assaulted to ridicule them for being “too uptight” to realize that politics is play. It may also be disingenuous, because few people characterize it as play when one of their perceived vested interests is seriously challenged. Some people who extol the playfulness of protesters costumed as sea turtles see nothing playful about people praying the rosary outside an abortion clinic. Some people who see gay pride parades as playful may see nothing playful about bloodletting on submarines. Probably every citizen has experienced some form of political “play” as uncomfortable. What allows for political playfulness in the best sense of that term—what allows such forums of engagement to evolve despite the intended discomfort to some—is the virtue of disciplined vulnerability. The disciplined vulnerable citizen bears the shock with forbearance when such symbolic drama is experienced as painful rather than playful. Disciplined vulnerability is the character trait that allows citizens to extend rebuttable presumptions of political friendship even to others who disorient them with alternative frameworks, symbolic assaults, or principled civil disobedience. It is the character trait that cautions a citizen against mistaking a self-protective dismissal for a rigorous moral assessment of the dissenting position. In fact, no rigorous moral assessment is possible if one is not first willing to bear the shock of symbolic vertigo. The recognition that one may “get something back” from the genuinely addressed dissenter—an enhanced understanding of the world, a new perspective on ethical trade-offs, or a new press toward consistency in one’s own moral visions—may be a more powerful motivation to cultivate the necessary virtue than any sacrificial ideal. When reciprocity is taken as an internal end of political discourse, sacrifice appears too little to ask of citizens. 288
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C i t i z e n a s C once p t ua l T r a nsl at or : L i m i t s of t h e A na l o gy Analogizing citizen virtues to virtues of linguistic translation helpfully reorients traditional cardinal virtues to support internal ends of multicultural democracy. Those ends include reciprocity, inclusion, transparency, dissent, and deliberateness in sifting through complex policy options. In short, they are ends that allow the possibility of political friendship among diverse citizens. Political friendship is not sentimentalized friendship. It encompasses relationships of great tension as well as great affinity but holds them together through the shared commitment to democratic habits. At the same time, the limits of the analogy must be acknowledged explicitly. These limits are threefold: limits of the analogy of “translation,” limits of the model of impartiality-as-practice, and limits of citizens. This book has repeatedly questioned presumptions that public justification of policy preferences is the quintessential activity of the virtuous citizen. It has repeatedly lamented the kinds of moral practices that are obscured from political view by such a reified view of political life. It aims at a model of civic virtue that recognizes verbal articulateness as only one among many political virtues. One danger, then, of the metaphor of citizen as conceptual translator is the strong association of translation with language per se. Therefore, it is critical to emphasize that I use the metaphor of “moral languages” and “translation between them” as shorthand for the consideration of moral practices, including comprehensive ways of life, and the practice of analogical reasoning by which one attempts to glean understanding of foreign moral practices or ways of life. While my base analogy seeks to borrow from the experience of language learning, it is not intended to apply solely to political language. Other limits to consider are those that constrain the extended practice of impartiality itself. While the model of impartiality-as-practice obviously resists a strict bifurcation between moral and political life (and thus between “the good” and “the right”), it does not therefore completely equate the two. While emphasizing the importance of the practice of impartiality to both personal moral development and to democracy, I am not suggesting that it is the whole of morality. There may indeed be deontological (duty-based), consequentialist, or natural law limits to human morality Just Love
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that exist apart from the practice of impartiality and the cultivation of its associated virtues. For example, a political community could reach conclusions about wetland protection strategies through an ideal extension of practices of impartiality and an ideal communal exhibition of political virtues of courage, patience, humility, prudence and moderation—only to discover that the wetland they preserved was an inadequate size for the maintenance of the given ecosystem or for the survival of particular endangered species that the chosen policy sought to protect. The policy would be proven tragically wrong in retrospect, despite the admirable practice of political virtues. I assume that deontological duties, consequentialist imperatives, or the limits of the natural order may all rightfully constrain the practice of impartiality. At the same time, I assume that its practice, collectively engaged in, may be more likely—albeit imperfectly—to provide gleanings of such constraints to non-omnipotent humans than other kinds of moral reasoning practiced in isolation. While that may be true in general, it will not be true in every case. Recognizing that deontological, consequentialist, or natural limits may constrain impartiality-as-practice is one reason to strongly distinguish civil disobedience from other forms of lawbreaking and to treat those who carry out acts of civil disobedience as serious political dissenters without excusing them from the force of law. They may act because they rightly perceive moral limits that are not perceived by even a healthily functioning democratic polity. In the example above, those who attempted to physically block the drainage and development of a piece of the wetland left unprotected by the considered policy would be proven “right” in retrospect according to the stated goals of the policy itself.12 Finally, the limits of citizens themselves need to be considered. Just as it is the rare person who can smoothly navigate among multiple languages, so it may be the rare citizen who can integrate multiple vicarious moral experiences in political reasoning. It may be the rare citizen who can integrate various virtues that all have civic ramifications: habits of wide perception, creative expression, organizational skill, appropriate loyalty. Conventional models of civic virtue that seek an Archimedean point teach us little about how to live with the finitude of citizens. Part of recognizing such finitude may be to appreciate that certain citizens may 290
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exemplify one civic virtue without exemplifying an integration of civic virtues—and that this can be a great contribution, balanced by the different civic contributions of others. Thus, an imaginative rapper who composes musical protest poetry may make a significant contribution to civic life even if she never participates in more structured political discourse. So too may the quietly efficient manager of a nonprofit organization who leaves public advocacy to better-known and more charismatic spokespeople for the cause. Recognizing civic virtues to be means allows for increased generosity toward those (all of us) who imperfectly embody them. Civic excesses may be just that: excesses in a kind of thinking or action that are not themselves civically bad and may, in fact, be civically necessary. The understanding of virtues as means, and the related understanding of how hard it is to hone one’s habits to the precise mean, can allow reciprocity among citizens to continue despite perceived missteps. For example, a citizen who believes that a certain form of symbolic protest crossed a line of decency (say, a Catholic greatly offended by Act-Up’s trampling of a communion host) could nonetheless remain open to further exchange by categorizing the offense as an excess from the mean of appropriate symbolic play rather than as a sign of moral depravity. Thus, while the conventional view of civic virtue is inherently religious in one sense, so too is transformed civic virtue in another sense. The conventional view embodies a certain contested interpretation of Christian love that asks citizens to be like a perfect “God.” In contrast, the transformed view demands that citizens confront their own and each others’ human finitude. This confrontation can promote a kind of civic forgiveness that allows citizens who sometimes hurt and confuse each other nonetheless to continue to view each other as fellow citizens in good standing.
C I V I L S O C I E T Y: B OR DE R Z ON E S NOT BU F F E R Z ON E S The extension of the presumption of political friendship to stranger-others demands an appropriate forum as well as citizen virtues. That is a crucial insight of the many political theorists who move (overly) quickly from calls for civic virtue to explorations of civil society. Citizens need public spaces, literal and figurative, where the vulnerability demanded by civic openness Just Love
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is a safe enough risk to take. Overlapping layers of civil society allow moral pathways for citizens’ infinite extensions of the practice of impartiality and the analogical reasoning entailed by that extension. In previous chapters, I argued that current theoretical work on civil society often replicates the same conceptual errors that rendered civic virtue incoherent. Theorists of civil society tend to assume either communities of place, such as family or neighborhood, or communities of choice, such as Rotary clubs, as models of civil society. Once again, citizens are viewed as either choosers or as molded, but not as both. Once again, caring labor and the most intimate of human associations are treated as categorically different from other political associations and thus either wrongly privileged or wrongly ignored. Religious organizations become conceptually problematic—are they communities of place (many are “born into” a religious tradition) or communities of choice (citizens may reaffirm or reject their inherited traditions, or convert to others)? A crucial function of civic virtue in general, and of the practice of impartiality with its incumbent disciplined vulnerability more specifically, is to bridge communities of place and choice. Thus, the regions of civil society that may deserve the most attention are the border zones that are downplayed by current conceptual schemas. Borders are more permeable than buffers. (Indeed, even “border zones” may be an unduly rigid metaphor for the terrain of civil society, since diverse avenues of civil society crisscross in all kinds of directions and angles.) The ironies of gender and religion that have distorted conventional accounts of civic virtue have directed attention away from the forums of civil society that connect intimate caring labor to political life, or religious vision to political life. I therefore focus on those areas of civil society. C a r i ng Org a n i z at ions a s Si t e s of C i v ic V i rt u e Many individuals or organizations that contribute to democratic life share a trajectory from personal experience to civic commitment that defies a conceptual bifurcation between communities of place and choice or between personal and public commitments. Their invisibility in conventional accounts of civic virtue is what made me mad(d) enough to write this book. MADD, neighborhood watches, support groups for various kinds of illnesses, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and so 292 ·
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forth—all of these groups not only provide support and information to individuals in need but also politicize issues that affect many but that might be viewed as a collection of idiosyncratic cases were it not for the creation of new forms of civil society. Often the internal ends of such caring citizens’ movements demand intergenerational cooperation. Adults with young children and elderly parents participate in neighborhood watches; grandparents of asthmatics become involved with asthma education; older parents of gay adolescents and adults join PFLAG. For citizens with civic imagination, the intergenerational nature of personal support can become a vehicle for broad politicization and public education. Significantly, the civic contribution that is taken for granted by inattention to such forms of civil society may be offered disproportionately by women. Some organizations that are short-changed are associated with mothering metaphorically or even biologically, like MADD or La Leche League. Others may have disproportionately female membership and volunteers, as is the case with many organizations that offer support and education for specific illnesses. Yet it is also significant that the short-changed moral work is not intrinsically “women’s work.”13 It is caring labor itself that is devalued, whether women or men engage in it. At their best, caring organizations of civil society enable the doubleedged critical function of impartiality-as-practice. Consider, for example, La Leche League, an organization applauded briefly in chapter 4 for its prescience in recognizing the decline of breast-feeding as a medical and family crisis. La Leche League promotes breast-feeding and helps new mothers learn to breast-feed. Its volunteers are experienced mothers who have found breast-feeding a rewarding personal experience and as a result have become politically committed to both the medical and the bonding benefits of breast-feeding. They provide hands-on outreach to new mothers to help them learn the practice of breast-feeding and publish a variety of materials encouraging breast-feeding. While nothing could be more intimately associated with family life than breast-feeding, the social importance of this work is vast, given the medical and psychological benefits of breast-feeding for children. Just as no organization sparked a social confrontation with drunk driving as successfully as MADD, no organization catalyzed the turn-around in American breast-feeding rates as successfully as La Leche League. Just Love
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La Leche League has exemplified civic virtue in several ways: by confronting the chasm between medical knowledge of the benefits of breastfeeding and its decline in practice as a genuine problem of reflective disequilibrium; by its recruitment of experienced breast-feeding mothers as civic resources who could mentor new mothers; and by its multipronged efforts to make breast-feeding more practically appealing. To be successful, those efforts demanded different sorts of campaigns in the overlapping venues of the medical profession, family homes, places of employment, the media, and law (in order to protect mothers nursing in public from censure under obscenity laws, a common occurrence when the League began and still not yet entirely eradicated). La Leche League is a particularly interesting organization for my purposes because it is doubly handicapped by conventional accounts of civic virtue and civil society: it is both necessarily a women’s organization and also one with religious roots. What many contemporary beneficiaries do not know is that the League was born of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic Family Movement (CFM) and that its founders were Catholic laywomen who were involved in that movement.14 The League’s advocacy for breast-feeding was originally oriented in a Catholic vision of family life that stressed the value of child rearing in a traditional home and the importance of parent-child bonding as well as the medical benefits of breastfeeding. One of the first decisions of the young movement, however, was to offer its services to any parents interested in breast-feeding. For those who made it, the decision itself reflected religious convictions, particularly confidence in a universalistic vision of flourishing family life offered by the Catholic natural law tradition. The history of La Leche League demonstrates the two-way arrow of impartiality-as-practice (see fig. 6.4). While its openness to all parents stemmed from a fundamentally religious impulse, that openness dramatically challenged the presumptions of the League itself.15 For example, the League’s founders assumed a stay-at-home mother was the desired norm of parenting. Indeed, its founders wished to valorize traditional parenting as well as to promote breast-feeding. But the people who sought support from the League increasingly included mothers who work outside the home. Goals that had seemed congruent to the original founders—promoting breast-feeding and promoting traditional parenting—no longer seemed so as the constituency of the movement widened. The League responded over 294
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time by dropping presumptions about desired family structure altogether from its mission, while retaining its emphasis on the importance of parentchild bonding and the value of breast-feeding to the bonding process as well as to the physical health of the child. To accommodate its openness to all parents, the League had to change its activities in many ways. A primary activity of La Leche League chapters is to provide regular meetings for breast-feeding mothers to gather, discuss physical or social challenges of breast-feeding, and offer collective advice in response. These meetings are also intended to provide a supportive social environment for mothers who are intensely committed to the physical health and emotional well-being of their children in the midst of a society that can be child-unfriendly in many ways. During the early years of the League, these meetings were typically held on regular weekdays. However, to accommodate working breast-feeders, most chapters now offer meetings on evenings or weekends as well. Even more fundamentally, La Leche League was forced to confront a challenge that was not on the radar screen of the original founders: the challenge of breast-feeding while working outside the home. This challenge entailed dispersing expertise on the use of breast pumps and experiential advice on feeding scheduling. But it also entailed targeting employers as part of the League’s educational mission. La Leche League adopted a carrot-and-stick approach. The stick was to press both labor law and equal opportunity law toward insuring necessary time and space for breast-feeding mothers on the job. The carrot was to initiate an educational program that teaches employers about the value of breast-feeding, the modest concessions of time and space necessary, and the value to them in retaining good employees. In order to promote its primary mission, a movement that began in the white middle class also had to venture into minority and lower-class contexts and to change its membership and outreach accordingly. Race and class greatly affect breast-feeding rates in the United States. The poor are less likely to breast-feed than the more affluent, and African Americans are less likely to breast-feed than any other racial or ethnic group. Researchers suspect that complex socioeconomic and historical factors may influence these patterns. Breast-feeding may be particularly burdensome for the working poor woman who has short or no maternity leave, goes to work by public transportation, and works in a setting where she has no office or Just Love
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private space. For African Americans, the history of forced wet-nursing during slavery continues to leave psychological scars that may discourage breast-feeding. Currently, La Leche League not only maintains chapters in racial or socioeconomic communities where breast-feeding rates are particularly low but also sponsors a variety of special activities to encourage breast-feeding in those communities. Few health initiatives may have as much impact on population health and health care costs as the reemphasis on breast-feeding. People who were breastfed as infants are dramatically less likely than others to develop allergies, asthma, auto-immune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus and many kinds of malignancies. Yet despite such extraordinary influence on the health and financial welfare of the populace, breast-feeding is rarely treated as a political issue, and La Leche League has remained unnoticed by those who lament the demise of civic virtue. R e l igious C om m u n i t i e s a s Si t e s of Ci v ic V i rt u e While conventional views of civic virtue treat religious communities largely as a dangerous threat to objectivity, the transformation of civic virtue articulates how religious communities may cultivate civically valuable habits. At the same time, the transformed conception suggests criteria by which to judge political excesses or civic vice in particular religious communities. Religious beliefs or practices that undermine reciprocity are inherently problematic for democracy. At the extreme, for example, the belief in God-ordained white supremacy and the resulting separatist behavior and suspicion of government in certain Christian militia movements precludes reciprocity between members and many other citizens. My focus, however, is on the positive civic contributions of religious communities that have been obscured by conventional views. The denigration of religiosity among theorists of civic virtue has been based on a doubly erroneous presumption: that religion equals “faith” in the sense of beliefs that cannot be justified to others. The first error is to assume that faith is the exclusive province of religion. In fact, all people hold some beliefs that they cannot claim to know are true.16 (Indeed, for related reasons it may make sense to talk about faith in democracy.) The second error is to assume that only faith is the province of religion. In fact, 296
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all religious traditions inculcate certain characteristic practices that cannot be described as beliefs, but rather are habits of life. The relationship between doctrine and practice and the relative tightness or looseness of that relationship vary across traditions, but even a religious tradition whose core beliefs remain hotly contested internally may be recognizable as a tradition by its elements of practice. (Consider, for example, Hindu traditions in which the ultimate unity or dualism or reality remains debated by adherents united by common forms of home and temple worship.) As Jeffrey Stout notes: Ethical theory has thus far given little attention to the ways in which ethical communities inculcate habits of moral observation. Some religious and philosophical traditions have devised stories, catechisms, rituals, and spiritual exercises that shape how their members perceive people, actions, and events. . . . If training is effective, they acquire a structure of appropriate emotions, a set of approved inferential habits, and a collection of reliable observational dispositions for reaching moral judgments. (2004, 221)
Positive civic contributions of some forms of religious training include religiously based motivations for justice and reciprocity, the honing of listening skills or prudential analogical skills for religious reasons, and the development of inclusive ritual infrastructures Motivation The motivational impetus of religious conceptions of love, compassion, dignity, or respect often extend beyond the confines of the religious community. Jewish interpretation of social justice as a divinely ordained moral imperative, Christian invocations to follow Jesus by loving one’s enemies, Buddhist meditative practices that inculcate compassion for all sentient beings, Islamic understandings of the struggle for justice as a religious duty, Confucian understandings of intergenerational obligation, Native American conceptions of the earth as the mother of all—these are just a few examples of religious commitments that may press adherents to weigh highly the interests of stranger-others in a diverse political polity. While a positive political role for religious motivation is sometimes recognized by those who generally cordon off religion from the domain of civic virtue, they seem to suppose that positive religious motivation is disconnected from the substance of the civil vision itself. In other words, they assume that religion may help motivate some citizens to do what all Just Love
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citizens should see as civically virtuous. But in fact, religious motivations may press adherents to truly new civic visions, or to ones that become more widely endorsed only over time. The motivation may be tied to the substance of the civic goal itself. Many citizens may not even realize certain social movements that have become household names have religious roots. For example, Habitat for Humanity, which builds home for low-income families, was inspired by communal early Christian communities.17 Today, while Habitat chapters are sponsored by many diverse religious and nonreligious organizations, the majority of volunteers come from churches. Significantly, an interpretation of the work as sacrifice for the stranger-other is explicitly rejected by the organization’s most famous volunteer, Jimmy Carter: Rosalynn and I are often asked, “Why do you work with Habitat. What do you get out of it?” I was president of the U.S. for four years, but I get a lot more recognition for building houses in partnership with poor people in need than I have ever gotten before. Habitat is not a sacrifice that we make for others. It is a blessing for those of us who volunteer to help others. It gives me a life of excitement and pleasure, and adventure and unpredictability, to say the least.18
The work is not sacrifice for the stranger because, through the work, the “stranger” is no longer strange and because the cooperation itself is positively transformative. Not only may Habitat’s work be motivated by religious visions, but the work itself may transform religious identity. In his history of Habitat for Humanity, Jerome Baggett (2001) explores how cooperation on Habitat house-building has reduced denominational identity and increased ecumenical identity among participating Christians, tagging Habitat as a “para-denominational voluntary association.” He portrays the ecumenically organized response to housing needs as a form of “public religion.” While Baggett characterizes Habitat for Humanity as a voluntary organization, it also acts as what I call a “border region” of civil society. The religious identity of participants provides visions that motivate their choice of voluntary association, which then also shapes their religious identity in new ways—including ways that push them to further engagement with wider circles of others. Participation at a worksite with diverse volunteers of varying levels of technical skill itself encourages the development of certain habits of cooperation. As participation in Habitat continues to 298
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expand among both religious and nonreligious participants, the work of the organization highlights questions about the structural causes of homelessness and working-class struggles to afford housing. The process of extension from religious identity to social vision often modifies the particularity of the original religious vision while retaining some of its original shape. That process lies in the background of many organizations now thought of as voluntary organizations of secular civil society. For example, The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) is now de-gendered and de-Christianized but still facilitates forms of community consistent with the founder’s visions. The real history of such social movements is conceptually denied by conventional accounts of civic virtue that demand a bracketing of civic life from religious life or that accord grudging acknowledgment of the role of religious motivation in the cultivation of civic habits without admitting that the motivation may shape the substance of those habits as well. The presumption that religiously motivated visions are necessarily incomprehensible to outsiders of the tradition is also refuted by the experience of Habitat for Humanity, YMCA, and the like. Blinders to the civic import of these movements may shortchange not only individuals or specific organizations but whole subgroups of citizens. For much of American history, African American churches have been a primary site of political resistance to institutionalized racial injustice. Religious communities nurtured just political visions that were harshly suppressed in other venues of civic life. Just as a stress on restricted justification in discourse makes the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. seem problematic rather than gift-like, so too the stress on secular civil society makes the role of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights movement an embarrassment. Demanding the suppression of religious attachments in citizenly reasoning robs some citizens not only of their civic motivation and vision but also of practicable forums for pursuing them. Developing Skillful Habits for Religious Reasons Religious communities may encourage, for distinctly religious reasons, certain habits that are also civically valuable, particularly habits of listening and of analogical reasoning. While listening habits have been underattended in discussions of political virtue, they have been stressed in certain Just Love
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religious contexts. A variety of religious traditions encourage practices of mind-quieting, whether to listen to God, or to one’s own Buddha-mind, or to religious text recitation, or to preaching or commentary by other members of the community. These meditative habits aim to enable focused attention on the other to whom one listens. The Quaker tradition, particularly, has explicitly developed attention to listening habits for theological reasons. Quaker meetings allow periods for Friends (significantly, the Quaker term for fellow Quakers) to speak “as moved by the spirit.” Typically, these periods involve many long intervals of silence, as congregants consider whether they are moved to speak and what the comments of other speakers mean for their lives. In general, the sacralization of silence for the purpose of listening in many religious traditions contrasts dramatically with the ever-present background noise of media culture sound bites. Consider, for example, that any speech by a public figure important enough to be covered by primetime television is immediately followed by commentary of pundits, with no intervening break for the audience to process and digest for themselves. Habits that support silence-bearing and listening to complex testimonies, texts, or arguments in religious communities could also support appropriate silence-bearing and listening to complex sources in the wider political community. Many religious traditions also support, for distinctly religious reasons, the development of analogical reasoning skills that are critical to political impartiality-as-practice. Religious traditions with holy texts may demand complex comparisons between textual passages, between text and context, or between textual narrative and features of modern life. Some religious communities have developed formal traditions of analogical reasoning in order to orient moral deliberation within a general religious worldview. The Jewish rabbinical tradition offers lessons for democratic life not only by articulating diverse accounts of similarities and differences between moral cases that have been brought for rabbinical consideration but also by retaining minority opinions as part of the tradition. Implicit in the tradition are assumptions that views that have “lost” in rabbinical consensus nonetheless have moral insights, that moral agents should consider a wide perspective of views on a moral issue, that certain actions may be outside the range of ethical options envisioned by the tradition, and that 300
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minority and majority positions may shift as interpretation of Jewish law evolves in changing social environments. To recognize that rabbinical reasoning offers important resources to democratic life is not to confuse rabbinical reasoning with democracy. The democratically relevant skills fostered by participation in the rabbinic tradition can be appreciated without denying that the underlying question of rabbinical reasoning—what ethical behavior is consistent with Jewish law—is not the fundamental question of multicultural democracy and that the rabbinical tradition has included decidedly undemocratic practices (for example, the exclusion of women). Catholic natural law reasoning and associated traditions of casuistry provide another example in which honed analogical reasoning skills have been encouraged within a religious context. In the Catholic context, religious visions of social flourishing provide internal ends by which ethical practices are compared and evaluated. This analogical evaluation is perceived as a social process within the church community. Of course, deliberations within this tradition can be distorted in many ways, and the tradition is fundamentally undemocratic in others, particularly in its hierarchical conception of the relationship between laity and clergy, and in its institutionalized gender discrimination. Critics assail the tradition’s incorporation of socially constructed views of gender into its conception of nature.19 Yet such criticisms become internal as well as external challenges for the tradition as it addresses issues of consistency and coherence among its moral stances. The associated process of analogical reasoning develops perceptive skills that are political virtues in a multicultural democratic context, even if that is not the context of the tradition itself. Some religious traditions encourage skills of analogical reasoning as part of their effort to understand the complexity of ultimate reality. Tibetan Buddhism, for example, has developed a rich tradition of philosophical debate in which two debaters will, reciprocally, both deconstruct each other’s premises on the ontological question under dispute and alternatively unravel or link unending possibilities of connections between premises. Sudden claps, shouts, or other distractions add drama to the resulting topsy-turviness. The result is an unsettling of certainty that the way one originally perceived the question, as well as its answer, is the only way to do so. The disciplined exploration of perspectives encouraged by this debating tradition develops skills that are valuable in a multicultural Just Love
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democratic context even though it originally developed in an aristocratic society ruled by a clerical elite. C onclusion: U n r av e l i ng t h e I ron i e s , Aga i n A transformed, de-gendered, and secularized conception of civic virtue presses for a transformed, de-gendered, and secularized conception of civil society. De-gendered civic virtue gives due political credit to civic organizations that widen the political infrastructure of care while opening caring labor to wider political critique. By ending the tyranny of one religious view of love, secularized civic virtue frees citizens to consider the civic potential of many religious organizations, including ones to which they stand as outsiders. Ultimately, unraveling the ironies that hamstrung civic virtue invites more tandem consideration of civic virtue and civil society than has occurred in recent political theory. C I V IC E DUC AT ION: I M PL IC AT IONS OF T R A NSFOR M E D C I V IC V I RT U E While my argument for transformed civic virtue has been couched within the context of conversations in political theory, gender studies, and religious studies, it clearly has implications for educational debates as well. Currently, questions of how schools, both public and private, might educate good future citizens prompt lively debate among educators and political observers alike. Since a full argument of the implications of transformed civic virtue for civic education is beyond the scope of this book, I can only gesture toward the broad outline of such an argument and invite further conversation from other parties. The transformation of civic virtue suggests that civic education focus on the development of certain kinds of habits, not just on civic knowledge (of constitutionalism, history, etc.); that analogical reasoning skills be promoted in “thick” social studies; and that educators creatively rethink their use of community organizations and volunteers in the schools. T h e Dev e l opm e n t of H a bi t s a s W e l l a s P ol i t ic a l K now l e d ge While much civic education has focused on knowledge of constitutionalism and government function and on encouraging students to vote when 302
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they reach adulthood, the transformation of civic virtue suggests that is overly minimalist. Returning to a classical sense of what “virtue” means should encourage schools to consider how certain educational habits as well as vices may have civic ramifications, and to more consciously promote those educational habits that hone civic skills. If listening is a political virtue, how do schools cultivate, or fail to cultivate, listening habits? What can schools do to train students to have continuously greater endurance for listening to more and more complex arguments, to thicker and thicker personal testaments, or to alternative venues (protest poetry as well as formal debates)? What can they do to train students to listen to each other as well as to the teachers? What kinds of structured activities encourage listening? How is good listening rewarded in student evaluation? Is bad listening penalized? Are points for student participation awarded only to students who state positions, not to students who ask clarifying questions, support others’ points by reference to the assigned reading, or indicate active listening in other ways? Educators should take particular care not to replicate prevalent vices of political life in their classrooms. Regrettably, the prevalent presumption of metaphors for battle in political life has infiltrated educational materials, as has the presentation of dichotomizing questions as the crux of civic debate. A popular textbook in bioethics, for example, is entitled Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Bioethical Issues (Levine 2004). While the essays included in the anthology are classics by some of the crispest thinkers in the field, they are presented in paired forms answering a stated question that is explicitly posed as a dilemma. The format discourages students from complex analogical processes by which they might articulate their own questions, discern overlapping values, or devise creative strategies that might resolve some of the tensions between the stated positions.20 With such a format, students could hardly be blamed for concluding that reflection on bioethics is a matter of choosing one’s battles. These problematic presumptions infect less formal educational materials as well. For example, consider the implications when a high school social studies unit on abortion presents the issue as a debate between diametrically opposed “pro-life” and “pro-choice” positions. Students are immediately given the impression that there is a limited set of relevant questions (whether the fetus is a “person,” whether abortion should be legally accessible, etc.), with each question having only two answers, both Just Love
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supported by appeal to “impartial principles.” The possibility of multiple questions, multiple perspectives, or multiple relevant personal narratives is obscured by the framing, and students who feel uncomfortable with the presuppositions of pro-life/pro-choice language will feel alienated from the discussion. (This example is particularly significant because repeated polls in the adult population indicate that many Americans fail to identify unequivocally with the pro-life or pro-choice labels even though those labels continue to frame political conversation on abortion.) Alternative pedagogical strategies that elicit the full range of ethical questions students have about abortion practice and the diverse language they use to frame them encourage habits that are politically valuable. Are questions framed to highlight only differences among political positions? Is the articulation of common presumptions invited or explored? To continue with the abortion example, do educators include any reference to multiple initiatives around the country that now invite supporters and opponents of legalized abortion into dialogue or partnership? How have those partners, perceived as strange bedfellows by some, been able to cooperate? Do educators elucidate common goals underscored by these alliances (desires to decrease unintended pregnancy, to reduce financial pressure to abort among women who otherwise would rather not, etc.) or discuss the virtues that allowed their participants to discover common goals in the first place? In fact, educators may be in a powerful position to counteract strong presumptions of citizen enmity that dominate contemporary democratic discourse. T h ick So ci a l St u di e s While the transformation of civic virtue encourages attention to the development of certain moral skills, it does not neatly divorce skills from content in a way that is currently in vogue in the educational world. The development of certain civically desirable skills may be inextricably intertwined with certain kinds of substantive knowledge. Such knowledge may include but extend beyond the constitutional “civics” that has been the traditional focus of civic education. For convenience, I label efforts to present substantive knowledge that is intertwined with civically desirable skills as “thick social studies.” If virtues of linguistic translation have structural analogues to virtues of conceptual translation, then we should not overlook the democratic 304
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importance of language-learning itself. If learning a foreign language forces one to grapple with the shock of untranslatability and to realize that different worldviews underlie different grammatical structures, then learning another language is a venue in which one practices virtues important to democratic discourse in a diverse polity. Several ironies immediately follow from this conclusion. Throughout multiple immigrant waves in American history, the exhorters of civic virtue assumed that the pivotal challenge was to inculcate civic virtue in the newcomers, who were presumed less capable of democracy than previous generations of Americans. Yet contemporary immigrants and immigrant children who struggle to negotiate different languages between home and school or work necessarily develop certain virtues of translation that may be relevant to conceptual translation among moral practices. Of course, intentional refusals to learn the culturally dominant language of English are problematic for American democracy. But my analysis of civic virtue suggests disproportionate attention to that problem. In fact, civic virtue could be encouraged if more American children experienced the moral education of seriously learning another language. Yet in contemporary American education there has been no general recognition of the moral value of learning another language. While America’s widely noted weakness in foreign-language education is often decried for economic, diplomatic, or even military reasons, it may be just as lamentable for moral and democratic reasons. Regardless of what the particular language is, learning another language encourages a young person to develop virtues that have political analogues in a multicultural democracy.21 Certain public school districts are recognizing the moral loss entailed by nonexistent or incompetent foreign-language education. The Boston public school district has been a pioneer in this regard. Boston requires serious, daily foreign-language education from first grade on and requires consistency between language education across years in school. In each major section of the city, the alternate language is the dominant second language in that area. So for example, in the precincts around Chinatown, Mandarin Chinese is taught. That ensures that non-Chinese Americans in the schools learn something about their many Chinese neighbors and vice versa. It may also serve as a bilingual bridge to help students who are primarily Chinese-speaking learn English. At the same time, it provides language training in one common dialect for Chinese American students Just Love
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who may speak a variety of dialects in their homes. However, the Boston policy recognizes that there is a moral value to the very process of learning a foreign language, apart from any practical demographics. So for many students, there will be a certain degree of randomness to the language taught at their school—and that is fine. Hispanic students who live near Chinatown will learn a language in school that is neither their first nor their second language, but that will still accomplish the goals of the program. Of course, a number of practical challenges arise in the Boston program. For example, it can be difficult for older children if their families move into the city or within the city but across the language lines of the foreign-language program. But the underlying assumption of the program is that the democratic value of serious foreign-language study is worth addressing the challenges encountered. Another element of thick social studies that might warrant higher priority in the schools is the academic study of religion. Religion often deeply influences people’s moral visions and the language and images they use to convey them. Certainly, organized religion has profoundly affected history and historical movements. Moreover, secular visions of morality often act religious in their articulation of ideal goals and use of symbolic currency. Indeed, there may be no rigid conceptual line between what counts as religious and secular moral visions.22 Yet substantive discussions of religion are often entirely absent in our public schools. Students fail to learn not only about contemporary religious communities but also about how religious movements shaped American or world history. They fail to explore the psychological import of symbols, narratives of identity, and ritual practices. That may be partly a result of wrongheaded interpretations of the separation of church and state. Though even the Supreme Court has weighed in to the contrary, some people assume that the injunction against state support for religion means religion cannot be discussed at all in public venues.23 Significantly, conventional views of civic virtue may also contribute to the neglect of religion in education. If religion is held democratically suspect because of its non-neutral embrace of comprehensive goods, and if civic virtue is defined as the ability to bracket oneself from primary personal commitments like religious commitments, then religion per se may seem an impediment to civic education. In reality, ignoring religious pluralism in school means ignoring a fundamental resource as well as a 306
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challenge for democracy, not to mention a fundamental reality of students’ lives outside school. The academic study of religion accomplishes a variety of civic goals without endorsing or privileging any religious tradition or religion per se. It familiarizes students with myths, rituals, and institutions of several different religious traditions, including traditions that are prevalent in the area and those that are minority traditions in the area (recognizing that which traditions may seem familiar or foreign will vary among students). Just as crucially, it sensitizes students to the psychological roles of myths and symbols, roles that crosscut conventional delineations of religious and secular. Consider the power of the American flag as a quasi-religious symbol, for example, or the power of the metaphor “frontier spirit.” Indeed, a central argument of this book is that religious metaphors of sacrifice have dramatically distorted conceptions of civic virtue while garnering virtually no explicit public notice. Such a lack of reflectiveness about influential symbolic frameworks would be less likely among a public critically schooled on the force of symbolic thought in human imagination The academic study of religion introduces students to the formative role of language and image in one’s moral thinking. It calls attention to the complexity of relationships between religious or cultural traditions and traditions of moral reasoning. It invites students’ attention to historical and contemporary challenges of moral dialogue across religious boundaries or across boundaries between religions and other worldviews (religion and science, for example). Just as importantly, it alerts students to the internal complexity of religious traditions or secular traditions of moral reasoning considered as traditions. All such traditions are never monolithic but inevitably encompass diverse views. All of them change over time in response to internal and external pressures. In short, the academic study of religion introduces students to skills of conceptual translation (Yearley 1994). Of course, to some citizens the academic study of religion may be a threat. These are citizens who are so wholly committed to a particular religious vision that the legitimacy granted to others and to nonreligious worldviews by the academic study of religion may be thought to undermine their intended legacy to their children. For such citizens who do not have accessible private school options, some accommodation may be made, such as permission to opt out of certain classes. Such accommodation may Just Love
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itself have democratic value. While the civic value of the academic study of religion renders it particularly appropriate to public school missions, and while private schools can legitimately provide an alternative for those offended by it, private schools have led in the introduction of religious studies to secondary school education. Public schools are just beginning to consider the matter seriously.24 Thick social studies includes but is not limited to foreign-language education and the academic study of diverse moral traditions, religious and secular. In general, it promotes attention to the complexity of similarity, difference, tension, and interplay between cases, arguments, cultures, worldviews, and moral practices. Such attention demands more subtlety than the caricatured analogies test. If complexly competing and overlapping visions of the good life brush, bump, and meld in real democratic political life, then exposure to such complexity in school is helpful preparation for future citizens. If virtues of conceptual translation are demanded of the virtuous citizen, then students should practice related habits during their school formation. C om m u n i t y Orga n i z at ions a n d Volu n t e e r s i n t h e S c ho ol s The transformation of civic virtue invites reconsideration of the relationship between schools and communities. A variety of local volunteers and organizations visit public schools with a variety of educational messages. How schools choose who will be invited or allowed to come and why, and how teachers orient the visits, may have implications for civic virtue. Many of the volunteer individuals and organizations active in the schools embody civic virtue in their unique missions and in their educational outreach. Thus it might be appropriate to educate students about the organizations themselves in conjunction with their guest presentations. For example, it would be powerful if classroom follow-up to a special presentation on drunk driving by MADD included not only discussions of drunk driving but also of the history of MADD as an organization. Such discussions could highlight the trajectory from private tragedy to public service in that history. At the same time, schools should resist overly straightforward embrace of seemingly good causes. In democratic life, there are trade-offs between perceived goods, and various vested interests become intertwined with 308
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principled causes. Significantly, groups that are profiled in all three case studies in this book are active in the public schools. Two engage in ways that I endorse (MADD and the Anti-Defamation League), but the third (organ procurement organizations) does so in ways that I find problematic.25 Staff of professional organ procurement organizations (OPOs) have become the primary designers and presenters of education on organ donation in schools. Few have questioned whether that may present a conflict of interest, given their financial and professional interest in obtaining organs for transplant. I hypothesize that idolatrous views of civic virtue contribute to this lack of questioning. Since organ donation involves sacrifice for the stranger-neighbor, it may seem to encapsulate civic deals and thus be beyond questioning, including organizational questioning. My concern is with the nature of education on organ donation, however, not with organ donation (which I support). In brief, is not surprising that presentations orchestrated by organ procurement professionals present transplant stories with happy endings. Nor is it surprising that they generally fail to dwell on transplant failure rates, transplant costs, inequalities of access in the health care system, the role of lifestyle factors in organ disease rates, generational questions as the average age of transplant recipients continues to increase, or trade-offs between rescue care and preventive care in the medical system. Typically, too, they fail to address the diversity of interpretations of embodiment and death that may affect people’s choices to become, or not to become, organ donors. Raising questions about the ability of organ procurement professionals to be appropriately impartial educators does not imply that OPOs should refrain from involvement in the schools. Typically, the panels they sponsor encompass a range of views and experience. Certainly, the panelists themselves may embody civic virtue in many ways. Often a panel consists of an organ procurement professional, the family member of an organ donor who feels positively about the decision to donate their loved one’s organs, and a now healthy transplant recipient. All of these people may demonstrate a civically virtuous extension of personal experience into public service. The vividness of their compelling stories may be an important jolt to those who have never considered organ donation. It is significant, however, that the panels typically lack families of the suddenly dead who declined donation; transplant recipients who remain ill post-transplant or family members of someone who died despite transplant; Just Love
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transplant recipients who openly discuss how smoking, drinking, or recreational drug use contributed to their need for transplant (lifestyle factors are among the most common causes of end-stage organ disease); or uninsured people struggling to gain access to the most basic of medical services. Of course, there is an inevitable self-selection process by which volunteers come into the schools, and it may be practically difficult to enlist people with those experiences to come and share them. Nonetheless, thick social studies would allow room for related perspectives in some way. Pedagogical strategies could allow space for relevant questioning while still appreciating the passionate witness of the panel. Simply asking students whether important perspectives were missing on the guest panel or whether there might be concerns about the practice of organ donation and transplantation that the panelists did not address might broaden the analogical playing field in follow-up classroom conversations and invite the participation of students who otherwise might assume their questions are illegitimate. Indeed, such pedagogical strategies may be important follow-ups to all citizen-education presentations that present models to the students that are implicitly condoned by school authority. While I have expressed special concerns about organ donation education in the public schools, the same follow-up questions could be appropriate following other presentations by community advocates of various causes. The question of how a transformed conception of civic virtue might lead to transformed pedagogy for civic education obviously deserves more attention than I can give it in this book, which focuses on articulating a transformed conceptualization of civic virtue. Efforts to encourage educational habits that have civic import, to develop thick social studies, and to reconsider the relationship between schools and community actors may be promising axes for further discussion. C ONC LUSION: C I V IC V I RT U E A S H A BI T S ; DE MO CR AC Y A S A T R A DI T ION Weary of the strictures of Rawlsian liberalism and of the analytical debates about its coherence, some leaders in American political theory are reclaiming the American tradition of “pragmatist” philosophy. A trajectory of reflection with roots in nineteenth-century literary giants such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, pragmatism 310
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crystallized as a philosophical movement at the turn of the twentieth century through the work of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. Pragmatism emphasizes language as expressive of values rather than as discursive of logical argumentation, and considers philosophy in terms of social practices and their complex goals.26 Democracy, viewed through pragmatist lenses, is a living tradition rather than a set of rules or institutions. Contemporary religious studies scholar Jeffrey Stout announces this conception with particular clarity: Democracy, I shall argue, is a tradition. It inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror. This tradition is anything but empty. Its ethical substance, however, is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls’ sense. (2004, 3; emphasis his)
My transformation of civic virtue is obviously sympathetic to the pragmatist turn. However, rather than beginning with cultural luminaries, it begins with ordinary heroes, elucidating how amidst their diversity they nonetheless exhibit common “habits of reasoning” and “dispositions” that support the internal goals of a democratic public. These habits are simultaneously transformative of the public and of the citizens who cultivate them, crosscutting as they do personal life, various venues of civil society, and broadly political life. Civic virtues of citizens are constitutive of the tradition of democracy—for what is a tradition but inculcated habit writ large? My focus on the dialectic between personal and political impartiality, and its incumbent virtues, itself aims for a difficult mean. It attempts to avoid two opposite excesses: either over-theorizing or succumbing to a romantic-anarchist sense of the democratic fray that throws up its hands at any understanding of processes of democratic maturation. My invitation encourages the reader to look for civic virtue in places where the nostalgic view wrongly leads us to believe we cannot find it: in the here and now, in commitments among intimates and the civic drives that develop out of them, in the border zones of civil society, in religious communities that may develop democratically relevant practices while pursuing spiritual kingdoms. In all of these venues, citizens are developing Just Love
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habits that help them hone impartiality-as-practice, that is, the prudential analogical reasoning necessary to give adequate attention to each. Each venue offers unique motivations for participants to brave the disciplined vulnerability necessary to gain vicarious perspectives, to endure the humility of participating in discourses they cannot completely control, and to maintain the restraint necessary to negotiate tensions in ways that enable mutual interchange. To insist that is so is not to deny that each of those venues may also entail intrinsic challenges to the development of civic habits. But to cordon them off from the domain of civic virtue is to close the curtain on the stage of actual lived civic virtue. It is no wonder that civic actors pushed backstage become invisible. While transformed civic virtue can open the curtain on many reallife civic heroes, it can also remove the veil that has wrongly protected other parties or their particular vices. It refuses to insulate from reflective criticism those who frame their goals in terms of altruism. Indeed, impartiality-as-practice inherently calls into question a rigid distinction between altruism and more selfish loves, a distinction based on interpretations of agape that pit neighbor love against intimate love. Just as intimate loves may enable important visions for broader community, altruistically aimed love may be harmful if it fails to appreciate the real perspectives, experiences, and needs of supposed beloveds. As the saying goes, the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. Transformed civic virtue aims to curb the imperialism of altruistic love as much as to free intimate love for public significance. At the same time, it insists that all loves be subject to the regulative norms that derive from the practice of impartiality. It insists that all loves be just loves.
