metonymy4u

One of the problems with moral disputes in the US is that they tend to be couched in terms of essentialist ethics. On the one hand the neo-liberal ethic is one of limited government: A Government which makes sure the streets are kept in good repair, (mostly) free of bloodshed, and no more. On the other hand the social justice movement demands that we recognize the essential goodness of all beings, and on that basis treat everyone as “equal” (whatever that means). The problem with both of these perspectives is that they propose to cash the value of an essentialist view of human nature in an algorithmic approach to civic life. Which clearly doesn’t work so well in a world that (apparently) neither heard of their algorithms, nor contracted to follow them. An alternative unconsidered by either camp, probably due to fears of “relativism,” is the notion of civic virtue. The central question of for civic virtue is not “how are we” but “how do we wish to be?” As such it is not nearly as algorithmic as either transcendentalism or utilitarianism – in fact it pretty much gives up entirely the notion of a fixed heuristic approach to human life and instead embraces the apparent contingency of language and community. Rather than asking “what are we?” and then trying to fit everyone into a deductive theory of how we should behave, the question is much more one of “what type of ‘we’ do we wish to be 500 years from now?”