What is the Point of a Public Morality?
| Author | Derek Edyvane |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00894.x |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
What is the Point of a Public Morality?post_894147..162
Derek Edyvane
University of Leeds
The recent revivalof popular interest in the idea of public morality has involved a striking divergence of opinion:there
is widespread agreement that we must recover a language of civic virtue,but disagreement about the point of so doing.
Some suppose that public morality should promote the good society, while others suppose that it should facilitate the
prevention of catastrophe.While on the face of it this disagreement constitutes nothing more remarkable than a
difference of temperament between optimists and pessimists, it reflects in fact a fundamental rift in the structure of
political action, the denial of which has led to considerable confusion. The denial of a rift depends on the assumption
of symmetry between the positive and negative political agendas of individuals and groups. This assumption in turn
presupposes a dubious monistic model of political action that is unable to make sense of certain forms of tragic
disappointment that are a familiar feature of political experience. Better sense can be made of these experiences by
adopting instead a dualistic model of political action which conceives of the positive–negative distinction as being cut
across by a more fundamental distinction between aspirational politics and preventive politics. Acknowledging this
distinction illuminates debates about ‘non-ideal’ political theory and about the possibilities for a politics of hope in
conditions of democratic pluralism. It also highlights an essential ambivalence as to the point of a public morality,
which may undermine the enterprise of salvaging civic virtue as conventionally understood.
Keywords: public morality; hope; fear; liberalism; civic virtue
There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the idea of a public morality.Exhausted
by tales of unscrupulous bankers and MPs’ misuse of expenses, the torture of terror suspects
and the lies we are daily told by our public servants,a kind of cynicism and moral despair
has set in. Amid concerns that British society,or perhaps the whole world, is ‘broken’,there
is growing consensus on the need for the reassertion of a language of moral value in public
life, a language that has been steadily displaced and eroded by the modern obsession with
cash value, cost and benefit. As the Archbishop of Canterbury,Rowan Williams, has put it,
we must rescue ‘the concept of civic virtue, and thus the idea of public life as a possible
vocation for the morally serious person’ (Williams, 2010). This much is widely agreed.
Among academics, public figures and politicians of all stripes, it is possible to detect the
yearning for a new public morality.1
From this preliminary point of agreement, however, and when it comes to the specific
question of what the point of this public morality is meant to be, opinions seem to
diverge in a striking and puzzling way which has not received a great deal of attention.
By far the more prevalent view suggests that the point of public morality is to facilitate
the pursuit and realisation of the good society. This is the position of Michael Sandel in
his Reith lectures:
[We] live in a time of great hope for moral and civic renewal.We saw this hope in the election
of Barack Obama as President of the United States. In many democracies around the world,
there’s a similar hope, a restless impatience with politics as it is. ... Whatever reforms may
emerge, one thing is clear:the better kind of politics we need is a politics oriented less to the
pursuit of individual self-interest and more to the pursuit of the common good (Sandel,2009).
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00894.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012 VOL 60, 147–162
© 2011The Author.Political Studies © 2011 Political Studies Association
In other words,we are to lend substance to a conception of civic virtue by reflecting on the
kinds of dispositions that will conduce to the realisation of the common good as disclosed
in the shared hopes and aspirations of the citizens of democratic societies.
Tony Judt proposes a starkly contrasting view. Judt suggests that we are entering ‘a new
age of insecurity’:
We ...have lived through an era of stability, certainty,and the illusion of indefinite economic
improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as
economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain.We are assuredly less confident of our
collective purposes,our environmental well-being,or our per sonal safety than at anytime since
WorldWar II.We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no
longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our ownin reassur ing ways (Judt,
2009).
Like Sandel, Judt is clear in his conviction that ‘something is profoundly wrong with the
way we live today’( Judt,2010, p. 1),but our circumstances of uncertainty cast the enterprise
of rescuing civic virtue in an entirely different light. ‘Rather than seeking to restore a
language of optimistic progress,we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent
past’ (Judt,2009). What is needed, Judt claims,is a ‘social democracy of fear’. Public morality
must derive its content from a sober historical sense of what we have lost and of what we
have yet to lose. The primary task of civic virtue is to resist the ‘complete breakdown of
liberal institutions’ and the ‘utter disintegration of the democratic consensus’ (Judt, 2009).
The contrast here is remarkable.Sandel and Judt both acknowledge the need to reinstate
a language of public morality, but they differ dramatically over the point of so doing. For
Sandel, we need a public morality to assist the pursuit and realisation of the good society.
For Judt, the point of public morality is to prevent the catastrophic collapse of liberal
institutions.While Sandel associates civic virtue with the politics of hope, Judt associates it
with the politics of fear.
What is at stake here? It is tempting to think that the difference is merely one of
temperament: Sandel plays the optimist to Judt’s pessimist. On this view, there is no real
disagreement about the point of a public morality, just a difference of emphasis. Sandel is
temperamentally inclined to look to the future and to the good society that public morality
will help to engender, while Judt looks to the past and to the horrors from which public
morality can protect us. In other words, public morality serves a dual purpose – by
facilitating the pursuit of the good, it functions to keep evil at bay, and vice versa. This is not
an unreasonable view to take. A number of scholars have argued that there is indeed a kind
of ‘symmetr y’ between positive and negative politics. For example, Michael Walzer has
suggested that there can be no such thing as a purely negative politics; in fact, the politics
of fear depends on the politics of hope ( Walzer, 1996). If he is right about that, then the
apparent disagreement between those who orient public morality to the pursuit of good
and those who orient it to the prevention of evil seems only skin deep: the basic point of
a public morality remains the same in either case.
But I am not persuaded. I shall question Walzer’s portrayal of the relationship between
positive and negative politics and shall argue that the differing perspectives of Sandel and
Judt may reflect a much more fundamental divide than that between optimists and
pessimists. I believe that the disagreement in fact reveals a kind of rupture in the fabric of
148 DEREK EDYVANE
© 2011The Author.Political Studies © 2011 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012, 60(1)
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