A classical perspective holds that ordinances and laws should be obeyed precisely insofar as those laws specify moral norms for the community. To specify or make determinate involves not merely applying moral norms to concrete situations, which anyone can do by themselves, but also creating the circumstances under which those obligations can be fulfilled. Lawmakers must recognize that there are general norms of justice, some of which require that we fulfill them by working out a system to implement them. 

So, for example, we owe it to others to ensure that we do not take what belongs to them. But how do we ensure we do not do this without a system for determining what belongs to whom? A system of property law helps us determine what belongs to whom in contentious cases. The law acts to determine or specify the general moral obligation we have not to take what belongs to others and following the relevant laws is our way of fulfilling that general moral obligation.

Political government thus creates the conditions for fulfilling obligations in justice towards other people. This might seem like an abstraction, but the idea is ultimately not abstract. Government functions to help us relate to others appropriately, to build the right kind of relations within the community. Political society aims to create what the classical tradition thought of as the conditions for peace among men. Peace requires a union of will and purpose. This is what is meant in the classical tradition when they speak of the “common good” which government aims to promote. Peace is good for each citizen, and peace is the unique good proper to political government, which is necessary to achieve it. A government fails to the extent it does not provide or promote peace.

The classical tradition distinguishes between peace and mere unity of will and purpose among peoples. It is this tradition to which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed famously in noting that “peace is not merely the absence of conflict.” But it equally applies to a union of wills in doing evil. A totalitarian regime can be relatively stable, without serious internal dissent or conflict, in pursuit of evil ends. National Socialism was able to achieve a kind of unity among German citizens. But what is required for true peace is that citizens have wills that are united in the good, in what is right and just (classically, living a life of virtue). “Peace is tranquility of order,” as St. Augustine said (De Civ. Dei xix, 13).

Christianity challenged the government’s right to promote the good life for its citizens. Christians in the Roman empire (as they later did in China, Japan, Korea, and many other places) repeatedly rejected the government’s belief that it had the right to mandate practices whose performance would conflict with what Christians believed was morally permissible. The issue was not just that the government could not mandate sin, since that was already recognized in the classical view. If Christians were right about moral norms, then the government never had any power to do what it thought it could do—despite the long-standing apparent pagan moral agreement that it did have that power. 

What generated a crisis in Western political thought was the proposal that true peace could be achieved only through God’s grace. This means that earthly government cannot in principle succeed in its aims of promoting the common good. Instead, Christians thought it was the Church, with the Gospel, her pastors, and sacraments, that was the only institution able to create conditions that promote that true peace. Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas or Robert Bellarmine later worked out an account on which earthly government can promote conditions for temporal peace and can “remove obstacles” to achieving that true peace that comes only from union with God. This led, however, to conflicts between Church and State, since, if these claims are true, there is a clear sense in which the civic government ought to direct itself according to the principles of the Gospel (although much that is critical hinges on what is required for the State to place itself under those principles and to what extent this requires political direction from the Church’s ministers).

Political philosophy struggles today with the fact of pluralism. Citizens do not share the same views about what matters (the good/right/just), and that disagreement extends up to the most important goods that exist. The Church is no longer recognized by most citizens as an authoritative interpreter of the moral or divine law, and so the modern solution (especially after the Reformation and discovery of the New World) is to carve out principled limits on government that prevent it from endorsing or imposing any penalties for differing views on important issues. Human rights law embodies that wisdom in its protections for religion, speech, and conscience.

Contemporary political problems result from the continuing struggle, not with Church authority, but with original sin. How can the government effectively achieve its aims, given human nature’s tendency to dissension and conflict? The problems of today’s constitutional democracies seem, to many, to result or be exacerbated by the way in which the protection of pluralism has led to an amplification of the tendencies of original sin. Pluralism becomes more and more divisive, eventually undermining the stability of society, and the common good itself. And there is an absence of any commanding authority relevantly similar to the Church, whose (relatively uncontroversial) authority might help eliminate international conflicts around the right and the good.

Putting it more cynically: ordinary folks cannot govern themselves; they are easily led astray by the market, demagogues, or other forces to act irrationally. Some, therefore, propose that the protections for those rights—religion, speech, and conscience—must then be limited by the government in such a way that pluralism cannot be allowed to undermine that common good. Those institutions which protect individuals from the kinds of civil coercion that would permit the government to contain or regulate pluralism—free market policies, universal suffrage, separation of powers, rule of law to which no person or party is superior, an independent and free press, etc.—are obstacles to good governance. 

