Editor’s Note: This is part of Law & Liberty‘s series of Faultline Essays, in which authors offer different perspectives on a given topic and respond to one another. Alexander Salter and Jeffrey Polet reflect on the relevance of the 1984 collection Freedom and Virtue for the current debate over conservatism and liberty.

Ever since John Stuart Mill dismissed conservatives as architects of “the stupid party,” we have had to deal with sneering dismissal by progressives. As bad as that is, there is our own inability to create a coherent and unified movement. One would think that in the face of the progressive rout of conservatism we would be more intent on highlighting our agreements than our disagreements.

Conservatives have never been united enough to be any kind of party. The factions coalesced around opposition to leftist ideology, but otherwise demonstrated disagreements. After the end of the Cold War, the paleo-cons, neo-cons, libertarians, religious conservatives, and other groups had turned on each other. The fissures in the movement were fully revealed with the invasion of Iraq.

We live in a similar moment. As progressives took control of our most important institutions and used that control to promulgate and impose a radical ideology, conservatives continued their crack-up. One of the central conservative principles that had united the movement from 1932 on—suspicion of federal bureaucratic power and the concomitant defense of the federalist principle—has given way to a new and aggressive national conservatism. Even as conservatives defended many of the principles of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on limited government and freedom of conscience, post-liberals began to arise within their midst. Many of the early writers for National Review, First Things, and other conservative outlets were Catholics taking up John Courtney Murray’s project of reconciling Catholicism to the American project. Against that effort has risen the new tide of integralism.

On the other hand, many libertarians seem perfectly comfortable with the reconstitution of familial and social life that conservatives regard as vital to a well-ordered society. Old-time conservatives of the Russell Kirk variety, to the degree they are taken seriously, seem to be on the margins of the movement. Alexander Salter shrewdly reviews the Meyer-Bozell debate as a forerunner to some of these current debates; as I make clear below, I am closer to Bozell than I am to Meyer.

All the while, the culture wars have only intensified. But this time around, the conflicts are taking place after the hollowing out of America’s middle class and its attendant bourgeois virtues. These bourgeois virtues were instrumental in holding the nation together and provided the foundation upon which America’s impressive economic and political achievements found their footing. These virtues are very different from those meant for “signaling.” Those so-called virtues—compassion, inclusion, sensitivity, empathy—are abstract and sentimental in nature and require very little of us; the bourgeois virtues—hard work, frugality, self-restraint, self-reliance—are concrete and active in nature and require sacrifice from us.

George Carey’s 1984 collection Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate still speaks to our moment. Re-reading those essays now impresses on the reader the overlap between the libertarian and conservative positions, and subsequent events make the libertarian position both more and less attractive than it was then. On the one hand, given the coercion taking place in and by many of our institutions, the fundamental impulse of the libertarian to resist all coercion seems admirable and, Salter argues, necessary. Reading Salter’s fine essay almost convinced me that I’m a fusionist, but only if one keeps in mind that fusionism, as Meyer understood it, requires a grounding in moral theories and conceptions of the person that differs widely from libertarian assumptions. It’s hard to fuse your views with those that you believe are wrong in their essentials.

The left had long defended its most radical social changes with two claims: it’s not hurting anyone, and it won’t affect you. The first is contestable—the debate over which has long been the issue between libertarians and conservatives—and the second is now proven to be a lie. What is tolerated often becomes prescribed. Conservatives consider the libertarian embrace of the harm principle as little different from progressive reformers, and libertarians regard the conservative suspicion of the harm principle as making them likely to embrace progressive coercion. Can there be a new kind of fusionism that will allow America’s non-progressive core, which still makes up the majority of Americans, to unite in their opposition to the obvious overreach of the left? I think that Salter is right when he says “a neat, rationalistic ‘solution’ is unnecessary,” but I’m not as convinced that fusionism “just is the American Tradition,” even as he rightly emphasizes the dialectic between freedom and order.

Some conservatives have indeed become too comfortable with embracing the coercive power of the state with the intent of shaping citizens to a particular notion of what is good. To this tendency, I think, libertarian skepticism seems well placed. One can be, like Socrates, an epistemological skeptic without being a metaphysical one. To the degree that libertarians are metaphysical skeptics, their thinking will be of little value to conservatives—the charge of relativism being consistently leveled by conservatives in the Carey collection. Nor will conservatives get anywhere by aping the Progressive obsession with power, as Salter indicates.

The main conservative criticism of libertarianism is that libertarianism is too abstract and too rationalistic. Conservatives don’t particularly care for rational-choice theory because it doesn’t accurately reflect what we are as human beings. We don’t like objectivism because we find it immoral. We don’t like the formal emphasis on choice because it brackets the ends. We agree with Bozell that there must be a higher principle for politics than free choice. We don’t like libertarian individualism because it doesn’t sufficiently account for the role of community and mediating institutions in human flourishing.

