-
8. Virtue in politics
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8. Virtue in politics There is no work left for moral sentiments in Adam Smith’s theory of the market. In the world of laissez-faire, the outcome is the realization of the maximum of common good, even if each person pursues her own interests. But such a removal of moral requirements is tied to unrealistically strong conditions. Some of these were discussed explicitly by Smith himself, others being made explicit by later economic theory. Here are some of these conditions; every market actor must be perfectly well informed, and the acquisition and processing of information must be costless; no one should be able to influence the size of the aggregate demand and supply, or the market prices; no one should be able to incur such costs on others that he has not paid for; all goods and services should be such that no one could have access to them unless he had paid the price for them, and so forth. Unless these conditions jointly obtain, individuals are not exempted from observing moral requirements. Thus, the “really existing” market does not remove the burden of moral reflection from individuals.29 Furthermore, democratic politics may not remove it even among ideal conditions. Why this is so was already shown in the discussion of the ethical model. First, whatever the majority may decide, it does not have to compensate the losers in the case the program it supported triumphs; majority decisions always carry external costs shifted onto other people. Second, some decisions are not about whose preferences the government should satisfy but about whose preferences should become the dominant preferences—that is, about what it is right to prefer. Finally, since our preferences depend on beliefs and value judgments, it is not only unattainable but also unreasonable for participants of democratic politics to be exempted from the obligation of moral reflection. I want to develop this latter claim in some detail. Suppose the preference-aggregating model works perfectly well; every 36 ⁄ The Common Good and Civic Virtue voter follows her own preferences and yet the collective decision tackles the common good. Should this be the case, the smooth functioning of the model does not require that the voters know and approve of the common good that is the outcome of the multitude of individual decisions. But of course those who design the institutions must know the common good and seek its realization . This asymmetry makes the choices of citizens mere means in carrying out the aims of the (benevolent) Designers. The system would manipulate voters into promoting their own aggregate good. This conception is not altogether alien from Jeremy Bentham and his Fabian socialist followers. But it is incompatible with the conception of liberal democracy. In that conception , voters are the ultimate subjects of politics. It is not sufficient that the outcome of the political processes be good in itself. It is also necessary that the outcome be selected in such a process that urges and encourages the voters to participate in reflecting on what is the common good and to cast their ballot according to their own judgment. Thus, if we approve of democracy as liberals, we have independent reasons for preferring such a model in which periodically held elections occur amidst widespread, vigorous and rational public discussions. An ideal picture of representative democracy must be able to show that the preferences of the voters are not shaped contingently, as it were, but partly in response to a collective deliberation about the reasons that underlie these preferences. And it also must be able to say something about what makes collective deliberation widespread, vigorous and rational. This is the only way to ensure that the outcome of political decisions will be transparent for the totality of participants rather than to the Designers only, and that it will be at least in part their own collective making—not the consequence of the workings of some manipulating and alien (though benevolent) power. If so, then not even the best ordered of democratic politics can dispense with counting on the individual moral motivations of the participants. No liberal theory of democracy can do without the hypothesis of civic virtue. With this claim we have arrived to the soft point of the ethical model; if it is the case that the realization of the common good requires that virtue be involved in the citizens’ decisions, we must ask what makes it plausible that people will be sufficiently virtuous. The core...