Episode 6 A System of Universal Public Moral Reasoning and Integrating Moral Philoso6phy and Social Science

This episode is really timely and cool. It makes all the work we have done up until now worthwhile, and it will make all of the work we do later possible. It surprised the heck out of me when I wrote it for Let’s Get Civil because I put some stuff together that I had not seen before, so it surprised me. That’s why I think it is cool. I hope the audience at least finds it interesting and useful.

It surprised me while writing Let’s Get Civil, because I started the chapter writing about theories of knowledge that evolved into developing a system of universal public moral reasoning. I wrote it like 6 or 7 years ago, and don’t remember how all of it took place. However, when I read the chapter now to re-frame it for this blog, it seems unusual that I did not make a bid deal out of telling readers we were going to develop a system of mature or universal public moral reasoning. It’s a huge achievement within the chapter, so at least for this episode of my blog, I want to make a big deal of it up front. I will leave the work as it was presented in the book because it’s kind of organic, it just develops within the larger discussions of theories of knowledge, but I have put it in the title of this episode and have mentioned it here. Now let’s get to it.

We have been talking a lot about how we think and that that it is important to what we think. Now we are really going to get into how we think.

We have been thinking about different “theories of knowledge” to help us think: Our theory of economics to help us think about economics and economic justice, our theories of cognitive development moral development to help us think about how we learn to reason like grown ups.

Now we might as well start using the technical term that puts thinking about how we think on steroids: Epistemology. Don’t freak out. Words are tools and we have seen that intellectual tools matter. Most words are everyday tools, but some are intellectual tools. “Epistemology” is a very useful intellectual tool. Let me demonstrate that assertion. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, what is required to claim we know something. It also studies and develops the organization, structure, and standards of knowledge in a discipline. That’s its classic role and it continues today. We can add that it studies the source of knowledge in various disciplines and their methods. Epistemology lets us really get into how we think.

An Epistemology unites knowledge in its discipline. An epistemology does not "shut itself up in its own standard" or conflicting standards. It unites the standards of knowledge in a discipline which allow it to unite its knowledge.

In this episode, we work on the epistemology of public moral philosophy and the epistemology of social science. Public moral philosophy. Not religious moral philosophy or personal moral philosophy. Public moral philosophy. With that said, we will use the term moral philosophy and we will all know that we are talking about public moral philosophy.

But why epistemology? Because nothing helps us think about how we think as much as learning about different epistemologies. And nothing helps us think about how we think in different disciplines as much as a sound epistemology. Learning about and developing the epistemologies of moral philosophy and social science is indispensable to our full intellectual development, to both how we reason and how we reason morally.

In this discussion, we use what we established from the beginning of the blog: Full intellectual development depends upon both mature cognitive and moral development. We work on the full cognitive and moral development of both moral philosophy and social science by working on their epistemologies.

We're going to study and solve epistemological problems in these two disciplines. We're going to study and do epistemology. To develop an epistemology, we need to identify the sources of knowledge in each discipline as well as the organization, structure, and standards of knowledge in each discipline. This whole discussion is necessary and it holds some very cool surprises.

First, early one, we develop a system of universal public moral reasoning. As we noticed when discussing individualism and universal moral reasoning, individualism works when we exercise freedom which is personal, but we need universal moral reasoning to pursue liberty which is political and is carried out by We the People. We the People must build agreement. We cannot "shut ourselves up in our own standards." We must work together with common standards, shared standards. And developing those shared standards requires a system of mature, universal moral reasoning.

Let me emphasize that. Without a system of mature/universal moral reasoning, we get stuck in individualism. That is why individualism is so prominent in the university, journalism, politics, and the public square; because there is no alternative, there is no system of universal public moral reasoning for We the People to use. It’s a big deal that we develop and can use a system of mature public moral reasoning. It lets use get out of our own, individual standards and develop shared standards of both morals and knowledge. One of the things that surprised me in all of this is how easy it was. We’ll get to it soon.

Second, we develop an epistemology for moral philosophy. We discover that only moral philosophy’s source of knowledge works independently of the social sciences. The organization, structure, standards, and methods of moral philosophy cannot be developed and used in just the work that moral philosophy does. The organization, structure, standards, and methods of moral philosophy have no use, no application without the social sciences. They cannot do anything on their own. They must be used in the social sciences. Moral philosophy can only get its own jobs started. Social science is necessary to get those jobs done. Needless to say, that's an important observation. The organization, structure, standards, and methods of moral philosophy are incomplete without the contributions that only the social sciences can make to them.

