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Autonomy, self-consciousness and national moral responsibility
0191-6599/93 $6.00+0.00 0 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd
Hirrory of European Ideas, Vol. 16. No. 4-6, PP. 949-955, 1993 Pnnted in Great Britam
AUTONOMY,
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND NATIONAL MORAL RESPONSIBILITY GEORGE GEOFFREY WELLS*
I For Kant, ‘autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of the to think of moral duties conforming to them.. . ‘.’ It would be inconceivable responsibility without at the same time being able to conceive of a will that ‘is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational’.2 In other words, accountability is intelligible only in the context of causality. Accepting for now the general reasonableness of this position, there are two remarks I would like to make. The first point may not be obvious, but I can provide only a brief sketch of what I mean by it here. The second point is related to the first and identifies the specific burden of this paper. First, responsibility is necessary to the development of any sense of moral freedom, and therefore exists as a reciprocal concept to that of autonomy. Secondly, because the idea of autonomy originates as a political description of states and is still frequently used synonymously with state sovereignty, and because autonomy is inclusive of the idea of responsibility, then it is possible, indeed necessary, to think in terms of the moral responsibility of the state or nation. I will develop this argument by first discussing the analogous relationship between the concepts of ‘person’ and ‘nation’ as developed by Joel Feinberg before turning to a consideration of the notion of autonomy and its relevance to national moral responsibility.
II In his essay ‘Autonomy’, Joel Feinberg identifies two meanings of ‘person’ that are analogous to two meanings of ‘nation’: both entities or concepts share a nonjuridical and a juridical sense, the former referring to the unity or integration of interests and the latter to the ‘ “ appropriate locus of rights and duties” ‘.3 Of the non-juridical sense of person and nation, Feinberg defines this as ‘the unity of loyalties, preferences, a collection of diverse psychic elements -memories, opinion-which puts on them all the stamp of a single self. “One self’ is the analogue of “one people”: it provides the sense of “person” analogous to the prepolitical “nation”.‘4 Using Feinberg’s comments as a starting point, I am inclined to believe that we cannot think ofautonomy in the juridical sense alone, that is as a matter of rights and duties, but that we must liken moral agency to a kind of self-discovery beginning from within the context of others and tradition. More *Division of Social Sciences, Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, TX 79072, U.S.A. 949
950
George
Geoffrey
Wells
than mere self-legislation, or the juridical sense of self-expression, the selfconsciousness of autonomy originates in the nonjuridical orientation to the communal, or social, or historical self, Indeed, it is only in context, the inherited tradition of values and thought that provides each selfwith the essential material for its initial psychological and social development, that moral autonomy ultimately assumes recognisable boundaries and realistic proportions. Context then is the reflexive boundary condition of self and of meaningful human occurrences, the familiar but often unspoken background information within which and against which the particular and conscious actions of human story occur. It is in a sense the condition of the pre-autonomous (juridical) self.5 Although I have been speaking primarily of the person, the notion ofjusgentium perhaps once captured this sense of responsibility for the nation, before succumbing to the political realities of national sovereignty and the juridical claim to national interests. Returning then to Feinberg, the juridical sense of person refers to one’s capacity as a ‘moral agent and possessor of rights, as “naturally sovereign” over from this, we can say that itself as the state is over its territory’.6 Generalising autonomy refers, at least in part, to one’s consciousness of one’s own moral freedom, and that it is this psychological as well as rational state of mind that underlies the existential experience of freedom as a condition of individual moral legislation. Or as Kant explains it, under the discipline of reason, personality describes a being endowed with inner freedom, in whom respect for the moral law is awakened. We could add that this awakening is the product of selfconsciousness: ‘the self-consciousness of reason becomes the consciousness of freedom’.7 Consequently, autonomy enters western thought as an epistemothe redemption of human existence is logical corrective of metaphysics: grounded on a thoroughly self-conscious psychology. Thus, equally necessary to the realisation of the autonomous personality is the development of the instrumental value of self-consciousness to complete the reflexive value of self-discovery. This second development refers to how one plays with context through self-expression, and follows from, while continuing in an important new direction, the process of self-discovery. Freedom, therefore, is not only derivative (from context), it is through self-expression creative. Indeed, the historical discovery of the notion of autonomy, of the self-conscious person, itself illustrates the conceptual value of this idea. Not only does the language of rights derive from a tradition of thought about human nature, law, liberty and justice in which it makes sense to speak of active rights claims, but this tradition itself had to be created: the conceptual language of rights had to be wrested from a familiar and yet different tradition of thought in which such claims were absent, or at best incohoate and unrecognisable.