Another election approaches, and soon hordes of “rationally ignorant” citizens (myself included) will shuffle to the ballots to vote.
But we can’t really blame them (ourselves?) for their ignorance: Contemporary political discourse is boring, predictable, and all in all deplorable. Everyone appeals to some conception of justice, and these conceptions usually depend upon posited, universal human rights. Despite this universality, the violence and intractability of disagreements give to the thoughtful observer the sense that there is no common standard to which we all appeal. This observation gains credibility when we note the frequency with which one partisan calls his counter-part unreasonable, hopeless, or stupid. Thus political discourse appears to be an interminable ideological shouting match without recourse to a common arbiter.
If this appearance were reality, though, it would undermine the traditional account of man as a political animal. If the political organization arises naturally from man’s capacity for speech and is a condition of living well, then a political unity can be judged good to the extent that it allows for and fosters the full flourishing of the citizenry. Within this conception of the political, discourse has a crucial role: It critiques the faults of and suggests improvements to the public sector, and it always does so in reference to the purpose of the political unity, which in turn gains its purpose from human nature itself.
If this account of political discourse is correct, then it cannot really lack a common arbiter. The ultimate criterion for the justice of a particular policy is human nature. Given this actual common ground, the appearance of interminability in discourse suggests some fault in the way in which we construct arguments about the political. This fault causes discourse to appear arbitrary and disagreement to appear insurmountable.
I would like to suggest that undue focus on “human rights” as the criteria for justice mistakes derivative criteria for the fundamental one, and in misidentifying the standard we confuse all thought that refers to it. The true criterion for determining the justice of a political organization is the extent to which the citizens live full, flourishing lives. Importantly, the citizenry can only live well in community if they preserve and protect human rights, but rights gain their vigor and meaning in their subordinance to human goods.
Thus the focus on human rights instead of human goods completely reorients the understanding of the political. When the great bulk of arguments happen in terms of rights, and rights are understood as inviolable, then it becomes difficult to conceive of conflicting political aims as arising from the conflict of legitimate, competing human goods.
Let’s take an example: The justification of a welfare program. One individual will argue that all men have a right to the fruit of their labor, and it would be unjust to coercively transfer his wealth to another citizen. Another will argue that everyone has a right to a basic level of subsistence, and it would be unjust for one citizen to live in excess while the other starves. As this imaginary argument would likely play out, both sides would retrench and reassert the same rights-claim.
But if we re-orient discourse to recognize that the point of the political is the well-being of all, then we can concede that both individuals have a claim of justice. We can recognize that a citizen needs property if he is to pursue his own life-plan; this is a human good, and one that the political organization must respect. We can also recognize that a basic level of subsistence is more fundamental to living well even than self-determination, and extreme poverty undermines this basic human good. Any justification of a welfare program would have to take both claims into account and arbitrate between them. Discourse in this form becomes messier, but it allows for real conversations about the demands of justice in an imperfect human society.
For some reason, I don’t predict that our mass culture — with its TV debates and propaganda advertisements and forever-blathering battalions of pundits — will adopt the hard path of difficult discourse. At least not this election.