Then we turn to the epistemology of social science and discover that it has the same epistemology as is used in science, kind of. We bring moral philosophy into social science's epistemology. So while we maintain a clear distinction between moral philosophy and social science, we also integrate them.

When we have completed our discussion of the epistemologies of moral philosophy and social science, we have integrated them and we have accounted for the source of knowledge in each, their methods, structure, and standards.

We put off the discussion of their organization of knowledge because we will discuss it and paradigms when we turn to Education Justice.

Finally we talk about how natural science, moral philosophy, and social science can work together in the public square and the powerful leadership they can provide to We the People when we work together and when we work with them. That discussion calls for significant cognitive modification as a prerequisite to our behavior modification.

The Epistemology of Moral Philosophy:

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) cleared the air regarding the fundamental difference between inquiry in the natural sciences (natural philosophy) and inquiry in social science (moral philosophy).

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant taught us that natural science inquires into the nature of what is, into “laws according to which everything does happen.” On the other hand, he wrote, moral philosophy (which, as Kant used the term, is now called social science) inquires into the nature of what ought to be, “laws according to which everything ought to happen.”

The natural sciences are perfectly suited to studying the nature of what is, but they don’t have the tools needed to inquire into what ought to be. What is exists in the physical world and is there to be studied, weighed, measured, observed, calculated, manipulated, and restructured. That’s what scientists do. But that is very different from studying what ought to be which explains why natural science has not developed the tools required to study what ought to be.

Society is a human construct. Humans have created society to meet their needs. By the time humans came along, nature was there to be studied. Humans created society to help them survive and thrive. When humans study what ought to be, we are studying our own creation, and that requires additional tools to what science uses to study nature. As social science has demonstrated, we can use tools from science, but we also must use tools that science does not use.

"What ought to be" does not exist in the physical world. "What ought to be" is a way of thinking about the social world, how we think we should design it, structure it. "What ought to be" tells us what our laws, policies, and programs ought to achieve. "What ought to be" provides us with the standard of knowledge in social science, the criteria for evaluating what is in society, and the criteria for evaluating the efficacy of the laws, policies, and programs we create to maintain and improve society. What ought to be guides our arguments in the public square about laws, policies, and programs that are supposed to make our society become what it ought to be.

So how do we inquire into the nature of What ought to be? We must use tools developed in moral philosophy. We will use two methods of moral reasoning: metaphysical moral reasoning and teleological moral reasoning, and one intellectual tool from moral philosophy, the Golden Mean which we have already used.

Metaphysical moral reasoning is deductive. It starts with a priori assumptions and works toward specific conclusions about what ought to be. We only use it when we discuss women’s reproductive rights and will save our discussion about it until then.

We use teleological moral reasoning extensively. If it is a new term for you, just hang with me a moment. I describe it at length below.

I mention the Golden Mean because it proved essential when I was thinking about economic justice, trying to figure out how we think about it and how we should think about it. Most young readers have probably never heard of it, and many older readers probably remember their most interesting friends disparaging it. Generations of young people have dismissed the Golden Mean, associated it with the Greeks' call for "all things in moderation.” Moderation? You don’t pursue excellence by seeking moderation. You don't do extreme skate boarding by seeking moderation. Fair enough. But as we have seen, it can be a powerful tool in public moral reasoning. It can force us to look for concepts that are not immediately obvious. We had that discussion when we discussed our economic theory and economic justice.

The bulk of our work will employ teleological reasoning. It is easy to make fun of teleological reasoning. Aristotle used it when doing natural science, what was then called natural philosophy. Newton rejected it and replaced with the scientific method, which was a new epistemology. But we must take it seriously when we apply it to moral reasoning. And it turns out to be compatible with the social science method. It does not change the scientific method used by social sciences, it adds to it.

We use teleological reasoning to establish our list of what ought to be in society, what we should do. Statements that describe what we should do are moral statements. We call them our morally grounded purposes. Aristotle called them teloi. Telos is the singular form, teloi, the plural. Teloi rhymes with Malloy. We get teleological reasoning from Aristotle, but we limit it to moral philosophy and the social sciences, and we vastly improve it by applying the power of the social sciences to it.

The Teleological Structure and Standards of Moral Reasoning

Here we go. We are about to develop a system of universal public moral reasoning.

