Chapter 10: The Ideas Behind Politics--
Evaluating Actions, Laws, and Constitutions

Chapter Objectives

When you have finished the present chapter you should understand:

1. Three methods we can use to evaluate actions: rationality or congeniality, morality, and legality;

2. Several yardsticks by which we can evaluate laws and constitutions.

3. The chief benefits and dangers of pragmatism-a concern chiefly for the practical consequences of actions.

4. Why, when there is conflict between people or nations one of which acts pragmatically and the other in terms of a body of principles, the pragmatic are likely to lose over the long haul.

5. How the basic nature of government as a wielder of sanctions complicates the relationship between politics and the ethical principles applicable to individuals.

6. Why principles of legitimacy come back to haunt the rulers who create them.

7. How situation ethics is compatible with absolute concepts of right and wrong behavior.

8. Why the relationship between sex and politics has always been important, and why future conditions might make it even more important.

9. The difference between abortion and birth control expressed in terms of sanctions and inducements, and how it can be argued that abortion should not be illegal even though it may be seen as immoral.

Key Terms

congeniality
pragmatism
ideologist-in-chief
rationality
lesser evil
situation ethics
morality
socialization

Under conditions of political combat, those who have no firm values of their own become the instruments of the values of others. *

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACTION AND RULES

We have classified actions into two basic types-retail and wholesale. We have introduced the notation A ---> X + Y for analyzing retail decisions based entirely on the merits of each individual case, and R ---> X + Y (simplified), R₁ - - - - >A, and R₂ - - - -> C for actions deduced from or limited by rules. We have noted the additional possibilities for specialization when decisions are made at wholesale, with some people concentrating on making rules and others on applying them. But we have not yet systematically examined the relations between actions and rules in general We judge or evaluate actions-our own, those of other people, and those of associations to which we are a party. Our purpose in evaluating an action may be to rationalize or justify it, to act better in the future, to figure out whether to join or to remain in an association (if we have any choice), to decide whether to support or oppose the action as a member of the association, or to decide how to act towards another person. As a result of our evaluation, we may communicate praise or blame, we may convey or refuse to convey inducements, and we may impose or refrain from imposing sanctions.

Ways We Evaluate Actions

There are three bases upon which we can evaluate actions:

Rationality/congeniality. The extent to which the actions produce consequences desired by the actor or (if this is a different person) by the evaluator. An action well-calculated to produce results preferred by the actor we call rational (Chapter 2). One well-calculated to produce results desired by someone else we can call congenial

Morality. The extent to which the actions comply with ethical standards, defined in terms of what people would want if they desired what they ought to by some cosmic yardstick external to man and society. An action may therefore be highly rational--- producing consequences desired by the actor--and also highly immoral, if he does not want what he ought to want. Most people would agree that Adolf Hitler acted reasonably rationally in pursuing his desire to exterminate European Jews, but that his actions were outrageously immoral.

Legality. The extent to which the actions comply with standards imposed by law.

Legal standards, in their turn, can thus also be evaluated. Like retail actions, they can be examined for their compatibility with moral standards. But they can also be evaluated in terms of whether their application will produce desired consequences. A speed limit, for example, is a legal standard resulting from trade-offs or compromises among various conflicting public goals, including bodily safety, keeping down costs of insuring against property damage, as opposed to fostering mobility and the ability to move around quickly and conveniently. At some speed in a given location, these conflicting considerations come into a rough balance and the legal limit is set. Legislation, the wholesale act of formulating and proclaiming rules which the government will enforce with sanctions, can thus be evaluated for its rationality or congeniality.

Evaluating Constitutional Laws. Laws may also be evaluated in terms of constitutional standards, a body of rules regarded as more fundamental than ordinary legislation. Although laws are "wholesale" compared to individual actions, they can also be regarded as "retail" compared to constitutions. Thus a constitutional provision may be a way of telling the legislator: The law you are proposing to enact appears to be a good idea, looked at strictly in isolation and on its own merits. But if we allowed this type of law it would tend to worsen the total situation. Therefore this Constitution prohibits such laws. An ex post facto law, for example, might be a very tempting way to get rid of or "put away" somebody generally agreed to be a public eyesore, nuisance, or worse. Assume that the country would be vastly better off if this person died or vanished. But he has cleverly avoided doing anything illegal, so no government sanctions can be imposed on him. An ex post facto law describing and proscribing something that the villain has already done would, let us continue to suppose, produce very good results in this individual case. Nevertheless, the general consequences of allowing ex post facto laws, the side effects of being able to get good results in this particular case, would be a vast decrease in the legal security of people in general.

Constitutional standards in their turn can be evaluated in terms of their rationality (production of desired consequences) and their morality (conformity to ethical standards). Moral judgments, in other words, can be applied to actions directly, semidirectly by evaluating legal rules, or indirectly by evaluating constitutions.

BENEFITS AND DANGERS OF THE PRAGMATIC METHOD

Pragmatism can be defined, roughly, as a concern chiefly with the practical consequences of actions. To be pragmatic thus implies the opposite of being "dogmatic," "theoretical," or "ideological." However the actual relationship between pragmatism and dogmatic ideology are by no means as simple as the usual dichotomy implies.

Benefits

Often cited as an Anglo-American virtue, pragmatism does appear to have many advantages. It encourages decision-makers to base their actions on a cost-benefit analysis instead of fiat justicia,, pereat mundus (do justice even if it means the end of the world). It emphasizes the need to consider actual consequences in deciding what to do, rather than just basking in the glow of noble intentions or on the sense of righteous behavior.

Pragmatism appears to give maximum possible scope for the exercise of common sense. Certainly, this is preferable to operating on the basis of a body of doctrine that is totally or largely perverse:

Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance,
So far, to make us wish for ignorance?
And rather in the dark to grope our way,
Than, led by a false guide, to err by day? Footnote 1

It is better, at least in the short run, to stumble around blindly than to go efficiently in the wrong direction.

