Virtue Ethics and Democratic Values

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VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

Michael Slote

V rtue ethics has recently been rousing itself from a long slumber.*

Although twentiethcentury hthical theoryhas been primarily concerned

with right and wrong action, we have lately seen a revival of interest in (the)

virtue(s) as supplementing or even grounding our understanding of right

action, and Aristotle and (to a lesser extent) Plato have had the greatest

influence on these developments. Over the last few years, virtue ethicists

have largely focused on the individual moral life rather than on issues of

social justice, and to the extent virtue ethicsiscontent merely to supplement

other views, there may be nothing at all problematic about such an omission

or de-emphasis. But most philosophers who call themselves virtue ethicists

believe that (the) virtue(s) should play a foundational role in a free-standing

total approach to ethics that can take its place, e. g., alongside (utilitarian)

consequentialism and Kantian ethics; and they will want (one or another

form of) virtue ethics to develop its own distinctive account of social

morality and of social justice in particular.

Yet anyone who has such a hope will, presumably, recognize the consid-

erable obstacles that lie in itspath. Virtue ethics has a proven record of siding

with anti-democratic social/political ideals, and when one considers that

neither Aristotle nor Plato favored democratic forms of government, one

may well wonder whether ancient models can provide any sort of plausible

contemporary basis for political philosophy or for ethics as a whole. Even if

individualistic virtue ethics is not incompatiblewith current-day democraticvalues, the Aristotelian virtue ethicist may have to draw upon other tradi-

tions in order to give any sort of account of such values; and in that case she

will face an intellectually unpleasant choice. If she declines to develop any

sort of political philosophy, virtue ethics simply gives up on any attempt to

develop a full-scale ethical alternative to currently dominant views, like

utilitarianism/consequentialismand Kantianism, that are clearly capable of

generating accounts of both individual and social values. (It is interesting

that Rawls’s contractarianismmakes no claim to account for the full range ofindividual morality.)’ However, if virtue ethics has to borrow from Kantian

ethics or consequentialism n order to generate a plausible political philoso-

phy, then it acknowledges their strength and superiority in one major sphere

JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY,Vol. 24 No. 2, Fall 1993 5-37Q 1993 Journal of Social Philosophy



6 MICKAEL SLOTE

of ethics, and that gives us at least some reason to prefer one or the other of

these general approaches.

Of course, in saying all this, Iam assuming that as ethicists we cannot be

satisfied with anything less than an account and justification of democraticand liberal values. But this is an assumption that many Aristotelian ethicists

even today seem unwilling to make, and, of course, the unwillingness plays

into the suspicion that virtue ethics is an anachronistic irrelevancy in the

current climate of political thought. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose

lustice? Which advances a basically Aristotelian ethics while

taking an openly critical stance toward liberal democracy. And inJustice and

the Human Good, William Galston conspicuously declines to defend the

superiority of democratic ideals and institutions over some of their tradi-tional alternatives, in the course of advocating a neo-Aristotelian conception

of social ju~tice.~

These contemporary examples make one all the more skeptical of the

relevance of Aristotelian virtue ethics to contemporary political philoso-

phy: and, of course, Plato’s philosophy is an even less likely source of

sustenance for liberaldemocratic values. But I still believe that ancient virtue

ethics is capable of helping us to understand and justify modem-day

political ideals, and the main burden of the present essay will be to develop

a plausible virtue-ethical alternative to utilitarian/consequentialist and

Kantian accounts of liberal democracy. In order to do so I shall appeal to a

tradition of ancient ethics in which interest is currently reviving, but which

has recently had far less influence than either Platonism or Aristotelianism,

namely, Stoicism.

1.The Ethics of Self-Sufficiency

TheStoicsdidnot advancemodernviewsabout the rights of citizens, but

they were the first philosophers in the ancient world to advocate the ideas of

the brotherhood of all men and of the divine spark or element in all human

being^.^ AndsuchideasnotonlyseemfarfromPlatoand Aristotle, but move

us in the directionof modem democratic/egalitarian/liberal views of social

justice. However, I believe that we need to appeal to another, quite funda-

mental Stoic notion, if we want to be in a position fully to defend such views.

The Stoics espoused an ideal of aufarkeia,or self-sufficiency, according to

which one should be free of all attachment to worldly pleasures andprivileges and care only about what was assumed to be within one’s own

control, namely, one’s ownvirtue and rationality. But we need not take self-

sufficiency to such an extreme to recognize it as an attractive human ideal.

For example, when we praise people for being moderate in their desires or



VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 7

needs, we are not thinking of them as having to curb certain strong desires

in order to insure their long-run well-being-exercising what we can call

instrumental moderation. Rather we imagine them as simply not desiring

(or not so strongly desiring) certain things many of us do want, as capableof being entirely satisfied or content with what would not be enough to

satisfy other people. Those who are not so easily satisfied-especially those

whose desires in certain directions are insatiabl-eem needy and even

greedy by comparison with someone whose desires are moderate, and such

moderation represents a kind of self-sufficiency, as opposed to neediness

and dependency, that most of us think well of. Even if the extremedegreeof

self-sufficiency recommended by the Stoicsisbeyond human capacities, we

can recognize self-sufficiency as an ideal or admirable trait which, taken (asit were) in moderation, has an appropriate and honored place in our lives.

And the defense of egalitarian and liberal democratic values and indeed the

entire virtue-ethical conception of social justice to be offered in the present

essay will take its primary inspiration from Stoic ideas about self-suffi-

ciency.6

However, the Stoics deployed the ideal of self-sufficiency within (what

is standardly regarded as) a fundamentally egoistic view of ethics, and one

may well at this point wonder how fairness between individuals and anykind of egalitarianism can be grounded in such a seemingly self-centered

virtue. But the virtue is less self-centered than it may have seemed to the

Stoics and than it may initially appear to us, and, for all his self-proclaimed

egoism, it is, ironically, Nietzsche who shows ushow to use the ideal of self-

sufficiency as a justification for certain forms of altruism.

In Beyond Good and Evil (section 2601, he writes:

The noble type of man...honours whatever he recognizes in himself:

such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground is the feeling of pleni-

tude, of power, which seeks to overflow... he consciousness of a wealth

which would fain give and bestow:-the noble man also helps the unfortu-

nate, but not-orscarcely-out of pity, but ratherfromanimpulsegenerated

by the super-abundance of power.

What Nietzsche is pointing out here is that an individual who feels

entirely satisfied with what she has will not only seek nothing more for

herself, but, in the natural course of events, also feel she has enough to spare

for others. Thus the person who isself-sufficient in the way we have spoken

of can exhibit or express or exude that (senseof) self-sufficiency in acts of

generosity toward others. Consider, for example, a person who stands

everyone in a barroom to a drink when he wins the lottery or daily double.



8 MICHAEL SLOTE

Such an action comes from and exhibits a momentary sense of superabun-

dance, but that precisely doesn’t mean that it is motivated by the desire to

gain something for himself. To be sure, if he acts as he does because he fears

the envy of those around him, his generosity is self-interested and instru-mental. But if the generosity stems from a sense of having more than enough,

it derives from his feelings about his own well-being but doesn’t aim to

enhance that well-being. Quite the contrary, the man gives something away

that he might use-the money that pays for the drinks-because he feels he

hasenoughtaspare for others,andinacting thusheexhibitsamomentaryself-

sufficiency and a momentary non-instrumental generosity that would be

lacking, for example, in any winner of the lottery who begrudged the drinks

to others and wanted to keep all his new-gained money for himself. (Norneed the generous winner beaiming at his own glorification, or admirability,

though he in fact does act more admirabIy than a lottery winner who

begrudges drinks to others.)’

Of course, the justdescribed example is one that would hardly please

Nietzsche, since i t illustrates a kind of generosity that can occur in the

everyday life of “the herd,” and Nietzsche speaks of superabundant gener-

osity only in connection with the extraordinary noble few. But if what is

admirable or noble in Nietzschean terms occurs in hornier and moregregarious

circumstances than Nietzsche suggests, perhaps such considerations can,

contra Nietzsche, beused to support democratic and egalitarian ideals of social

justice. We shall have to see. But let us now consider a further variation on

our homey example.

The person who stands everyone to drinks may not give very much of his

newly acquired wealth away and may make no move toward any form of

longer-term giving. But what ifsomeone wins a large sum in the lottery and

decides to finance his poor but very deserving niece’s way through college

and medical school? Given the way things are, such generosity may repre-

sentasubstantialportion of what the person has just gained, andinany event

it has a long-term aspect absent in the case of buying drinks for everyone. It

represents, in effect, a large commitment to the niece over a long period of

time, and as such it exhibits greater self-sufficiency than is seen in the act of

standing everyone in the house to a drink.

Let me be clearer. The person who stands everyone to drinks may bejust

as self-sufficient (or free from neediness or greed) as the person who finances

his niece (indeed, they may be one and the same person), but their respectiveacts/gestures don’t exhibit the same amount or degree of self-sufficiency.

The standing to drinks bespeaks a sense of (at least) momentary flushness or

superabundance or sufficiency, but not a sense of having (more than)

enough for the indefinite future. The latter counts as greater self-sufficiency,




and the generosity to the niece, which exhibits it, is thus, in the ethical terms

we have been exploring, more admirable than the momentary buying of

drinks. Sowe can see how it ispossible to explain and justifysubstantial and

long-range generosity-of a sort characteristic of friendship and otherrelationships involving commitment to others-in terms of the ideal of self-

sufficiency.

It is worth noting, however, that I am not assuming that a sense of

superabundance will automatically or necessarily lead to short-term or

long-term beneficence. We can imagine someone so giddy or dizzy with his

own good fortune that he can’t spare a thought for anything else and soends

up giving nothing to others. But superabundance may-and often does-

naturally and understandably express itself in thoughts like “Ihave enoughto spare for others” and in generous actions; and our account can explain

why a person who thinks and acts thus is more admirable than someone, e.

g.,whowins thelotterybutdoesn’tforamomentfeelsatisfied, hansomeone

who begrudges drinks to those around him at the time he wins the lottery.

