Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

Rob Watts, Professor of Social Policy, RMIT University, 26 July 2009, Rob.watts@rmit.edu.au

A beginning point to think with. Late in 2005 the Australian composer Larry Sitsky referred to our times as a kind of new ‘dark ages’. That phrase struck me then as just right.

We live in a time that is not good for politics, public life or public policy. It is a time seemingly marked by evidence of exhaustion and disengagement in our public life and political culture. It is a time Frank Furedi (2005) and others have argued is marked by increasing and widespread cynicism about politics and politicians, and by a pervasive sense that politics, ethical ideas and good policy does not matter any more. It is a time marked by conspicuous failure in the delivery of basic social services like education, health care, housing or public transport which exacerbates already well established inegalitarian social and economic dynamics. We saw as I said in my previous address an extraordinary breakdown in the global economic order fueled by an orgy of debt driven growth, staggering irresponsibility and greed on the part of the global banking system which has lost at least 13 trillion dollars and triggered a major economic crisis. We see too an astonishing failure of intelligence and courage on the part of governments to engage the greatest single challenge now confronting humanity namely pending ecological disaster while governments pursue the chimera of ‘international terrorism’ with misplaced intensity and reckless allocation of resources.

Ours is a time when governments and political parties, along with many of the very large number of important public organizations that make up the community sector, seem to have lost their way.

We see firstly the effects of the rise of managerialism including an excessive reliance on a vocabulary of what Don Watson (in his book Death Sentence) has called ‘weasel words’ leading to a profound lack of clarity about what matters and why. Managerialism sanctions a risk averse culture evident for example in the production of vision statements which are meaningless or codes of ethics which are strong on identifying the bads but weak on identifying the goods. ( Here I am taking Leo Strauss’ advice to stop talking about ‘values’ and to use plain words : ‘Goods’ are ideas, actions or qualities which make life worth living while ‘bads’ are things we should avoid).

Secondly we see the effects of two decades or more of an economic-liberal public policy framework. This framework has elevated market values and rationalities as well as the ethics of possessive individualism at the expense of older ideas of social provision and protection. One effect which has compromised the community sector has been persistent exercises in reducing the scale of direct government provision of services. This has lead among other things to increased reliance on partnerships between state and community organizations and an atrophy of advocacy.

The combined effects of managerialism and economic liberal public policy can be seen in the inability on the part of many community sector organizations to promote their profile in ways that enlarge the idea of the public sphere. This is manifest in a failure to defend the core idea of the public sphere and promote the sector clearly and courageously. Another consequence is a failure on the part of managers and workers in the community sector to spell out or use an ethical vocabulary that is both clear and identifies the goods that matter.

This is just one consequence of the persistent political mobilisation of economic liberal ideas carried out by neo-liberal think-tanks, business organizations, ideologues, the media and key political leaders and ideologues. The community sector is also implicated inn other more general problems.

The political culture has become afraid of politics evident in the absence of real choice, robust debate and the ascendancy of spin. We have long seen political leaders and whole parties parading the absence of policy as a good thing. There s no longer any strong sense that there ought to be a distinction between a ‘left’ committed to change and a ‘right’ committed to conserving the past.

This fear of politics is signified by increasing and widespread cynicism about politics and politicians as governments increasingly master the art of spin, enhancing a pervasive sense that politics and policy does not matter any more.

Too few social science academics in universities who like to think of themselves as social critics (Andrews 2007), have failed to act as consistent sources of critical discussion or value clarity. Too many have promoted various kinds of post-modernist silliness, or else those who remain committed to a broadly defined model of positivist research have become compliant as they board the gravy train provided by government funding for certain kinds of research which can be counted as useful scholarship in the new era of auditing the performance of universities.

What is to be Done?

Now there are many ways of thinking about what we might do. We might try to secure control of existing political movements of parties. We might wrote letters to the editor criticising the current state of affairs. We might think about establishing new political movements or parties. We might look to imagining what a new kind of economic or social order might look like.

In this address I want to focus on just one approach which involves us clarifying what we do when we think ethically. Implicit in what I say today is that one part of the current problem is a failure to be clear about our ethical language, our ethical ideas and our conduct as humans. We are all too often as Hannah Arendt, my absolute favourite philosopher of the 20th century said repeatedly is that we are ‘guilty of failing to think what we do’ because we rely on clichés and stereotypes. Hannah Arendt (1958:5) pointed to our widespread reliance on clichés:

... the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of 'truths' which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time.

To this she proposed an austere, even troubling antidote:

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. If we can think better and in this case about the human goods that matter we might begin to do better.

