Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 1

I finally completed James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  I have mentioned the book in previous posts; I will again -- and for good reason.  The late Prof. Wilson's accessible writing is marked by his massive erudition and incisive reasoning.  It offers much from which one may learn, even if one disagrees with parts or the whole.

Because I find the volume so worthwhile, I plan to post a series of reflections on it.  As with this entry, summaries will be followed by ruminations.  I do not pretend that my posts of gleanings will do justice to the book.

The book is about human nature.  In particular, it is about the moral sensibility that is inherent in human nature and cultivated accordingly.  In arguing that there is such a sensibility, Prof. Wilson finds himself at odds with many academic gatekeepers.  He contends that "an older view of human nature than is now current in the human sciences and moral philosophy is the correct view; thinking seriously about the kinds of animals we are will help us understand our persistent but fragile disposition to make moral judgments and the aspects of human relations that must be cultivated if that disposition is to be protected and nurtured" (vx).

To say that this disposition is something that may be "protected" assumes that it exists, and Prof. Wilson marshals plenty of supporting evidence.  That is the point:  "This book is a modest effort to supply the evidence that man has a moral sense, one that emerges as naturally as his sense of beauty or ritual (with which morality has much in common) and that will affect his behavior, though not always and in some cases not obviously" (25).

To say that one might want this moral disposition be "nurtured" affirms that that to which this sensibility disposes humans is potentially valuable.  Indeed, this positive moral trajectory seems to be where Prof. Wilson places the accent in his discussion:  "Beneath our wars, crimes, envies, fanaticisms, persecutions, snobberies, and adulteries; beneath, that is to say, all of those human traits that might be said to constitute our original sin, there is a desire not only for praise but for praiseworthiness, for fair dealings as well as for good deals, for honor as well as for advantage" (vx).  It is these desires, or sensibilities, and their sources that Prof. Wilson examines.

Although one can reasonably argue for more such moral senses common to almost all people than those that Prof. Wilson treats, he covers much ground with these four:  (i) sympathy, (ii) fairness, (iii) self-control, and (iv) duty.  Next time I will focus on these.  For now, I wish simply to comment on some overarching, framing matters.

To identify these ethical inclinations as Prof. Wilson does is not to identify a set of moral rules (see 11).  But it is in various ways "an attempt to clarify how we evaluate human behavior, and so [the book] starts with judgments in order to discover what we are praised for doing.  Almost everyone has a moral sense that is evident when we speak disinterestedly about our behavior or that of others.  We regularly praise and condemn other people's speech and conduct" (24-25).  There may be a place for rules.  What is more interesting to me is the everyday nature of morality, or moral sensibility, that is highlighted.  This is where most people live.

First, how conscious are we that when we condemn or praise others we are making moral claims?  This may be apparent for things like cheating (it violates our sense of fairness, which is a form of justice) or adultery (it violates our sense of loyalty, which is a form of self-control).  But it extends to more mundane behaviors, too.

When we say that someone is meanspirited, we are judging that meanspiritedness as behavior that ought not to occur; the person should have behaved with kindness instead.  Why?  Because we generally value or find praiseworthy kindness more than we do spite.  The former is the virtuous or moral alternative to the latter.

In this vein, Prof. Wilson discusses sympathy.  This is getting ahead of ourselves somewhat, but it will help to advance the present point.  He writes that sympathy is

the human capacity for being affected by the feelings and experiences of others.  Sometimes sympathy leads us to act altruistically; usually it does not.  More often it restrains us from acting cruelly.  And even when it does not inspire benevolent actions, sympathy is an important source of the moral standards by which we judge both others and ourselves.  Sympathy, in other words, is both a motive and a norm. (30)

We probably agree that sympathy is a motivation for our behavior, but we might ask, How does sympathy also function as a standard, a moral norm, for behavior?  Professor Wilson suggests that our motivation derives from our natural (biological and emotional) sociability.  We desire to be admired by others and so to please them, not to offend them.  In other words, we exist in relationship with others and desire to promote the mutual relational interaction.  To this end, "we must imagine" what others think and feel.  In imagining, we judge in this way:

More particularly, we judge whether the actions and feelings of another person are proportionate.  A rich boy distraught at the loss of a penny arouses not sympathy but derision; a boy indifferent to the loss of a loving dog arouses not sympathy but disdain.  We approve of the conduct and character of another person if, when we imagine ourselves in this position, our feelings correspond to those that we think motivate him. ... Sympathy -- our sense of another's feelings and of their appropriateness given the circumstances -- is the basis of our judgment.  (32)

If this account is roughly accurate, then feelings have a much larger role not just in our moral motives but also in our moral standards than perhaps many of us have been conditioned to suppose.

This is a second noteworthy item of the first section of The Moral Sense:  the role of emotions or feeling in both moral interactions and moral calculations.

