SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES

               A NEW POLITICS OF THE COMMON GOOD 

What might a new politics of the common good look like ? Here are some possible themes : 


1. Citizenship, sacrifice, and service

   If a just society requires a strong sense of community, it must find a way to cultivate in citizens a concern for a whole, a dedication to the common good. It can't be indifferent to the attitudes and dispositions, the "habits of the heart," that citizens bring to public life. It must find a way to lean against purely privatized notions of the good life, and cultivate civic virtue.
   Traditionally, the public school has been a site of civic education. In some generations, the military has been another. I'm referring not mainly to the explicit teaching of civic virtue, but to the practical, often inadvertent civic education that takes place 

when young people from different economic classes, religious backgrounds, and ethnic communities come together in common institutions. 
   At a time when many public schools are in a parlous condition and when only a fraction of American society serves in the military, it is a serious question how a democratic society as vast and disparate as ours can hope to cultivate the solidarity and sense of mutual responsibility that a just society requires. This question has recently reappeared in our political discourse, at least to some 
extent.
   During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama observed that the events of September 11, 2001, stirred in Americans a sense of patriotism and pride, and a new willingness to serve their country. And he criticized President George W. Bush for not summoning Americans to some form of shared sacrifice. " Instead of a call to service," Obama said,  "we were asked to go shopping. Instead of a call for shared sacrifice, we gave tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans in a time of war ---something that had never before happened in or history. 
   Obama proposed to encourage national service by offering students help with college tuition in exchange for one hundred hours of public service. "You invest in America, and America invests in you," he told young people as he campaigned across the country. The proposal proved to be one of his most popular, and in April 2009, he signed legislation to expand the AmeriCorps public service program and provide college money for students who volunteered in their communities. Despite the resonance of Obama's call to national service, however, more ambitious proposals for mandatory national service have not found their way onto the political agenda. 

2. The moral limits of markets 

   One of the most striking tendencies of our time is the expansion of markets and market-oriented reasoning into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. Earlier, we discussed the moral questions that arise, for example, when countries hire out military service and the interrogation of prisoners to mercenaries or private contractors ; or when parents outsource pregnancy and childbearing to paid laborers in the developing world ; or when people buy and sell kidneys on the open market. Other instances abound : Should students in underperforming schools be offers cash payments for scoring well on standardized tests ? Should teachers be given bonuses for improving the test results of their students ? Should states hire for-profit prison companies to house their inmates ? Should the United States simplify its immigration policy by adopting the proposal of a University of Chicago economist to sell U.S. citizenship for a $100,000 fee ?
   These questions are not only about utility and consent. They are also about the right way of valuing key social services --- military service, child-bearing, teaching and learning, criminal punishment, the admission of new citizens, and so on. Since marketing social practices may corrupt or degrade the norms that define them, we need to ask what non-market norms we want to protect from market intrusion. This is a question that requires public debate about competing conceptions of the right way of valuing goods. Markets may be useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS, we need a public debate about the moral limits of of markets.