The forms of generosity we have described above represent, however,

only part of the ethical account of self-sufficiency we need to draw upon in

framing a conceptionof socia1 justice that is adequate to present-day ideals

and traditions. The kind of self-sufficiency we have so far been speaking of

isan admirable inner state or disposition, and it is a distinctive (or at least an

ideal-typic) feature of virtue ethics that it should base its moral and even its

political ideals on facts about character and the inner life, rather than on

(rational or moral) rules or goals of action. Self-sufficiency as we have so far

described it certainly conforms to this idea of what virtue ethics is or ought

to be and is quite relevant to a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian and liberal

democratic values. But the familiar idea of self-sufficiency has another facet

less stressed by the Stoics, but perhaps more central to the account of social

justice to be offered here.

Self-sufficiency can be exhibited in moderation and, as Nietzsche may

have to teach us, in generosity-and such self-sufficiency is a lack of

neediness or greediness in regard to, a kind of independence from, thegood

things of this world. But there is also self-sufficiency, or independence, in

regard to other people, the self-sufficiency a child attains in learning to do(and

to want to do) things for herself rather than relying on her parents or others

to do them for her. Learning work skills and developing the capacity to live

on one’s own and make one’s own way in the world represent accomplish-ments in self-sufficiency, and this form of self-sufficiency is naturally re-

garded as a kind of self-reliance.However, self-relianceis alsodemonstrated

in learning to think and decide matters for oneself, and if we add these

further dimensions of self-sufficiency to our virtueethical picture, I believe



10 MICHAEL SLOTE

we have in hand the main elements we need in order to justify liberal

democratic ideals of social justice.s

The idea that the acquisition of work skillsand habits represents a form

of heightened or enhanced self-sufficiency is relatively obvious, and ifanyone speaks of the need to learn or develop self-sufficiency in life, one is

much more likely to think of learning to work and live on one’s own than to

think of the self-sufficiency nvolved in moderation (much less of the

connection Nietzsche points out and we have elaborated between being

satisfied with things and generosity). But not everyone wants or at least

develops the sort of self-reliant self-sufficiency we have just been speaking

about, and some individuals-typically the extreme cases of those most

pampered and those least well provided for in early lif-eek somehoweither to preserve the cocoon of childhood or to make up for the lack of such

by getting others to provide for them throughout the course of their lives.9

Moreover, people born to wealth typically lack the practical necessity of

providing for themselves through work or a profession. And one may ask

whether such people have any reason to cultivate the self-reliant self-

sufficiency-the capacity for and actuality of work and taking care of

oneself-that most people need. Why, for instance, should a rich person

concern him- or herself with work and the capacity for work isn’t the whole

notion of leisure and of a leisure class completely antithetical to the idea of

work, or a career, as a universal human ideal or aspiration?

Our current exaltation of work and career seems to be a fairly recent

historical development and one arguably influenced by Protestant religious

thought and practice. Indeed, in earlier stages of Western history and in

other cultures as well, work has been seen as an obstacle to human dignity

and moral development, rather than as a source of dignity and moral

development, as nowadays it isso typically considered to be. But I think that

the latter view can be defended and undergirded, without appeal to any

specifically religious traditions or ideas, by reference to the considerable

value we place on (thedevelopment o f )self-sufficiency.Aswe haveseen, the

ideal of self-sufficiency (and the value i t places on certain kinds of personal

strength and independence) is of venerable philosophical origin and has a

perennial appeal, and on that basis I would like to defend the value and

validity of work and making one’sown way in the world along lines similar

to those we used just above in defending (non-self-interested) generosity

and moderation.

Perhaps the Zocus classicus of the historically emerging idealization of

work is the discussion of master and slave (“Lordship and Bondage”) in

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spi r i t . Hegel says that a master who relies on slaves

is in a certain measure the slave of his slaves. He depends on them in a way




they don’t depend on him for sustenance and survival. And given that the

slaves show a mastery of life’s problems and of their environment that the

master lacks, Hegel also holds that slaves are in some measure masters in

relation to their master. But we need not dwell on such paradoxes/meta-phors or rely on any special ”dialectical logic” in order to make the relevant

point here about the connection among work and self-sufficiency and

human dignity.

Hegel connects the master-slave or master-servant relationship to the

idea of work and demonstrates a high opinion of (the capacity for) work.

Though the idea of self-sufficiency (or of human dignity) is not explicitly

mentioned, the whole master-slave discussion seems predicated on the

positive value, the admirability, of independence, self-reliance, and/or self-sufficiency. What Hegel doesn’t mention or even imply, however, is the

obvious connection that can be drawn between the master-servant relation

and the way children relate to their parents.

A master may be or become dependent on slaves or servants in the way

children are originally dependent on their parents, and if it makes sense for

children to envy, admire, and/or emulate the self-sufficiency, self-reliance,

or independence of their parents or other adults, then there may also be

reason to feel shame, inferiority, or regret if, through reliance on slaves orservants, one never learns to do things for oneself, if one remains parasitically

dependent on others. (Note that the charge of parasitism isn’t mitigated,

perhaps it applies with greater force, if onehas the ability to make one’s own

way in the world but doesn’t in fact do so.)Tobe sure, it is tempting, if only

one can somehow manage it, to rely on the work or devotion of others and

go through life being taken care of in the way parents care for children or

servants/slaves care for masters and mistresses. Such a life seems, or is,

comfortable, easy, pleasurable. But that is compatible with regarding such a

life as less admirable than the more difficult and possibly less secure life of

someone who has learned, or had to learn, how to work and/or take careof

herself.

However, the self-sufficiency that can be achieved through work is no

moreabsolute and unqualified than what isassociated with moderation and

generosity toward others. The Stoics seem to overestimate the human

capacity for indifference o pleasure and pain and to the presence or absence

of love or companionship, and our capacity for self-sufficiency in regard to

the so-called good things in life may, therefore, be somewhat limited. But by

the same token, it is pretty much impossible, and certainly inadvisable,

nowadays to achieve or aim for total self-reliance in one’s work. There exists

a division of labor, and we all have a general debt to the technology,

knowledge, and material infrastructure that have sedimented down to us



12 MICHAEL SLOTE

from previous generations, so even the present-day recluse in a log cabin in

the wilderness will not be entirely self-reliant. Rather, the self-sufficiency

that can be achieved or aimed for in this area is (roughly) a righting of the

balanceasbetween self and other.Where there is a division of labor, those who work (inside or outside the

home) provide for others and are in turn provided for by others in their

society or community, but for such people and unlike young children and

the leisure classes, the dependence is two-way and thus is no form of

parasitism. The degree of admirable self-sufficiency is thus greater than

anything attributable to young children or the leisured rich or powerful.

And even if it is very far from absolute, we should remember that such self-

reliance constitutes a life-accomplishment that it takes time and effort toachieve.

Work was not idealized or valued in the ancient world in the way it has

typically been in recent times, but, properly understood, Hegel’s discussion

of master and slave can helpus to see that work and the capacity/preference

for work exemplify a virtue that the ancient world in fact highly esteemed,

the virtue of self-sufficiency. It is at the very least ironic, then, that in

speaking of the self-sufficiency of the truly good or happy human life,

Aristotle should have ignored the ways such alife as he advocated lacks self-sufficiency through itsassumed dependence on the services of slaves.lo The

fact that Stoicism was a philosophy for slaves, and not just for the idle or

leisured, helps it elude the main brunt of this particular irony. But I have seen

no evidence that the Stoics ever emphasized or exalted work as an essential

ingredient in auturkeiu or as always necessary to playing one’s proper role in

life, and there may be a different irony lurking in the fact, if it is one, that the

grinding tedium and/or sheer horror of slavery may have blinded even the

Stoics to the admirability of work and the deplorability of leisured parasit-

ism.

So far we have been speaking of a kind of self-reliance that consists in

making one’s own way in the world and not being parasitically dependent

on other people. Such self-reliancerepresents an admirable form of (relative)

self-sufficiency that can be set alongside the (relative) self-sufficiency in-

volved in moderation. But as subsumable under the larger category of self-

sufficiency, the virtue of self-reliance has some other facets we have not yet

focused on, and in order to complete the (admittedly partial) picture of

individual virtue that we need in order to launch a virtue-ethical account of

social justice, we now need to consider self-reIiance informing opinions and in

making decisions.

Kant in the essays “What is Enlightenment?” and ’What is Orientation

in Thinking?’’ (and elsewhere) articulates perhaps better than anyone else




has what isat stake in regard to the issues of thinking for oneself and (though

there is less emphasis on this) choosing or deciding for oneself.” Having a

mind and will of one’s own are essential to one’s fullest humanity, and,

according to Kant, to allow someone else to dictate to one what one shoulddo or to take one’s opinions wholesale from some other person or some

institution is a deplorable violation or betrayal of one’s own human dignity.

Kant is thus advocating self-reliance in thought and choice that represents

the very opposite of intellectual or volitional parasitism, of not thinking for

oneself and of being themere instrument of anotheis will or another person’s

creature or lapdog.

The varied language in which we find it natural to speak of this topic

gives ample evidence of the importance we place on intellectual and voli-tional self-reliance, and clearly intellectual and volitional, especially voli-

tional, self-reliance are related to the kind of self-reliance that is exhibited in

making one’s own way in the world, e. g., by having a job and supporting

oneself. But it does seem possible for someone to accomplish the latter while

taking all her opinions and choices from, say, her parents-being told, e. g.,what job she should take and where she should live, etc. Such a person, we

might say, is less than fully adult: although she may have in some degree a

life on her own, itis

not a life of her own on her own. From the standpoint ofour virtue-ethical vocabulary, we can say that such a person or her conduct

is deplorable or criticizable for the parasitism she or it demonstrates, and the

fact that the same opposition of parasitism vs. self-reliance is naturally

applied to the issue of making one’s own economic way in the world and to

the issue of where one gets one’s opinions and choices gives us reason to

think that all the forms of self-reliance I have mentioned are related or

similar.*2

We may be further convinced when we consider what is involved in

forming an adult identity of one’s own-the sort of identity that is supposed

to be forged, if one is lucky, after what Erik Erikson (in Childhood and-Sociefy,

Identity and theLifeCycZe,and elsewhere)calls a youthful “identity crisis.” For

such an identity seems to require both making one’s own way in the world

(a life on one’s own) and choosing a distinctive way of one’s own for doing

so (a life of one’s own), and in the absence of either, therefore, an agent-based

virtue ethics that stresses (among other things) self-sufficiency will want to

say, and be in a position to say, that a person is less than (fully) admirable.