In teleological reasoning, we establish our telos, our goal, our morally grounded purpose, and then we identify the actions that help us achieve our purpose. That's our structure, and it includes our standards. Aristotle called the actions that help achieve one’s telos virtues, and he called the actions that undermine or prevent us from achieving our telos vices.

There you go. Classic moral language. Virtues and vices. We see that the telos provides the standard, the criteria, we use to judge actions as good or bad. We evaluate what we do by asking, Does it help or hurt our attempts to achieve our telos? Aristotle's language of the teleological structure and standards of moral reasoning is easily translated into language that fits public moral reasoning:

Teloi: The morally grounded purposes we establish for our society.

Virtues: Good Laws, programs, and policies that help us achieve our morally grounded purposes.

Vices: Bad laws, programs and policies that prevent us from achieving our morally grounded purposes.

Our morally grounded purposes tell us what we want to achieve, the ultimate goals that We the People seek in the public square. Not in our private lives. In our public lives.

Importantly, we are not talking about being good little girls and boys. We are talking about We the People being able to evaluate laws and public policies. They are good laws and policies if they help us achieve our goals, our morally grounded purposes. They are bad laws and policies if they prevent us from achieving our goals, our morally grounded purposes.

Now notice, moral philosophy can’t identify the laws, policies, and programs that help us achieve our morally grounded purposes or the laws, policies, and programs that prevent us from achieving those morally grounded purposes. Moral philosophy does not have the tools required to do that job. That’s the job of the social sciences. Teleological moral reasoning can’t function, can’t get the whole job done, without the social sciences. That means that our epistemology of moral philosophy must be integrated with social science.

Don’t even be tempted to re-integrate moral philosophy and social science as they were in the High Middle Ages. That would ignore the significant advances social science has made by being scientific.

We achieve that structure and use those standards in both moral philosophy and the social sciences or they don’t exist at all. What we do with “what ought to be” must be done in society, and only the social sciences can conduct the research and development needed to tell us what is in society, how it measures up against our morally grounded purposes, what we can and should do, and what we must not do to achieve our morally grounded purposes.

We improve upon Aristotle’s structure. For one, we’re doing stuff and we’re paying attention to the results. That’s consistent with the scientific method, and in philosophy it's called being pragmatic. That’s what it means to be pragmatic: set a goal, do stuff, and pay attention to results. However, as we have seen, pragmatism has a huge weakness.

Pragmatism is related to analytic philosophy and positivism both of which attempted to fix philosophy by making it scientific. And as we have seen, science does not have the tools required to investigate what ought to be. Similarly, pragmatism reminds us to focus on our goals and on our results, but it does not provide the criteria for selecting our goals, what we ought to achieve. We fix that weakness in pragmatism when we identify our morally grounded purposes, what we ought to achieve.

We’re in the public square and we’re interested in what works and what does not work. But something only works if it does what it ought to do, if it achieves what ought to be. We have put what works in the context of morally grounded purposes. We have united. pragmatism with moral philosophy to establish our criteria regarding what works and what does not work. We have been doing this all along, but now we can name what we’re doing: When we do public moral philosophy, we do Morally Grounded Pragmatism. Not pragmatic morality. Morally Grounded Pragmatism. As we will see, morally grounded pragmatism is wonderfully compatible with the scientific method used by social scientists.

We establish our morally grounded purposes and we use them as criteria (standards) to evaluate what is in society. We’re doing moral philosophy and social science. We have certainly talked a lot about our morally grounded purposes. It's time we find out what they are.

The Morally Grounded Purposes of America’s Democratic Republic:

The American Constitution established the United States as a Constitutional Democratic Republic. It was also founded and has been preserved as a liberal democracy. We have already described the role that John Stuart Mill (1806―1873) played in defining the core principles of the United States and France as liberal democracies.

What are the core principles of our liberal democracy? In identifying our morally grounded purposes, we don’t have to start with a blank slate. This is America. We have had national goals and values since the signing of the Declaration of Independence which stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Our morally grounded purposes then can start with all humans being created equal and with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But those are only “among” our unalienable rights. Even before those ends, we must declare our goal of freedom and how we will protect it while making laws.

In justifying the American Revolution, The Declaration of Independence, lists the offenses the King of England committed against the people of the American colonies and ended that list with this assertion:

A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We’re first of all “a free people. We must start with freedom. Anytime we suggest a law, we suggest that in some manner or other, we will impact someone’s freedom. In this country, we have chosen:

. . . civil freedom of the citizen under a government whose powers are limited, and under a rule of law whose reach is likewise limited, chiefly by the axiom that the constraints of law must serve the cause of essential social freedom.