* It is in this sense cretive selfexpression, one that has relevance to the person and to a whole culture, that I would like to speak of the juridical nature of autonomy. Because the process of discovery is a recurring one with every new individual, and with succeeding generations, the boundary conditions of self-discovery (context) resemble, to borrow out of context a phrase from Michael Oakeshott, a ‘continuously extemporized dance’,’ the ritual of utterance and response that is never fixed or finished. Although it has a settled character to it (context)-the fact that it is ritual indicates this-the quality of moral judgment is also a matter
Autonomy, Self-Consciousness and National Moral Responsibility
951
of vicissitude-that fact that it is a continuously extemporised dance indicates this. In this way, self-expression assumes the moral posture of rationalisation and reinterpretation of inherited norms. This condition illuminates the instrumental value of human stories by which present ideas, anticipating their own imminent past as they become absorbed in context, remain present or become present once again in reconstructed form. This seems to suggest a corrective value, if not a responsibility, insofar as it embodies in itself a call for continuation of context through interpretation and reinterpretation. Autonomy, as the radicalisation of this discovery, represents the modern conceptualisation of this corrective value of self-consciousness. Of course, this represents only a sketch of some features of autonomy, but it indicates that both the juridical and nonjuridical senses of person actually point in a significant way to the conceptualisation of autonomy in terms of responsibility, and as I shall argue presently in a way that has relevance to the nation-state. This may not seem obvious at first of the juridical sense of autonomy, but as Feinberg defines it this sense refers to duties as well as rights. In language that self-legislation (or sovereignty) alone might not imply, autonomy refers in a broader sense to self-determination. Not only is autonomy expressed by the idea that one makes particular choices and by the idea of interpersonal justification of these, it is expressed as well by the idea of imputation: each person is responsible for the whole moral character of his or her own creation, and this responsibility is unavoidable and nontransferable. Although self-consciousness lay behind the discovery of autonomy, the responsibility that inheres in this notion is not to self alone but, in a way Kant would argue, to the moral law or duty, or what amounts to reason’s duty to itself. In different language, we might and of reason as a moral faculty-consists say that the real value of autonomymore in the quality of one’s judgment than in the mere exclusive possession of one’s capacity to judge. This is not a denial of the importance of ‘ownness’, although it does challenge the exclusiveness value ofprivate judgment without, it is hoped, sacrificing the value of individuality. The point is that the consciousness of one’s own moral freedom may be simply another way of saying that as rational creatures we judge. It is by no means clear that autonomy requires a completely free will (of the contracausal kind) or even an efficacious one; it does seem to require, however, a consciously created moral character or personality from which the experience of autonomy (as both freedom and responsibility) arises and takes shape. Here I am talking about an internal activity that involves some success at self-discovery and self-expression and some reasonable understanding of what these processes mean. Self-consciousness should reveal, then, that as rational and judging creatures we are purposive and reflective, being both creative and contextually oriented.” I think it is now fair to say that the measure of freedom will be found not in selflegislation per se, but, in terms that I believe best describe it, in thoughtfulness or conscientiousness.” Responsibility through thoughtfulness creates a practicable bridge between the demands of pure rationality and the allure of mere interest as influences on moral judgment, as well as a brake on mere raison d’etat. The usefulness of the idea of autonomy, then, must derive from some middle ground that describes the conditions of uncoerced moral judgment. Two things follow from this: (1) autonomous moral judgment requires a context of other
952
George Geoffrey
Wells
persons for its proper development, and (2) if autonomy requires a context of others in which meaningful moral dialogue can occur (the condition of convergence), then the requirement of dialogue must at the same time presuppose the genuine opportunity for self-expression, even as this involves the manipulation of the contextual boundaries that form the basis of self-discovery. At some point in the analysis of the reasonable conditions of moral autonomy (responsible judgment), conceptual description of ethical principles must become prescription of a favorable ethical environment in which these principles are discoverable and practicable.
