Taking the American Moral Tradition Seriously[1]
Peter Berkowitz
Jean Porter has produced a fine and intricate account of MacIntyre’s analysis of “rationality as tradition guided inquiry.” I want to suggest that our moral predicament is not as grave as MacIntyre takes it to be. The problem in MacIntyre’s analysis, however, is not that he takes the idea of a moral tradition too seriously, but that he does not take seriously enough the moral tradition that actually guides life in the United States.
Contrary to MacIntyre, we, or most of us, do inhabit a thick and vibrant moral tradition. I can think of no better term to describe it than liberal. It is connected to the Enlightenment, but it is larger. It is not constituted by or reducible to a particular form of moral philosophy, but some forms of moral philosophy—say, deriving abstract rules of right conduct from unassailable premises—are more at home in it than others. It is grounded in a specific moral premise, the natural freedom and equality of all, and the debate that constitutes it concerns how to arrange or respect that natural freedom and equality in practice. As MacIntyre’s heroic labors to bring alive rival and competing moral traditions suggests, by understanding better the contours of our moral tradition, one can understand better the character of the debates that in part define our moral and political life.
This is a curious moment for the tradition that constitutes much of moral and political life in America. Never has a people enjoyed a greater range of individual rights, or been more jealous of their freedoms, or been more convinced that the liberty they prize is good not only for themselves but also for other peoples than we in the United States today. The freest society in most respects that the world has ever seen has produced the world’s most diverse society; the world’s best army; the world’s most organized, industrious, and productive economy; and a political order that, to a remarkable degree, contains the factions and divisions that have prevented so many other countries from innovating and solving collective problems. This represents the triumph in America of liberalism, a tradition of thought and politics stretching back at least to seventeenth-century England, whose fundamental moral premise is the natural freedom and equality of all and whose governing theme has been the securing of equal freedom in political life.
Yet cause for anxiety comes from many quarters. Freedom in America has produced or permitted massive income inequalities. It has given rise to a popular culture that frequently descends into the cheap and salacious. It maintains a public school system that fails to teach many students the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic; and at higher levels of education, it breeds an academic culture that preaches the relativity of values and that cannot reach agreement on what a well-educated person ought to have learned by the time he or she graduates from college. It has contributed to a destabilizing erosion of the old rules, written and unwritten, that govern dating, sex, love, marriage, and family. It has fostered among opinion makers and intellectual elites a distrust that borders on contempt for religious belief. And it has fortified among the highly educated an uncritical faith in the coincidence of scientific progress and moral progress.
To understand the challenge whole, it is first necessary to correct an unfortunate confusion of terms. In the United States, “liberal” commonly denotes the left wing of the Democratic Party. To be sure, as a result of bruising post-1960s political battles, many on the left have disavowed the term “liberal,” choosing instead the label “progressive,” in fact a more apt designation for their outlook. Nevertheless, the term “liberal” retains a distinctive meaning, indeed a progressive one, in our political lexicon.
To be a liberal in the progressive sense is to see inequality as the chief menace to freedom. It is to stand for government that seeks to care for the interests of the poor and disadvantaged through programs funded by a redistributive scheme of taxation; for government that advances the interests of women and minorities by promoting abortion rights and affirmative action; for government that protects the environment against commercial endeavors of large corporations; and for government that regards as a moral obligation expanding the range and reach of international law and institutions. Progressive liberals exhibit the pronounced tendency to place concerns about the inequities produced by markets ahead of concerns about the healthy functioning of markets; to place concerns about substantive equality or equality of results ahead of concerns about formal rules or equality of opportunity; and, in the international arena, to place concerns about the human rights of all peoples ahead of concerns about American security interests. Many of the policies and political predilections for which progressive liberals stand seem to involve a curtailment of freedom. Explicitly or implicitly, however, progressive liberals justify this loss in freedom by the anticipated gain in equality, whose spread, they also hold, is itself an imperative of freedom.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of libertarians as the true liberals. They certainly put individual freedom first. But for them it is not inequality but government that is the chief menace to freedom. Libertarians tend to be skeptical of government regulation on principle and down the line. Most libertarians, of course, recognize an indispensable role for government—enforcing contracts, securing basic rights, providing for the common defense. But they also are convinced that, with few exceptions, government discharges inefficiently, and in some cases unconstitutionally, many responsibilities of social and economic life that it assumed in the twentieth century. These could be more effectively and constitutionally dealt with, libertarians characteristically contend, if left to markets and private initiative. Some libertarians embrace traditional moral values, but as libertarians they oppose government efforts to promote or regulate them. And although they might think of themselves as the authentic heirs of nineteenth-century or classical liberalism, most libertarians today also consider themselves and tend to be considered by others as conservatives.
