Abstract
The central aim of Matthew Kramer’s latest book, the first in a projected two-volume treatise, is to contest an assumption that he believes has distorted the long-running debate between proponents of “liberal neutrality” and their perfectionist critics. The assumption is that political perfectionists must be committed to using legal coercion to “promote the edification of citizens” given some “moralistic” conception of personal virtue. Kramer agrees with Rawls, and the “liberal” tradition more broadly, that this edificatory project raises the specter of the state as busy-body, officiously interfering in the freedoms of ordinary citizens in order to further their moral flourishing. He denies, however, that such mistrust of the state as a vehicle for moral edification impugns all relevant forms of perfectionism. Accordingly, Liberalism with Excellence outlines an alternative “aspirational” perfectionism that, while jettisoning the strict requirement of public neutrality, nonetheless denies that the state has any business coercing, manipulating, or cajoling its citizens into lives of virtue.
In attempting to redirect the debate along these lines, the book criticizes not only recently influential accounts of “public reason” and state neutrality offered by the later Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Charles Larmore, Jon Quong, and many others but also such prominent contemporary perfectionists as Joseph Raz, George Sher, and Steven Wall. All of these perfectionist writers, Kramer contends, are seduced by the misguided goal of civic edification that he believes liberal neutralists have rightly rejected. The book’s tri-partite structure reflects its complex orientation to these entrenched positions. The first third of the text comprises a comprehensive interrogation of various elaborations of liberal neutrality; the second, a similarly thorough and quite powerful critique of recent defenses of edificatory perfectionism; and the final third is devoted to developing Kramer’s aspirational perfectionist alternative. Taken together, these three elements clear the ground for the task to be taken up in the projected sequel: the presentation of a comprehensive “stoical” theory of justice exemplifying the aspirational variety of perfectionism sketched out in this volume.
If not the promotion of good and virtuous lives, what ambition would guide the activities of a state committed to that alternative, aspirational, perfectionism? Kramer finds his answer in Rawls’s famously undertheorized commitment to the value of self-respect and its “social bases.” “An aspirational-perfectionist system of governance,” Kramer tells us, aims to secure institutional and economic arrangements “under which each citizen can be warranted in harboring a strong sense of self-respect” (p. 362). He thus views aspirational perfectionism, and the “Stoical” theory of justice to which it points, as latent in the same Rawlsian womb from which doctrines of state neutrality sprang. Like its Rawlsian sibling, but unlike its edificatory rivals, aspirational perfectionism regards the promotion of “warranted self-respect” as folded into the value of justice at the ground level. Whereas edificatory perfectionism (at least as Kramer construes it) thinks of the public promotion of personal virtue as a permissible and desirable supplement to the fulfillment of basic obligations of justice, his aspirational alternative treats the relevant perfectionist aims as integral to justice itself. For, if the promotion of warranted self-respect is both a perfectionist aspiration and already a basic obligation of justice, it follows that the state’s responsibility to secure just terms of public interaction is itself an inherently perfectionist one.
Kramer’s account implies, then, that the value of self-respect undermines, rather than supports, the Rawlsian idea of “public reason.” He contends that since the canons of public reason would banish any and all perfectionist considerations from the sphere of civic deliberation, they are fated to suppress a proper understanding of how self-respect is rooted in excellence.
The brief summary I have given barely scratches the surface of Kramer’s comprehensive engagement with the now sprawling literature on this topic. His careful discussions of Quong, Gaus, and Raz in particular provide a sophisticated yet accessible guide to the recent debates over liberal neutrality. For good measure, the book also offers an interesting reconstruction of Rawls’s understanding of self-respect, a searching critique of perfectionist conceptions of freedom, and some very enjoyable Shakespearean references. It would therefore work well as an assigned text in a graduate course, bringing newcomers up to speed on recent scholarship while offering them provocative food for thought. It also manages to open up an intriguing and quite novel perspective on perfectionism despite a saturated surrounding literature.
