I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can get along in an ethically pluralistic society. I feel like life in our world is, increasingly, a war among opposing ideologies. The problem is that the ideologues share their reasoning much less often. I worry that we’ve forgotten how to dialog respectfully. I feel, daily, like people put their own ideologies before the values of a free society and that our sacred public forums have devolved into shouting matches.
That led me to think about the virtues of a free society. I don’t know if we’ll ever resolve our many ideological differences, but maybe we can have common ethics about how we discuss them. Much of what I have to say here is a recapitulation of the Enlightenment (the idea that we should have a free society), but maybe we can all do with a reminder, and maybe the old 18th Century philosophy that underpins it is worth seeing in fresh, 21st Century, light.
The 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that we human beings establish governments for mutual protection. Since none of us wants to be, say, murdered or robbed, we empower our governments to enact justice on murderers and thieves. One consequence of this is that justice means that we cannot take the law into our own hands. We have to let the courts decide. I know that recently there’s been a lot of talk about whether or not our law enforcement always treats everybody the same, but let me get there, because I think we can find valuable grounding in Hobbes’ idea.
Today, we want democracy, specifically, not just any type of government. We no longer believe in the medieval concept that God chooses kings by birthright. Rather, we human beings all have the equal right to participate in self-governance. Our notion of a free society provides us with common virtues that inform how we engage, as a people, within the public forum, but I worry that we’re losing sight of them.
The framers of Declaration of Independence found our unalienable rights in “nature and nature’s God”. I wonder if part of the problem is that, as many of us no longer believe in God, and as today’s science teaches us to understand natures as mindless, we have lost that grounding. Do we need to transplant our notions of unalienable rights in firmer ground?
I wonder if the needs of democracy might be that ground. Maybe just as we need our government to enforce laws to protect us, our democracies require each citizen to have certain rights. We all need to have freedom of expression in order to share our political opinions. We need freedom of religion and a separation of church and state to ensure that no theocracy comes to power and dominates us all with its ideology. We need equality, so that everyone is equally represented. From equality, arises equal justice, equal rights, and the right to be treated with respect and dignity by the government, including our justice system and law enforcement. These rights must be unalienable and the laws our governments make must not oppress them.
It’s a classic view of Enlightenment philosophy that each of these rights implies a duty. We have the duty to respect other people’s freedom of expression, our great diversity of religion, and everyone’s essential equality with us, for several examples.
These laws, rights, and duties resemble Immanuel Kant‘s notion of categorical imperatives, at their core, but they’re rounded off with Consequentialism. We can say anything we want, but we can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, for example. To some extent, these need rounding off in order to protect people. They can’t be too rounded-off, though, or they’ll cease to have meaning. We can’t oppress free speech on the grounds that someone is offended, for example, because anybody could nullify our free speech at any time by claiming offense. Ultimately, our rights should empower us in our pursuit of happiness. Both ethical theories have their place in understanding these things.
From our rights and duties arise virtues. I’ve listed several of them here, but please add more in the comments, if you think I’ve left any out.
- Tolerance: we have to tolerate the free expression and freedom of religion of others.
- Courage: it’s our civic duty to speak up for what we believe in, even if others threaten us with abuse or worse.
- Listening: there are two sides to the free speech coin: speaking and listening. While it’s our civic duty to speak our minds, we all need to make space for others to speak theirs.
- Understanding: I mean this literally. Because different people have different ethics, values, ideologies, and political philosophies, we need to try to understand their assumptions, reasoning, and perspectives, so that we can communicate and tolerate each other.
- Self-discipline: we must have the self-discipline to tolerate, understand, listen, have courage, and to have all the other democratic virtues.
- Egalitarianism: Just as everyone must be equal under the law, so should we treat everyone else as essential equals. This does not mean everyone is as smart, as strong, as agile, or as emotionally intelligent. It simply means that every human being is equal in essence and worthy of a basic level of respect and dignity.
- Politeness and Civility: Part of respecting the opinions of others is to respond to them in a non-abusive and relatively peaceful way. We’ll always have heated arguments, but these can be mitigated by politeness and civility.
- Love for our Fellow Citizen: I use citizen extremely broadly, here, to include immigrants of all sorts, as well as official citizens. In other words, I mean members of our society, not just people who can vote. One virtue that arises from the others is that we should have a certain type of friendliness and kindness to everyone in our society, because we’re all equal and it’s vital to the health of our democracy that everyone be able to participate in the public forum.
- Love for our Political Opponents: Since our political opponents are fellow citizens, democracy entails extending our love (in the sense above) even to them. We don’t have to agree. If we disagree, we should be honest and brave about doing so. However, none of these democratic virtues mean anything if we only extend them to people we agree with. If we’re to avoid tribalism, we must be friendly and kind even unto our political opponents.
I know much of this is review, and I’m not trying to reinvent the Enlightenment wheel. Nevertheless, I feel like a review of these virtues is in order, at this time. We don’t have to agree on all our values and ethics. The great thing about democracy is that we don’t have to worry about some king, lord, or church deciding things for us. When we disagree, and public discussion fails, we can decide things at the voting booth.
However, we do (or at least should) have these democratic virtues in common. I reject the idea that “there can be no peace”. We can avoid tribalism, not by agreeing on everything, but by understanding our duties outside of our own echo chambers.
By following these virtues, we arise as beings better than the brutes nature made us. These virtues forge us into citizens. While we still have our disparate, often opposing, ideologies, as citizens we must set selfishness aside to act for the good of our society, to allow our fellow citizens to do the same, and to comport ourselves well within the public forum.