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A VirtuCon Manifesto
That’s a VirtuCon manifesto, not the VirtuCon manifesto. I suspect there are more visions of how virtue theory and conservatism could interact than there are actual VirtuCons. This rough first draft is a contribution to the conversation Rachel Lu rekindled last week — see Tom Meyer’s response and the conversation that followed it as well — about what an emphasis on virtue means for other parts of the conservative worldview.
Please note: The word “virtue” has recently (in the last century or so) undergone something of a change in meaning. The “virtue” in virtue theory harks back to the older meaning. Do not be misled by this choice of vocabulary, imposed by some 2,000 years of philosophical reflection.
- There is such a thing as human nature.
- There is such a thing as a form of life that promotes human flourishing. In the past this was also referred to as “happiness.”
- Virtues are those habits of character that tend to human flourishing. In the past, the development of these habits was also referred to as “the pursuit of happiness.”
- Virtues are not general understandings, but the application of general understandings to particular cases. This is known as practical wisdom.
- The virtues are inculcated in childhood through the enforcement of rules, in adulthood through deliberative practice, and in both stages of life through example. Enforcement by — and examples found in — family, local church, and one’s immediate community are better (more effective) than those enforced by or demonstrated in more distant institutions.
- Politics is an important area of human flourishing. Real participation in the life of a community requires that the rules and norms of that community are decided by its members, not imposed from afar.
- For these reasons, virtue requires a “hard” subsidiarity, where power is (sparingly) delegated upwards from the local to the general polity. (This contrasts with ‘soft’ subsidiarity, where the higher power delegates downwards, but always maintains real control, usually disguised as “support”).
- In the past, this was also referred to as “liberty.”
- Poverty, ignorance, and dishonour are the enemies of virtue. All three are opposed by the voluntary institution of the free market. Free markets create wealth, spread knowledge, and do not require social position to succeed. A free market requires the exercise of virtues, and assists in promoting them.
- In the past, this was also referred to as “life.”
- The realization of a continent-spanning republic amenable to human flourishing is a daunting task, but it requires an exquisite modesty. Fortunately, that modesty is the sure route to success, eschewing all temptation to tyranny. We need only have regard to three things:
- Life – adequate means of existence, provided by the voluntary interactions of persons making choices in a condition of freedom.
- Liberty – the room to learn and grow in practical wisdom.
- The pursuit of happiness – the exercise of wisdom and the road to human flourishing.
Hmmm. Locke did have a triplet “Life, Liberty and Estate” as some sort of definition of “Property”, but his concept of Pursuit of Happiness is a little different, isn’t it?
I’m not sure Locke much belongs in the virtuecon playbook. His definitions of happiness and liberty are much different from the traditional sources.
Nice!
But where’s the difference? That quote was about the goal of happiness. The effective means of reaching that goal is property, if I’m not much mistaken, as described in the Second Treatise of Government.
EDIT: Oh, I see what you’re getting at! Well done!
In this passage he says that virtue will get us closer to happiness than just following whatever desires come along. Ok, so I guess you’re right that he has the same idea of “pursuit of happiness” as you!
Very good! But the idea I described is still central to the Second Treatise, with or without that explicit phrase.
Get us closer to virtue how? What is happiness for a human being? What is man’s final cause? We need to find that before we can resolve questions about the nature of liberty. That’s MacIntyre: No telos, no ability to resolve questions of about liberty.
No objections there! And if that means so much the worse for Locke’s ethics, then so be it. (Though he may say quite a bit about this in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It’s a big book, and I’ve only read a little of it.)
We avoid it with a Constitution that limits government.
It is good to see you still active. Hope you are well.
We avoid it by persuading our fellow citizens that it’s a bad policy.
As I recall the movie, the existence of a statute wasn’t the problem. Even without a statute, there would have been no school dance because none of the adults approved. The subject of the movie is not that the townfolk were beyond their authority in banning dancing either legally or culturally (remember that they thought dancing would result in real though indefinite harm to the kids themselves and to the community itself), it was more of a substantive argument about how the value of expression and choice outweighed the sometimes real risk of moral degeneration, about how relations between the sexes nodding toward coupling is not inherently evil and could even be wholesome, beneficial, fulfilling.
