School Wars: Teaching the Moral Sciences

‘LET US first get clear,” I said, “that we are in the right place. This is Political Science 23: Political Obligations.” A young man in the back of the room raised his hand instantly and challenged me: “What do you mean by that?” For the next seven minutes it was virtually hand-to-hand combat, and as far as I could see, nothing of substance had been placed yet on the table. The young man who asked the question never returned for the second day. But the word filtered back to me across the campus: someone had told this fellow that if he conceded even the very first thing I said, he would never be able to work his way out of the argument.

And that is perhaps why the air was crackling with anticipation even in the first moments of the class. The central problem of the course was the nexus between morality and law. The root of law and obligation is the Latin, “ligare,” to bind. The law displaces personal choice with a binding commitment, or a public obligation. The law may forbid us to discriminate on the basis of race in a private business, or it may restrain us from aborting children in the womb. In these instances, the law may commit people to things they find morally repugnant. To ask how that state of affairs can be justified is to raise again the question of whether there really are moral truths, or moral propositions in the strictest sense: propositions about the things that are universally right or wrong, just or unjust, for others as well as oneself. Only if there are propositions of that kind could we ever be justified in displacing, or overriding, personal choice in favor of a uniform, public rule. For in that event, we may be asked, rightly, to forgo our personal preference out of a respect for things that are in principle right or wrong. Once we become aware, for example, that it is truly “wrong” for parents to torture their infants, it becomes comically out of place to conclude that “therefore we ought to give them tax incentives in order to induce them to stop.” When we come to understand the things that are in principle wrong, it becomes radically inapt to assert our “freedom of choice.”

About the Author

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.

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‘LET US first get clear,” I said, “that we are in the right place. This is Political Science 23: Political Obligations.” A young man in the back of the room raised his hand instantly and challenged me: “What do you mean by that?” For the next seven minutes it was virtually hand-to-hand combat, and as far as I could see, nothing of substance had been placed yet on the table. The young man who asked the question never returned for the second day. But the word filtered back to me across the campus: someone had told this fellow that if he conceded even the very first thing I said, he would never be able to work his way out of the argument.

And that is perhaps why the air was crackling with anticipation even in the first moments of the class. The central problem of the course was the nexus between morality and law. The root of law and obligation is the Latin, “ligare,” to bind. The law displaces personal choice with a binding commitment, or a public obligation. The law may forbid us to discriminate on the basis of race in a private business, or it may restrain us from aborting children in the womb. In these instances, the law may commit people to things they find morally repugnant. To ask how that state of affairs can be justified is to raise again the question of whether there really are moral truths, or moral propositions in the strictest sense: propositions about the things that are universally right or wrong, just or unjust, for others as well as oneself. Only if there are propositions of that kind could we ever be justified in displacing, or overriding, personal choice in favor of a uniform, public rule. For in that event, we may be asked, rightly, to forgo our personal preference out of a respect for things that are in principle right or wrong. Once we become aware, for example, that it is truly “wrong” for parents to torture their infants, it becomes comically out of place to conclude that “therefore we ought to give them tax incentives in order to induce them to stop.” When we come to understand the things that are in principle wrong, it becomes radically inapt to assert our “freedom of choice.”