S is for Shklar
As a child, I learnt there were a group of frightening behaviours called the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. I knew about pride, which ‘comes before a fall’, and which I grasped was about the danger of getting big-headed: it was many years later I came across that wonderful word ‘hubris’. Lust and envy had something to do with sex as I understood it, (rather unclearly at the time): I gathered it related to the seventh and tenth commandments, not committing adultery and not coveting your neighbour’s wife (whatever that meant). Greed, gluttony and sloth formed a natural set: they were all threats to the virtues of the Protestant Ethic, of having to work hard to get what you deserved, and no more than that. On these, my mother kept me on track! That left wrath, which was about anger. From what I could see, most people got angry at times, and wrath was a particularly dramatic, fiery version.
Around the same time, I also learnt about some other attributes (only later did I discover these were called the Christian virtues). These were prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity. That collection came over as somewhat pallid in comparison to the deadly sins, rather namby-pamby. Apart from the lingering allure of lust, the whole collection of sins and virtues slowly sank into my sub-conscious, a largely invisible set of character guidelines, mostly accepted without too much scrutiny, that shaped and still shape the way I behave.
Many years later, I became interested in philosophy, first reading the classical works, and then delving into contemporary writers. Intrigued by views on political systems, personal freedom, and liberty, I was greatly taken by John Rawl’s preoccupation with justice, justice as fairness. It made good sense. Then I picked up a copy of Ordinary Vices, by Judith Shklar. [i] A slim book with a distinctly 1960’s marbled design cover, it looked interesting. Shklar had escaped from Latvia in 1939, a Jewish refugee, studied in Canada, and ended up as a professor of government at Harvard University, as well as president of the American Political Science Association. Deeply thoughtful, densely written, her book turned several of my ideas on their head.
First , I realised in accepting all that stuff about the deadly sins, I had neglected to focus on the one key element. These were sins, they were personal matters between the individual and god; they were not about the law. To lust after another person, to envy another, or simply to be lazy and greedy, these things probably wouldn’t see you ending up in a mundane human court. Rather they would reflect on your character, they could impact on your spiritual future, and they might make you feel disappointed in yourself. These were vices of a religious kind.
Shklar’s concern was with another group, ones she had termed ‘ordinary’ vices. Drawing on Montaigne and Montesquieu, she explored cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, treachery, and misanthropy. Of these, the last has a particular resonance for me, as I frequently slump into a dislike, a hatred even, of humankind. Shklar’s ordinary vices are everyday, common aspects of character and behaviour, largely private and personal, not the focus of the public, legal system. As Shklar made clear, there’s no dividing line between private and public however, and personal treachery slips over into commercial dishonesty and crimes against the state, cruelty becomes spousal abuse, hypocrisy edges into breaking the law. Nonetheless, most of the time ordinary vices slip under the eyes of the judicial system, often hidden behaviours that are evidence of a flawed character, but no less dreadful for that. For Shklar, the pre-eminent of these vices was cruelty, a reiteration of the concerns of those two French scholars who had placed a priority on avoiding cruelty, unnecessary suffering, brutal punishment and fear above all else.
Montesquieu and Montaigne supported a minimalist approach to political systems. Rather than finding the best way to organise society, their aim was to go in a negative direction, to achieve a decent society through the absence of fear. It was an agenda Shklar supported, putting her on a collision course with Rawls, her better known contemporary and friend at Harvard. She was critical of Rawls’s approach to building a theory of justice, and proposed an alternative path: “injustice is not just the negative counterpart to justice. Instead, injustice must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right. She maintained that to give injustice its due demands not only a different perspective but also a different type of narrative, one that helps to identify and recognise the many victims of injustice. Such a new critical approach, she argued, could tell us more about the many faces of injustice than following the false hope of striving for an ever-more perfect state of justice, including the idea of a perpetual amelioration of the laws.” [ii]
Judith Shklar is often considered a critic of liberal thinking. However, she acknowledged its role in confronting totalitarianism, and especially the threat from Russia during the Cold War. You would have to believe her own status as a World War II refugee must have played some part in this. At the same time, she was concerned about the extent to which Cold War liberalism was essentially conservative, supporting the status quo, allowing the very vices she despaired of to flourish and grow. She saw the reactionary liberalism of conservatives did little to get rid of the continuing violence against minorities, especially African Americans, while simultaneously sustaining economic exploitation and the ever-increasing material wealth of the elites.
