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Notes
I am very grateful to the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University for supporting my research. For their generous feedback, I thank the anonymous referees and Sameer Bajaj, Jacob Barrett, Daniel Cummings, Adam Gjesdal, Tristan Rogers, David Schmidtz, Robert Van’t Hoff, and Steven Wall.
Samuel Scheffler, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
See Steven Wall, “Political Morality and the Authority of Tradition,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2016): 137-161.
Scheffler, op. cit., p. 10.
Kekes, A Case for Conservatism (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 38.
Wall, op. cit., pp. 139-40. In section III, I say why traditions are not mere conventions.
We need not answer questions here such as what counts as one community and whether, say, the antebellum United States was a single political community.
I suspect that “traditions” are related as Wittgenstein said games are, to wit, by “family resemblance.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (4th ed.), eds. and trans. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
See Waheed Hussain, “Corporations, Profit Maximization, and the Personal Sphere,” Economics and Philosophy 28 (2012): 311-331, esp. 324-25.
Millian welfare consequentialism, for instance, implies that societies will enjoy greater welfare gains if citizens are free to choose their political arrangements within ordinary moral limits.
Scheffler, op. cit., p. 291. Due to an apparent typographical error, I have changed “reasons” to “reason.” The singular “reason” agrees with “fact.”
One might then need to incur deep personal costs from, for instance, leaving behind one’s family and other close associates. See A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations, in eds. Diane Jeske and Richard Fumerton, Readings in Political Philosophy (Buffalo: Broadview Press, 2012), pp. 123-133, esp. p. 133.
I readily concede, though, that there will usually be a point at which traditions cease being traditions if sufficiently many persons privately reject a given tradition even while publicly showing support for it. Pluralistic ignorance might naturally figure in such a story: Citizens might privately reject traditional norms while erroneously assuming that others accept them.
The role of time in creating political meaning is surprisingly undertheorized. For exceptions, see Robert Goodin, “Keeping Political Time: The Rhythms of Democracy,” International Political Science Review 19 (1998): 39-54, and Elizabeth F. Cohen, The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Scheffler identifies a number of reasons why political and other multi-person, multigenerational traditions are normative. The reasons divide into two groups. (1) Traditions “serve to establish and entrench certain social conventions” (which he calls convention) (Scheffler, op. cit., p. 291). Traditions also help to set collective habits (habit); serve as repositories of insights gained by social experience (wisdom); help to render principles, duties, values, and ideals more determinate and thus more practicable (guidance); are, in effect, stores of value due to the activities they include (value); allow agents to uphold a value that others whom they respect or admire uphold, thereby, in a way, supporting the others or their legacy (loyalty); and enable persons born into traditions, whose identities are intimately bound up with their respective traditions, to be true to themselves by carrying them out (integrity). (Scheffler, op. cit., pp. 291-94; the italicized labels are Scheffler’s.) (2) To the above catalogue of reasons, Scheffler adds five more. These are time-related features of participation in tradition that help us transcend the fact that we are ever tied to the present:
Participation in a tradition [1] may help to compensate for our lack of control over our mobility in time, it [2] may enable us to domesticate time, it [3] may assure us of our own reality as temporally extended creatures, and, [4] by incorporating us into a custodial chain designed to preserve things (other than ourselves) that we value, it may help to enhance the perceived significance of our lives and [5] diminish the perceived significance of our deaths (Scheffler, op. cit., pp. 295-306; quotation from p. 306).
Ibid., pp. 295-96. The title “The Usual” is meant to fit Scheffler’s own description of the case. Ibid., p. 298.
Ibid., p. 297.
As in my account and Wall’s (op. cit.), we get an explanation here of why tradition is valuable, but now one grounded in our felt sense of time’s unfolding. This phenomenological “unfolding” needn’t be entirely linear and is compatible with diverse metaphysical views of time.
Scheffler, op. cit., p. 297. Emphasis mine.
See, e.g., ibid., p. 290.
But see ibid., pp. 289-90, 309-10.
