The Role of Morality in Liberal Democracies

What is the role of moral formation in politics? More specifically, what is the role of moral formation and character in liberal democracies?

To answer this question, we need to begin with Aristotle, who argued that “legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.” For Aristotle, it wasn’t individual freedom or political equality that was to be the legislator’s first concern. No, it was the moral character of the citizens, and if legislators get this part right, they’ll govern a good constitution.

Surely, though, this is an idea that belongs in the ancient world. Indeed, to be a modern person is to marginalize concerns of personal morality in politics. The only concern of the modern politician is to maximize liberty and protect the common good. Liberty and the common good may come into tension, but the legislator recognizes the tension is baked into the game. National security and press freedom, same-sex marriage rights and religious freedom. The task isn’t easy, but reconciling these competing demands is straightforward. More importantly, this modern task has nothing to do with the moral development of the citizenry. Concerns of virtue are best left to churches, mosques, synagogues, families, and other nonstate organizations. Right?

I set it up this way, of course, because this is not the whole of the modern story. Given democracy’s requirement of self-rule, modern democracies from the beginning have understood the need for a virtuous populace. If “the people” will vote and make decisions, they need to be informed on the issues, but they must also possess some level of intellectual and moral virtue. In other words, they need to both think rightly about an issue and behave rightly while deliberating about said issue. And so the need for character education is paramount. Let’s require everyone to get some level of schooling, and maybe, just maybe, the republic we build will also be one we can keep (to paraphrase Ben Franklin). It turns out, then, Aristotle’s dictum indeed has relevance even in liberal democratic societies that at least pretend to marginalize the moral formation of its citizens.

There is something more, however. Not only is character development vital to a democratic society, the laws democracies make are crucial to that same development and by extension to the health of the democracy those laws are meant to protect. In other words, it’s not just the job of schools and nongovernmental organizations to do moral formation; the state itself through the laws it makes will inevitably form the characters of those who compose it.

Let’s take just one issue to illustrate. Why, for example, should slavery be illegal? The early Christian theologian Augustine argued that because all people are created in God’s image, we are of equal worth and nobody has a natural superiority over anyone else. It’s on this basis that physical slavery should be illegal. However, he also argued that slavery should be illegal because to allow the slavemaster to persist in his sin is to allow an enslavement of a much more serious kind: spiritual slavery that only ends in eternal condemnation. One reason, then, to make physical, human slavery illegal is because of the eternal destiny of the slaveowners’ souls.

OK, fair enough, but here I am making another argument from the ancient world. What about the modern world?

Enter Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveowner, who uses a version of Augustine’s argument to explain why slavery’s abolition is especially important in a liberal democracy. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson argues that slavery should be abolished because, as Augustine argued, the character of the slaveowner will degrade over time if we allow him to persist in his evil ways. But he doesn’t leave it there. This is important for Jefferson, not because the state should care about the character of its citizens as such, but because evil characters will bring about the demise of the democracy they are obliged to rule. In a democracy, as mentioned before, the character of the people (slaveowners included) is vital to the health of the country precisely because the people themselves rule the country. To make a law that prevents injustice, then, is important not just because it’s good to prevent injustice, but also because it will help make the souls of our rulers more just.

Jefferson, then, uses an Aristotelian argument about the habituating role that laws make in our lives to apply to the democratic context. It turns out that despite its protestations, liberal democratic constitutions both form and are formed by the characters of the citizenry that compose them. If true, this view provides a challenge to both political progressives and libertarians. Progressives tend to be concerned with correcting social and economic inequality and consider issues of personal virtue to be mostly irrelevant. Libertarians tend to care about expanding personal freedom and consider the state’s encouraging a virtuous life to be an infringement of that personal freedom. My argument (and Jefferson’s as well) would be that progressive and libertarian ends are best served when virtue is encouraged and developed in the citizenry.