These virtues notwithstanding, Kramer’s book does not yet give a fully convincing defense of his distinctive aspirational form of perfectionism. To provide such a defense, Kramer needs to get two claims to stick. He must establish, first, that aspirational perfectionism has a structure that is clearly distinct from that of its more familiar edificatory alternatives. Second, he must explain how and why citizens cannot enjoy “warranted self-respect” unless the state adopts the perfectionist stance he recommends. While Kramer provides a compelling case for the first claim, his defense of the second is, as we shall see, much less successful.
To elaborate the first, Kramer contrasts the standard “edificatory” justification for the public funding of the artistic, intellectual, and other culturally important endeavors with that entailed by his own aspirational view. The former conceives such funding simply as an attempt to attune and incline citizens toward living in accordance with some prescriptive ideal of personal virtue. The latter instead sees the “occurrence of outstanding achievements” (p. 342) in the fields supported by such funding as fostering “conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in harboring a strong sense of self-respect” (p. 341). According to Kramer, these two lines of perfectionist argument differ in a crucial respect: unlike the former, the latter does not require the state and its officials to judge their own success in promoting culturally significant activity by asking whether or not citizens achieve more virtuous lives as a result. Public officials who adopt such a stance, Kramer objects, implicitly indulge a “quidnunc,” busy-body, mentality under which the state takes it upon itself “to elevate” citizens “into finer specimens” of virtue (p. 282). This not only betrays an attitude of “impertinence and condescension” toward citizens whose independence and discretion should be respected. It also thereby “debases” and “tarnishes the moral integrity” of the public institutions they represent (pp. 276–78). The implication is that a hectoring edificatory state cannot exemplify the virtue appropriate to “a system of governance that aspires and professes to speak in the name of everyone within its jurisdiction” (pp. 275–76). Such a state, Kramer argues, would in effect demean itself by the lights of the very perfectionist standards that define the distinctive excellences appropriate to organized public life.
Kramer’s aspirational case for public funding of the arts (and other culturally important activities) claims to avoid this danger, because a state that defends its decisions to support particular cultural initiatives on these grounds is not thereby committed to assessing its success in terms of the degree to which citizens are successfully nudged in the direction of personal virtue. Rather, such a state conceives of its action on behalf of outstanding cultural achievement simply as securing a necessary condition for all citizens to enjoy warranted self-respect. Although it abjures the effort to monitor and oversee the personal virtue of private citizens, Kramer’s argument retains two recognizably perfectionist elements: on the one hand, it requires direct and explicit public support for the pursuit of excellence in various cultural venues; and on the other, the excellence of the state itself consists in its fulfilling a basic duty to buttress the self-respect of its citizens.
Kramer is surely correct that neither of these, nor their combination, necessarily requires public officials to assume responsibility for ensuring that as many citizens as possible lead lives of virtue. And he argues powerfully that perfectionists have unsuspected reasons to disapprove of states that embrace that responsibility. In distinguishing this alternative mode of political perfectionism, Kramer has made a genuinely original and intriguing contribution to the debate.
The plausibility of the resulting political position, however, ultimately turns on whether Kramer adequately defends the second claim highlighted earlier, that only an aspirational perfectionist state can support the “warranted self-respect” of its citizens. On this point, I have significant doubts.
Kramer’s thought appears to be that citizens cannot have good reasons to feel a robust sense of self-respect unless their cultural milieu is richly stocked with exemplars of outstanding human achievement. In keeping with his rejection of an edificatory approach, this claim is not a version of the “role-model” theory asserting that such exemplars will spur others to greater excellence and personal virtue. Kramer’s contention, rather, is that such achievements directly provide everyone in a society with a warrant for self-respect. They do so, he maintains, because they are occasions for citizens to take vicarious pride in what their fellows have accomplished. To illustrate what he means, Kramer uses (among others) the examples of the special place Sibelius holds in the cultural life of Finland and of the pride that students or professors take in the outstanding achievements of others associated with their universities (p. 354). The implication, I take it, is that without Sibelius and a string of Nobel prizes, Finns and alumni of the relevant universities would be somehow less warranted in maintaining a high level of self-respect.
