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Defending the Central Tradition
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11432 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
1,694 Words |
| Author
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Peter Widulski
Peter Widulski teaches in the graduate liberal studies
division of Rutgers University. He has written articles on law
and philosophy and on constitutional issues. |
MAKING MEN MORAL
Civil Liberties and Public Morality
Robert P. George
Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1993
256 pp., $39.95
Modern Western societies are justly proud of their protection of civil liberties. Nevertheless, Western intellectuals are concerned about the dangers of complacency. They have sought both to extend the scope of these liberties and to develop conceptual accounts of their foundation. In attempting to identify threats to civil liberty, philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have turned a critical eye not only to the obvious examples of the tyrannical regimes of the twentieth century but to the philosophical roots of the Western tradition itself.
That tradition, represented by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, insisted that political societies were to be judged by looking at the character of their people. A primary goal of a good regime was the promotion of the moral character of its citizenry. Law was an important instrument in this task, restricting the liberty of people to act in ways that might undermine moral character, even though such actions arguably caused no harm to others. To that extent, the Western tradition sanctioned laws that the modern liberal outlook regards as an illegitimate interference with individual liberty.
Have modern philosophers helped us to learn that these basic premises of the Western tradition are serious threats to civil liberties? Are these premises disturbingly similar to the underlying assumptions of the tyrannies of our century? Have we now discovered that the idea of "making men moral" through law is wrong in principle and incompatible with respect for civil liberties? Robert George, a lawyer, Oxford-trained philosopher, and associate professor of politics at Princeton University, addresses these questions and, applying the analytical tools of modern philosophy with exceptional vigor, provides a reasoned defense of what he calls "the central tradition."
This defense is not unqualified, however. According to George, the central tradition is indeed correct in teaching us that the political order has an important responsibility for promoting the moral character of its citizens. Moreover, the tradition is right when it observes that moral norms serve fundamental human goods; enforcing moral norms thus promotes the good (even of the wrongdoer). But, as George sees
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