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APPENDIX: CASE STUDIES
I N T RODUC T ION TO T H E C A SE ST U DI E S This book has argued that conventional accounts of civic virtue are misguided and has argued for a new conceptual understanding of civic virtue. Three case studies serve to highlight civic heroes that are under-recognized by conventional views of civic virtue or civic vices that are glossed over by conventional views. Each case study addresses in microcosm particular distortions of conventional accounts while illustrating the greater suppleness of the transformed conception. All three demonstrate that the means demanded by transformed civic virtue are rarely clear and that honing them is never easy. My proposed understanding of civic virtue does not render inevitably complex issues simple. It does suggest different parameters for negotiating their complexity. Since this book was piqued by the failure of conventional accounts of civic virtue to explain the intuitively understandable civic achievement of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, it is only fitting that MADD be the first case study. MADD’s contributions confound the tendency of conventional views to define citizen reason over and against emotion, to demand a bracketing of one’s personal commitments for the sake of citizen virtue, and to locate citizen virtue in a sphere of production that is conceptualized as separate from reproduction. MADD’s anger can metaphorically be directed against historical tendencies to associate civic virtue with caricatures of masculinity as well as against drunk driving. The second case study considers the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The activities of ADL call into question prevalent accounts that define civic virtue over and against citizen religiosity. The history and contemporary 313
activities of the ADL demonstrate how the religious motivations, religious identity, and the historical experience of a religious community may cultivate sensitive perceptions of vulnerability and correspondingly visionary conceptions of justice that are invaluable to the wider community. The third case study, on organ donation and transplantation policy, is different from the first two in several ways. Rather than spotlighting an erstwhile hidden hero, it highlights civic vice that is protected by conventional accounts of civic virtue. Of course, the vice is not organ donation itself (in some circumstances organ donation is indeed heroic) but certain policies surrounding its contemporary practice in the United States. The case study provides one example of how the mythology of sacrifice that underlies conventional accounts of virtue can deflect attention from important issues of justice and diversity. It warns us to subject even the best of intentions to the ongoing analogical moral critique of a communally embedded practice of impartiality. The case study is also different in that it focuses on a set of public policies rather than on a particular organization. However, its analysis has clear implications for individuals and organizations in the transplant sector. For example, it implies that many organ procurement organizations and volunteer recruiters of organ donors wear moral blinders that obscure relevant ethical terrains. The result may be a form of civic hubris. C A SE S T U DY 1 : MOT H E R S AGA I NS T DRU N K DR I V I NG (M A DD) The central argument of this book articulates the heroism of Mothers Against Drunk Driving that seemed difficult to account for without a transformation of civic virtue. MADD embodies many civic virtues implied by impartiality-as-practice. Because drunk driving constitutes a random threat to the work of mothers, citizens qua mothers organized to confront it. MADD explicitly understands “mothers” as metaphorical: “We’re MADD. We’re dads and daughters, sons and uncles, friends and neighbors. And mothers.”1 By identifying themselves as mothers in their political activities, MADD members reject views of citizenship that call for public detachment from one’s private role or that sever child rearing from the political realm. Highlighting MADD as an embodied example of transformed civic virtue by no means suggests the organization is perfect. 314
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Significantly, however, even its challenges or failures may be adumbrated by the model of civic virtue proposed in this book. M A DD’s Ci v ic V i rt u e: Pe r s ona l L o s s T r a nsfor m e d t o P ol i t ic a l Pe rce p t ion Candy Lightner, the first president of MADD, is often heralded as its founder. In fact, that is an oversimplification, although her crucial role is indisputable. Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter was killed near her California home in a 1980 accident caused by a drunk driver. The driver was a repeat offender whose wife had just bailed him out of jail for a related charge and had let him use her car. For killing her daughter, the driver served only nine months in modified jail settings. Lightner was furious at the driver, his wife, the law, and the courts. Her commitment to MADD was born of this fury. Following her daughter’s death, Lightner formalized a then casual group of similarly bereaved parents in California and linked them to a politically active parents’ group in Maryland. From this fomentation, the first chapters of MADD were born. The founders’ mission was to stop other families from needlessly suffering the kind of loss they had endured. Through their own loss they recognized the prevalence of drunk driving as a political problem and as de facto reflective disequilibrium, given the primary goals of parenting.2 Sympathetically imagined loss to others or potential others was tapped not only for orienting vision but also for MADD’s successful membership and fundraising drives. Lightner, in particular, galvanized the press with the emotional charge of her appeal (McCarthy et al. 1988). In the years since its inception, MADD has grown from two local chapters to a major national organization comprising 600 local chapters, with over 400 professional staff, two million volunteers, and a total annual operating budget of $48 million dollars.3 It has been credited by many observers as the single most powerful force behind a 40 percent decrease in drunk driving deaths during the last twenty years, accomplished by complementary changes in drunk driving statutes, law enforcement practices, education, and public attitudes. MADD’s efforts were critical in convincing Congress to pressure states for a national standard of 21 years as the legal drinking age and to press for a national standard of .08 percent Appendix: Case Studies
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blood alcohol level as definitive of legal intoxication.4 While MADD has been the target of institutional criticism or financial questioning, surveys reveal that it continues to have positive name recognition that would be the envy of many other grassroots philanthropic organizations.5 A na l o gic a l E x t e nsion i n t h e wor k of M A DD At first the acronym MADD stood for “Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.” The driver at fault was the focus of the anger. Yet early in MADD’s history it became clear that that just as “mothers” was understood metaphorically, so too were drunk drivers. At fault was not only the driver but also the legal system that over-indulged drunk drivers and failed to recognize the overwhelming magnitude of harm to victims. MADD was one of the initiators of victims’ advocacy in criminal justice and tort law. It perceived the dual missions of stopping drunk driving and advocating for victims as integrally linked, and those dual missions remain the first two goals articulated in the organization’s current mission statement. MADD has not only pressed for stricter statutory law on drunk driving but also for more rigorous enforcement of the law and due consideration of harm to victims. As a pioneer of victim advocacy, MADD established long-standing programs that educate law enforcement on sensitive death notification and victim support, counsel victims on how to press criminal and tort charges and to obtain emotional support, provide victim information packets on the criminal justice system, and arrange for victims to be accompanied in court by more experienced volunteers. MADD has pressured individual prosecutors and judges to treat drunk driving as a serious crime, published creative prosecutorial and sentencing approaches, and publicly applauded prosecutors and judges that it considers model enforcers of drunk driving law (www.madd.org/victims). Over time, the focus on the drunk driver, even metaphorically understood, became overly constraining. The 1984 name change from “Mothers Against Drunk Drivers” to “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” represents the negotiation of a complex process of analogical reasoning as MADD broadened its mission to address a multitude of legal, cultural, and educational factors that influence drunk driving. MADD reasoned that not only increased penalties but also increased education could help violators change their behavior. Facilitating reform 316
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of offenders became another goal of the organization. Ultimately, this goal was supported by the development of an educational approach for violators—drivers convicted of DUI (driving while under the influence of alcohol) and DWI (driving while intoxicated). In conjunction with local police departments, MADD now promotes the use of “victims panels” in required offender education. Aimed at decreasing recidivism, these “tough love” panels force offenders to confront people who have suffered great losses from behavior like their own. Changing the name enabled public education to be addressed as a critical component of the campaign against drunk driving, and MADD’s educational outreach grew beyond the legal sphere. MADD realized that people need to learn how alcohol affects reaction time and judgment, how long it takes the body to process alcohol, what social pressures rationalize drunk driving, and, most importantly, the real consequences of drunk driving. Correspondingly, strategies that can reduce drunk driving, such as “designated” drivers, alternative post-event transportation options, and the consistent provision of non-alcoholic choices, deserve social encouragement. MADD has spearheaded educational programs both in schools and in adult civic organizations. For use in schools, MADD has developed two multimedia curricula, one geared to primary school and one to secondary school, as well as a program aimed specifically at college campuses. In all of its educational venues, MADD encourages public speaking by people who have been hurt by drunk driving and by remorseful drunk drivers who have caused harm. Some of MADD’s educational programs address targeted groups. For example, MADD initiated a national Spanish-language program after empirical evidence suggested that Latino communities suffer disproportionately from drunk driving and that Latinos had less access to relevant educational materials than other Americans.6 MADD’s educational approach is specifically designed to empower youth to become leaders in the campaign against drunk driving themselves. MADD often works in cooperation with Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) and sponsors regular youth leader training conferences. Similarly, MADD invests in leadership training for motivated volunteers from its adult corps. In all of its endeavors, MADD has been savvy in getting its message out through diverse media. MADD has become the press’s number-one Appendix: Case Studies
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resource on drunk driving statistics, legislation, and programs, and thus maintains ready access to the press for its own press releases. MADD uses the Internet not only to disperse information, but also to provide Web banners on drunk driving to other Web users. It has made a number of videos to dramatize the consequences of drunk driving and has commissioned poster art by prominent Hispanic artist Irene Carranza to promote its Latino outreach program. MADD has been equally creative in soliciting members, funds, and corporate sponsorship (although its promotional strategies have not gone without criticism). Currently, both the national professional office and volunteer local chapters participate in these activities, which include volunteer networking, direct mail that combines education on drunk driving with appeals for members or donations, and applications for national, state, or local grants. MADD has been highly successful at using celebrity spokespeople to promote both its missions and the organization itself as well as at soliciting corporate sponsors. More than 40 major companies have either given corporate donations or jointly participated in a civic program with MADD.7 MADD is self-conscious about its civic role as a model for social activism. Over the years, numerous other grassroots nonprofit organizations have contacted MADD for advice on getting started, connecting to media outlets, increasing membership, and so forth. MADD has published a document elaborating advice for startups based on its own history: Lessons Learned Along the Way: Starting a Non-Profit (2004). Ch a l l e nge s of Ci v ic V i rt u e Faced i n t h e Evolu t ion of M A DD MADD’s accomplishments were enabled by the cultivation of certain civic virtues by its founders, and of analogous institutional virtues by the organization as a whole. But it faces continued challenges with varying degrees of success. These challenges relate to the need for MADD to develop forms of impartiality suitable to its appropriately partial mission. Some challenges relate to the definition of the mission itself; others, to the institutional and financial structure to support the mission. While many aspects of MADD’s approach are consistent with a conception of impartiality-as-practice, critics have raised concern that the 318
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organization may be inattentive to actual practices of drunk driving regulation. While MADD has lobbied successfully for universal standards to determine inebriation and to sentence drunk drivers, the true universality of such standards depends on implementation: Which drivers get stopped on suspicion of drunk driving? Which customers get carded? And so forth. MADD’s campaigns against drunk driving have co-existed with an increased concern about racial and gender profiling in criminal justice. Considerable evidence suggests that black and Hispanic men are disproportionately stopped in routine traffic stops in many areas of the country. The practice seems most directly, if spuriously, tied to the “war on drugs” (there is no empirical evidence that drug dealers are disproportionately members of minorities). Yet the very terminology used for racial profiling in many minority communities—“driving while black,” a play on “driving while intoxicated”—demonstrates the potential for discriminatory perversion of MADD’s goals as well as widespread public suspicion.8 MADD’s fierce, passionate attachment to the victims of drunk driving initially may have diverted its attention from other kinds of group injustices in criminology. Such diversion may also have been facilitated by the makeup of the organization, which remained predominantly white, middle class, and female for some time, but which has changed significantly in recent years. Responding to the suspicion, MADD initiated and then expanded a section condemning racial profiling in its policies on enforcement. More broadly, beginning in 1997 it began to host periodic national diversity forums to address minority issues such as minority recruitment and victims’ services for minorities. The 2005 selection of Glynn R. Birch as MADD’s first male and first African American national president may demonstrate burgeoning commitment to addressing issues such as nondiscriminatory enforcement, especially given Birch’s history as a leader of the diversity forums. Breadth of mission also poses challenges to MADD. The challenge is judging where to stop the analogical extension of impartiality-as-practice in order to avoid diffusion of mission, as well as where to pursue it. In particular, MADD has wrestled with the question of to what extent “drinking culture” should be a target of its social critique. On the one hand, MADD insists that it is not against responsible adult social drinking, and it would lose considerable membership and corporate sponsorship if it became perceived as prohibitionist. On the other hand, drinking habits that may Appendix: Case Studies
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result in drunk driving are influenced by a broad array of cultural factors. MADD has faced some of its greatest opposition—particularly from professional lobbies of alcoholic beverage makers—when it has criticized the glamorization of alcohol in media and advertising. This issue has been controversial among MADD’s membership as well. Line-drawing questions are unavoidable. For example, should MADD criticize Hollywood only when TV and movie characters drink and drive with no consequence, or more generally, when alcohol is used as an omnipresent “prop”? Over time, MADD has decided to limit its cultural focus to stopping underage drinking. MADD added “prevent[ing] underage drinking” as a third goal in its mission statement, in addition to its founding two missions to “stop drunk driving and support the victims of this violent crime.”9 MADD’s efforts to curb underage drinking clearly relate to its concern about drinking and driving. Younger drivers may be particularly affected by alcohol because of their relative lack of driving experience, and they are responsible for a disproportionate share of drunk driving deaths. At the same time, this is the one mission of MADD that goes beyond stopping driving behavior per se—the mission is to prevent underage drinking, not only underage drinking and driving. The implicit argument is that the widespread flouting of laws governing legal drinking age discourages attention to the serious responsibility entailed by drinking alcoholic beverages and thus is a problem in itself. Yet MADD’s concerted efforts to curb underage drinking—through tough penalties for fake identification, encouragement of parental supervision, and parental education on the prevalence of adolescent drinking— inevitably raise general questions about cultural glamorization of alcohol and the relationship of that to youth appeal. To pursue those questions could lead MADD into diffuse cultural turf that risks diluting its focus on driving behavior. On the other hand, to refuse to pursue them could ignore important causes of underage drinking. MADD’s negotiation of that tension is still evolving, cautiously guided by its restriction of cultural focus to underage drinking. MADD has begun to argue for legal or consumer pressure on alcoholic beverage producers whose advertisements seemed designed to captivate youth below legal drinking age (e.g., MADD versus the Budweiser frogs).10 When NBC decided to air hard liquor advertisements after years of participating in 320
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network television’s self-imposed ban, MADD vociferously criticized the decision, claiming that the airtime and programming restrictions proposed were not adequate to protect youth audiences from the advertisements. Though NBC decided to reverse its decision, MADD continued to use the incident to highlight related issues. According to MADD, beer and wine contribute to alcoholism and to drunk driving as much as hard liquor, yet many alcohol and wine advertisements on television do not meet the youth-protection standards for hard liquor. MADD also endorsed and publicized the 2002 “CASA Report” on underage drinking, which contains a critique of the glamorization of alcohol in media much broader than MADD’s own comments on the matter.11 While line-drawing around its mission continues to be a difficult issue, MADD seems to have concluded that pressing cultural critique beyond underage drinking risks its political capital and its public image as the effecter of widely agreed-upon social goals. To internal and external critics, MADD’s decisions about what aspects of “drinking culture” to scrutinize may seem politically expedient and either too narrow or too broad. But their critique fails to recognize the negotiation of mission breadth as an intrinsic structural challenge. The internal end of reducing drunk driving provides a standard for the evolution of MADD’s partially driving impartiality. Another challenge of impartiality concerns MADD’s institutional and financial makeup. Its growth from diffuse local chapters to a highly organized, professionally staffed national organization did not occur without growing pains. Sociologist Frank Weed argues that MADD embodies “a problem identified by Max Weber: charismatic leadership and rational forms of organization have incompatible elements” (1993). Regrettably, Weed’s formulation buys into the very split between emotion and reason that is problematic in conventional accounts of civic virtue. He misses the rationality inherent in the charisma of the founders and the emotional current that must continue to charge MADD for the organization to remain successful. Nonetheless, the trials he details in MADD’s history have been critical ones. Rather than portrayed as the inherent tension between a “MADD queen” (charismatic founder Lightner) and a rational professional organization, they might better be seen as challenges endemic to the development of an appropriate institutional impartiality. One challenge was to define the relationship between the original founders, particularly Lightner, and the evolving national organization. Appendix: Case Studies
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As the first president of MADD, Lightner put both the cause and the organization on the map. A media master, she personally inspired many local chapter organizers with her can-do confidence and her prepared organizing packets. According to Lightner, MADD became her child after her daughter’s death. In its early years she held titles of president, founder, chair of the board, and CEO of the national organization. However, by many accounts, Lightner was not easy to work with. MADD experienced high staff turnover during her tenure, while loyal staff openly discussed their simultaneous dread and admiration for her. In fact, it was they who coined the nickname “MADD queen,” which ironically turns the deliberate emotional charge of the acronym into a pejorative term. She was known for relentlessness in her expectations (Weed 1993, 339). While Lightner’s personal leadership style became increasingly questioned, public criticism of MADD’s fundraising and operations also mounted. MADD was initially sustained by modest grants from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and an affluent private donor. These initial grants allowed Lightner to pay herself and to begin the process of forming a professional staff. In 1982, MADD employed a direct mail solicitation firm with considerable success (Weed 1993, 383).12 By 1985 the organization had a $13 million budget, but it was publicly criticized for spending more than 70 percent of that on fundraising (339). In response, MADD contended that the solicitations were an educational service as well as a fundraising appeal, since they contained information about the magnitude of the drunk driving problem. Negative publicity regarding fundraising practices and personality conflicts with Lightner contributed to the first crisis in the organization in 1983. The board hired a new executive director, revised rules governing the board of directors to ensure significant representation from geographically diverse chapters, increased the number of professionally trained staff, and moved headquarters from California to Texas—physically distancing the organization from the ambit of its California founders. The board attempted to limit but preserve an organizational role for Lightner, who was recognized as both the founding mother and a politically savvy strategist. However, she found the terms too constraining and left the staff in 1985. While Lightner was apparently bitter about her departure, it also underscored the ultimate scope of her influence—the movement she had helped to catalyze was bigger than any one person. 322
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Criticism of MADD’s fundraising tactics did not end with Lightner’s departure. For the next decade, MADD invested considerable energy in telemarketing promotion. It was criticized by charity watchdog organizations not only for its heavy reliance on telemarketing but also for its relationship with one major telemarketing firm who donated extensively to MADD and received exclusive contracts from it (G. Williams 1993). In the last decade, MADD has greatly diversified its fundraising. Local chapters have become more involved, particularly in applying for local and state grants. In MADD’s professional operations, celebrity and corporate partnerships have increasingly been tapped. Telemarketing has been de-emphasized relative to direct mail solicitation, which continues to generate a considerable percentage of MADD’s financial resources. The importance MADD now places on diversified fundraising is underscored in its “Lessons Learned” document geared to startup nonprofit organizations (MADD 2004). While it has diversified and professionalized its strategies, MADD continues to face difficult decisions about fundraising tactics. While it proudly emphasizes that more than half of its donations come from individual members, the scope of its direct marketing enterprise and corporate partnerships is vast. There are endemic challenges involved in keeping fundraising aimed at MADD’s primary mission rather than allowing the mission to be diluted by fundraising activities. Indeed, MADD’s “buckling up” with a seatbelt manufacturer to sponsor a safe holiday driving campaign seems significantly different than providing its banner to “Bugle” brand snacks. Of course, among MADD’s forty corporate sponsors and their particular sponsored projects there lies a diffuse spectrum between the example of the seatbelt manufacturer and of “Bugle” snacks. To err by demanding too tight a fit without recognizing the pragmatic self-interest of sponsors would risk losing general financial resources necessary for organizational operation—no money, no mission. On the other hand, to err by being too crass in promoting corporate partners’ interests because they are corporate partners might risk eroding mission focus or public trust. Struggling to negotiate a balance between professional management and volunteer energies, and between fundraising for goals and fundraising as goal, thus requires continued analogical effort in the development of impartiality-as-practice. Here the internal goals of the practice are defined by the organization’s own mission statement. The transformed conception Appendix: Case Studies
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of civic virtue advanced in this book is more helpful to understanding this challenge than an unreflective demand that “rational” bureaucratization succeed “emotional” personal charisma. C A SE S T U DY 2: T H E A N T IDE FA M AT ION L E AGU E (A DL) The founders, administrators, and volunteers of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have demonstrated creative civic virtue for nearly a century. The ADL has played a leading role confronting anti-Semitism in the United States. At the same time, it has repeatedly drawn upon Jewish experience of anti-Semitism to recognize and decry other group hates. ADL pioneered systemic exploration of connections between inchoate mental images of religious or ethnic minorities fostered by popular culture and social discrimination against those minorities. Correspondingly, the organization has launched multi-tiered responses to eradicate the roots of group hates. The civic virtue of ADL defies the presumption of “idolatrous” views of civic virtue that demand that citizens detach themselves from religious commitments when they act as citizens. The history of the ADL demonstrates how religious particularism can catalyze a prophetic social vision with ethical traction beyond the originating religious group. The founders of the ADL drew upon Judaism’s religious emphasis on social justice as well as on Jews’ historical experience of persecution in order to recognize when other peoples were the victims of group hate. They drew on the same resources to imagine a society without discrimination against groups and to implement educational strategies to build such a society. Those strategies encourage people to be reflective about their own prejudices rather than to imagine, self-deceptively, an impartial standpoint that lacks any prejudices. As was the case with MADD, to claim that ADL models civic virtue is not to claim the organization is beyond criticism, nor is it to deny that ADL continues to face difficult challenges of prudential moral reasoning that are intrinsic to its mission. ADL must negotiate difficult balances between its sensitivity to the vulnerability of certain social groups, and its commitment to consider individuals as such; between its insistence that hate speech hurts, and its recognition that censorship is morally problematic 324
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and manipulable against minorities; and between its commitment to addressing root causes of all group hate, and its categorical support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While a detailed history of the ADL is beyond the scope of this project, certain individuals and events in the organization’s history so fundamentally shaped its mission that they provide convenient prisms for an overview: the organization’s perceptive and determined founder, Sigmund Livingston, who trumpeted the connection between “the images in one’s head” and ethical behavior; the Leo Frank case; and ADL’s campaign to expose the fraud of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic invective. H istory of A DL: G oi ng Back to I m age s ; E x pa n di ng Pe rce p t ions of Grou p H at e s If impartiality-as-practice often demands beginning with experience close to home in order to comprehend vicariously the experience of others in wider circles, it may sometimes demand the opposite. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Jewish civic organizations such as B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Congress were focused heavily on the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, seeking to provide assistance to those suffering political persecution in the “old country” and lobbying the U.S. government to use diplomatic pressure to stop the pogroms.13 These organizations, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, had developed partially in response to anti-Semitism in the United States. Yet remaining optimistic that the American ethos of individualism and respect for merit would continually temper anti-Semitism over time, they viewed response to cases of discrimination as issues for local chapters. Some efforts aimed broadly against defamation in American popular media. For example, several years before the ADL was founded, B’nai B’rith president Adolph Kraus succeeded in convincing Melville Stone, president of the Associated Press, that it was wrong to report the religion of a criminal suspect only when that suspect was a Jew (common practice at the time). But combating such defamation was not generally seen as a primary task of Jewish civic leaders or civic organizations. So in 1908, when Illinois lawyer Sigmund Livingston proposed to the national B’nai B’rith “the development of an anti-defamation program to counter prevalent public ridicule of Jews[,] [t]here was no great bandwagon Appendix: Case Studies
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rush” (Belth 1979, 38). But Livingston persisted. An avid student of European and American history, he feared that increasing caricature of Jews in public culture as immigration burgeoned—caricature in cartoons, in literature, in prevalent media portrayals of Jews as “Shylocks”—could be the starting point in America for the eventual entrenchment of vehement anti-Semitism on a European scale. In short, he was convinced that images of Jews underlay discrimination against Jews. Under Livingston’s guidance, the Midwest District Grand Lodge of B’nai B’rith established a committee called the Publicity Committee to address anti-Semitic defamation in public culture. The committee engaged with advertisers, journalists, entertainers, and others to root out negative stereotypes of Jews in their work. In the spring of 1913, the Leo Frank case galvanized support for Livingston’s anti-defamation efforts.14 A northern Jew who had become the owner of a factory in Atlanta, Leo Frank was accused of the rape and murder of 13-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. Frank was convicted, largely on the basis of coached yet still checkered testimony by a factory employee who would be incriminated himself nearly seventy years later by an eyewitness who had been threatened into silence. Anti-Semitism fueled passions surrounding the case. Throughout the trial crowds shouted “Hang the Jew!” Both the prosecutor and some jurors made anti-Semitic comments. Frank was sentenced to death by hanging. As the case unsuccessfully made its way through various levels of appeal, several prosecution witnesses recanted their testimony, describing it as pressured by police or public. When appeals were exhausted, Governor John Slaton, convinced that the case had lacked due process and that Frank would likely be proved innocent over time, commuted the sentence to life in prison. This courageous but unpopular decision ended Slaton’s political career. However, it failed to save Frank’s life. In 1915 a lynch mob from Mary Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, overran the prison in which Frank was incarcerated, drove him to Marietta, and hanged him. No one was ever prosecuted for the crime, though the identities of the lynchers were well known in Marietta. The lynchers, who identified themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan, evolved into the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which had lapsed in the late nineteenth century. Ironically, then, the same case would prove pivotal both to the reorganization of the Klan and to the founding of the ADL. Closure on the 326
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case was finally attained in 1986 when the ADL successfully petitioned the Georgia Board of Pardons for a posthumous pardon of Frank on the basis of the new eyewitness testimony. The ADL’s pursual of the case for seventy years testifies to its determination to link accurate historical memory to contemporary moral challenges. The horror of the Frank case catalyzed a national B’nai B’rith initiative against defamation, spearheaded by Livingston. In October 1913, B’nai B’rith formally founded the Anti-Defamation League, which began with an investment of $200 and two desks in Livingston’s Chicago office. Livingston crafted the organization’s mission statement, describing goals that have remained remarkably consistent during the century since: to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people . . . to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike . . . to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens. (Belth 1979, 44–45)
The moral extension from personal to vicarious experience was thus part of the organization’s goal from its inception. In its first decade, ADL focused on calling to public conscience caricatures of Jews in the press, in the theater, and in education; opposing the scapegoating of Jews for the burdens of World War I; resisting the growing power of the Klan; and lobbying against immigration restrictions. Led by ADL board member and publisher of the New York Times Adolph Ochs, it attained clear success in decreasing defamation in the press. Ochs coordinated effective efforts, calling upon all newspapers to stop use of the word “Jew” as an adjective (Belth 1979, 44–45). In entertainment, the caricatures were harder to confront. Entertainment mediums were diffuse. Moreover, just as African American comedians of the time could find well-compensated work playing “blackface,” so too could Jewish comedians attract audiences by embodying prevalent social caricatures of Jews. It was politically difficult to both critique and enlist Jewish entertainers whom the League considered to be participating in defamation. Moreover, many works of literature whose production often enflamed anti-Semitism—such as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (with the caricatured character Shylock) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (with the caricatured character Fagan)—were recognized as great classics. Appendix: Case Studies
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Early in its charter, the ADL failed to recognize the potential for censorial tactics to conflict with some of its broadest goals. The League campaigned against the purchase, reading, or production of these works, particularly the Merchant of Venice, which was required reading in many high schools. The League’s first ecumenical endeavors aimed at limiting such literature: it enlisted Christian churches in its campaign against Shylock, Fagan, and their like. Over time, the ADL became increasingly uncomfortable with its stance, particularly since consumer boycotts were often used to discriminate against Jews. Instead, it began to encourage a complex confrontation with anti-Semitism in literature—for example, training high school teachers to explicitly address the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock. By 1962, commenting on the New York production of the Merchant with Lawrence Olivier, the ADL insisted it had “always” opposed censorship but urged producers to consider their social responsibilities in producing such works. The League has urged consultation with Jewish leaders for artistic projects that could potentially spark anti-Semitic interpretations. In a notable example, the ADL worked for many years with the citizens of Oberammergau, Germany, to change the script of the famed Oberammergau Passion Play. The changes increased attention to Jesus’ Jewishness, decreased the scapegoating of the Jewish people, and highlighted the culpability of Roman officials in the state execution of Jesus.15 The new script was used in the millennial 2000 performance of the passion play. While ADL considers the new script a significant improvement, it continues to have reservations about the passion play and encourages tour guides to discuss the historical link between the play and outbreaks of persecution against Jews. Related controversies came to the fore in regard to Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. While explicitly rejecting any call for a consumer boycott, ADL criticized both the content of the film, which it thinks depicts Jews as responsible for Jesus’ death, and the process of making the film, in which its invitations for consultation were spurned. ADL received thousands of pieces of hate mail, including threats, because of its criticism of the film.16 If the Leo Frank case catalyzed the formation of the ADL during its first decade, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism spurred the organization in its second decade. The pioneering industrialist owned not only the Ford 328
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Motor Company but also the Dearborn Independent newspaper, and Ford used the newspaper to spew anti-Semitic venom. The Independent reached wide national audiences because of Ford’s policy of promoting it through Ford dealerships, which often included a subscription with the purchase of a car. Ford eschewed advertising, willing to subsidize the newspaper from his personal fortune to avoid editorial constraint. After a more principled editor resigned rather than participate in the slander, Ford’s editorial staff paid for negative information about prominent Jews and hired shady private detectives to dig it up. In 1920 and 1921, ninety-one consecutive issues of the paper featured articles under the rubric “The International Jew,” exposing alleged Jewish conspiracies in banking, business, journalism, and politics. These articles drew on the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the paper continued to cite for years afterward. The Protocols, concocted by latenineteenth-century Russian secret police, allege an international Jewish plot to dominate the world. Its circulation in Russia sparked pogroms there, and its reintroduction into Germany after World War I was linked to the first stirrings of National Socialism. The document was definitively revealed as a fraud in a London Times series in 1920, ironically, just as Ford was gearing up to become its American mouthpiece. The Independent’s accounts of the Protocols were avidly read by many rural Protestant Americans who feared urban migration and immigration and who had grown up on negative stereotypes without much real contact with Jews. It was also read avidly by the reviving Klan, who cited it in Klan boycotts of Jewish businesses. Even today, Protocols continues to be cited by a variety of white supremacists, Christian militia, and other anti-Semitic hate groups.17 For the ADL, Ford’s calumny threatened to make a mockery of the previous gains in journalistic standards regarding anti-Semitism as well as to fan the flames of anti-Semitic nativism. Spearheading public denunciation of the anti-Semitic propaganda, the League published and circulated two pamphlets written by Sigmund Livingston that were aimed against Ford: The Protocols: A Spurious Document and The Poison Pen, which has become a classic of anti-hate literature. The organization also spearheaded efforts to encourage prominent Americans to speak out against Ford’s anti-Semitism and his debased journalism. Those efforts resulted in a public statement, “The Perils of Racial Appendix: Case Studies
