WE (Chapter 9)

9
ISSUES IN SOCIAL ONTOLOGY
There is no one-to-one correspondence between ontological doctrines and normative claims: Hobbes combined an individualistic social ontology with authoritarian politics. Yet questions of metaphysics are value-laden; and questions of value, when pressed, lead us into metaphysical territory. Some arguments are easier, and others harder, to make depending on our social ontology. If we believe that we are cells in the social organism, it is hard to see how we could have rights against society as a whole (though we still might have rights against one another, and even against the government of the day).
There are four issues here.
1. What is the relationship between social institutions such as money and the human actions and emotions, and (partially) natural facts such as scarcity, on which they rest?
2. To what extent do our various associations represent a disordered collection, and to what extent can one claim our exclusive or at least our predominant allegiance?
3. To what extent is the observable plurality of social forms grounded in, and limited by, a common human nature?
4. Once we accept an irreducible plurality of social forms, how can societies handle conflicts without lapsing into chaos or authoritarian rule, and how can individuals make firm moral judgments without lapsing into opportunism or fanaticism?

THE SOCIAL CONSTRCTION OF REALITY
I first address the relationship between the cultural facts and the ‘natural’ facts on which they supervene and from which they emerge. Race differences are about the closest thing we have to an arbitrary social construction, though the facts of body type and on which they are constructed belong to nature, and the power relations they reflect cannot be willed away. Gender distinctions reflect facts of sexual difference observable in every society and among the lower animals. But even gender differences look socially constructed compared with the difference between infants and adults, or between humans and nonhumans. (There are limits to what a childless couple can do with a pet cat or even a pet gorilla.) The difference between the living and the dead is even less manipulable, but even this line is not immune to contest. If there is a God of the traditional sort, He constructs all our constructions and us as well.
Once we conclude that a distinction or institution is socially constructed, there remains the further issue, who does the constructing. Believers in social construction often look like Hegelians without the Weltgeist. Even if the constructor were a malign (say ‘patriarchal’) elite, it could not engage in such construction if it itself were a mere heap of individuals. Nor is just any individual or group able to construct social reality as it wishes. What makes social constructionism politically explosive is the claim of certain groups that they have the right to deconstruct and reconstruct our shared way of life – though paradoxes ensue since such groups’ claim to authority is itself a product of social construction.
As Ian Hacking has pointed out, however, this sort of analysis neglects the purpose of social construction analyses – to raise our consciousness so that we recognize that what seemed necessary or inevitable is in fact a product of historical contingencies and for that reason open to change (H esp. chaps. 1 and 4). No one talks of the social construction of the Federal Reserve Board, as opposed to the economy or the deficit. Some social constructionists – whom Hacking calls ‘ironists’ – do not propose to do anything about socially constructed facts, and some even oppose programs of change.
Social constructionists also point to the ‘interactive’ character of the concept in question. To classify a person as a genius or a woman refugee affects his or her behavior, a fact that then affects the development of the concept – facts that create a possibility for social change. In other cases, the focus may be the changes in our behavior, or that of other people in the subject’s environment, for example that attendant on the concept of a ‘hyperactive child’ (H 103; see also his discussion of autism at H 115). Nothing similar is true of quarks, which exist indifferent to our theories about them. (Compare his discussion of Verstehen at H 108.) Social constructionists also call attention to what Hacking following Foucault calls the ‘historical a priori’ – those contingent conditions which determine what questions we ask and what sentences we are prepared to consider as possible answers (H 47 and 170-72). This means, for example, that the preponderance of research funded for military purposes affects the course of knowledge, perhaps in a permanently undesirable direction (H chap. 6).
These arguments are consistent with the existence of a world independent of our thought, which some theories represent more adequately than others. Moreover, that an institution or practice is a social construction does not imply that it either can or should be changed. When social constructions change, as they constantly do, the direction of such change is not necessarily subject to deliberate control. To the extent that it is, we must decide on other grounds whether we should change or retain existing social practices; and who is entitled to decide the direction, method, and pace of social change. Pragmatism is useless here, since what counts as working and for whom is the issue of issues.
The leading analytic theorist of the construction of social reality (notice the reversal of the usual formula) is John Searle. For Searle, cultural facts arise because people count certain objects, persons, and events as bearing cultural meanings (for example, accepting pieces of paper or metal as money). Such practices rest to some degree on features of human life shared with other animals; for example political structures rest on a disposition to form hierarchies observable in many other species (SC 86). But, since Searle believes that even the functions of our bodily organs are projections of human desires (SC 16), nothing useful for social philosophy follows from this fact. On the contrary, Searle takes human beings and the groups they form (and hence, it seems, the patterns of co-operation they manifest) as brute facts. In Searle’s own words, “The category of people, including groups, is fundamental in the sense that the imposition of status-functions on objects and events works only in relation to people” (SC 97; on the irreducibility of the We, see SC 11 and 26).
According to Searle, all institutions, including liberal ones, are sustained by “institutional power – massive, pervasive, and typically invisible” (SC 94). The background of established practice affects not only what its adherents do, but also what they expect to perceive and in consequence do perceive (see SC 132-36). The results are historically contingent, a fact Searle cites Nietzsche as having discovered (SC 132). Sometimes the system of power is sustained by “razzmatazz,” sometimes by just acting as if the pertinent powers existed (SC 118). Human rights are established by loudly asserting them, and getting others to accept them by whatever means. The Soviet system “collapsed when the system of status-functions was no longer accepted,” carrying with them in their collapse the system of espionage and terror which seemed to have sustained it (SC 92). Human rights continue to be recognized and even extended, despite the decline (Searle says the demise) of the religious framework that originally supported them (SC 96).
Searle develops his account of the construction of social reality against the background of a dogmatic physicalism (see SC 5-7). In Postmodern culturalism, the otiose material substrate vanishes into the emptiness of the Kantian noumenal realm, without Kant’s moral postulates and even without Kant’s assumption that the noumenal realm somehow exists. Neither Searle nor the Postmodernists provide us with any way of developing justifications for sustaining, modifying, or abandoning particular institutions. No normative principle follows from Searle’s philosophy that condemns a young radical prepared to rock the boat as hard as he can, in order to see what follows.
