|
Article Excerpt
Civic virtue is generally understood as relating to a specific polity and in that way to be distinct from virtues appropriate to a human being as such, the subject matter of most "virtue theory." This conception does not rule out "universal" civic virtues--ones appropriate to membership in a "world community"--and some theorists speak of and advocate some form of such "world citizenship." Nevertheless, I will consider civic virtues in the context of an individual national political community, the United States in particular.
Work and Public Space: A Broad Conception of the Civic Domain
Civic virtue is sometimes understood as engagement with the polity as such. On this conception, civic virtues might include appropriate regard for fellow citizens, being well-informed about public issues, a disposition to offer reasons for one's position on such issues, and being disposed to participate in political institutions and processes. But I will use a somewhat broader conception of civic virtue that also encompasses forms of public interaction and engagement with public modes of life. It will encompass, for example, relations in the workplace and in public spaces. These matters are appropriately regarded as "civic" because they bear on civic standing. As Judith Shklar, among others, has pointed out, in the United States having a job is a mark of a good citizen; other things being equal, the jobless are seen as civicly deficient. (1) How one is treated at work is also one mark of civic regard.
How do we decide which qualities or traits are civic virtues on this broader conception of the "civic"? The virtues presuppose some normative conception of the civic order--some notion of how that order operates when it is operating properly or well. Civic virtues can then be understood as qualities that engage in the appropriate way with that civic order and its norms.
Aligning Civic Practice with Civic Ideals
Some accounts of civic virtue emphasize that civic traits are necessary to reproduce (good) institutions and their concomitant political cultures. Citizens must, for example, participate in the appropriate manner, through voting, petitioning their elected representatives, and defending protections of vital liberties against internal and external threats. One might call this the "upholding good institutions" model of civic virtue. This model must form a part of any conception of civic virtue in contexts in which the institutions of the nation are worth upholding. But I am interested in a different, though related, dimension of civic virtue. That involves the ability of citizens to recognize when the practices of their political society fail to live up to the professed ideals of that society. Such a virtue requires a capacity and disposition to know what the ideals of one's society are, which in turn depends on some knowledge of the national history; an ability to recognize when the current reality fails to accord with one or another of those ideals; a recognition of (some aspect of) what it would take to bring that reality into conformity with those ideals; and a disposition to do something oneself along those lines.
The conception of the civic order that allows for such virtues must, then, include not only the actual functioning of institutions in society, but also a set of norms and ideals that might partly animate those institutions, but to which the institutions might also fail to live up. The assessment that current institutions fail to align with civic ideals is not necessarily the same as the assessment that they fail to meet some appropriate moral standard. For example, it is plausible to think that the current political order in the United States, and, indeed, in most nations of the world, violates minimal standards of social justice, and this is a reason for attempting to align them with such standards, generating civic virtues required to do so. But the civic ideals I am concerned with are not simply reasonable moral standards, but ones that are (perhaps also) specific to a particular civic order. Those standards can, indeed, fail to include some basic moral standards that should govern a given order, and they can equally go quite a bit beyond minimal standards. They can also overlap substantially with those minimal standards. Let us call the virtues I am pointing to here "aligning institutions with ideals," or "aligning virtues," for short. (2)
Critical Reflection
Some writers on civic virtue have emphasized one virtue that appears to be involved in the aligning virtues in liberal democratic polities, and that is the ability to engage in critical thinking; they have generally argued that schools should teach critical thinking as part of citizenship education. Such critical thinking has been emphasized in two contexts in the civic virtue/education literature. One is connected with personal autonomy, and the ability of each individual to subject a way of life with which she is presented (either as that within which she has grown up, or an alternative one in which she might choose to engage) to critical scrutiny. A good deal of this literature has been concerned with a balancing of this virtue with others with which it might be in tension, such as the right of parents to pass on their way of life to their children, or the right of a cultural community to reproduce itself without the state attempting to weaken its hold on its children.
