Political Morality as Convention

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A remarkable feature of contemporary political discourse is the dominance of morality. One legacy of logical positivism (which was dominant from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1960s) and analytical (or linguistic) philosophy was the reluctance of political theorists during the twentieth century to engage in substantive argument about appropriate social ends or individual rights and values. Philosophers were content to describe the linguistic framework within which related political proposals were discussed without offering any proposals themselves. It was felt that the philosopher was not especially qualified to give political advice or make any recommendations. The technical political theorist was properly confined to the second level of inquiry, that is, explanation of the meaning of concepts, not the first level, which was concerned with questions of how we ought to live, or issues of public policy. Economists and sociologists might have the technical skills appropriate for inquiries into public policy, but as to the big questions—such as the ends and purposes of man and society—almost anybody could make pronouncements. The important point was that reason was incapable of adjudicating between rival versions of the good life.

This emotivism, or subjectivism, in ethics, which decreed that carefully considered statements about freedom and justice were, linguistically, no more valuable than advertising slogans, was carried over into politics and jurisprudence. In jurisprudence, for example, all of the claims of natural lawyers to ground the criteria of proper law in a set of universally true moral principles were replaced by explications of the notion of sovereignty or by complex descriptions of validating processes in ongoing systems of positive law.