Shklar warned against the self-satisfied view of American liberals, and the belief that Western democracy was the ultimate form of political system. In her view, liberalism should be subject to constant change and renewal, history had revealed the fragility of liberal societies, so often overthrown, failing to preserve the liberties they trumpeted. She saw the increasing emphasis on private consumer choice alongside an ever-growing list of rights as developments taking place under the banner of liberalism as constituting threats to the achievements of democracy. “In contrast to orthodox liberal arguments that aim at a summum bonum or common good, Shklar advocated a liberalism of fear, which holds in its sights the summum malum ‒ cruelty. Avoiding cruelty, and the suffering it causes, is the chief aim. Other [everyday] vices such as hypocrisy, snobbery, arrogance, betrayal and misanthropy should be ranked in relation to this first vice.” [iii]
Rather than tinkering with the broader political system, her approach led her to put an emphasis on the importance of character, character building being the way to develop ‘good dispositions’. In the last chapter of Ordinary Vices, she questioned what was needed to ensure that these good dispositions were enhanced, and started by examining two major writers on this topic, Aristotle and Kant, both of whom saw character as being developed through a process of self-learning.
To say she was critical of Aristotle is a woeful understatement. In her eyes, Aristotle was aloof, seeking perfection through having the privilege of isolated and uninterrupted contemplation, a luxury only available to a rich Greek male supported by his chattels, his women and his slaves. That kind of aristocratic character rested on the very vices Shklar had identified, hypocrisy, snobbery, arrogance, and possible misanthropy for good measure. She concluded Aristotle’s character dispositions were those of the elite, embodying cruelty in its many forms.
Kant was a very different kettle of fish! As Shklar saw it, Kant considered a moral approach should be based on respect for humanity, avoiding lying and cruelty: “To other men he owes no liberality or pity or noblesse oblige of any kind, because this might humiliate the recipient. What he does have to show them is respect for their rights, decent manners, and an avoidance of calumny, pride and malice”. [iv] The contrast with Aristotle was, she noted, complete. In Kant’s eyes, you needed no special attributes of wealth or position. Anyone can aspire to good character, even if many chose not to. What that requires is freedom, freedom to choose.
Reading her book today, her approach has even more force than it did nearly 40 years ago. Our current obsession with individualism and pluralism has made a consensus on virtues impossible, opinions are disputed, and growing social fragmentation offer little chance of turning back to some kind of mythical paradise of agreement. Her conclusions had been drawn from Montaigne and Montesquieu because she shared their view on what needed to be avoided at all costs: those vices of cruelty, unnecessary suffering, brutal punishment and fear. She took on their aim and major purpose, to achieve a decent society marked by the absence of fear, rather than working toward an illusory perfect political system. She might have been writing for the present moment.
It is an ingenious and complex approach. It is an argument that we might be able to know what we want to avoid, without having to agree on a comprehensive vision of what would be ‘good’. This negative strategy supports political and liberal pluralism, on the basis that a “liberal government for bad characters did not promiser us that freedom would make us good; it merely argued that it would remove the most horrible obstacles to any ethical undertaking we might conceivably try” [v]. In other words, any attempt to govern or control what we do would be a form of imprisonment, the opposite of liberty, and in her view a worse outcome than seeking to encourage good character dispositions. If we can become like Kant, the vices that plague our society would be ameliorated.
