Two separate spheres of life?

Why does a blog ostensibly about "cultivating wisdom, prudence, and virtue" comment on and provide links to articles about political-legal topics such as termination of human life or Congress' powers to regulate it?

This is a fair question worth pondering.  Two recent sets of posts relate to these topics.

The question, it seems to me, probably reflects a critical assumption:  morals, morality, and moral evaluations -- those things tethered to virtue of mind and action -- have very little, if anything, to do with politics and law.

The reasoning behind such an assumption might go like this:  "If those two things, morals and politics, did have something to do with one another, then I could understand why you might mention them in this forum.  But I'm not really sure that they do go together.  Isn't morality just a private matter while politics is public?  Aren't these two separate spheres of life?  That's how I tend to think about it.  So I need some help understanding why you've raised those topics here, when you want to promote right practical thinking and action that are in accordance with virtue."  We might respond by posing a question of our own.

Are morals really separate from politics?

This is a well-traveled moral and political philosophical question.  It arises, for instance, in classical Greek thinking.  One encounters the matter in the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Aristotle.  It evolves in their successors, the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.  I touched on it in my inaugural post.

Another way to frame this question is to ask:  Do morals and morality transcend social structures, or are morals and morality determined by them?  Is doing right (morality) distinct from faring well (socio-political pursuits in community)?  This matter is not only well pedigreed in classical philosophy; it is also a matter that tangibly affects daily life today -- including the propriety of content in blog posts such as this one.

It is a mistake, I submit, to divorce questions of morals from questions of politics.

It is erroneous, in other words, to separate decisively considerations of virtue in individuals from considerations of society's governing policies that form the communal environment in which these individuals find moral pursuits a matter of daily experience.  To separate them so, at least, is to reconfigure radically social community.

In a previous post, I noted that some people explain political differences in terms of different conceptions about the structure and function of the family:  the morality that informs approaches to the family gets mapped onto the government as family.  The guiding moral framework of the microcosm (the family) becomes the guiding moral framework for the macrocosm (the political state).  People tend to see the government as family, and they wish for those principles operative in the one sphere to prevail in the other.  This is just one theory (that of George Lakoff in Moral Politics), and it is not perfect.  It does, however, posit one vivid way in which morality and politics are connected:  the role and moral principles of the family understood subsequently as those of the government.

Morals and politics may be connected not only from the perspective of cognitive linguistics but also from the perspective of philosophical reasoning.

In his A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre makes this observation while discussing the supposition that "there are two distinct spheres of life, one for 'morals,' the other for 'politics.'"

But, in fact, every set of moral evaluations involves either neutrality toward or assent to or dissent from the social and political structure within which it is made.  And insofar as dissent is concerned, the moral evaluation will involve some degree of commitment to an alternative.  (MacIntyre, Short History, 97)

This connection between the two was the case for Plato and Aristotle, the Notre Dame professor argues, because they assume that the proper role or duty of an individual is inextricably intertwined with that individual's role and duty in the polis.  That is, these philosophical giants take for granted their particular social structure in deriving norms for practical guidance in pursuit of virtue. Therefore, the "Greek moral vocabulary is not so framed that the objects of our desires and our moral aims are necessarily independent.  To do well and to fare well are found together in a word like eudaimōn" (85).  And they are found together, moreover, in the daily context, the rough and tumble world, in which they both occur.

Additional reflection on Prof. MacIntyre's larger treatment of Greek ethics could help to shed light on multiple angles of this topic, particularly how morality neither completely transcends social settings nor is wholly subsumed by them.  To explore his treatment, however, would take us far afield.  The point I find most germane now is the moral evaluation that necessarily takes place in one's disposition toward a certain social and political structure.  We might simplify this structure and call it policy.  Professor MacIntyre identifies assent, dissent, and neutrality.

I am not always entirely sure whether neutrality in the strict sense, without a slight preference for one policy or the other, is in fact possible.  Even if it were, the person displaying neutrality would still be involved in a moral evaluation based on some sensibility, and that person would still be assuming a commitment to an alternative, a third thing, something either not on offer or not yet proposed.  Neutrality in this sense would also be dissent from the social and political structure (or policy), a lack of assent to this but desirous of "something else."

My concern is not indifference or neutrality per se; rather, it is that approval of, disapproval of, or even neutrality toward a particular socio-political structure involves a moral evaluation of it.  The one socio-political structure or policy is approved or disapproved because it is judged to be right, or just, or not.  If one is neutral, one is either unsure whether it is just (itself a part of moral reasoning) or has a framework in which what is right is judged to be based on different criteria (because, from an alternate moral sensibility, the policy is not clearly right or wrong as other partisans suppose).

Therefore, it does seem that morals are connected to politics; the two are not separate from each other.  To say this is not to identify them; they are distinct but not separate.  It is just to affirm that politics have an inextricable moral dimension, and our moral sensibility is what causes us to think and feel the way we do about politics.  Our moral sense, to use the phrase that is the title of James Q. Wilson’s valuable book, is what prompts our assent to, dissent from, or neutrality toward a governing policy or regime.  We are involved in judging whether we think it is right.

What is the payoff of these reflections?  This point is important to make because there is a tendency with some currency to divorce moral questions from political ones.  This proclivity may be subsiding somewhat.  The oft-rehearsed appeal to "social justice" explicitly introduces moral questions into political discussions.  But we need to realize that differences on questions that may relate to "social justice," on the one hand, are not necessarily a matter of one side's being moral and the other's being immoral, the one just and the other unjust.  It is, on the other hand, actually to underline that the political topic is a moral one and that the disagreement is about the nature of justice, precisely the moral principle in question.

Second, this is, in fact, to bridge the two things that sometimes are divorced, the norms of virtues like justice and the social and political structures in which the norms find expression.  It is to recognize the uniting thread of doing right and faring well, morality and politics.

It is, third, to admit that discussion about policy measures that we might characterize as questions of "social justice" may involve us in discussions about more basic questions of morals, morality, and moral evaluation.  We may have to back all the way up to comprehensive moral frameworks.  We must be prepared for those more difficult soundings in our conversations with one another.  We cannot raise the political matter and shy away from discussions of the moral matter.  More to the point, in raising a political topic we implicitly welcome moral questions.  We cannot cry foul if we are pressed to explain ourselves and our guiding moral convictions and assumptions.  This may be the only way to make real political progress in such conversations.

Finally, we must also train ourselves to engage in these discussions both respectfully and thoughtfully.  Not only in ancient Greece but also in our own day, to probe the moral questions that lie underneath surface questions of politics is what responsible individuals do, as a key component of their role, in social community.  This sort of communal self-understanding and sense of responsibility is something that we would do well to reclaim.