Monday, April 1, 2013
Eudaimonia in America
Continuing the conversation that's been going on, in recent months, among folks like Patrick Deneen, Phillip Munoz, Paul Griffiths, and others, about "American liberalism": This essay, in the latest First Things, by Robert Miller (now at Iowa, formerly at Villanova), struck me as well worth a read. In particularly, his distinction between "philosophical liberalism" and "pragmatic liberalism" seems worth keeping in mind. A bit:
An Aristotelian-Thomistic eudaimonist can thus be a pragmatic liberal in contemporary America. There is a deeper point here, however, and it is that, although the philosophical liberal must reject as immoral any form of government other than liberal democracy, the Aristotelian-Thomist can be much more flexible. Leaving aside some extreme systems that would substantially prevent a person from attaining his final end (e.g., a Shari’a theocracy or a Nazi or communist dictatorship), an Aristotelian-Thomist should conclude that, in the right circumstances, almost any form of government may be the best available. Hence, St. Paul urged respect for the Roman emperor, who was an absolute autocrat;St. Wenceslaus was a feudal overlord; and St. Thomas More served Henry VIII, who was a constitutional monarch.
The Aristotelian-Thomist would endorse these forms of government not because they answer to certain political principles but because, in the circumstances, they were more likely to produce conditions under which people could live good lives than were any of the practically available alternatives.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/04/eudaimonia-in-america.html
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I like Robert a lot, but I think he's being too quick here. Both John Stuart Mill and John Rawls say, quite explicitly, that democracy is the right form of government only in certain circumstances, and that in other circumstances, other forms of government might be the right ones. Rawls doesn't try to say which is which, and Mill's discussion, like many that try to spell this out, turns out to be less than fully satisfactory. But, it's just false to suggest that "philosophical liberals" " must reject as immoral any form of government other than liberal democracy" if that means that there are not circumstances in which another form of government might be better. What Rawls (and probably Mill) would suggest is that in a society anything like ours, democracy will be the only form that can be fully just. It's hard to tell from the excerpt above whether Robert disagrees with this, but that would be a much more radical claim, and hard to support. (And, of course, the last bit quoted is completely compatible with Rawls's view in _Political Liberalism_ on the idea of an over-lapping consensus.)