A guiding assumption in Aristotle’s discussion of justice is
the formative power of contexts.
The root cause of injustice is pleonexia,
the over-grasping nature of the vicious person’s devotion to scarce
external goods, such as wealth, power and prestige, which leads to competition,
conflict and the desire to dominate others.
Human beings become deformed in this way by the mores of unjust
political regimes and the households under their influence, which do not give
due care to the sort of character formation justice requires. For Aristotle,
the cure for injustice requires a personal reorientation toward living life in a way that values the sorts of non-zero sum
goods found in friendships and filial relationships.
However, Aristotle’s conception of philia distinguishes
two types of friendship: those focussed on external goods and those concerned with internal goods. In friendships valued as a means to acquiring scarce
external goods such as wealth, prestige and physical pleasures, partners insist on equality as they seek
to protect themselves from exploitation.
By contrast, the right kind of philia is not concerned with equality of things given or
received, since the goods exchanged are incommensurable and do not diminish in
the sharing. He has in mind goods such as generosity, fairness,
practical wisdom and loyalty, goods that are virtues of character which for Aristotle
constitute and enable human flourishing or eudaimonia.
Three main factors contribute to bringing the right philia into being: a mature self-love that values the shareable
goods of character rather than the scare external goods sought by immature
self-love; the complementarity
that is of value when one person can give to another what he or she lacks; and a beloved common good that is mutually
shared, such as that created when husband and wife have and raise a child.
Aristotle uses both sorts of philia as an analogical concept for thinking about the
characteristics of a just community. Philia and justice are for him related
ideas since both friendships and just societies are undermined when immature
self-love overreaches for external goods, both thrive on and make the best of
the complementary qualities of different sorts of people, and both depend on a
vision of the good shared with others. Although he is pessimistic about the
prospect, Aristotle thinks a just society may be possible if we cultivate the right sort of philia in our relations with others in society at large.
This reorientation can only come about if families and political regimes pay
due attention to the character formation of human beings, primarily through childhood education.
Aristotle’s
diagnosis of the cause of injustice as excessive devotion to scarce
external
goods appears no less true today then it presumably was in his day. It
is interesting that the theme of equality features so strongly in
contemporary conceptions
of justice, whether in terms of social goods like dignity, perhaps the
modern
equivalent of honour, or the material goods that make up or enable our
privatised notions of the good life. As such, the failure to
be
other-regarding and a lack of sensitivity to other people’s notions of
the good are taken to be the main source of injustice on the liberal view.
However, Aristotle's analysis suggests that liberalism’s focus on equality may be symptomatic of the wrong sort of philia at the heart of a
society organised around the desire for external goods and rules to safeguard competitors from exploitation.
Liberalism is typically praised or dammed for its ethical
neutrality toward different notions of the good life, but if, as David Solomon argues,
liberals can be convicted of having some view of the human good, it may be
possible to convict them for having the wrong view. [1] There may be grounds for a verdict if we understand the liberal notion of the good as operating at two levels - the social and
philosophical. At the social level liberals should believe that the freedom of
individuals to lawfully pursue their private notions of the good is a common good of all members
of a liberal society. From this shared good other goods can be derived. For
example, prosperity contributes part of the common
good of liberal societies, since prosperity provides the most favourable
conditions for everyone to pursue their personally chosen way of life.[2]
This in turn justifies the promotion of other goods needed to attain prosperity,
such as having a decent work ethic or the courage and creativity needed for entrepreneurial
risk-taking. Liberalism then is not neutral to the good, but rather minimally
committed to those goods and virtues at the intersection of individuals’ common
interests.[3]
Critics argue that this liberal good exists
in tension with the very conditions needed for its own survival. They point to
how liberalism’s emphasis on individualism can undermine family and community life, which nurture the goods of fidelity, self-restraint and co-operation that underpin the
personal independence and tolerance needed for a viable liberal order.[4] Liberals may respond that such morally
destructive individualism is not inevitable since we owe duties to other individuals
who share the same right to lawfully pursue the good life, but it is doubtful
on the liberal view whether such human rights and civic duties have a metaphysical basis outside of the specific historical, cultural and political norms within which they are claimed and upheld.[5] If rights and their corresponding duties are inherently contingent, then they are likely to be too malleable to guide liberalism out of its internal contradictions.
However, while at the social level the liberal
good might appear self-defeating, the tension outlined above may in fact be necessary for
attaining the liberal good at the philosophical level. Patrick
Deneen outlines how historically
there have been two philosophical conceptions of the liberal good since the Renaissance. [6] The first conception, in contrast to the pre-modern view, believed in humanity's essential separateness from the natural
world and valued our mastery over it, seeking to channel the self-interested passions
of human nature into the building of a rational liberal order using the natural sciences and economics. The second more recent conception rejected the idea of a
fixed human nature and instead saw in human plasticity the potential for personal
transformation. This envisaged the liberation of the self not from base desires as
the pre-moderns had conceived of liberty, but from the limitations of human nature,
indeed from the very idea that there is such a thing as a human nature. These two iterations of liberalism
demarcate the dividing line in contemporary political philosophy between
liberal “conservatives” who value humanity’s power over nature and liberal “progressives” who
extend that mastery to human nature itself. What is of note here is that if personal transformation is taken as the
ultimate good of liberalism, then promoting the self-defeating tension of liberal order
at the social level makes sense, since such transformations can only really
take place in conditions of disorder and change. So what appears to be failure
at one level is the necessary means to success at another.
How then are we to answer David Solomon’s
challenge and judge the merits of liberalism? One approach is to think about the desirability of a future society that fully manifests the liberal values outlined above. One
prospect stands out: the interests of liberal conservatism and liberal progressivism, that of mastery
of nature and of personal transformation, merge together in 'transhumanism', the project to use 'enhancement' technologies to evolve humanity beyond its biological limits. Trends in the fourth industrial revolution hint at
this as a real possibility. It is not hard to see how secular liberalism might take us
there: commercial and national security interests develop enhancement technologies to increase their profits and power; mass media promote ideas that condition people into accepting these technologies; early adopters assert their legal rights to enhance themselves and procreate using genetic technologies; concerns over fairness motivate equality of opportunity legislation that widens access to these technologies; global economic and military competition between states incentivizes their use in societal transformation.
Whatever the likelihood of this scenario, a transhuman future in which human
nature is changed beyond recognition is not precluded by liberalism’s philosophical
goals, moral principles or patterns of development. But if it were achieved it would be a
paradoxical future, since using technology to liberate the self and humanity from the constraints of biology would
in effect make us captives to rapid technological change, like passengers on a train the pace and direction of which are beyond our control. There
appears, then, to be a choice looming on the horizon between philosophical
perspectives which seek to better humanity within the constraints of a given
human nature and a liberalism that calls on us to reach for the divine by becoming slaves to technology – like gods in cages. If you have the stomach
for the latter path then the liberal good is the one for you.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Donald P. Kommers, David
Solomon, ‘The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture’, p.374
Lyle A. Downing and Robert B. Thigpen, ‘Virtue and the Common Good in
Liberal Theory’, The Journal of Politics,
55, (1993), 1046-1059, p.1052
Emily R. Gill, ‘MacIntyre, Rationality, & the
Liberal Tradition’, Polity, 24
(1992), 433-457, p.435
