Abstract
This chapter examines the conception of political virtues, a central element of political liberalism, and the relation between political virtues and the education of future citizens. The development of political and civic virtues is seen as an important step in becoming a citizen in many liberal theories, and a political liberal approach to education should be no exception. Yet, Rawls’ own account, established in A Theory of Justice and still supposed to hold after his political turn, collides with the political liberal aim not to justify political decisions on comprehensive views, including decision about civic education. For Rawls, political virtues are connected to the so-called Aristotelian Principle, an idea that can be plausibly interpreted as such a comprehensive view. To provide political liberal education with the required legitimacy, this chapter suggests replacing the Aristotelian Principle with a Humean account of virtues which remains agnostic about the underlying mechanisms that motivate virtuous behaviour in citizens. The chapter further analyses permissible teaching strategies in political virtues education and assesses justifications of indirect ways of virtue education, such as nudging and moral bio-enhancement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
One of the particular properties of virtuous acts is that they are taken to be valuable, even though they will not lead to the best possible, or even merely good, consequences when judged by instrumental rationality, see, e.g., Adams (2013, pp. 60–62).
- 2.
For a helpful discussion of the congruence of the good and the right in Rawls’ theory see Freeman (2007), Ch. 6.
- 3.
An interesting question in this context would be if the different kinds of activities that Weithman thinks are characterised by the Aristotelian principle really all fit the category of complex activities and can all be explained by it. Regrettably, whether appreciation of beauty is a complex activity like e. g. chess cannot be discussed in further detail here.
- 4.
For an approach to circumvent the Naturalistic Fallacy in the spirit of David Hume see, e.g., Curry (2006).
- 5.
Rawls himself argues in A Theory of Justice that his virtue theory is warranted by psychological and evolutionary research (2005a, pp. 432–433).
- 6.
For the distinction between comprehensive and perfectionist conceptions of liberalism that I employ here, see 1.3.
- 7.
And as far I can be considered reasonable myself, there exists at least one reasonable person that would reject the Aristotelian principle.
- 8.
Doris for example suggests what he calls an “emulation” or “advice” model: being virtuous would have to include also the capacity to anticipate our behaviour in particular kinds of situations that would make unwanted behaviour more likely. This strategy would then allow us to avoid these situations, which counts as virtuous as well for Doris (1998, pp. 516–519).
- 9.
For an account of desire-based norm-following that supports this approach see also Brennan et al (2013, pp. 198–202).
- 10.
To my knowledge there is no distinction in political liberal theory between societies and states, other than a distinction between a people and a people’s government made by Rawls in The Law of Peoples that identifies the government as the “representative and effective agent” of a people (p. 38). This seems to me like an unfortunate shortcoming, as it is far from evident that the moral spheres of state and society are completely congruent, but one that cannot be remedied here. For present purposes, I will assume that state and society share the relevant norms of political morality to a sufficient degree.
- 11.
John Doris for example suggests that being virtuous just implies to be aware of the situational variability of one’s behaviour and take this into account when planning one’s actions (1998, pp. 517–520)..
- 12.
This can be called an externalisation of norms, see Brennan et al (2013, pp. 219–224).
- 13.
By transparency, I do not refer to full transparency about every detail of the choice architecture. There is so far no consensus in the empirical literature about nudging on whether detailed knowledge, or how much detail, about some given choice architecture negates the intended effects of the nudge on people’s decisions. To respect the autonomy of people subjected to nudging, it seems at least required, however, to clearly signal that some sort of nudging strategy is in place.
- 14.
As far as I am aware, no technology that would affect people specifically as I describe here is available yet and it might never be. It is nevertheless conceptually possible and technologies along these lines could emerge in the foreseeable future.
- 15.
This leads to the question whether, from a political liberal perspective, parents would be permitted to morally enhance their children if they had the means and would think it to be a valuable modification. Investigating this question here would be too much of a diversion but it would be worth addressing it on another occasion.
References
Adams, Robert Merrihew. 2013. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Elisabeth. 2000. Beyond Homo Economicus: New Developments in Theories of Social Norms. Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2000.00170.x.
Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Baccarini, Elvio. 2015. In a Better World?: Public Reason and Biotechnologies. Rijeka: University of Rijeka.
Brennan, Geoffrey, Lina Eriksson, Robert E. Goodin, and Nicholas Southwood. 2013. Explaining Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Callan, Eamonn. 2010. Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2015. Liberal Virtues and Civic Education. The Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12050.
Curry, Oliver. 2006. Who’s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy? Evolutionary Psychology 4: 234–247. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490600400120.
Darley, John M., and C. Daniel Batson. 1973. “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1): 100–108.
DeGrazia, David. 2014. Moral Enhancement, Freedom, and What We (Should) Value in Moral Behaviour. Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (6): 361–368. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2012-101157.
Doris, John M. 1998. Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. Noûs 32 (4). https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.00136.
Flanagan, Owen J. 1991. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Freeman, Samuel Richard. 2007. Rawls. London/New York: Routledge.
Galston, William A. 1991. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gaus, Gerald F. 2011. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hand, Michael. 2018. A Theory of Moral Education. New York: Routledge.
Harman, Gilbert. 1999. Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 315–331.
———. 2000. The Nonexistence of Character Traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100: 223–226. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00013.x.
Hume, David. 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Isen, Alice M., and Paula F. Levin. 1972. Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (3): 384–388.
Macedo, Stephen. 1990. Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Mathews, Kenneth E., and Lance Kirkpatrick Canon. 1975. Environmental Noise Level as a Determinant of Helping Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (4): 571–577.
McTernan, Emily. 2014. How to Make Citizens Behave: Social Psychology, Liberal Virtues, and Social Norms. The Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1): 84–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12015.
Merritt, Maria. 2000. Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (4): 365–383. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009926720584.
Milgram, Stanley. 1963. Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (4): 371–378.
Mills, Chris. 2015. The Heteronomy of Choice Architecture. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (3): 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0242-7.
Paulo, Norbert. 2016. Liberal Perspectives on Moral Enhancement. Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics 3 (XVIII): 397–421.
Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. 2012. Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2019. The Duty to Be Morally Enhanced. Topoi 38 (1): 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9475-7.
Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism Without Perfection. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 2005a. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
———. 2005b. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schmidt, Andreas T., and Bart Engelen. 2020. The Ethics of Nudging: An Overview. Philosophy Compass 15 (4). https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12658.
Sunstein, Cass R. 1996. Social Norms and Social Rules. Columbia Law Review 96 (4): 903–968.
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2003. Libertarian Paternalism. American Economic Review 93 (2): 175–179. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282803321947001.
———. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Wall, Steven. 2013. Rawlsian Perfectionism. Journal of Moral Philosophy 10: 573–597. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-4681023.
Weithman, Paul J. 2013. Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Podschwadek, F. (2022). Political Virtues. In: Educating the Reasonable. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84021-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84021-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84020-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84021-1
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)