Relatedly, though, many citizens might deny or care little about the narrativity of tradition. Some may even think it epistemically unwarranted to view one’s own life narratively. See Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio XVII (2004): 428-52.
The point about how shared political practices create value for citizens holds for shared political principles as well. When you and I refuse to give a political candidate power who would rule us theocratically, we jointly uphold the principle of the separation of church and state. We stand together as inheritors and upholders of a fundamental principle embedded in our shared political tradition.
This is not to imply, unreflectively, that current voting mechanisms are undoubtedly morally and epistemically superior to possible alternatives. Several theorists have recently voiced moral and epistemic skepticisms about voting. See, e.g., Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), and Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a response to Brennan, see Thomas Christiano, “Review of ‘Against Democracy’ by Jason Brennan,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2017).
Expressive voters vote as if cheering for a sports team or to be able to signal to others (e.g., when reporting for whom they voted) that they support certain ideas, values, persons, policies, or organizations. See, e.g., Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
This picture is simplified of course. The United States, for instance, does not elect its president via popular vote.
Scheffler, op. cit., p. 292. Italics mine.
Wall, op. cit., p. 137. My discussion in this section is indebted to Wall’s excellent essay on political self-determination and the illuminating conversations we had.
A society might be required to realize one of multiple permissible arrangements.
See, e.g., Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeves (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004).
See, e.g., David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
See, e.g., W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
See, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Scheffler, op. cit., and Wall, op. cit., ponder similar questions.
However, a strict constructivist about principles of political morality might think of the principles in part (A) of my model below as existing, already-constructed principles which are to be further specified or reconstructed as the society evolves.
See Wall, op. cit. My purpose herein is not to compare accounts of principle specification but rather to show why and how traditions plausibly do perform this function.
There is considerable debate about how to individuate principles. For simplicity, the below model treats different interpretations of principles as different principles.
I thank Steven Wall for helpful feedback on this section and the paper overall. My account to follow owes much to Wall, op. cit., but differs importantly in respects to be noted.
For my argument, these principles can but need not be universal and/or mind-independent.
In rare sociopolitical circumstances, only one interpretation might be available.
For instance, as in the examples below, they implement an equal-say principle of equality of resources, or free-speech jurisprudence via case law.
See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (vol. 1) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1776]).
“Path-dependency” need not imply diachronic dependency. I mean a path-along-a-fork, which can also be synchronic.
Plausibly, the fact that a polity has chosen a certain interpretation of a principle or at least allowed it to take hold will often give it additional normativity.
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4. See also Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1978), pp. 179-83.
See, e.g., Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Mill calls for a plural vote scheme according to (moral and epistemic) normative competence. See Mill, Considerations on Representative Government in J. Robson (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (vol. XIX), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1861), pp. 467-481.
See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981): 283-345.
A principle of equal resources is, nominally, not the same as an equal-say principle of resource distribution. In theory, though, perhaps each can recognize and respect citizens’ status as moral equals equally well.
There are many reasons to question such thinking. We can bracket these for the sake of argument, however, and simply allow that communal ownership is a morally permissible way to realize political equality in, say, a small island society.
For argument’s sake, we may here adopt a standard view of the state as a legitimate enforcer of property rights.
It is epistemically risky to make or assume generalizable claims about “large” versus “small” societies. There is surely great variation within each set.
Emphasis on “may,” as to say this is not to commit myself to the much stronger claim that any two specifications of the principle instantiate it equally well. Penguins and eagles are both species of birds, but eagles better instantiate birdhood since they alone can perform its paradigmatic activity: flying.
For a somewhat similar take on consent, see E. Cohen (op. cit.) on “lived consent” at pp. 62-96.
In the Second Treatise (see, e.g., ch. V, sect. 26), Locke famously argued for a claim that still commands adherents: Individuals can morally come to possess (unowned) resources from the commons by mixing their labor with them, provided both that the individuals leave a sufficient amount and quality of resources for others to appropriate, and do not ultimately spoil the appropriated resources.