What goes unsaid is, by abolishing those institutions of a free and open society, the very means for the protection of rights is also abolished. Those rights cease to be enforceable, and essentially become privileges. Those who run the government become the sole judge, jury, and executioner in determining what the rights are and to what extent they deign that they apply to the benighted commoner when he/she is deemed an enemy of the state. The officials of the State who assume this role make themselves the high priests of a new secular religion that demands faith in these self-anointed “experts” as being unable to do wrong, that is, as being in the place of God Himself—in effect, the pagan state religion comes back with a vengeance.

As Chesterton quipped, original sin is the most empirical Christian dogma. While some are perhaps innocent, many of those who endorse illiberal political theory transparently aim at using this ideology to gain power and excuse their abuses of it. Such proposals inevitably will bring back the same abuses of pagan religion, which involve licensing the state to see itself as arbiter of the most important values in life, and to use coercive civil authority (instead of spiritual authority) to eliminate the influences of pluralism and original sin. 

The arguments in favor of illiberal politics are theoretically problematic too. If humans cannot reliably govern themselves, that extends to the technically competent and to anyone occupying the highest offices in our government—our president, chairman, or judges. Indeed, original sin only increases our incentive to limit government and distribute power among everyone by checks and balances. As we are all affected by tendencies to make mistakes and abuse power, no person, institution, or party should exercise absolute authority or be placed above the law. (The Church too, not being above these moral demands, developed its own law and synodal structures to constrain its ministers.) Ensuring that we control who will lead us by means of popular elections—which enables us to remove established leaders if we so choose—is a proven way of ensuring reliable public accountability. 

I am sympathetic to the claim that political liberalism fostered a rise of illiberalism. Contemporary liberalism is wary of “imposing” any comprehensive doctrine, moral or theological, on a society, regarding that as contrary to proper respect for other persons. Liberalism is left advocating principles of state neutrality or secularity, which eventually evacuates justice of any content, ignoring the reality that justice is essentially motivated by and consists in appropriate relationships with other people. Moral or religious beliefs give substance to accounts of justice, explaining what is “due” to another person and what it is to love another rightly. Without such an account, we cannot determine what we as rational and loving persons ought to respect, or merely tolerate, or refuse to tolerate, and in what way. Some take advantage of these ambiguities to build institutions that impose their own perspective on others in the name of pluralism, which then enfeebles any possibility of a moral response to challenges from the enemies of a free and open society. 

When we understand that true peace springs from a rightly ordered heart, it becomes clear that effecting this change in the human heart is beyond the proper scope of temporal power. Failing to grasp this is a recipe for disaster—it has spawned all the nefarious totalitarian attempts to use government power to make men good, from attempts to pressure Jews into baptism up to the Soviet Union’s attempt to create its new Soviet man.” While political liberalism has at its core the clear moral conviction that these kinds of totalitarian projects are evil, liberalism’s great weakness is that it does not acknowledge that the State really does aim at promoting a good life of virtuous peace, not merely non-interference. Liberalism thus fails to advert the possibility that the government needs to distinguish those kinds of pluralism that lead to civic decay from those which lead to greater goods. Value judgments of some kind are necessary for the State to thrive. Thin liberalism that aims merely at concord without moral agreement is doomed to fail at drawing those limits to distinguish morally good pluralistic accommodation from those that bring about moral harm to the community.

Ironically, however, many of the same persons that advocate illiberal policies at home endorse this kind of thin liberalism in international relations. Many “conservatives” arguing that America ought to withdraw help from Ukraine (and focus on American problems) implicitly buy into Russian apologetics: nobody outside of Russia can reliably judge whether harm has occurred to Russian interests, and so nobody else is qualified to prohibit or sanction their country for acting in defense of those interests. Only our own country’s interest matters.

What such conservatives” implicitly endorse as the only rule of “realist” international politics is a version of Mill’s “harm” principle: no country should coerce any other, except to protect themselves (and perhaps their allies) from harm. They advocate, in effect, treating countries like Russia as being moral equals with Norway, America, Britain, Spain, Poland, or Germany. 

