Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Communitarians often complain that liberal political thought offers us no moral ideal, no conception of the moral virtues, no view of a life well lived. As a result, they say, liberalism makes a genuine sense of community impossible. A true community, they argue, requires a common view of the good life. Without such a conception, it is impossible for men and women to find their happiness in common affairs rather than individual affairs. Without it, there are no grounds upon which to ask people to sacrifice for the common good. Without it, political and social life degenerates into atomism and anomie.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I explore three related aspects of Rousseau's theory of identity. After discussing the problem of identity as Rousseau articulates it and how the very difficulties of self-knowledge point to the nature of the human self, I analyze his theory of the development of individual identity and self-consciousness. Then I examine his argument that morality or virtue is grounded in psychological development. Finally, I turn to his discussion of political identity, and his understanding of how shaping citizens with a strong political identity and civic morality solves the problems of political legitimacy and human happiness.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper makes a case for hypocrisy as a political virtue. I begin with the premise that our culture is permeated by an allegiance to a sort truthfulness which encourages public confession. I go on to show the roots of this phenomenon in Rousseau's ideal of sincerity. I outline two types of Rousseauan sincerity: political sincerity or integrity, suited to Rousseau's ideal citizens, and social sincerity, which is still political but designed for Rousseau's 'corrupt' or bourgeois readers. After outlining the political virtues of Rousseauan sincerity, I build a Nietzschean critique of this ideal which centers on Nietzsche's critique of pity and his demand that one have reverence 'for the mask' of the profound. In a Rousseauan rebuttal, I argue that Rousseau, as much as Nietzsche, was aware of the potential tyranny of sincerity, but that he thought sincerity could help most people without harming the few. Rousseau, that is, believed as much as Nietzsche in the value of hypocrisy as a mask for exceptional men, but he argued that most human beings should not be sacrificed to the exceptional few, because the few should be able to withstand the burden of a sincere culture, should be able to withstand importunate calls to confession and pity and importunate offerings of confessions and pity, by creating masks, their own psychic arrière-boutiques, where they could be free regardless of the cultural milieu.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the debate over liberal democratic virtues, and suggests a new approach for understanding the virtues required by both politicians and ordinary citizens. It argues that political virtue is episodic, with different virtues required by liberal democracy under different circumstances and some therefore needed very rarely, and pluralistic, with different political figures legitimately specializing in certain types of action congruent with their personal characters and particular commitments and responsibilities. It stresses the need to distinguish between “core” virtues, those actually necessary for liberal democracy to sustain itself, and “ideal” virtues, which are not actually necessary but which express one among many attractive liberal ideals and may serve to motivate the core. It develops these ideas through an analysis of arguments by Galston, Walzer, Macedo, Gutmann, and others. It ends by discussing the ways in which ordinary citizen duties like voting may be disanalogous from political duties and more closely related to the duties of private life.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown an increasing interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free society. Yet within this recent “return” to the virtues, one quality that has been almost entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this paper I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. Before making my case for democratic humility as an essential virtue for liberal citizenship under conditions of diffuse pluralism, I first explore some of the problems with humility by tracing its intellectual and moral history within the Jewish and Christian traditions. Next, I explore the “hidden” relationship between humility and pride in order to ask, with Hume and Nietzsche, whether humility is any kind of virtue at all. With this moral and historical terrain established, I offer an account of humility that seeks to address some of the historical difficulties with humility while arguing that the idea of humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important virtues for late-modern societies marked by incommensurable ethical and cultural pluralism.