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Prejudice,” signed by 116 prominent figures, including President Woodrow Wilson, former presidents William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Dubois, Clarence Darrow, Robert Frost, and William Jennings Bryan (Belth 1979, 79). The public statement of prominent figures became another weapon in the ADL arsenal against hate. In recent years, for example, the ADL used a similar strategy to publicize critiques of antiSemitic rhetoric by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In 1927, faced with a major libel suit from a prominent Jewish agricultural financier whom he had slandered, Ford wrote a public apology for the “International Jew” series. He claimed now to “join in condemning unreservedly all wholesale denunciations [of a people].” Many distrusted Ford’s conversion (the New York Times satirized it). As the Nazi movement gained momentum in Germany, allegations of Ford’s connections to Nazism became rampant. Ford infuriated many Americans of all faiths when he accepted a medal from Hitler for his seventy-fifth birthday in 1938, claiming to interpret it as thanks from the German people for the good work of Ford Corporation’s German division (a major producer of German military vehicles). After the atrocities of the Holocaust began to emerge, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the United States entered the war, Ford’s long-standing association with anti-Semitism became an enormous business and personal liability. In January 1932, Ford contacted the president of the ADL and arranged to write a public letter to ADL founder Sigmund Livingston, decisively repudiating anti-Semitism: I strongly urge my fellow-citizens to give no aid to any movement whose purpose it is to arouse hatred against any group. It is my sincere hope that now in this country and throughout the world, when this war is finished and peace once more established, hatred of the Jew, commonly known as anti-Semitism, and hatred against any other racial or religious group, shall cease for all time.18
ADL continues to highlight this letter on its Web site and in its educational activities as a succinct reminder both of the dark past of anti-Semitism in the United States and of the potential for healing. In the wake of Ford’s death, his grandson Henry Ford II continued the work of his father, Edsel (who died young, before the elder Ford), to make amends for the family patriarch’s anti-Semitic legacy. Under his leadership, the Ford Corporation began to sponsor the work of many Jewish civic 330
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organizations, including the ADL, and to fund educational and artistic projects on the Holocaust. For example, in 1997 Ford underwrote the commercial-free TV network premier of Schindler’s List. In 1951, Henry Ford II was awarded an honorary medal by ADL. The award highlights the full circle from hate purveyors to hate fighters, and from ADL targets to ADL benefactors, in the Ford family history as a symbol of the transformative potential of deliberative public attention to images of hate in popular culture. Indeed, the modern Ford Corporation’s constructive confrontation with its anti-Semitic roots is itself a witness of civic virtue. Ford Corporation continues to take legal action to try to stop publications or serializations of The International Jew. However, it is available in most major languages and is now spread unstoppably through the Web, increasingly in the Middle East and Asian Muslim nations as well as in places where it had a long-standing foothold: Russia, Europe, the United States, and South America. In recent years, the ADL has been one of the first organizations to recognize the exploitation of the Web by hate groups and to warn of the consequences. In the 1990s it began tracking Internet sites and Listservs devoted to hate-mongering, publicizing recruitment tactics, issuing advice on monitoring to parents, and pressuring Internet server providers who had hate speech codes in their service agreements to stop serving clear violators. (In the absence of such an agreement, hate speech is protected by First Amendment rights.) Clearly, a major accomplishment of the ADL has been to pose hate speech as an issue of character, virtue, and responsibility, and not only as an issue of free speech. ADL highlighted the connection between its Web-related hate-group tracking and its earlier exposure of hate mongering in other mediums by calling its 1991 report Poisoning the Web, a twist on the name of its earlier anti-Protocols classic, The Poison Pen. During the 1920s, in the face of the Klan’s zenith and newly devised boycotts of Jewish businesses organized by the Klan, ADL maintained a number of Klan de-masking activities. A constant focus was the effort to publicize both the identity of Klan members and the violence done by the Klan. ADL invested itself in the power of publicity in many related ways as well, for example, by pressing political candidates for public statements about their view of the Klan. The ADL also began to develop concerted efforts to oppose two kinds of institutionalized anti-Semitism that were on the rise as the century Appendix: Case Studies
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progressed: anti-immigration efforts, especially those that focused disproportionately on excluding Jews or other certain groups, and quotas on the acceptance of Jewish students at institutions of higher learning. The ADL’s desire to keep the United States an open haven could not withstand prevalent anti-immigration sentiments that followed World War I. Increasingly the ADL focused on exposing the surreptitious but widely accepted quota system by which Ivy League and other elite universities limited the percentage of accepted students who could be Jewish, regardless of academic achievement. ADL devised a “Crack the Quota” slogan for its multi-tiered publicity campaign that presented the quota system as an un-American rejection of merit. Given that history, the ADL has strongly opposed any use of quotas or statistical goals for representative populations of minorities in contemporary affirmative action programs, while it endorses more “individualized” approaches to affirmative action. It issued an amicus brief supporting the 2003 Supreme Court decision declaring the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program unconstitutional in its use of statistical goals, a decision that changed admission practices throughout the country. The ADL’s opposition to any statistically based forms of affirmative action transcends party lines and challenges many assumptions about what it means to be minority-friendly. Regardless of one’s conclusions on related policy, the ADL argument has invited increased historical consideration of an issue more frequently debated in terms of philosophical categories. T h e C on t e m p or a ry A DL : T ry i ng t o M a k e a Wor l d of Di f f e r e nce ADL’s mission to stop defamation has continuously extended in two ways: the kinds of group hate that it attends to has become increasingly varied, and the venues through which it works have broadened. The ADL now tracks indicators of and denounces not only anti-Semitism but racism, gender-based hate, including gay-bashing, and, particularly in the wake of the September 11 attacks, hate speech or acts directed against MuslimAmericans. Increasingly, ADL is not only an American organization but also an international one, with offices in Europe and Israel as well as in the United States. Those offices address particular group rivalries in those 332
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settings as well as what ADL considers to be a worldwide intensification of anti-Semitism at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The extent to which Sigmund Livingston’s original insights about the sources of group hate have been extended through the League’s development may be best encapsulated by considering its brave, though ultimately unheeded, call to prevent genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, discussed in chapter 6. Recall that ADL was the first organization— against the resistance of the U.S. government, which feared incurring military obligations—to equate “ethnic cleansing” with genocide. Analogizing to the Holocaust, the ADL presciently warned that spiraling Serbian repression of Bosnian Muslims would lead to the full-scale massacres that eventually came to pass, and pleaded for international intervention. When intervention was not forthcoming, it orchestrated the rescue and relocation to international refuge of endangered Bosnian Muslims. In this case, the League drew on its strong partial attachment to the history and culture of one people to recognize and try to defuse group hate against another. While idolatrous accounts of impartiality call on a neutral state to morally check the bias of partial organizations, particularly religiously affiliated ones, the actual course of events in this case turns that account on its head. Even critics of the ADL presume the accomplishment of such perceptive courage and implicitly appeal to it as a criterion of judgment in their critique. For example, Arab-American organizations explicitly turned ADL’s support for Bosnian Muslims toward critique of ADL support for Israel. They charged that certain historical and ongoing Israeli repressions of Palestinians were similar to the ethnic cleansing the ADL called “genocide” when it was committed against Bosnians. Significantly, however its merits are judged, this critique recognizes the analogical accomplishment of the ADL’s position on Bosnia. It exemplifies how the analogical reasoning of impartiality-as-practice may reverberate through various social venues, out of the control of any one party. The ADL has not only continually increased the kinds of group hate it seeks to eradicate but also the strategies for doing so and the layers of civil society through which it works. Certainly, one of the most imaginative and wide-reaching accomplishments of the contemporary ADL is the World of Difference Program (WD), its sophisticated educational program tailored to different school grades or civic settings. The goal of WD is to encourage people to explore their own particular biases toward different Appendix: Case Studies
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groups, including images they may harbor due to popular culture or other influences. It seeks to bring unconscious images to the fore for conscious reflection. That goal refutes the presumptions of idolatrous accounts of impartiality that render it embarrassing to explore one’s biases and their sources in public—since one is either not supposed to have them or to be capable of transcending them. ADL assumes that everyone has them and that rightly or wrongly they influence thoughts and actions. World of Difference provides a facilitated structure akin to group therapy, designed to help people develop the “disciplined vulnerability” of a good citizen. For this process it provides a safe environment with presumptions of goodwill (citizenly friendship) even amidst tensions. It uses hypothetical scenarios—encounters between people of different background that are described or acted out—and the exploration of reactions. ADL’s probing is designed to elicit an honest assessment of the images one harbors of certain groups, and then to begin to explore questions about where those images come from and what they mean. Participants are encouraged to consider how factors such as their personal experience, circles of friends, or popular media culture have shaped the images. They proceed to consider to what extent their images incorporate perceptive generalizations of group values or are at best unfounded and at worst pernicious defamation. This process is undergirded by an infrastructure of ground rules that require respectful language and manner in addressing other participants. WD structurally jump-starts the communally located analogical reasoning of impartiality-as-practice. The program assumes that since hate is learned, stopping hate can also be learned. World of Difference also provides space for public storytelling, recognizing the civic power of narratives of personal experience that are underappreciated in conventional accounts of civic virtue. Often WD employs guest speakers who have suffered terribly from group hate and who discuss how seemingly subtle symptoms politically metastasized into the events that threatened them. In one WD speaking tour, for example, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor teamed up with a young survivor of the Bosnian genocide. Both the gruesome particularity of each speaker’s experience and the haunting resonances between them forced the audience to confront patterns of group hate and ask: “Could it happen here?” In criminal justice settings, ADL has developed extensive programs modeled on strategies similar to WD to educate police forces about group 334
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hates, from subtle to severe, that plague their communities and their ranks. In fact, large numbers of police forces contract with ADL to provide this service. ADL is now taking the WD approach internationally, to ethnically diverse areas of Europe and to both Jewish and Arab-Israeli schoolchildren in Israel. In the Israeli context, approaches similar to WD are also being used in ADL outreach to Israeli soldiers serving in the occupied territories. ADL’s Israel office also engages in classic anti-defamation activities. While the majority of these are directed at anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish defamation, consistent with its mission to advocate for all minorities and against all group hate, ADL-Israel also actively publicizes and decries defamation against Israeli Arabs, including both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. C om pl e x i t i e s a n d Ch a l l e nge s The ADL’s goal of eliminating group hate necessarily invokes a series of tensions that constantly challenge the organization. Its raison d’etre is its sensitivity to the vulnerability of certain social groups, which presses it to insist that individuals be judged as such. To foster its own goals, ADL must constantly skip back and forth between pragmatic assessment of how perception of groups affects individuals’ life prospects, and advocacy of policies that could support a social order in which that was not the case. Censure not Censor The ADL must walk a tightrope between condemnation of hate speech and advocacy of free speech, between censure and censor. Conceptually, that entails resisting two philosophical poles: either the complete equation of speech with other kinds of acts, or the rigid distinction between the two that defines speech as categorically different from all other kinds of behavior. The League must also balance ethical stresses on motivation (since it seeks to eliminate a kind of attitude, group hate) and on action (what actions suggest group hate may be at play; what actions are punishable?). This is not merely a First Amendment (freedom of speech) issue. Many of the organization’s educational efforts presume the need to overtly discuss cultural images and their sources, including honest assessment of individuals’ indebtedness to various images. Censorial excess would Appendix: Case Studies
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throttle the cultural therapy ADL recommends as well as the hate it seeks to redress. A number of conceptually linked debates demonstrate the challenge of attaining the virtuous mean. College hate-speech codes of the kind supported by the ADL have been criticized—and, in some cases involving public universities, legally defeated—on First Amendment grounds. But they have also been criticized by some for undermining positive efforts to discuss sources of hate or complex social issues. They have been accused of contributing to what might be termed “insipid political correctness.” To be sure, ADL’s position on hate speech is more complex than is acknowledged by many of its critics. Because the critics entirely presume a First Amendment framing of the issue, they miss the extent to which ADL acknowledges the interest of protecting free speech and the extent to which ADL reframes the issue as one of virtue. While critics legitimately worry about whether ADL crosses lines that endanger free speech, the ADL warns against opposite vices: the excesses of providing platforms for hate speech, avoiding confrontation with hate speech, or failing to respond to victims of hate speech, all in the name of honoring the ideal of free speech.19 Yet finding the virtuous mean is no easy task. Indeed, the moral weight of accusations of hate exerts great influence on related conversations that may be either legitimate or stifling. The sheer force of that moral weight merits consideration and warns against over-easy ascription of hate. Given the ADL’s obvious concern with minority experience, the League’s principled challenge to some forms of affirmative action has helped to quell the dismissal of anti-affirmative-action arguments as necessarily “racist” by some proponents. Yet the charge is still frequently made. Similarly, some thoughtful critics of Israeli policy bristle at being dismissed as anti-Semitic by Israel’s supporters. In an interview, ADL staffers from the League’s Israel office acknowledged that too-quick ascriptions of anti-Semitism sometimes occur and that they are unhelpful both to policy discussions and to the League’s work.20 Yet the ensuing conversation demonstrated the challenge of distinguishing between real hate and unduly rhetorical ascriptions of hate. The staffers insisted that some criticisms of Israel are inherently anti-Semitic, including the claim that Israel should not exist. Wondering aloud if there were more subtle examples that they would highlight, I noted a statement 336
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on the ADL’s U.S. Web site claiming that a recent European poll rating Israel as the number-one threat to world peace was a de facto indicator of rising virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. Did they agree with that or find the claim excessive? They agreed wholeheartedly. From their point of view, the poll’s conclusion was ludicrous, not only given Israel’s standing as the sole functioning constitutional democracy in the Middle East but also given the obviously dire threat posed by the North Koreas, Sudanese militias, and international terror organizations of the world. Therefore, they assumed that anti-Semitism clearly drove the results. Yet even if anti-Semitism influenced some or even a great number of the poll respondents, others may be registering a specific critique of Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a related fear about potential consequences of that conflict in a tinderbox region. Or anti-Semitic influences and legitimate policy critiques may be complexly mixed in the minds of some respondents. To dismiss the poll offhand as anti-Semitic may be to take reflective critiques, and not only group hate, off the table. Whether one concludes this case marks excess or not, the structural danger is clear: not only hate, but ascriptions of hate, can exclude whole groups from serious moral discourse. H at e Cr i m e s Examining the ADL’s commitment to eradicating hate crimes in the United States provides another example of how the transformation of civic virtue fails to dissolve, but may orient, ethical complexity. Much of the ADL’s work on hate crimes is clearly a civic model, according to my account of civic virtue. The ADL used habits of perception that arose from its members’ experience of anti-Semitism to recognize the smoldering of other kinds of group hate. Significantly, it pointed out a connection between different incidents and different kinds of targets that were often otherwise viewed as idiosyncratic. Its meticulous tracking of crimes that seem to have been motivated by group hate has enabled citizens to realize the prevalence and patterns of such crimes in our society and has helped to make hate a subject of fully political discourse. At the same time, questions of what counts as a hate crime and of whether there should be differential (heavier) sentencing for crimes motivated by group hate than for similar crimes committed for other motivations are difficult ones. ADL has been a pioneer in advocating differential Appendix: Case Studies
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sentencing, defending the differential as an obvious ethical corollary to the recognition of group hate as a special kind of social danger. 21 ADL’s position implies that any opponent of differential sentencing must unconsciously adopt the idolatrous view of civic virtue. It implies that opponents must be so committed to a formal notion of equality that they feel constrained from considering the particularities of the case—such as motive, and its dramatic effect on widespread others beyond the case. But the question of whether there ought to be differential sentencing also may strain impartiality-as-practice or may be a difficult question to address under any rubric of impartiality. ADL’s stand seems most compelling for cases in which the motivation of hate changes the act itself so dramatically that it looks different from any other “similar” act. For example, given the reality of American history, burning a cross on a neighbor’s lawn seems radically different from cutting through a shortcut in the neighbor’s yard or building a fire on the neighbor’s property to roast marshmallows. Certainly, the effect on the neighbor is likely to be radically different. In this case, the closeness of the speech/act connection may contribute to the intuition that it would be downright dangerous to consider cross-burning just like any other case of unauthorized trespass. (Indeed, that was the logic of the appellate court that upheld a narrowly crafted Minnesota statute making cross-burning a felony as opposed to a misdemeanor as are other trespassing violations. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the appellate verdict.)22 In the case of cross-burning, failure to draw a distinction based on motivation seems to trivialize what we intuitively consider a serious crime. Yet in other cases differential sentencing may contribute to trivializing serious crimes. Many crimes are declared so because they cross a threshold of behavior, regardless of motivation, beyond which society cannot function. If someone is given more severe punishment for killing out of racial hatred than someone else who acted out of sheer greed (say, to cash in on a life insurance policy), the idea of law as a least common denominator for social interaction is diminished, and killing out of greed may somehow seems less heinous. Moreover, less articulate criminals might implicitly be considered less threatening criminals. If someone attacked another solely because of a group hate but didn’t mention or symbolically indicate the motive, the hate crime differential would not be invoked. Indeed, motive is rarely utterly transparent. 338
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What counts as a hate crime may also raise troubling questions. For example, only very recently and in a few places has gender-motivated crime been proposed as a category of hate crime, a development strongly supported by ADL. That is troubling, since statistically one of the most prevalent patterns of serious crime in our society is committed by chronic women-assaulters, such as serial rapists or girlfriend-beaters. While it is obvious that a hatred of women is at stake in such behavior, it has not assumed the paradigm of a hate crime, which has generally been taken to be a racially, ethnically, or religiously motivated crime. Increasingly, crimes committed against homosexuals because they are homosexuals are rightly recognized as hate crimes, but not the much more common crimes against heterosexual women because they are women. The danger here is that when trying to distinguish crimes motivated by group hate from other crimes, we may actually presume and accept— rather than challenge—the most pervasive forms of group hate in a society. Ironically, even the ADL’s defense of gender-defined hate crimes suggests this: one defense is that, in fact, not many cases have been prosecuted as such in places where the law would allow it.23 The assumption that genderbased cases should be relatively few presumes that we wouldn’t want gender-motivated hate crimes to derail attention from the really serious hate crimes: those that are racially or religiously motivated. Defining certain behaviors to be unacceptable, regardless of motive, may ironically provide more defense against hate than some hate crimes legislation. Increased protection of women has not been significantly affected by efforts to define gender-motivated assault as a special hate crime, but rather by efforts to classify it as an ordinary crime—just as if it were committed against men and even if it occurs in a domestic setting. The possibility that we could simply presume our society’s most pervasive discriminations in efforts to define hate for legal purposes also raises challenges for implementation of hate crime laws. Advocates of differential sentencing may highlight one historical reality (the prevalence of group hate and its social danger) at the expense of another (the de facto differential sentencing that has always occurred in the United States). Criminologists have relentlessly documented widespread tendencies for heavier sentences to be given based on the race of the perpetrator and the victim, with non-white criminals and criminals whose victim was white given heavier sentences on average. By giving a theoretical defense of one kind Appendix: Case Studies
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of differential sentencing, advocates of hate crime differentials may unwittingly support the most invidious kinds of differential sentencing if hate crimes laws are disproportionately invoked against minorities. One of the first cases in which differential sentencing was upheld on appeal involved black-on-white crime, fanning the flames of such fears.24 The argument that less rather than more differential sentencing will increase overall justice may be a reasonable conclusion of a practiced impartiality, given historical realities of criminal justice in America. At the least, it seems clear that differential sentencing is rightly more controversial than ADL’s work in tracking hate crimes and in addressing their root causes through therapeutic educational techniques. In some cases, perhaps only differential sentencing acknowledges the true nature of the crime. In others, differential sentencing may arguably violate impartialityas-practice. In still others, difficult analogical processes might be needed to discern the extent to which the motive of the crime changes the nature of the crime, or even to discern the motive. A transformed conception of civic virtue will not render the question of whether to support differential sentencing for hate crimes an easy one, but it may identify potential excesses that appropriate policy must negotiate. It may also rightly insist that a good motive alone is an inadequate basis for legally defining particularly bad motives, absent the process of ongoing bias-checking that ADL has advanced in many other forums. N e g o t i at i ng T e nsions In its efforts to negotiate tensions intrinsic to its mission, the ADL has broadened the field of analogical play in ways that should be appreciated by its critics as well as its supporters. For example, its stand on affirmative action, one that defies conventional party or ideological lines, invites all participants to a more fully historical consideration of affirmative action practices, and intended and unintended beneficiaries. The ADL’s critical commentary on dramatic productions such as Mel Gibson’s recent film highlights important questions that then become impossible for the public to avoid. (What moral criteria should moviegoers adopt in deciding whether to view a film?) Even critics of the ADL’s pro-Israeli Middle East policy implicitly endorse the accomplishments of the organization in their critiques, arguing that categorical ADL support for Israel sometimes 340
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hinders it from extending the momentum of its own analogical analyses of group hates. C A SE S T U DY 3: ORG A N D ONAT ION A N D T R A NSPL A N TAT ION P OL IC Y In our society, organ donation is considered a great gift. “Give the gift of life” has become a ubiquitous phrase in public efforts to increase organ donation, especially efforts to encourage people to sign donor cards or to indicate to their family their desire to be a donor. As transplantation success rates have risen dramatically over the last generation, a result of improvements in anti-rejection drug treatment, the corresponding increase in demand for organs has consistently outpaced supply. Encouraging the “gift of life” has thus become a priority of health policy. Considering organ donation under the rubric of civic virtue both makes sense and does not. Of course, many acts of organ donation intuitively do seem to embody civic virtue. Live organ donors bind their fates physically to the needs of particular others. Organ donation can literally embody the mutuality among family members, for example, when one member of a family gives a kidney to another. Alternatively, it can connect otherwise distant others into a web of community when cadaveric organ donation links parties previously disconnected by circumstances, region, class, or racial community. Families who decide to donate the organs of suddenly deceased loved ones connect pathos in their personal lives to needs in the broader community. Signers of donor cards think of the good of others as they imagine catastrophes for themselves. Often (though importantly not always) the donor’s gift actually results in dramatically tangible good for others if the transplant recipient survives and thrives. Although it aims to pursue both the sense and the nonsense of considering organ donation as civic virtue, this case study was motivated by nonsense: my overhearing a private conversation in which an organ procurement professional described a man who had chosen not to donate his suddenly deceased teenaged son’s organs as “lacking any civic-mindedness.” This conversation disturbed me greatly. The organ procurement professional knew nothing about this man except that, in the worst moment of his life, he had decided against organ donation. She did not entertain the possibility that he might be a pillar of the community in ways not known Appendix: Case Studies
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to her in their brief encounter; nor did she entertain the possibility that he could have had considered, rather than impulsive, reasons for declining donation. My discontent with her moral dismissal of the bereaved father became emblematic of more general concerns about excesses embedded in policies to promote organ donation and transplantation. The difference between what I have called “idolatrous” conceptions of civic virtue and a transformed conception of civic virtue can elucidate both the positive sense and the potential excesses of speaking about donation in terms of civic virtue. If one scratches the surface of American rhetoric on organ donation, one finds just beneath it the view of love that I criticized for distorting conceptions of civic virtue: a view that celebrates sacrifice for the stranger and asks for no return. The overcelebration of sacrifice in organ donation policy ignores relevant cultural and religious diversity, renders sacrificers invisible, avoids difficult questions of justice in transplant ethics, and leaves the real costs and benefits of organ donation untallied. The transformation of civic virtue challenges organ donation policy in several ways, without denying the real good that can come from donation and transplantation.25 Orga n D onat ion a s Sacr i f ice The practice of organ donation seems no ordinary gift. Indeed, organ donation structurally accords to common notions of religious sacrifice: it is a hard-wrought gift offered for a noble end, often in hopes of expiating evil. The expiatory hope is revealed whenever the family of a suddenly killed donor says: “We wanted to make something good come out of something that seemed senseless.” Many Christian supporters of donation perceive it as tracking Christian narratives of sacrifice in particularly vivid ways (though not all Christian denominations or individuals support donation). Organ donation is analogized to Christian communion in denominational statements supporting donation, explicitly connecting the spilt blood of the organ donor to the blood of the crucified Jesus (May 1985). Donors are also described as “Good Samaritans” in responding to the needs of recipients. Thus, organ donation and transplantation may grip public imagination not only because it is potentially life-saving and technologically impressive but also because it is mythologically gripping. In the political rhetoric 342
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of American transplant policy, both the basic sacrificial features of organ donation and their association with some foundational Christian stories have been pressed toward the extreme interpretation of neighbor love that defines paradigmatic love as sacrificial love, a love that is antagonistic to self-love or bonds to special intimates, and “disinterested” in any return. At the same time, transplant professionals and health-policy professionals promoting transplant, like their counterparts in political theory, maintain a staunchly secular sense of identity unreflective of the religious influence. Thus, language of resurrection, miracle, love, and Good Samaritans pervade discussions of organ donation even in medical and health policy settings, without garnering explicit notice. T h e P o t e n t i a l Da nge r : A C i t i z e nW ho -L ov e s-To o -M uch C om pl e x? This book has argued that excessive celebration of disinterested, sacrificial love distorts models of civic virtue and should be challenged by alternative conceptions of citizenly love stressing mutuality. If the desire for mutuality is lost in favor of the celebration of sacrifice, then transplantation practice becomes disturbingly immune from virtually any sort of critique. Policies to promote donation become portrayed as nothing less than policies to promote love—and it is difficult to argue against love. Similarly, transplantation becomes immune from cost-benefit analysis, since sacrifice is celebrated precisely for asking no return. Moreover, part of responsible citizenship may be to recognize when myth diverges from reality. Real transplant practice does not guarantee resurrection but results in inconsistent outcomes, with differing success rates dependent on the organ transplanted and on the pre-transplant condition of the patient. The assault of end-stage organ disease is often less random than the banditry in the Good Samaritan story. Lifestyle factors such as drinking, smoking, and diet greatly affect major organ function, and many people on the organ wait list are suffering from preventable conditions. To acknowledge that is not to argue against their treatment, including transplantation. It is, however, to recast transplantation by highlighting tragic aspects of it, rather than portraying it as a heroic enterprise. Transplantation is often a combined result of personal, medical, and social failure. Appendix: Case Studies
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The motivation for organ donation also frequently differs from mythological rhetoric. Many organ donors are actually motivated to donate by intensely particular loves or by a complex interplay between such particular loves and more generalized benevolence. Policy to promote organ donation that is based on myth may have unintended consequences in the real world or may promote unrealistic public images of transplantation. T h e Pa r a d ox : D ow n pl ay i ng w h i l e Pl ay i ng on Sacr ifici a l Mot i fs Current organ donation policy paradoxically downplays the recognition of organ donation as a true sacrifice while simultaneously playing on a celebration of sacrificial love. So organ donation is presented both as a great gift and also as no big deal. That is the same paradox that infects the idolatrous conception of civic virtue more generally. Radical self-sacrifice is celebrated as the root of civic virtue, but civic virtue so defined is then urged as minimal virtue for ordinary citizens. The result is a dangerous “routinization” of sacrifice. Insatiable demand for organs presses the paradox to its extreme. Currently, the United States is in the midst of a massive drive to increase voluntary organ donation. As transplantation techniques improve and more transplant surgeons are trained, more and more Americans with end-stage organ diseases are placed on waiting lists in hopes of a gift of life. Currently, nearly 100,000 people are waiting for kidneys, livers, pancreases, hearts, or lungs. Nearly 30,000 transplants are performed per year, while more than 7,000 wait-listed patients die annually without having received an organ.26 This disparity has fueled public lament and calls to obtain more organs. Strikingly, though, the clamor to make organ donation commonplace is a call to routinize sacrifice. Thus reflective supporters of donation face a continual challenge to resist taking the sacrifice for granted. To rise to that challenge, the public must critically consider conceptions of love that implicitly underlie transplant policy and renew attention to justice as a crucial but neglected category for reflection on organ donation. Following my argument for a transformed account of civic virtue, I appeal to what I call the mutuality criterion to organize my analysis of how we dramatically fail to meet the challenge. The mutuality criterion demands that sacrifice be justified by the aim and probability of increasing 344
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mutuality. Most basically, I speak of “mutuality” in transplant as the basic aim to effect the survival of the transplanted so that they may continue to receive and give in community. Desires for mutuality at other levels may also be relevant: reciprocities of giving between socioeconomic groups, or between geographic regions, or between generations may be included in fairness of organ donation and allocation. The actual relationship between the organ donor, the community, and the transplanted person may also be relevant. The unacknowledged routinization of sacrifice now endemic to organ donation and transplantation policy impedes fulfillment of the mutuality criterion. D ow n pl ay i ng w h i l e Pl ay i ng on Sacr i f ice: L i v e D onat ion On the face of it, the literal sacrifice entailed by organ donation might seem particularly obvious in cases of live donation. In live donation, healthy donors maim themselves to give a kidney or a lobe of a liver to another. In fact, however, the celebratory rhetoric of love in which that sacrifice is socially located dangerously minimizes the hard-wrought nature of the gift. In the early years of transplant, live donation was thought to be in need of the strictest justification. Stringent justification was deemed necessary because putting the healthy donor at risk through major surgery and the loss of an organ violated the principle of medical non-maleficence: “First do no harm.” Only in cases where donor and recipient were linked in such intimate ways that the good of one could be said to be the good of the other—for example, when a parent donates a kidney to her lifethreatened adolescent child—might it be justified. Only the maintenance of the most intimate forms of mutuality could justify harm to the healthy donor (Ramsey 1970). Increasingly, however, the donor’s consent is viewed as sufficient to nullify the medical injunction not to cause harm. Underlying this change lurks the unstated assumption that medicine should not stop people from making great sacrifices for others—should not stop people from great loving! The isolation of informed consent as the sole governing principle is particularly problematic since the possibility of truly informed and freely Appendix: Case Studies
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given consent may be impeded by the very circumstances that surround live donation, which often entail great emotional pressure. Simply put, it may be hard not to consent. When the principle of non-maleficence is ignored, the burden of justification shifts from doctors to potential live donors, and the decision shifts from harming the healthy to failing to sacrifice for the sick. Nondonation, rather than donation, becomes viewed as demanding justification. Not surprisingly, these shifts have accompanied burgeoning rates of live donation.27 For example, it is no longer unusual for adult children to give kidneys to their septuagenarian or older parents. Yet one might wonder whether the aim of such transplants has become the extension of normal lifespan rather than more straightforward healing, and whether the extension of normal lifespan for an elderly parent is a good sufficient to justify medically harming the donor. (Normal lifespan might rather be viewed as an expected limit on mutual love.) If live transplants for elderly recipients raise questions, even more so do live transplants among people who are loosely connected or even strangers. Immunosuppression techniques that stop organ rejection have improved success rates not only of cadaveric transplants but also of live transplants from a wider range of possible tissue matches, including matches outside the family. Thus live donations, particularly of kidneys, are being encouraged among people who may be casual acquaintances rather than intimates. Press coverage has celebrated cases in which a teacher gave a kidney to a student or an office worker gave one to a coworker, and so forth.28 Even more public attention has been garnered in cases of donation to strangers, particularly when it is clear that clandestine financial incentives are not operative. Live stranger donation got perhaps its biggest, albeit most bizarre, public relations boost in the fall of 2003 when more than five hundred fans offered to donate a kidney to ailing basketball star Alonzo Mourning—though in the end his successful transplantation was performed with a kidney donated by a cousin who proved a close tissue match.29 Zell Kravinsky, a millionaire developer in Philadelphia, made the front page of many national papers when he donated a kidney to a stranger as an expression of altruism. In cases where the connection between live donor and recipient is either loose or nonexistent, the tenor of media coverage is usually laudatory, presenting the donor’s action as a heartwarming example of love for humanity.30 346