I find this line of argument perplexing in at least three ways. First, why think that an aspirational perfectionist state is, as Kramer claims, necessary to buttress citizens’ sense of self-respect? While recognizing the need to answer this question, Kramer underestimates the challenges it poses. Part of the difficulty stems from an unacknowledged conceptual complexity built into his assertion that “the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect on the part of each citizen” (p. 362) has certain necessary conditions. The idea that the state is under a categorical obligation to guarantee these necessary conditions implicitly postulates some threshold of adequacy below which citizens’ self-respect must not be allowed to fall. Yet Kramer consistently treats agents’ sense of self-respect as a scalar property. This makes it very hard to know exactly how to adjudicate claims to the effect that citizens lack necessary support for a “strong sense of self-respect.”
Where, along the dimension from robust to hesitant self-respect, are we to draw the line? Kramer’s colleagues at the University of Cambridge, who can take vicarious pride in the achievements of Newton, Dirac, Hawking, Dryden, Wordsworth, Milton, Russell, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Vaughan Williams, and innumerable Nobel prize winners, are presumably on his theory above the relevant threshold. What about others teaching at less prestigious universities or community colleges, or whose professional milieu is, like the workplace depicted in the sitcom The Office, relentlessly mediocre? Is their “sense of self-respect” now in deficit because the required pride in themselves (whether psychologically present or not) lacks a warrant? Do they thereby acquire a right against society that it make good that deficit? How do we resolve disagreements about whether such complaints are valid?
Even if Kramer is right to think that outstanding cultural achievements are required for citizens to maintain healthy self-respect, it remains to be shown that it must fall to the state to promote the relevant excellences. The relationship between background institutional and political conditions and the tendency for traditions of excellence to emerge and be exemplified in the outstanding achievements of particular individuals is very poorly understood. No one doubts, of course, that societies burdened by catastrophic poverty, or particular populations facing crushing oppression, will have trouble maintaining cultural practices with much vitality. But removing these barriers to excellence doesn’t require the state to cultivate a perfectionist stance. It is enough that it guarantee justice, remove oppression, and secure the conditions of economic prosperity. Once these are attained, however, it is not obvious that further state action is needed to stimulate cultural excellence. Can’t we then rely on civil society to spontaneously generate sufficient cultural vigor without public assistance? After all, apart from the martial virtues, whose (highly questionable) value certainly does owe something to state activity, that is, how most traditions of excellence—aesthetic, sporting, religious, educational etc.—have actually evolved. Is there any reason to think that had late nineteenth-century Finland been a Nozickean minimal state, cultivating the stoniest neutrality toward cultural achievement, Sibelius’s musical genius would never have ripened? Perhaps Kramer’s idea is that state intervention is needed to steer citizens toward the “right” sorts of excellence, but then we seem to be back in the orbit of the edificatory perfectionism he sets out to resist.
Another reason to doubt the necessity of distinctively public action in this area derives from one of Kramer’s most important insights: that the phenomenon of vicarious pride requires that those experiencing it identify in some important way with those exemplifying outstanding achievement. Unfortunately, however, distinctively national or civic forms of identification don’t enjoy any special salience in this context. Einstein’s accomplishments provide an equally strong, if not stronger, justification for the vicarious pride of Israelis or Jewish Americans than for that of his fellow German or Swiss citizens. Shouldn’t Britons of color find in their vicarious pride in Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Marley, or an American hip-hop artist a much stronger warrant for their self-respect than any inspiration they take from Wilberforce’s abolitionism or the music of Elgar? These complexities weaken the case for thinking that specifically civic or national ties have any special role to play in supporting self-respect as Kramer construes it.