Finally, there is no denying that some of the most outrageous actions in human history were "justified" by reference to some grand ideology or body of doctrine. The Inquisition, with its burnings at the stake, was bad enough, but pales into insignificance compared to the slaughters in the name of doctrine in the twentieth century, Nazis exterminated Jews--six million of them--in pursuit of "Aryan" racial purity. Communists "liquidated" many additional millions of people after successfully seizing governing power in the U.S.S.R., China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, in order to "further" and "consolidate" the revolution. (The old German Marxists had a slogan, "Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag Ich Dir den Schadel ein"--If you don't want to be my brother, I'll smash your skull!) Footnote 2

Limitations of Pragmatism

Pragmatism, then, does have its good points. But a pragmatic analysis of pragmatism indicates that it also has serious limitations. Pragmatically, we must seek a theory, a doctrine, a "star" to steer by. Lacking theory, which at the wholesale or general level we may call ideology, we may find it difficult or impossible to get our bearings quickly enough in a complex and rapidly changing society.

Understanding the Consequences of Action. We must avoid misinterpreting the meaning of the arrow in our formulation of the elements of retail rational action, A ---> X + Y. To simplify discussion, we may sometimes assume that all of the consequences X and Y of a proposed action A can be foreseen with complete accuracy. In fact, in many of the most important personal and political decisions we face, this is not true.

Given the degree of uncertainty that is bound to exist about the consequences of any major action, especially when these include possible reactions of many other people, deciding everything we do at the strictly retail level becomes hopelessly cumbersome. When we consider pragmatically the consequences of acting pragmatically in the narrow sense, we thus find that the practical results are not satisfactory. Genuine pragmatism forces us to seek principles from which we can deduce many of our specific actions rather than trying to figure every individual case out completely on its own merits.

Considering the Interests of All. Another problem with narrow pragmatism is that it may encourage egotism and discourage us from considering the consequences our actions have on "third parties." Since there are limits to what we can calculate, in our particular actions we will inevitably tend to consider primarily the consequences an action will produce for ourselves and those relatively few others for whom we care as individuals. The "primarily" here all too easily drifts into "exclusively," so that we may end up acting as if we did not care at all about anybody outside our personal group. But since we are third parties for practically everybody else, we might not appreciate the consequences of making this inconsiderateness a general practice. Narrow pragmatism may thus lead us to act in ways that are not really in our own interest. And it will certainly reduce the predictability of the milieu within which we live and act, making our decisions in general both more difficult and more risky.

Consider, for example, the ordinary process of driving a car. We do so in the context of a maze of rules indicating what we may, may not, or must do. On two-way roads, we must drive on the right except under certain specific conditions. A green light means that we may, but do not have to, pass through an intersection. A red light means that we must not pass through an intersection. Speed limits indicate the range of speeds within which we can choose. We do not have to decide everything from scratch as we drive, and thus our decisions are manageable . . . usually!

Let us compare this with "pragmatic" driving. Each individual driver would choose what speed and which side of the road to drive on. Furthermore, he could change these decisions as often as he thought fit. Decisions about whether to stop, slow down, or barge ahead full steam at each intersection would be made "case by case" by each driver. Obviously, the information problem facing each driver would be enormous. As one approaches an intersection one must either slow down just in case someone else comes along the other road and does not proceed cautiously, or one must damn the torpedoes and maintain full speed, with a high probability of not living very long since luck cannot be depended on. And what should one do when going around a curve?

Driving safely is difficult enough when our choices are restricted by rules of the road. Pragmatically, therefore, acting under a principle that we will act under no principles produces practical consequences that no one will find satisfactory.

Domestic Dangers. The lack of a coherent U.S. ideology has probably aggravated efforts to solve many basic national problems. As we have seen, American efforts to regulate the economy have been highly pragmatic, but not highly successful. There may be a connection. Supreme Court efforts to formulate a legal theory of proper race relations have been unsuccessful. [Footnote 3] The country has reeled from one pragmatic policy-- e.g., forbidding colleges from requiring applicants to send a photograph, because it might facilitate choices based on race-- to the opposite--e.g., practically requiring them to treat applicants on the basis of their race.

Diplomatic Dangers. Perhaps pragmatism poses even more serious problems for American foreign policy than it does domestically. For many years, the main threat to U.S. military security and world influence has come from the U.S.S.R. And the U.S.S.R. is led by people who emphatically proclaim their allegiance to and inspiration by Marxist theory, as developed by Lenin and any leaders currently in power. The pages of Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, are filled with analysis expressed in "Marxist-Leninist" terms. And one member of the Party Politburo, M. A. Suslov, has functioned for many years as a kind of national "ideologist-in-chief." The importance of "principled" analysis and action is emphasized, and major political decisions are explained and justified in terms of their conformity to Marxism.

There is considerable doubt in Western circles whether Marxist theory really is a guide to Soviet leaders' actions or whether it is merely a means of rationalizing decisions made on entirely different-perhaps Machiavellian-grounds. But if propagandists tell a lie often enough, some of them may begin to believe it themselves. And it is easy to understand how Russian leaders could be perfectly sincere in their Marxist professions. They and their revolutionary predecessors and allies have managed to seize control over a third of the earth's population in less than two thirds of a century. No matter how weak Marxist theory may be philosophically and economically, if people committed to it meet with phenomenal success, some of that success is likely to rub off on their emotional attachment to the theory.

Who is the Stronger: Pragmatist or Dogmatist? Now let us raise a serious question: When a society whose leaders are committed to pragmatism comes into conflict with one whose leaders are partisans of an elaborate ideology, which of the two- -everything else being equal--is likely to prevail? Assuming that both societies are led by sharp operators who are willing to make occasional compromises in order to get some of what they want, which leaders are more apt to make individual compromises such that their cumulative impact is what they want? And which leaders are more likely to make a series of compromises each of which appears reasonable but the cumulative effect of which is to paint their country into a corner? The question practically answers itself.

