Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What is the Virtucon Project?
I have been forcibly reminded by recent mega–threads that there are conservatives who do not think the size and scope of the state is a pressing issue. Some of these folks, approaching things using the lens of virtue ethics, have a different diagnosis of what is wrong with society, a different idea of what needs to be done, and a different approach to what is permissible to achieve these ends. They are suspicious of markets, and fear that a focus on small government is not just electorally disastrous, but fatally distracts from the real issues facing the country.
Below I set out — largely in the form of collected paraphrases — what I take to be the virtucon project, in so far as I understand it. There are gaps, and I have no doubt made mistakes. The first paragraph, in particular, which is entirely of my own making, might be objected to as too rough and ready a summary. I have, however, tried to lay out the virtucon case in good faith, and invite corrections and additions.
The Virtucon Case
Virtue is those habits or dispositions of action that promote human flourishing. People are not innately virtuous, but they have the natural capacity for virtue. Because virtue involves habit, it is something learned through practice and repetition, and therefore requires a society that provides the appropriate incentives and correctives until immaturity is overcome and the habit is internalised. Human flourishing, or human excellence, or the proper end of being human, is not a choice but an objective property of what it is to be human — a key component of which is rationality. A good society is one which advances human flourishing; and here “good” is also an objective standard.
America today is wrestling with new and sometimes terrifying questions about justice and obligation. Deep social and spiritual problems have arisen in our modernist, technocratic, democratic state. Gripping moral questions are before us. Frightening moral challenges are looming over our heads. Many, or most, people are miserable, lonely and vicious. People are unprepared to tolerate the consequences of free markets in a technologically expanding world. Alienation is a big problem, exacerbated by large markets and a sort of specialization. Our society is having a hard time grappling with the tension between our egalitarian social ideals and the sizable inequality that free markets create. The Western world is falling prey to fear and envy.
A complex, careful analysis is needed to diagnose and respond to these challenges. We need to answer the big questions about human excellence and human community, family, life and the complex relationship between political freedom and virtue. Direct moral reasoning is required. This diagnosis is a massive project. We need to understand what the moral challenges are that make the administrative state seem necessary to us; for that we need an analysis of markets and human good. We need more complete answers to a deeper problem than the size of the state.
We need to offer a complete and satisfactory vision to the American public. We have to be armed with a better, truer, more ennobling vision. We need to assess the current state of our society and craft a message Americans will find compelling. We need to find ways to present a vibrant, hopeful conservative vision of what our society can be, and make them believe that it can be realized. We need to find some new ways to pitch traditional morals.
The highest goals are human excellence, happiness, virtue and a thriving society. Human good involves living a life of activity of the soul in accord with reason, habituating oneself in the virtues. Why have a government at all if it’s not going to be focused on the good of human beings? People in authority have special obligations to discern the good as well as they can. Historically, rulers took it for granted that they were obliged to be interested in the goodness and thriving of their people. We have to balance the various goods and claims of justice to the best of our ability. Good habituation is necessary to virtue, and that depends to some extent on having a healthy culture. The virtuous man doesn’t need laws to tell him not to indulge in vices, but — on an earlier point in the path to virtue — before he’s developed proper discipline, he might be tempted by those vices, and that might derail his moral development well before he has the opportunity to be virtuous.
The virtucon differentiates between freedoms that are supportive of virtue and ones that contribute little or nothing to the virtuous person’s existence, while potentially derailing some from the path when they’ve hardly begun. The democratic process can be used to regulate or ban certain vicious things. We can’t trust the common people to be good, especially in a state where they are morally malformed by a degraded culture. The aim is to build a culture that reinforces virtue and goodness.
Markets can fail. The outcomes of free markets are not necessarily just nor conducive to human good. There are many potentially good reasons for wanting to impede particular effects of free markets, or just to persuade people on a widespread level that markets are ruining their lives. The market approach to sex, marriage and babies robs these phenomena of their context as part of an organic whole and forms an attack on human dignity. It’s quite hard for people to develop the wisdom and maturity to see this at the ages at which it matters. Societies are obliged to find ways to mediate the natural tensions that arise when we try to recognize the infinite worth of persons and also allow some to enjoy far greater privilege than others.
The Tea Party strategy of “less, less, less” does not work. Most people aren’t too worried about things like religious liberty issues. The perception is that Republicans are selfish, racist plutocrats who want to screw over poor people. The libertarian populists and reformicons have some productive ideas, plausibly responsive to the problems and concerns that people actually have. But the main thing is to contextualize what is being offered within a larger vision and to help people understand what that is.