Searle, to be sure, believes in democracy (SW 171-73) and free speech (SW 187-191). He also takes non-violent value conflicts among groups for granted (SW 171). The question, however, is, how minorities, and groups whose beliefs and interests are endangered by free discussion, or even majorities which find constraints on their power irksome, can be brought to accept liberal democratic institutions. Democracy turns out to depend on the relatively unimportance of political decisions; when a truly life-or-death issue such as abortion comes up, the matter is decided by the Supreme Court on ‘Byzantine’ grounds. (See SW 168 [Bush v. Gore] and SW 172-73 [Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade]). Searle does not mention questions of war and peace in this connection.
Democracy in this sense ceases to be useful when it is most needed, when political passions threaten to overwhelm institutional barriers. The case for free speech rests on two considerations: “The first is that we are speech-act performing animals, and the other is that there is something especially important or valuable about our speech-act performing capacities” (SW 190). But what this especially important thing is, or why it is more important to us than the propensity of adolescent males to beat one another up (Searle’s example; SW 189), we are not told. To be sure society needs to regulate violence, but we might also deem some forms of speech harmful, and on wider grounds than liberals are prepared to accept. The promotion of ideologically repellent beliefs, which might in some people’s view include those of Democrats or Republicans, is in one sense obviously harmful
In Searle’s view, even the belief in our capacity for free choice, which underlies his account of institutions, might be an illusion (SW 133). Though Searle is an atheist or at least a religious skeptic (see for example SW 107), when he describes our capacity to create social reality, he inevitably refers to the powers of God set forth in the first chapter of Genesis (SW 100).
We can detect in Searle a sense of the fragility of our social institutions, and the dangers this fragility entails, which might with some stretching link him to the Conservatism of Burke. Unlike Searle, Burke did not do without a theory of social bonds. In a celebrated passage, he wrote:
Society is indeed a contract. … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue; and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but also between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular society is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible with the invisible world, according to the fixed compact which holds all moral and physical natures, each in their appointed place. The law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit that will to that law.
But this passage is ambiguous on the question, what lies behind the “decent drapery” and “politic veil” that Burke recommends elsewhere. Though Burke’s social philosophy is favorable to religion, at the point in his political theory where we would most expect him to do so, he does not mention God, replacing Him with a mystified version of human social bonds. Nor is Burke’s account of the nature of society consistent with his tendency to regard property rights as independent of all other institutions and capable of surviving their demise (say in Revolutionary France, where in Burke’s view all other institutions had become illegitimate).
We can make sense of social construction, however, if we grant fundamental human propensities such as a survival instinct, territoriality, reproductive sexuality, protective impulses toward the vulnerable; as well as a disposition to imitate other people’s behavior, including that of our adversaries. Customs, trends, fashions, fads, and climates of opinion affect professional philosophers as well as everyone else. People whose interactions are frequent and intense develop distinctive ways of habitually expressing these underlying dispositions, and hence find different institutions natural. Somehow patterns of personal influence get transformed into a climate of collective opinion. As social beings, we spontaneously form institutions, but at some point all explanations of the phenomena turn on opaque concepts as ‘charisma’ ‘team spirit,’ and ‘morale.’ The formation of institutions thus takes place in a spontaneous, half-conscious way, in a way that makes possible the development of a wide variety of normative customs. It follows that there is no reason to believe that one set of institutions is foreordained for all the peoples of the earth, and certainly no reason to impose such institutions on everybody. (There are nonetheless limits, or so I hope.)
The institution-shaping phenomenon at work in this argument is what we call ‘culture.’ The concept of ‘culture’ is normative at two levels: Terry Eagleton points to its roots in the cultivation of crops (EC 1). First, to refer to the culture of a group is not to refer only to its behavior, but also to the way its members imagine and evaluate that behavior. Second, since every culture contains conflicting strands, any interpreter must prefer some strands to others. The principal bearers of culture are religion, which is explicitly normative; and language, which is normative insofar as it prefers dividing the world at some points than at others and thus favors one set of purposes over others.

THE ONE AND THE MANY
Culture, however, lacks an uncontested referent (as does society). At one pole, what is required is a ‘thin’ set of principles that virtually no one rejects; such principles do little to support moral and political judgment. At the other pole, we are tied to a rich, ‘thick’ culture that critics fear will suppress all manifestations of individuality. Eagleton treats the resulting issues as a conflict between Culture and culture (EC 10, 37-38, 44-47, and 51-86), or in slightly different terms, between culture and civilization (EC 9-11 and 20-2). Both Culture and culture (or culture and civilization) occur within culture in the broadest sense. Incest prohibitions are neither more nor less natural (or more or less cultural) than abstract philosophical speculations. A thick culture does not exclude reflective thought: a great deal of reflection, of the sort called ‘Talmudic,’ goes on within thick cultures; is it, for example, incest to have an affair with one’s daughter-in-law? And strong individuals manage to assert themselves in even the most repressive environments.
Neither total abandonment of, nor total subjection to, a richly specified way of life is consistent with human nature. For we are social beings, not disembodied minds, and social life always consists of relations with persons with whom we stand in richly specified relations. But we are all mutts these days (and perhaps always were), and our human nature includes a capacity for critical reflection.
‘Essentialists’ hold that some social distinctions or institutions are a fact of nature, complete with a purposive structure according to which we can evaluate both existing mores and proposals to change them; ‘constructivists’ hold that a group is whatever can get itself recognized as such and its rules are whatever patterns of life in fact prevail in its internal struggles. Relativistic theories of identity require, however, a robust and richly normative social anthropology, to tell us which traits form part of a person’s identity and are entitled to govern his beliefs and conduct, and which not. The constructivist, in contrast, can find the reason for group allegiances in our common human nature, including our common preference for our own kin and our common desire to associate with people like ourselves.