Also, international propaganda efforts are bound to suffer when conducted by a pragmatic country. Either national policies will be presented to the world honestly, and come across as completely opportunistic, or they will be justified by appeal to principles which are not really believed in, and thus be vulnerable to exposure as hypocrisy. A country with an overall theory of what arrangements are just and how it is going to move towards that goal is apt to come over stronger in foreign countries than a country in which there is more actual justice but which has no coherent plan for correcting its inevitable imperfections. In the competition for the "minds and hearts of mankind," our realities are compared with Soviet aspirations and promises. That this is not a fair comparison is undeniable, but what can the U.S. do about it? There is an old slogan that "you can't beat something with nothing," and this appears to hold true in international propaganda. Without a positive ideology of our own, the U.S. government has tried to make do with attacking that of the Communists. But anticommunism is a very unsatisfactory substitute for a national ideology, for it allows the terms of the debate to be dictated by the other side, a poor tactical position for the U.S. It also draws more attention to the rival ideology, rather than deflecting it, and it sounds purely negative.

Dangers of Pragmatism in War. Finally, when the struggle of the pen and of the purse breaks down and resort is had to the sword, pragmatism can be a dreadful handicap. There are real problems in deciding when to use force, and on behalf of what objectives. We in the United States are singularly ill-equipped to think about these issues, for our obsessive pragmatism leaves us with no principles to guide us in deciding the really hard cases. War involves violence, and we are particularly incapacitated when it comes to being able to think clearly about use of force and violence. (The same inability is reflected in the half- hearted enforcement of domestic laws. Hardened criminals are turned loose daily to return to their private violence because many people cannot bear to think about judicious use of public force). Militarily, the U.S. is still strong. But enough armed might is enough, and extra soldiers and weapons cannot make up for an inability to decide what to do with them.

BEYOND PRAGMATISM: ETHICS AND POLITICS

Not all principles are necessarily "ethical principles." But ethics inherently involves principles, and principled analysis seems to draw our attention to ethical considerations whether we like it or not.

As we have seen, the spirit of pragmatism practically forces political actors to search for principles, yet ethics and politics are often seen as completely separate matters. When we think of politics, we tend to think of "Machiavellianism," of "compromise," of raison d6tat, and "power politics." "Politics" smacks of corruption, of egotism, and of "interest groups." We can all recognize the large element of truth in Max Weber's conclusion that

He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics. Footnote 4

There is a strong temptation--one made almost irresistible by the fundamental violence (sanctions) underlying every government- -to generalize that ethics is ethics and politics is politics and never the twain shall meet. But the relationship between ethics and politics is not that simple. Each of these concerns can profitably be scrutinized in the light of the other. Indeed, trying to separate the two can probably result only in defective analysis in both. As Max Weber puts it:

Should it really matter so little for the ethical demands on politics that politics operates with very special means, namely, power backed up by violence? Footnote 5

How Ethics Enters Politics

Despite the basic reliance on sanctions, perhaps indeed because of it, people who rule are generally very interested in finding good sounding principles from which they can deduce and thereby justify the specific actions by which they rule:

The rule is: those who wield power must establish their right to do so. This is not a pious wish or a peculiarly democratic canon, but a general political necessity. Every ruling group . . . must identify itself with a principle acceptable to the community as justification for the exercise of power. Such doctrinal tenets are known as principles of legitimacy. Their function is to establish authority as distinct from naked power. . . . All rulers, whether traditional, democratic, or totalitarian, need such a principle of legitimacy in order to reduce their dependence on naked power. Footnote 6

In other words, rulers must threaten people with sanctions and be prepared to impose them when laws are broken. This is the very essence of government. But sanctions are nasty-- deprivation of life, liberty, and property. The worse an action appears to be, the more necessary it is to deduce it from acceptable general rules or principles. Thus, just as conscientious revolutionaries must have very noble objectives before they can use the violence necessary to bring down an old government, so those who govern must have noble principles in order to retain self-respect in spite of the terrible actions they must take in order to maintain their government.

At the very least, then, we will find rulers engaged in a pragmatic search for principles to be used as weapons in the fight for men's minds. Even rulers with no sincere interest in justice or the welfare of others, even those who are strictly opportunists seeking power and glory and luxury will grope for fine-sounding principles to rationalize the individual actions they want to take for entirely other and ignoble reasons. But general principles always have implications beyond their specific application to the particular action for which a justification is being sought. These additional implications may be regarded as side effects of acting in pursuit of legitimacy, of invoking principles in the first place. A ---> X + Y, as usual. Thus, principles that are helpful to the rulers in one case get in the way of doing what they please in other cases. The whole usefulness of principles lies in their generality, in their rising above particular cases, and as such they come back to haunt their supporters.

Principles are thus like institutions invented by rulers for their own convenience but which later take on a life and dynamic of their own and become inconvenient, The outstanding example of such an institution was the British Parliament. Originally established by royal decree to make it easier to impose new taxes on the population, several hundred years later the Parliament became the center of opposition to royal absolutism and reduced the monarchs to a very limited "constitutionalized" role as head of state. Before rulers articulate principles to justify themselves, cost-benefit analysis is completely appropriate.

Relationships Among Justice, Legitimacy, and Stability

There is probably no way for governing actions to be seen as justifiable in themselves, even in a country whose government is ideal. And of course no actual government is ideal. In the absence of some set of generally accepted principles of legitimacy, there is, therefore, probably no possibility of political stability, since brute force can never cinch the matter. Guglielmo Ferrero, in his Principles of Power, graphically notes the military and revolutionary horrors unleashed in the early nineteenth century when the older royal theory of legitimacy was challenged by the democratic theory. [Footnote 7] Earlier, the wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant factions involved similarly conflicting views of the principle of legitimacy. Today, clashing views of legitimacy underlie terrorism, hijackings, kidnappings, and political assassinations in western Europe and the Middle East.