To compound the confusion of terms, when one takes the longer view, most contemporary conservatives come into focus as a species of liberal. While differing with progressives and sometimes also with libertarians about how to secure it, they, too, at least as a political matter, put individual freedom first. This is true of traditional conservatives, who are often religious and who see the benefit of putting freedom first as the conserving of inherited authorities and time-tested practices and institutions. It is true as well of neoconservatives, who believe that a government that puts freedom first is crucially in need of the sorts of citizens who have been molded by inherited authorities and time-tested practices and institutions. Both traditional conservatives and neoconservatives believe that it is an excess of freedom (especially in moral life) or an excess of equality (throughout all spheres of moral and political life) that is the chief menace to freedom.
Because they share with libertarians the conviction that government is a major threat to individual rights, traditional conservatives and neoconservatives champion limited government. They are willing to countenance here and there qualified government support for, and certainly seek to abolish laws that weaken, the institutions that they believe form the character necessary to self-government. Foremost among these institutions, most conservatives agree, are the family and religion. To varying degrees, traditional conservatives and neoconservatives are also friends of markets and private initiative. But their friendship is not without its strains. To varying degrees, they also warn of the threat to moral character posed by the rapid change, the celebration of consumption, and the transformation of goods into commodities characteristic of a market economy. Serious differences between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives are most likely to arise concerning questions of foreign affairs. While both distrust encroachments on American sovereignty by international law and international institutions, traditional conservatives are more inclined to believe that U.S. national security interests are best served by restricting America’s role abroad, while neoconservatives generally think that national security, as well as moral principle, compel the United States to promote democracy around the world.
It was not foreordained that “liberal” would become synonymous with progressive politics as it has in the United States. Witness the career of the term in Europe, where it has come to designate something much closer to libertarianism. Yet neither is the equation of liberalism with progressivism an accident, for there is a powerful progressive thrust inhering in the liberal tradition. When it arose in the seventeenth century, before it acquired its name, liberalism, particularly that of Locke, sought to limit the claims of religious authorities in politics and the claims of political authorities in religious matters. As these ideas took root, as religion receded from the center of politics (and as science and industry developed and markets spread), individual freedom acquired more space, more individuals began to enjoy its blessings, and power shifted to those who had long been denied it. When it came into its own in the nineteenth century, liberalism, particularly that of Mill, sought to limit the role in politics of status, wealth, and sex by assuring through the state formal equality. The result was to accelerate the pace at which power shifted to the people and to spread the blessings of freedom more equally. And when, in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century, it became synonymous with the left wing of the Democratic Party, liberalism aggressively sought to limit the role in politics of poverty, race, sex, old age, illness, and disability by guaranteeing to all individuals a certain minimum level of material goods and moral standing. As this outlook merged in the United States with the conventional wisdom, the press for freedom became indistinguishable in many minds from the improvement of social life through the push for equality in all ways and in all realms.
Yet there is more to the defense of freedom than progress in equality, as John Stuart Mill stressed in On Liberty (1859) and in Considerations on Representative Government (1861). Because moving ahead requires holding some things still, because freedoms won must be preserved, and because its improvement as well as its preservation depends upon citizens with particular skills, knowledge, and qualities of mind and character, a free society always requires a party of order as well as a party of progress. Hence, conservatives, who take a special interest in freedom’s limits and its material and moral preconditions, are properly seen as belonging to the liberal tradition and in fact play an essential role in maintaining the liberal state. Generally speaking, where the right in American politics today differs with the left is not about the primacy of personal freedom but about the primacy of competing policies; that is, the care for which goods—those related to order or those related to progress—freedom most urgently requires.
To maintain that liberalism constitutes our dominant moral and political tradition is not to deny the presence in America of competing traditions. Biblical faith, for example, remains a powerful force in the lives of many Americans. And even for the larger numbers who no longer organize their lives around sacred scripture and worship, biblical faith, through the impact it has had over the centuries on our moral concepts and categories, influences the scope and direction of our imagination and informs practical judgments, often in ways that rein in freedom’s most ambitious and reckless claims. Moreover, anger, pride, envy, ambition, honor, love, and a host of other passions that dwell within us are inflected by, but resist reduction to, our love of freedom.