Let me spell out what I mean.

Being Clear about the Goods that matter

If we are to think better, I suggest firstly that we need to use an ethical vocabulary and do so with clarity and increasing skill. The point of doing this is to be much clearer about what the elements of a good life are and why. I believe that this involves identifying the range of human goods which the organizations and people in the sector are committed to promoting variously through the services and resources they provide or by their advocacy work.

The second thing we then need to do if we are to do better is to engage with much greater clarity and courage in the task of promoting a vigorous political debate designed to extend and promote the human goods that matter and which require governments and the community to do better: there si much more to human existence than economic growth or managerial efficiency and it is vital to reinstate a regard for clarity and purpose.

Too often there is not enough attention paid to a basic distinction that matters between two quite different kinds or types of what people call ‘values’.

One group of values ought to be called instrumental goods These are distinct from though as becomes clear when we think about it they are connected to what can be called fundamental human goods.

This distinction can be grasped if we recollect that this is really what people are getting at when they make a commonsense distinction between means and ends.

In the case of instrumental goods (or means) we can say that ‘X’ is an instrumental good because it enables the achievement of fundamental goods or alternatively because it prevents fundamental human bads. One strong implication is that these instrumental goods have no value per se se. That is they are neither valuable or valueless in themselves until we have established which fundamental good/s or bad/s they respectively make possible … or prevent.

Think about the value attributed to ‘efficiency’. Economists have long identified ‘efficiency’) or doing or making something with the least expenditure of time, energy or cost) or ‘equity’ (ie., treating everyone the same) as a good thing or a good idea ie., as a valuable. This is fine in the abstract. However it is only when we pay attention to the question of what goods these instrumental values make possible that we can agree that they are in fact valuable or alternately destructive. ‘Efficiency’ for example plainly is valuable when it is connected to achieving some good. Think however about the alleged value of efficiency when bureaucrats set about making the trains run efficiently as they carry millions of people to their deaths in killing camps in Poland after 1942. This efficiency is not a good idea.

Even ‘equity’ or the principle of fairness is really only an instrumental idea. ‘Equity’ is the idea or injunction that we ought to treat everyone equally by applying a set of rules, principles or regard as if everyone is the same and so is to be treated in similar fashion. The idea of ‘equity’ suggests that to treat one person differently to another in the matter of accessing a valuable service (like a hospital or education) is to discriminate against one person by favouring another. Treating people differentially is thus treated as a bad idea because unfair. Yet a little thought about tis suggests that treating everyone as if they are the same is a slightly mad idea because it fails to take account of something quite basic. Think eg., about the bad that is set loose if we apply the principle of equity to treat all people in the same way in such fashion as to ignore the fact that people do not have the same abilities, backgrounds or resources. Treating a person eg., with cerebral palsy and who is strapped into a wheelchair as if they have same abilities as a champion athlete, involves a failure to notice something quite important and should suggest that applying a rule of treating everyone equally is to miss something important. Again we need to ask what particular goods will a decision taken to treat a random group of people fairly (ie., as if they are the same in all respects that matter to the intended treatment or policy) actually achieve or alternatively what bads might occur in consequence of making such a decision.

This idea of instrumental value applies no less to the promotion of human rights. Human rights properly understood only have value as means to basic human goods. There is no intrinsic value in claiming a right to privacy or freedom of expression until we can establish which particular good or bad the securing of that right will secure or promote. For example, if we use the right to privacy to plot and carry out the murder of another person this not a good which that right secures.

This very brief discussion is not meant to disparage instrumental principles. Instrumental values (including attempts by governments to specify and promote a range of human rights) are important. We need them. There is no point identifying a range of basic goods if we either do not know how to achieve them, or cannot achieve them because we lack the means to do so. Equally these instrumental values are really not valuable until we have attached them to more basic goods or bads. Instrumental values are important to the extent that they help to define or think about the ways we strive to achieve the goods that matter.

Again it matters that we work getting clear things we often muddle or confuse these two kinds of values: this requires lots of practice as we try to improve our capacity to think well or to know well as a prelude to doing well.

What are the Human Goods?

I have referred to basic human goods. What might this mean? What are the goods which define or enable a human life to be understood and lived as a good life? I think the discussion by John Finnis (1980) provides an uncommonly robust answer to this question. Certainly I know of none better. Provocativley he identifies just seven basic goods.

They are life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability or friendship, practical reasonableness and religion.