Another way to say this is that while libertarians tend toward a more formal and individualized consideration of decision-making, conservatives are equally concerned about the social ecology. We are concerned both about what ends are chosen and about the context within which choosing takes place—what Richard Weaver referred to as an “antecedent morality.” This is so for two reasons. First of all, conservatives disagree with libertarians over their idea of human nature. Tibor Machan wrote that “when conservatives claim that man has a ‘proclivity toward violence and sin,’ the libertarian would have to object.” The conservative would eagerly provide an abundance of historical evidence for the claim. In other words, we cannot share in the libertarian’s optimism either about individual choosers in particular or about human beings in general. After all, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

Secondly, this difference will result in competing understandings of government. Thus the conservative will not endorse the libertarian “night watchman” view of government in part because the conservative believes that one cannot eliminate government coercion (the libertarian writers in the Carey volume are strangely silent about taxation and conscription), in part because the conservative believes that all government policies involve some sort of moral deliberation, and in part, because the conservative believes that republican government has an interest in the formation of good citizens.

The conservative is therefore more likely to endorse our constitutional system. We have long been familiar with progressive frustration with our constitutional traditions, but traditional conservatism is now pinched between a libertarian wing that seeks to make government small enough that it can drown it in a bathtub, and an integralist/nationalist wing that would happily reject the Constitution as a relic of a discredited liberalism. The conservative tradition I mean to defend seeks to avoid both extremes. As Salter points out, “there’s no other game in town,” and the constitutionalism he defends is very much in the spirit of Orestes Brownson, public engagement with whom might benefit “post-liberalism.”

Furthermore, it defends a Constitution that, as Madison said in Federalist #57, assumes virtue “to a higher degree than any other.” The main libertarian mistake is assuming that virtue cannot be virtuous, or cannot partake of virtue, if it is at all coerced. The conservative assumes that it is better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than it is to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Conservatives thus believe that libertarianism doesn’t give a full enough accounting of virtue. Any act of virtue has at least two parties: the one performing the act, and the one who is the recipient of the act. Virtue doesn’t operate in the abstract but only relationally (which is why Salter rightly uses the word “person” rather than “individual”). The object of the act is typically indifferent to the motives of the subject; for him, what matters most is that the right thing is done. Any act of virtue must strive diligently to preserve the dignity of the recipient, which is why reciprocity matters. But not only reciprocity—for our act to be actually virtuous we have to know something about the person upon whom the act is being visited. Without such intimate knowledge, our efforts could soon fall into error. Attention to the recipient creates the proper scale of action, for only then can we see the full range of the effects of our actions, learn from them, and do better in the future.

In addition to the parties of the act, there is the act itself. This act consists of at least three parts: the good at which it is aimed, the means chosen for achieving that good, and the intention of the person engaged in so choosing. Of those three, the first is the most important and the last is the least important, although a fully virtuous act will satisfy the requirements of all three. That’s a high bar, and most of us fail at some level on all three counts.

Libertarians rightly draw our attention to confusion about ends. The authors in the Carey volume highlight a real-world problem: namely, we see through a glass darkly. For this reason, libertarians, when discussing the idea of a common good, will raise the sensible question of who is going to be in charge of defining and implementing it. Any self-proclaimed guardian of the common good probably can’t be trusted with its implied powers. However, referring back to Plato, without a class to the manner born, an aristocracy will soon devolve into an oligarchy, and if that, then power will be distributed on the basis of wealth alone. The suspicion of hereditary rule as well as our confidence in the ability of markets to “sort out” the population means the libertarian impulses more nearly fit our oligarchic age than the aristocratic instincts of conservatives. This aristocratic urge has always been an uncomfortable fit in American democracy, as demonstrated by thinkers such as John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as Russell Kirk.

Confusion about ends not only results from the limitations of the chooser, but from the ends themselves. We do not typically choose between good and evil but between competing goods (or sometimes lesser evils), and for that reason the tragic is always part of the human condition. That said, we are not helpless in the task, for experience brings wisdom; and, as Burke noted, while the individual is foolish, the species is wise. For that reason, conservatives are skeptical of Mill’s effort to replace tradition and social approbation with the harm principle. As much as I liked Salter’s essay, I find myself wishing he had discussed the centrality of the harm principle.

If confusion about the good perplexes, clarity about the proper means bedevils further. Sometimes we have to choose questionable means. None of us can fully anticipate the range of effects that any of our actions will have. Usually, in life, we don’t know exactly what the right thing to do is, even if we know what outcome we desire. Consider happening upon a homeless person: we believe it is not a good thing for a person to starve, and if we can prevent or ameliorate that person’s condition, then we have an obligation to do so. Are sins of omission even “harms” in the libertarian lexicon? Now we must deliberate: what is the best means to achieving that end? Do we support a government program with our votes? Do we contribute to non-profits that seek to feed the hungry? Do we take that person out to dinner? Do we buy that person a sandwich? Do we simply drop a buck in their cup? The answer to that is not clear, although we suspect that the action won’t be fully moral if we have chosen the easiest way out.