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On the one hand, the very reason for coverage is the presumption that giving up an organ is a significant sacrifice. On the other hand, the risks involved in live donation are minimized while the benefits are assumed without evidence. The stories generally focus on the caring motivations of the giver rather than on the details of the surgery, the risks involved, or the ultimate results, and they are written either before the surgery or immediately post-surgery, before it is clear whether there will be success for the recipient or long-term complications for the donor. (They also focus narrowly on the transaction between donor and recipient. There is no indication of the communal financial resources used for the transplant, for example.) Rarely does the reader learn how the loved ones or dependents of the donor feel about the decision to give. The Kravinsky case was the “exception that proves the rule” in this regard. Kravinsky’s wife and father were both vociferous in their opposition to the transplant and skilled in getting their view into the press. Their objection centered on his duties to his minor children and the risk that complications from donation or subsequent harm to the one remaining kidney could impede his ability to fulfill those duties.31 The medical community has also been guilty of minimizing risks of live donation, so that it really seems no big deal. For example, in a prominent essay urging the use of unrelated live donors that was published before and seemingly predicted its burgeoning practice, the authors claim that “the risks of nephrectomy to the donor are minimal,” while the benefit to recipient is great. They then elaborate the minimal risks: 0.03 percent mortality, but 3–4 percent serious morbidity, and about 20 percent of donors experiencing a significant increase in blood pressure that can be treated with long-term medication. By their own account then, one-quarter of donors suffer serious complications or long-term medical harm! Yet that account is sandwiched between assertions of minimal risk (Levy, Hou, and Bush 1998). In 2002, the transplant world was shaken by a highly publicized case in which a healthy liver lobe donor died following surgery. Michael Hurewitz, a previously healthy 57-year-old who donated a liver lobe to his 54-year-old brother, died in New York Mount Sinai Hospital’s transplant ward, while the brother survived the transplant. The hospital, a leading American performer of live liver lobe transplants, was sued by Hurewitz’s widow Appendix: Case Studies
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and temporarily suspended from doing live liver lobe transplants by the New York State Health Department.32 The extensive follow-up on the case focused on the medical procedural errors that occurred, such as the surgeon’s failure to provide follow-up care and inadequate resident staffing and attending oversight on the transplant ward. The case was used to develop procedural protocols to protect future donors, including staffing requirements for the provision of post-donation care.33 While procedural protections certainly merit close scrutiny, what was not focused upon is troubling. Remarkably absent was a public discussion of the conflicting duties of potential donors in the face of the procedure’s inherent riskiness. In this case, a wife lost her husband in his efforts to save a brother. The continued presupposition that sacrificial motivation of live donors is inherently noble can be maintained only by belittling the force of the donor’s ordinary obligations to intimates and dependents as well as to self. The implication is that the routine care of self required to commit to marriage or to child rearing is something less than Love-with-a-capital-L, which by contrast is distinguished by its sacrificial nature. The celebration of live donation between people who are not intimates and the presumption that any live donor is a paragon of virtue, regardless of the particular nature of the individual’s obligations to particular others, both participate in the very view of love that distorts conceptions of civic virtue. This variation of the martyr complex of civic virtue minimizes concern about breaching the principle of medical non-maleficence to live donors. It suppresses an otherwise obvious question. In a social environment in which an estimated 100,000 Americans die each year from iatrogenic (medically caused) illness or injury, might not a commitment to maintaining the principle of non-maleficence be civically virtuous on the part of the medical profession?34 If so, the continuous erosion of the presumption demanding justification for harm to live donors is troubling. D ow n pl ay i ng w h i l e Pl ay i ng on Sacr i f ice: C a dav e r ic D onat ion The paradoxical simultaneous celebration of and denial of sacrifice becomes even more pronounced in the practice of cadaveric donation. It may contribute to the frequent rhetorical association of cadaveric organ 348
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donation with civic virtue. I argue that while cadaveric organ donation often may be an act of civic virtue, nondonation should not be considered a civic vice, and public pressures that imply that are unfair. Moreover, no single decision should be considered a test of civic virtue, which by definition is a matter of cultivated and long-standing habit. The hard-wrought nature of the gift of organ donation may be most underappreciated in cases of donation from the dead. Some people think cadaveric donation is a perfect sacrifice in an ironic sense of that term: perfect because it doesn’t really hurt! The sacrificer is, after all, dead. (In technical terms, non-maleficence becomes an irrelevant concern for the dead donor.) But this view fails to consider the body as a symbol or to consider the relationship of the dead to the living—especially to the deceased’s family, who legally must make the decision for donation. To potential donor-card signers imagining their own death or to the loved ones of a suddenly deceased person, the body is not merely a corpse. It is a symbol that fully participates in that which it symbolizes, the life of the deceased.35 How a symbol-body is treated not only attests to understandings of death and afterlife but also to respect for the person the body once was. To understand the force of decisions to donate, consider how we generally view the cutting of bodies for purposes other than organ donation, autopsy, or medical education. In any other context, the cutting up of bodies is generally interpreted as a deliberate humiliation of the person the body once was. So the visceral repugnance that must be overcome to donate itself springs from a moral impulse.36 The actual circumstances of donation add to the psychological burden of the sacrificers. Because organs deteriorate quickly upon death, donation is possible only in a small percentage of deaths, usually sudden accidental deaths in which the patient is declared dead by “brain death” criteria while on a respirator.37 In order to preserve the viability of organs until the family makes its decision regarding donation, artificial respiration of the body is continued after the declaration of death. The mechanically maintained artificial respiration causes potential donors to appear comatose or asleep, a heart-wrenching illusion for a grief-stricken family. It is also an illusion that conjures cultic images of sacrifice: cadaveric donation physically looks like live sacrifice, even though it is not. Organ recruitment professionals worry that this illusion decreases motivation to donate, since empirical studies indicate that it is explicitly cited as a Appendix: Case Studies
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factor by some nondonors.38 On the contrary, I wonder if this illusion subconsciously plays a significant role encouraging donation, not only in individual cases but in the national psyche so fascinated with donation. If we cannot have Johnny “back,” why not make Johnny into Jesus: literal eucharist? (The French-Canadian film Jesus of Montreal plays on just this analogy, with the Jesus-like main character becoming an organ donor at the end of the film.)39 It would be unwise to turn a blind eye to the role that such sacrificial imagery plays in organ donation. It could even be unfair, if efforts to promote donation capitalize on this imagery while simultaneously downplaying it, thus avoiding public confrontation with the limits of the implied analogy. For example, organ procurement professionals’ training urges them to focus conversation with families on the loving character traits of the deceased and on the salvific goals of donation rather than on what happens to the body during organ retrieval, seemingly presenting the possibility of a bloodless sacrament. Challenging the paradoxical routinization of sacrifice in cadaveric donation practice also raises questions about both organ procurement and organ allocation. T h e Rou t i n i z at ion of Sacr i f ice i n Org a n “Pro c u r e m e n t ” P ol ic y In policy circles, the routinization of sacrifice in cadaveric organ procurement has been accomplished largely through a numbing jargon. This vocabulary describes informing grieving families of the donation option as “an approach.” The encouragement of donation is “recruitment.” The entire process of obtaining organs is called “procurement,” while the actual cutting open of bodies and removing organs is more specifically designated as “organ retrieval” or “organ harvesting.” This rhetoric semantically distances donation from sacrificial imagery by rendering the actual body invisible. But it is inescapable to potential organ donors, if not to procurement professionals, that the real bodies of real loved ones are at stake. If organs are “harvested,” then the measure of success is obviously crop yields. Thus, the nonprofit organ procurement organizations that administer organ exchange—known by their acronym “OPOs”—measure their success by the so-called consent rate. The consent rate is the percentage 350
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of potential donors approached who choose to donate. The consent rate presumes that an encounter with a potential donor family is successful if the family actually donates. But that is not the only possible definition of success, because the interests of the public in organ donation and the interests of the family considering a donation are not the same. The public wants organs for needy recipients; thus, the consent rate is a criterion of success. But the family’s most immediate concern is the honoring of their dead. Their concern is to make the decision that best accords with the particular values of the loved one: to do what Johnny would have wanted. This raises a host of specific issues related to Johnny’s life and views of death. Professionals who are committed to grieving families independently of the donation possibility, such as hospital chaplains and social workers, staunchly reject donation as the definition of success for encounters with families considering donation. They suggest process rather than outcome criteria: the decision is a good one if it helps the family’s grieving process, accords with their conception of the loved one’s values, and is affirmed rather than regretted by the family a year later.40 Thus for different families, different decisions on donation may all be “successful.”41 Both alternative definitions of success have integrity; one stressing the public interest in obtaining organs, the other supporting the more private interests of grieving families. One could imagine public policies that balance these two perspectives in ethically sensitive ways. But such balance is threatened by the malignancy of what I call the “procurement attitude,” defining success as donation rather than as considered deliberation. The procurement attitude seems to be hijacking public policy generally rather than defining a more narrow professional role commitment. For example, federal legislation now mandates involvement of organ procurement professionals in the actual hospital encounters in which families are informed of the donation option.42 In addition, OPO staff are now the primary public educators on organ donation, visiting schools, Rotary clubs, and so forth with their appeal for organs. Their special vocation to promote donation may render nondonation difficult for procurement professionals to accept or understand, despite training that demands their respectful treatment of nondonors so as to avoid negative public relations.43 Ultimately, the outcome definition of success presses toward a crude classification of families as either good donor Appendix: Case Studies
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families or bad nondonor families, and a corresponding erasure of their real particularity. At an OPO conference aimed at increasing donation, the clear presumption was that only ignorance or selfishness could explain nondonation.44 As one staffer put it, “We have to work on ignorance because there’s not much we can do about selfishness.” This attitude not only obscures the uniqueness of individual families but also the diversity of social groups. For example, the OPO staffers, predominantly white women, clearly considered lower donation rates among African American families a challenge of ignorance. Their job, then, was to dispel the greater ignorance of African American communities. In contrast, hospital chaplains I interviewed all raised the differential in donation rates by race, but they assumed this pointed to differential experiences rather than to differential ignorance (Mongoven 2000). Since their minority patients continue to face various sorts of discriminations in the health care system, the chaplains thought it made sense for them to be more suspicious of calls for their sacrifice to others. So the chaplains saw the challenge of increasing African American donation as a challenge for the health care system to live up to its claims of fairness. I am not questioning the special dedication of organ procurement professionals to their task of obtaining organs. On the contrary, we as a public want them to be crusaders for donation. Yet we may not want our overall public policy to be crusading. Crusades always have the dangerous potential to violate other goods for the sake of the designated good that is too singularly pursued. When the procurement attitude hijacks public policy, erasure of the particularity and diversity of sacrificers becomes far-reaching. In all of its public statements and brochures on organ donation, including training materials used by the OPOs, the federal government consistently claims that “all major faith traditions support donation.” One can only wonder what psychology allows public officials to brazenly repeat what appears a bald lie. Is it that they presume what counts as a “major” tradition? Thus they think we need not overly concern ourselves with traditions such as Christian Science or Jehovah’s Witnesses, traditions that, given their general suspicions of medicine (Christian Science) or of blood sharing (Jehovah’s Witnesses), are not enthusiastic about organ donation? Or are they presuming religion equals beliefs rather than practices, thus ignoring that certain death rituals can impede donation even in traditions that 352
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are not theoretically opposed to donation? Examples of such rituals are the Orthodox Jewish requirement of burial before sundown on the day of death, or the tenet common to many strands of Buddhism that the body should be left completely undisturbed for a significant time at death to facilitate peaceful transmigration of the soul. Is it that they don’t consider native Americans as Americans, thus it is irrelevant that certain tribes think organs are necessary for one’s next animal reincarnation? Have they discounted those Christians who reject donation because they think they might need their organs in a resurrected body, somehow considering them not really Christians—even though it is hard to deny the Christian gospels contain dramatically physical images of resurrection? The homogenization of sacrificers that occurs when sacrifice becomes routine can eventually render incoherent the primary metaphor of gift by which we understand organ donation. If the only motivations for nondonation are ignorance and selfishness, and if all major faith traditions support donation, then what is so special about the gift of life? Why think of it as a gift at all? Why not rather move toward thinking of organ donation as a civic expectation? An increasing number of policy proposals push in this direction.45 I think these proposals should be resisted to avoid a dangerous instrumentalization of the body politic. T h e Rou t i n i z at ion of Sacr i f ice i n Org a n A l l o c at ion P ol ic y The routinization of sacrifice in the rhetoric by which our government addresses the perceived organ shortage distorts allocation policy as well. In its efforts to encourage donation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has repeatedly labeled the deaths of those waiting for organs as “unacceptable.” This language is striking if we consider the health and public welfare challenges under its charter that have never been so labeled by the department. Apparently, it is unacceptable for any person to die of end-stage organ disease untransplanted. But the department has never called it unacceptable that more than 15 percent of Americans have no basic health insurance and that additional populations are underinsured or sporadically insured (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). It has never called it unacceptable that large homeless populations have become a standard feature of urban life in the United States. The perceived unacceptability of Appendix: Case Studies
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organ shortfalls depends on the routinization of sacrifice. The presumption seems to be that insurance access and homelessness are, after all, complex problems, but end-stage organ deaths might be fixed with just a little more simple sacrifice. The implied construction, that more sacrifice could save everyone on the organ wait list, allows basic questions about the real benefits and costs of transplantation to remain unexamined. That is alarming in light of the mutuality criterion, which demands that sacrifice actually accomplish something and that the true costs of sacrifice be adequately considered. The lack of attention to net benefit results in questionable policies of macro-allocation and micro-allocation. (By macro-allocation, I mean the consideration of relative weight given to transplant compared to other social goods; by micro-allocation, I mean the allocation of scarce organs among the greater number on the waiting list.) What we find when we do investigate transplant benefits and costs is troubling. Actual benefits are often less than so-called miracles. Costs, widely shared by the community in private and public insurance pools, are enormous. Of course, the success rates and costs of different kinds of organ transplants vary widely. Kidneys transplants are particularly successful: they have success rates over 90 percent, defined as three-year survival, and generally they dramatically improve the patient’s quality of life compared to extended dialysis. At an average of over $100,000 firstyear cost, they are the bargain of the transplant world. But the record for other organs is less rosy. Nearly a quarter of heart recipients and liver recipients die within three years. Lung transplants are least successful. Nearly half of those transplanted die. Average per-organ costs of liver, heart, and lung transplants range from $250,000 to $300,00 per transplant.46 Even the description of transplant survival as “a miracle” overstates the case. Transplantation is really a way to turn an otherwise fatal illness into a chronic illness. Most survivors face serious adverse side effects from the immunosuppressants they must take to avoid organ rejection, drugs that can cost from between one and two thousand dollars monthly. The associated debilitation varies by patient, but half of liver transplant survivors polled claim they made a vocational change to accommodate it, while nearly 40 percent of kidney survivors did not consider themselves physically capable of working full time (Girod 1999). 354
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In other areas of medicine, relatively high-cost and low-efficacy treatments are increasingly questioned. Often, though, one is portrayed as callous for raising questions of cost-effectiveness about transplant. The perennial retort is that “The gift of life is priceless.” But the rhetoric of pricelessness is just the ultimate extension of the routinization of sacrifice. In fact, the gift comes at a very high price, not only in terms of socioeconomic costs but also of the real burden of the sacrifice of donation.47 While one risks being portrayed as uncaring if one dwells on ambiguous transplant outcomes and exorbitant costs, it may be uncaring not to consider the real outcomes of transplant rather than the mythology. The harsh fact is that in a significant number of transplants, what we actually give patients is not a gift of life but a more extended dying.48 Of course, this does not give us any simple directive about when to transplant, since one obviously cannot know the results of any particular transplant beforehand. But it must be a consideration in designing sane guidelines for transplant and in debating the relative good of transplant compared to other worthy social investments. Such deliberations should consider the psychology of donation as well as hard data on outcomes. As medical anthropologists Renee Fox and Judith Swasy (1992) argue, there is a certain “tyranny of the gift” involved in organ donation. It can be difficult to refuse great sacrifices made on one’s behalf. Social workers report that patients awaiting highrisk transplants often express more doubts about having the transplant when they are alone with the social worker than when family or medical staff are present. These patients don’t want to appear ungrateful for the massive effort that is under way to save them, but they also fear a bad outcome—not just because statistics tell them they should but because they themselves have seen such tragic outcomes, as well as positive ones, on the transplant ward. Two additional issues of macro-allocation demand increased attention to benefit. One is an issue of intergenerational justice. The poster boys and girls of transplantation are generally young and vibrant, perhaps chosen for their ambassador role because their youth testifies to the ultimate redemptive potential of transplant. But the largest and fastest-growing age bracket of transplant recipients is the over-55 group, making transplant one of a large array of health and welfare commitments in our society that direct resources more toward the old than to the young. Appendix: Case Studies
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The other issue concerns the place of transplant in overall strategies to stop end-stage organ disease. Perhaps in order to make transplant parallel the simplicity of the Good Samaritan story more closely than it really does, the poster cases highlight people who were randomly assaulted by organ disease, either by bad genetic luck or by a sudden acute failure. But such cases are more the exception than the rule. Many end-stage organ diseases are heavily influenced by lifestyle factors such as drinking, smoking, or diet. In other cases, better diagnosis or treatment earlier in the disease process might have enabled organ rejuvenation. Of course, transplantation and increased efforts to prevent end-stage organ disease are not mutually exclusive choices. But it is troubling that the celebration of organ donation is rarely explicitly connected to broader discussions of reducing end-stage organ disease. While many successfully transplanted people have become public advocates for organ donation, I am not aware of any who have used their stance as an organ recipient to address prevention of end-stage organ disease. Yet certainly it would be forceful if, for example, Mickey Mantle had used the time he gained from his now notorious liver transplant to speak to youth about the ravages of alcoholism—rather than using it only to extol the gift of organ donation. The celebration of ever-increasing transplant rates becomes ironic if one favors a mutuality-defined, rather than a sacrifice-defined, definition of love. The mutuality criterion posits the goal of a world where radical self-sacrifice is not needed. Rather than simply applauding the exponential growth of transplantation, we should instead ask how to make transplantation less necessary. As currently practiced, organ donation and transplantation participate in wider patterns of medical resource allocation through which our society favors rescue over preventive care, high-technology acute care over consistent chronic care, life extension over quality of life, and care of the old over care of the young. It could be a discernment of civic virtue to call these often unreflected priorities into public question and to recognize the connections between organ transplantation and these wider patterns. To argue for such recognition does not necessarily entail a rejection of donation and transplantation, but it does broaden what it means to have made a “considered” decision on organ donation. Given our society’s stubborn reluctance to face the macro-allocation questions raised by transplantation, we have instead focused on micro356
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allocation, the question of how to allocate scarce organs among the greater number who need them. This issue has generated so much public and press attention that the phrase “organ fight” has entered popular lingo. Unfortunately, the fierce attention to micro-allocation also has inadequately addressed the issue of benefit. Consider a striking example. In 1998 the Department of Health and Human Services endorsed a blueprint for a new national system that prioritized getting livers to the sickest patients first, the so-called “sickest-first policy,” in order to redress geographic variation in wait list times.49 This policy generated several years of intense debate among transplant centers and in Congress. The conflicts centered not only on ethical issues but also on questions of authority: particularly, whether policy-shaping should ultimately reside with DHHS or with the private nonprofit organization that administers organ donation and allocation under contract to the federal government, United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS. Affirmation of DHHS’s oversight authority and clarifications in the policy itself have led to an evolving consensus. Current liver allocation emphasizes organ sharing across increasingly large geographic areas, governed by a “sickest-first” approach that prioritizes transplant for the most urgent patients within each transplant region.50 After the initial proposal of “sickest first,” the press quickly characterized opponents of the policy as selfish. How could anyone oppose giving organs to the sickest patients first? In fact, opponents offered serious moral arguments that point to endemic ethical tradeoffs in the distribution of tragically scarce goods. Note that a sickest-first priority focuses exclusively on the pre-transplant condition of the patient, without considering the likely benefit of transplant. But some of the sickest patients on the liver waiting list have relatively poor prognoses with transplant as compared to other patients. Some of these are people so sick that they are unlikely to survive even with transplant, but only transplant offers a chance. Also included in the “sickest” category are patients for whom an initial transplant has failed. While only “retransplant” offers them a chance, transplantation success rates decline dramatically in repeat transplants. Always prioritizing these riskier classes of patients could force many others to wait until after the optimal point for transplant to receive an organ, reducing overall transplant success rates. It could mean that relatively fewer donated organs become actual gifts of life.51 Appendix: Case Studies
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The history of the policy change toward “sickest first” was intimately linked to debates about geographic distribution of organs. The previous policy had included an element of local priority for the distribution of organs, while “sickest first” encourages the broadest possible geographic sharing. Just as those who criticized “sickest first” were labeled by policymakers and press as selfish, so too are those who explicitly argue for any continued form of local priority. While I personally favor increased geographic sharing of the organ pool, I worry about the public denigration of those who disagree. Proponents of local priority wonder whether felt mutuality can be maintained over infinite geographic distance. They worry that if a community cannot see the redemptive results of locally driven efforts to promote organ donation, then organ donation might decrease. They also raise justice questions. Some geographic areas are net organ exporters and others net importers, a disparity that could increase under current policies. A sensitive policy of national organ-sharing must address the weight of these legitimate concerns. In addition to regional considerations, patient-oriented issues of justice may be deflected by a “sickest first” policy. Organ transplantation in the United States occurs against a backdrop of dramatic inequities in access to medical care. Poor people awaiting organs, particularly those whose lack of insurance impeded medical attention at earlier points in their disease process, may have a claim of justice for special consideration in the allocation algorithm. With simultaneous stresses on increasing the geographic distance between many donors and recipients and on decreasing likely medical benefit as a criterion of allocation, current policy embodies Reinhold Niebuhr’s conception of radically self-sacrificing love. This love depends neither on mutuality between lover and beloved, nor on the actual result of a sacrifice whose self-emptying motivation is considered sufficient to prove moral nobility. Yet this celebration of sacrifice renders invisible the real sacrificers, and may rob them of their true redemptive potential. To the family of an organ donor, the ethereal satisfaction of being willing to give so much may not be considered adequate. They may rightly wish that their donation will actually result in saved life. They may presume the mutuality criterion as the reason for their sacrifice without realizing that transplant policy does not presume it. Long-standing practice of encouraging anonymous 358
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donation while simultaneously discouraging contact between donors and recipients preserves this unrecognized disparity in sacrificial ideals.52 Similarly, the general public who pays the enormous costs of transplantation may have its sacrifices taken for granted and robbed of redemptive potential by current policy. It can become the public who loves too much, expending massive resources to prove its willingness to love without any return. C onclusion: Ci v ic V i rt u e a n d Orga n D onat ion Organ transplantation policy in the United States has pushed to the side certain ethical questions that ought to be front and center, including questions of justice, of beneficence, of respect for autonomy and diversity. A cultural mythology celebrating sacrifice explains the otherwise puzzling diversion of attention from these neglected issues. Current rhetoric and policy on organ donation embody the idolatrous conception of civic virtue and demonstrate its real costs. Highlighting this point need not lead to a rejection of organ donation (personally, I am a supporter of it and a registered donor), but it offers a chastening perspective. It may correct distortions while still applauding the neighborly love and saving of life that is enabled by transplantation reasonably pursued. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that citizens can love too much. Public policy should be as vigilant against injustice generated by altruism as that resulting from less admired motives. Altruism itself should be questioned when it promotes unlimited sacrifice. Thus, the public should resist adopting what I have labeled the procurement attitude as the basis for organ donation policy. The public that values transplantation can have a defined place for crusaders without becoming a crusading public. Our ability to foster a critical reflectiveness on transplant policy—an arena where the stakes are so high, and winners and losers often clearly identifiable—will stand as an important precedent for other challenges of public fairness. The relationship between organ donation and civic virtue is vastly more complex than was realized by the OPO staffer who privately criticized a nondonor for a failure of civic virtue. To consider any one decision, whether on organ donation or another issue, as a litmus test for civic virtue erodes the most important sense of what a virtue is: a cultivated habit. A structural understanding of virtue presses toward consideration of the Appendix: Case Studies
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deliberative habits one should cultivate to make a considered decision on organ donation. The transformation of civic virtue suggests that it is not the yes-or-no result that makes deliberations on organ donation admirable or suspect and that decisions both to donate and not to donate could be civically virtuous decisions—which are different from civically virtuous persons! (In my terms, one could call a decision civically virtuous if it is informed by the deliberative and motivational habits of civic virtue.) The complex issues at play may be expected to be differently evaluated by different deliberators, both because diverse people may have different relevant factors to consider and because reasonable people may disagree on the negotiation of intrinsic ethical tradeoffs. The potential risks and benefits of live donation may depend on the potential recipient’s health, the probability of transplant success for that recipient, the previous medical history of the potential donor, and the other particular obligations of the potential donor. In cadaveric donation, one ought to consider not only the hope of saving others but also the responsibility to respect donor wishes, if known or surmisable; to make a decision in accord with the donor’s values if not; and to facilitate the grieving process of the bereaved family who are ends in themselves. Desires for distributive justice in a health care system lacking universal coverage for basic services legitimately complicates evaluation of the priority that should be put on expanding transplantation. A considered decision on organ donation should be made with some awareness of the resource-allocation priorities that one de facto participates in as an organ donor.53 If impartiality-as-practice aims at adequate attention to each, organ donation acutely raises questions about what is adequate medical care, and about who are the relevant “each.” No one should assume that a decision is good just because it was motivated by loving concern. Just as someone could make an ill-informed but well-intended decision in personal life or in choosing an electoral candidate, so too with organ donation. Intentionality is not a sufficient barometer of transformed civic virtue. Rather, transformed civic virtue demands the continual broadening of analogical engagement in part as a deliberate check on the fallibility of personal intentions. My analysis insists that there can be civically virtuous decisions not to become an organ donor—the possibility that was rejected in the 360
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conversation that motivated this case study. Moreover, it suggests that many decisions to sign a donor card are not the result of civically virtuous deliberative habits. Many organ donors, swayed by the simultaneous downplaying-while-playing-on sacrifice in idolatrous accounts of civic virtue, simply assume donation to be a straightforward expression of neighbor love.54 They do so without any analogical deliberation that considers organ donation in the context of a non-mythological health care system, with its attendant lost opportunities, disfavored classes, and financial incentives. While crusading promoters of organ donation may be dismayed that I argue that many decisions to donate are uninformed, they may be comforted to know that I do not assume the makers of those decisions are thus altogether lacking in civic character. While focused on policy, my argument also has implications for various groups involved in the promotion of organ donation. Professional nonprofit organ procurement organizations have become both the primary approachers of the families of potential cadaveric donors and the primary facilitators of education on organ donation in schools and civic venues (a trend discussed in more detail in conjunction with civic education in chapter 7). The transformation of civic virtue begs questions about why the intrinsic role conflict of interest remains unnoticed (people who are paid to get organs are the “neutral” counselors and educators on organ donation decisions?). Once the over-celebration of sacrifice in conventional accounts is rejected, the conflict of interest appears raw. My argument also has implications for the many volunteer organizations that promote donation, often very effectively. Many volunteers in these organizations are people who have been touched personally by organ donation, especially transplant survivors and their loved ones. Their journey from personal crisis to public service embodies a laudable trajectory of civic virtue that deserves appreciation. Yet the blind spots of these organizations underscore that challenges of civic virtue remain endemic within that trajectory. Often they fail to link their mission to reducing endstage organ disease, to considering justice and access issues in transplant policy, or to inculcating adequate “disciplined vulnerability” to allow that critics of transplant policy may have moral insights. Those failures suggest an incomplete expansion of the analogical process of impartiality-aspractice and incomplete development of other incumbent civic virtues. To say this aloud is not to deny these are virtuous organizations that have Appendix: Case Studies
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accomplished tremendous civic good. But it does raise questions about whether their internal end is intrinsically related to other unrecognized ends, or whether their goals are in tension with other well-recognized goods, and if so, why that has not been perceived. The transformation of civic virtue suggests that one central challenge crosscuts the complexity of determining both personal donation decisions and organ donation policy. That challenge is never to let organ donation become routine, even as it becomes more common.
C ONC LUSION T O T H E C A SE S T U DI E S The three case studies have dramatized problems with conventional accounts of civic virtue and the increased explanatory power of a transformed account. At the same time, they have deliberately “reined in” potential excesses of my own rhetoric. My book looks to ordinary heroes to resolve the dilemma of impartiality and to launch a transformed account of civic virtue. Part of the ordinariness of ordinary heroes is their imperfection amidst continual striving. MADD and ADL are presented as invisible heroes because their successful outward turn of relevant “partial” experience is unnoticed in conventional accounts of civic virtue. Yet the case studies demonstrate that these organizations have made moral mistakes and missed the mark on necessary moral means while continuing to struggle with unresolved tradeoffs—not only according to myself or other critics but by their own account. Perhaps what I most admire is their resilience in acknowledging lessons learned and their ongoing effort to inculcate virtuous means governed by the internal ends of the organization. They have cultivated a disciplined vulnerability to carry on that process. Conversely, while the case study on organ donation seeks to elucidate how civic vices may be unduly protected by conventional accounts, vices are not villains. Organ donation policies and those who promote them have allowed hundreds of thousands of needy people to receive transplants in hopes of renewed health. Vices are by definition excesses caused by missing positive moral means. Crusading transplant policy results, not from bad citizens, but from good citizens overly focused on one potential good. My criticism is certainly not that those promoting current organ donation policies are morally bankrupt—far from it. But I do suggest they
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could be more civically virtuous as well as more capable of promoting their own long-term goals if they confronted the mythology of sacrifice at play and engaged more fully in an analogical process considering conflicting goods. The case studies underscore that citizenly goals in defining and promoting civic virtue should be pragmatic, not perfectionist.
