Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue

4. Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue

123 4 Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue In this chapter, I return more fully to the contemporary theorists of civic virtue briefly introduced in chapter 2. I argue that the lingering false dichotomy between partialist and impartialist moral theory subtly but dangerously replicates itself in their work. This explains the invisibility of people like MADD’s founders in the fall narrative of civic virtue. Ultimately, it explains an otherwise puzzling feature of contemporary literature on civic virtue: the loss of virtue amid calls for its retrieval. Few theorists who seek to renew civic virtue actually articulate structural virtues—that is, cultivated moral habits that result in settled character traits—of the good citizen. Although many begin by criticizing democratic procedure, institutions , or law as inadequate, they eventually retreat to those same foci. Although their collective failures launched this project, these are all theorists whom I admire, and to whom my own argument is indebted. They are not only astute critics and nimble thinkers but also courageous pioneers who have invited the public to a renewed conversation about citizenship. By presuming that personal character traits have political relevance , they overtly challenge the legacy of the stranger-versus-loved-one cases. However, that suspect legacy continues to influence their accounts. Certain theorists can be characterized as “impartialist” and others as “partialist,” and the ability to make that classification is the root of the problem. The result is a pervasive failure to articulate civic virtues as cultivated moral habits, despite the rhetoric of virtue. More positively, some theorists do propose specific virtues. Usually these imply a movement, 124 · The Dilemma of Impartiality albeit incomplete, toward a view of impartiality-as-practice. However, in many cases to press that movement toward completion would challenge the virtues proposed. For convenience, relevant theorists can be divided into three categories : liberal (impartialist) virtue theorists; communitarian (partialist) virtue theorists; and explorers of civil society. While the labels “liberal” and “communitarian” are commonly employed in reference to the first two groups, I prefer to distinguish them as impartialist and partialist virtue theorists. Excavating the nexus of partiality, impartiality, and civic virtue in their accounts may help to explain the stubborn persistence of the liberal/communitarian axis despite their own efforts to deconstruct it. The last category substantively overlaps the first two, since explorers of civil society differ as to whether they focus on voluntary associations (liberal-impartialist), or communities of birth and place (communitarianpartialist ) as the civil society of relevance. I address William Galston, Stephen Macedo, Robert Audi, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson as liberal proponents of civic virtue, with Kent Greenawalt as a critical interlocutor; Amitai Etzioni and Michael Sandel as communitarian proponents ; and Benjamin Barber as a thinker embodying long-standing tension between political quests for civic virtue and for civil society. Despite many profound insights, these thinkers fail to articulate the civic virtue of MADD. They fail in unique ways, but two crosscutting similarities link their failures: they continue to presume the “standpoint” view of partiality, and they exacerbate gender problems. Each failure in some way shortchanges the ethical work of caretakers, disproportionately women. Public/private boundaries continue to be defined in highly gendered terms. The gendering of civic virtue is left intact, although degendering the term is essential for its constructive transformation. Given the linkage between ideologies of gender and religion detailed in previous chapters, these failures are connected to conceptions of love and justice with distinctly Christian roots. However, this may be surprising to the theorists themselves, since none of them consider themselves religious thinkers—and some consider themselves protectors of the public against the prospect of coercive religious hegemony. The crosscutting failures underlie the greatest irony of all: that virtue gets lost again amidst calls for its retrieval! This problem is true for both “impartialist” and “partialist” proponents of civic virtue for different Impartiality-as-Standpoint and Lost (Again) Virtue · 125 reasons. Excessively impartialist thinkers are prone to fall into the very procedural focus they criticize. Excessively partialist thinkers are prone to romanticize certain kinds of local communities, inadequately critiquing care provided by those communities. They thus veer toward an institutional rather than a virtue-based focus. Theorists addressing “civil society” tend to see it either in partialist terms, focusing on communities of place, or impartialist terms, focusing on voluntary associations. In all cases, virtue falls between the cracks opened by the false dichotomy between impartiality and partiality...