III For the person, the moral sense refers to conscience, which I shall define as moral co-perception (con + scientia) to indicate that the idea of moral development is a dialogic condition of moral values and truths. This condition itself should be seen as the social, political and moral freedom to search out, reflect upon, and challenge ethical assumptions necessary to the development of responsible moral personality or character. Freedom of this sort is not automatic, but must be promoted as a value in its own right, even if some other sense of freedom or truth becomes the object of our search for moral standards. There are certain difficulties in expanding these thoughts to include the moral responsibility of the nation. A beginning would be to see collective moral sense in terms of dialogic context, or community norms, in which self-discovery is made possible. But the tenor of these comments has been that moral responsibility is not strictly a product of the internal point of view; whereas context confronts each person from the outside with external constraints and other points of view, for a people, context is the internal point of view. But this makes the collective moral sense harder to talk about: in one sense it is the dialogic context, but in another sense (from the external point of view) it requires a context broader than itself. Inherent in this is the problem that if the collective moral sense is limited to the internal point of view exclusively, the argument leans in the direction of seeing it in terms of an Hegelian sittlichkeit. But the same token, drawing the boundaries of a Kantian federation of sovereign states is just the sort of elusive problem that inspires these considerations. In their critique of the modern principles of private morality, Louis Dupre and William O’Neill argue that ‘modern political thought has failed in a signal fashion to develop social structures that would effectively mediate the conflict of national interests’.13 And they add, ‘the traditional conception of national sovereignty can no longer serve as a valid norm for assessing the behavior of states. Autarchy is hardly an imaginable political ideal, and the need for a greater degree of international Yet the prospect of even a limited cooperation is generally recognised. suprantional sovereignty appears hardly less remote today as when Grotius first surveyed the emergent state.‘14 They suggest the need to drop the language of rights.15 Although I share their concern, I neither agree that there is an ultimate rational standard of morality not that a global ‘communitas perfecta’ is either attainable or desirable.i6 And even if it were attainable, surely the reality of continued
Autonomy, Self-Consciousness and National Moral Responsibility
953
national plurality of some sort would compel us still to think in terms of individual moral agency (or sovereignty), regardless of the challenge of the new conceptual language of transnationalism and globalisation to the prevalent conceptual currency of autonomy. One solution may lie in recourse to a classical sense of virtue or to Aristotelian ethics, but this would require serious intellectual revamping. As Bernard Willims argues: Even if we leave the door open to a psychology that might go some way in the Aristotelian direction, it is hard to believe that an account of human nature-if it is not already an ethical theory itself-will adequately determine one kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of human nature. We do have no reason to believe in that.”