Political stability apparently requires both just arrangements and general perception of that fact. Neither a just order generally seen as unjust nor an unjust order currently seen as just is a good prospect for longevity .

A just society perceived generally as such will be as stable as human affairs can be. The opposite, an unjust society generally perceived as such, is probably so unstable that it cannot last for very long. We should therefore not expect to find either of these extremes in actual practice, for perfection is highly unlikely, consensus on that perfection is even less likely, and absolute perversion destroys itself quickly. A society characterized by actual but unperceived justice could be stabilized by teaching the people to see things differently.

Reality Combines the Elements. Of course the most likely society is one whose arrangements have a mixture of good and bad qualities. Just as all political discourse is a mixture of sense and nonsense, so all institutions combine elements of justice and injustice. Pure justice is improbable among imperfect men, while pure perversion falls of its own weight; hence a mixture is the only real possibility. Unfortunately, the most likely attitudes are that existing arrangements are good or bad, pure and simple. Perception of the actual mixture of good and bad elements will probably come in a dismal third. This means that unrealism is the most likely attitude, and this in turn is likely to encourage one of two equally inappropriate types of action:

1. unbudging conservatism
2. rabid revolution

Assuming that realism is good and that the side effects of actions are important, it appears to follow that genuine and orderly progress requires that as many people as possible move inwards towards a "reformist" position and away from these extremes.

       Unbudging                                  Revolutionary
       conservatism          Reformism            radicalism
            _____________________________________________

Philosophical "conservatives" have long understood this. Metternich observed that "stability is not immobility," and Burke warned that we must be prepared to change what is bad if we wish to retain the good aspects of existing arrangements. [Footnote 8] Efforts to prevent all change can only result in cumulating pressures and a violent explosion. Efforts to change everything will, if successful, destroy much good as well as much evil.

Politics and Situation Ethics

Actions always take place within specific circumstances. Even when we employ the simplified version of the elements of action, A ---> X + Y, A is implicitly surrounded by capital C with which we refer to the circumstances within which it is taken. When the advantages of simplicity are outweighed by those of precision, we use the full expression.

Circumstances are important, as we have noted before, for two reasons. First, they determine which actions are possible and which are impossible. Second, they affect the specific consequences produced by a given action. Striking a match at night in a dark room produces a result quite different from the same action in a gun powder factory.

The Lesser Evils. The common idea that politics is evil and that political leaders are bad results in large part from the circumstances in which these leaders work. Often, they do not have the luxury of taking an action that is intrinsically good. Instead, they are forced to choose among several actions, all of which are clearly bad in one or more aspects. The best they can do is to choose the lesser evil, a very political concept indeed. What would you have done, for example, if you had been in President Truman's position? Truman became president on the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, and was then informed for the first time about the secret development of the atomic bomb. He had to decide whether to drop the bomb on Japan in order to end World War 11 quickly, or to refrain and try to win the war by conventional means. The latter course was estimated to cost one million additional American military casualties as well as a substantial number of Japanese casualties. Dropping the bomb would greatly decrease American casualties, but increase Japanese casualties.

Let us assume that you believe it is bad to kill people. What would you do if you were Truman? Your options do not appear to include any action which kills nobody. Clearly, resigning the office will not solve the problem, for the decision must still be made, and it must be made by somebody. Presumably, your choice must depend on how many people will be killed by each of your options, by who they are (Americans or Japanese, soldiers or civilians), and by other important consequences of following either choice.

Of course perceived alternatives may not include all actual options. Given enough time, effort, and luck, someone might have been able to pull a "rabbit" out of the hat, an action which would have none of the objectionable consequences of the actions actually being considered by President Truman. Perceived dilemmas may be false ones. A possible example is the so-called Phillips Curve, which some economists think means that low unemployment is always accompanied by high inflation and that low inflation produces high unemployment. The fact that very high inflation has recently been accompanied by high unemployment tends to suggest that the asserted relation between unemployment and inflation does not exist, in which case it should be possible to combine low unemployment with a stable currency. But leaders are not omniscient, and they must choose from among the alternatives which they do in fact perceive as available within the circumstances.

It is all too true that ethical precepts applicable to individuals often seem to be ignored or even reversed at the political level. Reinhold Niebuhr thus spoke convincingly of Moral Man and Immoral Society. [Footnote 9] But in fact in the context of politics and government the implications of many ethical precepts are "reversed." Consider, for example, the virtue of "generosity." According to Christian theology, it is good to sell all you have and give the proceeds to the poor. It is said to be good to lay down your life for the good of others. Fine! Let us not dispute the validity of these prescriptions. But what are the implications here of the fact that government's resources are all obtained at gunpoint? How noble is it to take somebody else's property and give it to the poor? How altruistic is it to conscript people and force them to lay down their lives for the benefit of others--at home or abroad?

Perhaps we should remember Milton Friedman's "Eleventh Commandment" that everybody should be free to do good at his own expense. This does not mean that there should be no political or collective charitable actions. It does mean that we should refrain from imposing rules on others via government that we do not also impose on ourselves. If to support governmental charities or any other worthy purpose we want to compel some people to pay 50% of their income as taxes, we have no business voting to tax ourselves at only the 20% rate. But this is not a new discovery. It is merely a restatement of the generality requirement of the rule of law.

Situation Ethics and Absolute Norms of Behavior

All that situation ethics "tells" us is that bad actions may produce the best consequences we can get under some circumstances. This is obviously true. Lying, for example, is widely regarded as wrong, no doubt with excellent reason. But what are we to do if a friend runs up, on the street, informs us that someone is trying to kill him, and dives into an empty garbage can? Just as he pulls the lid on over his head, his would-be assassin emerges around the corner, six-shooter in hand. "Where'd he go?" he roars. What do you say? Do you pull a "George Washington," point to the can, and piously proclaim, "I cannot tell a lie"? Or do you tell the madman that "He went thataway," pointing on down the street, and then call the police? Which is the moral thing to do? Clearly, we lie. And it is not a "white" lie; it is a good lie.

