Just Love: Transforming Civic Virtue

7. Just Love: The Transformation of Civic Virtue

271 7 Just Love: The Transformation of Civic Virtue In this concluding chapter, I elaborate the implications of impartialityas -practice for conceptions of civic virtue. My goal is not to provide an airtight definition of civic virtue but to counter distortions in conventional views and to redirect discourse in productive ways. I aim to foster renewed appreciation for the practical lessons offered by real civic heroes. These heroes are not merely ghosts from some past golden age. They are among us now in ordinary communal life. At the same time, a transformed conception of civic virtue exposes civic vices that have been flourishing quietly without adequate critique. This book focuses on appreciating real political virtues of ordinary heroes. But it also aims to increase ethical scrutiny of policies advocated by appeal to an “impartial standpoint” or to sacrificial ideals, and to question their relationship to civic virtue. Rhetoric can be manipulated to cloak positions adopted for the most crassly selfish reasons as “impartialist” or sacrificial arguments. Just as problematically, practices adopted because of genuinely “altruistic” motivations may be unjust, harming because they ignore unique needs of unique others or because they err in the assessment of needs and wants. The development of my argument has questioned several features of democratic life on related grounds: law (blue laws, divorce law); the public framing of ethical issues (pornography framed solely as an issue of free speech and censorship rather than an issue of sensitivity to harm and development of virtue); and the presumed virtues of political 271 272 · Resolving the Dilemma life (the defense of restricted justification as some citizens’ rationalization of their own worst vice). In other areas of public life, recent developments imply a rejection of sacrificial ideals of civic virtue, while few comment on that theoretical undertone. For example, a generation ago the norm in American adoption practice was to require permanent severing of bonds between the birth mother and the child. Relinquishing those bonds was portrayed as a noble sacrifice for the good of all. Individuals and charitable institutions who facilitated adoptions on those terms often were considered paragons of civic virtue. It took many social changes, from the feminist movement to the deconstructionist movement in philosophy, to question the power dynamics at play, the emotional harms that could result to birth parents and children, and the unacknowledged motivation to keep adoption from disrupting traditional structures of family life. Now it is commonplace to recognize injustices in adoptive practices that pressure unwilling but resource-strapped parents into adoption or that demand the relinquishment of all birth parents’ bonds as a condition of adoption (though some may choose such relinquishment). Similarly, there has been increased recognition that genuinely felt concern of social welfare professionals is not immune from racial, ethnic, or class bias. Yet little attention has been paid to how still-prevalent accounts of civic virtue made past questionable adoptive practices seem unambiguously nobly loving. One case study at the end of this book addresses in more detail an arena in which conventional “idolatrous” accounts of impartiality and civic virtue are particularly explicit, and particularly distorting: organ donation policy. The starting point for a transformation of civic virtue is a revised conception of impartiality as a moral practice, a practice that politically values caring labor and offers a dialectical view of the relationship between love and justice. That reorientation de-genders civic virtue, resisting conceptions that define political virtue in association with socially constructed views of masculinity and in opposition to socially constructed views of femininity. It underscores not only that passionate personal commitments can inform conceptions of public justice but also that how one fulfills passionate commitments may inform how one fulfills citizenship commitments . The family with adolescent children that allows turn-taking at dinner to express alternate views on a family decision may be model-­ Just Love · 273 ing virtues and procedures relevant to democratic life. So too does the friend who can make diverse guests feel comfortable together at a social event. Such a transformation also secularizes civic virtue. Ironically, the secularization ultimately allows for more sophisticated appreciation of the constructive ways that religious practice can interrelate with civic virtue. (Of course, there also can be destructive interrelationships, but those have been too exclusively emphasized by accounts of civic virtue tied to idolatrous conceptions of impartiality.) By exposing the influences that shaped modern demands for virtuous citizens to detach their political life from...