‘Monists’ insist on a single, or at least a supreme, social and political identity. Conflict reinforces their determination on this point; as Clifford Orwin has observed, “there are no ‘multiply situated selves’ in foxholes.” Whatever their view of the God of heaven, Monists in politics require a (mortal) God, visibly active on earth, by appeal to whom can settle all normative issues. Yet there is no power on earth that either will or ought to be obeyed or whatever it might ordain. The state is not in fact a closed and self-sufficient community, though some rulers try to make it so. And even ultramontane Roman Catholics hold that if the Pope adheres to a heresy, he ceases to be Pope and ought not to be obeyed. Making the requisite judgments requires us to appeal to standards other than those invoked by the people in change, or at least to different readings of those standards, developed within some sub-community.
‘Pluralists,’ in consequence, recognize a multitude of normative spheres, each with its own governing principles and forms of solidarity. The demand for recognition of identities smaller than, or at least other than, the nation-state becomes more intense in a globalized world, in which what Thomas L. Friedman calls “the golden straightjacket” limits the power of national authorities. And the more important such particular allegiances are, the more common and important the multiply situated self will be, and more challenging the problem of conflicting loyalties.
Stuart Hampshire writes:
The primary enemy from my standpoint is monotheism, and after that moral universalism such as the utilitarian philosophy, which, in its classical form, submerged the salient differences of aspirations among individuals and among societies in a single, highly abstract principle of action, and in the pursuit of a single value: pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
There are no firm moral rules constraining the ways in which we resolve the resulting conflicts. As Hampshire puts it, “a philosopher in his study is in no position to lay down rules for justified murders and reasonable treachery.”
Anglo-American Pluralists combine postmodern theoretical themes with mainstream political attitudes. They divide, however, on the question, whether the diversity of human beings is limited by anything like a common human nature and hence a rudimentary natural law. Pluralism draws its strength from the existence of a Monist enemy, against which it can define its normative standards. Negative ideologies like anti-Communism require a ‘focus of evil’ to sustain them, and if history fails to comply, will create one. Unlike most Pluralists, Michael Walzer retains aspirations toward social justice; constraints on possible positions are supplied by a theory of the just war and by moments of cross-cultural insight. Other Pluralists collapse into a flaccid (though for this reason very popular in academic circles) ideology of diversity, which is unable to explain what forms of diversity count (or should count) and what not. This ideology has found “wide acceptance in the [American] legal culture,” though it is now losing ground. The last sentence was written before the election of Barrack Obama, but the idea that he is an affirmative action president, chiefly valuable because he affirms the identity of other African-Americans, is a gift to his Republican opponents, who can easily run a candidate representing some other group traditionally excluded from Presidential politics, such as a woman, an Alaskan, or a Mormon. We can be certain that, however much diversity of other sorts this ideology produces, class stratification will remain undisturbed.
John Gray is an advocate of modus vivendi liberalism – of liberalism as a quest for peace among adherents of diverse modes of life embodying incommensurable goods. Yet, he admits, “there are limits to modus vivendi. Liberals and pluralists walk side by side in resisting totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes.” He also opposes all universal religions, many versions of the Enlightenment, rival forms of liberalism, and both Rawls- and Bush-style attempts to turn the whole world into the America. The resulting constraints on legitimate pluralism are not trivial. But the specification of the limits depends on such unhelpful formulations as that market freedoms and human rights “are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do so, they can reasonably be altered.” What human need does the right to life serve, except (tautologically) the need to live (and thus experience other needs)?
The issues are often discussed with the help of the word value, most often used in the plural – for example, traditional values, new values, shared values, and aristocratic values. The use of the word values, however, invites confusion among evaluative properties (such as beauty), with evaluative propositions (such as Democracy is good), and with acts of valuing (such as I value your friendship). But it most accurately refers to social practices embodying shared evaluations, such as marriage or the opera. Thus aristocratic values refers to practices embodying evaluations of a second order, which adherents of aristocratic culture, including butlers and nannies, use to make judgments of relative worth among the values embodied in ground-level practices such as personal relationships, aesthetic endeavor, or economic activity. Expressions such as false, or I should prefer to say spurious our counterfeit, values refer to practices embodying shared evaluations where what is valued is worthless or bad. Values in the proper sense are historical entities like legal systems, and as such come into being and pass away (so that we can speak of the decline of aristocratic values).
An approach to social institutions that lacks an understanding of human nature, which enables us to evaluate both existing institutions and proposals for change, leaves us with two unpleasant choices. We can practice the Total Rejection of existing institutions and traditions characteristic of end-state Sixties radicalism. By way of reaction, we can follow the Neoconservatives and accept all our social institutions just because they exist (in a religious mood, because they are ordained by God), though we may no doubt be glad about past developments such as the end of slavery (which, again in a religious mood, we can attribute to Divine Providence). Social justice on this view is a phantom: there is only justice between individuals, a thesis to which Liberals respond, not by demanding social and political responsibility, but by instilling collective guilt. Even justice between individuals is questionable on Neoconservative premises, when these individuals are members of different societies, or when one of them is deviant beyond a certain ill-defined point (and the limits on who counts as a ‘true American’ become narrower in times of stress).
On such premises, the life of a pluralistic society is one in which groups embodying shared interests and shared outlooks compete for social power. Even people who try to give the appearance of being above the battle are caught up in a network of partisan allegiances. Incommensurable claims face one another, conflicting arguments are dismissed rather than answered, and propaganda seems our only recourse in discussion. The tendency inherent in this sort of politics is conflict ending in either tyranny or war. Defending group-transcending norms that are of any practical use is, however, not easy.

CONSERVATIVE RELATIVISM
One response – call it ‘Conservative Relativism’ – takes core features of the status quo, including division of our society on cultural and class lines, as immutable givens. It then accepts the resulting deadlock, and facilitates the withdrawal of men and women into gated communities where they are protected, so far as possible, against the necessity of dealing with those they find threatening. Thus it favors localist solutions, especially to problems about which moral perceptions are divided, while relying on external enemies to maintain national unity. Conservative Relativists avoid fascism on the fragile ground that civil liberties, including both religious toleration and the right to belong to associations other than the state, are part of the shared principles which unite our society.
