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Article Excerpt
Human Virtue and Civic Virtue
Human virtue is one thing, civic virtue another. Human virtue is desirable for its own sake, for all individuals. While modes of enactment may shift from culture to culture, its basic content does not vary among individuals, regardless of their time, place, or circumstances. By contrast, civic virtue is valued instrumentally, for its contribution to sustaining a political community. Because communities differ--in principles, purposes, institutions, and history--the substance of civic virtue varies from community to community. (This is not to say that there are no civic virtues common to all communities.) Human and civic virtue, then, cannot be fully congruent. In all too many circumstances, the tension between them will be painfully manifest, and it will not be clear which is to be given priority.
Consider the philosophical debate over patriotism. In his article "Patriotism as Bad Faith," Simon Keller argues at length against the proposition that patriotism is "a character trait that the ideal person would possess," at least if one's conception of the good or virtuous human being includes a propensity to form and act upon justified belief rather than distorted judgments and illusions. (1) Toward the end, Keller acknowledges that "[c]onsistent with all I have said is a defense of patriotism as a character trait that has instrumental value." (2) He leaves the practical implications of this tension unexplored.
There are two opposed strategies for dissolving this tension. The first is to argue, as Hobbes did, that because traditional accounts of intrinsic virtue reflect diverse and changing "appetites and aversions," they lack either intellectual justification or practical force. The only defensible conception is of virtue as instrumental. Civic virtue is in the service of a single overriding public purpose--namely, peace and security: "All men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore also the way, or means of peace, which ... justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest of the laws of nature are good; that is to say, moral virtues." Hobbes acknowledges that his list of virtues coincides with that of traditional moral philosophers, but he criticizes these authors for "not seeing wherein consisted their goodness, nor that they come to be praised as the means of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living." (3)
Despite Hobbes's ruthless reductionism, however, he finds it difficult to suppress altogether the competing account of virtue. In discussing the meaning and occasions of honor, for example, he observes that "[t]o praise, magnify, or call happy is to honour, because nothing but goodness, power, and felicity is valued." (4) Power is one thing, goodness another; power is instrumental (the "present means to obtain some future apparent good") while the good is valued for its own sake. Human beings can act wrongly--inconsistent with the good--even when their actions are consistent with moral virtue understood as the means to peace and self-preservation. So when soldiers leave the field of battle in fear of their lives, they behave "dishonourably" but not "unjustly." Indeed, Hobbes argues, because the fundamental purpose of political life is self-preservation, civic virtue does not obligate individuals to fight for their country at all. Citizens may be required to fight only when they have volunteered to do so and have in effect bound themselves contractually to accept morally optional risks. (5)
Second, and conversely, one can dissolve the tension between civic and human virtue by denying the moral force of the instrumental conception. In his stirring polemic, "Is Patriotism a Mistake?" George Kateb comes very close to doing just that. Patriotism, he argues, is an intellectual mistake because its object, one's country, is an "abstraction"--that is, a "figment of the imagination." (6) Patriotism is a moral mistake because it requires (and tends to create) enemies, exalts a collective form of self-love, and stands opposed to the only justified morality, which is universalist. Individuals and their rights are fundamental; one's country is at most a "temporary and contingent stopping point on the way to a federated humanity." (7) Intellectuals, especially philosophers, should know better, Kateb insists. Their only ultimate commitment should be to Enlightenment-style independence of mind, not just for themselves, but as an inspiration to all. In this context, "[a] defense of patriotism is an attack on the Enlightenment." (8) From Kateb's standpoint, it is hard...
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