Whence the virtue needed for American constitutionalism: Reason, faith, or commercial self-interest?
Adam J. MacLeod | December 1, 2015
I am glad that Rob called attention to the recent debate between John McGinnis and Robert George regarding John Adams’ famous proposition that our Constitution is designed for a moral and religious people and wholly inadequate for the governance of any other. Helpfully, both professors have published written versions of their respective contributions to the debate, George at Public Discourse and McGinnis in three parts at the Library of Law & Liberty (one, two, and three). These are two towering intellects, both men of good faith and unusual ability who share an appetite for acquiring knowledge and an obvious, mutual respect.
The timing of this debate is likely not an accident. Alarm at the lack of civic virtue in America, particularly among young adults, is running high at present. Underlying this concern is a consensus that virtue is important. At the very least, constitutionalism cannot function without pervasive lawfulness.
McGinnis and George agree that our constitutional order requires republican self-government, which requires virtue in some form. As George puts it, “virtue is one cultural condition of freedom, and it is necessary to the establishment and preservation of freedom’s other cultural conditions.” McGinnis acknowledges that “virtues of self-restraint and social trust” are necessary for a people to remain free and thriving.
McGinnis and George disagree about the source of virtue in our constitutional order. George cites George Washington’s admonition, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Reason unaided by religion can, George concedes, support virtue in persons who possess “minds of peculiar structure.” But those people are rare, George observes. And so,
Reason itself, and experience, teach us not to pin our hopes on virtue ungrounded in, or unsupported by, faith in God. Washington, like Adams, believed that reason, given man’s fallen condition, was a bit too uncertain a trumpet, and that human passions of the sort that compete with virtues and lead us into error and sin are too powerful for reason to reliably prevail over them.
We “need not and should not deny that there are virtuous people, good citizens, among those of our neighbors who profess no religion,” George insists. “And yet, dare we suppose that liberty-sustaining virtues can survive if the great mass of people over a great expanse of time lose or abandon a sense of the transcendent, the spiritual, the more-than-merely-human source of meaning and value?”
McGinnis does not pin his hope on reason unaided by theistic faith; he pins it on commerce unaided by theistic faith. Specifically, the Constitution sets the conditions for a commercial republic in which interest checks interest. He quotes Hamilton’s maxim that “man will only serve the public interest, if the structure of government interests his passions in doing so.” He observes that “commerce rewards virtues of self-restraint, fair judgment and social interchange that are indispensable to republican life.”
Well, sure. Commerce rewards virtue (as a general rule; there are of course notable exceptions of vicious businessmen and scalawags who get away with their dishonest schemes, and honest dealers who never prosper). But that is one way to say that commerce depends on virtue. That does not solve the problem. It makes the problem more acute. Can a commercial republic produce the virtue that is needed to sustain it?
McGinnis thinks it can. He opines that “the Constitution is premised on the enlightenment view that its very design can create the necessary virtues for civic life from elements of human nature, including raw self-interest. The constitutional structure thus maintains itself and does not necessarily depend on any religious system.”
Provocative theses, both. In future posts I hope to explore these claims in more detail.
Adam J. MacLeod
Adam J. MacLeod is a member of the Maine and Massachusetts (inactive) bars and an Associate Professor at Faulkner University, Jones School of Law. He is the author of “Property and Practical Reason” (Cambridge University Press) and dozens of articles in journals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, many of which can be accessed at his website.