At the same time, however, Williams allows that the general outline of the description of the ethical self recovered from the ancients-that ‘the agent’s dispositions are the “ultimate supports” of ethical value’-is the correct one, but that we must learn to do without their assumptions. As yet, he adds, no one has found a good way of doing this.‘* This paper is not a search for those substitute assumptions. In fact, although I find the notion of autonomy (surely the constitutive principle of modern private morality) difficult and ambiguous, I must defend the notion here. Indeed, respect for human rights and liberties is important to the concept of moral responsibility, and with or without the notion of autonomy as support, it is my view that it is necessary to uphold these ideas as moral values important in themselves. Moreoever, the importance of thinking in these terms further underscores the value of institutional freedom. Gino Germani’s description of socialisation under Italian fascism as a ‘mobilization from above’ offers one conceptual tool for examiningviolations of the value ofuncoerced dialogue.‘gOf course, there are no guarantees that in open societies the problems of distortive, language will not equally or as severely encumber moral dialogue as institutional controls over communication do in closed societies. And if the search for moral values presupposes diversity of opinion, there is no guarantee that some people (and therefore some societies) will not prefer tutelary or paternalistic government and controls. Even so, the obligation to adhere to ‘official’ truth violates the condition of free dialogic discourse as a prerequisite of uncoerced moral judgment. The question of how to realise such freedoms really addresses the external point of view. That is, given the different political and moral systems that exist and the different perceptions of the meaning of liberty and fulfillment, instituting or maintaining (western or liberal) institutional freedoms is the kind of internal matter than cannot be compelled with any moral consistency fromthe outside, regardless of the apparent advantages to both parties. This leads me to two observations on this matter. First, from the external point of view, just as individual conscience is defined as moral co-perception (of selfexpression rooted in self-discovery) that frees us from any obligation to begin our moral search from the position of Cartesian self-doubt or from a strictly inner dialogue, the same may be true of the discovery and expression of national moral
George Geoffrey Wells
954
consciousness. The sense of collective conscience may be derived from an interactive dialogue with other peoples, even if this means defining this sense of identity by what one people is not or by how different one people is from another and how desirable it is to maintain this difference. Dialogue does not require, indeed it precludes, sameness; it seeks ultimately convergence of some sort. Secondly, from the internal point of view, the moral responsibility of nations must be viewed in the final analysis in terms of the choices individual persons make. There are many complications that accompany such a proposition, such as the matter of any citizen’s conscious complicity in or support of the policies of that person’s government, or for that matter of a person’s complicity resulting from misunderstandings of even deliberate governmental disinformation. Nevertheless, 1 believe that the most productive route to understanding national responsibility is in terms of individual choices, although this may ultimately involve a whole people. Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolph Eichmann’s rationalisation for his complicity in the final solution is illustrative,*O as in another way the recent restitution awarded by the U.S. Congress to Japanese-American survivors of the relocation camps in the United States during World War II also is instructive. A final comment follows from these observations. The continued occurrences of wars and pogroms, as well as a state’s use of extreme force or of torture and other forms of terrorism indicate a need to preserve the language of individual liberties and rights as guarantees in the name of morality precisely, but not exclusively, for those typically excluded from political dialogue on justicenamely, the stateless, the disenfranchised, and the economically deprived and dependent. Accordingly, I find myself taking the position that it would be neither desirable nor helpful to abandon altogether the language of autonomy, not as defense of national sovereignty so much, but for the very reason that it serves as a familiar standard by which to hold sovereign states morally responsible for their own actions that are of concern to all humanity. It is the autonomy of selfdetermination, not mere self-legislation, of the autonomy that derives from the condition of thoughtfulness in viewing human beings as ends, never as mere means. George
Geoffrey
Wells
Wayland Baptist University, TX
NOTES 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of PracticalReason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 33. 2. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1964), p. 114. 3. Joel Feinberg, ‘Autonomy’, in 7?re Inner Citadel: Essays in Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 48. 4. Ibid. 5. I have developed this argument more fully in an unpublished manuscript, ‘The Use of Story as Political Metaphor’. 6. Feinberg, ‘Autonomy’, p. 48.
Autonomy,
Self-Consciousness
and National Moral Responsibility
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7. William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975) p. 79. 8. See Richard Tuck’s excellent history of the discovery of natural rights in his Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 9. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 63. 10. Kant, Practical Reason, p. 101. 11. See Charles Taylor’s essay ‘What’s Wrong With Negative Freedom’, in The Zdea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979) pp. 175-194. 12. Hannah Arendt works have had a major influence on my thinking, which I am sure is evident here; see especially Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). For his comment that conscientiousness cannot replace Kant’s meaning of reason, see Thomas E. Hill Jr’s essay ‘The Kantian Conception of Autonomy’, in The Inner Citadel, p. 97. 13. Louis Dupre and William O’Neill, S. J., ‘Social Structures & Social Ethics’, The Review of Politics, LI (1989), 340. 14. Ibid., 341. 15. Ibid., 342. 16. Ibid., 327-331, 341-342. 17. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 52. 18. Ibid., pp. 51-53; however, see Jay Budziszewski’s persuasive effort in his The Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986). 19. Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 1978) p. 245. 20. Arendt, Eichmann.
