Ethics and politics: Individuals' responsibilities to communities

'Roundtable Ethics' features University faculty members answering ethical and moral questions solicited from the community. The questions may range from personal to academic in nature. The 'Prince' hopes that the column will spark campus dialogue.

This week's columnist, Josiah Ober, is a professor in the classics department and is the acting director of the University's Center for Human Values.

Is it ethical to vote for a candidate if you don't know much about his views or where he stands on certain issues, but someone you know told you to vote for that person? Is it ethical to publicize public opinion polls if these polls might steer other people's opinions?

These are questions about political ethics: that is, not just "what is the right way to act, in terms of each individual's responsibilities to other individuals?" but "what is the right way to act, in terms of each individual's responsibilities to the community?" Aristotle argued that ethics and politics were part of the same enterprise, because humans are, by nature, "political animals." By this he did not mean that we are all naturally power-hungry, but that we can only live fully satisfactory lives within a bounded community in which each takes an active part in seeking the common good, by "ruling and being ruled in turns."

If Aristotle is right, political activity is not something that we can just turn over to a few people who are eager for power or honors, then restrain them through legal regulations meant to prevent their eagerness from degenerating into criminality, and then spend all of our energy on our private lives. Participating in ruling becomes something more than a means of ensuring security; it becomes an important human end in itself. Agreeing with that idea does not require us to accept Aristotle's restrictive assumptions about who was truly equipped to be a participating member of a political community (he wanted to exclude women, "natural slaves," and people who work for a living), nor must we suppose that each of us needs to be a full-time political activist.

So what does being a member of a political community require of us? Given the constitutional structure of our own political community, presumably it includes the act of voting. Understood this way, voting is not merely an expression of my private interests, but an attempt to further the common good. Yet if voting is to be regarded as meaningful political activity, it should be based on reasons. So what counts as good reasons?

Given our highly individualistic culture, we tend to suppose that each of us should have our own reasons for important judgments, like voting, and that taking over someone else's opinion, whether from a friend or an opinion poll, is an abdication of responsibility. But is that necessarily right? Aristotle argued that language is an essential human attribute because it allows us to advance the common good through the process of learning from one another. That is to say, each of us makes judgments about what is best for "us as a community" not just on the basis of social instincts, like bees, or just on the basis of our own personal experience of the world, but also by considering the experiences and judgments of others.

Aristotle noted that a large body of people can judge some matters better than any one individual. His example was the judgment of musical drama: some people, he suggested, appreciate a certain part — for example, music or staging — so that all of them together appreciate the whole thing. He meant that each of us counts on the expertise of others about parts in making our judgments about the whole. I may have a tin ear, but my friend with perfect pitch lets me know if the orchestra was in tune. Whereas my friend, with little experience of live theater, depends on my sense of what counts as great staging. If not accompanied by friends whose capacities I know, I can still ask, "Why are others in the audience booing or cheering?" And so, through shared learning, "a large body of people" is able to make a good overall judgment.

Politics is admittedly more complex; there are no precise analogues of "perfect pitch." But the judgments that most of us make on most matters — including how we vote in elections — operates in an analogous fashion. We learn by thinking about the reactions of others. This need not be ethically worrisome. Indeed, you will be able to contribute more to the common good if you do not need to make "completely independent" judgments on all matters, but rather can learn from the judgments and experiences of others.

In order to count as ethical political behavior, borrowing your friend's judgment on how to vote, or the judgment of a large body of people through reading an opinion poll, must be reciprocal and critical. If you habitually and passively lean on others' judgments, without ever contributing anything to the judgments of others, you are not fulfilling your responsibilities as a member of a political community. You are both behaving as a free rider on other's labor and denying yourself moral agency. But if you do express yourself upon matters in which you have bothered to inform yourself more carefully than others, you become part of the cycle of reciprocal learning that characterizes flourishing political communities.

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Does the political lethargy of the typical college student today, in contrast to the student activism of the 60s and 70s, harm the American political system? Realistically, what positive effect could a student activist have?

In response to these last two questions: activism, whether by students or others, can be a highly relevant input into the judgment that people make about political matters. Activists often seek, in the first instance, to influence policymakers. But their actions — based on their having gained special knowledge and/or based on a sensitivity to injustice — are relevant to the judgment of the community as a whole. Members of the community who do not know as much about the matter, or who are less morally sensitive, are provided the critical opportunity to ask, "Why are those members of my community (in effect) cheering or booing?"

Seeking to answer that question becomes part of how each of us makes our judgment on relevant political matters, including voting. Whether you end up embracing or rejecting the activists' agenda, their political activity, if it is accepted as seeking a common good, should help you to formulate a judgment. Thus, whatever one thinks about the agendas of activists of the 60s and 70s, the very fact of participation in activism, insofar as it does not violate other ethical principles, can be regarded as valuable in political terms: as a substantive contribution to the mutual instruction that is essential to achieving any common good. Got an ethical question? Email The Page 3 Department