Evaluating Circumstances As Well As Actions. We should avoid concluding, however, that we were wrong to believe the action in question to be wrong to begin with. Nor do we need to conclude that "everything is relative." We can evaluate circumstances as well as actions. A bad circumstance is one in which we must take bad actions in order to get good results. And it is very important to be able to evaluate circumstances. To some extent we shape future circumstances by our present actions. Accordingly, one thing we should ask ourselves before deciding what to do today is: What effect would this contemplated action have on the choices I will have to make tomorrow? Am I painting myself into a corner from which the only escape is to take immoral action?

To answer such a question is not easy. When everything is considered, the preferred action may or may not be one producing a worsened set of circumstances for tomorrow. The alternatives can always be worse. Much may depend on how far ahead one is thinking, on the ratio between what is given up today to what is gained tomorrow, and on the extent to which the actor "discounts" the future. "Apres nous, le deluge" represents one possible extreme, where no future gain is regarded as justifying any sacrifices today. We will return to this issue of political "investment" in the concluding chapters of this study.

For now, though, we can use the Vietnam war to illustrate the relation between the morality of actions and the morality of circumstances. There can be no denying that the United States government took outrageous actions in Vietnam. Even the staunchest defender of our involvement would not argue that all of our actions could be said to be inherently good. War, after all, is "hell." People do get hurt and killed. Rather than trying to justify American actions in their own right, the defender of involvement will presumably make one or both of two other arguments: 1) The other side engaged in even more outrageous actions. 2) Under the circumstances, American alternatives were even worse than what we actually did.

Although there is plenty of evidence that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong did engage in actions at least as outrageous as those of the U.S., the first argument is not very strong. Bad actions by others are not inherently a justification for bad actions of our own. In fact, when we call these actions bad, it implies that, everything else being equal, we ought not to imitate them.

The argument that our bad actions were the best possible ones under the circumstances is much harder to find fault with. As we have repeatedly seen, this is a definite possibility which frequently occurs in human affairs. Whether or not this was actually the case in Vietnam is, of course, a much more controversial issue. But we do not need to settle this issue in order to make an important point. Instead, we can assume arguendo [Footnote 10] that the assertion is true, that U.S. actions in Vietnam really were the lesser evil under the world circumstances that we found ourselves in.

If American actions in Vietnam were lesser evils under the circumstances, it was a very sad commentary on the circumstances. Of course, at any given time we must work within the circumstances that actually do exist, not those that we might wish existed. But when circumstances are that deplorable, failure to do anything to try to improve them over time becomes inexcusable. One part of the world circumstances within which the U.S. must presently operate is anarchy, the absence of a common government to resolve disputes between different areas lawfully rather than by indiscriminate force. Under conditions of anarchy, appeal to the naked sword may indeed be justifiable. Our engagement in Vietnam may well have been justifiable--not all justifiable wars are successful wars. But the more justifiable our immediate actions there were under the circumstances, the more unjustifiable our failure to be doing anything--before or since--to put an end to the world conditions in which such outrageous actions were warranted! Critics of the U.S. involvement may therefore have been harping on superficialities and failing to get down to the fundamental issues.

SEX AND POLITICS: FAMILIES, CHILDREN, AND SOCIALIZATION

Nowhere is the concept of situation ethics raised more frequently, or more controversially, than in issues related to sexual activity.

Regulating Reproduction

The production of children is generally regarded as legitimate only in the context of a civil relationship known as marriage. Children produced "out of wedlock" have been expressly referred to as "illegitimate," and have suffered various legal disabilities. The reasonableness of penalizing children for origins over which they had absolutely no control is most dubious, of course.

Whether political disadvantages are heaped upon such children or not, they will probably suffer from their origins. The institution of marriage promotes the welfare of children in several ways. Responsibility for specific children is allocated to particular adult parents, rather than assumed by the community in general. Given the tendency for everybody's responsibility to become nobody's, this is undoubtedly beneficial to the average child. Marriage also provides two adults with an emotional stake in each child; if one dies or is otherwise unable to care for the child, the other may still be available. While both parents survive, the marriage allows for some specialization; in the U.S. this traditionally has meant that the father provided necessary family income and the mother ran the house and cared for and educated the children. But many other forms of specialization between the parents are possible. One of the functions of traditional legal and ethical prohibitions against extramarital sex has been to minimize production of children who will not be properly cared for. These prohibitions may also have helped minimize disputes over responsibility for children.

Abortion. Today the social interest in regulating reproduction has come dramatically to public attention in the abortion issue. Abortion--medical intervention to terminate a pregnancy--is a foolproof although extreme means to avoid having a baby when abstinence was not practiced and contraceptives were ineffective or not used. In the mid-1970s a tremendous uproar was touched off by two Supreme Court decisions that:

1. Prohibited (on grounds of "unconstitutionality") all legal restrictions on abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.
2. Ruled that the federal government had no constitutional duty to finance abortions for women claiming inability to pay for one themselves.

Two major camps emerged in the debate over the legality of abortions. One faction argued either that abortions are not immoral and therefore should not be illegal, or that since the consequences of outlawing abortions are bad, abortions must not be immoral. The other faction retorted that abortions are immoral, and therefore should be illegal. These camps, however, do not exhaust the logical possible positions on the abortion issue. Taking morality as one question and legality as another, we get the following possibilities:

  Table 10-3.  Abortion and Morality

                            Immoral    Not Immoral
                            ______________________________                   
                Should be   |1. major camp  2.
                 illegal    |
                            |
                Should not  |3.             4. major camp
                 be illegal |

It is hard to imagine why anybody would opt for position (2) that abortion is not immoral but should be illegal. Position (3), however, deserves more serious consideration. It maintains that abortion is immoral but should not be illegal.

