Virtues in the Public Sphere

Citizenship, Civic Friendship and Duty

James Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138585737
• eBook ISBN: 9780429998867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Virtues in the Public Sphere features seventeen chapters by experts from a variety of different perspectives on the broad theme of virtue in the public sphere. Spanning issues such as the notion of civic friendship and civic virtue, it sheds light on the role that these virtues play in the public sphere and their importance in safeguarding communities from the threats of a lack of concern for truth, poor leadership, charlatanism, and bigotry. This book highlights the theoretical complexity of putting virtue ethics into practice in the public domain at a time when it has been shaken by unpredictable political, social, technological, and cultural developments.

With contributions from internationally acclaimed scholars in the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and education, this book highlights the main issues, both theoretical and practical, of putting virtue ethics into practice in the public domain. Split into three sections – "Virtues and vices in the public sphere", "Civic friendship and virtue", and "Perspectives on virtue and the public sphere" – the chapters offer a timely commentary on the roles that virtues have to play in the public sphere.

This timely book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of education, character and virtue studies, and will also appeal to practitioners.

Section 1

Virtues and Vices in the Public Sphere

Chapter 1

Virtue against sovereignty

John Milbank

I

The modern political order is based upon a refusal of the founding of political order in virtue. That has to be the starting point for any consideration of the question of virtue in public life today. If one is a Kantian, a utilitarian, or an advocate of the ethics of sympathy, then it is possible to suggest an increased moralisation of a current political order seen as being inevitably about power and pragmatic purpose in the first place. But if one is any sort of virtue ethicist, in an antique, Patristic or mediaeval tradition, that is impossible.

For an ethics of virtue, this conception of the political, by marginalising the ethical, misconstrues at once the political, and also the ethical as having a centrally political dimension. This follows because the ethical is not, for this outlook, a kind of ‘add on’ to the normally human, but concerns specifically human purposes as such. These are acting in such a way as to bring about a good and noble flourishing, and to develop habits of persistence in such action. It is impossible to understand what a good flourishing is solely at the individual level, since man is a social and political animal and purpose must first be understood socially and politically, in a sense that includes the priorities of a religious community.

To act ethically is therefore to aim towards the bringing about of a particular kind of community whose goodness is its justice. Justice consists in the appropriate distribution and proportioning of roles, tasks and rewards. And it is only with reference to political justice that the individual can fully discern what her own appropriate and so ethical role might be. Conversely, a political order not concerned to foster the living out of such roles in good character is not simply an order lacking in virtue, it is, by that very token, also an order lacking in the quality of the political as such.¹

For this reason, a politics of virtue refuses the usual modern contrast of realism with idealism. They are not, at the most fundamental level, in tension with each other, because only the genuinely ideal, which is always a situated ideal, will work, while conversely that which cannot work is not truly an ideal, but an escapist fantasy.

But what is then the consequence of such an observation for our assessment of our contemporary political order and the possibility of its increased ethicisation?

As already indicated, this order refuses the primacy of virtue for the primacy of power, will, comfort and convenience. Does that then mean that any hope to morally improve it is hopeless, as Alasdair Macintyre tends to imply? Is the project of a politics of virtue rather a revolutionary one? In one sense, the answer to that question has to be yes, if we mean not so much revolution as a thoroughgoing and fundamental transformation. This follows, because so long as politics has refused its basis in classically understood virtue, it cannot, for the virtue ethicist be significantly moralised.

On the other hand, such a drastic verdict can covertly stress too one-sidedly the ‘ideal’ dimension of an ‘ideal realism’, the realism of objectively real forms and ideas, to which virtue ethics is inherently linked ever since Aristotle and Plato. For if ‘virtuous’ is as much a description of all human life as such, as it is a recommendation and prescription, then it follows that, while a society may deny the basis of politics in virtue, this is not just to debase itself, but also to tell itself a lie, and a lie even, to a degree, about its own politics insofar as it remains vestigially a politics at all.