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who argue that liberal theory, institutions, and society embody—and depend on—individual virtue” (Galston 1991, 215). 5. Sandel succinctly unpacks the term “New Democrat” to note a stress on responsibilities as well as rights. Of Clinton, Sandel notes:
1. Invisible Heroes 1. Terence Hunt, “Clinton Signs Drunken Driving Bill,” Associated Press, 23 October 2000, http://www.crimelynx. com/drunk.html; Rodney Slater, “Mothers against Drunk Driving 20th Anniversary,” U.S. Department of Transportation, 6 September 2000, http://www.dot.gov/ affairs/2000/090600.sp.html. 2. Of course, acknowledging the intuitive heroism of MADD does not imply the organization is immune from criticism. This point is explored further in the more detailed case study on MADD at the end of the book. I will argue that an improved conception of civic virtue implies criteria for appropriate selective critique that are absent in conventional models. 3. The cross-cutting sense of civic loss underlying diverse ethical visions leads Williams to articulate her project: “to link virtue with a nonfoundationalist [noncomprehensive] approach [to civic life].” 4. “In spite of considerable evidence for the proposition that the liberalrepublican polity requires no more than the proper configuration of rational self-interest, this orthodoxy has in recent years come under attack from scholars
Speaking in the Memphis church where Martin Luther King Jr. had preached before his assassination, Clinton ventured onto moral and spiritual terrain that liberals of recent times had sought to avoid. Restoring work to the inner city was essential, he explained, not only for the income it brings but for the character-forming effects, for the discipline, structure, and pride that work confers on family life. He also acknowledged that even the best efforts government might take to deal with crime, drugs, violence, and the breakdown of the family would achieve little without changes people must make “from the inside out,” changes that reach “the values, the spirit, the soul.” On other occasions Clinton continued to trespass on value-laden territory once occupied by conservatives and the religious right. “Our problems go way beyond the reach of government,” he declared in his 1994 State of the Union Address. “They are rooted in the loss of values, in the disappearance of work, 365
and the breakdown of our families and communities.” (1996, 327–28)
6. Peter Berkowitz introduces his book Virtue in the Making of Modern Liberalism with an account of the 1992 election as a watershed event for conversations on political virtue. (1999, ix). 7. For an example of a celebration of care as superior, see Nel Noddings (1984). For an example of (1), see Diana Fritz Cates and Paul Lauritzen (2001) on medical ethics; for (2), see Allison Jaggar (1995); for (3), see Susan Moller Okin (1989), Marilyn Friedman (1993); Joan Tronto (1993); and Virginia Held (1993); for (4), see Seyla Benhabib (1992); Kathryn Tanner (1996); and Annette Baier (1995); for (5), see Andrea Maihofer (1998). For a Christian theological account, see Valerie Saiving Goldstein (1960). 8. This argument pragmatically relies on a conventional sex/gender distinction that distinguishes biological sex from acculturated gender roles. For concise overviews of the history of the sex/gender distinction and its current critique, see Susan Nicholson, “Gender,” and Tina Chanter, “The Postmodern Subject,” both in Jaggar and Young (1998). 9. For a trenchant analysis of how gender, care, and social constructions of public/private intersect, see Jean Bethke Elshtain (1981). 10. While the liberal tradition has complex antecedents in philosophical lineages from Aristotle, Kant, Locke, and Mill, to name a few, its quintessential contemporary American spokesman is often taken to be John Rawls (1971 and 1996). Michael Sandel’s challenge to his former teacher John Rawls, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), is often considered a charter document of the communitarian movement. During the 1980s the work of Sandel, Michael Walzer (1983), Charles Taylor (1985), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) redirected attention to the importance of shared moral practices and the moral authority of community. 366
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For a good history of communitarianism, see chapter 6 of Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy (2002). 11. The contrast between John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice exemplifies this disagreement. 12. Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism explicitly articulates this tension. In addition to After Virtue (1981), see also his Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). 13. The contrast between Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s account of rationally deliberative democracy, on the one hand, and Iris Marion Young’s call for a passionate public, on the other, exemplifies this tension. See, e.g., Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Young 1990. 14. An illustrative contrast is that between John Rawls (justice) and feminist political theorist Joan Tronto (care). See Rawls 1971; Tronto 1993 and 1995. 15. The pithy distinction between freedom from and freedom for was first articulated by Isaiah Berlin (1969). 16. Many people who debate this priority don’t realize it, because they wrongly presume that interests in civic virtue and civil society are complementary. However, as Gerard Hauser (1998) argues, these two terms are indebted to two different, and competing, legacies in political theory. The tension between them and the desire to resolve those tensions will be taken up over the course of my fuller argument. 17. The term “reflective equilibrium,” coined by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, refers to a balance between one’s moral theory (or a theory of justice) and one’s particular life experiences—which ideally mutually reinforce and fine-tune each other. Critics of Rawls claim that his theory of justice in fact favors theory over experience. Martha Nussbaum (1990) coined the term “perceptive equilibrium” to address what she finds lacking in common use of the term
“reflective equilibrium.” Her account melds questions of perception and aesthetics to the challenge of reflective equilibrium, which she sees primarily as a challenge of moral perception rather than of pristine moral rationality. 2. New Calls for Civic Virtue, and Calls for New Civic Virtues 1. A robust conversation often tagged “discourse ethics” explores the preconditions of healthy public discourse. Pioneered by Jürgen Habermas (1979, 1996), this conversation has evolved in ways that link liberalism, postmodernism, and feminism. Discourse theorists alternatively preserve the possibility of universal moral claims by examining how such claims arise out of inclusive discourse, articulate ethical and procedural conditions for discourse, or propose deontological limits to ethical agreements reached through discourse. My project notes the connection between calls for civic virtue and dissatisfaction with public discourse and tries to transform civic virtue in ways that redress that dissatisfaction. However, ultimately I claim that the terrain of civic virtue is broader than the terrain of public discourse. See also Seyla Benhabib (1986, 1992, and 1996); Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (1990). 2. For a structural analysis of how war metaphors shape conceptions of argument, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), 4–6. 3. I take the phrase “recovery of virtue” from Jean Porter’s 1990 book by the same title. 4. My account of a classical conception of virtue paraphrases Aristotle, the most precise of the ancient writers on the structure of virtue. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book 2. 5. Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth-century Prussian Enlightenment philosopher who sought to elucidate universal ethical duties. See Kant 1969.
6. Nineteenth-century Englishman Jeremy Bentham is often cited as the father of modern utilitarianism. See “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” in Warnock 1962. 7. Casuistry refers to case-based analogical reasoning. “Narrative ethics” is a movement that seeks to understand how stories of identity inform ethical reasoning and, conversely, how the construction of a narrative framework for one’s life is a moral task. Regarding contemporary interest in casuistry, see e.g., Jonsen and Toulmin 1988; Arras 1991, 29–51; Miller 1996. Regarding contemporary explorations of narrative ethics, see e.g., Hauerwas 1989; Nussbaum 1990; Phelan 1996; Nelson 1997; Fasching and Dechant 1991; Newton 1995. Narrative ethics are often linked to virtue ethics because perceptions of desirable virtues may derive from stories of identity. See, e.g., MacIntyre 1984, 1988. 8. Postmodern ideas permeate contemporary art and literary criticism as well as ethical thought. Towering figures of reference are three French thinkers: Michel Foucault (1930–1984), Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Foucault (1988, 1990) considers shifting patterns of power in the actual social practices by which people define identity and conceptual reference points. Lyotard (1997) attacks “grand narratives” that attempt to give a comprehensive account of a culture and its ideals, narratives he feels inevitably mask power battles. Derrida (1976) decries a “metaphysics of presence” that tempts interpreters of texts to ignore the instability of reference points and the complex mediation of symbols in the text, because they long for an epistemologically impossible pure encounter with a pure subject. 9. See, e.g., Nussbaum 1988. 10. Sandel’s first book (1982) remains a classic statement of this critique. 11. See e.g., MacIntyre 1988, chap. 17. Notes to pages 20–26 ·
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12. The phrase “syndrome of civic privatism” was coined by Jürgen Habermas (1996, 78). 13. See, e.g., Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” in Young 1990; and Schwartzenbach 1996. 14. Eric Schmitt, “Helms Orders Ten Women from House out of Senate Hearing,” New York Times, 28 October 1999, A25. 15. See also Stanley Hauerwas (1995). 16. While the tradition labeled “moral sense theory” began with English thinkers of the seventeenth century, it is most closely associated with the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Three towering figures of that intellectual movement were Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790). 17. See Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 22–23. 18. For a detailed historical portrayal of the articulation of this view in nineteenth-century America, see Riva B. Siegal (1994). 19. Social contract theory is a tradition that conceives of citizens of a state as implicit contractors. These citizencontractors assent to the implied contract governing political formation out of self-interest—since freedom and security cannot be gained without such cooperation. Social contract theory was born in the seventeenth century with the work of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and continues to ground contemporary liberalism. For example, John Rawls’s work seeks to articulate explicitly what terms of social contract reasonable “bargainers” in the “original position” (not knowing the particular facts of their own lives) would affirm. See John Rawls (1971). 20. See also Pateman, “Genesis, Fathers, and the Political Liberty of Sons,” in her The Sexual Contract, 1988, 77–115. 21. For a classic reflection on this socially constructed dualism, see Sherry B. 368
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Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature to Culture?” (1998). 22. See, e.g., Joan Tronto (1993); Annette Baier, “Hume: A Women’s Moral Theorist?” in her Moral Prejudices (1995). Business ethicist Patricia Werhane, while she does not label herself a feminist theorist, seeks to integrate the Scottish moral sense tradition with contemporary business ethics. See her “Business Ethics and the Origins of Contemporary Capitalism” (2002, 325–41). 23. See, e.g., Jeremy Bentham (1962), 40–50. 24. See, e.g., M. Jamie Ferreira (2001). 25. Nygren’s theology was grounded on a fundamental distinction between neighbor love and erotic love. See Anders Nygren (1969). 26. For a classic text of the social gospel movement, see Walter Rauschenbush (1922). 27. See Niebuhr 1964, especially, 68–90. 28. Against this stream, feminist theologian Rebekah Miles (2001) critically retrieves insights from Niebuhr in an attempt to develop theology that is both feminist and realist. 29. Gudorf overstates the case when she accuses Niebuhr of rosy idealism about intimate relationships. But certainly she correctly perceives his categorical distinction between those relationships and political ones. And certainly heirs of Niebuhr have used his distinction in less sophisticated ways than he, in ways that do cast intimate relationships in naive terms. 30. See also Sarah Bentley (1998), 151–71; B. Gill-Austern (1996); J. Dasher (1996). 31. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, especially, vol. 1, part 2, sec. 4, and vol. 2, part 2. Many contemporary theorists stressing the need to revive civil society follow Tocqueville by emphasizing voluntary associations. See, e.g., Robert Bellah et al. (1985); Jean L.
Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992); Francis Fukayama (1995); Robert Putnam (1995); William Boxx and Gary M. Quinlivan (1996); Benjamin Barber (1998); Amy Gutmann (1998); E. J. Dionne (1998); John Keene (1998); Christopher Beem (1999); Thomas L. Dumm (1999); Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (1999); Robert K. Fullinwider (1999); Don E. Eberly (1998); Don E. Eberly and Ryan Streeter (2002); David T. Beito (2002); Nancy Rosenblum (1998); Nancy Rosenblum and Robert C. Post (2002); Simone Chambers and Wil Kymlicka (2002); John Ehrenbert (1999); Brian O’Connell (1999). 32. Hauser draws inspiration from discourse theorist Jürgen Habermas. 33. The metaphor of children as “expensive private hobbies” comes from Sylvia Hewlitt and Cornell West (1998). 34. The metaphor of ethical “accenting” is borrowed from literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). 35. See, e.g., Anne Phillips (1987); Zillah Eisenstein (1981, 1984); Carole Pateman (1989); and Virginia Held (1993). 36. See Iris Marion Young 1987, 1989,1990a, and chapter 4 of her Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1990b. 37. Although Young is clear that she wishes to reject the ideal of impartiality, she is also insists that rejecting impartiality is not rejecting critical moral reflection and a quest for fairness. Yet she does not develop her contrasting view of moral reflection and fairness as well as she contests the equation of impartiality and reflection (1990, 105). 38. Here Young rejects a key element of the thought of discourse theorist Jürgen Habermas. She rejects Habermas’s retention of impartiality-as-universalizability, despite his socialization of the process of moral discovery (compared to Kantian philosophy). While this rejection is helpful to demythologizing impartiality, Young goes too far when she criticizes Seyla Benhabib’s sophisticated response to Habermas on this
point. Benhabib, while also rejecting even discourse-derived universals as an adequate account of impartiality, continues to assume that one raison d’etre of public discourse is the assessment of what she calls “shared subjectivities.” See Habermas 1990; Benhabib 1992. 39. See www.pbpub.com/ bread&puppet/bread.htm. 40. Young’s critique of impartiality presumes this confusing conflation; she simultaneously equates impartiality with universality and generality. In so doing, she correctly characterizes common portrayals of impartiality but misses a chance to question their coherence. 41. For example, contemporary partialists taking up Godwin’s case include John Cottingham (1983), John Kekes (1981), and Lynne McFall (1987). An impartialist defender of the case is Brian Barry (1995). 42. For examples of conversations explaining and questioning the labels “partialist” and “impartialist,” see John Kekes (1981) and Marilyn Friedman (1993), especially “Part One: Partiality and Impartiality.” 43. Here and for the remainder of the book, I use the term “feminist” to refer to feminist developers of the ethics of care, since perceived conflicts between the ethics of care and political ideals of impartiality drive this project. Of course, not all developers of care ethics are feminists, and not all feminists identify with the ethics of care. When I refer to other branches of feminism, I use a specifier, e.g., “liberal feminism.” 44. In addition to Iris M. Young, Nel Noddings (1984), Lynne McFall (1987), and Christian feminist theologian Carter Heyward (1984) are examples of self-identified feminists who challenge impartiality as an ideal. While Heyward challenges constructions of impartiality with her focus on embodiment and relationality, she also speaks of a need for judgment. Although she does not Notes to pages 52–68
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fully develop an account of embodied, relational judgment, she highlights theological symbols and motifs that she thinks are constructive to thinking about judgment. 3. The Dilemma of Impartiality 1. Contemporary partialists who consider Godwin’s case include John Cottingham (1983 and 1991) and John Kekes (1981). A contemporary impartialist who defends the case is Brian Barry (1995). 2. Lawrence Blum (1991 and 1994) argues that often such spontaneous response indicates a higher degree of moral cultivation on the part of the moral agent. 3. As Bernard Gert notes, to be clear about impartiality “one must be specify the group with regard to which one is impartial and the respect in which one is impartial with regard to this group” (1992, 599). 4. I follow R. M. Hare (1981, 40–41) in making this distinction. However, I will not follow Hare’s subsequent equation of impartiality, universalizability, and equal regard. 5. See R. M. Hare (1981); Adrian Piper (1987, 102). 6. I am indebted to Bernard Gert (1992, 600) for this example. 7. Marilyn Friedman and Marcia Baron explicitly criticize the tendency of partialists to attack such straw men. See Friedman 1991, 831–32 (this criticism does not appear in the version of the essay in What Are Friends For?); Baron 1991, 843–44. 8. R. M. Hare (1981) attempts by a number of problematic moves to maintain universalizability as the criterion of impartiality without advocating a monistic conception. Hare alternately blurs or adheres to his own distinction between generality and universality. He suggests that “equal regard” rather than any particular conception of the good is the 370
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content of impartiality when impartiality is properly governed by universalizability. However, equal regard invokes generality as he defines it—the lack of specificity in the object of moral dictum. On the flip side, Hare rigidly maintains his distinction when it comes to actual casuistry. He seems to consider situational facts as mere instruments to correct logical representation. Thus, Hare takes cases that might otherwise seem to call into question universalizable norms and presents them as unique, extraordinarily specific (non-general) examples of nonetheless universalizable principles. 9. Sources in the extensive feminist literature on the role of emotions in the moral life include: Alison Jaggar (1989); Virginia Held (1993, 43–54); Susan Moller Okin (1990). 10. See Annette Baier (1986; reprinted in Cass R. Sunstein, ed., 1990.) 11. Friedman’s wording wrongly implies that only nonfeminist critics of impartiality make this mistake, though many self-identified feminists do as well. 12. I take the term “reflective equilibrium” from its originator, John Rawls, who uses it to refer to an achieved compatibility between principles of justice and “considered judgements” of common morality. I expand its sense to include a series of related balances discussed by many commentators. 13. These are my own designations, because I find the terminology in the literature ambiguous. I follow Holly Smith (1992, 594–96) in emphasizing the distinction between the two models. 14. Some of these terms are pervasive in the literature on impartiality; others are more specifically associated with certain figures. Henry Sidgewick concocted the “point of view of the universe”; R. M. Hare the “archangel.” Several eighteenthcentury moral sense theorists emphasized spectator, or third-person perspectives, while Adam Smith employed the language of the “impartial observer.”
15. The contemporary John Rawls is particularly blunt about this definitional strategy: “The representation of equality is an easy matter: we simply describe all the parties in the same way and situate them equally, that is, symmetrically with respect to one another” (1980, 550). He is also direct about the relationship of his thought experiments and the imagined state of nature in earlier contractarian thought: “In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract” (1971). 16. For a basic description of Rawls’s “original position,” see Rawls 1971, 17–22. 17. The lack of attributes such as race and gender on Rawls’s list of necessary insulations is striking, given their influence on one’s place in society. 18. Margaret Urban Walker (1991, 762–63) comments on the same irony in Hare. 19. Political theorist Michael Brint, currently on the faculty of Kenyon College. 20. Friedman borrows this play on words from Stephen Darwall (1983), a defender of conventional models who recognizes this problem. 21. Many of Rawls’s articles subsequent to Theory of Justice (1971) were integrated, with an explanation of the original theory, in his later Political Liberalism (1996). However, since the articles show directly and sequentially how Rawls was responding to specific criticisms of the theory, I continue to cite them. 22. I follow Virginia Held in using the term “economic man” as a label of convenience for the assumed paradigm. “Economic man” simultaneously calls attention to several features of the implicit model: its competitiveness, its presumption of self-interest, its focus on singular selves, and its engendered nature. 23. Michael Sandel offers a sophisticated analysis of Rawls’s epistemological
reasons for the assumption of mutual disinterest. He also shows how this assumption “distances the self from its ends” as the subject becomes viewed as the possessor of its interests, thus integral separate from its interests but connected to its interests by choice. See Sandel 1982, 54–59. 24. Benhabib locates Rawls’s denial of difference, not in his assumptions about sympathy, but in his assumptions about rationality embedded into his strategy of essentialism. 25. The term “monological,” originally coined by Jürgen Habermas in the development of his discourse ethic, has been adopted as common currency by many feminists. 26. I take the language of being “grasped” from Martin Buber, whose work anticipated a variety of contemporary feminist themes in its stress on relationship and dialogue. Reacting against philosophical traditions that objectify the moral world, Buber argued that human relationships experienced as “I-Thou” rather than “I-It” are fundamental to humanity. See Buber, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1970. 27. Of course, courtrooms do not exist in a social vacuum, and decisionmaking about relevant and irrelevant information in the courtroom reflects debates in the messier, less-constrained public forum. Consider that until recently a woman’s extended sexual history was considered relevant to determining whether in a given instance she had been raped. However, in recent years public opposition to this—particularly by women’s groups involved in education about the nature and prevalence of rape—has turned the tables so that such information is now generally considered irrelevant, either by judicial practice or by statute. Thus, even formally “impartial” forums like courts need continued reflection on what constitutes impartiality. Notes to pages 85–99
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28. A short account of Blum’s argument regarding impartiality and compassion can be found in Lawrence Blum (1991). See also Blum 1980 and 1994. 29. This problem structurally parallels the problem in John Rawls’s thought, in which the priority given to the principles of justice limit the potential for moral experience to challenge those principles. 30. In so doing, I underattend the work of certain “partialists” whose investigations of partiality and impartiality merit futher consideration. These thinkers include Charles Fried and Lawrence Blum, whom I take up only incidentally through critiques of others who are more focal to my own inquiry. Fried tends toward the libertarian wing of the liberal tradition. He anticipated major axes of contemporary conversation when he began struggling with limits of impartiality as an ethical ideal decades ago. Fried defends a realm of life circumscribed by the dictates of impartial justice but within which chosen partialities ought be given free rein. He correlates the importance of personal relations to traditional liberal presuppositions, considering affective personal relationships among the voluntary associations that liberal government is intended to foster. He also defends the liberal regard for privacy, not on the basis of autonomy, but rather on the basis that privacy is “moral capital” for the development of personal relationships. See Charles Fried (1970, 1978, and 1984). Lawrence Blum emphasizes perception and discernment as moral tasks ignored in conventional formulations of impartiality and also emphasizes the intrinsic good we ascribe to our partial giving to particular beloveds. Blum’s individualistic starting point is belied by his language of “altruism” to describe care for others. Blum’s thought shows the potential for someone who begins with an individualistic self-conception to move toward a relational ethic. His 372
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emphasis on close relationships with particular others is intertwined with, rather than developed at the expense of, more universalistic concerns. For example, Blum considers the actions of non-Jews who risked their lives to harbor Jews during the Holocaust, exploring the connection between universalistic moral norms and the pull of particularity (that a certain person stood before them in need of help). See Lawrence Blum (1994). 31. See Bernard Williams (1981), especially the essays entitled “Persons, Character, and Morality” and “Moral Luck.” See also J. F. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (1973). 32. This is a recurrent theme in Williams’s essays and is addressed particularly explicitly in Jeffrey Blustein (1991), chapters 17 and 18. 33. Blustein 1991, 197; citing Neera Badhwar (1987), 19–21. 34. I choose to develop a hypothetical example with Oxfam because involvement with Oxfam has been discussed both by impartialists and partialists wrestling with issues of global concern, the rigors of impartialism, and the limits of self-preference. See, e.g., John Cottingham (1983), 92; discussing commentary by Jonathan Glover (1977). 35. See Marilyn Friedman (1993), 170. For a fuller feminist critique of Williams on moral luck, see Claudia Card (1990). 36. For a detailed account of tragedy in the moral life and exploration of inattention to it in modern ethics, see Martha Nussbaum (1986). 37. Relevant sources include Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, 1988, 1990); Michael J. Sandel (1981); Charles Taylor (1989). 38. See e.g., Michael Walzer (1983), especially section two, “Membership”; and Amitai Etzioni (1993, and “Old Chestnuts and New Spurs,” in Etzioni, ed., 1995). 39. Marilyn Friedman entitles her critique of communitarians “On Being Social But Not Conventional,” in Friedman 1993, 72–79.
40. MacIntyre has garnered criticism from, among others, Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, Virginia Held, Marilyn Friedman, Annette Baier, Seyla Benhabib, and Susan Moller Okin. 41. MacIntyre does not employ the language of an “impartial standpoint” in his critique. However, I take his criticism of what he terms a “correspondence theory of truth” to be closely related to the “standpoint” conception of impartiality. MacIntyre criticizes the belief that truth corresponds to some “objective” facts out there in the world. 42. MacIntyre draws this term from the work of historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn. See, e.g., , Kuhn 1970. Kuhn will be discussed more in chapter 5. 43. See especially MacIntyre 1988, chapters 1, 18, and 19. 44. For examples of MacIntyre’s schizophrenic views, compare After Virtue, 9–14, implying the more objective view of language, and Whose Justice? chapter 18, which presupposes the alternative view. For a critique of MacIntyre’s tendency toward the more objective view of language, see Barbara Hernstein Smith (1988), 85–94. Smith implies that, ironically, when MacIntyre speaks of “coherent” older moral languages, he presumes the very correspondence theory of truth that he explicitly denies. To some extent the tension between two views of language is indicative of MacIntyre’s development between After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? However, even in Whose Justice? MacIntyre fluctuates between the two views of language, retreating to the objective view when he maintains the dichotomy between older “coherent” moral languages and modern “fragmentary” ones. 45. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1981), especially essay four, “Discourse on the Novel.” 46. MacIntyre presents the innovators who appropriately respond to epistemological crises as being swept to their
inventiveness by the force of the tradition and the crisis itself. This is unduly dismissive of the imagination of such innovators. Galileo—whom MacIntyre presents as a paradigm of inventiveness in epistemological crisis—did not in fact have to convert to a heliocentric view of the universe after making the observations he did. He might just have “rationally” concluded that he had dust on his telescope. MacIntyre also fails to explain how the imagination of moral pioneers may itself contribute to the identification of previously unnoticed tensions within and among traditions. Certainly no easily identifiable sweep of tradition pushed Elizabeth Blackwell to medical school, but her success pressed tensions in gender structures. Charles Taylor’s communitarianism offers a big improvement over MacIntyre on this point. Taylor accepts MacIntyre’s reliance on coherence as a primary criterion for moral critique and thus accepts MacIntyre’s rejection of any “standpoint” of impartiality. However, Taylor’s archeology of the modern Western self focuses on the long periods of history between so-called epistemological crises. Despite the broad generalities denoted by the label “the self,” Taylor does attend to practices of ordinary social life—for example, changes in marriage and child rearing practices—in addition to the ideas of grand theorists. Taylor’s historical narrative takes the identity of “the modern self” as its subject and thus explores the multiple strands of traditions within the self, the periodic reweaving of those strands, and the possibility of future reweavings. In contrast, MacIntyre’s account focuses on moral traditions as its subject; thus, persons sometimes become viewed simply as bearers of a given tradition under discussion. See Charles Taylor (1989). For a discussion of why Taylor may be preferable to MacIntyre for feminists, see Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey (1993), 144–48; 157–61. Notes to pages 114–119 · 373
47. Again MacIntyre does not completely ignore the complexity, but seems reluctant to admit its full force. For passages in which he is more sensitive to the complexity of traditions in the life of persons, see his previously cited treatment of Thomas Aquinas in Whose Justice? and also in After Virtue, 207, in which he considers the intersecting narratives and practices that come together in the life of one farm. 4. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue 1. The notion that liberalism relies on a “thin theory of the good” was articulated most famously by John Rawls (1971 and 1996). 2. While Gutmann and Thompson borrow from the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas, they also distinguish themselves from him. Unlike Habermas, they want to preserve room for principles that stand outside deliberation. If deliberation is their primary focus, it remains just one leg of the tripod necessary for democracy (proceduralism, constitutionalism, and rational deliberation. 3. In several published accounts Audi elaborates complex views affirming the potential rationality of faith, while maintaining that democratic justification may be a more restricted realm than rationality. He advocates secular motivation as well as comprehensible reason-giving in public justification. But for Audi, only original religious motivations that cannot be translated to secular motivations are precluded. His account of restricted justification is thus less a “rule” than a guideline for practice. See Audi 1986, 139–66; Audi and Wolterstoff 1997; Audi 1995. 4. Amy Gutmann in a 1999 presentation at the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics conference; and Stephen Macedo in a 2000 Harvard presentation. 374
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5. For an insightful related discussion of blue laws, see Sandel 1996, 60. 6. This definition is based on W. D. Ross (1930). For a contemporary source that succinctly explains principlism in the opening chapter, see Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress (2001). 7. See, e.g., Donald B. Kraybill (2001). 8. A reformulation of Greenawalt’s recommendations in terms of virtue would make sense of the otherwise puzzling introduction to his five chapters elaborating “principles” for self-restraint: “[The argument of this book] indicates my belief that self-restraint about the use of religious or nonaccessible reasons is not part of a set of fundamental principles for liberal democracy” (1995, 129; emphasis added). 9. Among liberal virtue theorists, Macedo is both particularly forthright about recognizing this danger and particularly ironic in falling into it: “Liberalism was born out of controversy, disagreement and war—an element of controversy is understandable. But liberalism is not, either as a theory or as a stable practice, based on disagreement or relativism or compromise in the face of every controversy” (Macedo 1991, 51). 10. For a history and discussion of the La Leche League, see Jule DeJager Ward (2000). 11. See, e.g., Stephen Bayme, David Blankenhorn, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (1990). The New York–based Institute for America Values, an organization with an explicit mission of promoting “civic virtue,” also emphasizes the importance of two-parent heterosexual marriage. 12. Amitai Etzioni (1993, 1995, 1998, 2001). Etzioni is also the founder and editor of the journal Responsive Community. For an example of optimism about membership in multiple subcommunities, see Etzioni 1995, 24–25. 13. Here Sandel implicitly draws on Michael Walzer’s explanation of “dominance” as a moral danger. Walzer (1983)
uses that term to describe the colonialism of a distributive principle outside its realm of ethical life. 14. Iris Marion Young (1990). Young’s use of this term was discussed in more detail in chapter 2. 15. Mrs. Jellyby is Charles Dickens’ famous character in Bleak House. She is the philanthropic townswoman who neglects her children while supporting far-away charitable causes. Sandel specifically cites her as a metaphor for the civic malaise he wishes to address (1996, 343). 16. This list seems broader than can be encompassed by his own claim later that civil society is composed of voluntary associations. 17. In a related vein, Robert Putnam emphasizes time as “social capital” for the development of civic virtue in his groundbreaking sociological analysis of civic life, Bowling Alone (2000). 5. Saving the Baby from the Bathwater 1. German interpretive theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer famously articulated this view. He used the term “foregrounding” to label the presumptions that one brings to a text. “Foregrounding” is enabling bias, though one’s foregrounding presumptions may be challenged through the process of interpretation. Gadamer insisted that the contingency of interpretive processes did not mean they were capricious. He believed that “horizons” of interpretation could be approached, since no interpreter individually controls the text. Gadamer wrote to critique the influence of positivist conceptions of science in the social sciences. See Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975). 2. See, e.g., Gustavo Gutierez (1973); Leonardo Boff (1991). For an overview of some major Latin American liberation theologians, see Ismael Garcia (1987).
3. For a specific discussion of the term “praxis,” see Roberto Goizueta (1993), 53–62. 4. See, e.g., Mario Pilar Aquino (1994); Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz (1996); Leonardo Boff (1997). 5. The association between Reason and God began long before modern times. For example, in the twelfth century, Thomas Aquinas interpreted the “special image of God” in human beings, described in the Genesis creation story, to be the power of reason. But the perception of reason’s stark contrast to emotional life is a modern notion. 6. See, e.g., Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, 1984, 1994, and 1998. 7. Whitehead was an Englishman who came to Harvard in 1924 and taught there for the rest of his career. Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit paleontologist who spent much of his life on fossil digs in China, retiring to the United States until his death in 1955. Subsequent prominent American process theologians include John Cobb and Charles Harteshorne. See Alfred North Whitehead (1929); Teilhard de Chardin (1968); John Cobb (1969); Charles Harteshorne (1965). For a concise selection of some classic texts in process theology, see the anthology by Ewert Cousins (1971). 8. John Cobb, “The World and God,” in Cousins 1971, 165. 9. John Cobb does take up the idea of “God’s impartial standpoint.” But he does so to challenge conventional presumptions underlying that metaphor. For Cobb, God’s view is all-inclusive because God relates to all entities in creation. So the “impartial standpoint” is really a sum of cumulative experience of all those intimate relationships, not a feat of detachment. See Cobb, “The World and God,” in Cousins 1971, 164–65. 10. For an insightful book review that highlights tensions between these emphases, see Amy Hollywood (1999). Notes to pages 158–189 · 375
11. The title of Cahill 1996, chapter 4, emphasis added. 12. For a spectrum of potential interpretations of the love commandment, see Garth Hallet (1989). 13. See Ursula King (1981, 1993); Carolyn Bynum Walker (1987, 1992); Amy Hollywood (1995, 2002); Christine Mazzoni (1991); Catherine Keller (1996), especially chapter 3. Of particular interest to several of these thinkers are the twelfthand thirteenth-century Beguines of northern Europe. These communities of lay women integrated mystical devotion to the Eucharist with active social work. Their communities confounded conventional public-private boundaries, mixing liturgical, contemplative, and residential space with infirmaries and poorhouses. Neither married nor under formal religious rule, the Beguines remained outside the two dominant social institutions for women in their day. 14. See also Heyward 1989. 15. See Mary Daly (1989); Janice Raymond (1986); Mary Hunt (1994). All of these interpreters oppose C. S. Lewis’s oft-cited distinction between “eros” and “friendship.” Lewis (1988) argues that while erotic love is characterized by desire for the beloved as a person, friendship is forged by a shared moral vision that allows friends to be “non-inquisitive” about the details of their lives unrelated to the recognized shared quest. Lewis’s formulation obscures how love for a particular friend may transform one’s sense of moral quest. Despite this disagreement, Lewis shares with feminist theologians a comprehensive, rather than antagonistic, interpretation of agape. 16. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book IV. For a concise summary of Augustine’s theology of friendship, see Paul J. Wadell (1989), 97–104. 17. Contemporary theologians who explicitly take up the Thomistic account of friendship with God or the notion of friendship with God include: Paul J. 376
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Wadell (1981); Diana Fritz Cates (1997); Elizabeth Johnson (1998a). 18. For example, medieval Cistercians Aelred of Rieveaux and Bernard of Clairvaux considered monastic life a community of friends sharing friendship with God, and a variety of contemporary commentators are reconsidering their accounts. See Aelred of Rievaulx (1994); Bernard of Clairvaux (1987); Mary E. Giles (1989); Brian P. McGuire (1985); Elisja Schulte van Kessel (1986); John R. Sommerfeldt (1978). 19. See e.g., Janice Raymond (1986); Mary Hunt (1994); Sharon Welch (1990); Dolores Williams (1993). 20. For example, Margaret Farley (1986) suggests how covenantal norms may positively inform even necessary ruptures of marriage in divorce; William May (1983) articulates how covenant could guide professional relationships such as physician-patient relationships; Eric Mount Jr. (1999) argues that regardless of the scope of the relationship, from highly personal to broadly communal to fully environmental, covenantal motifs press toward a consideration of the common good; and Walter Brueggemann (1999) claims that appropriate understandings of the “covenanted self” lead to an appreciation of positive moral law. 21. See, e.g., Carol J. Adams and Marie Fortune, eds. (1998); especially Mitzi N. Eilts, “Saving the Family: When Is the Covenant Broken?” (444–50), and Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God so Loved the World” (36–59). For a documentary film on Jewish and Christian religious communities struggling with limits to covenantal ideals because of confrontation with domestic violence, see Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence 1994. 22. See, e.g., Christine Gudorf (1985), and Barbara Hilkert Andolsen (1981). 23. See Paul Ramsey (1970 and 1978). 24. For an analysis of convergence between the Catholic natural law
tradition and feminist theological ethics, see Cristina L. H. Traina, Feminism and Natural Law (1999). Another explicit commentary that integrates the natural law with contemporary gender concerns is Lisa Sowle Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (1996). 6. Impartiality-as-Practice 1. Of course, attitudes toward child rearing differ across cultures, and a spectrum of acceptable differences exists within any given culture. Moreover, moral judgments of particular cases of parental decision-making may differ dramatically. My argument does not depend on uniform agreement about what constitutes hitting the mark of parental impartiality, but rather on the intuition that parents generally do struggle with questions about fairness among their children. 2. For an excellent analysis of critical needs assessment, including careful distinction between wants and needs and thoughtful reflection on standards of adequacy, see Nancy Fraser (1989). 3. See Marilyn Friedman, “The Impracticality of Impartiality,” in her What Are Friends For (1993), 9–10. 4. I take the term “social capital” from Robert Putnam’s sociology. See Putnam 2000. 5. See, e.g., Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; St. Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality, and Politics. 6. See Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other,” in her Situating the Self (1992). 7. See Anne Philips (1987); Drucilla Cornell (1998). 8. For a discussion of how such caricatured “straw” argument partners impoverish debate, see Thomas Hill (1987). 9. Marilyn Friedman provocatively addresses questions about the relationship between partiality, impartiality, and global moral concern (1991, 831–85).
