What makes people good?

National Review, Sept 9, 1991 by David Martin

This is very serious, because it encourages liberal moral education to turn away from the demanding disciplines of virtue to the seductively easy acquisition of nice attitudes, especially attitudes toward victimage. After all, the vast majority of humankind has a claim to victimage and so to non-responsibility and the unlimited credit line. This status is especially useful if we are about to set up as oppressors on our own account. The history (and misleading name) of Liberia is a terrible warning. As for the consequences for whatever it is that "makes people good," these are pretty clear. We can face down the requirements of virtue by citing our status as victims and telling our hard-luck story. Even Saddam Hussein tried it.

But supposing we repudiate the moral license granted by this credit line, and also know perfectly well that goodness doesn't come naturally or even in any straightforward way by social rearrangements, how do we devise a modest proposal for its modest encouragement? Modest, of course, it has to be, since we must never go beyond the marginal improvement of the "average sensual man." Sanctity and heroism must be left to heaven. To help make people good, or (better) to help them to "make good," is first of all to diminish any gross advantages accruing to greed and malice. That requires, as a necessary though far from sufficient condition, the firm exercise of authority and the deployment of fear-that is, sanctions. No civil or civilized society significantly larger than Tristan da Cunha can exist without the exercise of authority, meaning a graduated distribution of executive power.

In one sense this is too obvious to mention, but it is necessary to do so because the obvious is strictly unmentionable according to the contemporary Index of Prohibited Concepts and Words. Even if everyone in civilized society knows that civilized society depends on authority and sanctions, civilized society does not allow this to be said. This is a serious restriction (and a patent misuse of authority and sanctions) because it encourages social science to avoid serious analyses of taboo areas, and because what is not allowed to be said often hamstrings what has to be done, or ensures that what is done comes too little and too late.

The underlying problem is the high-minded feeling that these necessary conditions for people to "make good" are not good enough. Put it another way: since authority has in the past been an engine to promote every kind of oppression, it is somehow impolite to notice that it is also an unavoidable requirement for the promotion of goodness. The goods of liberty and equality, for instance, are specifically dependent on the exercise of authority, and indeed the proponents of equality demand deployments of authority and fear far beyond what is proposed here. The logical extension of their aims is Hoxha's Albania, where even clothing was equalized and made "uniform" by fiat. What T propose is only a limited but secure exercise of authority in home, school, and society, to ensure an open social space for the disposition to good and a more restricted space for the disposition to ill.