In other words, if the virtue approach is true, we can never quite depart from virtue as much as we think and to some degree theory must misdescribe practice, which can never be as fully modern as we imagine. For example, it may well be true that courts much more assume in their deliberations the exigency of distributive justice, than theoretically avowed positivisms, formalisms and theories of the basis of justice in subjective rights would seem to allow. In the face of this observation, the project of infusing public life with more virtue might be given a more reformist, besides a more drastically transformative cast. But it might then become a matter of discerning the most promising points of entry for future change. I will return to this point eventually.

II

For the moment, I want further to substantiate the idea that modern politics is a refusal of the basis of politics in virtue and for that reason of its basis in the ethical as such. In fact, I want to argue that the main lines of modern political theory, and to a degree modern political practice, involve a reversion to barbarism, in contrast to the mediaeval gothic modification and development of the classical outlook.

This becomes most apparent if we examine the prime concept of modern politics, which is sovereignty. For many commentators, for example the legal theorist Martin Loughlin, this notion is a mark of modern sophistication of which the mediaevals were not quite capable.² For sovereignty is taken to be a notion of authority at once resting in and yet over the whole political body and yet abstracted from any particular personal or even institutional site of the exercise of such authority. On Loughlin’s account, this means that Jean Bodin, the main modern instigator of sovereignty doctrine, failed adequately to distinguish it from absolutism, regarded as a mediaeval survival. Of course, to say this is to commit a scholarly howler, because absolutism is as modern as sovereignty, which is its twin, and was equally unknown to the Middle Ages. But Loughlin can commit this blunder because he is making an a priori assumption about the essential rationalism and objective abstraction of the modern perspective.

For just the same reason he also claims that sovereignty picks out for the first time the differentiated essence of the political as the abstract relationship of binding authority between government and people that is, beyond feudalism, at last distinguished from power relationships involving material property. Yet he immediately finds himself in some confusion when forced to concede how closely tied up the thinking about sovereignty and the thinking about property right is in a thinker like Thomas Hobbes, and is again forced to imply an insufficient development of a distinction already sufficiently there in germ. Yet once more and as I shall presently argue, it is just the other way round: it is rather modernity, not the Middle Ages, that tends to conflate entirely notions of ownership with notions of ruling.

In these respects, evidences of the barbaric at the outset of the modern appear, to a conventional establishment thinker like Loughlin, to be so counter-intuitive that they must be speedily glossed over. By the same token, he cannot even consider the possibility that the mark of the modern might not be its distinguishing of the specifically political from other social relationships, but rather, as Hannah Arendt contended, its suppression.³ For that would follow if politics as legitimate rule is only possible as the rule of virtue, or rule through the direct action of honourable citizens, and if the prime purpose of ruling is the promotion of virtue. This paradigm immediately implies that there is no centre of rule, no alienated ruling apparatus or machinery set apart from the ordinary life of citizenhood, nor even necessarily any civic or national circumference of rule, since virtuous citizenship, ever since Plato and as enacted by ancient Rome, has a capacity to transgress, beneficently as well as questionably, every possible border. Legitimate rule for this paradigm is to be exercised collectively and turn by turn by the practically wise, in whatever numbers and in whatever social position, with the primacy of terrain subordinated to that of interpersonal community.

This outlook in turn implies that rule is to be fundamentally shared and distributed. Indeed, it further implies that to rule is to give the possibility of participation in rule, both as the government of others and of oneself.⁴ For such a model therefore, there is a certain continuity (however sometimes drastically qualified) between the rule of families, villages, other corporate bodies and the city itself. Rule is dispersed just because it is coterminous with the entire social body, just as virtue is taken to be coterminous with a fully human existence. At the very centre of government, there has to be an ‘aristocratic’ sharing of rule to the degree that the valid rulers are equal in virtue.

From these assumed circumstances, the notion of ‘mixed polity’ that we find in Plato, Aristotle and Polybius and that were conventionally echoed through the Middle Ages and beyond, naturally arises.⁵ The architectonic role of the ‘one’ ruler at the top can never be avoided to the degree that a polity is like a single organism and must be unified both continuously and in an emergency. But this rule is generally to be shared with relative equals in virtue, save in the problematic case of an outstanding god-like persona whose emergence presents very grave problems, as discussed by Aristotle.⁶ Polities are normatively mediated by an aristocracy of ‘the few’ and this tends to render deliberation amongst the wise politically fundamental, rather than the location of a single indefeasible origin of power to which all must submit. Where virtue is more widespread, then much greater democracy becomes valid, as it does equally if virtue is more or less lacking, since the corruption of the many tends to temper the corruption of the elite. The ancients were of course not blind to the pure power-play element of politics, nor even to its normal human prevalence, but they did not think that a just, and because just, stable order could be erected on the assumption of its normativity.

