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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
I dislike hit-and-run commenting, but I’m going to do it anyway:
I’m with the VirtueCons to this extent: “But I will just say quickly that it’s not at all true that I view the administrative state as a non-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.” In particular, we won’t get anywhere if we think of the America we live in being what it is for inexplicable reasons. They’re all too explicable, and if you don’t make that effort, how can you reasonably expect to counter them?
That said…
“We need something more substantial. Something ennobling. Something hopeful and meaningful. I don’t think self-identified libertarians generally have that…”
Categorically untrue, as a study of the mass of libertarian literature reveals. But let’s leave that to the other thread. In this one, let’s try to focus on this: what’s the positive program VirtueCons want to advance that libertarians can get behind? We have lots of assurances that VirtueCons don’t want to control people politically, but, frankly, very little in the way of evidence. Most of the comments I’ve seen from VirtueCons have been quite explicit about desiring a public sphere that they don’t find—pick a term—demeaning, offensive, vulgar, prurient, or what have you. The problem here (from a libertarian perspective) is that the proposed remedies are indeed, as far as I can tell, legislative. Everyone seems to have given up on cultural moral suasion. I don’t want to overstate the case—I can’t, really; I live in Porn Valley north of LA, and it can be challenging to get from point A to point B without passing half a dozen strip clubs on the way, and I can’t help the fact that Vivid Video is just off the 101 freeway as I head south to go to Universal Studios. I really am sympathetic. I merely insist that the most durable, meaningful, and suitable to a free people means of addressing these concerns is to deprive the strip clubs and porn studios of their customer base by convincing their customers that the product is undesirable. Ironically, the left is extremely good at this, viz. environmentalist and health-related causes. (Don’t get me wrong; I know they also don’t hesitate at all to legislate their opinions, no matter how lacking in factual basis.) We—libertarians and VirtueCons—need to get good at it, too.
For the record, I professed VirtueConservatism, though I’ve so far refused to spell it without the E. And I favor Aristotelian/MacIntyrean/Thomistic/Lewisian accounts of ethics over Kant and Mill (whose views I still concur with more than 90% of the time).
And I want free markets. I really, really want free markets! (Maybe not exactly 100% free, but way, way, way closer to the free side of the spectrum than to the other side.)