Most people are sensitive to their environment and learn that it is changeable, fragile, and within our power to ruin. We prefer a clean room to a dirty one, rivers sans sewage, and so on. What seems less clear is our sensitivity to what we’ll call the moral or ethical environment. This is that place filled with ideas about how to live.
The moral and ethical environment is determined by what we find acceptable or unacceptable, worth admiring, or warranting condemnation. It determines our judgment about whether things are going well or going badly, and it determines our conception of what is due us and what we owe others. And, this environment shapes our emotional responses by causing us to feel pride or shame, rage or gratitude, and for judging what can be forgiven, or not. It gives us our standards for behavior.
These environments, physical as well as moral and ethical, are best when they are balanced. That’s why gardeners take soil tests, and why the best love story is never about unrequited love. In unbalanced environments things don’t grow well, and hearts get broken.
Our current public environment seems unbalanced, one where we care more about our rights than about our goodness. For early thinkers about morality and ethics, like Confucius or Plato or St. Paul, the focus was on the condition of one’s soul, meaning one’s personal state of goodness or harmony. For Plato, there could be no “good” political order – a just political order respecting rights – unless the people within it were also good.
We appear not to believe that anymore. Instead, it looks like we think that our constitutional democracy is fine regardless of the private – and not so private – vices of those within it. We wave flags and call it good citizenship, but out-source our wars and whine about taxes. The greatest portion of our moral energy goes toward judging our neighbor, while feeling outraged when the favor is returned. Notably, the Victorian ideal of a life of duty is considerably lost to us; we measure ourselves, and one another, by the quality and quantity of our consumption.
Perhaps this explains the shamelessness of our politics.