(Some related sections of this essay are omitted in the shorter version published in Friedman 1993.). 10. This is the mistake of partialists such as John Deigh (1989), John Cottingham (1983, 1991), and the “integrity theorists” discussed in chapter 3. 11. After Virtue (1984) focuses on the relationship between moral practices and their internal ends; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), on analogical reasoning between moral practices. MacIntyre was discussed in more detail in chapter 3. 12. Insistence on the activeness of care is often advanced as a critique of one of the first major works that discussed care philosophically, Nel Noddings’s Caring (1984). Noddings emphasized the “passivity” of care. Her critics urge a greater distinction between passivity and receptiveness to the other. (In fact, though the language is misleading, Noddings’s work implies that “passivity” in terms of receptiveness to the other should result in “active” responses and active social policy changes.) Noddings has also been criticized for neglecting care of the self who cares, or for considering relationships of care too individualistically and atomistically rather than investigating social practices of care. For a critical analysis of Noddings, see, e.g., Marilyn Friedman (1993), chapter 6. 13. Marilyn Friedman distinguishes four levels “at which the practice of any particular relationship can be morally evaluated,” and illustrates each in regard to marriage. There is (1) the “generic level,” defining marriage as the relationship between husband and wife; (2) the level of the “specific cultural formalization,” by which, for example, American case law previously assigned husbands responsibility for the economic support of the marriage and wives responsibility for the sexual satisfaction of husbands; (3) the level of informal practices that are not “formally codified” but may be “culturally normative,” for example, Notes to pages 206–224 ·
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the convention that women adopt their husband’s name; and (4) the level of a specific relationship with its attendant unique particularities (1993, 42–43). 14. Friedman 1993, 44–52; Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable (1985). 15. These include several neoKantians discussed in chapter 3: Barbara Herman (1983); Adrian M. S. Piper (1987); Marcia Baron (1991). 16. For a philosophical account that argues that the coherence of the wedding vow is based on the priority of duty, see Susan Mendus, “Marital Faithfulness” (1989). 17. I take the phrase “horizon of interpretation” from Paul Ricoeur (1981). 18. “Abuse” in their title Abuse of Casuistry refers simultaneously to (1) the excesses of casuistry, questionable rationalizations of morally troubling action, for which casuistry became notorious at a certain point in its history; and to (2) the resulting historical discreditation of casuistry as a method, which the authors consider undue and hope to rectify. 19. I paraphrase these criticisms from John Arras (1991), 29–51. 20. In addition to Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of analogical conceptual translation between traditions, relevant contemporary contributions to moral theory include Lee Yearley (1990); Richard B. Miller (1991, 1996). Yearley uses extended analogical reasoning to consider Christian and Confucian conceptions of virtue, comparing Thomas Aquinas and Mencius. According to Yearley, this method reveals important “families of resemblances” that allow moral terms such as “courage” to have cross-traditional resonances, while at the same time it notes important differences that may underlie a variety of cross-traditional misunderstandings. Richard Miller uses an analogical method to explore overlap between the Christian pacifist and just war traditions, allowing him to highlight previously under-attended 378
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consensus and to creatively reinterpret the demands that conflict places on Christians. In his 1996 book, he expands his use of analogical reasoning, presenting non-cased-based casuistry as a prism for reflection between various moral issues that resolves certain weaknesses of principlism. 21. My conceptual analysis of this accomplishment is informed by Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) and Sabina Lovibond (1983). 22. See Jim Copeland (2003); Michael W. Peregrine (2002); Lawrence M. Metzger (2002); Marc Gunther (2002). 23. See Anti-Defamation League (1994). In the case study on ADL, I argue that its advocacy of differential sentencing for hate crimes, compared to otherwise similar crimes without that designated motivation, is appropriately more controversial than its hate crime tracking efforts. 24. See, for example, Melvin Salberg and Abraham H. Foxman, Letter to President William Clinton, August 3, 1992. 25. The optimism of “liberal feminism” is based on the assumed continuation of this process. Even feminist critics of liberalism maintain the importance of the process, while articulating obstructions of it embedded in prominent liberal notions of political agency and public/ private boundaries. 26. Several contemporary women who write on parenting use the gendered term “mothering” in a rhetorical, metaphorical way. They explicitly include in their definition fathers, non-biological mothers, and anyone who is caring concretely for young children. Yet they prefer to use the gendered term to signal that such moral work has been and continues to be done disproportionately by women. Recognizing a trade-off, I nonetheless prefer to use the term “parenting” since my focus is the parental work itself. Although I prefer the term “parenting,” I will use “mothering” when I am quot-
ing or paraphrasing those who use that term. 27. This description of Ruddick’s project comes from the cover of her book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1995). 28. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 37ff.; Ruddick 1995, 69. 29. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 33–35; Ruddick 1995, 89ff. 30. I borrow the metaphor of burdened virtue from Lisa Tessman (2005), who argues that to be successful in liberatory struggles, people struggling in liberatory movements may have to embody virtues that are not virtues of flourishing. 31. “Womanists” are critical of blindness to racial and class issues in branches of feminism that have been developed primarily by middle-class white women. In my analysis I focus on a few themes that cross-cut this richly diverse literature. For a concise definition of womanism and an overview of the history of the term, see Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan (1998). 32. This is my phrase, coined to represent Delores Williams’s focus on the imagery of “Mammy.” Williams (1993) emphasizes that archetypal Mammies cared for their charges devotedly and creatively within the constraints of severe injustice, without challenging the structural injustice itself. 33. The discussion of sacrifice in womanist literature is complex. Many womanist writers are overtly Christian and positively identify with the suffering of Jesus. However, they interpret the aim of embraced suffering to be survival, and they question the glorification of sacrifice. See Toinette M. Eugene (1989), and Delores Williams (1993). 34. See, e.g., Petra Bowden (1997), 45–55; Amy Rossiter (1988). 35. Toinette M. Eugene (1989) extensively explores the use of “Mother” as an honorific. 36. See www.childrensdefense.org.
37. For a detailed theoretical analysis of ethical interplay between micropractices, see Diana Fritz Cates’s Aristotelian argument that the internal ends of friendship properly constrain parenting (1997, 51–52). 38. Marilyn Friedman (1991) creatively extends the language of prima facie principlism to duties of care. 39. In one remarkable congressional debate, this pattern of deception was recognized as evidence of reflective disequilibrium. The fact that so many physicians admitted lying in order to obtain screening mammograms for Medicare patients was cited by members of Congress as one of several reasons to pass legislation including regular mammograms in Medicare coverage. (Before, Medicare paid only for mammograms ordered to address a documented reason for suspicion.) The Medicare policy on mammograms was subsequently adopted by many private insurers of younger women. Both Medicare and private insurers generally fund only acute care, not preventive services; therefore. the mammogram “exception” begs profound questions about the relative benefits of funding sickness versus funding wellness, questions that go well beyond the circumscribed policy change. 40. See Martha Nussbaum, “Perceptive Equilibrium,” in her Love’s Knowledge (1990), 168–94. 41. For examples in which Nussbaum presents loving perception and “the moral point of view” as exclusive standpoints between which moral agents oscillate, or alternatively examples in which she questions the dichotomy suggested by the language of “oscillation,” see Nussbaum 1990, 176–80, 183, 187; cf. 344–45, 347, 358, 361. Nussbaum’s ambivalence may reflect the fact that the literature she analyzes simultaneously embodies and questions dichotomized views of the relationship between “personal” and “moral” perspectives. Notes to pages 240–256 · 379
42. See Nussbaum 1990, esp. 93–94, 155–161, 183. 43. See Sara Ruddick, “Preservative Love,” in her Maternal Thinking (1995). 44. Nussbaum (1990) most explicitly recognizes a relationship between perceptive imagination and duties of partiality in the essay “’Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” 148–67. Analyzing Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum elucidates the connection between Maggie’s general filial duties and her sensitive communication with her father. At the same time, she emphasizes that no general norms adequately capture Maggie’s creative response to her father’s particular impending loss (of her in marriage). 45. My sample diagram is a modified version of schema employed by Tom L. Beauchamp and James Childress (1989), 30. 46. John Rawls (1971); Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (1988); Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (1989). 47. I take contemporary principlists to be making a similar argument when they morally defend their focus on the intermediate level of “principles” because of its overlap. For example, Tom Beauchamp and James F. Childress (1989) argue that no comprehensive moral theory developed to date completely passes tests of clarity, consistency, simplicity, comprehensiveness, and the ability to account for the full range of moral experience. Moreover, they note that cross-disciplinary input from various professional practices contributes to overlapping consensus at the level of intermediate principles. 48. Following in the tradition of Jürgen Habermas (1996), so-called discourse theorists emphasize metaphors of hearing, speaking, and conversation. Some liberal virtue theory is indebted to Habermas (1987), such as Gutmann and Thompson’s account of deliberative 380
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democracy (1996). Some feminist criticism draws on discourse theory, such as the work of Seyla Benhabib (1992). Several integrity theorists, including Jeffrey Blustein (1991), heavily emphasize perception. Neo-Aristotelians, led by Nussbaum (1990), have greatly revived attention to perception. Iris Murdoch (1971) combines Platonic and existentialist approaches to make questions of perception, and distorted perception, central in both her fiction and her philosophical work. 49. For an overview of discontent with the care/justice dichotomy in feminist theoretical literature, see Kathryn Tanner (1996). 50. Rosemarie Tong (1993, 4) summarizes the use of this distinction. 51. Nina Eliasoph’s (1998) complaints about the “evasion of politics” for lack of a “category for politics” in discourse were discussed in chapter 1. 7. Just Love 1. For an accessible introduction to the history of reflection on cardinal virtues, see Joseph Pieper (1980). 2. See Thomas Aquinas (1951, 1964, 1966) and Lee Yearley (1990), especially chapter 4. Yearley’s book provocatively connects to my project because he details how different cultural views of virtues have structural family resemblances and yet substantive differences as well. He also argues that analogical reasoning between traditions of moral reasoning can enhance understanding of all participant traditions as well as provide horizons of understanding that are not accessible in any of them singly. In other words, his approach to comparative religious ethics embodies many of the moral skills I link to impartiality-as-practice. 3. Thomas Aquinas (1964), section 2–2.123.5. For a related discussion, see Yearley 1990, 131. 4. In this way, MacIntyre makes an inverse mistake compared to those who
hold the idolatrous view of impartiality that he criticizes. While they pretend themselves beyond limits of finitude in their ability to attain an Archimedean point of view, MacIntyre assumes bonds of finitude are more constraining than they really are. By assuming that nothing short of mastery of a moral tradition offers the reasoner insight, he ignores much of the pragmatic bricolage of real moral agency. A challenge, then, for any vital conception of civic virtue is a realistic assessment of human finitude. For a developed argument on the importance of bricolage in moral life, see Jeffrey Stout (1988). 5. For related discussions, see David Little and Sumner B. Twiss (1978); Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, eds. (1992). 6. It is important to stress that I am using the term “moral languages,” not to refer to real linguistic languages, but rather as a metaphor for moral practices. Thus I am not contesting the important role of a common linguistic language in the political life of a multicultural polity where people may speak many languages at home. 7. Cates’s distinction between complacency and passivity is framed as a critique of Nel Noddings, who emphasized the “passivity” of care in her Caring (1984). While Cates is indebted to other aspects of Noddings’s account, she is concerned with the lack of judgment and the possibility of the “blank check problem” entailed by viewing compassion as passive. Personally, I do not favor Cates’s own term, complacency, because it has connotations of passivity in ordinary parlance, but I acknowledge my indebtedness to her by using the term as she does, while noting the caveat. 8. See Iris Marion Young (2000), chapter 2, especially 57–64; drawing on Emmanual Levinas (1981); Charles Taylor (1992). 9. Jürgen Habermas (1998, 2002) is one leading proponent of discourse
ethics, and Martha Nussbaum (1990, 2001) is one leading proponent of the stress on perception and moral “seeing.” 10. I was pressed to consider the relationship between my account of civic virtue and democratic dissent by my participation in the Indiana University Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institution’s interdisciplinary faculty seminar on dissent, 2003–2004. I am greatly indebted to my colleagues there for encouraging me to explore this connection: Richard Miller, Robert Ivie, David Williams, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, John Stanfield, and Jennifer Girod. 11. Iris Marion Young (1990), discussed at length in earlier chapters, exemplifies the prevalent use of the metaphor “play” in post-modern political theory. 12. When I use the term “civil disobedience,” I am presuming publicity of protest and of any associated lawbreaking; that is, I presume a strong distinction between civil disobedience and clandestine sabotage of the law for the sake of a moral vision. 13. Breast-feeding may be an exception in this regard, but even here the work is not only women’s work. There is much evidence that supportive fathers are a major factor in breast-feeding. Certainly, supportive medical professionals, employers, store owners, and public affect the practicality of breast-feeding. 14. For a history of the League, see Jule DeJager Ward (2000). 15. See Ward 2000, especially chapters 4–5. 16. For a developed argument on this point, see Jeffrey Stout (2004), 87, commenting on work by Robert Brandon. 17. The original founders were associated with Koinonia Farm, a racially integrated intentional Christian community in Georgia, during the 1960s. For a history of Habitat for Humanity that connects it to a wider discussion of civil Notes to pages 276–298
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society and religion, see Jerome P. Baggett (2001). 18. Quoted in Baggett 2001, 32. 19. See, e.g., Cristina Traina (1999). 20. For a developed critique of such dilemmatic presentation of ethical reflection, see William May’s critique of “quandary ethics” in the introduction to his Patient’s Ordeal, 1991. 21. See, e.g., Stephen Barr, “Looking for People Who Can Talk the Talk—in Other Languages,” Washington Post, 12 March 2002, B02. 22. For a related argument that the very category of “religion” is an academic construction, see e.g., Jonathan Z. Smith (1998). 23. In School District of Abingdon Township v. Schemp, U.S. 203 (1963), the Supreme Court first clearly articulated a distinction between the devotional reading of religious texts in public school settings and the academic study of religion as an object of secular study, including attention to literary and historical qualities of religion. The Court reaffirmed this distinction in Stone v. Graham 449 U.S. 39, 42 (1980). 24. The State of California’s department of education has pioneered the promotion of the academic study of religion for civic ends and is phasing in required religious studies for all state secondary schools, beginning in sixth grade. California’s program addresses the relationship between religion and social and political order in historical civilizations such as ancient Egypt and ancient Israel, requires reading sacred literature from a number of religious traditions, and analyzes the complex role of religion in American public life. For example, high school students are expected to understand the simultaneously religious and political force of events such as the First and Second Great Awakenings and the Social Gospel Movement. Critical analysis of positive and negative legacies of religious fervor are requested of students. 382
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By their senior year, high school students are expected to be able to discuss: “contributions of various religious groups to American civic principles and social reform movements (e.g., civil and human rights, individual responsibility and work ethic, antimonarchy and self-rule, worker protection, family-centered communities),” and also “incidences of religious intolerance in the United States (e.g., persecution of Mormons, antiCatholic sentiment, anti-Semitism).” Significantly, one of the most ethnically diverse states has responded to the challenges of education that result from such diversity by increasing academic attention to religion, not by attempting to bracket religion from the civic realm. A number of states are currently following California’s lead in considering the deliberate development of the academic study of religion in their social studies classes. See www.cde.ca.gove/be. 25. The reasons for my disparate assessments interlink with fuller appraisals of these organizations in the case studies, but here I focus only on implications for civic education in schools. 26. For an historical and philosophical overview of American pragmatism, see Cornell West (1989). Appendix 1. Banner on the MADD national headquarters Web site, 2004. 2. In 1982, 27,163 traffic fatalities in the United States were alcohol-related, accounting for 60 percent of the total 43,945 fatalities (www.madd.org/stats). 3. Gary Ellis, director of marketing for MADD, telephone interview, 8 April 2004. See the Mothers Against Drunk Driving Web site. 4. Note that while MADD focused on the 21-year-old drinking age as a result of empirical research on the disproportionate number of drunk driving accidents caused by younger drivers— implicitly an exercise in political im-
par tiality—the disparity between the legal age for drinking and other adult responsibilities or privileges also raises questions about impartiality-as-practice. Recall that during the Vietnam War, many states lowered their legal drinking age from 21 to 18 in response to the complaints of young people who were considered old enough to be drafted into military service but too young to order a drink. 5. See “America’s 100 Best Charities,” Worth Magazine, December 2001, 84; The Gallup Organization (2000), 47–50. 6. Mary Jo Burgess, MADD National Field Coordinator’s Office, telephone interview, 31 March 2004. 7. For a list of MADD corporate sponsors, see www.madd.org/aboutus/ corporatesponsors. 8. See David A. Harris (1999); Amnesty International U.S.A. (2004). 9. See Mothers Against Drunk Driving, “Mission Statement” at www.madd. org/About-Us/Mission-Statement.aspx. 10. “MADD’S Move Turns Tougher on Liquor Ads,” Advertising Age 65 (47): 1994. 11. See National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (2002). 12. See also C. Reinarman (1988). 13. See Nathan C. Belth (1979), chapter 1. 14. For a detailed account of the Leo Frank case, as well as an extensive bibliography on the case, see www. crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/ not_guilty/frank/. 15. See www.adl.org/Interfaith/ Oberammergau/. 16. The relationship between Gibson and the ADL re-ignited two years later, when Gibson, arrested for drunk driving, unleashed tirade of anti-Semitic expletives at a police officer that became nationally publicized. Gibson issued an apology to the Jewish people through ADL, and ADL offered to work with him on “rehabilitation from the disease
of prejudice” after he successfully completed “rehabilitation from the disease of alcoholism.” ADL, 2006. 17. See, e.g., www.whitefuture.com/ html/protocol.html. 18. See Henry Ford, Letter to Mr. Sigmund Livingston, Anti-Defamation League, 7 January 1942 at www.adl.org/ ADLHistory/ford_letter.asp. 19. Such excesses marked the response of Indiana University, my own university at the time, to student and World Church of the Creator member Benjamin Smith. Neither Smith’s distribution of racist and anti-Semitic posters on campus nor his classroom diatribes against Jews and other minorities were considered serious enough to warrant strong university action until July 4, 1998, when Smith catapulted over the speech/action distinction, going on a shooting spree in Indiana and Illinois that killed two and seriously injured others in random attacks on African Americans, Jews, and Koreans. 20. Phylis Gerably and Laura Kam Issacharoff, Anti-Defamation League, Israel, telephone interview 17 June 2004. 21. Michael Lieberman, Civil Rights Policy Planning Center, AntiDefamation League, Washington, D.C., telephone interview, 17 May 2004. 22. R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992). 23. Michael Lieberman interview, 2004. 24. Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476 (1993). 25. My analysis of organ donation policy draws extensively on a previously published paper, “Sharing Our Body and Blood” (Mongoven 2003). Because I draw upon data compiled under federal contract by the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS) as cited, this work was supported in part by Health Resources and Services Administration contract 231-00-0115. The content is the responsibility of myself alone and does not reflect Notes to pages 316–342 ·
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the views or policies of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, nor does mention of trade names or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. 26. United Network for Organ Sharing, 2007 data. 27. In recent years live donors have increased to about 40 percent of donors and account for about one-quarter of transplants. (One cadaveric donor typically results in more transplants than one live donor, since multiple organs, including life-necessary organs such as the heart, can be taken from cadaveric donors.) 28. See, e.g., Emily Yellin, “A Teacher’s Gift? Why, Most Certainly,” New York Times, 18 December 1999, A12; Lisa Belkin, “Life’s Work: Angels Amid the Aridity of Office Life,” New York Times, 26 May 2002. 29. Lee Jenkins, “Mourning Goes Home Four Days after Surgery.” New York Times, 24 December 2003. 30. See, e.g., Stephanie Strom, “Giving of Yourself, Literally, to People You’ve Never Met,” New York Times, 27 July 2003. 31. Stephanie Strom, “An Organ Donor’s Generosity Raises Questions of How Much is Too Much,” New York Times, 17 August 2003. 32. Denise Grady, “Donor’s Death at Hospital Halts Some Liver Surgeries,” New York Times, 16 January 2002, B2; Lydia Polgreen, “State Fines Mount Sinai $66,000 and Bans Live Liver Transplants Indefinitely,” New York Times, 21 April 2002. 33. Jane Gottlieb, “Quality of Care is Real Issue in Reporter’s Death,” Albany Times Union, 27 March 2002; Susan Saulny, “Mt. Sinai Lays out Plans for Better Transplant Ward,” New York Times, 22 March 2002; Janny Scott, “Plan Approved for Improving Hospital Care for Liver Donors,” New York Times, 20 December 2002; Lydia Polgreen, “State to 384
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Notes to pages 344–351
Give Liver Donors Safeguards in Transplants,” New York Times, 26 September 2003. 34. Institute of Medicine Health Care Quality Initiative (1999); Robert J. Blendon (2002). The ballpark figure of 100,000 deaths is likely an underestimate, since related studies focus only on hospital deaths and cases in which an identifiable mistake can be isolated. 35. Paul Tillich (1957) developed the oft-cited definition of a symbol as a “sign that points to while participating in something beyond itself.” 36. William F. May elaborates the moral insight of such visceral repugnance in the chapter on organ donation in his Patient’s Ordeal (1991). 37. Since “whole brain death” is a consensus legal standard of death in the U.S., I will not address continuing diversity among both philosophers and the general the public regarding the felt coherence of that definition of death. But certainly that diversity is relevant to how one approaches and perceives organ donation decisions. Continuing social ambivalence and diversity in defining death, even in the face of a clear legal definition, suggests using great caution in respecting family wishes on donation. 38. See. e.g., William DeJong (1998). 39. Denys Arcand, Jesu de Montreal, Montreal: World Films, 1990. 40. Consider changes in organ donation slogans in light of these different possible explanations of success. The long-standing slogan “Give the Gift of Life” focused attention on the organ recipient without flagging the investment of the invisible sacrificers. The new slogan is “Share your Life; Share your Decision.” This slogan encourages families to talk about organ donation together when no tragedy has occurred— a more communal deliberation than simply signing or declining to sign a donor card. Because decisions about organ donation, whether pro or con, are
easier for families who definitively know the deceased’s wishes, this slogan has the potential to ease the trauma of the sacrificers as well as to encourage donation. The slogan introduces the mutuality between sacrificer and redeemed, and the mutuality between deceased potential organ donors and their families, thus bringing together the two alternative definitions of success. From the standpoint of the mutuality criterion, this slogan is preferable. However, its history is troubling. Ethically the concern to facilitate the family’s grief-burdened deliberation stands independently of the outcome of their decision. Yet this slogan was designed only after statistical research indicated that the practice of such pre-death family conferencing would more often than not increase donation. 41. See, e.g., Ann Mongoven (2000). 42. Passed in 1999, the legislation requires that the primary approacher (the person who informs the family of the option to donate and requests a considered decision) either be an OPO staffer or have completed a training course sponsored by the OPO. 43. Public rhetoric of organ procurement professionals emphasizes respect for any decision, whether donation or nondonation. Yet in several situations within OPO professional circles, I have been surprised by the extent of the anger expressed toward nondonors. For a fuller discussion of this anger, see Ann Mongoven (2000), 170–97. 44. United States Department of Health and Human Services (1998). 45. For example, an increasing number of commentators urge that the U.S. switch to a system of “presumed consent.” Presumed consent policies presume that people are organ donors unless they explicitly opt out, as opposed to current policy, which demands either an explicit decision to become a donor or explicit consent of the family. This means that any suddenly deceased person
without evidence of “opt out” could have their organs removed. See, e.g., Laurie G. Futterman (1998). 46. UNOS data 1997–2004; cost estimates from Richard H. Hauboldt (1999). 47. For a provocative ethical critique of transplant trends based on cost/ benefit considerations, see Jennifer Girod (1999). 48. It is remarkable that transplant examples are rarely invoked in contemporaneous discussions of overaggressive treatment of the dying, discussions that are now a mainstay in biomedical literature. 49. Significantly, other organs—kidneys, hearts, lungs—have traditionally been allocated differently than livers in some ways. My comments focus on debates about liver allocation. Some of my points may be transferable to allocation issues for other organs, but others not. 50. In response to criticism, Department of Health and Human Services ceased using the term “sickest first.” The DHHS has clarified that “futile” transplants should not be pursued and claims that this means the policy is not strictly speaking “sickest first.” Since the policy continues to heavily weight medical urgency as a criteria of transplant, I follow many commentators who continue to use the label “sickest first” for its shorthand convenience. 51. The ethics of wartime triage provide an interesting analogy. While war is obviously different from the current environment of transplantation, there is a tragic similitude in the relative scarcity of necessary medical resources. Triage is explicitly designed to address urgency, likely benefit, and tradeoffs between them. Thus, on the battlefield both the most dire injured and the most likely to survive may be sidelined in order to care first for the urgent-and-likely-to-survive casualties. The “sickest first” policy simply ignores the frequent tradeoffs between urgency and likely benefit. Notes to pages 351–357 ·
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It thus subverts the goals of triage by consistently prioritizing the most urgent cases. 52. In fact, the policy of anonymity is beginning to informally erode, as recipient families clamor to learn more about and meet the family of their cadaveric donors and as donor families seek to learn the results of the gift. An analogy can be made with developments in adoption, in which the maintenance of a policy of protected anonymity continues but is also undermined by the actual efforts of many adopted children to find their biological parents. Increasing contact between donors and recipients is being facilitated in cases where that is desired by both parties. This trend is interesting in the light of the arguments about organ donation mythology made in this case study: many organ donors and recipients seek substantive mutuality with those they have touched through the practice of transplantation, not just the comfort of their general love for humanity.
386
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53. Jennifer Girod (2000) employs the language of “complicity,” arguing that to become an organ donor is to become complicit in patterns of resource allocation that are questionable. 54. For much of my life, my own decision to be a designated organ donor was unsupported by the virtuous habits endorsed here. Only a chance invitation into the world of organ donation policy forced me to engage in the analogical reasoning that made the decision appropriately more complex. At the same time, I was puzzled by the resistance of some policy-makers to such engagement though it seemed demanded by the ambiguous data and ethically tension-filled decisions they must confront. I now attribute that resistance to the power of the idolatrous conceptions of civic virtue, with its overcelebration of sacrificial love. While I remain an organ donor, my more informed decision to remain one is also an appropriately more ambivalent one.