In a book which seems to have too quickly and unjustifiably disappeared from too many people’s list of indispensable books, John Finnis (1980: 18) offers a gritty and compelling account of the nature of the fundamental human goods and the role played by human rights. As Finnis announces from the start he wants to identify both the human goods and the requirements of practical reasonableness which help to constitute a sense of what we might mean by a good human life. It is an unfashionable book since Finnis is neither a relativist, nor a liberal individualist. (He plainly belongs to a tradition of natural law which has sought to ground its claims about the good life either in a naturalistic anthropology and/or in a religious account of an order of things established by a God).

His is an inquiry into both the kinds of goods which support human flourishing and of what practical reasonableness looks like. As he says for this to be possible the theorist has to find a point of ‘reflective equilibrium’ between description and evaluation. His account is located methodologically in the capacity of a theorist like himself to develop a non-value neutral descriptive account of the goods which accepts that such a theorist necessarily participates in the work of evaluation. Finnis proposes a kind of analytic dialectic which moves backwards and forwards between assessments of human good and its practical requirements and explanatory descriptions using historical, experimental, and sociological materials and methods. This says Finnis requires both a descriptive-evaluative anthropology of the goods which support a flourishing life, or inform the good life, conjoined with a capacity to understand what is really good for human persons and what is really required by practical reasonableness.

It is an ambitious exercise since Finnis claims that there are universal goods, albeit goods which can only be specified at a certain level of generality. Further he claims that his account is not so much a wish list as something descriptively grounded in the actual circumstances of human existence. His inquiry relies on the descriptive social sciences which seek to tell us how people in different societies engage their pursuit of the good life. Yet it is not put off by the inevitable discovery that people in different times and places are not all equally devoted to or united in their conception of what justice or the goods may look like. As he notes Leo Strauss (1953: 10) treated the fact that that there is an indefinitely large variety of notions of right and wrong, is not so much ‘incompatible with the idea of natural right, than it is the essential condition for the emergence of that idea’. Equally it needs to be informed by sound judgment about all aspects of genuine human flourishing and by insight into what authentic practical reasonableness’ looks like. Assessing this depends on Finnis’ ability to persuade his readers that he has made a good case. We may test the adequacy of his work by considering his claim that knowledge of truth is a basic human good.

It says something about Finnis’ courage, if nothing else, that he is writing at a time when all manner of relativisms have flourished which deny that truth matters or that reality is real. Finnis defends the proposition that the first great human good is knowledge where knowledge is conceived of as knowledge of truth. This is an important argument worth dwelling on.

This good he (1980: 60) says, is grounded in a very common human activity, namely the ‘activity of trying to find out, to understand and to judge matters correctly’. As he (1980: 61) puts it:

Commonly one’s interest in knowledge, in getting to the truth of the matter, is not bounded by the particular questions that first aroused one’s desire to find out … In explaining, to oneself and others, what one is up to, one finds oneself able and ready to refer to finding out, knowledge, truth as sufficient explanations of the point of one’s activity, project or commitment. One finds oneself reflecting that ignorance and muddle are to be avoided … ‘it’s good to find out…’ now seems to be applicable not merely in relation to oneself … but at large … and for anyone.

This idea of knowledge -of truth- as an intrinsic good is not limited. Saying that knowledge is a valuable activity is simply to say that the pursuit of knowledge makes intelligible any particular instance of the human activity and commitment involved in such a pursuit’. He (1980: 65) proposes that knowledge is a human good and there are no sufficient reasons for doubting that this is the case. He allows that the truth of this claim ‘cannot be demonstrated, but then it needs no demonstration’. It is simply self-evident. This is not to say that each one of us will recognise the value of knowledge. Such a recognition is not innate and will not for example, be experienced as such by a new-born child:

Rather the value of truth only becomes obvious only to one who has experienced the urge to question, who has grasped the connection between questions and answers, who understands that knowledge is constituted by correct answers to particular questions and of other questioners who like himself could enjoy the benefit of attaining correct answers.

As Finnis (1980: 74-5) then proceeds to suggest, any scepticism about the basic value of knowledge is self-defeating or self-nullifying. (He accepts that this cannot be used to show that the basic value of knowledge is self-evident). As he shows some propositions are logically self-contradicting like claims that ‘I know that I know nothing’, or ‘It can be proved that nothing can be proved’. Others are operationally self -refuting as with the case of someone singing, ‘I am not singing’. It is another instance of an operationally self –refuting claim if someone were to assert in writing that, ‘No one can put words (or other symbols) together to form a sentence’. Finnis says that for someone to say that knowledge is not a basic good is operationally self-refuting. The reason for this is simple:

For one who make such an assertion intending it as a serious contribution to rational discussion, is implicitly committed to the proposition that he believes his assertion is worth making, and worth making qua true; he thus is committed to the proposition that he believes that truth is a good worth pursuing or knowing. But the sense of his original assertion was precisely that truth is not a good worth pursuing or knowing. Thus he is implicitly committed to formally contradictory beliefs.