This, however, is exactly the modern and barbaric move. Sovereignty was offered, first by Bodin and later by Thomas Hobbes as a salve against endemic civic conflict and failure to agree about fundamental religious and moral norms. Hobbes erected this circumstance into a sceptical anthropology and denied that human beings can ever achieve fixity over their opinions and legitimate preferences without the exercise of an absolute authority. This opinion was later (contrary to received interpretations) shared by Immanuel Kant, for whom the categorical imperative as such finally reduces to the imperative to obey the state just because we can never be quite sure of our own purity of motive in electing norms that may become the subject of universal and external moral legislation and so require this externality to be backed by decision and force.⁷

Sovereignty is here required not just as a salve against human tendencies to rivalry and conflict, but also as a salve against an inherent human ignorance of the true and the good. Since we have no access to any absolute within finitude and such an absolute may not even be available, we require a substitute absolute which is the absolute of the monopolisation of force. In the case of Hobbes, it is this monopoly alone which can now mediate to us the divine absolute in every respect as touching human social existence, including the public interpretation of scripture.⁸ Thus where Machiavelli had merely enunciated a cynical power-basis for political morality, leaving ordinary, private morality untouched, Hobbes extends this cynicism into every human domain and thereby politicises also the private, in an already totalitarian fashion.⁹

Ostensibly the doctrine of sovereignty, in despair of the rule of virtue, is the result of a purely rational consideration, purged of all feeling, which Hobbes in any case reduced to an amalgam of evidence and efficient impulse to motion.¹⁰ Yet in reality the doctrine of sovereignty was entirely cobbled together from ancient and primitive elements and from a later Middle Ages already turned neo-primitive.

From the outset, Bodin declared that his novel sovereignty was also ancient Roman majestas. ¹¹ In this way he linked it with a certain supervenient, imperial claim to overriding glory and the capture of territory. It is true that Bodin did not, like Hobbes, see the sovereign as something ‘artificial’ standing over-against the people, and indeed curiously promoted a kind of pluralism of guild and corporate sharing in government which would seem to us to be the very opposite of sovereignty-doctrine, just because he denied an Aristotelian breach between familial economic and public political authority.¹² In this way, sovereignty is kept by him within a given and organic national boundary. Yet the same assimilation of the king to supreme paternity could also later endorse a spilling over this boundary, if all the ultimate right to decide has been alienated to him, rendering him equivalent to a lone individual, potentially able to roam over the world and constrained only by his own liberty.

In this respect, as Tuck has described, Bodin adhered in part to a group of often Protestant late, Tacitean humanists, who tended to advocate a ‘reason of state’ beyond the constraints of virtue and who celebrated in a more unconstrained way the Roman imperial pursuit of glory.¹³ It was within this current, as with Alberico Gentili, an Italian Protestant professor of Oxford university, that the Spanish New World ventures tended to be entirely justified, against the qualms of the Spanish second scholasticism.¹⁴ Pre-emptive war was held, after Cicero, to be valid and equally war to enslave people simply on the grounds of their primitive or supposedly immoral character.

From this historical linkage one can suggest that, if the basis of sovereignty lies in an unconstrained source of power, that while on the one hand it is inherently linked with the newly autonomous modern state, on the other hand from the outset this was not a securely bounded state, unthreatening to its neighbours. On the contrary, it was an inherently proto-imperial state, almost immediately to become such, as with Spain, France and England in the early modern period.

It is with the thought of the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, histori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: Virtues and Vices in the Public Sphere
• SECTION 2: Civic friendship and virtue
• SECTION 3: Perspectives on virtue and the public sphere: Why public reason is not enough
• Concluding remarks
• Index