The immorality of abortion is implicit in the analysis of associations on which the present text is based. Biologically, once conception (fertilization and implantation of the egg) has taken place a living human being will result in the normal course of events. The well-debated question of when a "person" comes into existence--at conception, "quickening," viability, or birth--is probably a nonsense question. In any event it has nothing to do with the question of the morality of abortion. Abortion is a positive action depriving either what is a person, or what will become one in due course of nature, of life without his consent. It thus constitutes a sanction. And our theory allows sanctions only when they are imposed in response to violation of a really general rule of action. A fetus is totally incapable of "acting" in any sense of the term. Thus, abortion is immoral according to the logic and premises of association theory. By contrast, the major methods of birth control constitute--in effect withheld inducements rather than sanctions. It is one thing to refrain from launching a ship; it is another thing to scuttle it after it has been launched.

But to say that an action is immoral is not to say that it should be illegal. As we have already seen, immorality is not even a basis for saying that the action should never be taken. Although inherently immoral, an action may be good in the sense that it is the least bad option available under the circumstances. Such actions should not be outlawed. And even when the action is such that it could never be justifiable as a lesser evil, a law against it is not always desirable. As St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out, the side effects of trying to outlaw all sin may be worse than the benefits. Government has only limited resources for enforcing its laws and can easily spread itself too thin. It must therefore concentrate on preventing actions that destroy all possibility of civilization and human fellowship, not squander its scarce enforcement resources on secondary (though still important) problems.

Under the unfortunate circumstances of the modern United States, laws against abortion would probably produce an increased total amount of evil and a further deterioration in our circumstances. Sexual promiscuity and illegitimate births are rampant. Were it not for the large number of abortions currently performed--outnumbering live births in many cities--a higher and higher percentage of children would be brought up in underprivileged homes. Already intolerable pressures on the welfare and schooling systems would be increased. Thus as a policy the Supreme Court's decision unleashing abortion from the shackles of law was probably wise. The Supreme Court, however, is not supposed to make basic policy decisions. And the constitutional provision from which the Court claimed to deduce its decisions--a Fourteenth Amendment right to "privacy," which is never mentioned in the Amendment's language-- is so vague that it could mean anything. Once again, the justices used legal hocus pocus to justify doing what they wanted to do, rather than behaving like a court of law. Footnote 11

On the other hand the later decision that there is no constitutional requirement that government finance abortions for the poor was clearly on sound legal ground. It is one thing to say that a certain action is not illegal and entirely another matter to say that the taxpayers must help you to do it. (Flying to Hawaii or Bermuda for a midwinter vacation in the sun is perfectly legal, but if you cannot afford it what business would you have forcing the taxpayers to finance it for you?) Only a general confusion between the nature of laws and bodres, and of the constitutional standards appropriately applied to each, allows claims like those pressed in the abortion finance case to be taken seriously. [Footnote 12] As a policy decision, however, the Supreme Court's financing decision is open to attack. The community's interest in abortions is strongest in the cases where the mother is least able to pay. Children born to indigent women are likely to become public charges, and they are more likely than average to be brought up in conditions giving them a very poor start in life.

As the Supreme Court itself pointed out, however, Congress remains free to appropriate all the money it wishes to buy abortions for poor women. The Court's correct ruling that Congress has no constitutional duty to do so does not prevent Congress from making the correct policy choices.

Government Involvement in Reproduction

Many government policies and laws affect patterns of reproduction. Tax structure, for example, may reward, ignore, or penalize people who have children. Everything else being equal, the $1000 (in 1979) tax exemption for each dependent is a reward to people who have children. If taxes were higher for people with children, this would discourage large families.

It is instructive to review government's options if population increase ever constitutes a major problem. Assume, for example, that after full discussion of the resource limits and other constraints within which we live, the government decides that zero population growth (ZPG) must be a high priority goal. How can it go about achieving this goal?

Education. One approach might be via the power of the pen. A campaign to educate people to the individual and social consequences of overpopulation will probably convince some people to hold down on the number of children they have. This technique might work. One possible side effect if it does work might be to increase the proportion of unconscientious people in the society over the long haul--the conscientious refrain while the unconscientious multiply.

Negative Inducements. Another approach would be to manipulate the tax structure deliberately. Also, if there is a social dividend as suggested in the previous chapter, children might not receive their dividend until they become "of age." Instead of paying the dividend on a child's behalf to its parents each year, government-as-trustee II would pay the money to government- as-trustee I. The latter would hold or invest the accrued dividends for each child and pay him a lump sum (including accumulated interest) on his eighteenth birthday. This would prevent parents from having children merely in order to increase their own disposable income, which might otherwise be a serious danger if the social dividend is substantial. And it would provide each young adult with a nest egg to help finance a higher education or other worthwhile projects.

Positive Inducements. If the pen and the negative purse do not suffice, positive inducements may be offered. We have already alluded to the Indian government's payment of a sum to everybody undergoing surgical sterilization. With governments, however, the ultimate recourse, when necessary, is sanctions. But sanctions, to be legitimate, must be imposed only on people violating general rules of action. How can government act through laws to control the total population in a country?

Sanctions: Licensing Reproduction--A Model. Necessarily, to limit population using a general rule, each couple must be allowed to have only the same number of children. But the odds that ZPG can be achieved if the limit is any integral number are very small. One child per couple would be too low, while two might be either too high or too few for population stability. The limit would probably have to be set at some noninteger--1.8 or 2.2 or some such figure. But it is not possible to have .8 of a baby, or .2 of one. King Solomon's offer to cut the disputed baby in two may be the earliest recorded recognition of this fact.

Perhaps the most obvious thing would be to set up an agency, perhaps called the Population Stabilization Permissions Board (PSPB), require people having babies to get a license, and allow the board total discretion to give out licenses when and only when it feels they serve the "public convenience and necessity." But the dangers of putting arbitrary control over this power of life (if not death) into any set of hands are self-evident.

