A Socialist Morality Has Social Requirements
Moral reasoning beyond personal preferences requires social conditions that allow people to inhabit practical identities.
Ana Maria Cisneros’s Damage article “The Need for a Socialist Morality” makes a welcome plea for socialists to rid themselves of the incoherent taboo on normative claims about the kinds of personal lives that are desirable. There are, for Cisneros, a pretty clear set of social goods that contribute to human flourishing on this earth, and socialists shouldn’t be shy about affirming them as the moral undergirding of their political vision.
I have no objections to Cisneros’s overall argument, but I do wonder about Cisneros’s assumption about the intuitive appeal of these goods to broad swathes of the population. In her view, only “the middle class and elites,” segments that tend to dominate the Brahmin Left, are thoroughly wedded to permissive individualism in morality because “their range of freedom as consumers makes it appear as if they are truly autonomous.” Meanwhile, “people who lived in pre-capitalist societies, and even many working-class people today, are not autonomous in most aspects of their lives. As a result, their approach to moral thinking does not rely on individualistic morality.” If this is true, then the vast majority of people incline towards external, collective standards of goodness, while only the rootless PMC insist on an incoherent individualism in ethical consideration. If this were the case, the socialist moralist’s job would be simple: clear away the bad thinking habits of this restricted group, whose form of life warps their moral sensibilities, and re-connect with the moral intuitions of the vast majority.
Sadly, the task is harder than Cisneros leads us to believe. If we recognize that a form of life can negatively shape moral outlook, then we must account for the positive conditions required to form the collectively oriented, externally anchored moral outlook that she recommends. And if the development of a pervasive non-individualistic moral outlook has necessary social conditions, then we might discover that we are sorely lacking the required social infrastructure and institutions.
Practical Identities and Morality
I want to consider the uncontroversial claim—one that I think Cisneros would agree with—that repeated, habitual daily practices powerfully shape our ability to recognize reasons for actions. Such practices allow us to fulfill social roles that place practical demands on us beyond our personal preferences, grounding deferential attachments to projects and to people and the capacity to recognize “external” goods or reasons for actions in the sense that Cisneros describes.
Philosophers have used different terminology to describe the connection, but the idea is straightforward. If I am involved in a practical role such as, say, a teacher or a doctor, there are standards to which I must adhere and ends I must desire in order to practice the role at all. To be a good teacher or a good doctor is to internalize standards of excellence that are not dependent on my “authentic self”, my feelings, or my desires. To truly be a teacher is to attempt to be a good teacher; I have no choice but to recognize a set of goods bound up in the occupation and to be motivated by them. My “individual,” original motivations for adopting the role (“I heard that I can have a secure retirement”, “people think doctors are hot”) become less relevant as I take on the practical identity and the motivations internal to the practice. A “practice” or a “practical identity” are a condition for having reasons at all for action beyond my own immediate desires.
Here is how philosopher Christine Korsgaard defines practical identities:
… a description under which you value yourself and your life worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. Conceptions of practical identity include such things as roles and relationships, citizenship, membership in ethnic or religious groups, causes, vocations, professions, and offices.... Our conceptions of our practical identity govern our choice of actions, for to value yourself in a certain role or under a certain description is at the same time to find it worthwhile to do certain acts for the sake of certain ends, and impossible, even unthinkable to do others.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s account is not so different:
By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.
Note that practical identities don’t refer only to jobs, titles, or crafts. The same connection between the recognition of external goods and a practical identity holds for the kinds of everyday relational roles to which Cisneros alludes. To be an aunt or a co-worker entails at least some form of external standards of goodness and motivations to adhere to them.
Note also, however, that having a practical identity doesn’t just mean “having a job.” Under the two descriptions above, there’s quite a lot that doesn’t qualify. Packing Amazon boxes as directed by a management app and separated from other workers such that any communications or sense of collective project is possible won’t do. Neither will the routines of white-collar “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters”, high-paid or low-paid, college-educated or not. Neither will parasocial relationships on social media or internet-based social networks. There is a floor to practical identity, and quite a lot of what we—speaking broadly, “we” as Americans—do does not meet it. For this outlook to really hook in, it can’t be isolatable—you can’t just “clock out” and leave your practical identity at the door.
Practical identities are the social nucleus out of which we are educated into a moral outlook that integrates external standards of goods and sensitivity to the collective (what Cisneros calls the “not me, us”) aspects of those goods. They are where our deferential attachments to external projects and people are nourished. From this nucleus, we can see how a broader moral outlook might develop that carries the structure of good-oriented desires and reasoning over into the broader, overarching practical identities of our lives. We can even see, as MacIntyre argues, that there are certain goods of character and virtues that are required to perform a practical identity well: honesty, courage, and so on. We can see that ultimately this training in making our desires conform to real goods in order to legitimate them would have positive consequences for social behavior and coordination, and commitment to common goods that require political coordination to provide.