Conservative Relativism implies a willingness to accept grave injustice, or at least what many people reasonably regard as such, rather than disturb the existing order. Hence the abolitionists and the civil rights movement were wrong on Conservative Relativist premises, though it would also be wrong on such premises to try to reverse their victories now, and we can even say that, retrospectively, that their errors were providential. One possible application of Conservative Relativism is a politics of the specious present, which accepts whatever balance of forces happens to prevail at a given time and place. Avoiding this result requires artificially insulating some of our principles of conduct from the critique that produces skeptical questions. This means dismissing internal critics, in Shirley Robin Letwin’s language, as “cannibals.” For non-terminating disagreements often arise within existing moral and political practices, and outside agitator theories are unpersuasive.
Taken at its full metaphysical claim, however, relativism, conservative or other, self-destructs, since it requires us to assert as true the proposition that there is no truth. A fortiori, relativists cannot claim to have discovered the truth that there is no truth about politics. Likewise, to reject general principles in favor of abridgements of moral practice is to articulate a general principle. Yet these points are consistent with large concessions to relativism at the level of practice.
In any event, Conservative Relativism implies that cultural conflicts are contests of power, and that the culture of the most powerful group within any given territory is entitled to prevail. In the global version of Conservative Relativism, the United States, as the only ‘hyper-power,’ is entitled to impose its culture on the entire world. The Hegelian question then arises; in what direction our political theory (and practice) might move. The conflicting tendencies (‘contradictions’) in our society are clear: the money power erodes our attempts at democracy, the advocates of change lack a normative framework to establish their priorities, cultural traditionalism lives in a forced marriage with corporate capitalism, imperialism erodes both democracy and civil liberties, and triumphant capitalism exhausts its own cultural capital. But where we are to go from here is not so obvious.

LIBERAL PLURALISM
Sometimes Pluralists believe in what Stephen Gould calls “non-overlapping magisteria,” among which God or History somehow guarantees absence of conflict, so long as each respects its proper domain. Sometimes they accept a moral theory in which each source of norms has a claim on our allegiance that cannot be balanced away for the sake of any other. Sometimes they place norms in ‘lexical’ order, so that subordinate norms are relevant only when superior norms are satisfied, but are not absorbed in the superior norms. Or they may build into their Pluralism a principle of respect for minority cultures that transcends the requirements embedded in any particular culture.
In any event, many adherents of minority cultures desire to preserve their way of life against majority pressure, and, in the process, restrict the liberty both of members of their own group and that of outsiders. The Québécois’ fears for their cultural survival, in the wake of a quiet revolution that abolished the two non-linguistic markers that had defined their identity – devout Catholicism and enormous families – brought this issue to the fore. Multinational federalism provides institutional resources for dealing with the result; the ‘Liberal Pluralism’ advocated by Will Kymlicka provides it with a theoretical rationale.
Kymlicka argues for the exportability of the Canadian solution to Eastern and Central Europe, and presumably to the rest of the world as well. In an attempt to be both liberal and pluralistic, he supports “the right of the group against the larger society, designed to protect the group from the impact of external pressures” and opposes “the rights of the group against its own members, designed to protect the group from the destabilizing impact of internal dissent” (K1 7). For example, he defends external pressures on internally illiberal groups such as Hasidic Jews (K1 38), and is hostile to American federalism, assuming without argument that the cultural differences among the states of New England do not demand the respect required by more colorful sorts of difference (K1 29-31).
Though Kymlicka recognizes a dizzying variety of national and quasi-national groups, he recognizes only one kind of legitimate state – an immigrant state on the American model. He neglects the role freedom of religion, and the forms of freedom of association it supports, has had in enabling ethnic groups in America to maintain crucial elements of their way of life while assimilating to a thin civic culture. He also shows himself blind to the concerns of people who try to maintain the integrity of a national community.
Of the groups he calls ‘metics,’ i.e., immigrant groups not destined for citizenship, he writes, “These people arrived without any expectation or entitlement of becoming citizens, and may indeed have come here illegally. But at some point, the original terms of admission become irrelevant” (K1 41-42). This contention seems right so far as the children of metics are concerned, since they know no home but the country to which their parents have migrated (at least American law takes this position). But it is rather too quick for metics of the first generation, who might think of themselves as participants in a quiet invasion, and be greeted as such. If they perform work that makes their continued presence necessary, however, justice requires that they be given a reasonable opportunity to identify with the host country.
Kymlicka’s approach to ethno-cultural justice, which calls for different rights for different sorts of minorities, is likely to multiply the resulting problems. He rejects the claim that minority nationalisms are more likely to be intolerant than majority nationalisms (K3 § 2). But a minority preoccupied with its own wrongs is unlikely be hospitable to cosmopolitan demands.
Kymlicka imposes a mandatory thinning on all cultures, both majority and minority. The adherents of all cultures are to be required to follow the example of the Québécois in shedding many of their distinctive features, as the price for protection against pressure from national majorities. Thus: “If the EU [European Union] said that Macedonia can join only if creates an Albanian-language university in Tetovo, as the Albanian minority wants, Macedonia would probably accept, however reluctantly” (K3 370). The prospect of this sort of micromanagement is certain to make joining Europe a lot less attractive to many people in Eastern and Central Europe. Moreover, Kymlicka and his supporters too facilely extend a theory designed to deal with the problems of the Québécois (and Russians in the Baltics) to very different sorts of groups. Given the centrality of understandings of reproduction and family life to the shape of any cultural tradition, it is irresponsible to extend Kymlicka’s argument, without further ado, to questions of gender and sexual orientation. There are moral constraints on the expression of cultural attitudes, but to dismiss traditional beliefs about sex and gender issues as bigotry is to deny the human need to maintain a way of life and transmit it to the next generation.