I’d lay odds, though, that of all those new dancer kids close to 100% of them would feel justified in a legal ban on public nudity, that most of them would support some kind of public decency laws, that many of them might support blue laws. What constitutes public decency or harm is inherently a public decision. Part of liberty is being able to contribute to these decisions in your own community without undue interference from a higher polity.
Quoted from the conversation: The virtues are inculcated in childhood through the enforcement of rules, in adulthood through deliberative practice, in in both stages of life through example. Enforcement by, and examples found in, family, local church and immediate community are better (more effective) than those enforced by or demonstrated in more distant institutions.
1. If church is used in the context of religion, then perhaps God is not being avoided.
2. There are now moral issues being accepted by the churches which were once outside of that acceptance, hence no guarantee that a unchanged morality will be adhered to.
3. For those of us whose connection to the Church is not a “local” thing, it might appear that we are being read out.
#6 An important area of human flourishing is politics. Real participation in the life of a community requires that the rules and norms of that community are decided by its members, not imposed from afar.
I am going to take an exception on this. We are both Catholics. I was an evangelical Pentecostal. If the center of our religion involves a Person and His vicar, and an authority outside of ourselves, the magisterium, we are part of the whole, but not necessarily part of the decision making apparatus.
On a lesser scale, there are things that government knows that we don’t know. Someone with a specific authority must be aware of the issues and then plan to deal with the expected results.
World War II was raging in Europe and the anti-war sentiment in the US kept us out of the conflict. The Europeans were dying. The Chinese were dying. FDR found a way to get aging destroyers to the Brits to be used to sink U-boats and guard convoys. If the citizenry who wanted to avoid the conflict understood what FDR was doing, the road to eventual victory in this conflict would have taken longer, especially if we had to conquer a German-occupied Great Britain as part of winning the war.
Then the Japanese caused a fatal error. They attacked us. No more isolationism on our part.
Respectfully disagree. What you are describing is democracy. This
guestis the concept of 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner.We have the foresight of a Constitutional republic to place limits on what the majority can foist upon or take from the minority.
There is persuasion in ratifying and amending the Constitution. There is no persuading adherence to it.
Maybe just me, but if I’m talking about being freed from my passions, I never call it “liberty”, but “freedom”. To me, “liberty” always connotes the freedom from restraints that allows people to satisfy – not necessarily their “appetites” but their purposes (which may or may not be base appetites).
So, for example, a monk who takes a vow of silence is not at liberty to sing, even if he desires to sing for purposes nobler than what we colloquially think of as “mere appetite satisfaction”. Of course, a vow of silence is also a self-imposed constraint on liberty, and so inherently freer than being forced into a vow of silence one did not agree to.
The small town in Footloose is not a constitutional republic. But if the constitution purported to be able to tell communities that they couldn’t legislate public decency, common good, or common harm when they thought it necessary then I doubt it would have been ratified. Obviously these assessments will vary greatly depending on the community. And that’s ok. The federal constitution doesn’t purport to speak definitively on all applications.
One of the protections we have (had) in place is that decisions regarding public good, public harm, and public decency are supposed to be left up to the local public affected by those assessments and that they had some broad latitude. Sure, this included slavery until the overriding charter specifically outlawed it; sure this included anti-sodomy laws until the overriding judicial agent interpreted such statutes as against existing law. Public morality changes and politics is inherently messy. But we don’t now and never have had a system restricted by a libertarian view of harm.
Representative Republic form doesn’t avoid the “2 wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner” scenario either. It’s just that the wolves must first vote for a representative, but it’s pretty much still proportional. So we get 2 wolves representing 200 other wolves and 1 sheep representing 100 other sheep all voting on what’s for dinner. Same result. We have that now. Constitutions are a check on power, but they don’t guarantee anything either since they can be differently interpreted or even ignored. We have that now.
I don’t get where you think the disagreement between us lies. (I’m not even totally sure you think there IS a disagreement.)
In any case, I do not imagine I have “decision-making-power” when it comes to the teachings of the Church. Nor do I imagine that the moral life of a Catholic is reducible to obedience to the law, or to authority figures.