As he concludes, knowledge of truth is a basic good. This seems to be objectively true because there are warrants for asserting it, and because it seems to be correct and there are certainly no ways of denying it. Thought it be non-demonstrable, it is objectively the case that knowledge is a good to be pursued. For those not inclined to agree the onus is on them to say or show why they think this.

Are there other basic values or goods that may be indemonstrable but which seem to be self-evident? Is it not the case, as so many social scientists and philosophers have observed, that human cultures manifest such a wide degree of variability, even chaos in their preferences, motivations and evaluations that no values or principles can be said to be either universal or self-evident? He addresses this protean problem in two ways. Firstly he asserts, though of course does not try to validate this claim, that a survey of human cultures does suggest that all societies manifest a common set of goods. Secondly we could also pursue this task by asking ourselves via some process of intense meditation what are the basic aspects of my well-being that I regard as basic goods? He says we will again come up with a similar set of basic goods.

To pre-empt an obvious response from sceptics, Finnis (1980: 85) insists that the identification of these basic goods is not intended to deny the limitless diversity in the ways people and cultures experience these goods. There is limitless diversity with respect to the depth, duration of commitment, intensity in the extent to which the pursuit of any given good is given priority in the shaping of a life in common or in more personal ways. As he says, this is only to recognise that truth is not the only basic value and:
… that people and their cultures differ in their determination, enthusiasm, sobriety, far sightedness, sensitivity, steadfastness and all the other modalities of response to any value.

So apart form the good of knowledge or truth Finnis identifies six other basic goods. They are life, play, aesthetic experience, sociability or friendship, practical reasonableness and religion. In effect he says if we have these goods in our life we will be blessed If they are missing we will live less and less good lives.

Life itself is the most basic good. It encompasses all aspects of life as vitality from self-preservation in the face of imminent threat of death or injury, to the many ways we seek self-determination by way of bodily and emotional health including freedom from pain. All societies show a concern for the value of life, as well as a regard for bringing new life into being. Self-preservation is accepted as a motivation for action, while killing another human is everywhere prohibited unless there is some strong justification for it.

Knowledge as the pursuit of truth is the second great and basic human good. All societies for example, provide for the education of their young in both the instrumental or technical aspects of living from how to avoid danger to how to obtain food through to aesthetic, ethical and religious practices.

Then there is the value attributed to being practically reasonable. All societies show a regard for the capacity of its members to be practicably reasonable ie., to possess and display the capacity to reflect on and make choices about what we will do, or how we will live, and what values ought properly obtain in any given situation requiring us to act. It relates both to the choice of ends and the means we might adopt to achieve those ends. It has internal dimensions frequently understood as the display of personal qualities or virtues like courage, gentleness, moderation and so on which define a person’s character just as it has external dimensions about the shape and quality of our relations with each other. Being practically reasonable forces reflection on the interplay between being free to choose and the resources of intelligence and character available to make good choices. It follows as Finnis (1980: 119) will argue later, that one central requirement of practical reasonableness is that we will, as an instance of practical reasonableness, always seek to act so as to promote on or more of the basic goods. (Or to put this negatively practical reasonableness entails ‘not choosing directly against a basic good’). Acting deliberately in the light of the requirement to act in practically reasonable ways needs , he says to acknowledge that the basic goods are the only guides we have. (That is true he insists for anyone who acts deliberately for they must be seeking some form of good even if only the good of authentically powerful self expression and self-integration which he seeks through sadistic assault or through malicious treachery or deception ‘with no ulterior motives’).

Play is another basic good. All societies demonstrate a regard for various kinds of play serious and formalized or informal and relaxed. Humans value play for its own sake: they play physically, intellectually and socially where the point is simply the enjoyment of play. And play involves some kind of activity which is its own end.

Aesthetic experience involves the pursuit of beauty and is likewise everywhere valued. It is often found in forms of play but is distinguished from play because of the value given to some idea of the beautiful and because, and unlike play, the pursuit of beauty does not need to involve activity: it can be done contemplatively, even meditatively.