We are assuming that the government's sole interest is in regulating the size of the population, not its "quality" (which would be another issue entirely). This being so, there are two approaches that do not place discretionary powers in bureaucratic hands and that fit the "ideal" suggested in the previous chapter. In either case, the government would first calculate how many babies per year or per couple will produce a stable population. Then (1) Government can sell the indicated number of licenses for each year on the open market at the equilibrium price. (Remember, this is the price at which the demand-the number of licenses people are willing and able to buy at that price-equals the supply, which is based on the government calculation.) Since in effect a limited monopoly of the rights to have babies during the year is being auctioned off, all receipts must benefit the public, which is the only owner of any monopoly. Therefore they must be placed in the trust fund and distributed in the social dividend.

Auctioning the limited rights to reproduce would hold down the number of babies to the determined level, assuming enforcement is possible. And it would do so without giving anybody dangerous power to make arbitrary case by case decisions. However even though the revenues generated by the auction are distributed equally to everybody, objections may be raised that the system discriminates against the right of the poor to have children, since even with their share of the dividend the poor may not be able to afford to buy a license.

(2) Alternatively, government can issue licenses good for, say, 1.8 children to each new couple, assuming it is the first marriage for each. Licenses not used can be sold at the market price; additional licenses can be bought in the same way. A poor couple can thus have one baby and may be able to purchase the .2 of a license needed to have a second. Or the couple can sell all or part of its license at the market price, thus becoming less poor, if they would rather have the money or are unable to have children.

Enforcement could take many forms. Compulsory abortion might be imposed on persons becoming pregnant without a license. Or the government might hold back enough certificates to cover unlicensed children, but take them from their parents and subject the parents to sterilization. Or something might be put in the water supply to prevent pregnancy, and an antidote made available only to people with a proper license. No doubt many other techniques could be imagined, some of which might raise less serious ethical issues than these noted here. However enforcement is a problem no matter what the basis for allocating rights to have children, and hence is no basis for deciding among them.

The population problem will, we trust, never become so severe that such government regulations become necessary. But if the awful day ever comes, it will be better to have thought the problem out in advance in a principled way than to have to improvise on the spur of the moment.

Regulating Socialization

Excruciating though they may be, the problems of physical reproduction are easy compared to those of converting the newborn baby into an adult human being--the problems of "socialization." Socialization, in its turn, is probably simple compared to the problems of producing oneself faced by adults.

Child Development and Education. Socialization includes the processes by which the child learns a language, rules of social behavior, facts about the world, and values. It is the process of learning to live with others, to "coexist," and it takes place both formally and informally. Every child is surrounded by parents, priests, pedagogues, and peers. The relative influence of each of these elements varies from child to child and from time to time. Parents, for example, are probably most influential with very young children. As the child grows, parental influence declines, and peer influence increases. At some point, and it might plausibly be when the conflicting influences of parents and peers are in rough balance, the young person may come to realize that he or she must choose between conflicting schemes of values, outlooks, and paths of life, and that nobody can do it for us. As long as we are immature--i.e., passive absorbers of the emotional influences in our social environment--our education will inevitably be a very sensitive political issue. Everybody has a stake in seeing that we get the "right scoop," which is that orientation that will encourage us to act in ways the would-be influences find congenial.

Education as an Institution. Education is also politically sensitive because it has become institutionalized and powerful professional vested interests have developed. Assuming that at some point an increase in the average level of formal schooling benefits society less than the extra cost, it is conceivable that we might have already passed that point. It is not conceivable that professional educators will bring this fact to our collective attention or even agree with those who do. Their financial interest is in multiplying customers, not "drop-outs" and in restricting entry to their own ranks. Professional pressure is therefore devoted to seeking compulsory schooling, truancy "laws," child labor "laws" (thus making schooling almost the only option aside from completely "dropping out") and constantly escalating certification requirements for teachers. Up to a certain point, of course, these pressures may serve the public interest as well as that of the professionals. The problem is that these professional interests have absolutely no reason for quitting while we are all ahead. Nor do they care to have us reminded of the important distinction between schooling and education. [Footnote 13] These are serious, fundamental questions which our society has not squarely faced yet.

The "Decline of the Family." One interesting connection exists between the critical importance of early socialization and the women's liberation movement. Under the traditional arrangement in which women specialized in running the household and raising the younger children, their influence on the course of the most important human events-the development of individual personalities-was probably very great. Paradoxically, as more women move into the so-called "work force" (as if running a house and raising children were not work) and duties on the home front are more equally shared with husbands or are relegated to professionals (day-care centers), women's huge leverage over the foundations of society may decrease. Whether the net consequences of this reduced leverage will be desirable remains to be seen, but if increasing violence, drug use, and sexual promiscuity among the young are connected to this process, the outlook may not be favorable.

Dissociation in Modern Society. In a way the much discussed "decline of the family" may be just one part of a more general tendency for growing up to become more difficult in America. The "generation gap" may be magnified by lack of any clear-cut modern "rites of passage" marking the social transition from childhood to adulthood. [Footnote 14] But it is probably rooted in the growing separation between residence and workplace, the "commuter" society in which large numbers of children have no concept of the work done by their parents. Unable to view production by others, and blocked off from personally participating in it by child labor and minimum wage "laws," rampant credentialism, and other bottlenecks, the young find it hard to visualize wealth as something requiring human effort. Rather than scarce goods requiring production, there is a tendency to see taken-for-granted abundance requiring distribution. Such a perspective hardly encourages a realistic perspective on economic and political issues, and makes it even harder for young people to jump the gap between childhood and adulthood.