A second, less common, way that critical thinking or critical reflection comes into the civic education literature is in the idea that students should be taught the ability to criticize their own society. This virtue is often emphasized as a counterweight to what is taken by its proponents to be an emphasis on an uncritical or insufficiently critical loyalty to one's nation.
I agree that such critical thinking is important, but my conception of the aligning virtues involves critical thinking or reflection in a somewhat different way from either of these concerns. Both of these views of critical reflection leave it entirely open what standards the individual will choose to use to evaluate what she is evaluating, whether ways of life or aspects of her own society. Indeed, it would be contrary to the spirit of the advocates of both these sorts of critical thinking if certain standards of assessment were ruled out. This would be seen as denying autonomous critical reflection itself. However, the aligning virtues do restrict the standards for critical reflection; they restrict them to the ideals of a particular political society. The aligning virtues concern the ability of citizens to think critically in the sense of discerning whether the actual practices of their society align with the ideals of their society and, if not, to try to bring them into such alignment.
Suppose, for example, that an American citizen thinks it would be better for the American people if the U.S. were to become a Soviet-style communist state, another, a Muslim theocracy, and a third, a Christian theocracy. Suppose advocates of each of these proposals proffers a set of arguments for her proposal. Those arguments could not appeal to the actual political ideals of U.S. society. (3) Communism, Muslim theocracy, and Christian theocracy are clearly not within the range of plausible interpretations of American political ideals. And so those candidates for standards against which to assess the functioning of American practices cannot be part of the aligning virtues, even if good normative arguments could nevertheless be given on their behalf.
In saying this, I take no stand on whether it might in some sense be better for the United States if it abandoned its own ideals and attempted to live up to some other ideals, such as the ones just mentioned. I am not privileging a political society's own ideals in any absolute sense. I am merely trying to distinguish one type of civic virtue from others, and, more specifically, one sort of critical reflection from others. I recognize that the aligning reflection that I am defending could be seen as too limited from the vantage point of these more expansive visions of critical reflection. Nevertheless, there is a recognizable civic integrity to the idea of critical reflection on the practices and institutions of one's own society in light of that society's own ideals. "Are we living up to what we profess to stand for?" is an important question for a citizen to attempt to answer; and providing the cognitive and moral wherewithal and knowledge to do so seems to me arguably a legitimate goal of civic education.
I do not mean to imply that it is a simple matter to discern what the ideals of a given polity are. There is generally room for disagreement about this, although some interpretations will be more plausible than others. Civic ideals are not merely a cover for ideals held on other grounds. Also, there may be agreement on an ideal's formulation at a certain level of generality--"freedom," in the American context, for example--yet disagreement as to how to understand that ideal in a form closer to practice and policy. Moreover, the same civic order may generate competing civic ideals. Rogers Smith's influential work on civic traditions within the U.S. finds a liberal tradition, a republican tradition, and an exclusionary and hierarchical tradition. (4) But I am not sure that every tradition can rightly be called an "ideal." I imagine that most Americans, if asked which of equality and liberty on one side, or exclusion and protection of privilege on the other, they regarded as ideals of American political tradition, would select the former, even if some of their responses to public issues are in line with the latter. In any case, one can also regard liberty and equality as the "best traditions" of the nation, and as representing the appropriate ideals against which current arrangements are to be assessed. (5)
Racial Equality as a Civic Ideal
I want to discuss the aligning virtues in the context of one particular American civic ideal, and that is racial justice, conceived of as a particular application of the American ideal of equality. Racial justice or racial equality is arguably an ideal embodied in various amendments to the U.S. Constitution (13th-15th); in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that has been taken to be a good deal more than simply a Supreme Court ruling but to have defined and helped to secure an important civic ideal; (6) and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and later elaborations, reaffirmations, and reiterations of it. I will not engage with the admittedly complex historical and political issues related to the standing and character of this ideal. Equality more generally has some claim to be an American civic ideal;...
|