Moreover, the kind of self-reliance we have just been describing is

subject, for us humans, to the same limitations we earlier saw attach to

economic self-reliance and self-sufficient moderation. We cannot be fully

self-reliant in economic terms because of the division of labor and the

historical accumulation of technological nfrastructure and knowledge-we



14 MICHAEL SLOTE

can only counterbalance our dependence on others and early-life parasitism

by independent work. But given the difficulties involved forus in achieving

even this limited or moderate self-reliance, there is no reason to deny that the

effortful achievement of such self-reliance s admirable (inus).Similarly, weare not likely to be entirely indifferent to comfort, money, security, eputa-

tion, physical pleasure, and companionship, but if we are not greedy with

respect to such things, which is by no means easy for us humans, and are

consequently generous to others, then we are admirable (as humans).

All these points also apply to self-reliant thought and decision-making

(choice). Even someone who displayssuchvirtueshas to rely toa largeextent

on what others have thought and on habits of action and a sense of what

counts as a live option that may largely be inherited from or influenced byother people. But the self-reliant individual forges from what she has learned

from others opinions of her own (at least on certain important topics) and

chooses a distinctive path in life, distinctive ways of living, even though her

freedom here will be limited by what others expect of her or have over the

years expected of her. Still, by comparison with those who are or let

themselves be overwhelmed, in their choices or opinions, by the decisions or

opinions of others, such a person counts as admirable. The limited self-

reliant thought and/or choice that sheachieves isdifficult to achieve and not

all that widespread-people, especially parents during one’s childhood, are

always trying to influence one with overt or lurking bribes or threats, so such

limited volitional and intellectual self-reliance really is something admi-

rable.13

In addition, dignity attaches to these kinds of self-reliancein much the

way it attaches to the economic self-reliance of work. Being a parasite of any

kind seems ethically deplorable and contrary to human dignity. Someone

who takes his opinions and decisionsfrom others lacks a certain dignity that

others possess,14 nd, of course, thesamecan be said as between the parasitic

master and the slave/servant/worker. Indeed, a similar distinction also

seems applicable to the self-sufficiency that connects with moderation vs.

greed and insatiability. Someone who is not difficult to satisfy with respect to

pleasure, power, money, or fame is naturally regarded as being more

dignified with respect to these things (JuliusMoravcsikcalls this ”a touch of

class”) than someone who is very eager for and strives to get more and more

of these worldly things (the image of “grubbing after things” has force with

respect to more than money).

Notice that the familiar notion of (human) dignity at stake here is a

variable one: one can have or lack dignity, gain or lose one’s dignity. Given

the roots of this notion, as here explicated, in Stoic doctrines, this result

should be anything but surprising. For according to (at least some of) the



VIRTUE ETHICS A N D DEMOCRA TIC VALUES 15

Stoics, human dignity consists in being virtuous, rational, and wise-all

three being equivalent for them-and, according to the Stoics and common

sense, people vary enormously with regard to these traits. The idea of human

dignity has its source in Stoic thought, and indeed the distinction Kant so

greatly emphasized between having dignity and having a price seems to

have been taken by him from Stoic sources (Seneca's Epi~tles). '~ ut Kant's

notion of dignity applies in two ways (at least): to the actually good moral

will and to people insofar as they possess such a will, on the one hand, and,

on the other, to people generally in virtue of their capacity, however evil they

may be, for morally good choice. The first application allows for human

dignity to be variable, but the second applies to humans by virtue of their

essential freedom and rationality and is thus not variable between individu-als or at different times within the same individual (I ignore the problem of

what to say about idiots or people who go insane).

The invariable notion of human dignity comes,as have indicated, from

Seneca via the notion that all humans have dignity rather than (merely)price,

and Iearlier noted that the idea that all men are brothers and the idea that we

all have a divine spark in us both also come from Stoicism.Soit would seem

that Stoicism was capable of generating or inspiring two different notions of

(human) dignity, one variable, one not, but it is only the variable notion thathas entered into our account here of what is admirable about self-reliance

and self-sufficiency in general.I6 Kant's invariant conception of dignity, with

its Stoic roots, has an important role in grounding Kant's political and

individualistic ethical ideals, and we shall return to it later in our discussion

of social justice. But what Ihope to show you now is that wedo not need that

notion in order to ground an adequate contemporary conception of social

justice. We can provide for liberal and egalitarian democratic ideals through

a variable notion of dignity that is based in ideas about variable human self-sufficiency andself-reliance that also have theirStoicroots. Ourgoal,in other

words, will be to ground democratic values in human dignity as an ideal to

be emu2ated rather than as a universally posited metaphysical reality.

2. Self-sufficiency, Social Parasitism, and Democracy

Most moral theories treat the assessment of actions as primary and

evaluatecharacter or inner states favorably or unfavorably depending on theactions they lead to or are directed toward; or else, in the manner of direct

utilitarianism, separately assess both actions and motives/character in

terms of their consequences. By contrast, a truly "agent-based" virtue ethics

evaluates actions by reference to independent (and thus prior) evaluations

of the inner states of the individuals who perform them, and a Stoic-inspired



16 MICHAEL SLOTE

ethics that highlights self-sufficiency is (to that extent) agent-based in this

sense because it regards certain motivations as inherently admirable or

deplorable and evaluates human actions in terms of whether they express,

exhibit, and/or give realization to such motivations.’’ Thus greediness inone’s appetites and a parasitic desire to let others do everything for one

exemplify the very opposite of self-sufficiency, and actions serving or

exhibiting such motivations can be regarded as derivatively deplorable or

criticizable, given the kind of theory I have been defending. The present

essay makes no pretense, however, of giving a general account of human

virtue or morality; its claim, rather, is to have uncovered a multifaceted

individual virtue-self-sufficiency-that can serve as the basis for a defense

of egalitarian and liberal democratic values. Other virtues and values havean important rolein any total virtue ethics, but since they don’t enter into the

present account of justice, we can leave them aside for another occasion.

Thus for the limited purposes of the present essay, self-sufficiency is the

fundamental intuitive value in terms of which acts, motives, customs, and

institutions are ethically to be assessed, and although we have so far been

discussing ethical issues concerning parasitism vs. self-reliance and greed

vs. moderation on an individualistic basis, much of that discussion can now

be extended to questions about the ethical admirability or criticizability, and

in particular about the justice and injustice, of larger and smaller social

units.18 The main idea will be that a society is just to the extent its people

exemplify all the forms of self-sufficiency we have been discussing. And we

might say that the schematism of our account-what enables us to move

from ethical evaluations of individuals to claims about the justice of a society

as a whole-is the fact that social groups and even entire societies can

naturally be characterized in terms of the same notions of self-sufficiency

and dependency (and consequent dignity or lack of dignity) that we have

applied to individuals. If an individual can be parasitic or dependent on

particular parents or slaves/servants, receiving a great deal, but doing little

or nothing in return, so too can we speak significantly of an individual’s

being a social parasite and of a social class or group’s being parasiticon other

classesorgroups and on society as a whole. Although the issue of parasitism

can be raised about those who are (perpetually) on welfareand that topic will

be of concern to us later in this essay, when we talk about egalitarianism, I

want to begin our discussion of social justice by focusing on the parasitism

of the rich and powerful-what we might call (social or economic) parasit-ismfrom aboveand the connections of the latter to issues of social justice.

Throughout history there have been dominant social groups/classes in

societies, and that dominance has typically expressed itself in terms of some

sort of social/economic parasitism. Dominant groups have certainly pro-



VIRTUE ETHICS AN D DEM OCRA TIC VALUES 17

vided leadership and to that extent have fulfilled a social function, though

when the leadership consists in starting wars and other projects that simply

glorify or aggrandize the leaders, it is hardly clear that the leadership isn’t

parasitism (and/or greed) masquerading as other things. But at least inlarger civilized societies dominant classes are also leisure classes,and leisure

classes are socially parasitic.

Tobe sure, some members, many members, of dominant leisured classes

willhold office or otherwise work. However, typically such individuals will

not have to work (to a large extent this will be true even of hereditary

monarchs, who can almost always find people willing to take decisions and

governing off and out of their hands). And in any event their working allows

a typically larger group of other members of the dominant group to be freefrom any need to work ruling classes are thus also leisure classes. And a

leisure classisby and large parasitic on the work and contributions of others,

taking, not giving.Ig

We earlier characterized parasitic dependency as the opposite of admi-

rable in individual cases, and basically the same considerations can be

invoked in connection with the parasitism of classes, where, again, there will

be large numbers of individuals (though not too large, since we are talking

about an elite) who are content to be dependent on others, not self-reliant, inthe conduct of their lives. (Remember that this is always a matter of degree,

given the division of labor and the sedimenting of social benefits from the

labor and inventions of previous generations.)

Such (willing or intentional) dependency is deplorable, according to an

individualistic ethic derived in the above manner from Stoicaufarkeia, and

where a society ischaracterized by such dependency, i t is the very opposite

of ethically admirable and we can call it unjust. Moreover, the features of

social and individual life in such a society that express, exhibit, and give

realization to this parasitism will also, on an agent-based view, be character-

izable as deplorable or unjust, and of course dominating elites tend to

support, insist upon, work through institutions that preserve their preroga-

tives. In traditional monarchies, ordinary people will, for example, have no

vote or any real say in the running of the government or of other institutions,

and to the extent these features of the society reflect and serve the motives

of an elite bent on and capable of allowing no inroads on, no erosion of, its

leisured prerogatives, they thus count as unjust and ethically deplorable on

the present view.