Moreover, the distinction on which Kymlicka’s strategy rests – between a group’s self-assertion against hostile forces without and its control of dissident forces within – cannot be maintained in practice. For insiders and outsiders are frequently in alliance. The ‘security track’ adopted by the High Commissioner on National Minorities (K3 374-78) may therefore turn out to be better, even in humanitarian terms, than the attempt to convert the whole world to some particular political philosophy, including Liberal Pluralism.
The most important shortcoming of Liberal Pluralism is its neglect of the inescapable sociality of human beings. Ethnic and cultural conflicts, like conflicts based on difference of social position, will not go away; in fact these two sorts of conflict combine virulently. For contempt for a group’s way of life blends with a policy of seizing their possessions and excluding them from positions of advantage, and at the extreme of preventing them from reproducing or destroying those members already in being. A modest liberalism will attempt to so manage such conflicts as to avoid civil war and make possible co-operation and mutual consideration among groups, while respecting the right of each group to maintain its own modes of association. Kymlicka’s theory, however, encourages the fissiparous tendencies of both liberalism and nationalism.
Our argument thus approaches the ‘vulgar’ or Hobbesean liberalism defended by Patrick Neal, for which “the mark labeled ‘civil peace’ is not preceded by the adjective ‘mere.’” But we need to modify Hobbes in direction of Madison, acknowledging both that ideological and communal conflict is an important source of faction, and that the danger of the state’s falling into the hands of one faction is real. Madisonian liberalism requires active devotion to the constitutional order, and a willingness to uphold it against both the state and public opinion, in a way unnecessary on Hobbes’s premises. It must also include reassurance to all cultural groups, that they will remain free to hold their distinctive outlooks, practice them, defend them publicly, and transmit them to their children.
Modus vivendi liberalism will not satisfy the suicide bomber, who prefers death to acquiescence in domination by cultural aliens, but then neither will neutralist liberalism or a conception of autonomy alien to many people’s moral outlooks. No social philosophy can protect us from history; and pluralistic social orders, like all others, can break down. Whether it is possible to develop a form of public reason for a pluralistic society, which does not amount to the imposition of one group’s imposition of its ways of thinking (and living) on the others, is the question addressed in chapter 10.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND PARTICULAR ALLEGIANCES
Cosmopolitan may designate an attractive moral ideal, but it may also be a euphemism for opportunism, i.e. for choosing moral principles to suit needs or mood at any given time. Nenand Miščevič defends a ‘pluralistic cosmopolitanism’ grounded on the prevalence of mixed ancestry, and modeled on the life of the Western intellectual who enjoys the cultural products of many societies. He proposes political forms to match. But he neglects to distinguish between the creative fusion of divergent cultural traditions, and the mishmash or worse that results when an individual favors whatever tradition happens to favor his mood, inclinations, or political program.
To be human is to be a specific kind of human, and the bare demands of humanity are insufficient to support the sacrifices necessary to sustain social life, especially the care of infants and the aged and infirm. The hunger for wholeness cannot be dismissed any more than any other persistent human desire. Nor are merely private solutions satisfactory, since liberal institutions constantly pressure us to treat our deepest convictions and loyalties as ‘preferences.’
We all have special obligations to our parents, and should respect one another’s efforts to perform these obligations. More broadly, each of us is tied to a family of groups smaller than the human species, and these groups support special obligations and ideals of the good life, both including a table of specific moral requirements. Within limits yet to be defined, each of us should nurture his or her own cultural tradition and respect other people’s efforts to do the same.
In any society, there are majorities and minorities. Sometimes it is right to demand that a minority culture conform to the requirements of the larger society. But sometimes adherents of a minority culture are entitled to reject the majority culture, at least in part, and sometimes even adherents of the majority culture ought, so far as possible, to abandon it. Adherents of each cultural tradition need to discern which features of their inherited way of life are worth preserving, which not, and how the good is to be disentangled from the bad. In the case of a religious tradition, this disentangling requires a prior discernment, which features are of divine and which of human origin.
The political defense of threatened cultural traditions requires us to argue that some such traditions are worth preserving, like natural beauty and art treasures. We must also defend the particular tradition under threat, especially against the charge that it rests on irrational myths and is therefore at least proto-fascist; and also against the claim that its sense of difference from other, closely related, traditions is based on trivialities. In the absence of such an argument, traditionalists are proposing merely to limit the opportunities of the younger generation for the sake of the comfort of their elders. Yet the ‘liberal’ solution – letting the younger generation do whatever it pleases – is no better, since they younger members of a cultural minority are likely to be inundated with the larger culture in (what many members of the majority may admit are) its trashiest aspects before they attain the capacity for mature judgment.
We should not deny the adherents of threatened cultures the right to defend their traditions, or to develop them to meet the challenges of the contemporary world. But we lack a robust criterion for distinguishing development from degeneration, except in the extreme cases where it may be too late to do anything about degeneration. The continued vitality of a heritage-defined group requires dialogue among those adherents of the tradition who regard themselves as ‘faithful’ and those products of the tradition who regard themselves at ‘progressive.’
But Liberals now frequently accept, almost to the letter, the view Lord Macaulay attributed to the Catholic Church: “I am in the right and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when you I am the stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.” They argue that oppressed minorities need not tolerate those who would deny them (what they take to be) their rights, in cases far short of genocide or slavery. As Professor Karl Liem of Harvard University put it, “The pain that racial insensitivity can cause is more important than a professor’s academic freedom.” And the same is held to be true of the pain created by Politically Incorrect doctrines about sex and sexual orientation.
On some versions of Pluralism, it is hard to see how we can even pose the necessary evaluative questions. Such versions attempt to manage the conflicts that arise from diversity in a way modeled on the liberal doctrines of religious freedom, in order to avoid the cruelty and humiliation such differences frequently engender. There are clear cases of humiliation, such as sexual abuse or forms of segregation that treat contact with the excluded group as tainting. Beyond such cases, the line between such humiliation of outsiders and assertions of one’s own identity is fuzzy: it is not clear whether non-Hindus ought to have regarded the Hindu-inspired decision to rename Bombay ‘Mumbai’ as an act of humiliation. To let a group define what measures humiliate it is to empower it to claim whatever it wants. Humiliation, in any case, is too strong a word for the real and imagined slights of which politics is full.