As we think and talk about creating public laws and policies, we must be able to argue that our laws serve the cause of essential social freedom. Public laws preserve personal and social freedom. Essential social freedom is one of our morally grounded purposes.

We begin with the assumption that all of our citizens enjoy complete social freedom: how they act with others in any social setting: in their home, with their family, what churches and clubs they join, and how they act in those churches and clubs; what they say and write; and so on.

In every facet of their lives, all citizens in a liberal democracy are free. The laws that the government of a liberal democracy makes always impact, reduce in some way, essential social freedom. So even though arguments for laws and policies are intended to clarify and protect our social freedom, they must protect personal and civil freedom. If laws destroy the personal or civil freedom of some of our citizens, telling them that if they don’t like it they can leave the country is not just a stupid statement, it violates a moral axiom of our liberal democracy. It operates in tribal moral reasoning. It violates the rights of some citizens while giving advantages to others. It undermines and threatens our liberal democracy.

Life and liberty are rights that have received considerable attention in the public square. We could treat safety as a separate responsibility, but I think that it's obviously included in “life.” Rather than write life/safety, I will ask the reader to assume that safety is included in “life.” Our laws and policies can’t serve the cause of essential social freedom if they don’t provide life and liberty. Using Kant’s insight, a law that undermines life and liberty for some but not for others “destroys itself in practice.”

We’re building our list of morally grounded purposes:

Essential social freedom,

Life and liberty.

I have already clarified what I mean by freedom and liberty, but it bears repeating here. Freedom is personal, social, a promise to each person. Liberty is political; it is a promise to We the People, not to individuals but to all of us living as citizens in our Democratic Republic.

Our commitment to liberty means that rulers can’t conduct themselves as if they're above the law or impose their authority on individuals. In a liberal democracy, rulers rule through the power given to them in the Constitution and are affirmed or replaced through elections. Rulers (in America’s case, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government) must exercise their authority in a way that preserves the Constitution and the liberty of everyone who lives in our country. We exercise our freedom independent of the law. The law protects our political liberty and our social freedom.

Next, we can strengthen our morally grounded purposes by adopting an axiom that’s ubiquitous in the Eastern Intellectual Tradition: One’s happiness can’t cause pain in others. That's a nifty commitment to universal moral reasoning. What else?

As a nation we haven’t been so clear regarding peace. We haven’t adequately linked peace with justice. That’s just weird. The Declaration of Independence cited the violation of justice as grounds for the people to declare their ruler a tyrant who is unfit to rule and for their right to overthrow him, even to take up arms against him. In brief: No Justice, No Peace! It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. And yet our government and institutional leaders haven’t hesitated to use violence to suppress activists who have used peaceful demonstrations to demand their Constitutional rights. We must include peace and justice among our morally grounded purposes.

The pursuit of happiness has been largely ignored as a public responsibility and treated as a private matter, a personal responsibility. The pursuit of happiness is not a new claim. Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence. Our Founding Fathers risked their lives when they signed off on the document that includes it. It deserves a lot more intellectual attention in the public square so that we understand which areas of happiness and fulfillment are best thought of as personal and which are impossible to pursue alone, can only be achieved with the support of our community. We may not know what to do about the pursuit of happiness, but we know that it must be included in the morally grounded purposes of our liberal democracy. It's a goal, not an achievement. We give this topic more attention in the episodes that deal with Social Justice.

We might also acknowledge that public policy must deal with the just distribution of wealth. But as communist countries have taught us, the distribution of wealth is not an interesting topic if there is no wealth. Our economic system must both generate wealth and distribute wealth. Economic justice is better understood as a set of economic laws and policies that either help or frustrate our attempts to achieve our morally grounded purposes.

Interestingly, we have developed another insight. Our morally grounded purposes stand alone. They provide the standards by which we evaluate what is in society and the laws, policies and programs we adopt to achieve those purposes. Economic justice is a goal of our economic system and must be accounted for in our theory of economics.

The areas of our lives that require laws and policies can be described as areas of public responsibility, not morally grounded purposes. The just distribution of wealth is achieved through laws, policies, and programs that are evaluated in terms of their ability to achieve our morally grounded purposes.

What morally grounded purposes do we have so far?

Preserve and protect essential social freedom.

Provide for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Guarantee justice and peace.

Make no laws that give happiness or benefit to some at the cost of doing harm to others.