However, it is possible for the absence of civil liberties and powers/

rights of political participation not to be an expression of self-interested

parasitism on the part of some dominant class or group. This can occur for

a limited period, for example, when a national vote is postponed or certain



18 MICHAEL SLOTE

liberties are suspended as part of an effort of national self-defense against an

invading army or widespread flooding. But more importantly the absence

of the sorts of democratic institutions we cherish might to a large extent

reflect the attitudes of the ruled rather than that of rulers. In Making SenseofMan,Jon Elster reviews a large body of literature devoted to this topic and

points out, among other things, that in traditional monarchies the politically

powerless classes may actually not want to vote or otherwise participate in

the political process (or have the civil liberties we now insist upon).20 By

faulty intellectual reasonings that Ekter describes in interesting detail, such

people may persuade themselves that any more democratic system couldn’t

work. Or the learning or beautiful manners of their social superiors may

make them willing to defer to them politically and in other ways as theirevident superiors. Finally, those who are dominated may say they are not yet

ready for political responsibility and a “sour grapes” adjustment to the

harshness of their lot in life may in any event make them cease to want

anything better.

To the extent the absence of democratic political institutions and civil

liberties expresses the preferences or wishes of people outside the parasitical

ruling elite, it isnot an expression of economic parasitism (at least on the part

of the rulers, but let me simplify)and cannot be considered unjust accordingto our conception. Willing (or chosen or intentional) parasitism on the part

of the elite or anyone else is always unjust, but on the present view, and not

implausibly, it is unjust only to deny civil and political powers to those who

seek them; there isno injustice merely in the fact that people lack civil liberties

and political powers they don’t want.*I (Nevertheless, there is at least an

empirical connection between the absence of certain powers and intellec-

tual/volitional parasitism, and we will shortly have to consider how this

bears upon issues of social justice.)

However, for an agent-based account, the idea of social justice seems to

involve more than the idea of the (relative) economic non-parasitism of

social groups and/or individuals. For even if i t is humanly impossible and

a mere myth, Plato’s ideal republic seems far from ethically ideal or just in

contemporary terms; yet it isprecisely a society where thedominant class or

ruling elite does not govern in its own leisured interests. Although the

philosopher-rulers in his republic are politically in total charge, Plato imag-

ines most economic wealth and benefits to accrue to the merchant or artisan

class, and the rulers, far from being a leisure class, are one and all to be

involved in the hard work of governing. Their main privileges, if these are

privileges, are privileges of education and political effectiveness or influ-

ence, not of enjoyment or comfort, and since Plato characterizes his just

republic as a place where everyone does his or her job, the charge of social/




economic parasitism presumably cannot be brought. So if there isanything

ethically wrong with such a society, we must go beyond the ideas of

parasitism, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency or, better, we must recognize a

further dimension to these notions.This s precisely what we did above in describing the different (though

related) aspects of admirable individual self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

Kant and Rousseau (among others)insist upon the ethical value and signifi-

cance of thinking and doing for oneself, and yet this is a value that is largely

absent from Plato’s republic. The philosopher-rulers may or may not think

for themselves, depending on how one conceives the guidance/influence of

the Form of the Good and of their particularly rigorous and rigid form of

education. Arguably, though not obviously, they learn to think for them-selves, and are not (merely) indoctrinated. But even if we are led, under

certain interpretations of what Plato (must have) had in mind, to regard the

rulers as having minds and wills of their own-as being more than mere

instrumentsnot,in thiscase, of themvine Will, but of theFormof theGood-

we clearly cannot make this statement about anyone else in the republic

Plato depicts. The lower orders are intellectual and volitional parasites,

taking direction inall major matters from the philosophers, and indeed they

are supposed to imbibe false opinions, nobles lies, from the elite in theinterests of social harmony.

We nowadays find the position of the lower orders in such an imagined

society degrading or degraded, and that judgment stems not from any

imagined facts of economic parasitism, but from the parasitism of opinion

and action that characterizes everyone other than the philosophical elite.

Thus earlier we spoke of the dignity inherent in making one’s own way in the

world, and that dignity is to a substantial extent absent among a parasitic

leisured elite. Where it is, that absenceof dignity redounds morally badly to

the society that contains and is governed by such an elite. For in the present

agent-based virtue ethics, judgments about the justice or admirability of a

social unit depend on ethical judgments about the groups or individuals it

contains.

But where, as in Plato’s ideal republic, there is no social/economic

parasitism, there are no privileges of leisure, we cannot speak (so readily) of

the lack of human dignity among the dominant or ruling elite; the lack of

dignity, the degradation, if you will, is to be found among those who are

dominated and take their lives and opinions ready-made from their rulers.

The dialectic of master and slave imputes ethical failure to the master, and

one side of our understanding of social justice and the human dignity and

self-sufficiency it requires stresses the ethical disvalue of the privileges of a

leisured elite. But if we want to say what is wrong with or unjust about



20 MICHAEL SLOTE

Plato’s republic, we must refer to the lack of human dignity in the lower

classes, and the basis of the indignity is a failure of self-reliance and self-

sufficiency that is not particularly economic in character. The lower classes

don’t think for themselves and are willing to let others bear all the burdensof political thought and activity, and this clearly represents a kind of

political-cumcognitive parasitism that we might wish to condemn as unfair

and unjust.”

Thus (at least) two aspects of human dignity and self-reliance/self-

sufficiency seem relevant to a virtue-ethical conception of social justice that

is firmly based in an account of what makes individuals ethically admirable

or criticizable (we are not talking about evaluating people as artists, scien-

tists, or wits). As a result, our evaluation of social institutions or circum-stances may allow virtue-ethical considerations a foothold, as it were, from

twodifferentdirections. Andlet meat this point expandalittleon this theme.

The political powers and civil liberties possessed by the citizenry in a

democracy are largely absent in autocratic or non-democratic forms of

government, and I have said that in the latter, the absence of democratic

political prerogatives and liberties can reflect the power-cum-motivation of

some larger or smaller leisured elite. Thus where freedom to criticize the

government openly or, for that matter, the freedom to organize unionsis

notpermitted, the denial of what we nowadays think of as rights functions to

preserve the hegemony and privileges of an elite, and although such an elite

may really believe in the justifications it offers (or offered in its behalf) of

why, e.g., unions shouldn’t be allowed, it, or its most sagacious members,

may surely in some way recognize and act upon the fact that various

democratic institutions or liberties would endanger its economic position or

way of life. Indeed, given what we know, it doesn’t require any controversial

social theory, it just seems common-sensical, to make such an attribution.23

But if the denial of democratic liberties and prerogatives is in given

instances criticizableas the expression of the parasitic motivations of an elite

(and I have simplified because there may be class or other forms of stratifi-

cation even within such an elite), then the presence of such liberties and

prerogatives can be said in some measure to counteract the parasitic tenden-

cies of an actual or potential elite. That does not make such democratic

institutions or circumstances insfrumentallyadmirable (i.e., admirable be-

cause of their consequences): agent-based ethics has no room for such a

notion. But it does mean, first, that democratic institutions constitute the

(ethically acceptable)absence of certain conditions which, because or to the

extent they serve and express deplorable parasitism, are themselves deplor-

able and unjust according to our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics. Thus for such

cases ”just (democraticinstitution)”operateslikea trousers word inAustin’s



VIRTUE ETHICS AN D DEMOCRATIC VALUES 21

sense, and it is the idea, so to speak, of positive injustice that wears the

trousers according to our conception. (In other instances, as we shall see

later, liberal democratic institutions can exhibit positively admirable mo-

tives like group generosity.)Secondly, and here again there is an interesting contrast with utilitari-

anism, democratic prerogatives and liberties, to the extent they counteract

the accumulation of parasitic privileges by an elite, are instrumental in

preventing the lack of human dignity that accrues to an elite as a result of its

ability to provide many or most of its members with full-time leisure.24

Utilitarian authors like Mill regard democratic institutions as counteracting

the self-interest of the ruler(s), where the latter is thought to run counter to

the larger good of society, or the people in it.” Sodemocracy has, for Mill,a role to play in the advancement of social good or utility, whereas according

to the present account of virtue ethics, democratic institutions are means to

greater human dig ni fyon the part of those who rule or would rule.

But asI mentioned earlier, the idea of human dignity gets a foothold from

a second direction, from the consideration not of the dignity of those who

rule, but of those who are ruled or are worse off. Having the voteand/or the

freedom to organize a union will more frequently (we hope) lead people in

socio-economicallyworse-off groups to think for themselves about politicalor economic matters, rather than taking their opinions cut-and-dried from

their ”betters.” Mill in ”RepresentativeGovernment” stresses precisely this

advantage of universal suffrage and/or representative government, but

misses the significance such an advantage has under an agent-based virtue

ethics of the present sort.26 For Mill, again, the instrumental value of

universal suffrage lies in the fact that if everyone has a vote and everyone

thinks about politics, then society will be better off on the whole. (For one

thing, according to Mill, people do better on their own behalf than others cando for them.) But for the present virtue ethics, everyone’s thinking for

himself or herself is admirable in itself, because i t constitutes a form of

admirable self-reliance and dignity. So if everyone’s having a vote helps to

make people who are worse off (or everyone generally) think more for

themselves, its instrumental value lies in its being a means to virtue and

human dignity, rather than (merely) to utilitarian ends like pleasure, happi-

ness or similar benefits. The main stress is on human dignity and self-

sufficiencyand admirability even as regards instrumentali ties, but, of course,in the present instance, the dignity at stake is not that of actual or potential

ruling classes, but most particularly that of those individuals potentially or

actually not of the elite who would lose in dignity if, through not having a

vote, etc., they were or became demoralized and thought less for themselves.