My second general reservation about Kramer’s argument for aspirational perfectionism is that it uncritically relies on Rawls’s understanding of self-respect. To be sure, Kramer both clarifies and modifies Rawls’s account in several ways, most notably by denying, I think correctly, that self-respect is a social primary good. Kramer gives good reasons for these refinements to Rawls’s analysis but does not subject Rawls’s underlying conception of self-respect to serious critical scrutiny. As a result, he preserves two of its most troublesome features: an emphasis on feelings associated with self-respect and a connected tendency to blur the contrast between self-respect and self-esteem. The former explains why, like Rawls, Kramer seems ultimately concerned not with self-respect as such but with agents’ “sense” of it; the latter, why Kramer so closely associates self-respect with notions of pride, prestige, and accomplishment.
Yet neither of these is a self-evident or unchallengeable aspect of the concept. Rather than reducing self-respect to a feeling, or to a distinctive set of evaluative judgments informing one’s “sense” of self, one might better construe it instead as a disposition to act toward oneself in certain ways. On this view, at the core of the concept is not a distinctive set of feelings or self-evaluations, but an ideal of self-respecting conduct that includes, among others: protesting and openly resisting wrongful mistreatment or refusing to compromise standards of personal rectitude to which one is committed. So understood, two people can both display equally high self-respect even though one possesses, and the other lacks, high self-esteem and pride in their achievements. A virtue of this view is that it allows that, and explains how, (say) Christians who regard pride as sinful and who therefore harbor a lively sense of self-disgust can nonetheless be highly self-respecting people. Insofar as such a view is plausible, the link Kramer postulates between the social bases of self-respect and vicarious pride becomes correspondingly tenuous. Ironically, I think of this alternative, non-Rawlsian, understanding of self-respect as a Stoic one, and so it will be interesting to see how volume two reconciles Kramer’s promised “Stoical” account of justice with the aspirational perfectionism he introduces here.
A third and final problem for Kramer’s account is that he may exaggerate its actual distance from the liberal neutralist view from which he strives to differentiate it. To be fair, Kramer does acknowledge considerable overlap between the two, not least in their shared rejection of edificatory perfectionism. He nevertheless insists that not all of the compelling features of aspirational perfectionism can be absorbed into a neutralist or “public reason” perspective. I am not so sure.
It is important to emphasize here that, contrary to tempting stereotypes, nothing in the doctrine of liberal neutrality forbids its exponents from claiming that the value of a neutral state consists in part in its provision of a just and equitable format within which human excellences can flourish. The idea that a commitment to state neutrality deprives one of any reason to prefer that citizens enjoy opportunities to thrive and live well rather than to confront a dismal and stultifying cultural mediocrity is a caricature. Indeed, Kramer’s discussion is peppered with citations from Rawls saying just the opposite (e.g., p. 370).
These quoted passages underline that the neutralist project was never motivated by indifference toward the cultivation of human excellence. Its point of departure, rather, is the recognition that unbridgeable yet entirely reasonable disagreements about how to pursue the good life are inevitable fruits of a free society. The question is how a state purporting to represent everyone, not merely some narrower subset, can manage these disagreements in a way that does justice to citizens’ freedoms. Kramer says little about how an aspirational perfectionist state would handle such disputes. How, for example, should it decide which particular traditions of excellence (opera, rap, golf, etc.) merit public support for the sake of self-respect? I suspect that, were he to address these questions, Kramer would be forced to adopt procedural restraints at least reminiscent of those applied by doctrines of “public reason” and neutrality. He after all agrees that the state cannot make good on its claim “to speak in the name of everyone within its jurisdiction” (pp. 275–76) and will lack “moral legitimacy” unless its officials exercise a certain self-restraint (p. 269). Moreover, he eloquently argues that the public worth of individual liberty does not depend on the value of any particular project free persons might choose to pursue (pp. 200–7). Both of these claims have been mainstays of the neutralist position. Once he has joined all the dots comprising his aspirational perfectionism, then, Kramer may find that it leads back to the very view he seeks to evade.