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. defined, 39, 46, 48, 183, 200; dilemma in, 175; erotic love and, 184, 191–92, 195; feminist theologians on, 48; friendship and, 42, 193–95; gender and, 11, 34, 184, 193; idolatry and, 184, 185; inclusive, 46, 184, 198; integration in, 184; intimate love and, 184, 191–92, 193, 195, 197, 312; justice and, 198; Kierkegaard on, 42; Lewis on, 376n15; morality and, 11; motivation and, 45, 197; mutuality and, 46, 48, 197; as neighbor love, 10–11, 34, 39, 40–43, 175, 183–84, 198, 376n15; Niebuhr on, 45, 47, 199; political life and, 47; reconstructive theology on, 184, 190, 197–98; self-love and, 40–42, 184, 190; as self-sacrifice, 48. See also care; impartiality; parenting; particular others Alcoholics Anonymous, 168. See also MADD Amish, 143, 147 analogical reasoning, 17, 378n20; ADL use of, 237; care and, 221, 232; casuistry and, 233, 367n7; civic virtue and, 302, 312; development, 299; education and, 303, 310; Enron as, 236; in impartiality-aspractice, 232, 233, 253, 264, 266–67, 269, 270, 273; micro/macro levels of, 221, 232–35, 267; moral practices and, 273, 289, 377n11, 380n2; in parenting, 195, 247, 248, 251; in politics, 252; practice
AARP, 252 abolition, 103, 133, 239 abuse: care and, 214, 226, 250–51; CDF and, 246; child, 48, 209, 226, 250–51; effects of, 214; impartiality and, 101, 207, 209, 210; partiality and, 226; rates of, 246; response to, 251; sexual, 209, 214, 226, 250–51; substance, 4, 168, 207, 240. See also MADD Abuse of Casuistry (Toulmin), 233, 378n18 ascessibility, 17, 26; versus comprehensibility, 132, 133, 140, 143–44 active passivity, 257 Act-Up, 21, 285–86, 291 Adams, John, 23 adoption, 197, 272 affirmative action, 217 African American, 145, 194, 295; churches as resistance sites, 299; feminist literature, 244; Senator Moseley Braun, 134–35; Martin Luther King Jr., 138–39, 142, 299, 365n5 After Virtue (MacIntyre) 5, 373n44, 374n47, 377n11 agape: altruism and, 372n30; ambiguous, 198; antagonistic concepts of, 40–41, 46, 48, 184, 186, 195, 376n15; benevolence, 41–42; Butler denied, 40–42; care and, 200; civic virtue and, 11, 56–57; covenant and, 192; cultivating, 183; 403
extended by, 236, 238, 270, 292; religious, 297, 300, 301; sacrifice and, 244; translation and, 277; Yearley on, 380n2 Anti-Defamation League (ADL): activities, 237–38; analogical reasoning of, 237; anti-Semitism and, 4, 237; Bosnia and, 237–38; endorsments, 309; genocide and, 237; hate crimes and, 4, 237, 378n23; Holocaust and, 4, 237; legislation supported by the, 237; Muslims and, 237–38; partiality practice of, 237; restricted justification and, 238; vulnerability and, 37 Aquinas, Thomas, 118, 274, 275, 375n5, 378n20 archangel, 66, 85, 87, 88–89, 90, 98, 99, 370n14 Archimedean point, 175, 175, 204; Communion and the, 187; dialogic, 265; as a spatial metaphor, 66, 91; virtue seeks the, 290, 381n4 Aristotle, 366n10; Aquinas and, 118; on internal good, 178; on moral practice, 26, 40, 102, 115, 230, 257, 279; on morality, 100; on perception, 255–56, 257, 380n48; on polis, 28, 160; teleology and, 257; on trust, 213; on virtue, 26, 41, 100, 240, 367n4. See also neoAristotelians Audi, Robert, 124, 125, 132, 133, 144, 374n3 Bacon, Francis, 33, 187 Baggett, Jerome, 298 Baier, Annette, 212, 213, 214, 373n40 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 118, 369n34 banker-monk anecdote, 151–52 Barber, Benjamin, 58–59, 124, 163; on civic virtue transformed, 165, 166, 168–69; on civil society, 164, 167; on gender, 166–67; A Place for Us, 164; on voluntary associations, 167–68 Baron, Marcia: challenges impartiality, 74–75, 76, 100, 101, 104, 370n7; disputes Deigh, 209–10 Barry, Brian, 369n41, 370n1 Beauchamp, Tom, 380nn45,47 Beguine communities, 376n13 Bell, Daniel, 53 Bellah, Robert, 5 404
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Index
Benhabib, Seyla: criticized, 369n38; definitional identity, 96; discourse theory, 380n48; on essential agents, 97; on impartiality, 215; on MacIntyre, 373n40; moral point of view models, 96; on perception, 256–57, 258; on Rawls, 371n24 Bennett, William, 6 Bentham, Jeremy, 33, 367n6 Berkowitz, Peter, 31, 32 Berlin, Isaiah, 22, 366n15 bias: affirmative action and, 217; caretaker, 11; foregrounding enables, 211–12, 375n1; Friedman on, 212; gender, 9, 11, 13, 78; hate crimes as, 4, 237, 378n23; impartiality and, 212; inappropriate, 212–13; moral philosophy, 213; proper, 213–14; welfare, 272; wet nurse, 296. See also Anti-Defamation League bishop and the chambermaid vignette, 67, 76–77, 79; civic virtue in, 122; denied, 269; effects, 128, 129, 136, 211, 269; ghosts of the, 129–30, 133–39; interrogator in the, 95; legacy of the, 73, 82–83, 120, 121–22, 211; SVLO cases and the, 74, 110, 120 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 373n46. See also gender Blum, Lawrence, 101, 370n2, 372nn28,30 Blustein, Jeffrey, 106, 107, 225, 372n32, 380n48 Boff, Leonardo, 187. See also libertarians Bok, Sissela, 235–36, 247 Bowling Alone (Sandel), 375n17 breast-feeding, 250, 381n13; La Leche League and, 4, 146, 293–96; slaves and, 296 bridgeheads, 276–77 Brint, Michael, 371n19 Brueggemann, Walter, 376n20 Brunner, Emile, 199 Buber, Martin, 371n26 Buddhism, 151, 297, 300, 301 Bush, George H. W., 6 Butler, Joseph, 40–41, 43 Cahill, Lisa Sowle, 189–90, 377n24 California Department of Education, 382n24
cardinal virtues. See virtue, cardinal care: abuse and, 214, 226, 250–51; activeness, 377n12; agape and, 200; caregivers and, 48–50, 51, 54, 96; caretakers and, 7, 8, 9, 11, 124, 205–206, 221; cognitive, 222; communication in, 230; compassion in, 268; containment of, 229, 253; conventions of, 223–26, 264; defined, 222, 230, 233; democracy and, 232; denigration of, 58, 154; devaluation of, 51, 56, 200, 292, 293; duty and, 222, 224, 226, 227–29, 253, 264, 379n38; and equal attention to all, 85, 104, 205, 214–15, 216; ethics of, 8, 56, 95, 100, 124, 200, 228, 268; fair-minded, 205–206, 221; feminism and, 56, 268; gendered, 9, 35, 51; imagination in, 231; impartiality and, 220, 222, 223, 230–32, 264; impartialityas-practice and, 220, 222, 266–67, 293; infrastructures, 223, 302; internal ends to, 222–23; justice and, 8, 94, 223, 266– 67, 380n49; labor of, 9, 10, 56, 83, 121, 150, 166–67, 272; macro-practice in, 267; micro-practices of, 232, 239, 246, 252; morality in, 8, 16, 56, 120, 220; partiality in, 16, 222–26; for particular others, 222, 227–29, 267; passivity in, 377n12; patience in, 230–31, 232; perception in, 230; personal impartiality in, 223, 229–30; political life and, 95, 232, 268, 292, 302; as practical reasoning, 222, 230–32; as practice, 222–29, 230, 244, 267; prima facie principlism and, 140, 143, 253–54, 260, 379n38; prudence and, 230, 232; reflective equilibrium and, 229, 254, 267; SVLO cases and, 229, 260, 267, 268; virtues of, 230–32; vulnerability, 225, 226, 231, 232. See also Friedman, Marilyn; impartiality; impartiality-as-practice; partiality Caring (Noddings), 377n12, 381n7 Carter, Jimmy, and Rosalynn Carter, 298 case-based reasoning. See casuistry casuistry: Abuse of Casuistry, 233, 378n18; analogical reasoning and, 233, 367n7; case-based, 233, 367n7; criticized, 233; defined, 233, 367n7; discredited, 378n18; Hare on, 370n8; religion and, 301; revival of, 25
Cates, Diana Fritz, 195, 279, 282, 376n17, 379n37, 381n7 Catholic Family Movement (CFM), 294 Chardin, Teilhard de, 187, 375n7 Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), 246 Childress, James F., 374n6, 380n47 Christian neighbor love. See agape Christianity: Act-Up protest and, 21, 285–86, 291; agape and, 10, 34, 175, 183, 184, 198; Catholic, 285, 294, 301; friendship revival in, 194–95; God revisited in, 185–89; impartiality and, 174; love reinterpreted by, 200–201; neighbor love of, 10–11, 42, 46, 376n15; paradigm of love-as-sacrifice, 198; political life and, 44–46, 48; sacraments, 188; saints and, 175, 176, 183, 191, 193, 200–201; special loves, 211; Trinity of, 175, 187, 189; virtue and, 8, 10, 291, 378n20; YMCA and, 299. See also agape; care; impartiality; love; religion citizenship, 50, 272; autonomy and, 58; bonds, 20, 37; civic virtue and, 19, 21–23, 26, 29, 52, 53; civil society and, 166; communitarian, 281; democratic, 232; economic man and, 149, 150, 152; exclusion and, 164, 165; and the Fall, 6; good, 29, 146, 149; home and, 53; as identity, 52; love and, 56; lower status, 53; metaphors, 150, 242; negative, 160; parenting and, 251; private, 127, 128; revisited, 123; roles and, 163; universal, 61–62, 63; virtues, 21, 22, 26, 128 civic education, 305, 307, 309; in science, 303; thick social studies as, 302, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310 civic friendship, 26, 194 civic labor, 10 civic life, 12–13, 17, 20, 365n3, 375n17 civic-mindedness, 4, 5, 60 civic republicanism, 4; civic virtue and, 34, 52, 59, 158; criticisms of, 61; development, 22, 61; focus of, 22; overlaps communitarians, 57, 58–59; Sandel on, 154, 158–59, 164–65 civic virtue: Adams’s, 23; adoption and, 197, 272; agape and, 11, 56–57; analogical reasoning and, 302, 312; Barber on, 165, 166, 168–69; in the bishop and Index
·
405
chambermaid tale, 122; care organizations as sites of, 292–96; caregivers disqualified from, 148–50; challenge to, 27; citizen character and, 19, 21–23, 26, 29; citizenship, 52, 53; civic activity and, 30; civic republicanism and, 34, 52, 59, 158; civil society and, 13, 51–54, 291–92, 366n16; civility and, 4, 20, 21, 29; classic roots of, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 52, 274; coherence, 7, 34, 48, 63, 161; communitarians, 12, 57, 58, 59, 149, 151, 153–55, 169; critics of, 28, 59–65; decline of, 52; defined, 26–27, 33–34, 50, 57, 125, 234, 272, 274; de-gendering, 13–14, 34, 113, 124, 272, 302; deontology, 24, 25, 264; dissatisfaction with discourse, 367n1; domesticity and, 50–51, 53, 54, 59; education and, 302–10; ethics and, 124; “the Fall” of, 4; fall narrative and, 5–7, 9, 18, 19, 21–23, 55, 123, 139, 168; family values and, 50–51; feminist theologians and, 47–48; friendship and, 26, 194–95; gendered, 9, 30, 54–56; golden age and, 4, 19–20, 21, 23, 271; heroes and, 7, 22–23, 161; human finitude and, 381n4; ideals, 28, 38, 48, 52, 54–56, 62, 66; ideologies problematic to, 9–11, 49, 54–57; impartiality and, 15, 16, 18, 123, 124, 270, 272, 275; innocence of, 27–34; and just love, 18, 55, 57, 270, 271–73, 312; La Leche League as, 4, 114, 146, 293–96; language of, 19, 26, 29; law and, 271; liberalism and, 31; loss of, 4–7; love and, 11, 14, 18, 197, 311; MADD and, 4, 14–16, 18–19, 53, 55, 123–24, 292–93, 309; martial undertones of, 30–31, 52; martyr complex and, 43–48, 244–45, 268, 272, 283; masculinity as a, 9, 30, 34, 272; measuring, 5; metaphors, 14, 17, 57, 58, 148, 151, 289, 292; missing values, 19–23; modernism and, 22; moral category, 15; moral habits for, 274; mutuality and, 153; need for, 6–7; neutrality and, 150, 152, 153; overlapping consensus on, 125; partialists and, 131; passion in, 133, 272; polis and, 28; political theory dichotomy and, 11–13, 14–15, 29; politics and, 18, 51, 55, 406
·
Index
57, 147, 157, 173, 232, 311; pragmatism and, 310–11; proponents, 124, 374n11; prudence, 275; public discourse and, 20–21, 26, 367n1; public space and, 20, 124; rational dispassion and, 33; redefining, 7–8, 15–18, 33–34; rediscovered virtues of, 23–26; religion and, 18, 273, 296–302, 306–307; revival, 22; rhetoric, 10, 11, 34, 52–53, 139; sacrificial ideals of, 43–48, 244–45, 268, 272, 283; Sandel on, 23, 114, 155, 157–58, 159, 160–61, 163; secular, 273; self-restraint and, 16, 17, 33, 127, 139–40, 374n8; social capital and, 375n17; suffrage and, 29, 53, 55, 239, 287; theoretical accounts of, 139; theory, 12–13, 26–27; tolerance and choice, 150–53; transformed, 56–57, 153, 162–64, 271–73, 275, 302, 310–12; unencumbered self and, 154–58; virtue and, 125; volunteers and, 20, 30, 53, 54; “witness,” 47, 146, 147; Young criticizes, 60–65. See also Anti-Defamation League; domesticity; gender; good life; ideals; identity; impartiality-aspractice; MADD; public justification; Rawls, John; religion; translation civil disobedience, 29, 239, 278, 381n12; Act-Up and, 21, 285–86, 291; African American churches as sites of, 299. See also civil rights; King, Martin Luther, Jr. civil rights: abolition and, 103, 133, 239; civil disobedience and, 21, 29, 239, 278, 381n12; constitutionalism and, 32, 128, 302, 374n2; King and, 138–39, 142, 299, 365n5; racism and, 114, 192, 194, 278; rhetoric, 139, 278; SCLC and, 299; suffrage and, 29, 53, 55, 239, 287 civil society: Barber on, 164–66, 167, 168, 169; border regions, 298; civic virtue and, 13, 51–54, 291–92, 366n16; communitarian, 164, 291–92; explorers and theorists, 57–58, 124; libertarian, 164; as political life, 164, 167; rhetoric, 52–53; strong democratic, 164; voluntary associations and, 163, 298; women contribute to, 293 civility, 4, 20, 21, 29 Clinton, Bill, 3, 6, 167, 365n5
Cobb, John, 375nn7,9 coherence, 107, 108; civic virtue and, 7, 34, 48, 63, 161; impartiality and, 101, 203, 219, 220, 236, 238, 269, 369n40; Kantian, 258; MacIntyre and, 116–21, 373n46; political, 310; scientific, 175; theological, 301, 378n16 Collins, Patricia Hill, 244, 245 communion of saints metaphor, 193 communitarianism, 4, 6, 11, 373n46; abstraction by, 92; Barber criticized, 166; Beguines and, 376n13; central figures in, 114; challenges liberals, 12, 27; citizen defined by, 281; civic republicanism and, 57, 58–59; civic virtue and, 12, 57, 58, 59, 149, 153–55, 169; civil society defined by, 164, 291–92; dichotomies, 13–15; feminism and, 113–14, 121; focus of, 12, 16, 60, 61, 112, 269, 281; founders of, 154; gender ignored by, 113–14; impartiality and, 65, 67, 120, 121, 124, 169, 269; justice and, 92; liberalism and, 12, 27, 269, 281; partialists as, 105, 112–20, 121, 124, 153, 168–69, 377n10, 380n48; as political life, 12, 112; Sandel as a, 114, 124, 366n10; SVLO and, 83; volunteerism criticized by, 58. See also Etzioni, Amitai; MacIntyre, Alisdair; Sandel, Michael; Taylor, Charles; Walzer, Michael communities: Amish, 143, 147; Beguine, 376n13; development corporations for, 160; ideals of, 60; intermediate, 58; MADD, 114; Quaker, 300; religious, 296–302; residential community association (RCA) and, 53; Responsive Community journal and, 374n12 compassion: caring as, 268; choosing to feel, 279; empathy, 181, 188, 228, 237, 279–80, 297, 381n7; God’s, 188; impartial, 75, 101–102, 104, 372n28; lack of, 228; motivational, 297; mutual disinterest and, 94; omniscient, 88–91; passive, 381n7; SVLO and, 103–104, 105; vulnerability and, 279, 280; women’s, 35 complacency, 279, 280, 282, 381n7 comprehensibility, versus accessibility, 132, 133, 138
comprehensive view of the good, 127, 128, 136, 143, 255, 261–63, 268 Confucianism: impartiality and, 76–77, 78, 95; obligation and, 297; virtue and, 378n20 consensus: medical, 146; moral, 262; rabbinical, 300; solo, 95–96. See also overlapping consensus considered judgments, 258, 264, 370n12 constitutionalism, 32, 128, 302, 374n2 contract, defined, 196. See also coverture; marriage; social contract theory Cottingham, John, 369n41, 370n1, 377n10 courage, 274, 378n20 covenants: agapic fidelity in, 193; as bonds, 195–96; ethics of, 195; God’s, 186, 195–96; Jewish, 195; love and, 199; marriage norms of, 376n20 coverture, 36, 37, 38 critical fair-mindedness, 64, 65, 83, 97, 219; in caretakers, 205–206, 221; de-gendered, 268; disinterested judge as, 99; feminists and, 68, 114, 268; hobbled, 121; impartiality as, 75, 79, 82, 87, 98, 101, 173, 220–21, 268–69; partiality and, 121; personal impartiality and, 204; political life requires, 73, 220; public, 176; theology and, 201, 203 Daniels, Norman, 255, 262, 263 Darwall, Stephen, 371n20 death, 168, 228, 309 definitional identity, 96 de-gendering: of civic virtue, 13–14, 34, 113, 124, 272, 302; domesticity, 51; fairmindedness and, 268; politics, 268; religious groups, 299 Deigh, John, 209–10, 377n10 deliberation, 90, 94, 215; on common good, 159; communal, 251; Habermas on, 374n2; Kantian, 102, 121; moral, 103, 283, 300, 301; political, 128, 161; public, 136, 137; rational, 125, 128, 132, 134, 135, 366n13, 374n2 deliberative field model, 102–103, 121 democracy: care and, 232; cardinal virtues and, 16, 274, 276, 289; civic virtue and, 27, 271, 311; constitutionalism, 374n2; courage in, 274; deliberative, Index
·
407
128; discourse in, 275; faith in, 206; goals, 275; Jews and, 300; pragmatism and, 310–11; proceduralism, 374n2; rational deliberation, 366n13, 374n2 Democracy and Disagreement (Gutmann and Thompson), 145 Democracy’s Discontent (Sandel), 154 deontology, 217; of civic virtue, 24, 25, 264; defined, 289; ethics, 102, 106, 228, 367n1; impartiality and, 24, 25, 264, 290; Kantian, 264; King’s speech as, 138; principles, 26; Ramsey’s, 199; reason and, 33, 62, 84, 85; reflective equilibrium and, 262 Derrida, Jacques, 60, 367n8 dialogical politics, 98 dilemma: of impartiality, ch. 4, 173–74, 176, 201, 203, 267; of love, 173, 184, 201, 203, 267; of objectivity, 173, 184, 201, 203, 267 disagreement, 126, 127; on breast-feeding, 146; Christian, 200; liberal, 374n9; moral, 128, 262; political, 129, 144–45, 162 disciplined vulnerability, 16–17; civic virtue and, 312; defined, 279, 281, 284; dissent and, 287–88; friendship and, 279–80; impartiality demands, 231, 232, 249, 270, 292; judgment and, 280; MADD and, 280; restricted justification in, 284; virtuous, 279–80, 281, 282, 284. See also reciprocity; translation discourse, 17, 380n48; civic virtue and, 20–21, 26, 367n1; democratic, 275; ethics, 367n1, 380n48, 381n9; impartiality and, 265–67; mutuality in, 128, 129, 138, 143; political theory, 146; public, 20–21, 26, 136, 137, 367n1 discourse ethics, 98, 284, 367n1, 381n9 disinterested judge archetype, 98–99. See also critical fair-mindedness Diversity and Distrust (Macedo), 145, 153 domesticity: civic virtue and, 50–51, 53, 54, 59; conventions, 36, 238; gender and, 9, 10, 34–39, 51; household labor and, 36–37; Jewish, 62; love and, 198; modern, 38; rhetoric, 35, 36, 38; virtue and, 38. See also care, labor of; social contract theory 408
·
Index
dominance, 136, 374n13 drunk driving. See Lightner, Candy; MADD duty: care and, 222, 226, 227–29, 253, 264, 379n38; defined, 262; Friedman on affection in, 224, 226, 227, 228–29; impartiality-as-practice and, 263; of partiality, 227, 254, 257–58; perceptive imagination and, 380n44 economic man: as a citizen, 149, 150, 152; civic virtue and, 148–49; Enron and, 236; malignancy of, 147–53; paradigm, 93, 371n22; politics and, 152; Rawls and, 93, 95; Sandel on, 155 economic policy, 155–56 education, 153, 248; Boston, 305–306; California, 382n24; civic virtue and, 302–10; language and, 304, 305–306; organ donor, 309; political, 303; religious, 306–308; thick social studies as, 302, 304, 306, 308, 310 Eliasoph, Nina, 269, 380n51 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 30 empathy: analogical reasoning and, 303, 310; caring, 268; compassion and, 94, 188, 228, 237, 279–80, 297, 381n7; human capacity for, 181; impartial, 75, 101–102, 104, 372n28; modal imagination and, 102–103; omniscient, 88–91; SVLO and, 103–104, 105; women’s, 35 Enron and impartiality, 236 epistemology, 117, 118, 119, 251, 373n46 equal attention to all, 85, 104, 205, 214–15, 216. See also impartiality; partiality equal regard, 46, 87, 218, 370nn4,8 Equality and Partiality (Nagel), 83–84 erotic love, 43, 184, 191–92, 195, 250–51, 376n15. See also love; parenting essential models, 84–86, 96, 97, 191, 371n24 ethics: applied, 253; care, 8, 56, 95, 100, 124, 200, 228, 268; civic virtue and, 124; covenantal, 195; deontology and, 24, 25, 264; discourse, 367n1, 381n9; duty and, 367n5; gender-coded, 186; of human knowledge, 189; of incarnated God, 189–90; narrative, 25, 367n7; political, 175, 203; postmodernism and,
25; principlist, 24, 75, 140, 143, 253–54, 380n57; renewed, 189; rule-based, 25, 135; situation, 198; theory and practice of, 17, 297; utilitarianism and, 24, 25, 33, 264, 367n6; virtue and, 25. See also civic virtue; particular others; practice Etzioni, Amitai, 5, 113, 124, 154, 374n12 Eugene, Toinette M., 195, 245, 379n35 existentialism, 380n48 faith: in democracy, 206, 296; good, 226; King’s, 128; liberal, 125; in observation, 175; rationality of, 374n3; religious, 132–33, 296; in science, 177, 179, 180, 181, 184, 192, 232; selfish, 148. See also religion fall narrative, 5–7, 9, 18, 19, 21–23, 55, 123, 168; rhetoric of the, 5, 139 family values, 50–51 Farley, Margaret, 376n20 Farley, Wendy, 185, 192 femininity: identity and, 13–14, 187, 272; labels, 268; and labor, 10 feminism: abstraction and, 92; African American, 244; agape and, 48, 376n15; care and, 56, 268; communitarianism and, 113–14, 121; contract theory and, 93; critical fair-mindedness and, 68, 114, 268; divisions in, 55–56; Friedman and, 114, 370n11; gender issues and, 267–69; Habermas on, 367n1; history, 55–56; labels, 268; liberal, 56, 369n43, 378n25; MacIntyre critics and, 114, 117; monological reasoning and, 371n25; politics and, 268; Rawls challenged by, 95; reflective equilibrium and, 112; science critics in, 182; theoretical literature and, 380n49; womanists and, 244, 245, 379nn3,33. See also feminist theologians; suffrage feminist, defined, 268, 369n43 feminist theologians: on agape, 48; civic virtue redefined by, 47–48; criticize Niebuhr, 47, 48; on erotic love, 191, 192; on gender issues, 191, 267–69; on Jesus’ sacrifice, 198; justice and, 47; love’s meaning and, 47; on oppression, 186; self-sacrifice and, 48 Fletcher, Joseph, 198
foregrounding, 211–12, 375n1 Foucault, Michel, 367n8 Frazer, Elizabeth, 113, 373n40 freedom from versus freedom for, 366n15 Fried, Charles, 372n30 Friedman, Marilyn: ADL and, 237; on bias, 212; on care, 226, 227, 228–29, 379n38; on chosen communities, 114; Darwall and, 371n20; on duty, 224, 226, 227, 228–29; feminine criticism and, 114, 370n11; gendering and, 82; against generality, 77; MacIntyre and, 373n40; mutuality as norm of, 226; on omniscience, 89, 90; partiality and, 224–26, 237, 370n7, 377n9; on relationship morality, 80–81, 377n13; SVLO and, 82–83; on veil of ignorance, 91; on vulnerability, 224, 225, 237 friendship: agape and, 42, 193–95; bias and, 213; civic, 26, 194–95; complacency and, 279, 280, 282, 381n7; with God, 193, 376nn17,18; identity and, 107; linchpin, 193; love and, 39, 42, 43, 193–95; parenting and, 195, 379n37; Philia defined, 193, 194; in political life, 195, 282–84; revival, 194–95; spiritual, 194; theology of risk and, 194; vulnerability and, 279–80 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 211, 375n1 Galston, William, 6, 58, 124, 125, 127; on caregivers, 149, 150, 152; economic man as citizen, 149, 150; organizational virtues, 148, 149, 150; public justification, 132–133 Gauguin example, 110–11, 152 gender: agape and, 11, 34, 184, 193; Barber on, 166–67; bias, 9, 11, 13, 78, 180–81, 182, 184; biblical, 186–87; Blackwell and, 373n46; care and, 9, 35, 51; in Catholicism, 301; and Christian patterns, 190–91; civic virtue and, 9, 13–14, 30, 34, 54–56, 113, 124, 272, 302; communitarians and, 113–14; conceptions of public and private spheres, 34; coverture and, 36, 37, 38; domesticity and, 9, 10, 34–39, 51; in ethics, 186; evolution of, 34–35; femininity, 10, 13–14, 187, 268, 272; feminism and, 191, 267–69; Index
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409
Friedman on, 82; ideology, 9–11, 34–39; impartiality and, 267–69; invisibility of, 113–14; labor and, 9, 10, 35; language of, 8, 10, 277, 378n26; love and, 190–91; MacIntyre and, 114, 120–21; moral philosophy and, 268; MWPA and, 36–37, 376; neutrality, 156; roles, 38, 366n8; terminology, 8, 10, 378n26; women’s work and, 9, 11, 14, 35, 293, 381n13. See also care; de-gendering; masculinity generality, 95, 198, 218, 223; citizenship as, 61; defined, 66; Friedman against, 77–78; Hare on neutrality and, 77, 370n8; justice and, 267; universality and, 66, 74, 76, 79, 82, 85, 87, 370n8; Young on, 369n40. See also impartiality; universality genocide, 237 Gert, Bernard, 370n3 Gilligan, Carol, 8, 104 Glover, Jonathon, 75, 372n34 God: Buddha-mind as, 300; Christians look at an old, 185–89; covenants of, 186, 195–96; ethics and, 189–90; friendship with, 193, 376nn17,18; incarnated, 188, 189–90; listening to, 299–300; as love, 197; metaphors, 196, 375n9; mutuality of, 185; Reason and, 186, 375n5; scriptural, 175, 186; self and creation and, 187; Trinity of, 175, 187, 189, 190. See also agape; Aquinas, Thomas; God’s-eye point of view; Jesus; Native American religion; process theology; reconstructive theology; names of individual religions and faiths God’s-eye point of view, 66, 85, 87–88, 90, 100, 103, 183, 219; challenged, 188; Cobb and, 375nn7,9 Godwin, William, 66–67, 74, 76–79, 80, 81, 369n41, 370n1. See also bishop and the chambermaid vignette golden age, 4, 19–20, 21, 23, 271 good, 95, 102, 115, 129, 147, 259; the common, 159, 160, 162; comprehensive view of, 127, 128, 136, 143, 255, 261–63, 268; internal, 178 good life, 11–12, 47, 85, 117, 278; conceptions, 26, 28, 86, 126, 127, 144, 308; defined, 24, 27 410 · Index
Goodin, Robert, 224 Greenawalt, Kent, 124, 130, 139–40, 141–44, 374n8 ground projects: identity and, 108; impartial, 106–108, 111, 112; scalar negotiation, 108, 110, 116, 120, 121; Williams on, 109, 110 Gudorf, Christine, 48, 188, 197, 368n29 Gutmann, Amy, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 282, 374nn2,4; on deliberative democracy, 380n48; Democracy and Disagreement, 145; on Moseley Braun speech, 134–35 Habermas, Jürgen: civic privatism and, 27, 368n12; deliberation, 374n2; as discourse ethics proponent, 380n48, 381n9; on feminists, 367n1; on impartiality, 369n38; metaphors of, 380n48; “monological,” 371n25 Habitat for Humanity, 298–99, 381n17 Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.), 5 Hare, R. M., archangel of, 66, 77, 85, 87, 88–89, 90, 98, 99, 370nn4,8,14 Harteshorne, Charles, 375n7 hate crimes, 4, 237, 378n23. See also racism Hauerwas, Stanley, 46–47 Hauser, Gerard, 52, 53, 366n16, 369n32 Hayward, Carter, 191–92, 369n44 Held, Virginia, 148, 245–46, 259, 371n22, 373n40 Herman, Barbara, 100, 101, 102–103, 104 heroes: civic, 15, 19, 23, 243, 271, 311, 312; civic virtue and, 7, 22–23, 161; Greek, 28; impartial, 220; MacIntyre’s, 118; MADD, 3–4, 7–8, 15, 19, 22, 67, 74, 243, 365n1; Sandel’s, 159–60, 161; SVLO and, 204–11; tacit knowledge and, 220; Trinitarian, 175. See also ordinary moral heroes Hill, Thomas, 75 Hindu tradition, 296 Hobbes, Thomas, 32, 61, 85, 93, 368n19 home labor (household), 10, 35, 36–37 horizon of interpretation, 378n17 Hume, David, 102, 368n16 humility, 16, 274–76, 290, 312 Hutcheson, Francis, 368n16
ideals: agape, 183, 194; agents of, 83–86, 87, 95, 97, 98, 99, 116; character, 27; civic, 165; civic virtue, 28, 38, 48, 52, 54–56, 62, 66; class, 37; classic, 26, 28, 52; community, 60; critical fairmindedness and, 82, 114; cultural, 13, 367n8; dilemmas of, 175; ethical, 12; home, 35, 43; idolatry of, 174–75, 175; impartiality, 16, 62–63, 65–68, 73, 75, 84, 128, 174; love, 48, 49, 191; moral, 11, 194; mutuality, 138; political, 29, 57, 65–66, 91–92, 174, 201, 204, 273; public, 15; religious, 49, 200; sacrificial, 43, 46, 48, 196, 198, 200, 245, 271–72; scientific, 174, 190; Smith’s, 32 identity: choice defines, 152, 156–57; civic virtue and, 12; conferring, 106, 107, 108, 110–11, 115–16; defined, 367n8, 380n48; definitional, 96; friendship and, 107; gender, 13, 14, 156–57; ground projects and, 108; impartiality and, 269; moral philosophy and, 107 ideology. See Christianity; civic virtue; gender; ideals; religion idolatry: agape and, 184, 185; avoiding, 203; Christian theological, 175, 176; correcting, 176; of ideals, 174–75, 175; of impartiality, 175, 176, 214–15, 234, 272; impartiality-as-standpoint, 138; of love, 175, 176, 185–86, 268; market, 166; parallel dilemmas and, 174–75, 175, 176; political, 175, 176, 252; reclamation, 175; in science, 175, 176, 177–83, 184 impartiality, 38, 41, 42, 369n37, 370nn1,3,4; abuse and, 101, 207, 209, 210; analogical reasoning as, 232, 233, 264, 269, 270, 273; bias and, 212; Blum on, 372nn28,30; care and, 220, 221, 222, 223, 230–32, 264; challenged, 73, 74–75, 76, 100, 101, 104, 369n44, 370n7; Christian love and, 174; civic virtue and, 15, 16, 18, 123, 124, 270, 272, 275; coherence, 101, 203, 219, 220, 236, 238, 269, 369n40; communitarian, 65, 67, 120, 121, 124, 169, 269; compassion, 75, 101–102, 104, 372n28; Confucian, 76–77, 78, 95; critical fair-minded, 75, 79, 82, 87, 98, 101, 173, 220–21, 268–69; in courts, 371n27; defined, 67, 123, 273; deontology and,
24, 25, 264, 290; dialectic with partiality and, 232–39; empathy and, 75, 101–102, 104, 372n28; equal attention to all as, 216, 217; excesses, 168; failures of, 203–204; feminist suspicion of, 68; Friedman on, 377n9; ground projects and, 106–108, 111, 112; Hare on, 370n8; idolatry and, 175, 176, 214–15, 234, 272; is not impersonal, 82; liberalism and, 128; MacIntyre on, 221, 236; metaphors, 66, 88, 101, 218, 242–43, 245–46, 253; monological reasoning and, 97–98, 208, 371n25; as moral practice, 220; motivation and, 45, 79; neo-Kantians on, 100, 104–105, 121, 227; non-feminist critics and, 370n11; norms and, 209, 221; overlapping consensus on, 121–22, 248; Oxfam and, 372n34; parenting and, 101, 211; partiality and, 121, 232–39; personal, 204, 221, 229, 230–32; political, 133, 174, 216–17, 220, 232, 238–39, 269, 274; as practice, 68–69; proponents, 75; prudence of, 230; Rawls on, 371n15; reciprocity and, 129; reconceptualized, 169, 173; SVLO cases and, 66–69, 73, 74, 83, 101, 173, 204, 260; tacit knowledge and, 204, 211, 220–21, 230, 232; terms, 370n14; theorists, 124; utilitarianism and, 24, 25, 33, 264, 367n6; virtues and, 16, 274, 276, 289. See also critical fair-mindedness; generality; impartiality-as-practice; impartiality-as-standpoint; partiality; particular others; prudence; reflective equilibrium; translation; universality impartiality-as-practice, 69, 122, 124, 138, 218; abstraction in, 233; active passivity, 257; analogical reasoning as, 232, 233–36, 253, 264, 266–67, 269, 270, 273; Bok on, 235–36; care and, 220, 222, 266–67, 293; challenges impartiality, 269–70, 278; civic virtue and, 235, 270– 71, 273, 275, 277, 281, 289–90; defined, 253, 268, 270, 312; denies the bishop and chambermaid, 269; dialectic with partiality, 232–39; dialogic discourse and, 265–67; disciplined vulnerability and, 231, 232, 249, 270, 292; duty and, 263; equilibrium in, 259, 260–61, 260; Index
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411
ethical goals, 264–66; feminists and, 268; gender and, 267–69; Gert on, 370n3; heroes and, 220; identity and, 269; influences on, 269; La Leche League shows, 294–95; as a linchpin virtue, 270, 273; love and, 269, 272; macro-practice of, 221, 231, 233, 246–47, 250–51, 266–67; MADD and, 243; metaphor, 268; micro-practice of, 221, 222, 232–34, 238, 239, 246–48, 252; monological models and, 98; moral agent function in, 259; moral principles and, 220, 259, 261, 263, 263, 264, 264, 380n2; overlapping consensus on, 269, 277; perception and, 255–56, 257–58, 259, 267–69, 380n48; perceptive equilibrium and, 17, 256, 257, 258, 366n17; perspective, 220; political virtues and, 203, 273–74; politics and, 220, 234, 239, 251–53, 267, 269, 281, 300; principles and, 253; principlism and, 253–54; process, 219–20; prudence as, 275; religion and, 267; tacit knowledge in, 204, 211, 220–21, 230, 232; translation and, 270, 275; as a virtue, 270. See also care; critical fair-mindedness; neutrality; perception; practice; reflective equilibrium; translation; virtue impartiality-as-standpoint, 15–16, 46, 173, 185, 219–20, 234, 253, 373n46, 375n9; archangel and, 66, 87, 88; bishop/ chambermaid and, 129, 211; critics of, 114, 182, 219; defined, 67, 68, 69; disdains caring labor, 83, 254; idolatries of, 220, 221, 252, 285; MacIntyre and, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 373n41; MADD and, 124, 243; as metaphor, 66; mutuality and, 138; neutrality and, 130; outsider’s view as, 101; policies, 271; political, 126; for public morality, 61; rejected, 168; SVLO and, 68, 122; understanding, 259; virtue and, 122, 151 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 8 Indiana University Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, 381n10 Institute for American Values, 374n11 integrity theorists: define integrity, 107, 108; moral luck and, 110–11, 152; 412
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Index
partiality and, 105–12, 121, 377n10, 380n48 intimacy, 101, 181, 193, 215; children and, 251; compassion and, 104; God and, 185; identity and, 107; moral skills of, 8; particular, 105–106, 192; public good and, 31; self-love taints, 43. See also care; civic virtue; love; parenting invisibility, 9, 113–14. See also AntiDefamation League; La Leche League; MADD Islam, 237–38, 297 “I-Thou” relationships, 371n26 Jackson, Timothy, 199 James, Henry, 256, 380n44 Jesus: chosenness of, 185; as an incarnation, 187, 188, 189; neighbor love of, 39, 297; paradigm, 44; particular others and, 186; “passion,” 44, 186–87; self-sacrifice and, 40, 44, 197–98, 379n33; as transcendence, 45; true love as, 45 Johnson, Elizabeth, 187, 193, 376n17 Jonsen, Albert, 233 Judaism and Jews: anti-Semitism and, 4, 237, 382n24; covenantal bonds of, 195; democratic life and, 300; domesticity and, 62; Holocaust and, 4, 237; rabbinic tradition of, 300–301; social justice and, 297 judgment, 257, 258, 280 just love: and civic virtue, 18, 55, 57, 270, 271–73, 312; defined, 55 justice: agape and, 198; care and, 8, 94, 223, 266–67, 380n49; and civic virtue, 18; communitarian, 92; defined, 215; generality and, 267; Jewish, 297; love and, 45, 47, 198–200, 272; metaphors, 138, 199; passion for, 191–92; and politics, 45, 47; principles of, 95; reason and, 8; trust and, 213–14. See also Rawls, John justification. See motivation; public justification; restricted justification Kant, Immanuel, 32, 33, 75, 88, 367n5, 369n38; coherence, 258; critics of, 100–105, 106; on deliberation and, 102;