(Remember I am not yet talking of welfare dependency.)



zz MICHAEL SLOTE

However, the above picture somewhat simplifies the phenomena by

assuming that the parasitism of elites is chiefly economic and that i t is

primarily those who are ruled or disadvantaged who are in danger of

displaying intellectual or cognitive parasitism about the larger social andpolitical issues that bear upon their lives. Butin totalitarian states (as well as

in many primitive societies), certain basic views are held dogmatically, and

the absence of permission to dissent and of certain other freedoms may result

from self-protective ideological rigidity rather than from specifically eco-

nomic motivations. To be sure, dogma or a party line may be enforced from

above, but it is still possible that the elite (together perhaps with almost

everyone else) in a given society should fall under its spell and be unwilling

to think for themselves, and the absence of certain civil liberties in suchcircumstances may, according to the present virtue ethics (and barring

certain forms of total economic determinism), be deplorable and unjust for

exhibiting/serving (the elite’s) intellectual, rather than any sort of economic,

parasitism. We see, then, that the absence of human dignity and self-

sufficiency allows of a wide variety of social patterns and causes, but the fact

that agent-based virtue ethics can make a common charge against all (or at

least all seemingly unjust) anti-democratic social orders clearly supports the

contemporary relevance and plausibility of a Stoic-inspired approach.It is worth noting that even though the present virtue ethics gives the

notion of humandignityamorecentral position than doesutilitarianism, the

latter cannot be said entirely to lacka notion of dignity, and since, moreover,

Kantian ethics and political philosophy accord a place to human dignity just

as great as, though in many ways different from, that accorded it by our

Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, it might be quite helpful at this point to say

something comparatively about the place of the idea of dignity in utilitari-

anism, kantianism, and our virtue theory.

To begin with, utilitarianism does make use of something like a notion

of human dignity insofar as i t insists, with respect to the calculations of

consequences that determine the rightness or admirability of any given

action, that the well-being or pleasure or preferences of each individual

counts equally with that of any other (”each person to count for one”). AsDworkin points out in Taking Rights Seriously,both utilitarianism and his

ow n form of liberalism embody an ideal of according equal respect to every

individual-they just differ in their conceptionsor theories of (what it is to

accord) equal re~pect.2~tilitarianism’s ideal of equal respect is to be foundin the way it sums up consequences. An aristocratic system ofmorals might

give greater weight to the happiness of a duke or a king than to that of

commoners, but utilitarianism insists that everyonemust count equally in its

calculations, and this represents equal respect for everyone in a way that




weightings in favor of the aristocracy or king do not.

A similar point can be made in regard to the idea of human dignity.

Utilitarianism, we can say, respects the dignity of each human by treating no

human as more important initscalculations than any other. However, in onerespect utilitarianism isvery inadequate as a means of expressing either the

ideal of equal respect for every person or the ideal of human dignity. Most

forms of utilitarianism treat the pleasure or pain of animals as just as relevant

to their calculations as that of humans, so if utilitarianism accords equal

respect, it seems to be equal respect to all sentient creatures; and if it gives

expression to an ideal of dignity, the dignity it honors issuch as to be shared

by all sentient creatures, rather than constituting any sort of ideal of (distinc-

tively) human dignity.By contrast, the present virtue ethics embodies ideals of dignity that as

a whole serve to distinguish humans from animals. To be sure, the fable

about the fox, nearly starving but free, who prefers such an existence to the

chained but comfortable existence of a dog can be thought to show that the

distinction between motivational parasitism and the dignity of self-reliance

can be made, anthropomorphically, within the animal kingdom. But the

dignity of thinking for oneself and autonomously making one’s own deci-

sions has little or no foothold with regard to animals. By and large, thedignity we have been speaking of in articulating the present conception of

justice is, considered as a whole, a dignity that many humans lack and that

othersshare only withother humans (or other rational beings wedon’t know

about). What is more interesting, at this point, would be briefly to compare

and contrast the dignity at stake in our virtue-ethical account of social justice

with Kant’s powerful alternative conception of human dignity as it applies

to the political sphere.

The Kantian idea of a dignity or worth that is beyond price derives from

Stoic ideas, but makes its owndistinctive reference to the noumenal charac-

ter of human moral freedom and rationality. The good will, making the

morally right conscientious choice, has dignity, but dignity and worth also

attaches to human beings in virtue of their capacity for such choice. Accord-

ing to Kant, both moralIy good choice and the capacity for it must be seen in

the light of our noumenal status, and our dignity consists in our being, as

moral persons, above nature.**

By contrast, of course, our virtue-ethical view of human dignity makes

no such demands. It holds that dignity can vary from person to person,

depending, for example, on whether the person is a parasite or has a life of

and on her own. But Kant too allows variation in how morally good people

are and thus in the dignity or worth that is displayed or exemplified in

morally good choice. However, he also places great weight on our capacity



24 MICHAEL SLOTE

for moral choice as a basis of dignity relevant to political values, and

although our account here of social justice can certainly allow that even

people who have let themselves become economic or intellectual parasites

may well retain a distinctively human (though not noumenal) capacity forself-reliance, it is actual self-reliance or self-sufficiency that plays the crucial

role in its account of how democratic ideals and social justice are and can be

realized. (However, there may be some minimal degree of actual self-

reliance in l e t t ing someone dictate to one.)

For Kant, it isbecause people have the capacity for choosing morally that

we cannot rightly treat them as mere means. Even morally bad individuals

must be treated in the light of their capacity for moral goodness, and if the

denial of democratic liberties and powers involves treating peopleasmeans,then that, according to the "End in Itself" (or "Formula of Humanity")

version of the Categorical Imperative, is what is wrong with and unjust

about traditional monarchies and the like. But this form of political argu-

ment, this way of approaching social justice, rests on a picture of human

nature that relies on the idea of the noumenal, an idea that most of us would

beintellectuallyuncomfortablewith. And without reference to thenoumenal,

it is not clear how a distinctively Kantian approach can or should proceed.

One can still say that where there is the capacity for rationality and

morality, there isalso dignity and a right not to be treated as a mere means,

but if we are thinking of things more empirically, we run into problems about

morons, psychopaths, and others who seem to lack one or both of these

capacities. When one thinks of political values under the aegis of the "End

in Itself" formulation of the Categorical Imperative, it is natural to think of

the dignity Kant ascribes to all humans as giving rise'to a right not to be

treatedasa mere means and then, derivatively, to certain particular familiar

democratic rights. Then, if one ties dignity to certain empirical human

characteristics, one avoids the noumenal, certainly, but there is the risk thatone will assign rights to too narrow or too broad a group of individuals or

sentient beings. However, that is a risk many political philosophers have

been willing to take.

Notice that Kant's view, whose fundamental ethical category is often

said to be the notion of duty, seems to be able to accommodate the idea of

human or political rights. But no less is this possible for our agent-based

account of political morality. To begin with, and as Allen Buchanan has

pointed out, the language of social justice and of political rights are by andlarge intertran~latable.~~ne has a right to something if and only if one

possessesitasa matter of justice,and what weearliercharacterizedasunjust,

e.g., on the part of an elite can also readily be viewed as a violation of rights,

according to our agent-based view. Where ruling elites defend their leisure



VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 2s

and power by preventing or repressing freedom to criticize or to organize

unions or to have a say in who governs, we have seen that they act unjustly

and that the institutions that exist are unjust. But we can just as easily tie the

notion of rights to self-sufficiency and non-parasitism and say that one hasa right not to be treated in a certain way (e.g., denied freedom of speech) if

such treatment exhibits parasitism and thus the opposite of self-sufficiency

on the part of an elite or if full self-sufficiency can be exemplified only if

institutions are set up for the prevention of such treatment. (Note that in the

light of what was said earlier, one may in some circumstances have no right

to unionize beyond the right not to be prevented from unionizing if one so

chooses.)

But now we have another whole side of social justice to attend to. Wehave so far ignored issues of equality and rights connected with issues of

equality, and although, once a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian values

has been offered, we can say about rights to (greater or lesser) equality what

we have just been saying about civil and political rights, it is high time we

spelled out the account itself.

3. Virtue-Ethical Egalitarianism

In order to treat relations between justice and equality in agent-based

terms, it is necessary to bring in another aspect of self-sufficiency, one

familiar from our earlier discussion but largely dormant, so far, in our

discussion of social justice/admirability.

We earlier said that there was something admirable or virtuous in the

self-sufficiency that is exhibited in an attitude of satisfactionwith, and desire

for no more than, what one has already had or enjoyed and in a generosity

that gives out of a sense of having enough or more than enough, a super-abundance, of what one wants. We also saw that a larger or longer-term

commitment of generosity can be the sign of an even greater, more secure

sense of sufficiency or superabundance, and we must now draw on such

considerations in order to give a virtue-ethicalcharacterizationof egalitarian

ideals and the role they play in a proper theory of social justice.

The issue of equality in connection with social justice arises most force-

fully and relevantly for societies where conditions of moderate scarcity

obtain, societies like those in the West nowadays where there is an economic

surplus beyond what is necessary for people’s survival and the issue can

arise of how fairly that surplus is distributed within the given society. In

some measure, I think the (instrumental and in some circumstances consti-

tutive) conditions of social justice already set out in this essay have a

substantial equalizing tendency, because the democratic institutions or



26 MICHAEL SLOTE

powers and liberties that we have defended-. g., universal suffrage, free

speech, organization into unions-operate as a brake on any ruling class or

elite's penchant for running things entirely to itsown economic and political

advantage. But the existence of such institutions is nonetheless arguablycompatible with society's operating on a meritocratic or libertarian basis,

with thoseleft behind in the race for good jobs and economic rewards largely

dependent on the charity of the more successful for anything that takes them

beyond, or even to, a subsistence level-consider the possibility, for ex-

ample, of widespread unemployment and no welfare or unemployment

insurance to mitigate that condition.