My impression in reading your item involved authority. In our country we vote for local, state, and federal positions such as city council, county commissioners, state house, senate, and governor, and federal house and senate, and the president.
We empower others to act on our behalf. In so doing we relinquish control and the ability to make rules on our own behalf.
There are times when the rules come from afar. We are witnessing a president who is rather lawless in what he is doing. We did empower him, even if you and I did not vote for him and he is far from what we would do.
I can’t imagine what in what I wrote made you think I would disagree with any of that. In any case, I don’t.
Reading the comments on this thread has been somewhat depressing for me, but also a valuable reminder. The self-proclaimed “virtuous” commenters on this thread are short on details on how they would “help” those of us who they deem to be unvirtuous. Short on details, but long on subtext. And in that subtext is the valuable reminder.
It reminds me why we lose elections, even though the majority of voters agree with us on the majority of issues. It reminds me why tens of millions of Americans, if you ask them why they do not vote for Republicans, will answer that the GOP is a Party of narrow-minded religious extremists and they want nothing to do with it. It reminds me why my alliance with the SoCon right is (unfortunately) only an alliance of convenience. And it reminds me to be ever vigilant against falling into the trap of smug self-confidence in my own “virtue,” which is also known as the sin of pride.
In the realm of politics I recognize one and only one “virtue.” That virtue is tolerance for people who disagree with me, but who have done me no harm.
I don’t understand. What sort of “help” do you think VirtuCons should be offering?
I don’t understand this either. To what subtext are you referring? (Maybe the “smug self-confidence in my own ‘virtue’ “? That’s my best guess.)
I don’t think they should be offering any “help.” I tend to my own virtue. I ask only that they do the same.
This “VirtuCon” movement is (so far as I can tell) a political movement. It seeks to make society more “virtuous” by political means, which is to say by use of force. They are only explicit about a couple of things. Banning SSM and abortion, of course. But the subtext is that it doesn’t stop there. The soidisant virtuous are being pretty coy about telling us what “virtues” would be imposed next. But I feel confident/afraid that if I picked the right church and walked in to hear the sermon, I would find out.
So why did you complain that they were short on explaining what sort of help they would offer?
Just come out and name names. Who has self-proclaimed to be virtuous? Because I don’t see it.
I’m with Augustine: I don’t understand. What subtext? What has been so religiously extreme?
Maybe they weren’t offering or threatening to “help” at all.
Ah, I think maybe I get it. You presume that the VirtueCons are planning various other ways of instilling virtue and you want them to come clean about it. Is that about right?
“Is that about right,” you ask. Well, it’s what I’m saying, but it’s not what I want. What I want is for them to stop scaring the bejeezus out of voters who would otherwise vote with us. What I want is for them to tend to their own virtue, and leave me alone to tend to mine. I think I’m being pretty clear about what I want.
Maybe. But then, what exactly are they doing? If VirtuCon is not a political label for a political movement, then what is it?
That was all I meant.
It’s clearly (in Lu’s The Public Discourse piece) a label for a cultural movement that happens to have a political dimension.
The political aspects would (I imagine) include abortion and marriage and welfare reform and freer markets and devolution of power in the direction of the local– maybe less room in the laws for gambling and porn. Not sure what else. (I’m pretty sure I’ve heard next to nothing in sermons about any of this stuff.)
The non-political aspects would be considerably more extensive. (Heard plenty of those in a sermon!)
You’re missing my point. The concern is about turning the non-political aspects into political causes/goals. And if you want to hear how Democrats use that fear to drum up support, just listen to any Democrat’s screed about the “war on women,” including predictions that Republicans will ban birth control.
Rachel (who coined the term VirtuCon, I think) says that her goal is to cut off the hydra’s head of “secular culture.” That suggests to me an intention to replace “secular culture” with the only alternative I can see, which is a religious culture.
That’s the problem right there, methinks. It’s your imagination.
You think a call for virtue means a call for legally enforcing virtue. Meanwhile, people who are pointing out the essential and historical link between political liberty and personal virtue, are generally speaking, very well aware that virtue can’t be brought about through force.
So you’re reading in a subtext that isn’t there.