Is Our Patriotism Moral?
IN FOCUS, 9 Jul 2012
Gary Gutting – The New York Times
To my mind, the Fourth of July has a lot going for it compared with other holidays: great food without a lot of work, warm weather, no presents, and fireworks. And, in our house, at least, there’s the special moment when we read out loud the Declaration of Independence and follow with a toast (American sparkling wine, of course), “To the United States of America!” And I have to force back tears of pride at being an American.
This is my own distinctive experience of what we call “patriotism,” and I suspect that many Americans experience something similar, and acknowledge it in their own ways. Amid the frequent confusion, frustration and anger of our political disagreements, patriotism — a deep-seated love of our country — remains something that has the potential to bring us together, particularly at times of national crisis or triumph.
But within my own particular intellectual tribe of philosophers, patriotism is often regarded as a “problem,” an emotion that many find hard to defend as morally appropriate. Of course, many Americans are uneasy with, even repelled by, certain expressions of patriotism — perhaps the obligatory flag-pins of politicians, the inanity of “freedom fries,” the suggestion in the revised Pledge of Allegiance that atheists aren’t patriotic, or even readings of the Declaration of Independence. But the philosophical problem of patriotism is not about whether or not certain expressions of patriotism are appropriate; it is about the moral defensibility of the attitude as such. (For a good survey of the philosophical issues see Igor Primoriz’s Stanford Encyclopedia article.)
At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. That was the answer among the ancient Greeks as well as many other traditional societies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders.
Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism, thus beginning a centuries-long argument that, by modern times, led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals. In other words, the “in-group” for morality is not any particular social group (family, city, nation) but humankind as a whole. This universal moral viewpoint seems to reject patriotism for “cosmopolitanism” —the view perhaps first formulated by Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, replied that he was a citizen of the world.
Certainly, patriotism can take an explicitly amoral form: “My country, right or wrong.” But even strong traditional patriots can accept moral limits on the means we use to advance the cause of our country. They may agree, for example, that it’s wrong to threaten Canada with nuclear annihilation to obtain a more favorable trade agreement.
But the moral problem for patriotism arises at a deeper level. Suppose the question is not about blatantly immoral means but simply about whether our country should flourish at the expense of another? Suppose, for example, that at some point Saudi Arabia, now allied with China, threatened to curtail our access to its oil, thereby significantly reducing our productivity and tipping the balance of world economic power to China. Imagine an American president who declined to oppose this action because he had concluded that, from a disinterested moral viewpoint, it was better for mankind as a whole. Even if we admired such a response, it’s hard to think that it would express patriotic regard for the United States.
Should we therefore conclude that patriotism is ultimately at odds with a moral viewpoint? There remains the option of denying that morality has the universal, all-inclusive nature modern philosophers think it has. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, argues that morality is rooted in the life of a specific real community — a village, a city, a nation, with its idiosyncratic customs and history — and that, therefore, adherence to morality requires loyalty to such a community. Patriotism, on this view, is essential for living a morally good life. MacIntyre’s argument (in his Lindley Lecture, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”) has provided the most powerful contemporary defense of a full-blooded patriotism.
It may seem, then, that we must either accept modern universalist ethics and reject patriotism as a basic moral virtue or accept patriotism along with MacIntyre’s traditional localist morality. But perhaps, at least in the American context, there is a way of avoiding the dilemma.
For what is the animating ideal of American patriotism if not the freedom of all persons, not just its own citizens? This is apparent in our Declaration, which bases its case for independence on the principle that governments exist to “secure the rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to which all persons are equally entitled. This principle is the avowed purpose of all our actions as a nation, and we may read our history as the story of our successes and failures in carrying out this principle. America, then, is the paradox of a local historical project that aims at universal liberation. Through this project, we have a way of combining traditional patriotism with universal morality.
This project has had many failures, most often when we forget that the freedom of a nation must always grow from its own historical roots. We cannot simply wage a war that rips up those roots and then transplant shoots from our own stock (American-style capitalism, political parties, our popular culture). We have also often forgotten that the liberation of our own citizens is by no means complete. But none of this alters the fact that our governments have often worked and our soldiers died not just for our own freedom but for the freedom of all nations.
We are a MacIntyrean community that is still trying to live out a modern morality that seeks the freedom of everyone. I love America because I still believe that this sublime project is possible.
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Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.
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