Ina libertarian meritocracy, then, there will tend to be vast differencesof

economic benefits or well-being unless there is an extraordinary amount ofcharity donated individually or through corporations or other organizations

(the Church), yet the spiritof competition seems likely to foster a "devil take

the hindmost" attitude toward those who lose out in the struggle for

prestigious jobs, high pay, and even steady wages. (Iam aware that many

will not see themselves as engaged in such a struggle.) Such a society is far

more likely to display a kind of unconstrained greed and an obsession with

upward mobility that are by and large incompatible with the kind of

charitable giving that would lessen the tendency to large socio-economicdifferences in any significant way.

When a meritocratic society is greedy, its upper echelons obsessed with

and seemingly insatiable with regard to their ow n power, prestige, and

wealth, it lacks the moderation and generosity characteristic of those who

are not, so to speak, slaves of the enjoyment or possession of the good things

of this world, those whose desires for such things are limited and who at a

certain point are satisfied with what they have (had) and feel they have

enough to spare for others. So our earlier discussion of the ideal of self-

sufficiency,as t relates not so much to making one's own way in the world,

to self-reliance, as to the self-sufficiency of not feeling the need or desire to

have or enjoy more and more, gives us a basis for ethical criticism of typical

meritocracy. The better-off members of such a societywil ldisplay a lack of

self-sufficiency, a greediness and lack of generosity, that makes them ethi-

cally unadmirable or deplorable, and our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, which

bases its evaluations of societies and groups on the evaluation of their

members, can then say that such a society is very far from being ethically

admirable or just. (By the same transpositions we saw operating earlier, it

can also say that such a society denies some people their rights.)

But couldn't there be a libertarian meritocracy where greed was not the

rule and where charity largely took of the edge of distinctions of success and

salary?I really doubt it-don 't you?But weneednotbasewhat wearesaying




on such an assumption. A society where such charity really became the

(statistical) norm would arguably be far more just than the society described

above,and our virtue ethicscan characterize that difference n itsown terms,

obviously, because the charitable meritocracy and its meritocrats wouldprecisely be less subject to the accusation of greed and ungenerosity. Given

moderate scarcity, those who have the better jobs in a meritocracy reallywill

be displaying immoderateness if they seek to keep everything they have for

themselves and wish to gain further power and wealth. But if they don’t,

then the claim that the meritocratic class or the better-off members of the

meritocratic society display a deplorable lack of self-sufficiency and/or act

unjustly is substantially mitigated and so too is the accusation that the

society itself is, froma virtue-ethical standpoint,unjust (or,given the earlier-mentioned transpositions, that it denies the worse-off their rights).

But we need at this point to make a further distinction regarding self-

sufficiency in order to see that there is also something unjust and rights-

denying and less than fully admirable about any libertarian meritocracy, if

such a thing is possible, where everyone well off is always very charitable

toward the less successful and less fortunate. Notice that as we have

described it, such a society contains no institutions that take the giving of

such charity out of the hands of the usual donors. They give, but, as with the

lady of the manor who brings soup to sick or indigent families, the giving is

entirely at their discretion. But, you say, if everyone gives, there may be

social pressure to give and this undercuts the idea of total discretion. Yes,

perhaps it does, but if we bring in the hope or assumption of such social

pressure, that may well be because we feel that there is something less

generous about a society where charity is given that doesn’t tie itsownhands

and those of its members with regard to such giving. It is somehow less

generous if one gives to others but entirely reserves to oneself the right or

decision to stop giving at any future moment one pleases. For as Imentioned

earlier, there seems to be something especially generous about a long-term

commitment to giving, as opposed to momentary acts of generosity; and the

distinction can be well be accounted for in terms of the notion of self-

sufficiency. If one feels not only enough for the present, but in secure

possession of enough, or indeed of a superabundance, in regard to a more or

less indefinite stretch of the future, one displays a greater (sense of) self-

sufficiency than if one merely thinks one has enough or more than enough

for the moment, and the kind of longer-term commitment to giving that we

find, for example, in love and friendship is thus more admirable than mere

momentary giving, because it evinces greater and more admirable self-

sufficiency. (Of course, someone more securely self-sufficient may also

display momentary generosity, but the latter doesn’t exhibif the greater self-



28 MICHAEL SLOTE

sufficiency that lies behind it and isn’t, according to the theory, as admirable

as what does.)

But institutions or laws that take charitable giving out of the hands of

members of a given society-not absolutely, but at least for the foreseeablefuture-are another instance of the kind of long-term commitment to giving

that evinces more admirable self-sufficiency than momentary acts of gener-

osity or a succession of such. Laws that provide for social welfare payments,

progressive taxation, and the like are precisely of this kind, and thus any

society with such lawsand institutions that back them u p will, other things

being equal, count as more just, than a libertarian meritocracy whose

members retain the discretion to give or not to give charitably.

Moreover, even where there is strong social pressure to give substan-tially to charity, what the worse-off receive is still chanty and seen as such,

whereas in a society with laws providing for progressive taxation and social

welfare, those who receive such benefits can regard what they receive as a

matter of legal right and, far from being beholden to particular individuals,

can see themselves as benefiting from decisions and arrangements that,

assuming suffrage and majority rule, they themselves have had a part in

making. This seems psychologically far more compatible with individual

self-respect on the part of those worse-off individuals who receive relevant

benefits, and so on grounds ofgene rosi fy fself and in the terms to which our

agent-based conception of justice wishes to appeal, there is reason to prefer

to see the differences that arise from economic competition reduced via the

long-term commitment of laws rather than through the similarly long-term

inertia of social custom and pressure, and thus to see the institution of liberal

democratic social arrangements in place of a libertarian meritocracy, how-

ever benign.

This accords well with what many of us are antecedently inclined to

believe about what kind of society is ethically preferableor most just, and it

has further implications that should briefly be noted, If, for example, there

is to be progressive taxation that expresses the sense of having enough on the

part of the better-off members of a society, then there need to be effective

laws that make them secure in what they do have, in what remains o them,

laws against stealing that apply equally to all members of the society.

(Where, as often occurs,such laws effectively apply only to the worse-off, we

have yet another expression of greed rather than generosity on the part off

those who are better-off.) Furthermore, the possibility cannot be ruled out

that a virtue-ethically just society might have laws that prohibited forms of

behavior that at least on certain occasions would not count as individualis-

tically criticizable or wrong according to the same virtue ethics. But the

possibility of such cases is hardly limited to virtue ethics and has long been




familiar from discussions of the connection between law and morality: e.g.,

intuitively speaking, there is nothing morally criticizable in exceeding the

justly instituted legal speed limit in order to get someone to the hospital in

a medical emergency.It is also interesting, at this point, to compare what has just been said

against meritocracy with Rawls’s criticismsinA Theoryoffustice.Rawls says

that meritocracy fails to conform to the dictates of his ”difference principle’’

and as such fails to embody an ideal of fraternity that the latter can be seen

as giving expression to. He thinks fraternity can be understood in terms of

the generous spirit of sharing that one expects or hopes to find in families,a

feeling natural to family life and not imposed by larger legal/social institu-

tions, to the effect that one wants to benefit only if other members of one’sfamily also benefit (though perhaps to a lesser degree).30 Rawls’s wording

in this passage taken by itself suggests something a bit weaker than the

difference principle: his description of fraternity doesn’t tie it to a desire to

benefit only to the extent that other family members reach the highest level

that is possible through one’s own good fortune. And it is not at all clear that

family spirit and real fraternity require such a stronger spirit of sharing.

What does seem obvious is that Rawls’s fraternity and the legal enact-

ments to which it gives rise can also be viewed as a kind of generosity on thepart of society and/or its better-off members (to the extent the latter by and

large accept and support those enactments rather than trying to undermine

them-if they do seek to undermine them, then on our account, the society

is lacking in admirability and justice, and, given the power of money, neither

will it be well-ordered or conform to Rawls’s overall social ideal.) And just

as Rawls’sview does not require absolute equality, but has strongly egalitar-

ian implications, the present account of social justice is strongly egalitarian

for reasons we have mentioned, and indeed there may be reason to suspectthat it will recommend a degree of equality fairly close to, possibly even

greater than, anything that follows from Rawls’s understanding of frater-

n i t ~ . ~ l

One reason for suspecting this is the way in which Rawls’s employment

of the idea of fraternity undergirds or reinforces the contractually arrived at

difference principle with an argument from (something like Humean)

natural feeling and natural virtue. Our account of social justice also appeals

to something that can without impropriety be called natural virtue, for

although many people are not generous or generous-spirited, still when

people are generous from self-sufficiency and a sense of superabundance,

they need not be consulting conscience, convention, or ethical principles,

and in that sense their virtue comes naturally. Of course, it may be rarer to

find people willing to share with poor people outside theirownfamilies than



30 MICHAEL SLOTE

with worse-off family members, but it doesn’t follow that there is anything

less natural or less than natural about it, and Rawls must certainly be aware

that somefamilies don’t exhibit his kind of fraternity, not just some societies.

But the point is that for Rawls this natural or familiar family spirit andgenerosity is the proper basis for larger social arrangements, and our virtue-

ethical conception of justice can likewise say that the self-sufficiency and

sense of having more than enough-enough to spare-that helps to launch

or at least preserve the love and friendship that in turnunderpins family life

can also serve as a standard for the evaluation and criticism of larger social

groups and social arrangements. As I have indicated, i t seem that such

considerations can be brought to bear in defense of liberal egalitarism in

much the way that Rawls’s defense of the difference principle can be seen to

do.J2

However, one doubt will now perhaps seem particularly pressing in the

light of what we said earlier about the institutionalization, through law or

even through force of custom, of anything amounting to social welfare. Ifpeople willingly live on chanty or on the legally instituted dole, they are

(what we might call) economic parasites from below,and if parasitism in the

well-off is to be condemned on grounds having to do with the ideal of self-

sufficiency, it must be condemned in the welfare poor. Do I then want to say

that social welfare is unjust or ethically deplorable, but that if the rich refuse

to allow it, that too might be unjust or deplorable?