We may deplore the human habit of adding insult to injury, and call for respect for one another’s territories, as codified in the American private-public distinction. Perhaps we can control forms of invective, or exhibitions of sex and violence, everyone knows have no serious intellectual or political message. But these remedies are merely palliative. In the end we have the endless jostling of groups for power and recognition, in which the oppressed become oppressors with remarkable alacrity
Multiple loyalties provide a basis for what I shall call a ‘multiculturalism of conscience.‘ Thus ‘progressive’ Jews brave charges of disloyalty to their group to protest injustice against Palestinians. However strong may be the arguments for their right to depart from what they believe to be chauvinism of the Jewish Establishment, it is less clear what is the basis of their claim to Jewish identity, since many of them neither believe in the God of Abraham nor follow the law of Moses. Some such Jews call for a ‘new prophetic,’ free of the claim to speak for the LORD that both authorized and limited the older sort, and grounded if anything in the de facto Liberalism of the American Jewish community on issues other than Middle Eastern policy. The tu quoque response – that, for the Jewish Establishment itself, Jewish identity means little more than pro-Israeli politics – is less than satisfactory.
Any tradition, however transcendent its claims, must also deal with the fact that men and women are finite beings, tied to some persons and places more than others – a fact that has large implications for moral and political judgment. Hence individuality in the socially and politically significant sense, though rooted in our condition as separate organisms, is not an endowment but an achievement, founded upon our need to resist social pressures in order to avoid being overwhelmed. The virtue characteristic of individuals in the proper sense is ‘integrity’ – a mean between the mutually reinforcing extremes of fanaticism, which overrides other people’s perspectives without a hearing, and opportunism, which easily adapts to whatever pressures appear to be most powerful at the moment. Like all virtues, integrity requires something like grace.

NATURAL LAW AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Integrity requires a courageous, well-informed, and self-critical conscience. This means the capacity to know moral truth, at a reasonably concrete level, even when it is unpopular within one’s social environment. Appeals to conscience that transcend social boundaries begin by employing some version of the Golden Rule: Do as you would be done by. But the attempt to apply this maxim very quickly discovers the fact that other people’s desires are embedded in a variety of ways of life, each of them including evaluations at odds with the others. What members of one group might wish done to them, members of another will violently reject. An adherent of open marriage may be surprised at the reaction of his mistress’s husband. And we must be prepared to accept the possibility that it would be better for slaveholders if they were divested of their slaves and the corrupting influences slavery exerts on everyone involved.
The natural-law tradition allows for pluralism in three senses: a plurality of goods, a plurality of spheres of human life each devoted to its own distinctive goods, and each with its own regulative principles; and a plurality of ways in which various societies might regulate the relations among these spheres. But it also insists that pluralism be grounded in, and limited by, a normatively rich understanding of human nature, which at the extreme might counsel the disbanding of a society that cannot or will not function at a minimum level of justice. The richer the underlying understanding of human nature is, however, the less plausible will be the claim that it will be acceptable to all reasonable people, and the more serious the charge of smuggling a controversial program into one’s premises. Protestants suspect Catholic spokesmen of a dishonest rhetorical subterfuge, in which natural-law rhetoric is used within a discourse whose premises, methods, and conclusions are controlled by ecclesiastical authority.
Hence arises the notorious problem of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ natural law. Senator Joseph Biden deployed this distinction when he successfully opposed Robert Bork’s candidacy as Supreme Court Justice for his disbelief in natural law, and then unsuccessfully opposed Clarence Thomas on the ground that his version of the natural law implied unacceptable conclusions.
Efforts persist to find moral guidance in the behavior of nonhuman animals. But the whole approach founders on the question, which animals? For some forms of animal behavior are guaranteed to turn the strongest stomach, e.g., the eating of the male after or during intercourse in some species of insects. Natural-law arguments can be used to support any number of positions in personal morality, for example the view that, in view of the superfluity of the semen from a reproductive point of view, males are entitled to extensive sexual liberty (whereas women, at least those whose task it is to be mothers, are not). So far as social theory is concerned, Ayn Rand relies heavily on natural-law ethics to defend the virtue of selfishness and a social and political philosophy designed to give maximum scope to that virtue. Among more conventional natural-law thinkers, there has recently been a shift in the position on the death penalty, as there was in the nineteenth century on the question of slavery. To appeal to the “preponderance of natural law opinion,” as John Haldane does, is to replace philosophy by an opinion poll. At the level of theory, issues arise when we attempt to specify both the pertinent human goods and the proper relationship between these goods and moral requirements. We need to discover whether pleasure, procreation, or autonomy represent independent goods; and whether and to what extent it is appropriate to resolve conflicts among goods by weighing and balancing their claims, and whether and to what extent they impose absolute requirements. There are also controversial virtues, such as chastity and sincerity.
Examining one’s intuitions, or those of the people with whom one ordinarily discusses moral issues, does not distinguish natural-law standards from revealed principles or legitimate or illegitimate conventions. The concurrence of culturally distant communities strengthens a judgment of natural law, but, even if all societies condemn mother-son incest, that prohibition hardly makes for an adequate moral code. Appeal to the shared standards of civilized behavior encounters the issue, what communities are to count as civilized. Technological development is irrelevant to civilization in the moral sense, and moral criteria of civilization are circular (often representing the views of some elite within technologically advanced societies). In the Conclusion, I suggest, following Collingwood, an understanding of civilization as rational dialogue, but the results of such dialogue are often unclear.
Martha C. Nussbaum reads her political program into human nature. She specifies the requirements of women’s dignity with the help of a register of “central human capabilities.” Together with other elements of the standard left-Liberal catalogue, these include “being able to live [until]… one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living,” “having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction,” and “having the social basis of self-respect and non-humiliation [including] … provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of … sexual orientation.” One could with equal plausibility build into one’s register of goods a natural need to remain alive from conception to natural death, enforce traditional moral standards at home, and impose one’s form of life abroad. Masculinity, understood in remarkably similar terms, is highly valued in many societies (though not quite all).