Plato's ideal. Interest in the political implications of socialization is hardly new. Plato's Republic, written several hundred years B.C., sketched out an ideal method of breeding and educating the rulers, or guardians of a country. These guardians were to be picked on the basis of ability. Both men and women could be guardians (a most unusual idea in its day), and future rulers would largely be children of the current ones. However a talented child born to nonrulers was to be brought into the charmed circle as soon as discovered, and mediocre children of the guardians were to be cast into the larger society and not become rulers.

In order to avoid parental blindness to the inabilities of their own children, Plato's guardians were to raise their children in common. Indeed, arrangements were to be taken to assure that nobody knew who his or her children were. Thus, objective decisions on their successors would be encouraged.

A great deal of the Republic is devoted to the proper upbringing of the future guardians. Details of their exposure to music, drama, literature, and mathematics are discussed at length. Interestingly, from the point of view of the present discussion, the young guardians were to receive systematic exposure to the governing work of their "parents." Plato carried this idea so far that he suggested the children accompany their parents to military battles--with some precautions against their coming to harm--so they could gain early acquaintance with the extremely important defense function of government. We can only imagine the reaction any proposal along similar lines would evoke today!

Plato's Republic may not have been intended as a serious work on politics and may indeed have really been a psychology textbook using political illustrations and analogies. Whatever its intended purpose, however, it can still be read profitably by the modern student. And it serves to remind us that government institutions cannot properly be studied in isolation from the family, the school, and other fundamental aspects of society.

SUMMARY

As pragmatists, Americans tend to evaluate particular actions mainly in terms of the goodness or badness of their specific consequences. We find it more natural to think in terms of A --->X + Y than in terms of R ---> X + Y. But we should not let pragmatism's advantages blind us to its inadequacies. Limited time, information, and empathy with others makes it impossible and undesirable-even from a strictly selfish point of view-to make all of our decisions at the retail, unprincipled level. And whenever we must decide whether to impose sanctions--on domestic criminals or foreign enemies--the nastiness of such actions forces us to decide in a principled way or to abdicate our responsibilities in the hard cases.

Ethics and politics do not fit very comfortably together. But thinking about either forces us to think about the other, too. The apparent contradictions between ethical principles commonly prescribed for individuals and the actions of even the best government leaders are due to the peculiar circumstances within which leaders must act. To the extent that some of these circumstances might be changed, we should take note, but in the meantime we should refrain from damning all leaders as immoral. Nor can we assume that failure to enact laws prohibiting all sins proves the basic immorality of government.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Explain the differences among rationality, congeniality, morality, legality, constitutionality, and metaconstitutionality.

2. In 1978 the effort to secure ratification of the "Equal Rights Amendment" (ERA) had apparently bogged down. Consent of 38 states was required, but only 35 had ratified. (Four of the states which had voted to ratify had already voted to rescind their ratifications, but ERA backers claimed these actions were null and void.) The seven year time limit for ratification set by Congress was due to expire on March 22, 1979. Backers of the ERA tried to get congress to extend the ratification period for seven more years.

What principles do you think could be used to decide what to do here? What implications would each of these principles produce for each of the following sets of actions?

a. No congressional action at all, allowing the ERA proposal to expire.

b. Congress votes to extend the ratification period seven years, but provides that all ratifications to date are suspended until confirmed by the state legislatures.

c. Congress extends the ratification period seven years, but provides that states voting to ratify may also vote to rescind at any time before 38 effective ratifications have been secured.

d. Congress votes to extend the ratification period seven years.

e. Congress votes to extend the ratification period seven years, and enacts a bodre cutting off all federal money grants to any state which fails to ratify the ERA within one year.

3. Columnist Gary Wills, speaking of President Ford's forceful rescue of an American ship seized by Cambodia:

So President Ford went in with guns blazing. In the process, he lost more American lives than were originally at stake. (Forget Cambodian lives; they don't count.) The most recent obscene photograph in our history, following on those of the My Lai ditch, was that of Ford in evening clothes rejoicing in the Oval Office at the news of the Mayaguez raid's dubious success. (Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1978.)

Explain how we can arrive at different evaluations of the propriety of this "raid" depending on whether we look at it pragmatically or in terms of principles.

4. Many of the arguments in favor of permitting abortion are also applicable to infanticide. (Aristotle discussed the two subjects in the same breath in his Politics---Book VII, Chapter 16.) If abortion is allowed because a child may be a nuisance to his parents, deformed, etc., why not allow parents to kill their children later, when it turns out in fact that they are a nuisance, etc? Evaluate the following rule of law:

Parents (acting jointly, if both are alive) may put any of their children to death at any time and for any reason, provided that after the child's first birthday a jury of 12 other parents must be convened and the consent of one juror for each year of the child's age shall be required before extermination can proceed. Thus parents plus any one juror shall suffice for a one-year-old, but to kill a twelve-year- old shall require unanimous consent of all the jurors. Before the first birthday, parents can kill the child without anybody's permission. After the thirteenth birthday, the child may not be killed by the parents.

5. What should be the place of children in society? To what extent are present arrangements in the U.S. inadequate by this standard?

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Footnotes

Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1952), p. 308.

1. Sir John Denham, "Cooper's Hill," quoted in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin Books, 1961, p. 131.

2. Gottfried Dietze, America's Political Dilemma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968, p. 133f.

3. See Wechsler.

4. Gerth and Mills, p. 126.

5. Ibid., p. 119.

6. Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952, p. 242.

7. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942.

8. Burke, p. 33.

9. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, New York: Scribners, 1960.

10. Accepting an opponent's argument or fact for the purpose of showing that his conclusions based thereupon do not indeed follow logically from it.

11. See Berger.

12. The distinction between laws and bodres is not totally unknown to the courts. But for the more general case see the author's review of Robert M. O'Neil's The Price of Dependency: Civil Liberties in the Welfare State, 65 American Political Science Review (1971), pp. 812-813.

13. Banfield, pp. 132-157.

14. See John Holt, Escape from Childhood, New York; E. P. Dutton, 1974.