Not quite. The term “self-reliance” has both a motivational sense and an

achievement or success sense, and from the standpoint of an agent-based

account but also more generally, the term ”parasite” applies with greatest

force only in connection with the motivational sense. So if someone really

does desire to be self-reliant (success sense) but has, in fact, no other way to

keep alive than by accepting charity or welfare, we may not consider her a

parasite, and in any event our agent-based view will treat her motivation,rather than her success,as the basis for moral evaluation. Such a person will

presumably prefer workfare to welfare, but if there really are possible

economic conditions of moderate scarcity under which the worst-off cannot

be provided for in any way other than by charity or passive (non-workfare)

formsof welfare, then it will be ungenerous andunjust if the better-off don’t

provide such help (through relevant institutions).

The same point applies to the problem of individual handicapwhal-

lenges. We are learning more and more about how handicapped people andthe legally insane can be helped to useful, productive lives, and there may be

something to criticize in earlier social attitudes that, one might say,

ungenerously, condemned the challenged to total uselessness by not even

trying to devise ways in which they could be useful. But where someone




really is incapable of doing any useful work or performing any useful

services, this may not involve any parasitism or failure of self-reliancein the

motivational sense relevant to the present theory of justice. (If an irrerusably

helpless person feels temble about her total dependency, that may involvea realistic sense that she lacks one of life's goods, but from the standpoint of

our theory it can be said that such a person is mistaken, if she feels guilty

about not being able to do more, and her moral illusion is itself, ironically,

evidenceof and perhaps even constitutes admirable motivation in this area,

thereby freeing her from any justifiable moral or ethical criticism.)

Ouragent-based theory of justice thussays that where there isdeliberate

or willing parasitism (and this doesn't require the parasite to recognize that

she is a parasite; she need only prefer to act in a way that obviously countsas parasitical, but that is compatible with not wanting to face the fact that she

is a parasite), people and therefore society are to that degree less admirable.

Thus welfare cheating and the leisured existence of the rich are chosen as

such and constitute injustices according to our view,%but this doesn't mean

that those who really prefer to be independent but cannot manage to

accomplish this (and this may include some children and adolescents) are

criticizable in itsterms,and that, Ibelieve, is a desirable or at least a plausible

result.It also follows from the present view that if the worst-off in a given just

society came (gradually) to prefer passive welfare to workfare and/or if the

well-off in that society eventually became restive under progressive taxa-

tion, then the society would no longer be just, even if the institutions of

workfare and/or progressive taxation-the husk or shell of justicewere

somehow to remain in place for a while. One thing that seems attractive

about an agent-based approach to social justice is the way it conceives the

justice of any society as dependent on the "(ethical) soul" of that society as

embodied/realized in the persons who make up the society. But that

precisely means that the justiceof a given society cannot simply be "read off"

from the way institutions are at a given time (from the fact that institutions

are as they would be if the society were just)."

Let me, then, by way of conclusion say a little more, briefly, about the

overall structureof theaccount of justicedefended in these pages. The theory

we have offered begins with a view of how ethically to evaluate individuals

and their actions and uses this as the basis for its larger-scale social evalua-

tions. That stands in marked contrast with Rawls's ethical views, where a

theory of the justice of the basic structure of society is supposed to precede

any account of individualistic moral norms. It also is the opposite at least of

Plato's procedure in the Republic, where justice "writ large" in society or the

state is treated as a heuristic for a correct understanding of justice in the



32 MICHAEL SLOTE

individual. To that extent Plato is working (to use John McDowell’s conve-

nient phrase)from oufside n. Yet when one focuses not on the analogy; with

the state, but simply on what Plato says about individual justice itself, it is

apparent that he understands right or just action as derivative (in the orderof being, not necessarily in the order of knowing) from an inner state of

justice, and, under that aspect or to that extent, Plato is clearly working frominside out .

By contrast, the present defense of liberaldemocratic values moves

consistently from inside out. It bases its evaluations of actions on or in

evaluations of the inner life of the individual, and it also derives its evalua-

tion of any given institution or society from its ethical judgments about the

individuals init.%

And thisis

a reason for regarding the present view of

justice as more purely agent-based than Plato’s ethical views. However, our

view is not the only treatment of social justice to base the evaluation of social

justice on the evaluation of individuals and/or individual behavior. Nozick‘s

libertarian conception of justice is essentially of this kind; and certain recent

and very interesting attempts by Kantians/kantians to deal with questions

of social justice in terms that have their original home in Kant’s account of

individualistic morality-onora O”ei1l’s view, for example, that capitalis-

tic institutions can be criticized for treating workers as mere means-also

work from inside out in this way.% And I think there isno reason, before we

begin to work out one or another conception of social justice, to assume that

we have to base individual justice/morality on larger scale evaluations

rather than vice versa. The test of our account of justice depends, rather, on

its theoretical and intuitive merits as compared with other conceptions of

justice. And I might just mention at this point that the agent-based account

we have offered of justice wifhingiven societies seems naturally extensible

to issues of international justice as well-though there is no space to discuss

the matter further here.Having now seen that a virtue ethicsseekingrelevance to contemporary

thinking has no need to borrow a political philosophy from outside itsown

traditions, virtue ethicists must nonetheless eventually consider how to

integrate a virtue-ethical political philosophy into an endogenous general

account of ethical phenomena.But whether we should at this point combine

an Aristotelian virtue ethics of the individual (perhaps along lines devel-

oped in From Morality to Virtue,but highlighting the considerations of self-

sufficiency hat that book only occasionally discusses) with a Stoic-inspiredaccount of social justice or whether we should prefer a consistently Stoic or

Stoic-inspired approach overall to such an internal hybrid is a question best

left to a future occasion.37Under either eventuality, virtue ethics will have

shown its capacity to function as a total ethical view that is far from




anachronistic or irrelevant to currentday ethical theory. If any plausible

total ethics needs to be able to account for democratic and liberal ideals and

values, then virtue ethics isa worthy alternative to the Kantian and utilitar-

ian/consequentialist views that have for so long dominated the scene inmoral and political philosophy.

Notes

*I want to thank Bill Galston and Jerry Schneewind for helpful suggestions.

'SeeA Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971,p. 512.

*Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1988.

3Universityof Chicago Press, 1980. In his recent Liberal Purposes (Cambridge U. Press, 19911,

Galston defends liberalism, but not in a distinctively Aristotelian way.

'Of course, it is possible that a distinctively Aristotelian justification for liberal democracy

may someday be successfully formulated, but in the light of history this seems highly

unlikely. Recently, Martha Nussbaum in "Aristotelian Social Democracf' (in R. B.huglass, G. Mara, and H. S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good, Routledge, 1990)

argues that Aristotle advocated a relatively egalitarian social democracy among citizens

of the state. But since Aristotle thinks that in the best state only those with non-manual

occupations, leisure, and virtue are qualified to be citizens, the socialdemocracy is far

narrower in extent than what we normally think of under that title. Nussbaum clearly

believes that this defense of social democracy canbe extended via Aristotelian consider-

ations to all the people of (permanently living in) a given society, but she doesn't make itclear how she proposes to do this. (See, sp., pp. 239f. of her article.)

Ssee John Rist, Human Value: A Study of Ancient Philosophical Ethics, Leiden: Brill, 1982.

Lof course, both Plato and Aristotle appealed to ideas about self-sufficiency in a number of

ways and their views had a great influence upon Stoic doctrines, but neither made self-

sufficiency as central to individual virtue as the Stoics did, and the view to be offered here

grounds its account of social justice on self-sufficiencyas a virtue of individuals.

'One certainly shouldn't say: the man in the bar is satisfying his own desire to be generous and

is possibly gaining pleasure from acting generously,sohe is not giving anything up and

his motivation is hardly altruistic.As Bishop Butler taught us, such arguments prove too

much.T h e erm "autonomy" is naturallyused both in connectionwith earning one's ownliving and

with thinking for oneself/making one's own decisions, but the term has so many other

uses in ethical theory that I think it best largely to avoid it in favor of the term "self-

reliance."

91n his Italian Journey,Goethe mentions visiting the houses of some rich Italian noblewomen

who were so pampered that they had practically lost the use of their legs and had to be

carried up and down stairs.

'OFor interesting criticismsof Aristotle's depreciation of (manual) work, see Terence Irwin's

Aristotle's First Principles, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, sects. 221-22. But Irwin makes no

connectionbetween leisureand the lackof self-sufficiency.Sucha connection is mentionedor at least hinted at by Sarah Broadie in Ethics With Aristotle (Oxford, 1991,pp. 424f.); but

she doesn't try to draw out its implications in anything like the direction taken in the

present essay.

I might just add at this point that the idealization of work that has developed recently in

Western culture and that I am calling upon here need not preclude a Marxian (type of)

critique of the deadening or dehumanizing quality of much repetitive labor. But such



34 MICHAEL SLOTE

critiques often ignoreor downplay the fact that even purely repetitive laborhas an asped

of nobilityor admirability to the extent it representsa self-reliant adult making his or her

own way in the world. (Forsimplicity, I won't now try to make sense of child labor in the

present virtueethical terms.)

l1Seealso Rousseau's Emile.I2InA Theory ofFredom, Cambridge Univiversity Press, 1988,p. 213,StanleyBenn explicitly

uses the term "parasite" to describe intellectual/volitional non-self-reliance.

I3F0rdiscussion of how those who are volitional parasites can be said to allow themselves to

operate as the ',mere instruments" of others and of how pressure is put on people to

become volitionally/intelletuallynon-self-reliant, see Benn, op. cit., esp. p. 194."For example, in "Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics" (PoliticalTheory 12,

1984,p.343),George Kateb says: "One'sdignity resides in being, to some importantdegree,

a person of one's own creating, making, choosing...'This point ismadebyH.. PatoninTheCategoricaZImperutive, ifthedition,Hutchinson,l965,

p. 189.Wist (op. cif., pp. 1,30-32,,1-47,70,112f., 151f.l makes it clear that the Stoics, despite their

views about the "divine spark," regarded individual dignity as contingent on individual

effort and variable among human beings.