Sociability and friendship are inescapable aspects of our common flourishing. All of us live in or on the margins of a community of some size. In all societies there is both friendship and closer familial relations involving sexuality. In all there are rules for sexual life like some prohibitions against incest and rape and some favouring of permanence and stability in sexual activity. All societies also display a concern for cooperation and reciprocity while recognizing the difference between meum and tuum and possessing some reference to ideas of justice.

All societies display a regard for some order of things in which ideas of the sacred or the transcendent play a central role. All societies have ritualised ways for example of demonstrating regard for the bodies of dead members of the group in some traditional or elaborate way. All have ways of referring to something beyond the ordinary or mundane aspects of communal existence and the human scale of things, typically involving some idea of super-nature or the transcendent. All societies have arrived at a question which Finnis (1980: 89) says defines what he means by the value attributed to religion:
For as there is the order of means to ends, and the pursuit of life, truth, play and aesthetic experience in some individually selected order or priorities and pattern of specialisation, and the order that can be brought into human relations through collaboration, community and friendship, and the order that can be brought into one’s character and activity through inner integrity and outer authenticity, so finally there arise such questions as … how are all these orders, which have their immediate origins in human initiative, and pass away in death related to the lasting order of the cosmos and to the origin if any of that order?

As for those who deny the existence of the transcendent, thinking of existentialists like Sartre who deny the value of ideas of ‘god’ or the transcendent, Finis responds noting that even Sartre :

… nonetheless appreciates that he is ‘responsible’ ie., obliged to act with freedom and authenticity and to will the liberty of other persons equally with his own, in choosing what he is to be, and all this because prior to any choice of his ‘man’ is, and is-to-be free. And is this not a recognition (however residual) of, and concern about, an order of things beyond each and every man?

Of this list of the goods Finnis makes a number of important observations. While he allows that there will doubtless be argument about the exhaustiveness or inclusiveness of these goods, Finnis says that while there is nothing magic about the number seven, when other goods are proposed it will shown on analysis that they are simply sub-sets of these goods, or else ways or combinations of ways of giving effect to one or more of these seven goods. (This goes to claims for example about virtues like courage, humility or prudence: these virtues are better understood as some of the instrumental ways we identify to live towards the goods that matter).

Secondly each of these goods is basic and each is self-evidently a good. None for example can be reduced analytically to any other by virtue of being simply instrumental to the others, and accordingly there is no way of constructing a hierarchy of goods. Each if reflected on, can be treated as the most fundamental. Each can reasonably be focussed on, and each, when focussed on claims a priority of value. Further each one of us can reasonably choose to treat one or more of these as more fundamental. That is, there is necessarily a sense in which each of can as a subject make a choice between these various goods and order them in ways that reflect our choices. Finnis (1980: 93) instances the scholar who privileges the pursuit of knowledge over friendship, religious worship, play and the pursuit of the beautiful. These choices properly reflect the interplay of the personal and the social circumstances that shape one’s temperament, upbringing, training, capacities and opportunities and thereby influence our choices and rankings of the goods that matter. This does not affect the ‘objectivity’ of these human goods.

I do not propose to add any additional justifications for what is surely an uncommonly bold set of propositions. I am persuaded by Finnis. Like Finnis, I think that the seven human goods he specifies do grasp albeit at a certain level of abstractness, a sense of the goods that provide ‘an outline of everything one could reasonably want to do, to have, or to be’ (Finnis 1980: 97).

Almost as importantly they provide a basis for thinking about how and by what means a community such as ours might set about promoting and protecting these goods and the role to be played by organizations like the Unitarian Church that make up the community sector that will actively seek to promote them.

To begin with the people and the organizations who make up the public or community sector need to be able to speak with icreasing clarity and conviction to the ethical imperatives that give shape and purpose to their work. This I suggest entails an ability to identify the basic human goods they seek to promote.

At the same time as this is done, there needs to be a realistic recognition that identifying the basic human goods that matter is not likely by itself to lead to any sudden consensus. If anything it will only confirm what many great thinkers have long understood namely that we confront a non-reducible diversity of ethical ideas and values.

To deal with that ‘discovery’ organizations in the community sector need to defend and promote the very idea of a public space or sphere committed to respectful and robust debate. For this the sector will need to be courageous in defending and extending the idea of a public sphere given over to controversy and to clear sighted ethical reasoning.

In parallel with this practice the sector needs also to give consideration to promoting among its members the capacity for identifying and practising a range of virtues, as well as promoting the capacity for good judgement .

And to do this the sector will need to resource itself by committing to professional development and the cultivation of an ethos of practical reasonableness. Taken together these comprise the elements of a basic action plan for the urgent task of practical ie., ethical renewal.