Eagleton is both more cautious and less tendentious:
A culture would be ill-advised to try to suppress the kinds of needs we have in virtue of what the young Marx calls our ‘species being’ – needs such as food, sleep, shelter, warmth, physical, integrity, companionship, sexual fulfillment, a degree of personal dignity and security, freedom from pain, suffering, and oppression, a modest amount of self-determination, and the like. If nature is moulded by culture, it is also resistant to it, and we might expect robust political resistance to such a need-denying regime. (EC 99-100)
But many of these needs – most notably ‘dignity’ and sexual ‘fulfillment’– are themselves culturally shaped to a high degree. Perhaps all are.
Among the requirements of morality commonly held to apply across social barriers, the prohibition against murder – usually framed as a ban on killing innocent human beings or persons – has a special place. But this prohibition generates a host of casuistical problems. One definition of murder that used to be influential – killing a human being for private purposes – has ceased to become so, since killings by totalitarian governments are not murder by this definition.
In any event, it is not plausible that murder is the only act whose wrongness is independent of the mores.
One understanding of the universal requirements of morality is the Ten Commandments, which includes prohibitions on adultery and theft as well as murder (but no general prohibition on lying). Even if we rely on revelation, we still need to argue that adultery in ancient Israel is the same sort of action as adultery in contemporary America, despite the large differences between our institutions of marriage. The contemporary debate about the public role of the Ten Commandments turns on a distinction among moral, religious, and historical forms of instruction utterly artificial from the standpoint of the world of the Commandments.
Joseph Boyle takes as morally and politically central the requirement that we love God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves – a requirement to which the Commandments give a particular shape. Boyle writes:
Some general norms, like the precepts of the Decalogue, follow from the basic principles of the natural law by a short, deductive process in which the conceptual analysis which allows for the linking of terms like stealing and adultery to the basic moral predicates is straightforward, for example that killing someone is harming them [sic].
This argument jumps over a host of problems, such as adultery where the ‘injured’ spouse does not know of the act or is indifferent to it. Moreover, at least three of the Commandments – against theft, against Sabbath-breaking, and against adultery – presuppose institutions not generated by philosophical argument.
The Tenth Commandment – against covetousness – requires special attention. Although sometimes interpreted to forbid only concrete steps to impoverish one’s neighbors, it is also read as a forbidding certain state of mind – which makes it unique among the Commandments (and strangely so, since murderous thoughts are not forbidden). Conservatives use it against redistributive politics, as if it were invariably covetousness to object to the greater wealth of the rich. But it is not a sin, on anyone’s reckoning, to resent wealth that is unjustly acquired or held, or to be concerned with wealth differentials and forms of class stratification that undermine our sense of community.
In any event, human nature both supports and resists the Commandments. David Daube’s principle of the ‘self-understood’ – that legislators do not ordain what no one questions — is pertinent here, especially if, as some scholars believe, the Ten Commandments form the core of ancient Israel’s criminal code. The current official Catholic position, as expressed in the recent Catechism, leaves it unclear to what extent reason can discover the Commandments. “The commandments of the Decalogue, although accessible to reason alone, have been revealed. To attain a complete and certain understanding of the requirements of the natural law, sinful humanity needed this revelation.” In any event, the voice from Sinai does not speak without reference to the needs of human beings in society; as if it could equally require adultery as forbid it.
At the other end of the spectrum from traditional religious teachings is the hard school of experience, from which not only fools must learn. Some patterns of behavior and forms of human society have broken down, partly under the weight of distorted understandings of human nature. Marxism-Leninism is the most popular example, but one should not infer from this fact that God or human nature has ordained consumer/corporate capitalism either for America or all humanity. In any event, many manifestations of humanity we are disposed to think of as dehumanizing or otherwise contrary to nature persist.
The problems for natural law do not arise from an imaginary fact-value divide: as human beings discussing human behavior and society we are already in the evaluative thick of things. The difficulty lies rather in the complexity and diversity, and on some views the depravity, of human nature. (The fact that human beings regard some manifestations of human nature as wicked implies without more that we are complex and diverse.) Sustaining a claim that human beings are too wicked for a natural-law ethics to be possible, however, requires some extra-human source of evaluation – whether provided by revelation (as in some forms of Calvinism) or by some form of Gnosticism (as seems to be the case in those who complain of our ‘speciesism’). It does not help to change one’s language to higher law, as Russell Hittinger proposes, for that leaves us at sea about the source and content of that law. However we formulate the matter, a ‘thin’ understanding of higher law is appropriate here, since we are concerned with discourse among people of widely varying convictions and dispositions. In the attempt to specify the requirements of ‘thin’ natural law, we have to begin with the gut responses of the ordinary human being. For a willingness to listen to all sorts and conditions of people before framing moral requirements is one of the most attractive features of a natural law approach to ethics.
The problem of the unusual individual is more severe in moral than in social/political contexts, especially since each one of us is in some respects unusual. Normal people, it has been said, are people one does not know. Yet one should not take the extraordinary case as decisive for social policy, which has to be framed for human beings as they are ordinarily and for the most part.
‘Thin’ natural law is best defined by contrast to the fully Thomistic version, which includes fully theological items such as the Old and the New Law. The anti-dialogical implications of ‘thick’ natural law, and its placement of a We-They distinction at the center of theory, are well captured in a sentence by Hittinger: “the gentiles need to be taught.” There is nothing wrong with the discussion of moral issues within a community of faith, but such discussion should not be confused with arguments addressed to all reasonable people.