"Aristotle's virtue ethics is arguably not agent-based in this sense, because of the emphasis

he places on the virtuous man's perceiving what it is right or noble for him to do in various

circumstances.But Plato's idea that right action is what servesor enhances the (indepen-

dently specified)health, harmony, orvirtue of the soul doesseem to make the evaluation

of inner states prior to that of actions. Perhaps the clearest example of agent-basing in

recent times can be found in James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory. For M h e r

discussion of agent-basing and the differing forms of virtue ethics, seemy From Moralityto Virtue, New York Oxford, 1992,esp. Ch.5.

'?%&ties can be more or less admirable for Teasons having little to do with justice:e.g., for

producing great composers generation after generation or for the gracefulness of their

manners. But I shall confine the discussion to considerations that, a t least from a virtue-

ethical standpoint, arguably bear on issues of social justice.

19According o Man , any landlord is a 'louse," a "parasite on capitalist production." (See

Theo~iesf Surplus Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972, vol. 2, p. 328.)And he

elsewhere says similar things about financiersof capital or what we call coupon clippers.

But he accuses industrial capitalists not of parasitism but of exploitation. Although the

Marxian notion of exploitation has interesting connections o what Iam calling parasitism,I shall rely on the latter notion, which fits in better with agent-basing and is less likely to

invoke Marxian views in the midst of the arguments I actually want to make.

*% lster's Mnking Senseof Man, Cambridge University Press,1985,esp. pp. 413,420,428,505.

?'Elster points out that Marx frequently confuses what serves the interests of the rulers with

what they consciouslyorunconsciouslydo in order to advance those interests. Ideology,

for example, might benefit rulers, but be a product of faulty reasoning or sourgrapes on

the part of the lower orders. The present account of justice attempts to avoid such

confusion.For example, I am saying that certain ideological institutions count as unjust

only if the ruling classes are, consciouslyor subliminally, using them to advance their

interests and, in particular, preserve their prerogatives of leisure.

Wnwillingness to participate in the political process may count as politically parasitic

analogously with the way in which, for example, making false promisesor failing to keep

them is parasitic on a long accumulating and beneficial practice of promising. In that

degree, requiring people to vote (as is done in some countries) may be just or a condition

of justice. If those who don't want the vote, in a traditional monarchy, are expressing a




political aziness, then they may beacting unjustly by being unwilling to do their fair share,

and the absence of the vote, for example, might be unjust for what it expressed about the

political parasitism of the lower classes, rather than for what it showed about the

economically parasitic elite.

uFor an interesting discussionof how, in particular, labor union organization, the absence ofmonopoly, and respecting the "rights" of minorities all help to prevent exploitation/

parasitism, seeStephen Worland, "Economicsand Justice," in R. Cohen, ed.,Justice, N. Y.:

Plenum Press, 1986, esp. pp. 62ff.

"Bringing baskets of food to the poor in times of sickness s a kind of sopthrown to the ideal

of self-reliant non-parasitism, and to the extent upper class women and men managed to

convince themselves by such occasional charitable activities that they were not living as

parasites, the ethical deplorability of their basic parasitism is compounded with that of

self-deception in the face of presumably unpleasant facts about themselves. This is but one

exampleof how the desire for ease and comfort can contend with an aspiration most of us

feel toward self-sufficiency (think of how insistent many teenagers are on making theirown money and doing things for themselves, even when they might have things easier if

they allowed their parents to do all the things the parents are willing to do for them).

=Mill makes this point in various places including the Logic (first edit., pp. 557f.) and

"Representative Government."

%ee Chapter 3 ('The Ideally Best Polity"); also his Political Economy V, 11,sect. 6 and passim.27SeeDworkin's Taking Rights Seriously, Harvard, 1978, esp. ch. 12.

"If we thinkof Kant's metaphysicsof noumena as fundamentallyan "asif" metaphysics, hen

we should say, instead, that as moral beings we must regard ourselves as having a status

above/beyond nature and a special dignity or worth consequent upon that status. There

is more to be said, but this is not the time to say it.29seehis "Justiceas Reciprocity versus SubjectCentered Justice," Philosophyand Public Affairs

1990,pp. 227-52. Incidentally, our agent-based theory of justice and rights is not based on

reciprocity in the sense criticized by Buchanan in his article.

3osee Rawls's A Theory of Justicz, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 105f.

3'A more or less egalitarian principle like the difference principle could be put into effect

through (piecemeal) legislation or actually be enshrined in a country's constitution,

though this too would require supporting legislation.(Onhe constitutionalizing of the

differenceprinciple or something like it, see oshua Cohen and Joel Rogers's O n Democracy,

N. Y.: Penguin, 1985, pp. 157ff.) In that case, the reasons Rawls gives for thinking the

difference principle (among others) can function as he just basis of a well-ordered society

can be harnessed to our virtue-ethical conceptionof justice.

However, in "Social Justice" (Journalof Social Philosophy XX, 1989, pp. 72f.), Bernard Williams

says that American social philosophy has tended to ignore the problem of getting to the

ideal state and concentrated, instead, on the character and institutions required tomaintainsocial ustice-and certainly we find this tendency in Rawls'semphasison well-orderedness

and the very little he has to say about building the just society. The present essay isopen

to the very same criticism, and indeed from the standpoint of a commitment to social

justice, it is unsatisfying to be able to say little or nothing about how social justice is most

likely to be achieved. But that may be because theory taken by itself may be unsatisfying

for someone with practical hopes and aspirations, not because the theory itself is at fault

as a theory of justice. Moreover, as Cohen and Rogers point out in their Chapter 6, a

theoreticallydefended picture of what a just social order would be like is practically

relevant and potentially useful, because it gives us something to aim at and primes us to

be alert for certain justice-building opportunities, if and when they arise. Of course

theories differ among themselves, and no single justification of democracy or relative

equality is likely to gain the support of the majority of moral/political theorists; but to the



36 MICHAEL SLOTE

extent the theories (or most theories)convergeon something like the difference principle,

their foundational differences may appear less practically debilitating and aspirations to

work toward social justice may become better focused through having an agreed-upon

ultimate target of legislation and/or constitutional amendment. (Compare Rawls's meth-

odology of overlapping consensus in "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,"Philosophy and Public Affairs 14,1985, esp. pp. 248-50; also his remarks inA Theoryoflustiw,pp. 315-20, about the ways in which various "mixed conceptions" of justice might

ultimately have to appeal to the difference principle.)

=For defense of the idea that liberal democratic egalitarianism need not commit itself to

absolute equality or even to something as strongly egalitarian as the difference principle

seeAmy Gutmann's DemocmticEducation, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1962,p. 262and also

her Liberal Equality, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 149.

=In the case of most welfare dependents and "chiselers," the injustice is far less clear, because

of the injustices that have been done to them. People brought up in wretched poverty and

in a milieuwhereeducationalopportunitieseitherareunavailableor made toseem uselessmay despair of economic success and perhaps understandably take the course of least

resistance by living on welfare and preferring not to get a job. But to the extent their own

society's lack of generosity is responsible for their impoverished circumstances, any

virtueethical injustice there is in their actions and life-style may be ethically mitigated.

Moreover, if we think of what society has done to them or failed to do for them as blighting

their human potential,asdamging them, then their welfaredependency and cheating (and

who knows what else) may seem like "getting their own back" and "recouping something

from life" and thus possibly more compensatory than parasitical and unjust. Here, the

contrast with parasitism from above, where we find people who have been brought up

with every advantage living entirely off the labor of those who have not, couldn't bestarker.

MTheconnectionoftheseideas oKant'sideaofaKingdomofEndsand o thedisputebetween

(e.g.1 Rawls and Nozick on the importance of actual, rather than hypothetical, consent is

an interesting question, but best left to a future occasion. (I am indebted for helpful

suggestions here to Larry Dobbs and Scott Gelfand.)

Tompare Brian Barry's claim (in TheLiberal Theory of lustice, Oxford, 1973, p. 126) that "a

liberal...must hold that societies ought to be organized in such a way as to produce the

largest possible proportion of people with an admirable type of character...."Incidentally, one doesn't want to say that the justice of a society depends on every member's

displaying all the forms of self-sufficiency we have discussed. But the kinds of depen-dency/parasitism/greed we have considered are not simply a matter of individual

failings hereand the re -they have a structural character and certain infectious endencies.

More needs tobe said on this topic, but I might just point out that the present view doesn't

have the implication that absolute monarchy is juster than oligarchy because parasitism

from above is less widespread in it. In an oligarchical form of government, after all, more

people play a creative, determinative role in deciding political issues, and more self-

reliance in thought and choice, therefore, is presumably to be found. How these opposing

factors weigh against one another is a matter of fine tuning and further discussion beyond

the scope and programmatic intentions of the present essay.

Jdsee Onora 0"eill's Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy,Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 122ff.

T o ra discussion of social justice that combines Aristotelian and Stoic/Kantian elements,see

Martha Nussbaum's "Human Functioningand SocialJustice," PoliticalTheory20,1992, pp.

202-46. Nussbaum's essay does not, however, focus on the problem of justifying demo-

cratic institutions.

the agent-based theory of justice presented here is, from an historical standpoint, a hybrid of



VIRTUE ETHICS A N D DEMOC RATIC VALUES 37

Stoic ideas and resonant borrowings from later philosophy, but asa thoretical account it is

highly unified, since it is based on the single leading notion of self-sufficiency.Having this

bird in hand, I have not, however, explored the possibility of giving a persuasive defense

of liberal democratic ideals on a more purely Stoic basis. Given Stoicism's historical

reliance on metaphysical assumptions (and arguments from naturalness) that wouldnowadays seem highly suspect, sucha task seems a daunting one. But in work that has just

come to my attention, Julia Annas seems to be moving in something like this direction.See

her 'The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others," SocialPhilosophy and Policy 9,1992, pp.

133-48; nd TheMorality of Happiness, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

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Virtue Ethics and Democratic Values