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Must Politics Be War? in Defense of Public Reason Liberalism

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Must Politics Be War? in Defense of Public Reason Liberalism Must Politics Be War? In Defense of Public Reason Liberalism Forthcoming with Oxford University Press Version 4.0 Kevin Vallier Associate Professor of Philosophy Director, Program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law Bowling Green State University [email protected] Note to Readers: You may circulate this draft without my permission, but citations to the manuscript must cite the version number so that they are not confused with future drafts, which may change considerably. Comments are welcome. This draft is considerably different from all three previous drafts because the book has split in two. The present book covers only chapters 1-6 of the original draft. Chapters 7-9 have been moved to a second book. 2 Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..……………………..3 Chapter 1: Moral Peace and Social Trust..………………………………………….………...…...….20 Chapter 2: Trust and the Foundations of Public Justification.….…………………………..62 Chapter 3: Public Justification………………………………………..………..………………………....107 Chapter 4: Legal Systems………………………..………………………………………………….……..…169 Chapter 5: Primary Rights……………………………………….….……………………..………………...213 Chapter 6: Constitutional Choice……………………..………..……………………………………….237 Chapter 7: Liberalism Justified…………………………………………………………..……………..…274 Epilogue……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….305 Works Cited…………………………………………………..…………………………………………………….309 Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…318 3 Introduction: Must Politics Be War? “War is politics by other means.” ~ Carl von Clausewitz “Politics is war by other means.” ~ Michel Foucault American politics is more divided today than at any point since the Civil War.1 There are fewer moderate politicians on either side of the political divide, and an increasing spirit of hardened partisanship has made political compromise, even on issues where compromise is desperately needed, all but impossible. With the advent of Internet politics and social media, Americans can easily insulate themselves from opposing points of view, reaffirming their own prejudices every minute of the day, and so grow more radical and intolerant over time.2 We find among Republicans an almost entirely closed media circuit, with Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio driving much of the political agenda of the Republican Party. And while the intellectual and media base of the Democratic party is much larger, we find an increasing hostility to alternative points of view in the academy, where membership in the Democratic Party is nearly ubiquitous. These developments are arguably part of the reason why Americans seem to be losing their faith in liberal democracy, particularly millenials.3 In light of our present predicament, one might reasonably wonder whether American politics isn’t invariably a struggle for power between the righteous and 1 Campbell 2016. 2 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23258 3 For a review of some recent data, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/08/yes-millennials-really-are- surprisingly-approving-of-dictators/?utm_term=.b9272b63ede5. 4 the wicked. At present, American political life often looks like a brute contest for dominion, where the victors drag the country in their direction without concern or respect for the losers. Our present condition raises the specter of a more general concern. People have said for centuries that political life as such is war. Be it the orthodox vs. the heretical, the rational vs. the superstitious, the racially pure vs. the impure, the productive vs. the parasitic, the story is the same. Politics is an arena of strategic confrontation where parties struggle to defeat their opponents. Even democracy is a gladiatorial encounter. Philosopher David Enoch’s recent remarks speak for many; with respect to politics, “there is no way out of the arena,” and we are all mere players. We must “enter it, to fight, shoulder to shoulder … for what is just and good.”4 This book attempts to identify social, political, and economic institutions that could convince people with divergent worldviews that our shared political life is a fundamentally moral enterprise. We could experience inevitable political contestation and negotiation as bound by an acceptable public morality. Under these conditions, social life in a diverse society would not be naked institutionalized aggression. To put it another way, I am asking whether there are institutional structures that can sustain social trust in our public moral order. Can we show, at least in principle, that diverse persons have sufficient reason to endorse some set 4 Enoch 2013, p. 175. 5 of social rules to govern us all, such that we can trust one another to govern our disagreements by these rules? If so, then our shared social and political institutions establish a moral peace between persons, such that our disputes and contestations are bound by a shared moral constitution. If we can determine, through philosophical inquiry, whether moral peace is feasible, I believe we can answer the skeptical challenge presented by current American political trends. Establishing the feasibility of a moral peace is not easy, however, for it is threated by the recognition that our shared moral and legal order is constituted by rules that we use to direct one another’s behavior. We order one another to engage or refrain from many lines of conduct, and those directives stand in need of justification; without a justification, these demands look like small-scale acts of war. They are attempts to dominate and browbeat one another. Consequently, we need a moral standard by which we can distinguish between demands that preserve respectful social order and demands that disrupt it. We need a standard that, when followed, establishes moral peace between persons, a state of society with widespread, justified social trust where free people can use shared moral and legal rules to direct each other’s behavior without risking authoritarianism, disrespect, sectarianism, and instability. The moral standard I defend is public Justification. A public justification for a moral or legal rule specifies when each person has sufficient reason to endorse the moral or legal rule applied to her by others. If each agent in a society has sufficient reason of her own to endorse the moral and legal rules to which she is 6 subject, then I argue she can be said to be reconciled to those who insist that she follow those rules, including with persons who are very different from her and who have substantially different moral, political, and religious beliefs. If each person is only subject to moral and legal rules that she sees herself and others as having sufficient reason to endorse, then she sees that each person has distinctively moral reason to comply with the rule, and so she can trust others to follow it. For if our moral and legal rules are publicly justified for each person, then each person sees herself as having reason to comply with and internalize each rule as her own. Consequently, we can expect one another to be trustworthy with respect to each rule, such that social trust is a rational response to each other’s behavior. Thus, public justification lays the foundation for relations of trust by making trustworthy behavior practically rational. And from the soil of trust, moral peace can grow. I defend an account of public justification with two arguments. First, I argue that a system of social trust in shared moral rules is a great moral good. Social trust lays the foundation for the formation of social capital, social knowledge that persons can use to form mutually beneficial social relations. Social capital, we shall see, is critical for making any large-scale political and economic institutions work well. Social trust also has value because it is a precondition for forming a wide array of social relations on which we place great value, such as relations of love and friendship. Since relations of love and friendship are among humanity’s most cherished goods, a world without social trust has incredible costs. This is what I call the teleological value of social trust and moral peace. 7 Second, I argue that members of a system of social trust owe two important duties of respect to one another. First, when others trust us, we owe them trustworthy behavior in response, out of respect for their dignity as our moral equals. If we fail to return trustworthy behavior in response to the trust that others have placed in us, then in most cases, we are manipulative, deceptive, and show a general indifference to the value of others. Second, when we trust others, we will confine our ordinary practice of moral accountability to observed violations of public trust. That is, we will give others the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to choose to act in a trustworthy fashion, and only reprimanding them for recognized, culpable moral mistakes. Even so, our duties to be trustworthy and to treat others as trustworthy have limits. I argue that if the moral rules that are the object of social trust cannot be publicly justified, then respect for those we trust and who trust us does not require compliance with those rules. If, for instance, others insist that we comply with a rule that is incompatible with our deep commitments and values, respect for them does not require that we respond in a trustworthy fashion. We do not owe others trustworthy behavior regarding a norm we have good moral reason to reject. Further, we should not hold others accountable to moral rules that cannot be publicly justified to them. If a moral rule cannot be publicly justified, then the person can see no good moral reason to comply with it. For ordinary moral agents, then, a failure to comply with the rule is not culpable, for the person cannot reasonably be said to know better than to violate the rule. But if members of the 8 system of trust recognize that the rule violation was not culpable, holding a person accountable for violating the rule is inappropriate. In this way, the standard of public justification figures into two duties of respect that we owe others within a system of trust.
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