In 2013, 9 Foundations responded to a speech made at the Independent Sector Annual Conference, "Our Common Purpose." The goal: citizens’ dialogues that would produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities”... "[Later, Republican billionaire donor] Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century.”You will notice these two things are not the same. "An agenda of national priorities" is not "what it means to be a good citizen." But the foundations kept giving each other money and people and in 2020 and renamed the commission "Our Common Purpose."
Emphasis added.
They are not the same question. However, the relationship between them has been a foundation of political philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. You may remember how the Nicomachean Ethics (EN) ends the long inquiry into human virtue by transitioning into a call for political thought. The reason was that the ethical program only works on those who are interested in it, the ones who are seeking that which is most worthy of honor, most noble, the ones moved by the stories of such things they heard in their upbringing. Most people aren't like that:
Not everyone has an equal capacity for virtue. We have seen this repeated many times, especially in Book IV. This is not only due to environmental issues -- for example, the presence or absence of a good upbringing -- but also due to these issues that Aristotle describes as character-based. Plato, meanwhile, had belabored repeatedly in his dialogues that great men often fail to produce great sons: even an extraordinary family will only sometimes, and not reliably, produce people with the highest capacity for virtue. This is a major theme of both the Protagoras and the Republic, for example.
So this brings us back to a problem Tom raised early: how does this program become workable? Aristotle has an idea that he is about to tell us, but at the beginning we have a program that is only workable for those who are interested in it: if you wanted to become virtuous, and you were willing to do the work, this is how you go about it. Yet the many do not wish to become virtuous, especially not if it requires work[.]
The 'idea that Aristotle is about to tell us about' is that you need a politics to go with the ethics.
[I]t is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.
Emphasis added. Aristotle was a great lover of law; in the Rhetoric too he proposes that the laws cover as much as possible and as specifically as possible, as even carefully selected magistrates can't be relied upon to get above their class or family interests in order to rule impartially.
Now, what you will notice about Aristotle's proposal is that it is a set of 'national priorities' that is intended to shape 'good citizens.' The whole point of all of these laws is to make the people virtuous, and one of the questions considered in the EN is how the virtue of justice relates to good citizenship. Justice is a kind of 'lawfulness,' but the laws are not just any laws: they're laws that require everyone to behave as if they were virtuous or suffer punishments -- laws of just the type Aristotle is imagining at the very end of the work.
This was also Plato's concern in the Laws, as it had been in the Republic. The whole point of both of those dialogues was to ponder how to use the law to shape good citizens: and this was the point of the state's constitution, to shape the best sort of citizens. Both of these projects of Plato's end up being totalitarian in scope, because both acknowledge the problem Aristotle is considering too -- not all people are equally capable of virtue. In the Republic, Plato sketches a scheme in which only the best are allowed to rule, protected by an auxiliary class of warriors who can be trusted to obey orders (having at least the virtues of courage and spirit and enough self-mastery to be enduring as necessary); the bulk of men are to be kept from power and guided by the Wise, and guided to by propagating a Noble Lie (which is, by the way, the story you will hear at church: 'those who behave well live a glorious afterlife, but those who don't obey the rules are doomed to suffering after death'). The Laws has a different schema entirely, as you may recall from our long exploration of it together one winter, but it ends with laws controlling every aspect of society and also a secret nocturnal council that spies on the citizens in order to punish departures from virtue.
Thus, "an agenda of national priorities" both is and is not "what it means to be a good citizen." It 'is not' in the sense that you can discuss either of those independently; it 'is' in the sense that the two questions are so closely related that one naturally leads into the other and vice-versa. They always have.
The panel assembled here to consider the politics is just following the natural course of the landscape, as a river suddenly springs up in a desert in the same place as during the last rare rain even though the river has been gone for years.
What came out was not a civics pamphlet. The commission produced 31 recommendations including proposed constitutional amendments, expansion of the U.S. House by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, ranked-choice voting nationwide, and a universal expectation of national service. The question about good citizenship had become a structural blueprint for a different republic.
That is exactly the path followed by Plato and then Aristotle, and by many others down the years.
I obviously have a very different sense myself about the right way to proceed; but I understand exactly why they are where they are. They are just following the lay of the land.
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