Teaching the moral sciences

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by Hadley Arkes

|LET US first get clear,' I said, "that we are in the right place. This is Political Science 23: Political Obligations." A young man in the back of the room raised his hand instantly and challenged me: "What do you mean by that?" For the next seven minutes it was virtually hand-to-hand combat, and as far as I could see, nothing of substance had been placed yet on the table. The young man who asked the question never returned for the second day. But the word filtered back to me across the campus: someone had told this fellow that if he conceded even the very first thing I said, he would never be able to work his way out of the argument.

And that is perhaps why the air was crackling with anticipation even in the first moments of the class. The central problem of the course was the nexus between morality and law. The root of law and obligation is the Latin, "ligare," to bind. The law displaces personal choice with a binding commitment, or a public obligation. The law may forbid us to discriminate on the basis of race in a private business, or it may restrain us from aborting children in the womb. In these instances, the law may commit people to things they find morally repugnant. To ask how that state of affairs can be justified is to raise again the question of whether there really are moral truths, or moral propositions in the strictest sense: propositions about the things that are universally right or wrong, just or unjust, for others as well as oneself. Only if there are propositions of that kind could we ever be justified in displacing, or overriding, personal choice in favor of a uniform, public rule. For in that event, we may be asked, rightly, to forgo our personal preference out of a respect for things that are in principle right or wrong. Once we become aware, for example, that it is truly "wrong" for parents to torture their infants, it becomes comically out of place to conclude that "therefore we ought to give them tax incentives in order to induce them to stop." When we come to understand the things that are in principle wrong, it becomes radically inapt to assert our "freedom of choice."

I used to tell the students, on the opening day, that we spend so much time in the colleges lingering with the things that are problematic and uncertain that it was worth taking at least one course to remind ourselves of those things in the domain of morality and law which we not only know but which cannot be otherwise. The reception accorded to William Bennett's Book of Virtues may show the persisting hunger in the public for some older understandings about the teaching of right and wrong, before nihilism and cultural relativism began to touch everything around us. But what I can report from the battle lines of the campus is that the news, for all students, is not exhilirating.

THE STUDENTS, of course, arrive at college confirmed in the secular religion of cultural relativism. With this state of mind, some of them seem positively depressed to discover that there really are moral truths, and they show no hesitation to blame the messenger for bearing the news. But a handful of others seem to discover a certain serenity in knowing--as one of my students put it years ago--that they may have access to a moral understanding that does not simply depend on the opinions of their friends.

The course on political obligations would pose the question again of how we could know, in morals, of certain apodictic or "necessary truths," and we would put that question to ourselves through the classic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. When the Founders said "all men are created equal," did they really mean "all men," black as well as white? Did they truly articulate, as Lincoln said, an abstract moral truth, applicable to all men and all times? Or did they mean, as Douglas argued, that only white men were equal to one another, and did they really believe, with Douglas, that judgments about right and wrong were always 'relative' to the culture in which they were held?

It was Lincoln's understanding that the rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence had a "natural" foundation in the things that separated human beings from other animals. The right of human beings to be governed only with their own consent was a right that arose distinctly for beings who could give and understand reasons. And therefore those rights would remain the same in all places where human nature remained the same and men were still distinguishable from animals. Even in this age of animal rights, no one has suggested that horses or dolphins should share the vote (except perhaps in Massachusetts). That is what the Founders meant when they referred to "all men are created equal" as a "self-evident" moral truth--not evident to every self who happened down the street, but self-evident in the sense of axiomatic or true per set nota, true in the nature of things. This understanding of the Founders was set down with a remarkable precision by Alexander Hamilton in the opening to the Federalist #31: "In disquisitions of every kind," he wrote, "there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, command the assent of the mind."