Some Questions
What are the terrifying, gripping, deep, frightening moral questions we are facing?
How is the task of rethinking and reformulating morality/society to be done, and by whom?
Is the criticism of markets and/or modernity and/or enlightenment individualism an inextricable part of the virtucon project?
What is the point of winning elections? Is the virtucon project a political one, an apolitical one, or a supra-political one? How is reformicon incrementalist instrumentalism consistent with a virtue-based society?
If I promise to promote courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, proper ambition, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, modesty and righteous indignation can I also abolish the Department of Education?
Published in General
That is amusing! Not a problem for Mormons though!!!!!!
I’d just like to add, in fairness to Rachel, that it’s not that the deeper philosophical questions and problems should not be discussed, here on Rico and everywhere. The party obviously has to grapple with practical policy issues when crafting a platform. It can’t just be Small Government and More Freedom, much as some would like that. Ordinary mortals don’t think in those terms. They wonder what the party stance is on Social Security, health care, law and order, immigration and everything else. That’s been one of the points that SoCons have made all along. The devil is always in the details, but whenever we try to talk details, there tends to be a chorus of “statist” or “you’re trying to force your morals on me” if we don’t agree with drug legalization, genderless marriage and other positions. To some degree, in other words, we are just talking past each other. So I appreciate G’s effort to get beyond talking past each other! But the devilish details are still there and still must be worked out with a whole lot of talk, about virtue, freedom and everything else.
“Hi Pot, this is Kettle, you’re black.”
Sigh. Child Porn clearly falls afoul of the harm principle. Children are unable to make these decisions for themselves and are therefore being forced to do something against their will or without an understanding of the consequences. This in ability to make rational decisions is why minors are granted the right to dis-affirm contracts. This is not even remotely comparable to an adult making the decision to disrobe in exchange for money or some other consideration.
gen,
I don’t want to appear as some tough old Kantian. However, since that is exactly what I am I might as well. This is the problem with Virtue Ethics. It is vague and not clearly part of any particular larger system. Examples are from Aristotle to Confucius. This unfortunately can be manipulated to suit the intellectual agenda of the author. The left wing academic of today uses the vague miasma of virtue ethics mixed with his poisonous socialist apologetics.
This is why I like my morality deontological. Just call me old fashioned.
Regards,
Jim
A good post and good questions. As I see it:
1) None of these “virtuous” things are objective. They are all subjective, and moreover, they apply to every political ideology. Did the Nazis not want “virtue”, “happiness”, “excellence” etc.? Of course they did…so what’s the meaning of these words then?
2) This is fundamentally a question of whether government is the proper mechanism for advancing these goals, whatever they may be. The answer from American experience has been a resounding…NO.
3) Markets fail. This is not an argument. This is an accepted observation that no economist, conservative, “libertarian” etc. denies. Markets fail…at a few things. For those few things, we have other institutions, such as government. That’s the role of government. Hence, “markets fail” only addresses an…anarchist…argument against government. Not a conservative/libertarian one.
4) Governments fail too! And much more spectacularly, especially if involved in issues which are outside of their legitimate domain…such as instituting “virtue” in a society.
No one makes the argument that markets can, or do, or should, address social issues of “virtue”. Yet social-conservatives argue that government should address these issues, because markets can’t.
Are they perhaps forgetting about other social institutions in existence, besides “markets” and “governments”? Seems to me, they are.
I think “virtucons” are making only 1 argument: centralized government authority is the best mechanism for instituting whatever it is “we” define to be “virtuous”.
How this differs from any other form authoritarianism…I’m not sure.
Seems to me “virtucons” should spend a fair amount of time actually reading some economic theory, especially on institutions. They seem to be sorely lacking in those. I’d suggest starting with the basics, maybe Doug North.
Then combine those with some historical accounts of how various forms of institutions evolved in American history.
Then combine those two with some reading of public choice theory. Start with the old stuff, Buchanan maybe.
Otherwise, it all sees to be an attempt at reinventing the wheel on their part. Markets fail, we want “virtues societies”, so lets get a big and good government to do it. All of this has been studied to death in many disciplines.
Without understanding what’s out there, there is no identification of a particular problem they are making, and certainly no suggestion for a particular solution that they are making. Especially since their points are…not new at all.
I don’t necessarily think that VirtueCons want government to dictate virtue from on high, however I’m at a loss as to where there argument actually goes after “We want a virtuous society, therefore…” It’s rather like an Underpants Gnome theory of political action:
Step 1: Virtuous citizens are important for a well run society.
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: Well run society.