But, of course, it is false that Russia is the moral equal of Ukraine. Russia acted against another, outside of its borders. To say that nobody but Russia can judge whether their invasion was morally justified is to say that nobody other than Russia can judge whether the people of Ukraine deserve or merit our support, i.e., whether Russia did wrong to them. But this is false—countries can properly be held accountable for wronging other nations, and it is possible to discern that they should be.

Human beings form one moral community whose interests are damaged when other innocent people, even in other countries, are harmed. We are ultimately concerned about harm to people, not countries. This fact is precisely what is recognized by international human rights law when it attempts to identify the most serious harms, that is, those harms which would justify intervention and sanction by other countries. Otherwise, the State would be exempted from being held accountable for its moral obligations to its citizens and put in the place of God. 

The most cynical perspective on these matters is ironically endorsed both by “conservatives” and their illiberal allies abroad. Whereas some protest human rights concerns and international law as the imposition of foreign values and the “advantage of the stronger over the weaker” rather than true norms of justice, others argue that only civil coercion is sufficient to bring about unity in the common good. Merely “spiritual” means of authority—such as rational persuasion and the force of prayer, commitment, and pursuit of justice—would be powerless by themselves to unite us as one people under God, bringing people to recognize those values that are objectively good for them. This too is a lie. Early Christianity won out not by using the civil power to crush its opponents, but because Christianity made clear to most that the pagan religion had failed on its own terms to promote true peace. 

For those now living in the post-Christian world, recovering many of the insights of the pre-Christian tradition might be the only way to recover our insight into the power of morality itself to unite humanity in pursuit of its common good.

First encountering Christianity in the sixteenth century, the Confucian tradition was never forced to engage with Christian theology until modern times (and still has not thoroughly grappled with its consequences in political philosophy), and so was not shaped by the possibility that true peace might come only through grace or that there are higher goods that come through union with God. Nevertheless, the upheavals of Asia’s modern history revolve around just those same questions of pluralism that the Roman Empire once had to grapple with. 

For instance, Confucians recognize, like their Western counterparts, that citizens have rights by nature against their government (Mencius argued kings do wrong to citizens by implementing harmful policies) and held that the government derived its power from the moral law (the Dao) but treated most ordinary uneducated persons as unable to govern themselves. Scholars, kings, and nobles cooperated to govern the State—self-government of all citizens was not ever a live option. Nevertheless, in their encounter with democratic modernity, Confucians are faced with the possibility that they too must revise their moral or religious beliefs and find ways to live in a much less homogenous world. 

However, the guiding thread for Confucians to engage with modernity has been what has always been central to their moral vision. What is central is the virtue of appropriate love for others—ren (仁). It is no coincidence the spirit of Christ’s command “What you have done to the least of these, you did for Me” (Matt. 25:40) gets echoed by Zhang Zai (张载) in his Western Inscription (西铭): 

All under Heaven who are tired, crippled, exhausted, sick, brotherless, childless, widows or widowers—all are my siblings who are helpless and have no one else to appeal to. To care for them at such times is the practice of a good son. To be delighted and without care, because trusting Them, is the purest filial piety. 

While “human dignity” is vague and less-than-desirable as a term, what both Christians and Confucians mean is that anyone can recognize that the State is made for man, not man for the State. There are some things that the State cannot provide, and it would err grievously in aiming to provide them. One of those things that the State would grievously err is aiming to bring about moral agreement and change of heart primarily by means of coercive punishments: “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good” (Analects 2.3, trans. J. Legge). 

Zhang Pengchun (张彭春), in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, included a note affirming our capacity to recognize our connection to other human beings, saying that, “[all human beings] are endowed with reason and conscience,” that grounds our obligations to act in favor of human rights. Our moral capacity as human beings—our “heart of compassion”—allows each of us to recognize that no earthly government has the right to imprison its citizens without trial, to torture them, to prohibit or control religious activities according to an atheist ideology, to invade another sovereign country and kill innocent people merely to reestablish its former glory, and the like. No amount of moral failure or selfishness takes away our ability to recognize these things—hope remains.

Confucians and Christians together need to re-discover the insight that our hearts are restless—not because we have failed to find the right recipe for civil government—but because we do not love as we ought. That is, because we are not yet one with Heaven.