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A Liberal Theory of Civic Virtue*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Robert Audi
Robert Audi
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Extract

A democratic society cannot flourish if its citizens merely pursue their own narrow interests. If it is to do more than survive, at least a substantial proportion of its citizens must fulfill responsibilities that go beyond simply avoiding the violation of others' rights and occasionally casting a vote. The vitality and success of a democracy requires that many citizens — ideally all of them — contribute something to their communities and participate responsibly in the political process. The disposition to do these things is a large part of what constitutes civic virtue. But that virtue encompasses considerably more. My task here is to explore civic virtue. I first outline a conception of virtue in general and, with that set out, pursue the question of what makes a virtue civic. My special concern is to articulate what constitutes civic virtue in relation to an enduring problem for democratic societies and especially for the pluralistic democracies of the Western world: how to determine what constitutes a proper relation between religion and politics and, in the lives of religious citizens having civic virtue, an appropriate balance between religious and secular considerations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Winter 1998 , pp. 149 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1998

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References

1 I use the term ‘citizen’ broadly, to apply to both permanent legal aliens and citizens. I do not include illegal aliens, but take it that conscientious citizens, even if they favor deporting the former, should be at least humanely concerned with their well-being.

2 For discussions of many aspects of virtue ethics, see French, Peter A., Uehling, Theodore E. Jr., and Wettstein, Howard K., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).Google Scholar The studies by Robert C. Solomon, on love, and Gabriele Taylor, on envy and jealousy, are helpful investigations of specific virtues; the papers by Marcia Baron (‘Remorse and Agent-Regret”), Amélie O. Rorty (“Virtues and Their Vicissitudes”), Nancy Sherman (“Common Sense and Uncommon Virtue”), and James D. Wallace (“Ethics and the Craft Analogy”) are among the helpful studies of more general aspects of virtue ethics. For a detailed treatment of virtue ethics that contrasts it with common-sense and Kantian ethics and stresses its elements of continuity with utilitarianism, see Slote, Michael, From Morality to Virtue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Here and in the next few paragraphs I develop ideas in my “Acting from Virtue,” Mind, vol. 104 (1995), pp. 449–71.

4 Special problems are created by such groups as religious communities and military units, particularly in times of crisis or war. Here there may be explicit promises of obedience that make fidelity more far-reaching than it would otherwise be; and in extreme cases, such as wartime military service, conduct that would ordinarily be required by one virtue, such as beneficence or compassion, may be prohibited by another, say fidelity to the war effort. The latter, however, should not be understood so as to license atrocities.

5 This is a subtle matter. As Bernard Gert points out in Morality, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), in certain cases, those he calls matters of moral ideals (as opposed to strict duties), such as when one must decide which of several deserving charities to give to, one need not be impartial and can choose as one simply prefers. Notice, however, that one could not permissibly exaggerate the merits of one charity in order to justify preferring it over another.

6 Two points are in order here. First, this formulation is intentionally vague, but should serve our purposes. Second, I do not think beliefs can carry all the motivation required; but for this essay, as opposed to a full-scale analysis of traits, what is essential to the point is only that traits require both a cognitive and a motivational dimension. It is at least more perspicuous to separate these as I do in the text.

7 Without endorsing (or rejecting) a broadly intuitionist approach like Ross's, Sissela Bok has suggested a minimal morality freed of theoretical baggage that might divide people; see her Common Values (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995).

8 See Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 21.Google Scholar

9 Ross himself thought that there is a prima facie duty to obey the law grounded partly in the duty of gratitude (to one's country), partly in the implicit promise to obey that goes with permanent residence, and, for countries with laws that are “instruments for the general good,” partly in that fact; see ibid., pp. 27–28. For discussion of Ross's view and of the case for the duty to obey the law being a basic one, see Smith, M. B. E., “The Duty to Obey the Law,” in Patterson, D., ed., Companion to the Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996).Google Scholar A different perspective on the duty to obey the law is explored in relation to jury nullification (roughly, a jury's acquitting a defendant despite legal guilt) in Schopp, Robert, “Verdicts of Conscience: Nullification and Necessity as Jury Responses to Crimes of Conscience,” Southern California Law Review, vol. 69 (1996), pp. 2039–2116.Google Scholar

10 For the two principles of justice, see Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and for an account of public reason and its place in a liberal democracy, see Rawls, , Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), esp. Lecture VI.Google Scholar

11 Nozick, Robert's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar, develops a partly historical conception of the basis of the state that is instructive in this context.

12 I have defended the distinction in, e.g., “Intrinsic Value and the Dignity of Persons,” in my Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The approach of the book as a whole has elements in common with both the universal standards and the pragmatic approaches.

13 In “Acting from Virtue” (supra note 3), I present a detailed account of acting for one or more reasons that are connected in the relevant way with a virtue.