It is that Step 2 that us FreedomCons (see I can re-brand too) are wary of. Since this is mainly a political discussion FreedomCons assume that you wish to do this via politics and that makes it authoritarian.
Say what you want but at least FreedomCons have thought through the steps.
Step 1: Virtuous citizens are important for a well run society.
Step 2: Get government out of peoples lives so they can form and strengthen institutions conducive to virtuous living.
Step 3: Well run society.
Genefrei! How long did you spend on this? Holy cow! So unfortunately, I have class tomorrow and can’t give this the time it deserves right now. But I will just say quickly that it’s not at all true that I view the administrative state as a mon-problem. It’s a huge problem, but I think Americans are wedded to it for explicable reasons and unless we address those, the mostly negative energy of the small state purists isn’t going to be able to convert the country back. We need something more substantial. Something ennobling. Something hopeful and meaningful. I don’t think self-identifdied libertarians generally have that, and some are hostile even to talking about it. We need to be wise enough, brave enough and prudent enough to go deeper than just out bitterness against the administrative state. That’s what being a virtucon involves.
Jaime, the point is, we need to be energetically, ardently engaged in trying to revitalize virtuous ideals and mores, and we need people to associate those efforts with conservatism. I think we can do that without writing them into law per se but it needs to be onviously, visibly part of the conservative project and ethos.
Rachel,
Why should that be part of a political movement? Political movements are about using government and law to enact policy. Do you see how someone would find your formulation troubling?
Genferie,
This short section I think boils down Rachel’s virtucon argument quite nicely.
Being virtuous is liberating not confining. If you are for liberty you must be against pornography, it enslaves. There is freedom and license; freedom is choosing amongst various goods, license is being free to choose vice. Libertarians should be for maximizing freedom without promoting license.
Expanding on the conversation:
1) I think it is fair to say that virtucons value virtue above liberty (i.e. liberty is valued because it helps to support a virtuous society), this is opposed to Libertarians who value liberty highest and value virtue only in that it supports a liberal (in the classical sense) society.
2) The fight seems to me to be a chicken or egg kind of argument. Libertarian leaners say you can’t have a virtuous society without small government and virtucons say you can’t have small government without a virtuous society.
3) One problem is that Rachel Lu is a philosophy professor who has a very specific definition (with lots of baked in unsaid meaning and jargon) of what virtue is and what a virtuous society is that is very difficult for the non PhD level philosopher to fully appreciate. (e.g. When a quantum physicist uses the word uncertainty it’s not the same thing as when an normal person uses the word uncertainty. Even though they are very similar concepts and describe very similar things the word uncertainty to a physicist carries with it a deep background of knowledge that goes unsaid).
Well, that’s the problem isn’t it. If they don’t think that government is the mechanism for this, then what’s the…point…of having a political ideology centered around it?
Well, that’s even worst. She hasn’t yet defined what this “virtue” is, and how exactly “virtucon” differs from :
1) 95% of all political ideologies which also want the exact same thing.
2) 95% of all authoritarian ideologies which also want the exact same thing.
Go to any Old Country country in the 1980s, and you’d have seen banners placed on buildings and across roads which read 100% like the defining characteristics of this “virtue conservative”.
More summarizing:
4) There are political centrists (i.e. actually political novices) who claim the label of Libertarian because they are social liberals and don’t like high taxes, but who could care less about the proper role of government, and there are a lot who claim the label of social conservative merely because they are religious and religious types are unwelcome in the Democrat party. The Libertarian leaners claim the center-right coalition can win by adding the former. The virtucon leaners claim the center-right coalition can’t win if the latter stay home and don’t vote.
Now, lets take this “valucon” argument to its’ logical extreme: the ideal society here would be one run by the Pope. Or one run by an enlightened dictator. Those are the type of societies, which in theory, would provide this sort of outcome that “virtucons” seem to want.
So this raises the question, where does the “conservative” in”virtucon” come from? The American form of government was created specifically in recognition that no such Pope-led society is desirable, and no such “enlightened despot” society is possible.
The American form of government was created specifically with the idea that…social institutions…would be the vanguard in defining and maintaining virtue. Not government.
So what’s “conservative” about this ideology, anyway?
Another interesting issue is their argument that “markets fail”, therefore… Lets take the “marriage” issue. Where is the “market failure” there? Who redefined marriage? The government. Does maintaining an existing millennia-old legal definition require any expansion in the role, size or scope of government? Nope.
Lets take the abortion issue. Where is the “market failure”? Who allows for this type of murder? Does having a law preventing murder beyond what existed for centuries require an…you get the idea.