Hirrory of European Ideas, Vol. 16. No. 4-6, PP. 949-955, 1993 Pnnted in Great Britam
AUTONOMY,
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND NATIONAL MORAL RESPONSIBILITY GEORGE GEOFFREY WELLS*
I For Kant, ‘autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of the to think of moral duties conforming to them.. . ‘.’ It would be inconceivable responsibility without at the same time being able to conceive of a will that ‘is a kind of causality belonging to living beings so far as they are rational’.2 In other words, accountability is intelligible only in the context of causality. Accepting for now the general reasonableness of this position, there are two remarks I would like to make. The first point may not be obvious, but I can provide only a brief sketch of what I mean by it here. The second point is related to the first and identifies the specific burden of this paper. First, responsibility is necessary to the development of any sense of moral freedom, and therefore exists as a reciprocal concept to that of autonomy. Secondly, because the idea of autonomy originates as a political description of states and is still frequently used synonymously with state sovereignty, and because autonomy is inclusive of the idea of responsibility, then it is possible, indeed necessary, to think in terms of the moral responsibility of the state or nation. I will develop this argument by first discussing the analogous relationship between the concepts of ‘person’ and ‘nation’ as developed by Joel Feinberg before turning to a consideration of the notion of autonomy and its relevance to national moral responsibility.
II In his essay ‘Autonomy’, Joel Feinberg identifies two meanings of ‘person’ that are analogous to two meanings of ‘nation’: both entities or concepts share a nonjuridical and a juridical sense, the former referring to the unity or integration of interests and the latter to the ‘ “ appropriate locus of rights and duties” ‘.3 Of the non-juridical sense of person and nation, Feinberg defines this as ‘the unity of loyalties, preferences, a collection of diverse psychic elements -memories, opinion-which puts on them all the stamp of a single self. “One self’ is the analogue of “one people”: it provides the sense of “person” analogous to the prepolitical “nation”.‘4 Using Feinberg’s comments as a starting point, I am inclined to believe that we cannot think ofautonomy in the juridical sense alone, that is as a matter of rights and duties, but that we must liken moral agency to a kind of self-discovery beginning from within the context of others and tradition. More *Division of Social Sciences, Wayland Baptist University, Plainview, TX 79072, U.S.A. 949
950
George
Geoffrey
Wells
than mere self-legislation, or the juridical sense of self-expression, the selfconsciousness of autonomy originates in the nonjuridical orientation to the communal, or social, or historical self, Indeed, it is only in context, the inherited tradition of values and thought that provides each selfwith the essential material for its initial psychological and social development, that moral autonomy ultimately assumes recognisable boundaries and realistic proportions. Context then is the reflexive boundary condition of self and of meaningful human occurrences, the familiar but often unspoken background information within which and against which the particular and conscious actions of human story occur. It is in a sense the condition of the pre-autonomous (juridical) self.5 Although I have been speaking primarily of the person, the notion ofjusgentium perhaps once captured this sense of responsibility for the nation, before succumbing to the political realities of national sovereignty and the juridical claim to national interests. Returning then to Feinberg, the juridical sense of person refers to one’s capacity as a ‘moral agent and possessor of rights, as “naturally sovereign” over from this, we can say that itself as the state is over its territory’.6 Generalising autonomy refers, at least in part, to one’s consciousness of one’s own moral freedom, and that it is this psychological as well as rational state of mind that underlies the existential experience of freedom as a condition of individual moral legislation. Or as Kant explains it, under the discipline of reason, personality describes a being endowed with inner freedom, in whom respect for the moral law is awakened. We could add that this awakening is the product of selfconsciousness: ‘the self-consciousness of reason becomes the consciousness of freedom’.7 Consequently, autonomy enters western thought as an epistemothe redemption of human existence is logical corrective of metaphysics: grounded on a thoroughly self-conscious psychology. Thus, equally necessary to the realisation of the autonomous personality is the development of the instrumental value of self-consciousness to complete the reflexive value of self-discovery. This second development refers to how one plays with context through self-expression, and follows from, while continuing in an important new direction, the process of self-discovery. Freedom, therefore, is not only derivative (from context), it is through self-expression creative. Indeed, the historical discovery of the notion of autonomy, of the self-conscious person, itself illustrates the conceptual value of this idea. Not only does the language of rights derive from a tradition of thought about human nature, law, liberty and justice in which it makes sense to speak of active rights claims, but this tradition itself had to be created: the conceptual language of rights had to be wrested from a familiar and yet different tradition of thought in which such claims were absent, or at best incohoate and unrecognisable.