To admit a place of emotions in moral reasoning may seem odd, but it also seems to make perfect sense.  As I thought about this from the perspective of engaging others on often controversial topics (because morality is typically a disputed subject), it struck me that a perhaps (more) fruitful way of conducting these conversations is to be sensitive to and aware of other people's emotional responses to the topics under consideration.

Some of us find it relatively easy to explain why we think what we do about a moral topic.  Others do not.  Often it is also the case that people have difficulty mustering arguments for their firm position on a moral topic.  It is therefore helpful to remember this:  "The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments that they employ" (8).

Why is this helpful?  It will help us to learn to practice patience in our own lives as we interact with people who may display inconsistency (as we all do) between our words and actions and who may not be able to verbalize their moral feelings.

Second, the feelings on which people act may give us a better barometer of what positions people actually hold, despite what they say.  It will help us to understand -- to sympathize with, as it were -- our family members, friends, or other conversation partners, because we understand the integrity of moral sensibility in persons:  it involves not just their mental senses but also their emotional senses, which prompt physical actions.  We become, as it were, more holistic readers of moral philosophy.

Third, in being patient with others and sympathizing with them so as to understand them better, we will also likely perceive more constructive avenues to pursue in our actual dialogues and interactions.  Where is there more common ground than we might otherwise have assumed?  What is the heart of the matter or disagreement, if there still in fact is one?  Are we approaching the same point in different ways?  How should we best carry on the conversation from here?

Fourth, we will learn to be more self-aware.  We will hone the ability and discipline to discern when emotions are compelling us to respond to justice or injustice, to something praiseworthy or condemnable. And we will better be able to identify which ones they are and why.

In this connection, we may wish to ask ourselves these questions or ones like them.  "Why am I feeling this way about what she just said?  Is it a moral response?"  Or, "Why do I have this physical reaction to what he just did?  What is the connection with my sense of what is right?"  In so doing, we will actually deepen our social relationships with people, because we will be more in tune with, and frankly concerned about, the deeper principles that individual occurrences reflect.  I suspect that we will also be led to better appraisals of ourselves and others.  And in time, with faltering steps -- and by honing our senses of sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty -- we will probably be able to cultivate not only more substantive relationships but also more virtuous responses to them.

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.

The Dark Knight (of Taxing) Rises

In an effort at once to sympathize with those who find themselves in the minority and to recognize respectable reasoning through a topic when it arises, I reproduce in full today's rather lengthy editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

A Vast New Taxing Power

The Chief Justice's ObamaCare ruling is far from the check on Congress of right-left myth.

The commentary on John Roberts's solo walk into the Affordable Care Act wilderness is converging on a common theme: The Chief Justice is a genius. All of a sudden he is a chessmaster, a statesman, a Burkean minimalist, a battle-loser but war-winner, a Daniel Webster for our times.

Now that we've had more time to take in Chief Justice Roberts's reasoning, we have a better summary: politician. In fact, his 5-4 ruling validating the constitutional arguments against purchase mandates and 5-4 ruling endorsing them as taxes is far more dangerous, and far more political, even than it first appeared last week.

This is a minority view. By right-left acclaim, at least among elites, the Chief Justice has engineered a Marbury v. Madison-like verdict that camouflages new limits on federal power as a reprieve for President Obama's entitlement legacy and in a stroke enhanced the Supreme Court's reputation—and his own. This purported "long game" appeals to conservatives who can console themselves with a moral victory, while the liberals who like to assail the Chief Justice as a radical foe of democracy can continue their tantrum.

It's an elegant theory whose only flaw is that it is repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts's own language and logic. His gambit substitutes one unconstitutional expansion of government power for another and rearranges the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system.

***

His first error is the act of rewriting the plain text of a law, instead of practicing the disinterested interpretation that is the task of the judiciary, regardless of the partisan outcome. The second error is converting the health insurance mandate's penalty into a tax. Ninety years of precedents have honed precise and widely divergent legal meanings for taxes and penalties for violating laws or regulations, and they are not interchangeable.

The Chief Justice did not simply change a label—as if Congress said something was a penalty when it was really a tax. Rather, these categories are defined by their purposes and effects, by how they operate in practice. Taxes are "exactions" whose main goal is raising revenue, while penalties punish individuals for breaking the law. The boundaries can blur—legitimate taxes may also have strong punitive aims—but scarcely so in this case. ObamaCare's mandate was designed to regulate individual conduct to help achieve universal coverage. If it succeeds perfectly, it should collect $0.

Even if Democrats had passed the mandate tax as rewritten by the Chief Justice, and they did not, the Supreme Court until Thursday has never held that Congress can call anything it wants a tax. The taxing power like the Commerce Clause is broad, and the courts are generally deferential. But all powers the Constitution enumerates are also limited, and these limits—unique to each power—must be meaningful and enforceable by the legal system.

