So we begin Part II of West's book, "The Moral Conditions of Freedom." This first chapter is devoted to simply proving, against a host of leading scholars, that the Founders took it to be part of the purpose of government to inculcate virtue among the citizens. West accomplishes this by quotations from founding documents and charters.
He begins with three documents that focus on the education of the citizenry, including the 1785 charter for the University of Georgia (quoted here). "As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not necessity, and that the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens. When the minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and with evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature." (165-6)
Scholars have wrongly thought that 'liberty' and 'republicanism' -- or 'liberty' and 'virtue' -- were opposed to one another. The concept, as West reconstructs it through quotations to these scholars, is that liberty is about doing what you want; virtue is about doing what you ought (and republicanism, requiring virtue, ends up being a kind of freedom-that-binds-you, a paradox of sorts). Some go as far as suggesting that the Founders rejected, through their embrace of freedom of conscience, any notion that the government should try to train its citizenry towards virtue.
Returning to the state constitutions and other foundational documents, West shows many clear examples that this conception is wrong. In addition to The Federalist, he gives the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: "no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." (175) He finds similar language in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire; and similar language to the opening quote from Georgia in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Likewise above the state level, he has quotations from the 1776 resolution of the Continental Congress that the powers they were claiming were "for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as for the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties[.]" (176) That puts the defense of natural rights -- life, liberty, property -- in the last and perhaps fundamental place, but raises the preservation of 'virtue' as well as 'peace and good order' to near parity.
This should be no surprise, West suggests, given that the Founders equated moral law with the very natural law they were intending to enshrine. Jefferson is quoted on his foreign policy, which he describes as "the moral law of our nature" which is "the moral law to which man has been subjected by his creator," adding, "The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany him into a state of society[.]" (177) Hamilton also: "the established rules of morality and justice are applicable to nations as well as to individuals; that the former as well as the latter are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements, to respect the rights of property..." is natural law, and also the moral law. (178)
Private virtue is not enough, given that not all are equally capable of virtue nor inclined to it; and so, moral institutions are required. (181-3). In this, West says, they are in agreement with "philosophers both ancient and modern." (184) He quotes a scholar who mentions Aristotle by name, but cites a different section than the one that occurs to me, to whit, Aristotle on the function of law with respect to justice:
Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one's lust), and those of a good-tempered man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well. This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour.... What the difference is between virtue and justice in this sense is plain from what we have said; they are the same but their essence is not the same[.]
What Aristotle means here is that the law should compel everyone to act as if they were virtuous. Thus, the coward will be enjoined to act as if he were brave, and punished if he does otherwise; the temperate and the intemperate will be required to act temperately, etc. This means that justice (i.e. lawfulness) and virtue are the same in terms of the conduct they produce, but not the same in essence: the virtuous man does it because he is virtuous, without compulsion, and thus is better than the lawful.
West notes an important difference in that the Founders separated public virtue from private virtue, leaving a great deal more leeway in private life. Not complete leeway, as he points out: even religious liberty is not unlimited in these charters, which say that it cannot excuse 'licentiousness.' (175-6, 180) Yet I believe he has successfully shown that the Founders thought of encouraging the virtues necessary for citizenship as a task that government and especially its educational systems both should and must undertake.
UPDATE: West doesn’t mention him, but the want/ought discussion of liberty and virtue is also present in fellow Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. For Kant, what proves that a rational being is free and not driven like an animal by base desire is his ability to choose what he ought instead of what he wants. Even metaphysically freedom is proven by doing the virtuous thing instead of the desirable thing.
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I have read that all 13 original states had established churches or religious tests for office. The 1A only applied to the federal government until passage of the 14th. This bolsters West's argument; not only did they put virtue in the founding documents, every state acted on that belief.
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