A legitimate role for government?

Aristotle’s concept of the human person as a “social animal” provides a better basis for understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Social organisation is not a piece of inventory we have voluntarily picked up at some stage in our evolutionary history. Rather it is a dimension of the human person itself; it is constitutive of our being.

Humans have bio-psychological as well as rational reasons for forming societies and for being governed. Writers such as Virginia Held have demonstrated the complete impropriety of a social contract model for understanding the first human society - the family - and in particular the relationship between mother and child. Roger Scruton points out that even on a larger scale, there is a need for a pre-contractual “we” before any semblance of a contract can be formed.

Phenomenologically, our social nature can be studied in the various formal and informal associations that we create. If social contracts involve obligation, would it not be rational to minimise our participation in them? The consequences of a deprived social nature can be examined in the “shadowland of moral chaos”: in the psychological trauma of solitary confinement, in the yearnings for sociability that drive much drug and alcohol abuse and in the depressive effect of an intense but impersonal urban lifestyle.

By understanding the human person as a social animal we remove the wedge between the individual and society. Our bond to others, and hence our bond to government, transcends the agreed-upon terms of an economic transaction. And the assertion of inalienable, common rights hints at the possibility of common goals. We can approach the concept of a natural law.

The operative word in our original question really is “values” and up to now I have not defined this term. The modern usage of this word is best understood by examining its historical development since the Enlightenment. Hume’s dichotomy between what is and what ought drained values of their metaphysical content. It was a great aim of the Enlightenment project, in fact, to explain all “oughts” in terms of “ises”. The project was given added impetus by the logical positivists at the start of the 20th century, who explicitly established an epistemological dichotomy between facts and values.

I think that today values are popularly understood in this positivist tradition. We pay lip service to them, as Hume would have, and there is a general appreciation that certain values are necessary for the cohesion of nation-states. But values are things that we can choose to pick up and carry around. They are optional and intensely personal. We expect that public policy will be “fairly values-neutral”. In the dichotomies proposed between state and church, fact and opinion, empirical reality and belief, objective and subjective, values stand squarely in line with the latter.

But are these real dichotomies? Does objectivity mean divesting ourselves of values? Max Scheler, who built his whole moral philosophy on the foundation of values, thought not:

“To conceive the world as value-free is a task which men set themselves on account of a value: the vital value of mastery and power over things.”

Postmodern philosophers have further questioned the distinction between fact and value, sometimes to a radical degree. Can we really talk about “facts” independent of their value-context and the personalities that produced them?

What I believe all this points to is another key aspect of the human person forgotten by the Enlightenment. Martin Heidegger claimed that “we are creatures of the unreal”. Unlike animals, we are not defined by our biological need to feed and reproduce. The things that we are most concerned with are those “ought” statements. We are moral beings. We seek a normative dimension to our actions and our lives. Values are an important part of who we are, and any pretensions to “values-neutrality” should be seen merely as the expression of another value.

Then what is the origin of our “oughts”? One possible answer is given by the concept of natural law. This proposes that there are certain “values” that human beings hold by virtue of their being human. I believe that the study of the morality of different cultures, rather than negating this idea by its variability, rather enhances it by its consistency. Everywhere we see some evidence of certain values; that it is wrong to violate or take innocent human life, to steal another’s property or to lie.

In the light of this, a role begins to emerge for governments in shaping the values of citizens. In the first place, we cannot continue to pretend that there is such a thing as values-free government. It would be a mistake, for instance, to view the abortion debate that is so topical now as a conflict between the “fact” of a woman’s right to choose, and the “religious value” of the dignity of human life. Rather, both sides present certain facts, and both rest these on particular values. We need the ethical tools to evaluate these values.