* It is in this sense cretive selfexpression, one that has relevance to the person and to a whole culture, that I would like to speak of the juridical nature of autonomy. Because the process of discovery is a recurring one with every new individual, and with succeeding generations, the boundary conditions of self-discovery (context) resemble, to borrow out of context a phrase from Michael Oakeshott, a ‘continuously extemporized dance’,’ the ritual of utterance and response that is never fixed or finished. Although it has a settled character to it (context)-the fact that it is ritual indicates this-the quality of moral judgment is also a matter
Autonomy, Self-Consciousness and National Moral Responsibility
951
of vicissitude-that fact that it is a continuously extemporised dance indicates this. In this way, self-expression assumes the moral posture of rationalisation and reinterpretation of inherited norms. This condition illuminates the instrumental value of human stories by which present ideas, anticipating their own imminent past as they become absorbed in context, remain present or become present once again in reconstructed form. This seems to suggest a corrective value, if not a responsibility, insofar as it embodies in itself a call for continuation of context through interpretation and reinterpretation. Autonomy, as the radicalisation of this discovery, represents the modern conceptualisation of this corrective value of self-consciousness. Of course, this represents only a sketch of some features of autonomy, but it indicates that both the juridical and nonjuridical senses of person actually point in a significant way to the conceptualisation of autonomy in terms of responsibility, and as I shall argue presently in a way that has relevance to the nation-state. This may not seem obvious at first of the juridical sense of autonomy, but as Feinberg defines it this sense refers to duties as well as rights. In language that self-legislation (or sovereignty) alone might not imply, autonomy refers in a broader sense to self-determination. Not only is autonomy expressed by the idea that one makes particular choices and by the idea of interpersonal justification of these, it is expressed as well by the idea of imputation: each person is responsible for the whole moral character of his or her own creation, and this responsibility is unavoidable and nontransferable. Although self-consciousness lay behind the discovery of autonomy, the responsibility that inheres in this notion is not to self alone but, in a way Kant would argue, to the moral law or duty, or what amounts to reason’s duty to itself. In different language, we might and of reason as a moral faculty-consists say that the real value of autonomymore in the quality of one’s judgment than in the mere exclusive possession of one’s capacity to judge. This is not a denial of the importance of ‘ownness’, although it does challenge the exclusiveness value ofprivate judgment without, it is hoped, sacrificing the value of individuality. The point is that the consciousness of one’s own moral freedom may be simply another way of saying that as rational creatures we judge. It is by no means clear that autonomy requires a completely free will (of the contracausal kind) or even an efficacious one; it does seem to require, however, a consciously created moral character or personality from which the experience of autonomy (as both freedom and responsibility) arises and takes shape. Here I am talking about an internal activity that involves some success at self-discovery and self-expression and some reasonable understanding of what these processes mean. Self-consciousness should reveal, then, that as rational and judging creatures we are purposive and reflective, being both creative and contextually oriented.” I think it is now fair to say that the measure of freedom will be found not in selflegislation per se, but, in terms that I believe best describe it, in thoughtfulness or conscientiousness.” Responsibility through thoughtfulness creates a practicable bridge between the demands of pure rationality and the allure of mere interest as influences on moral judgment, as well as a brake on mere raison d’etat. The usefulness of the idea of autonomy, then, must derive from some middle ground that describes the conditions of uncoerced moral judgment. Two things follow from this: (1) autonomous moral judgment requires a context of other
952
George Geoffrey
Wells
persons for its proper development, and (2) if autonomy requires a context of others in which meaningful moral dialogue can occur (the condition of convergence), then the requirement of dialogue must at the same time presuppose the genuine opportunity for self-expression, even as this involves the manipulation of the contextual boundaries that form the basis of self-discovery. At some point in the analysis of the reasonable conditions of moral autonomy (responsible judgment), conceptual description of ethical principles must become prescription of a favorable ethical environment in which these principles are discoverable and practicable.