14 The notion in question is close to what Rawls, in Political Liberalism, describes under the heading of public reason, and what Kent Greenawalt calls accessibility; see Greenawalt, , Private Consciences and Public Reasons (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 3. For a proposal of some definite rules of civic virtue for public officials, see Davis, Michael, “Civic Virtue, Corruption, and the Structure of Moral Theories,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII (supra note 2), esp. pp. 355–57.Google Scholar

15 This is not a sharp distinction; there are, e.g., different ways to collect social security taxes even when the tax rate is specified. But there is an important difference between choices among ways to do a mandated thing and among substantially different kinds of mandated things.

16 On accessibility and public reason, see Rawls, , Political LiberalismGoogle Scholar; Greenawalt, , Private Consciences and Public ReasonsGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, Equality and Partiality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Larmore, Charles, “Beyond Religion and Enlightenment,” San Diego Law Review, vol. 30 (1993), pp. 799–815.Google Scholar

17 If we count as religious the significant number of theological noncognitivists who identify themselves as such, e.g. as Christian, there is further difficulty in understanding the normative force of religiously grounded reasons: since on this view religious language is (roughly speaking) expressive rather than assertive of propositions, the authority of normative claims which are supposed to be grounded in divine command is at best problematic.

18 These points are argued at some length in my “Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics,” in my book (with counterpart essays by Wolterstorff, Nicholas) Religion and the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).Google Scholar

19 See my “The Separation of Church and State and the Obligations of Citizenship,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 18 (1989), pp. 259–96. The principle applies with differential force in different contexts. Moreover, the adequacy requirement rules out some non-religious reasons, e.g. those that are ill-grounded; but my concern here is with the specifically religious in relation to the political. I might add that the principle is not meant to require that an adequate reason be objectively correct in a sense implying its equivalence to a true proposition. A false proposition that is sufficiently well justified can count here as an adequate reason. As to the prima facie qualification, the relevant factors that can defeat the obligation are the sorts of considerations a morally conscientious person would take to be such, e.g. the need to argue from religious grounds in order to muster opposition to genocide strong enough to stop it.

20 Given the assumption of God's infallibility, it is impossible that they be both endorsed by God and false, though they need not be regarded as necessarily true in themselves.

21 See my “The Separation of Church and State,” esp. pp. 284–86.

22 In “Acting from Virtue,” I provide an account of such action which supports the conception of it employed here.

23 Our voice is, however, likely to be also determined in part by what we say, and, other things equal, a civic voice is not fully achieved if one is proposing religious reasons as grounds for public policy decisions. It may be possible, however, to present such reasons in a context that preserves a certain balance, e.g. by noting that, in addition to whatever sufficient secular reasons may exist for supporting a piece of legislation such as permitting state aid to handicapped children in religious schools, many religious citizens will support such legislation because they feel it will enhance their ability to provide for their children services they believe God requires. Thus, the emphasis on achieving a proper civic voice as part of civic virtue leads to no simple rule about the admissible content of advocacy of laws or public policies.

24 For an example of the representative position on standards for coercion, see Richard J. Regan, S.J., who suggests “that legislation to enforce public morals, as a matter of prudence, should satisfy two principal conditions. First, such legislation should concern activities which cause serious harm to citizens and the community. Second, the legislation should enjoy broad support from citizens of different religious and ethical persuasions” (Regan, , “Virtue, Religion, and Civic Culture,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII [supra note 2], p. 346).Google Scholar The results of adopting this proposal would very often be the same as those of adopting mine; but the principles are very different, and his principles embody weaker safeguards against a domination of the non-religious by the religious and even of some subset of religious groups by others. This is particularly so if the relevant notion of harm is not secular (and in Regan's essay, it seems not to be).

25 There are theoretical problems in the way of grounding a general prima facie obligation to obey the law of the kind associated with political obligation. For a detailed treatment of some of the major problems, see Simmons, A. John, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

26 There are kinds and degrees of alignment between religious and secular motives, and even cooperating motives can, given changes in circumstances, support divergent conduct; but these complexities need not be pursued here.

27 In “Preventing Abortion as a Test Case for the Justifiability of Violence,” Journal of Ethics, vol. 2 (1977), I argue that for many abortions, even if they are culpable killings of an innocent person, ‘murder’ is an incorrect description, and that seeing why is of some significance.

28 Nothing less than the holism-individualism issue lurks here; for our purposes an individualistic reading of the principle is best, but the normative issues could be similarly treated if one plausibly formulated the principle as applying directly to institutions as such.

29 A special exception regarding neutral behavior is advocacy, especially the representative kind of advocacy appropriate to someone like an attorney officially taking the point of view of another, as opposed to the subscriptive kind of advocacy appropriate to individuals speaking for themselves in letters to newspapers. In such individual statements, clergy and others should not be uncritically taken to represent their respective institutions. In “The Ethics of Advocacy,” Legal Theory, vol. 1 (1995), pp. 1–31, I offer a theory of advocacy that supports the general position of this essay on the nature of civic virtue.