TRUMP THIS

At times, one wants to figure out in a meaningful way why a person acts as he/she does – it’s important to know.  Usually, in such cases, one is not considering reflexive behavior as when a person instinctively ducks an approaching object.  As one digs deeper into the question, one will eventually be led to what that person considers is good or bad.  That is, the ultimate reason for behavior is a normative concern. 

If one is inquiring about a serious behavior, a behavior that affects others in a consequential way, the good and bad character takes on a moral quality.  And finally, if the behavior relates to a power relationship, then one is dealing with a political situation.  As such, there is a civics education connection.

The claim being made in this and following postings – and hopefully sufficiently backed with scholarly findings – is that the nation’s efforts at teaching civics is guided by a political construct.  That construct is called the natural rights construct.  As with any political construct, this one has a narrative representation of what politics is and what politics should be.  This posting addresses the latter, the ideal.

Given this moral character, one is well served in understanding a political construct by beginning with that construct’s ideal, its values or what it considers morally good and bad.  Such an understanding provides a reason for all the construct’s elements, why it believes what it claims to be real or of normative value.  This type of understanding contextualizes the rest of its attributes.

The natural rights construct is not the only construct that bids for the nation’s commitment.  There are others and the natural rights view has not always been the dominant one – a topic for another posting.  There are various issues over which this competition for the nation’s commitment is conducted.  One such issue has been central in America’s constitutional history.

That is, the tension is over which of the following values should be given priority:  liberty or equality.  This has been a recurring issue in the political arguments among Western thinkers and politicians.  More specifically, the debate is one that pits a value for individualism against a value for community.  Liberty represents a commitment to individualism while equality is associated more with community. 

Faced with a question regarding why someone acts politically as he/she does, often at the heart of any such motivation has something to do with what that person believes is more important:  the interest(s) of an individual or the interest(s) of some community or other collective. 

Usually, that sort of inquiry into a social event or condition is looking at a disagreement between or among parties that doesn’t agree about which is more important.  What adds to the difficulty is that participants, with their own sense of which is more important, discuss the issue as if there is agreement on this foundational question.  This usually leads not to collaboration, but to the parties arguing past each other.  

But the central moral question, too often unspoken, relates to:  when reality or policy strives to advance or protect liberty at the expense of equality, or vice versa, which of these ideals is a person willing to sacrifice or minimize to bolster the other?  With President Trump’s just issued budget, a lot of the contention over its provisions is regarding this very choice.  Yet the debate in the media and even on the floor of Congress will not speak to this very question. 

Of course, the advocates do not hold the value of liberty or equality equally, In terms of the biases of natural rights’ adherents, those who are well ensconced in its value structure, liberty is that person’s political trump value; it anchors his/her civic morality.  This does not mean he/she totally abandons equality, necessarily, but its importance is less than the importance of liberty.  As such, he/she values the classical tenets of liberal political thought. 

Fundamentally, liberal thought claims that a person should be free to form and hold his/her own self-defined values and goals in life accompanied with the freedom to pursue those values and goals.  Per John Locke's standard, the right to seek one's value choices is constrained only by the rights of others to do the same.  This principle of a person to be such a free agent has been given a title:  individual sovereignty.[1]  Or as John Locke proclaimed:  “every man [or woman] has a Property in his [her] own Person.”[2] 

Of course, Americans generally agree with such a value.  They generally believe in it and even cherish it.  But is that devotion a trump value in the value structure of a citizen?  In terms of an individual citizen, is liberty his/her trump civic value? 

The question is to what extent is this value held?  For those who do believe liberty to be the trump value, they tend to see government's ultimate function, even its only function, is to insure this ideal of liberty.  They see that the aim of governmental policy should be to ultimately secure individual sovereignty with the least amount of coercion possible.  And any challenge to liberty, as just defined, is naturally of the highest importance. 

The more devoted advocates – the ideologues – apply this priority in defining or evaluating how moral a person is when considering this other person’s civic behavior.  This view is not limited to considerations about public policy, but is cast on the efforts of civics curriculum developers and implementers.  They extend natural rights beliefs to the freedom of students to develop for themselves any set of moral beliefs they deem appropriate if such beliefs do not trump liberty as just defined.  By applying this moral perspective to a civics curriculum, of course, places individual rights as prominent in what is taught.[3] 

Thus, the student is free to adhere to Christian, Judaic, Islamic, secular humanistic, or any other moral set of beliefs if he/she is not forced to do so.  This includes the freedom to follow them in his/her practices if he/she does not interfere with others also doing the same.

Consequently, under these parameters, all other reasonable moral claims have equal validity.  In other words, the natural rights’ moral position is neutral to the clear majority of moral questions.  Or so it logically claims. 

As mentioned above, the natural rights view became dominant in the American political culture.  This was not always the case.  As has been explained in this blog, it began to become the dominant view of government and politics in the years immediately after World War II.

What the nation has experienced in the years since World War II is an ever-increasing individualistic view of morality in general and, more specifically, in its political ideals.  One can detect this bias across the policies of the various social institutions such as schools, churches, and businesses. 

This newer dominance has become part of the nation’s collective consciousness to the point that it no longer is that conscious; it is just the way things are and need to be in the minds of most of the nation’s populous.  How this became the case is an interesting history.  One can readily see this transition by watching featured films from the various years, before and after World War II, on, for example, Turner Classic Movies network.

But before delving into how this perspective affects current political thought, it is useful to capture a sense of how the natural rights construct was introduced into American political thinking.  This will be a topic of subsequent postings.

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[1] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in Delaney The Liberalism-Communitarism Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-38.

[2] Meir Dan-Cohen, Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2002), 296.

[3] Space prohibits a full accounting of this aspect.  Within the ranks of natural rights adherents are believers known as libertarians or followers of such popularized philosophies such as those of Ayn Rand’s objectivism.  Yet, there are other adherents who accommodate more altruistic beliefs and the philosophic ideas of such writers as John Rawls.