AIG,
As I said, I think it is a problem. When Rachel uses the word virtue she means something very different from what a Soviet apparatchik meant when he used the word virtue, even if the characteristics they cite are very similar.
AIG,
I think Rachel Lu would disagree that the best society would be run by the Pope or enlightened dictator.
I know she doesn’t mean the same thing. But that’s the problem here: you can’t have a political ideology which pretends to be different by saying “we’re for nice things”. Everyone’s for nice things.
It’s when one tries to frame it in terms of…we like nice things, markets’ don’t work, big government ain’t such a bad idea…therefore…that one gets flashbacks of Old Country banners ;)
But as I said, the “critics” Rachel lays out, in need for solution, are devoid of philosophical, historical or empirical positioning. They are by far not new “critiques”. They are the oldest in the books. And they are by far not “critiques” without solutions to. They’re the reason governments exist in the first place. And historically, they are the reason the US government was laid out the way it was.
So what’s “new” here?
AIG,
To believe that a virtucon desires an enlightened dictator is to ascribe irrationality to the virtucon. The virtucon as I see Rachel preaching it is one who takes to heart Madison’s admonishment about men, angels, and government.
Here is a Venn diagram that draws out the situation with apologies for being over simplistic.
AIG,
Don’t think Rachel is saying that we just need to say “we’re conservatives and we are for nice things so vote for us.” What she is saying is “we’re libertarians and small government and a free market will produce prosperity for everyone – trust us” is a non-starter politically.
While I agree virtue is liberating, and personally dislike porn (I’m a woman), I’m much less certain than you are that porn categorically enslaves.
I’d rather not talk about how I know, as that would betray confidences, but some porn consumers are useful, upstanding members of society despite their proclivities. Exaggerating the dangers of nasty habits is not necessarily the best way to ensure that people avoid the dangers; there’s something to be said for portraying the dangers accurately.
Who decides whether something is a good or a vice?* And what if maximizing freedom (as per your definition) incidentally allows for license?
I observe that the boundary between “good” and “vice” is often one of degree, based on individual susceptibility. Is such a boundary more feasibly self-policed (with the help of friends, as needed) or centrally policed?
_______________________________________
* Is coffee a vice? Tobacco? Alcohol? Television? Meat eating? Dancing? Card games?
“If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.” – Samuel Butler
I’ve always assumed that when Rachel or other virtue conservatives use the term “virtue” that they mean something very similar to Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia. Now, I don’t have a PhD in philosophy ( my doctorate is in law) and my interest in philosophy is primarily oriented toward the political rather than moral variety, but I really don’t think this is an issue of misunderstanding the meaning of “virtue” as used by Rachel Lu. If understanding of virtue conservatism requires advanced degrees in moral philosophy I would suggest that it has very little chance of picking up much traction among the general public and that this recent rebranding might be in vain.
Continued from # 56:
When it comes to the definition of virtue I think virtue conservatives are in roughly an analogous position to libertarians relative to the definition of harm.
When libertarians talk about the harm principal we tend to have a very specific idea of what is meant by harm. The problem is not usually that those who disagree with us do not understand what we mean by harm (though that is sometimes the case). It’s that they either disagree with us about what harm means (in which case they often, somewhat facetiously, invoke the harm principle to justify whatever government intervention they support), or they simply think that government should not be limited strictly to the prevention of harm.
Virtue conservatives similarly are faced with the two main problems of people disagreeing with them as to what constitutes virtue and that substantial numbers of people disagree with the premise that the promotion of virtue is the legitimate role of government.
Z,
Interesting diagram. Let me add a little graphic aid of my own.
Virtue => Right => Government
This is why Virtue is so important even if it is not directly connected to Government. The arrows don’t point the other direction. When we try to make them point the other direction we get tyranny. I believe to fully defend my little logical device I must defend the categorical a priori point of view. After a lot of trying only the deontological version of morality seems to fit.
Well, I like it.
Regards,
Jim
I think a big part of the problem is that a government which has the authority to promote Rachel’s definition of virtue will have that same authority when someone other than Rachel is running things. As a general matter of political philosophy, not just libertarian political philosophy, I think it prudent to resist granting the state power that you would not wish exercised by someone with whom you vehemently disagree.
Ulp!!
Merina, after your ..uh.. spirited comment on my post yesterday, I started looking at some of your comments on Rachel’s posts. We see eye to eye on a lot of things, so I was puzzled.
Now I get it. If you or Rachel felt insulted by my swipe at Reformicons, I am sorry.