Nor should it be the case that we choose the means that enable us to feel best about ourselves. The end of the moral action becomes obscured if our purpose is to make others think we are a good person, simply to become self-satisfied. This fact indicates that there are distinctions to be made when it comes to the intention behind an act. Here, too, we are dealing with knowledge deficits, for we have an infinite capacity for self-deception. We don’t always know why we do what we do, and it would be atypical for our motives to be pure and of one piece.

We thus need guidance when it comes to engaging in virtue. How we learn virtue is a question of enormous personal import, just as how we form virtuous citizens is a question of significant political import. Aristotle identified a number of means by which virtue is learned, but did not neglect to mention the role of the law in doing so. But here, Salter offers a significant challenge. “It comes down to this: Can the state, through its police powers, promote ethical habits by taking bad options off the table? While conceptually possible, I do not see why this is at all likely.”

I understand his skepticism, especially in an age of progressive ascendancy, rampant incompetence, increased cronyism, and the stench of corruption. There doesn’t seem to be much the federal government does right, especially since its supervision of our public schools, the most aggressive effort at character formation, has failed miserably. Critics of government efforts like to point to prohibition as their test case, as does Salter, but often fail to consider federal direction of civil rights reform.

As a defender of localism, I’m inclined to agree that “our Constitutional architecture thus allows for a political virtue gradient: The national government focuses on freedom, whereas state and local governments take the responsibility for more substantive goods, to the extent citizens demand them. The closer the citizen is to his government, the more he can go in for a politics of virtue.” But the argument for federalism is not primarily an argument either for or of virtue. Local governments are capable of being every bit as corrupt and vicious as any federal government. It is, as Salter says, an argument for exit and voice. I’m not sure about his inclusion of “loyalty” since, as Publius argues, time will alter loyalties toward the national government; and in any case, exit and loyalty do not pair up well with each other. 

With regard to the operation of virtue, Aristotle stressed the importance of habit, an idea that Sartre found so objectionable that he accepted freedom as a condemnation. I think libertarianism partakes too much of this error in stressing that an act can only be authentic if it is freely and knowingly chosen; and that, furthermore, authenticity is the thing that matters most.

What actually matters most is that the right thing be done, even though how it is done also matters. In an ideal universe, choice of means, the good to be accomplished, concern for the well-being of the other, and good intention work seamlessly. Good intentions by themselves count for little—the road to hell is paved with them. But the libertarian would have you believe that intention is what matters most so long as it is free.

Nor does the focus on intention help us deal with the problem of social ecology. Well-intended decisions can introduce toxic elements into our shared social spaces. Take, for example, the libertarian defense of pornography as a personal choice that is victimless, and therefore licit. Spend some time on a college campus and talk with the bright and attractive young women who can’t get addled young men to ask them out on a date because those men are too busy pleasuring themselves in front of computer screens and tell those women that pornography affects only the viewer.

Look at the billboards on any highway in Michigan and you would assume that every Michigander is sitting in his parents’ basement smoking marijuana and gambling online. These persons are not functioning contributors to society, and they are also failing to develop their potential as persons. The law responds to this in its two-fold function: it is both proscriptive and prescriptive. It will always tell us something about what we expect human beings to be by prohibiting some behaviors and encouraging others. The libertarian might not like good Samaritan laws because they’re too coercive, but others will recognize them as an important indicator of the solicitude we are expected to extend to others. John Hospers in his essay indicated he might allow for them, and such a concession introduces the idea of prudence into the use of coercive power and thus mitigates libertarianism’s central claim.

The conservative is more suspicious of political absolutes than he is of moral ones, while the libertarian seems more suspicious of moral absolutes than he does of political ones. If any new fusionism emerges, it can only do so on the basis of respect for the individual person, protecting both the promise inherent in allowing that person to choose freely, and the dignity inherent in choosing well. Salter and I agree on the fundamental importance of the person to any morally compelling system of political thinking, and that this emphasis itself results from our Western and Christian heritage. Reading his essay, I was struck by how similar his final paragraph was to my own, the essence of which is to find that sweet spot in the tension between being free to choose and choosing well or poorly. To the degree that fusionism, as Salter defends it, means sustaining the tension rather than resolving it, his version of fusionism indeed “remains indispensable for liberty under law in America.”

Its application requires political prudence, and that prudence will manifest itself by weighing carefully the harm caused by restricting the right to choose against that caused by allowing people to choose badly. Unlike Mill, who saw social mores as more destructive of liberty than government action, the conservative defends the importance of those mores and their restrictive application in communal life, as well as their constant reevaluation by subsequent generations.