III For the person, the moral sense refers to conscience, which I shall define as moral co-perception (con + scientia) to indicate that the idea of moral development is a dialogic condition of moral values and truths. This condition itself should be seen as the social, political and moral freedom to search out, reflect upon, and challenge ethical assumptions necessary to the development of responsible moral personality or character. Freedom of this sort is not automatic, but must be promoted as a value in its own right, even if some other sense of freedom or truth becomes the object of our search for moral standards. There are certain difficulties in expanding these thoughts to include the moral responsibility of the nation. A beginning would be to see collective moral sense in terms of dialogic context, or community norms, in which self-discovery is made possible. But the tenor of these comments has been that moral responsibility is not strictly a product of the internal point of view; whereas context confronts each person from the outside with external constraints and other points of view, for a people, context is the internal point of view. But this makes the collective moral sense harder to talk about: in one sense it is the dialogic context, but in another sense (from the external point of view) it requires a context broader than itself. Inherent in this is the problem that if the collective moral sense is limited to the internal point of view exclusively, the argument leans in the direction of seeing it in terms of an Hegelian sittlichkeit. But the same token, drawing the boundaries of a Kantian federation of sovereign states is just the sort of elusive problem that inspires these considerations. In their critique of the modern principles of private morality, Louis Dupre and William O’Neill argue that ‘modern political thought has failed in a signal fashion to develop social structures that would effectively mediate the conflict of national interests’.13 And they add, ‘the traditional conception of national sovereignty can no longer serve as a valid norm for assessing the behavior of states. Autarchy is hardly an imaginable political ideal, and the need for a greater degree of international Yet the prospect of even a limited cooperation is generally recognised. suprantional sovereignty appears hardly less remote today as when Grotius first surveyed the emergent state.‘14 They suggest the need to drop the language of rights.15 Although I share their concern, I neither agree that there is an ultimate rational standard of morality not that a global ‘communitas perfecta’ is either attainable or desirable.i6 And even if it were attainable, surely the reality of continued
Autonomy, Self-Consciousness and National Moral Responsibility
953
national plurality of some sort would compel us still to think in terms of individual moral agency (or sovereignty), regardless of the challenge of the new conceptual language of transnationalism and globalisation to the prevalent conceptual currency of autonomy. One solution may lie in recourse to a classical sense of virtue or to Aristotelian ethics, but this would require serious intellectual revamping. As Bernard Willims argues: Even if we leave the door open to a psychology that might go some way in the Aristotelian direction, it is hard to believe that an account of human nature-if it is not already an ethical theory itself-will adequately determine one kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of human nature. We do have no reason to believe in that.”