Why did she develop this minimalist position? As Shklar saw it, the opposite approach, putting happiness first, whether based on utilitarianism or hedonism, was a path to disaster. It would require active government, and, she concluded, it would require giving government power to achieve prescribed ends. However, having such power also provides the ability to inflict fear and cruelty. As we all know, however benevolently the government’s intentions might be stated, power does corrupt. In her view, to avoid that we need the people, the governed, to be alert and suspicious. “only a distrustful population can be relied on to watch out for its rights, to ward off fear, and to be able to make their own projects, whether these be modest or great.” [vi]
Are these vices only private? Of course not. Cruelty is certainly a public phenomenon; public officials are often the agents of cruel government action and coercion. However, just as Shklar wanted much to be left to the individual, she agreed some choices had to be in the public domain. “the sorts of choices that occur in public regularly are no different from those that have to be made by every single person who is responsible for other people and not just to them. No mother of a family can cultivate her conscience only; and if she does not calculate the consequences of her actions in a cool matter-of-fact way, her children will suffer the effects. What we look for in both public officials and in our friends is character. Not a set of discrete, heroic, ethically significant decisions, but the imperceptible choices of dispositions that are manifest in the course of a lifetime. And character is an indissoluble amalgam of motives and calculations … we can all have unclean hands some of the time.” [vii] Her views endorse pluralism, light government allowing freely competing groups, systems undergoing constant change.
Shklar’s focus on addressing cruelty continues to be taken up in some contemporary critiques. For example, Anand Giridharadas spoke at The Aspen Institute about what he called ‘the Aspen Consensus’: “the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. Are we using our collective strength to challenge the powerful, or are we helping to make an unjust, unpalatable system feel a little more digestible?” [viii] He was concerned the elite will continue to meet with the elite, and gradually grow irrelevant.” [ix] Today democracy is just that, elites talking to elites, the system increasingly oligopolistic, the rich bleeding society.
I find her views inspiring, and they have shaped my view of liberalism and what it could be. At the end of Ordinary Vices, she summarises it well: “Ours is a nonscheme and that is how I have looked at character. Liberal democracy is more than a set of political procedures. It is a culture of subcultures, a tradition of traditions, and an ethos of determined multiplicity It puts enormous burdens of choice on all of us, and it ought to be seen as very demanding” [x]
Is Shklar so very different from Rawls? Both were concerned with principles, rather than practice, and neither sets out an alternative to our system of checks and balances. Both advocate the importance of liberty, a limited role for government, the traditional libertarian model. Both offer principles, Rawls through his concern with justice and fairness, Shklar with her focus on character and the personal domain. Shklar was a critic of practice, and continued to debate and review what is meant by a good political system up until to her death, at the age of 63, in 1992. She was determined to push for our ‘better natures’ in the face of the flawed behaviour she observed, and concluded, “If we can do better, it is because democracy is itself dynamic”. [xi] I would agree, but current evidence suggests the direction is toward decay, not improvement.
Can we do better? Today, technology makes the personal and private public, from amplifying the derogatory demeaning diatribes from Trump to promoting pervasive accessible pornography. Don’t be misled into thinking that’s all. The ordinary vice of cruelty continues, with the vicious hate-based treatment of family members, friends and colleagues largely unseen and unchecked. Right now, it appears the freedom to develop good character hasn’t worked out particularly well.
[i] Belknap at Harvard University Press, 1984
[ii] The theorist of belonging, Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, Aeon, March 24, 2020
[iii] Ibid. Forgive the extensive quote, but it summarises her views succinctly
[iv] Ordinary Vices, Op Cit, p. 233
[v] Ibid, page 235
[vi] Ibid, page 238.
[vii] Ibid, page 243
[viii] Reported in Inside Aspen: the mountain retreat for the liberal elite, Linda Kinstleris, 11 October 2019. It was published in the October/November 2019 issue of 1843
[ix] Op cit
[x] Ibid, page 248
[xi] Judith N Shklar, Redeeming American Political Theory, Presidential Address, published in J. of American Political Science Research, Vol. 85, No. 1, March 1991