Yet it is harder to do without a normative human nature than might be supposed. The arguments, Human beings are diverse, and therefore ought to be mutually tolerant, Human beings need to live in peace with one another, and therefore we should obey the law of the sovereign, and Human existence precedes essence, and therefore we must choose ourselves and avoid bad faith are of the same logical character as Human beings are male and female, and therefore ought to be heterosexual. And the kinds of reasons commonly given for rejecting the last of these arguments – for example, that it marginalizes those who cannot measure up to the proposed standard (or at least who are ill disposed to do so) – apply also to the others. Without some reason to believe that it reflects something deep about human nature, diversity of moral belief is nothing more than disagreement and a challenge to develop arguments.
In deciding which arguments concerning human nature to accept, there is nowhere to begin but with our intuitions. We are concerned especially with those responses, such as that one has special obligations to one’s own family, that are widely shared at a variety of times and places. Such responses also testify to virtues (such as justice, at least in other people), to goods (such as health) and to rights (such as not to be punished as a criminal without due process of law). There is more consensus about goods than about the other normative items, though no single way in which goods translate into obligations. One reason for this observation is the doctrine of organic unities, according to which something bad (say a tormented face) can contribute to the greater value of the whole (say a painting of the Crucifixion).
The most important intuitive responses are those that set limits on moral reasoning by designating some human possibilities as sick or perverse. A contemporary case is Timothy Treadwell, whose quest for union with bears led to his own death and that of his companion Amie Huguenard. These responses are, however, fallible (we know this because they are culturally and individually variable). The resolution of moral conflicts and the correction of moral errors is not only a matter for moral philosophy, but also for the complex mix of argument and struggle that led, for example, to the consensus that human slavery is unacceptable. When we come to the question of pitting our own intuitions against those of others, the best we can say is that we have carefully considered the arguments and remain of our opinion. While it is good to cast one’s argumentative net as widely as possible, universal agreement cannot be expected.
Four philosophical points from the Aristotelian tradition will, I hope, be accepted across cultural boundaries. Despite the undoubted fact of individual and cultural variation, human beings share enough to make a universally accessible morality a doable project. We are embodied beings, so that the distinction between male and female cannot be dismissed as alien to our identity. We are social beings who learn their morality from others, so that common moral responses cannot be dismissed as socially fabricated. We have a the capacity to critically examine our habits and desires, and can conclude that the life of a contented slave or addict is not in the proper sense a happy one.
Yet disagreement persists even among those who accept these doctrines. The diversity or perversity of human beings, which threatens to imply an unbridgeable gap between actually existing human beings and ideal human nature, poses the most serious challenge to natural law ethics. Even a stable self cannot be taken for granted: a person with an established pattern of life may find himself or herself acting ‘out of character,’ or strongly desiring to do so. To thine own self be true may not be coherent advice.
The existence of a common human nature and the same basic moral requirements for everybody is a practical postulate in something like Kant’s sense – though what we look for we are likely to find. An ethical theory that recommends that each person think of himself or herself as a special case, exempted from the requirements of common morality (for example from the rule against reckless driving by a special disposition to road rage), is unacceptable. So is a social theory that treats Diversity as a God-word, covering an endless diversity of frequently clashing agendas. Such philosophies lead to endless conflict, but this is where we in practice are. A theologian would speak of our fallen nature and need for grace.

WHO DECIDES?
We now face the issue, which decisionists like Hobbes and Schmitt press upon us, who is to settle issues to which reasoned discussion is insufficient. These include the question, how to handle value-conflicts that appear intellectually irreconcilable and cannot be resolved by private decision, or when if ever a political crisis warrants the overriding of ordinary legality. And life-and-death battles (or battles for the survival of a certain way of life), where for us or against us is the battle cry, fuel the deepest critique of liberalism. Yet an anti-liberal approach to politics makes likely wars destructive both of human life and of the forms of society they are intended to protect.
Any account of human nature must include the claims of kin and clan on both our resources and our allegiance. The French rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen spoke no more than truth when he said, “I like my daughters better than my nieces, my cousins better than my neighbors, and strangers better than foes.” And Gadamer was right to investigate “what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” when we receive inherited ideas – and inevitably this means particular inherited ideas. Those who dislike the political implications sometimes drawn from these doctrines should not deny the reality of our various allegiances and heritages. Horror at Nazi Germany is both conventional and traditional, and should not lead us uncritically to defend Weimar, whose failure made Nazism possible.
‘Liberal’ societies fight wars, just or otherwise, as do societies of other sorts (and sometimes win), and though they sometimes exhibit a naïve surprise at the hostility of others, that fact hardly does them credit. In liberal societies authorities issue their decrees, and succeed in getting people to obey them – by argument, irrational persuasion, bribery, or force. Yet, as a lawyer like Schmitt should certainly have been aware, there are a multitude of forms of conflict – litigation, for example – short of warfare. We dare not sever ‘the political’ from its larger social context. For such a move deprives us of the capacity to invoke background norms to criticize, and in extreme cases to resist, the decrees of those in power.
Our endeavors as liberals must be to civilize conflict, not to abolish it. The fact that the demands of justice and peace frequently conflict, and the same is true of other human goods, does not imply a fundamental incoherence in our system of goods. Nor does it mean that a good human life is in principle impossible. It means only – and this is quite enough for purposes of social and political philosophy — that, under the conditions of human life, including some that are deplorable but permanent here below, conflict within and among both individuals and societies is an inescapable fact. Dante allowed a multitude of different forms of beatitude in his Paradiso, but these implied conflict neither within nor among the blessed.
In a widely admired remark, Joseph Schumpeter observed, “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” But we need to ask whether relativity refers to here, beyond the indubitable fact that a differently situated person would make moral and political judgments other than my own, without open abandonment of rational discourse or obvious bad faith. We most of all need to explain the social and psychological conditions that make it possible to cultivate the states of character necessary to standing unflinchingly for ‘relative’ convictions. The best we can do is to cite a leader like Abraham Lincoln, who exhibited both moral courage and humility, and thus was able to win a bloody civil war without pretending that the Confederates were embodiments of ultimate evil and the Union forces embodiment of unspotted virtue. It is this sort of awareness that enables us to transcend the boundary between Us and Them and affirm our common nature as human beings.

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