deontology and, 264; on duty, 80; on morality, 256, 258; neo-Kantians on, 100–105, 121, 227 Kekes, John, 369n41, 370n1 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 180–81, 183 Kierkegaard, Søren: antagonistic love, 40–41, 42–43, 48, 192 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 138–39, 142, 299, 365n5 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 88, 96 Kuhn, Thomas, 179, 180, 182, 201; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 177–78 La Leche League: breast-feeding, 4, 146, 293–96; civic virtue of, 4, 114, 146, 293–96; focus of, 146, 293–94, 295; invisibility of, 296; law and, 294 labor: civic, 10; domestic, 9, 10, 34–39; gendered, 35; home, 10, 35, 36–37; reproductive, 35. See also care Lacey, Nicola, 113, 373nn40,46 language: of civic virtue, 19, 26, 29; education and, 304, 305–306; gender, 8, 10, 277, 378n26; MacIntyre and, 117–20; moral, 8, 16, 115–20, 138, 277–78, 373n44, 381n6; religious, 133; struggles of, 277–78; translation and, 16, 118, 275, 277–78, 289, 304. See also moral philosophy; translation Lasch, Christopher, 35 law: civic virtue and, 271; divorce, 156–57; hate crime, 237; impartiality and, 371n27; La Leche League and, 294; MADD and the, 3, 243, 280; marriage, 36–37, 156–57; state rape statutes, 238. See also U.S. Congress; U.S. Constitution Leisure, the Basis of Culture (Pieper), 166 Levinas, Emmanuel, 283 Lewis, C. S., 376n15 liberal feminism, 56, 369n43, 378n25 liberal neutrality, 12, 22, 26, 126, 128, 132, 137, 139 liberal virtue, 57, 58, 124, 125, 126, 129, 150, 169, 374n8. See also Galston, William; impartiality; Macedo, Stephen Liberal Virtues (Macedo), 152
liberalism: care and, 246; citizen defined by, 281; civic virtue and, 31; communitarian, 12, 27, 269, 281; critics of, 26, 378n25; development, 22, 31; feminism as, 56, 369n43, 378n25; focus of, 12, 22, 25–26, 31–32, 37, 127; Fried on, 372n30; Habermas on, 367n1; impartialist, 124; liberty, 31, 159, 246; Macedo on, 374n8; political theory and, 11; politics and, 26, 136; transformative, 127–28, 140. See also impartiality; neutrality; Rawls, John; virtue Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Rawls), 154, 366n10 liberation theologians, 183, 185–87, 375n2 libertarians, 164, 187, 372n30 liberty, 22, 55, 127, 239; defined, 159; justice and, 86; liberal, 31, 159, 246; Mill on, 32; protecting, 8; virtue and, 153, 164 Lightner, Candy, 3. See also MADD linchpins: friendship, 193; impartialityas-practice, 270, 273; virtue, 16, 32, 65, 270, 273 listening skills, 299–300 Locke, John, 32, 85, 93, 368n19 logical positivism, 177 love, 368n25; agapic and intimate, 184, 191–92, 193, 195, 197, 312; approximated mutual, 44, 45; Christian neighbor, 10–11, 42, 46, 376n15; Christian reinterpretation of, 200–201; civic virtue and, 11, 14, 18, 197, 311; disinterested, 42; domesticity and, 198; erotic, 42–43, 184, 191–92, 195, 250–51, 376n15; friendship and, 39, 42, 43, 193–95; gender patterns and, 190–91; God as, 197; idolatry of, 175, 176, 185–86, 268; impartiality and, 311; just, 18, 55, 57, 270, 271–73, 312; justice and, 45, 47, 198–200, 272; martyrdom and, 43–48, 244–45, 268, 272, 283; models of, 183, 191, 197; mutual, 41, 183, 197–201; negative self, 42, 43, 46, 190; Neibuhr on self-sacrifice, 44, 45, 46; Ramsey on, 199; rhetoric of, 43; sacrificial, 40, 43, 45, 48, 175, 197, 282; saints and, 175, 176, 183, 191; selfish, 42, 47, 192; sin and, 190–91; special, 211; value of, 106; wider, 192–93. See also agape; care; just love Index
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413
Love, Power, and Justice (Tillich), 199 Lying (Bok), 235–36, 247. See also principle of veracity Lyotard, Jean-François, 367n8 Macedo, Stephen: banker-monk anecdote of, 151–52; on caregivers, 152; on civic virtues, 151; Diversity and Distrust, 145, 153; liberal virtue theorist, 58, 124, 125, 127, 128, 374nn4,88; Liberal Virtues, 152; public justification and, 131–32, 136; on separation of powers, 151 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 366n12, 378n20; After Virtue, 5, 373n44, 374n47, 377n11; care and, 120; coherence and, 116–21, 373n46; communitarian, 114; criticism of, 373nn40,41,44; criticizes impartiality, 116, 380n4; epistemological crises and, 117, 118, 119, 373n46; feminist critics of, 114, 117; Friedman and, 373n40; gender and, 114, 120–21; on heroes, 118; on identity, 116; impartiality process and, 221, 236; impartiality standpoints and, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 373n41; on internal good, 178; “isms” and, 118; language and, 117–20; on marriage, 80–81; moral language and, 115–20, 278; as a paradigm, 114; polis and, 117; on practice, 178; scalar negotiation, 116–17; SVLO cases, 15, 120; universal rationality and, 114–15; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 373n44, 374n47, 377n11. See also translation macro-practice. See impartiality-aspractice MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving): alcohol and, 168; civic movements and, 7; civic virtue of, 4, 14–16, 18–19, 53, 55, 123–24, 292–93, 308–309; in the classroom, 308; critiques and, 365n2; community and, 114; drunk driving and, 243, 251, 280; feminists on, 114; focus of, 59, 145, 168; founding of, 3, 243; heroism of, 3–4, 7–8, 15, 19, 22, 67, 74, 243, 365n1; impartiality-aspractice and, 124, 243; invisibility of, 7, 9, 14, 15, 19, 59, 123; legislation and, 3, 243, 280; name of, 243; politics and, 63; rhetoric of, 51; untranslatability 414 · Index
and, 280; virtue of, 145; as a voluntary association, 51–52, 168; vulnerability and, 280 Madison, James, 5 Mammy mythology, 244, 379n32 marriage, 374n11; covenant norms, 376n20; coverture as, 36, 37, 38; divorce law, 156–57; gender conventions, 36, 156; laws, 36–37, 156–57; MacIntyre on, 80–81; moral luck and, 110–11, 152; vows and duty, 229 Married Women’s Property Acts (MWPAs), 36–37, 376 Martin, Emily, 181–82 martyr complex, 43–48, 244–45, 268, 272, 283 masculinity: as a civic virtue, 9, 30, 34, 272; cultural coding and, 63, 180–82, 268, 272; as identity, 13, 14; and labor, 10; religious coding of, 191, 193 May, William, 195–96, 376n20 McClintock, Barbara, 181 McFague, Sallie, 186, 188–89 McFall, Lynne, 106–107, 110, 369nn41,44 mean: Aristotelian, 100; impartiality as, 104; liberalism as, 126–28, 130–31 medical ethics: on breast-feeding, 146, 250, 296, 381n13; La Leche League and, 4, 146, 293–96; mammograms and, 379n39; organ donation and, 18, 309–10; slave wet nurses and, 296 Medicare and Medicaid, 252, 259–60, 379n39 Meilaender, Gilbert, 193–94 Mencius, and Aquinas, 378n20, 380n2 Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Yearley), 380n2 metaphors: in education, 303; limits of, 196; Macedo on constitutional virtues (legislative, executive, judicial), 151; monological, 97; Tannen on, 20 metaphors, types of: agapic, 186; agent, 97; algebraic, 199; Archimedean point, 66, 91; biblical, 138, 139, 196; borrowing, 119; burdened virtue, 379n30; business, 150; children as hobbies, 369n33; citizenship, 150, 242; civic malaise, 375n15; civic public, 61; civic virtue, 14, 17,
57, 58, 148, 151, 289, 292; discourse, 17, 380n48; economic, 149, 150; ethical accenting, 369n33; feminist, 268; gender, 14, 378n26; God, 196, 375n9; impartiality, 66, 88, 101, 218, 242–43, 245–46, 253; impartiality-as-practice, 268; justice, 138, 199; linguistic, 276, 284; love, 14, 199; moral, 88, 119, 245–46, 289, 381n6; Neibuhr’s, 199; omniscience, 85, 87–88, 90, 97; parenting, 245–46, 293, 378n26; play, 381n11; political, 13, 245–46, 381n11; public space, 20; Ramsey’s, 198; religious, 57, 90, 138–39, 186–88, 193, 196, 198–99, 307; science, 180, 188; sensory, 17, 266–67, 380n48; standpoint, 219, 253, 375n9; SVLO, 67; virtue, 151; war, 20, 21, 253, 288, 303, 367n2 metaphysics: Archimedean point and, 91; defined, 187; of impartiality, 126, 173, 219; of justice, 91, 92, 94; Kantian, 88; of love, 184, 203; of neutrality, 127, 130; of objectivity, 177, 184, 203; omniscience and, 88; of presence, 60–61, 158, 367n8; science and, 178; of unencumbered self, 155 micro-practice. See care; impartiality-aspractice Miles, Rebekah, 368n28 Mill, J. S., 32 Miller, Richard B., 378n20 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie, 195, 241 modal imagination, 102–103 models: conventional, 371n20; deliberation, 102–103, 131; deliberative field, 102–103, 121; essential, 84–86, 96, 97, 191, 371n24; love, 183, 191, 197; monological, 98; moral, 96; of sacrifice, 43 moderation, 274–75, 284, 290 modernism, 22 Mohrmann, Margaret, 119–20 Mongoven, Ann, 352 monological reasoning, 97–98, 208, 371n25 moral agents, 8, 95–96, 215, 221, 259, 281, 379n41, 381n2 moral balance, 256 moral capital, 372n30 moral character, 21–22 moral concern (global), 377n9 moral danger, 374n13
moral discernment, 237 moral language, 8, 16, 115–20, 138, 277–78, 373n44, 381n6 moral luck, 110–11, 152 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 45 moral perception, 97, 367n17 moral philosophy: affection and duty in, 227; agape and, 11; Aristotle on, 100; bias and, 213; in care, 8, 16, 56, 120, 220, 377n1; community and, 366n10, 372n30; considered judgments of, 370n12; deliberation, 103, 283, 300, 301; deontology, 24, 25, 264; disagreement and, 128, 262; duty and, 222; evaluation of, 377n13; gender issues in, 268; identity in, 107; impartiality in, 208, 219; integrity and, 109–10; motivation and, 74, 297; on objective third in parenting, 247; on person, 208; on second person, 208–209; trust in, 213; utilitarianism, 24, 25, 33, 264, 367n6. See also civic virtue; friendship; moral practice; moral theory; virtue moral practice, 16, 220; analogical reasoning and, 273, 289, 377n11, 380n2; Aristotle on, 26, 40, 102, 115, 230, 257, 279; civic virtue and, 15, 274; personal impartiality in, 209, 211, 213, 214; political, 381n6 moral prejudices, 212, 213 moral rationality, 367n17 moral reasoning, 230, 233, 240, 242, 269, 275 moral reflection, 369n37 moral sense, 33, 88, 368n16 moral sympathy, 33 moral theory, 255, 263–64, 263, 264, 368n16, 378n20, 380n47; agents, 8, 95–96, 215, 221, 259, 281, 379n41, 381n2; Yearley on, 380n2. See also analogical reasoning; impartiality-as-practice moral tradition, 233, 281, 308, 381n4; MacIntyre and, 115–20, 373n46; translation and, 117–20, 277, 278 moral visions, 140, 153, 275, 288, 306 Moseley Braun, Carole, 134–35 Mothers Against Drunk Driving. See MADD Index
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mothering, 378n26; African American, 244, 245, 379n35; breast-feeding and, 4, 146, 250, 293–96, 381n13; La Leche League and, 4, 146, 293–96; Mammy mythology and, 244, 379n32; “Mother” honorific and, 379n35. See also care; parenting motivation, 84, 88, 90, 107; affection and, 227; agapic, 45, 197; altruistic, 271; criminal, 378n23; duty and, 227, 228–29; Greenawalt and, 140; impartiality and, 45, 79; justification, 79, 80, 82, 140; loving, 101, 199; moral, 74, 297; parental, 228, 250, 272; parochial, 137; passion and, 268, 269; religious, 297, 298–99, 374n3; scientific, 177, 179; secondary, 103; virtuous, 273, 288, 311; Young on, 62 Mount, Eric, Jr., 376n20 Murdoch, Iris, 192, 380n48 Muslims, 237 mutuality, 94; agape and, 46, 48, 197; civic virtue and, 153; covenantal, 196; demonstrative, 285; in discourse, 128, 129, 138, 143; divine, 185, 189; Friedman’s norm of, 226; friendship, 282; of God, 185; in impartiality, 102; linguistics and, 277; love and, 41, 183, 197–201; moral duty and, 102; political, 201, 282, 284; relational, 184; renewed ethics and, 189; sacrifice and, 175, 197 Nagel, Thomas, 83–84, 211 The Naked Public Square (Neuhaus), 138–39 narrative ethics, 25, 367n7 Native American religion, 297 neighbor love. See agape; Christianity neo-Aristotelians, 111, 256, 380n48 neo-Kantians, 100–105, 121, 227 Neuhaus, Richard John, 138 neutrality, 85; civic virtue and, 150, 152, 153; Friedman on, 77; gender, 156; goals, 130; liberalism and, 12, 22, 26, 126, 128, 132, 137, 139; moral aims of, 130; political, 162; public boundaries and, 136; Rawls on, 91–92; rejected, 152, 153; scientific, 180 New Democrat, 365n5 416 · Index
New Urbanism, 160–61 Newton, Isaac, 33, 187 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 46–47, 48, 197, 198–99, 358, 368nn28,29; Moral Man and Immoral Society, 45 Noddings, Nel, 369n44; Caring, 377n12, 381n7 norms, 102, 121, 234, 239, 248, 370n8, 376n20 nostalgia, 23, 60, 115, 121, 158, 165, 273, 275; of the fall narrative, 6, 19 Nussbaum, Martha, 366n17; active passivity and, 257; discourse ethics proponent, 381n9; on moral agents, 379n41; as a neo-Aristotelian, 111, 256, 380n48; perception and, 255–57, 380n44; on reflective equilibrium, 255–57 Nygren, Anders, 44, 368n25 objectivity, 373n41; associated with masculinity, 180–81; defined, 177–79; practice and, 203; in science, 177–79, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 201 Okin, Susan Moller, 373n40 omniscience, 63, 84–90, 91, 95–96, 97, 98. See also God’s-eye point of view optimism, 93, 374n12, 378n25 ordinary moral heroes, 22; care and, 220, 222; civic virtue and, 7–8; defined, 205, 211, 218, 220; discourse and, 265; duty and, 227; equal consideration of all and, 216; impartial, 204–205, 211, 215–19, 220, 229–31, 253; paradox of, 204–205; personal impartiality and, 211, 218, 220 organ donation: allocation, 309–10; as disordered love, 18; education, 309; procurement, 309–10; as sacrifice, 309; transplants and, 18 organ procurement organization (OPO), 309 “original position” (Rawls), 85, 86, 91–94, 255, 368n19, 370n15 oscillation, language of, 379n41 Outka, Gene, 46 overlapping consensus, 137, 261, 264, 380n47; on civic virtue, 125; on ethical principles, 248; impartiality and, 121–22, 248; impartiality-as-practice and, 269,
277; on liberalism, 131; on moral goods, 57, 262–63; SVLO cases and, 122 Oxfam, 109, 372n34 pacifism, 46, 243, 378n20 paradigms: economic man, 93, 371n22; MacIntyre, 114; sacrifice, 44; sacrificial love, 198 parenting: acceptability goals, 241; adoption as, 197, 272; African American, 244, 245; analogically, 195, 247, 248, 251; bonds, 246, 272; breast-feeding, 381n13; care, 242–43, 249; CDF and, 246; citizenship and, 251; community mediation of, 250, 251; constrained, 379n37; erotic love in, 195, 250–51; friendship and, 195, 379n37; home environment and, 242; impartiality of, 242–46, 248; impartiality-as-practice and, 244–46, 252–54; and macro-practice of impartiality, 247; MADD and, 9, 243; marginalized communities from, 245; Mammy mythology and, 244, 379n32; maternal practice and, 243; maternal thinking as, 240, 241, 242, 244; metaphors, 245–46; and micro-practice of impartiality, 101, 239–42, 245, 246–48; militarism criticisms and, 243–44; moral truths in, 247; mothering as, 238–39, 243, 245, 257, 378n26, 379n35, 381n13; norms and, 248; personal impartiality of, 240; politics and, 239, 242–43, 251; sacrificial ideal and, 244–45; sexual abuse in, 250–51; SVLO cases and, 242; value, 244; veracity in, 247; virtues, 38, 240, 241–42, 249, 261, 280; vulnerability and, 246, 249, 280 Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), 4, 168, 292, 293 partiality, 372n30; AARP, 252; abuse and, 226; of ADL, 237; in care, 16, 222–26; challenged, 100, 101; civic virtue and, 131; communitarian, 105, 112–21, 124, 153, 168–69, 377n10, 380n48; critical fair-minded, 121; defined, 67, 105; Democracy’s Discontent, 154; differing, 105–22; duties, 227, 254, 257–58; Friedman on, 224–26, 237, 370n7, 377n9; integrity theorists and, 105–12, 121,
377n10, 380n48; Oxfam, 372n34; partialists and, 42, 68, 83, 369n41, 370n7; practice, 225–26; reconceptualized, 169; standpoint, 124; vulnerability and, 225. See also care; communitarians; particular others particular others, 10, 12, 13, 372n30; agape and, 198; care and, 222, 227–29, 267; civic virtue and, 57; defined, 200, 222; feminine sacrifice for, 44; friendship for, 193; impartiality and, 79, 102, 215, 222; Jesus and, 186; love for, 41, 43, 69, 106, 149, 184; passion for, 192–93; sympathy for, 42 particulars, 256, 258 passion: civic virtue and, 133, 272; erotic, 191–92; in Moseley Braun speech, 134–35; for particular others, 192–93; public, 10, 133–34, 366n13; reason and, 134; in science, 179, 180 passivity, 377n12, 381n7; active, 257 Pateman, Carole, 37 patience, 16, 230–32; parental, 248, 274–76, 279, 281, 290 perception, 258, 259, 275; Aristotle on, 255–56, 257, 380n48; in care, 230; imagination and, 380n44; listening skills and, 299–300 perceptive equilibrium, 17, 256, 257, 258, 366n17 personal impartiality: in care, 223, 229– 30; defined, 204, 211, 230, 231; moral heroes and, 211, 218, 220; in moral life, 209, 211, 213, 214; norms and, 209–10, 211; parental, 206, 240, 242, 248; partiality and, 207; political, 243; power of, 207; as practice, 270; in public life, 216; relationships in, 209, 210; sacrifice and, 244; tacit knowledge, 211, 221, 230, 232; virtues and, 232 perspectivists, 116, 370n14 PFLAG, 4, 168, 292, 293 philosophy. See existentialism; metaphysics; moral philosophy; public philosophy; science Pieper, Joseph, 166 Piper, Adrian, 77, 100, 102–105 A Place for Us (Barber), 164 Platonism, 118, 380n48 Index
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Polanyi, Michael, 177, 180, 200, 230; belief in science, 179, 192, 232; tacit knowledge, 182, 211 polis: Aristotle on, 28, 160; MacIntyre on, 117; Sandel’s, 155, 158, 160, 162 political impartiality, 133, 174, 216–17, 220, 232, 238–39, 269, 274; defined, 214, 221, 266, 270; ideal agents and, 83–84; norms and, 221; in political theory, 65, 201; reflective equilibrium and, 112. See also care; impartiality-as-practice Political Liberalism (Rawls), 91, 127, 371n21 political life: agape and, 47; analogical reasoning in, 252; bases of, 22; care and, 95, 232, 268, 292, 302; CDF and, 246; Christianity and, 44–46, 48; civic society and, 164, 167; civic virtue and, 18, 51, 55, 57, 147, 157, 173, 232, 311; communitarians and, 12, 112; conflicting standards in, 216; critical fair-mindedness required by, 73, 220; defined, 45, 73, 145, 196; deliberation, 161; dialogical, 253; disagreement and, 129, 144–45, 162; domesticity and, 45–46; economic life and, 148, 152; education and, 303; empathy and, 90; Enron scandal and, 236; ethics and, 175, 203; exclusion in, 286; feminism and, 268; friendship in, 195, 282–84; gender in, 267–69; idolatry and, 175, 176, 252; impartiality and, 65, 112, 133, 174, 216–17, 221, 232, 274; impartiality-as-practice and, 220, 234, 239, 251–53, 267, 269, 281, 300; liberal, 26, 136; lobbyists, 252–53; love in, 197, 200, 269; MADD and, 63; metaphors of war and, 20, 253, 303; moral practice and, 381n6; mothering and, 243; motivation and, 143; parenting informs, 248, 251; personal impartiality in, 243; personal life and, 68–69; playfulness in, 181, 381n11; realism in, 44, 46; religion and, 273; secular, 90; Watergate and, 236. See also political theory; political virtue political theory: civic virtue and, 11–13, 14–15, 29; coherence and, 310; communitarians, 11–12; discourse in, 146; disequilibrium, 254; fall of virtue and, 6; “play” metaphor, 381n11; prudence in, 290; rhetoric, 64, 113, 131, 239, 283; transitioning focus of, 54, 57. See also 418
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Index
civic virtue; civil society; ethics; political impartiality; practice political virtue, 146, 366n6; impartial, 203, 273–74; linchpin as, 270, 273. See also civic virtue Pope, Stephen, 46, 198 Porter, Jean, 367n3 positivists, 177, 375n1 postmodernism, 25, 367nn1,8 practical (moral) reasoning, 230, 233, 240, 242, 269, 275 practice: analogical reasoning extends, 236, 238, 270, 292; care as, 222–29, 230, 244, 267; casuistry and, 233; defined, 115, 220; impartiality and, 203; love and, 201; MacIntyre on, 178; objectivity and, 201, 203; truth as, 192. See also care; domesticity; impartiality-aspractice; moral practice; parenting; partiality; science practice; truth pragmatism, 310–11 praxis, 185 presidential election of 1992, 6 prima facie principlism, 140, 143, 253–54, 260, 379n38 primary goods, 95 principle of veracity, 235–36, 247, 262 principlism: defined, 253; ethics, 24, 75, 140, 143, 253–54, 380n57; prima facie, 140, 143, 253–54, 260, 379n38 priority of the particular, 256, 257 privacy, 127, 372n30 procedural liberalism, 154 proceduralism, 128, 374n2 process theology, 183, 187–88, 375n7 protest. See civil disobedience prudence, 16, 129, 274, 290; care and, 230, 232; civic virtue and, 275 public civility, 4, 20, 21, 29 public discourse: civic virtue and, 20–21, 26, 367n1; deliberation and, 136, 137 public impartiality, 16, 260. See also care; impartiality public justification, 130, 143, 204, 289; defined, 129, 131; fall from, 5; Macedo on, 131–32, 136; as mediator, 132; motivation for, 374n3; restrained, 134, 136, 140, 142. See also restricted justification public philosophy, 154–55 public-private, 9, 110, 124, 136, 163
public reasonableness, 12 public space, 20, 124 Putnam, Robert, 375n17, 377n4 Quakers, 300 racism, 114, 192, 194, 278, 296 radical inclusiveness, 186 Ramsey, Paul, 198, 199 rational contractors, 95, 150, 152, 245–46, 255 rational deliberation, 125, 128, 132, 134, 135, 366n13, 374n2 rationality: care and, 10; faith and, 374n3; moral, 367n17; Rawls on, 371n24 Rawls, John, 155, 258; as an American spokesman, 92, 366n10; civic virtue and, 27; contract theory and, 93, 368n19; criticized, 96; on economic man, 93, 95; essentialism and, 371n24; feminist challenges to, 95; impartiality of, 371n15; on insulations, 371n17; on justice, 94, 199, 311; Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 154, 366n10; mutual interest and, 94; neutrality and, 91–92; “original position” of, 85, 86, 91–94, 255, 368n19, 370n15; Political Liberalism, 91, 127, 371n21; principles and priority, 372n29; on rational contractors, 95, 150, 152, 245–46, 255; on rationality, 371n24; reflective equilibrium and, 92, 254–55, 260–61, 260, 366n17, 370n12; Theory of Justice, 91, 366n17; veil of ignorance of, 86, 91, 93–95, 96, 98, 255 realism, 44 Reason, and God, 186, 375n5 reasoning: abstract moral, 255; case-based, 233, 367n7; deontology and, 33, 62, 84, 85; monological, 97–98, 208, 371n25; practical, 230, 233, 240, 242, 269, 275. See also analogical reasoning; casuistry reciprocity, 82, 113; citizen, 284, 285; defined, 128, 282, 284, 289; friendship and, 282; impartiality and, 129; moral, 96; norms and, 112; political, 286, 288; religion and, 296, 297; trained, 284–85; undermined, 296; virtue and, 91, 282–83 reconstructive theology, 185, 186, 189, 192, 196; on agape, 184, 190, 197–98
Recovery of Virtue (Porter), 367n3 reflective equilibrium, 83, 109, 280, 379n39; care challenges and, 229, 254, 267; challenges to, 259–60; civic virtue and, 17, 266; Daniels’s criterion for, 255, 262, 263; defined, 82, 254–55, 259, 265, 366n17; deontology and, 262; dialogical discourse and, 265–67; feminists and, 112; horizontal, 264–65, 264; impartiality and, 74, 111, 121, 219, 234, 244, 246, 270, 278; impartiality-as-practice and, 253, 254, 263, 263, 264, 264; love and, 199; Nussbaum on, 255–57; parenting as, 239; passion in, 255; principles and, 254; Rawls’s, 92, 254–55, 258, 260–61, 260, 366n17, 370n12; vertical, 261–64, 264, 265; Wide Reflective, 255, 262, 263. See also overlapping consensus religion: academic study of, 282nn23,24; accommodation language and, 133; analogical reasoning and, 297, 300, 301; casuistry and, 301; civic virtue and, 18, 273, 296–302, 306–307; civil, 30; education and, 306–308; ideology and virtue in, 9–11, 14, 56–57; impartiality and, 267; metaphors, 57, 90, 138–39, 186–88, 193, 196, 198–99, 307; motivation and, 297, 298–99, 374n3; persecution, 382n24; sacraments in, 188. See also agape; Aquinas, Thomas; God; God’s-eye point of view; Jesus; Native American religion; process theology; reconstructive theology; names of individual religions and faiths religious communities, 296–302 residential community association (RCA), 53 Responsive Community (journal), 374n12 restraint: justice as, 49, 55; as moderation, 284; parental, 251; of passion, 33, 49; as proceduralism, 17; and public justification, 130, 139–140; as reciprocity, 285, 312; against self-deception, 39; as virtue or character trait, 17, 29, 139–49, 377n8 restricted justification: abolitionists, 133; ADL and, 238; alienation and, 266; cost of, 131, 132, 137–39, 143–44; defense of, 272; in discourse, 299; liberal call for, 288; King’s speech as, 138; public Index
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419
reason-giving and, 126, 129; restraint and, 140, 141, 284; restrictions on, 138, 139; rule of, 282, 374n3; translation and, 277–78; virtue and, 130, 138–39, 147, 287 rhetoric: civic virtue, 10, 11, 34, 52–53, 139; civil rights era, 139, 278; civil society, 52–53; of dissent, 287; domesticity, 35, 36, 38; fall narrative, 5, 139; King’s, 139; love, 43; MADD’s, 51; manipulative, 271; Moseley Braun’s, 134; political, 64, 113, 131, 239, 283; Sandel’s, 156, 158, 159; of virtue, 123 Rich, Adrienne, 192 Ricoeur, Paul, 378n17 Ross, Susan, 188 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 85, 93, 160 Ruddick, Sara, 239–41, 242–43, 244, 245, 257 rules of discourse, 129; versus virtues of discourse, 144 sacrament, 188, 194 sacrifice, 379n33; agape and, 48; analogical reasoning and, 244; civic virtue and, 43–48, 244–45, 268, 272, 283; love and, 40, 43, 45, 48, 175, 197, 282; martial models of, 43; mutuality and, 175, 197; in parenting, 244–45; personal impartiality and, 244; questioned, 189; for strangers, 298; wartime, 244. See also Habitat for Humanity; Jesus saints: communion of, 193; love and, 175, 176, 183, 191; mutuality and, 200–201 Saiving Goldstein, Valerie, 190–91 Sandel, Michael, 211, 365n5; on Adams’s civic virtue, 23; Bowling Alone, 375n17; on care denigration, 58, 154; on civic republicanism, 154, 158–59, 164–65; on civic virtue, 23, 114, 155, 157–58, 159, 160–61, 163; communitarian, 114, 124, 366n10; community development corporations and, 160; Democracy’s Discontent, 154; economic life and virtue, 155; fall narrative of, 6, 23; friendship, 162; gender issue selectivity and, 158, 159; heroes of, 160; impartiality and, 162; intermediate communities, 58; law and, 156, 158, 159; on Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 154, 366n10; on market capitalism, 58; metaphors 420
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Index
of, 375n15; on moral danger, 58, 374n13; New Urbanism and, 160–61; nostalgia and, 23; on partialist excesses, 168; on polis, 155, 158, 160, 162; public philosophy search of, 154–55; on Rawls, 366n10, 371n23; rediscovering virtue, 23, 58, 155–56; rhetoric of, 156, 158, 159; sprawlbusters and, 160; tolerance and, 152; on unencumbered self, 154–58, 159, 169; on virtue’s recrudescence, 6, 158, 161, 163, 169 scalar negotiation, 108, 110, 116, 120, 121 School District of Abingdon Township v. Schemp, 382n23 Schussler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 186–87 science, 187; belief and, 177, 179, 180, 181, 184, 192, 232; casuistry and, 233; coherence, 175, 175; education, 303; feminist critics of, 182; gender bias in, 180–81, 182, 184; idolatry in, 175, 176, 177–83, 184; influenced ethics, 33; metaphors, 180, 188; objectivity in, 177–79, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 201; passion in, 179, 180; philosophers, 177, 181–82, 183, 184, 232; positivist, 177, 375n1; tacit knowledge in, 177, 179, 182, 211. See also Kuhn, Thomas; Polanyi, Michael; science practice science practice, 177–79, 183, 192; gender bias in, 180–81 Scottish moral tradition, 32, 38, 368nn16,22 secular morality, 306 secular motivation, 374n3 self: care of the, 377n12; modern, 373n46; social, 58, 108, 121; unencumbered, 154–58 self-love, 279; agape and, 40–42, 184, 190; as a challenge, 190; definitions, 190; human, 189; negative views of, 42, 43, 46, 190; pure, 44 self-preference, 372n34 self-restraint, 16, 17, 33, 127, 139–40, 374n8 sexism, 192. See also bias; feminism; gender; masculinity Sidgewick, Henry, 370n14 sin or pride, 175, 175 Singer, Pete, 75 slavery, 28, 55, 185, 296; abolition and, 103, 133, 239; polis, 117; symbol, 134. See also King, Martin Luther, Jr.; racism
Smith, Adam, 32–33, 38–39, 368n16, 370n14 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 373n44 Smith, Holly, 370n13 social capital, 166, 375n17, 377n4 social constructionists, 177, 182 social contract theory, 37, 61, 84, 85, 93, 150, 371n15; covenant limits, 196; defined, 368n19; rationality and, 95. See also covenant; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Rawls, John; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques social gospel movement, 44, 368n26 social self, 58, 108, 121 solo consensus, 95–96 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 299 standpoint: metaphors, 219, 253, 375n9; partiality, 124; virtues or, 104. See also impartiality-as-standpoint Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 37 Stout, Jeffrey, 296, 311 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 177–78 substitutionalist universalism, 96 suffrage, 29, 53, 55, 239, 287 SVLO (stranger-versus-loved-one) cases, 100, 102, 108; bishop and chambermaid tale and, 74, 110, 120; care and, 229, 260, 267, 268; communitarians and, 83; compassion and, 103–104, 105; empathy and, 103–104, 105; equal attention to all and, 214; false dichotomy of, 121; Friedman on, 82–83; impartiality and, 66–69, 73, 74, 83, 101, 173, 204, 260; lineage, 73; MacIntyre and, 15, 120; metaphor, 67; moral heroes and, 204–11; moral practice and, 115, 120; overlapping consensus on, 122; parental impartiality, 242–50; Piper and, 103–104; politics and, 251–52; structure, 74, 81–82, 83, 87, 103, 104, 105, 110. See also impartiality sympathy, 103. See also compassion; empathy syndrome of civic privatism, 27, 368n12 tacit knowledge: agreement and, 210; foregrounding as, 211; impartiality and, 204, 211, 220–21, 230, 232; of
moral heroes, 220; in science, 177, 179, 182, 183, 211 Tannen, Deborah, 20, 21 Taylor, Charles, 283, 373n46 Tessman, Lisa, 379n30 theology, 194, 195, 201, 203, 301, 378n16; on agape, 184, 190, 197–98; process theology, 183, 187–88, 375n7; reconstructive, 185, 186, 189, 192, 196. See also process theology; reconstructive theology; religion Theory of Justice (Rawls), 366n17 thick social studies, 302, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310 thin theory of the good, 27, 374n1 Thompson, Dennis: deliberation, 128, 374n2; Democracy and Disagreement, 145; discourse theorists, 380n48; as a liberal, 124, 125, 126, 129; on Moseley Braun speech, 134–35; mutuality and, 282 Tillich, Paul, 199 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 51, 52, 53, 58, 160, 368n31 tolerance, 152–53 Toulmin, Stephen, 233, 378n18 Traina, Cristina, 195, 250, 251 transformative liberalism, 127–28, 140 translation: academic study and, 307; analogical reasoning and, 277; conceptual, 16, 270, 275–77, 282, 304, 305, 308, 378n20; linguistic, 16, 118, 275, 277–78, 289, 304; moral language and, 117–20, 277, 278; struggles, 277–78, 279, 280–81 Tronto, Joan, 33, 230, 232 trust, 213–14; communal, 81 truth: and deception, 235; Enron and, 236; human, 225; impartiality and, 235, 264; liberalist, 127, 131; love and, 42; moral, 192, 235, 247, 264; objective, 373n41; perspectivist, 116; as practice, 192; veracity as, 235–36, 247, 262; Watergate and, 236 unencumbered self, 154–58, 159, 169 universality, 26, 62, 369n40, 372n30; Benhabib on, 96; generality and, 66, 74, 76, 79, 82, 85, 87, 370n8; substitutionalist, 96 utilitarianism, 24, 25, 33, 85, 264, 367n6 Index
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421
U.S. Congress: ADL hate crime legislation, 237; Helms removed women from, 29; Medicare and, 252, 379n39; Moseley Braun speech to, 134–35 U.S. Constitution, 23, 134, 135, 136, 137; protected minority rights, 32, 128, 302, 374n2; separation of powers, 151 U.S. National Park Service (NPS), 53 U.S. Supreme Court, 306; Sandel on, 156; School District of Abingdon Township v. Schemp, 382n23; Stone v. Graham, 282n23 utilitarianism, 24, 25, 33, 264, 367n6 values: civic, 272; core, 91; family, 50–51; lack of, 5, 19; language and, 119, 275, 303, 311; moral, 75–76, 116, 117; parenting, 242, 244; shared, 6, 19, 119, 132 veil of ignorance, 86, 91, 93–95, 96, 98, 255 veracity. See truth virtue: Aristotle on, 26, 41, 100, 240, 367n4; burdened, 379n30; cardinal, 16, 274, 276, 289; of care, 16, 230–32, 274, 276, 289; Christian, 8, 10, 291, 378n20; civic virtue as, 125; Confucian, 378n20; courage, 16, 24, 30, 103, 207, 274, 276– 77, 279, 290; defined, 24; domesticity and, 38; ethics and, 25, 367n7; fall of, 5–7, 9, 18, 19, 21–23, 55, 123, 168; gender and, 9–11, 34–39; government depends on, 5; individual, 365n4; intermediate ends and, 275; liberal, 57, 58, 124, 125, 126, 129, 150, 169, 374n8; liberty and, 153, 164; linchpin, 16, 32, 65, 270, 273; metaphor, 151; moral habits in, 274; neo-Kantian, 100, 104–105; rhetoric of, 123; standpoint or, 104; traditions and, 31; transformed, 271–72. See also Christianity; civic virtue; compassion; Confucianism; Greenawalt, Kent; impartiality; Macedo, Stephen; Piper, Adrian virtues of discourse, 138; versus rules of discourse, 144, 147 volunteers, 165, 247, 253; Barber on, 167–68; civic virtue and, 20, 30, 53, 54; civil society as, 163, 298; communitarian critics of, 58; in Habitat for Humanity, 298–99, 381n17; La Leche League, 4, 114, 146, 293–96; MADD, 422
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Index
3–4, 51–52, 168; school, 302, 308–10. See also MADD vulnerability, 17; ADL and, 37; care and, 225, 226, 231, 232; compassion and, 279, 280; Friedman on, 224, 225, 237; friendship and, 279–80; impartiality and, 231, 232, 249, 270, 292; in parenting, 246, 249, 280; partiality and, 225–26; virtuous, 279–80, 281, 282, 284 Wadell, Paul J., 376n17 Walker, Margaret Urban, 84–85, 89–90, 97, 208, 215 Walzer, Michael, 113, 366n10, 374n13 wartime ethics: metaphors and, 20, 21, 253, 288, 303, 367n2; and mothering, 243–44; sacrifice and, 244 Welch, Sharon, 194 welfare policy, 252, 259–60, 379n39 Werhane, Patricia, 368n22 Whitehead, Alfred North, 187, 188, 375n7 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (MacIntyre), 373n44, 374n47, 377n11 Wide Reflective Equilibrium, 255, 262, 263 Williams, Bernard, 67, 68, 80, 81, 83; on ground projects, 109, 110; integrity theorist, 105, 106, 107–10, 116; on moral luck, 110–11, 152; on scalar negotiation, 108, 110, 116 Williams, Delores, 195, 379n32 Williams, Joan, 5, 365n3; gender ideology of, 10, 34–35, 36, 37, 156–57 Willimon, William H., 46 witness, 47, 146, 147 womanists, 244, 245, 379nn3,31,33; defined, 244 women’s work, 9, 11, 14, 35, 293, 381n13 Yearley, Lee, 378n20, 380n2 Young, Iris Marion: criticizes civic virtue, 60–65; feminist, 369n44; Habermas and, 369n38; on impartiality, 96, 369nn37,38,40; metaphysics of presence, 158; “play” metaphor of, 181, 381n11; on procedure, 283; solo consensus and, 95–96 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 299
ann mongoven is Assistant Professor at the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences in the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, and an affiliate of the university’s Department of Philosophy. She has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a M.P.H. from The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her scholarly work bridges theoretical conceptions of justice and practical ethics, with special attention to issues of gender, diversity, and health. She engages in democratic deliberative processes that inform public policy on bioethical issues such as organ transplantation, research ethics, and determination of public health priorities.