At the same time, however, Williams allows that the general outline of the description of the ethical self recovered from the ancients-that ‘the agent’s dispositions are the “ultimate supports” of ethical value’-is the correct one, but that we must learn to do without their assumptions. As yet, he adds, no one has found a good way of doing this.‘* This paper is not a search for those substitute assumptions. In fact, although I find the notion of autonomy (surely the constitutive principle of modern private morality) difficult and ambiguous, I must defend the notion here. Indeed, respect for human rights and liberties is important to the concept of moral responsibility, and with or without the notion of autonomy as support, it is my view that it is necessary to uphold these ideas as moral values important in themselves. Moreoever, the importance of thinking in these terms further underscores the value of institutional freedom. Gino Germani’s description of socialisation under Italian fascism as a ‘mobilization from above’ offers one conceptual tool for examiningviolations of the value ofuncoerced dialogue.‘gOf course, there are no guarantees that in open societies the problems of distortive, language will not equally or as severely encumber moral dialogue as institutional controls over communication do in closed societies. And if the search for moral values presupposes diversity of opinion, there is no guarantee that some people (and therefore some societies) will not prefer tutelary or paternalistic government and controls. Even so, the obligation to adhere to ‘official’ truth violates the condition of free dialogic discourse as a prerequisite of uncoerced moral judgment. The question of how to realise such freedoms really addresses the external point of view. That is, given the different political and moral systems that exist and the different perceptions of the meaning of liberty and fulfillment, instituting or maintaining (western or liberal) institutional freedoms is the kind of internal matter than cannot be compelled with any moral consistency fromthe outside, regardless of the apparent advantages to both parties. This leads me to two observations on this matter. First, from the external point of view, just as individual conscience is defined as moral co-perception (of selfexpression rooted in self-discovery) that frees us from any obligation to begin our moral search from the position of Cartesian self-doubt or from a strictly inner dialogue, the same may be true of the discovery and expression of national moral
George Geoffrey Wells
954
consciousness. The sense of collective conscience may be derived from an interactive dialogue with other peoples, even if this means defining this sense of identity by what one people is not or by how different one people is from another and how desirable it is to maintain this difference. Dialogue does not require, indeed it precludes, sameness; it seeks ultimately convergence of some sort. Secondly, from the internal point of view, the moral responsibility of nations must be viewed in the final analysis in terms of the choices individual persons make. There are many complications that accompany such a proposition, such as the matter of any citizen’s conscious complicity in or support of the policies of that person’s government, or for that matter of a person’s complicity resulting from misunderstandings of even deliberate governmental disinformation. Nevertheless, 1 believe that the most productive route to understanding national responsibility is in terms of individual choices, although this may ultimately involve a whole people. Hannah Arendt’s study of Adolph Eichmann’s rationalisation for his complicity in the final solution is illustrative,*O as in another way the recent restitution awarded by the U.S. Congress to Japanese-American survivors of the relocation camps in the United States during World War II also is instructive. A final comment follows from these observations. The continued occurrences of wars and pogroms, as well as a state’s use of extreme force or of torture and other forms of terrorism indicate a need to preserve the language of individual liberties and rights as guarantees in the name of morality precisely, but not exclusively, for those typically excluded from political dialogue on justicenamely, the stateless, the disenfranchised, and the economically deprived and dependent. Accordingly, I find myself taking the position that it would be neither desirable nor helpful to abandon altogether the language of autonomy, not as defense of national sovereignty so much, but for the very reason that it serves as a familiar standard by which to hold sovereign states morally responsible for their own actions that are of concern to all humanity. It is the autonomy of selfdetermination, not mere self-legislation, of the autonomy that derives from the condition of thoughtfulness in viewing human beings as ends, never as mere means. George
Geoffrey
Wells
Wayland Baptist University, TX
NOTES 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of PracticalReason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 33. 2. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1964), p. 114. 3. Joel Feinberg, ‘Autonomy’, in 7?re Inner Citadel: Essays in Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 48. 4. Ibid. 5. I have developed this argument more fully in an unpublished manuscript, ‘The Use of Story as Political Metaphor’. 6. Feinberg, ‘Autonomy’, p. 48.
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7. William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975) p. 79. 8. See Richard Tuck’s excellent history of the discovery of natural rights in his Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). 9. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 63. 10. Kant, Practical Reason, p. 101. 11. See Charles Taylor’s essay ‘What’s Wrong With Negative Freedom’, in The Zdea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979) pp. 175-194. 12. Hannah Arendt works have had a major influence on my thinking, which I am sure is evident here; see especially Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). For his comment that conscientiousness cannot replace Kant’s meaning of reason, see Thomas E. Hill Jr’s essay ‘The Kantian Conception of Autonomy’, in The Inner Citadel, p. 97. 13. Louis Dupre and William O’Neill, S. J., ‘Social Structures & Social Ethics’, The Review of Politics, LI (1989), 340. 14. Ibid., 341. 15. Ibid., 342. 16. Ibid., 327-331, 341-342. 17. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 52. 18. Ibid., pp. 51-53; however, see Jay Budziszewski’s persuasive effort in his The Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986). 19. Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 1978) p. 245. 20. Arendt, Eichmann.