The Chief Justice's compounding errors deprive the taxing power of any viable limiting principles. Article I, section 8 gives Congress an independent grant of power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Taxes must originate in the House, the political body designed to be most responsive to voters. There are also important additional safeguards on the type of exactions known as "direct taxes."

Indirect taxes—"duties, imposts and excises"—are taxes on activities and products. They are passed on by a seller, triggered by a transaction and more or less optional: Consumers don't have to buy taxed goods and services. Direct taxes, on the other hand, are those that the federal government is empowered to impose on individuals as citizens. They cannot be avoided because they are levied on the existence of people.

America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes. These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states. For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves.

***

That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power. The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society.

Chief Justice Roberts concedes that "Congress's ability to use its taxing power to influence conduct is not without limits" and that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Supreme Court "policed these limits aggressively, invalidating punitive exactions obviously designed to regulate behavior otherwise regarded at the time as beyond federal authority." But then he writes that "more recently we have declined to closely examine the regulatory motive or effect of revenue-raising measures."

His error—or more likely, his deliberate sleight-of-hand—is that this modern jurisprudence does not deal with direct taxes but indirect taxes and income taxes. Income taxes were authorized in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment, which was necessary to bypass the other important limit on direct taxes, called apportionment.

The Constitution says that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." Colloquially, direct taxes are known as head taxes and they must be spread among the states according to population. Apportionment's onerous limits were meant to protect against abuse and sectional favoritism. If Congress uses direct taxes, the residents of South Carolina will pay the same overall share as Massachusetts, and so forth.

But apportionment would defeat the mandate tax's "whole point," the Chief Justice writes, since every state will have a different percentage of citizens that are uninsured. So he cryptically rules that "A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax."

But if not a direct tax, then what kind of tax is it? It is not an indirect tax because it applies to a failure to purchase something, what the Chief Justice calls "an omission," not an optional transaction. It is not a tax on income because that merely hits "accessions to wealth," not what people choose or choose not to do with those accessions.

The result is that Chief Justice Roberts has created the only tax in U.S. history that exceeds its own constitutional limits and is meant to execute powers that the Court otherwise ruled were invalid. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises.

In the process, Chief Justice Roberts has hollowed out dual federal-state sovereignty and eviscerated the very limit on the Commerce Clause that he posits elsewhere in his opinion and that has some conservatives singing his praises. From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.

The Chief Justice seems to understand this, so he tries to articulate his own new limiting principle for the tax power. His mandate tax isn't a mandate but merely a suggestion: choose to buy insurance or "pay money into the Federal Treasury, no more," an act he likens to a tax on gasoline. He also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."

True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

***

The John-Roberts-as-Daniel-Webster school argues that the long-term limits on the Commerce Clause and other aspects of the ruling are a good trade for the loss of upholding ObamaCare, and government excess has now reached its high-water mark and will recede over time. That false hope seems unlikely given the subversion of the taxing power and unleashing a general federal police power. This is equally harmful to liberty and dual sovereignty.

One possible saving grace is that this center-right country remains suspicious of taxation, and therefore the Chief Justice increases accountability somewhat through truth-in-labeling. But note how Democrats are already claiming that the ObamaCare mandate is not really the tax that is the only reason it was upheld.

White House chief of staff Jack Lew said Sunday that "The law is clear. It's called a penalty." Neither sentence is true. On Friday, the Obama re-election "truth team" was even less subtle in a memo titled "They're lying about ObamaCare" that made the same claim. Chief Justice Roberts has created a creature that is not a tax for political purposes but is a tax for constitutional purposes.

Chief Justice Roberts's ruling is careless about these bedrock tax questions, and they are barely addressed by either the Court's liberal or conservative wings. His ruling, with its multiple contradictions and inconsistencies, reads if it were written by someone affronted by the government's core constitutional claims but who wanted to uphold the law anyway to avoid political blowback and thus found a pretext for doing so in the taxing power.

If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked. The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

"It is not our job," the Chief Justice writes, "to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." But the Court's most important role is to protect liberty when the political branches exceed the Constitution's bounds, not to bless their excesses in the interests of political or personal expediency or both. On one of the most consequential cases he will ever hear, Chief Justice Roberts failed this most basic responsibility.

A version of this article appeared July 2, 2012, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Vast New Taxing Power.

Reminders

Big picture reminders are sometimes necessary.  For instance:

• what is legal is not always just;
• what is permitted is not always prudent; and
• what is required is not always right.

A tad more than a $6,300 fine

This article in today's The New York Times about a Chinese woman's pregnancy and the government's decision to execute her child touches on some topics I raised in previous posts this month (first here and then here).