Practical identities are a premise for developing any philosophical reflection on morality. Aristotle takes it as a given that you must internalize these patterns of practical thinking in order for moral philosophy to be anything more than mouthing words. Korsgaard and MacIntyre hold radically different views in moral philosophy, but they all hold more or less to the same view about the habituated practical social nucleus of morality. If our society cannot provide most people the opportunities for robust, overlapping networks of practical identities—the prerequisites for moral reflections—then, debates about what kind of morality socialists ought to embrace put the cart before the horse.
Social Atomization’s Moral Aspect
If such nexuses of practical identities are in most cases conditions for developing the moral outlook that undergirds Cisneros’s socialist morality, then far more of us are deficient than just the “middle class and elites” with untethered consumer power—the widespread withering of practical identities has a far more significant impact on moral reasoning. As Americans, we’re all falling short on the necessary conditions and institutions to develop practical identities and the corresponding commitment to external goods beyond personal preference.
Those on the Left are familiar with the facts on US social atomization. Employment trends in the US continue to suffer deepening rounds of de-skilling. Employment growth is concentrated in low-wage, low-skill industries designed for high turnover. Civic mediating organizations are little more than a memory. Neighborhood and local-level organization is a farcical front for the NGO-industrial complex. Unions are bleeding out. The number of Americans who live in the same neighborhood throughout their lives (let alone through multiple generations) is dwindling. Church-going and participation in religious life continues to decline. Policy wonks describe a “friendship recession”, and the Surgeon General reports there is an “epidemic of loneliness”. Even NPR is now reporting on dwindling births and family life. The litany goes on.
Social atomization is much discussed, including in these pages. The relevance here is that this atomization destroys the requisite conditions for practical identities and the “external” moral outlook Cisneros is after. It is never fully destroyed, of course—nobody can really live without at least some practical identity—but the prospects for richly inhabiting a set of practical identities that force us to orient ourselves to reasons beyond our personal preferences are poor.
Short of a practical context that creates social roles that facilitate a nexus of practical identities en masse, projects for reviving a socialist morality will remain intellectual and rhetorical as similar calls to re-moralize politics are on the Right. We can exhort people to reject an atomized vision of personal autonomy, embrace the search for common goods, debate on the order of goods in common life, and promote both the personal virtues and institutional measures that facilitate these goods. But without mass remedial re-socialization, this all remains something between a philosophical exercise (we can construct arguments about the common good, about the incoherence of liberal morality, and so on), or political rhetoric to be judged on the merits of circumstantial effectiveness. Is the Left in New York City more likely to garner support for the new mayor’s ambitious childcare initiative if we frame it around freeing up autonomy for parents to continue living their lives and careers and making their own choices, or as a normative policy that encourages young people to have children and take root in the city in such a way that motivates a commitment to the common-good institutions of civil society?
The scale of the problem is enormous and so ought to be the scale of a solution. As firms like Amazon transform our labor regimes in much the same way that Ford did a century ago, and new technology threatens further social dislocation, all sorts of discussion of how to reverse-engineer civil society are back on the table for the Left and Right and whatever the hell you want to call what is going on in Silicon Valley. My point is that these programmatic discussions will be improved by recognizing that practical identities are the psychological and ethical core of a strong civil society and the moral authority of external reasons that Cisneros wants. New Deal Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps facilitated the mass production of practical identities by institutionalizing collective living and experience in common projects, socialization across class, racial, and geographic divisions, rigorous physical training combined with training in skills in engineering, construction, and technology essential to the competitive advance of industry.
Today’s candidates for programmatic fixes—comprehensive industrial policies, jobs guarantees, educational reforms, national mandatory service programs, etc.—can use the same tactics to facilitate practical identities to an atomized populace, while at the same time supplying the labor force and the skills that are needed for overhauling the US’s crumbling transit, energy, and communications infrastructures (to name just a few). There is a gnawing chicken and egg problem here—is it possible to win socializing programs without the pre-existing sociality that makes them appealing?—but at least we’re beyond mere appeal to moral intuition. Though it would never cut it as a political slogan, “Practical Identities For All” is the prelude to getting beyond the pervasive normative authority of personal preference and authenticity.
Scott Jenkins is a labor educator and an advisory board member at ASU’s Center for Work and Democracy.