Nor is arguing that many of today’s progressives and conservatives are equally members of the liberal tradition and pillars of the liberal state to imply that if everybody were to sit down together, talk things over civilly, and sort through the issues reasonably, we would discover universal agreement on all the important questions. This is a popular conceit among professors, who can’t bear the thought that the problems of politics are not amenable to conclusive resolution through rigorous reasoning (by them) and rational discourse (under their direction). Yet the lesson that emerges from an examination of the liberalism that we share suggests that the professors who dream of disinterested deliberations and ideal speech situations grounded in self-evident premises, governed by objective and necessary rules, and issuing in unassailable public policy choices have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion.
To be sure, agreement on basic liberal political institutions is as broad as is agreement on liberalism’s fundamental moral premise: the natural freedom and equality of all. Who opposes representative institutions, separated powers, an independent judiciary, a free press, and legal guarantees of freedom of belief, speech, and association? However, the very scope of agreement among partisans about the lineaments of self-government brings home the permanence of disagreement in the politics of a free people. Theory teaches both that a balance must be struck between the claims of order and the claims of progress and that theory itself cannot specify the proper balance that we, in our peculiar circumstances, must strike. This is partly because theory does not determine the weight to be given to the competing goods that the party of order and the party of balance promote. It is also because that job falls to flesh-and-blood individuals, given to self-seeking and ambition. Nor can theory, once the balance has been struck, replace the need for such individuals to find ways to cooperate in maintaining it.
A liberal spirit conduces to the task of maintaining free institutions. Such a spirit is tolerant of opposing opinions and choices, which means that it is prepared to respect the rights of individuals with whom it disagrees and of whose conduct it disapproves. It is generous, both in seeking to understand what is true in other people’s beliefs and in looking for the shared humanity in their diverse and indeed divergent strivings. And it is capable of restraining immediate desire in the interest of satisfying higher or more comprehensive desires. The exercise of these virtues enables citizens to ease the friction, take advantage of the opportunities, and handle the responsibilities that arise, amidst the frenetic motion, in a free society.
Where do the virtues that compose such a spirit come from? Will free societies always have such a spirit in sufficient supply? Thinkers on the left, particularly those influenced by Kant, such as John Rawls and Judith Shklar, have argued that free societies are in a sense self-sustaining: the experience of living under free institutions fosters in citizens a liberal character. Thinkers on the right, especially those who take their bearings from Tocqueville and Aristotle, such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and Harvey Mansfield, warn that free societies contain the seeds of their own destruction: the experience of freedom leads to a voracious desire for more of it, steadily severing individuals’s attachment to family and faith, which they contend are the most reliable sources of the liberal spirit’s virtues.
In fact, when properly formulated, these two opinions, reflecting the optimism of the left and the pessimism of the right, should be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. Free institutions do tend to teach toleration, generosity in the understanding of others, and self-restraint in the short term for the sake of long-term self-interest. But undisciplined and unbalanced by other principles, freedom causes toleration to metamorphose into rigid and unconvincing neutrality between competing goods. It transforms generosity in the understanding of others into the presumptuous conviction that one has understood other people’s beliefs and needs better than they have and therefore should legislate so as to bring their conduct in line with their true interests. And it opens the door to excessive focus on calculating the best means for the satisfaction of desire, which soon crowds out calculations about the satisfactions found in fulfilling one’s duty and eventually renders invisible the claims of duty that transcend calculation.
Why does the liberal spirit overreach? In part because to overreach is human. In part because of the common belief that freedom is made more secure by acquiring more of it. In part because the enjoyment of freedom pushes against and wears down not just the claims of this or that authority but the claims of all authority, save for that of the freely choosing individual. This is not to say that we are at the mercy of freedom’s overreaching. In a free society, freedom creates the conditions under which we can bring our passion for freedom under control and discipline it to serve our purposes. Such an undertaking depends upon the awareness that our liberalism never fully embraces or exhausts our humanity. It also depends upon emancipating our understanding of the liberal tradition from a variety of misconceptions with which it has become encrusted, and then grasping the temptations to which the liberal spirit is perennially prey.
One such misconception is that the very soul of the liberal tradition is the aspiration to provide rational foundations from which to derive abstract rules of moral conduct. It is not. Rather, the soul of the tradition is the belief in the natural freedom and equality of all. And this belief we hold to be self-evident, or rather we hold as if it were self-evident. Perhaps it cannot be decisively rationally vindicated. But its grip on our souls is unmistakable, and reexamining the great moral and political tradition that has for more than 400 years been wrestling with its implications for self-government and the government of the self is, in the current clamor and confusion, crucial to understanding how our past has formed us and how we may take some responsibility for forming our future.[2]
1. I develop these ideas in “The Liberal Spirit in America,” Policy Review (August and September 2003): 29–47.
2. "A Guide to U.S. Liberalism," Jerusalem Post, Dec. 9, 2003, 15.