Later I note how, on my model, principles could in principle emerge from the bottom up. In this regard principles-for-us need not be specifications of universal principles, though presumably at least some are.
Wall, op. cit., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 145.
Ibid., p. 146.
Ibid., p. 148. Given Wall’s analogy between agents and political societies, this quotation from his discussion of agents also applies to his conception of political societies.
Ibid., p. 148.
Ibid., p. 150.
Ibid., p. 144.
Building on Wall’s account, I hope to have shown how principles of political morality that apply to many societies can become tradition-dependent principles which are normative for particular societies here-and-now.
The notion that one freely chooses such commitments might also be questioned, but many moral responsibility theorists think it plausible enough.
Ibid., p. 142.
Wall does say, though, that “[t]he principle of the separation of church and state is thus a valid principle for the societies to which it applies … in part because it is reflected in the established practices of those societies” (Ibid., p. 142). Notice the notion that the practices of a society “reflect” this principle. This idea betokens the idea behind (C) in my model. For (C) implies that individuals and groups in a society can bring to bear their wisdom, particular experiences, and much else to specify a principle of political morality. This makes it their principle, and so normative for them.
I distinguish true principles of morality from those to which societies adhere. The two sets of principles often overlap.
In fact, top-down specifications are often codifications of preexisting, informal traditions at local levels.
J.S. Mill, On Liberty in The Classical Utilitarians Bentham and Mill, ed. John Troyer (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), p. 200.
True, moral exemplars might realize that (and how) certain universal moral principles apply within their societies. Still, the exemplars need not always realize a universal principle. They can sometimes realize how universal principles can be applied. Alternatively, they can create apt principles for their particular societies.
I have argued that the epistemic problems here will be similar to those which Hayek argued central planners face. See Gregory Robson, “Justice Theorizing and Local Knowledge,” in Peter J. Boettke, Virgil Henry Storr, Jayme S. Lemke (eds.), Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of F. A. Hayek (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 35-54. See also F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 15: The Market and Other Orders (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 93-104.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address the points in this section.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for noting this worry. Note that (d) and (e) can overlap: Others’ cooperation can correctly be considered a resource in efforts to effect political change.
An example of the former is the principle of equality, discussed below regarding women’s suffrage.
I lack scope to explore this further here. In work in progress, though, I argue that this “emergence” can involve the creation of a new awareness of existing principles and/or the construction of partly or wholly new principles themselves. For interesting discussion of moral experimentation, see Ryan Muldoon, “Expanding the Justificatory Framework of Mill’s Experiments in Living,” Utilitas 27 (2015): 179-194; and Justin Weinberg, “The Practicality of Political Philosophy,” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 330-51. Muldoon uses the “bubble up” locution at p. 180.
I believe that citizens who engage in experiments in living test not only a form of life but also, at the same time, whether their tradition has adequate scope and opportunity for such testing itself.
These are the rules governing other social rules. Take an example adapted from H.L.A. Hart. Suppose that what the queen says in Parliament is law actually is law. Hart calls this constitutional rule a “secondary” rule. It is a “rule of recognition” regarding the source of law, and governs the creation of “primary” rules (laws). See H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (2d ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1994), and John Thrasher and Kevin Vallier, “Political Stability in the Open Society,” American Journal of Political Science 62 (April 2018): 398-409, esp. 402-404.
As Michael Bennett observes, a “successful experiment is a pure positive externality for those who learn by observing it.” See Bennett, “Experiments in Distributive Justice and Their Limits,” Critical Review 28 (2016): 461-83, esp. 468.
See Cass R. Sunstein, “How Star Wars Illuminates Constitutional Law (and Authorship),” Review of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise, by Chris Taylor (Head of Zeus, 2015), in The New Rambler Review (April 2015).
More generally, to “retcon” X is to “retroactively ensure X’s continuity.”
Thanks to an anonymous referee for mentioning the example of legal retconning.
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Robson, G. Two Underappreciated Reasons to Value Political Tradition. J Value Inquiry 54, 519–538 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09726-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09726-0