Enduring Classical Benefits

In a recent post, I drew attention to a political and ethical tension:  the government's position in the United States to permit gendercide (or female foeticide), which is legal, and the ostensible position of the United States government with respect to other countries regarding the same permitted termination of life, which the Secretary of State has said should be prohibited.

Shortly after making that blog entry, I ran across the following discussion of ethical matters in ancient Greece.  It has to do with the development of moral theory and practice from Homeric myth to fifth-century Athens.  In his A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre discusses the tug of war between nomos (law, custom, convention) and physis (nature), the order of society and the order of the universe, as it relates to one's understanding of virtue and moral expressions within cultures and across them.  I take it that this tug of war is parallel to the tension in the U.S. domestic approach to gendercide through selective abortion and its foreign approach to the same question.

I mention Prof. MacIntyre's discussion for another reason.  It is often asked, Of what benefit or enduring significance are the humanities and especially the study of classics?  One answer might be that such study helps us to understand ourselves, our institutions, and our moral theory and practice -- and to make informed judgments about them -- in ways that we might not do without classical knowledge and some reflection.

I offer the following, then, as evidence of the enduring benefits of a classical education.  The tension in the U.S. is not new.  The Athenians, too, were conflicted.  Who knew, right, that an account of the development of moral reasoning in ancient Greece could be, well, just so relevant to contemporary discussions?  It is.  What, then, might we learn about justice from their experience and moral investigations that can help to improve ours?

Between Homer and writers five centuries later there is a great change in Greek myths about the order of the universe.  The Homeric myth does reflect, though with much distortion, the workings of an actual society in which a close form of functional organization is presupposed by the moral and evaluative forms of appraisal which are in use.  The later assertions of order in the universe reflect not a structure that is, but one that was, or one that is struggling to survive.  They are conservative protests against the disintegration of the older forms and the transition to the city-state.  The myths themselves cannot but open up the question of the difference between the order of the universe and the order of society.  But above all, this question is sharpened by a widening awareness of radically different social orders.

         The impact of the Persian invasions, of colonization, of increase in trade and therefore in travel, all these brings home the fact of different cultures.  The result is that the distinction between what holds good in Egypt but not in Persia, or in Athens but not in Megara, on the one hand, and what is the case universally as part of the order of things becomes overwhelmingly important.  The question asked about any moral rule or social practice is, Is it part of the essentially local realm of nomos (convention, custom) or of the essentially universal realm of physis (nature)?  Linked to this is of course the question, Is it open to me to choose what rules I shall make my own or what restraints I shall observe (as it may be open to me to choose which city I shall live in and what therefore shall be the nomos by which I live)? or does the nature of the universe set limits upon what I may legitimately choose?  (MacIntyre, Short History, 10-11)

… Different cities observe different customs and different laws.  Does and should justice differ from city to city?  Does justice hold only within a given community between citizens? or should it hold also between cities?  The Athenians condemn the character of Alcibiades because he did not observe the restraints of dikaiosune in his behavior within the Athenian state.  But their own envoys behave just like Alcibiades in their attitude toward other states.  That is, they equate what is morally permissible with what the agent has the power to do. (MacIntyre, Short History, 11-12)

Initiative in the Poverty Debate

These days, questions about justice, particularly that nebulous but ubiquitous term social justice, turn in my hearing mostly on the basic structure of life in the United States.  It is a structure, it is claimed, that in its very fabric is unjust.  Therefore, the unjust social fabric ineluctably results in inherently unequal opportunities, not to mention also unequal outcomes.  A case in point, frequently offered as Exhibit A, is poverty.

Without discussing now the philosophical postulates about justice that this prevailing view reflects, I was struck by a report of Congressional testimony that was given last week on the subject of poverty.  The Wall Street Journal reproduces in today's edition the following remarks by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. (The Brookings Institution is generally considered a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C.)  Mr. Haskins's point:  certain behavior is an extremely accurate predictor of adult poverty or, alternately, general economic success.

His testimony does not deny environmental challenges (and one should readily admit them), but it does underscore, more than I believe is often acknowledged in philosophical and policy debates, the key role of individual responsibility.  (We might say communal responsibility for its individuals.)  This effort, as he describes it, seems to me to have at least one unifying moral quality:  discipline, or self-control.  Specifically, it is the self-control required in pursuing education, work, and family.

Whatever one may think of Mr. Haskins's view, the Census data that he provides must be part of the ongoing political, economic, and moral debate.  (The full transcript of his Senate testimony may be found here.)

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Ron Haskins testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, June 5:

I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success—complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2% chance of being in poverty and a 72% chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77% and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4%.

Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation's struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.

A version of this article appeared June 11, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Notable & Quotable.