That list looks pretty good, but it lacks clarity on one essential issue we studied in moral development. Universal moral reasoning treats everyone the same. Our moral statements must apply to all, equally. Just like it says in the Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal”) and the Pledge of Allegiance (“With liberty and justice for all”). And as we have seen, to treat everyone equally, we must acknowledge and protect the full humanity of all of our people: All races, all religions, all genders, all sexual orientations. We acknowledge that full humanity includes the domains of the individual, person, and self. Now we’re getting at our morally grounded purposes, our core American values.

Recognize, preserve, and promote the dignity and worth of all humans.

Preserve and protect essential social freedom of all humans.

Provide for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all humans.

Guarantee peace and safety for all humans.

Make no laws that give happiness or benefit to some at the cost of doing harm to any other humans.

In We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray, S.J. insisted that agreement does not end argument but that useful argument begins with agreement. This truth applies to how we work to achieve our morally grounded purposes. Yes, we must agree about what we’re trying to accomplish, our morally grounded purposes. And when we have agreed, we treat them as axioms: Unquestioned core values that stand on their own, that everyone agrees to, that guide inquiry, practice, and most of all arguments in the public square.

Obviously, because the teloi or morally grounded purposes of a teleological argument or teleological reasoning play a defining role in the argument, in the reasoning that supports the argument, they must be unarguably true. They must be accepted by everyone participating in the argument. A false telos produces a fallacious argument. Unaccepted teloi produces the kind of disagreement that makes productive argument impossible.

I have not made arguments for our morally grounded purposes. I did not have to. First, I took them from our founding documents and added one that's ubiquitous in eastern philosophy and another that is a sine qua non to the others. They both seem indispensable in this discussion. Further, any arguments against them would employ tribal moral reasoning that has no place in the public square. Second, once we committed to mature moral reasoning, our morally grounded purposes became self-evident, as Jefferson said they were. One might be able to “just disagree” but as we have seen, that's fine in private life but childish conduct in the public square.

One must present a rational argument to support one’s rejection of any of our morally grounded purposes, and to do so one must advance the philosophy of a different form of government than ours or one grounded in tribal moral reasoning.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that we could add new morally grounded purposes to our list, like to protect the earth and our environment. But to do so would require our developing whole arguments to defend them which would be easy, but is not the job of this blog, well, not yet. This blog is designed to help We the People conduct all public arguments productively, not to carry them out. These morally grounded purposes suffice for now, and are unarguable, but they may not be exhaustive. There may be more.

Once we agree on our morally grounded purposes, there is enormous room for argument about how to achieve them. The important point to remember is that it's impossible even to begin rational discourse on what we ought to do in society, if we haven’t agreed on what we ought to achieve. This list of morally grounded purposes provides a solid foundation upon which to conduct moral discourse in the social sciences and in the public square. It supports the full development of the social sciences, our body politic, and our political mind.

With all this very practical work in epistemology, look what we have done. We have developed a system of universal public moral reasoning. We have both its structure and its essential content. A whole bunch of intellectuals in universities, journalism, and politics did not see that coming. Well don’t fight it. Improve on it or replace it with something better, but there is no denying that a system of universal public moral reasoning is indispensable to healing our fractured body politic and conducting rational discourse in the public square. It is indispensable to full intellectual development.

Checking back in on what we have done and what we must do, we recall that we're working on how we think about how we think. Epistemology consists of the source, organization, structure, and standards of knowledge in a discipline. Aristotle helped us think about our structure and standards. But what is our source? This is where mathematics helps us think

The Source of Knowledge in Moral Philosophy

It's helpful to think of moral philosophy as similar to mathematics and social science as similar to natural science. Mathematics and natural science are indispensable to each other, and develop knowledge differently. Moral philosophy and social science are indispensable to each other, and develop knowledge differently.

When mathematicians develop knowledge, they identify mathematical axioms and conduct rational arguments based on the best mathematical knowledge and deductive reason. What is their source of knowledge? In a nut shell: The mathematics community, working together with shared rules is the source of knowledge in mathematics. However, as we will see when we discuss the Enlightenment, mathematics was not able to reach full development on its own. Only when mathematics became indispensable to science, only when mathematics was forced to solve problems within the scientific method, did it begin to reach full development.

Moral philosophy has a lot in common with mathematics. Working together, moral philosophers correct and contribute to each other when they operate with mature cognitive development and mature moral reasoning. The moral philosophy community working together with shared rules of logic is the source of knowledge in moral philosophy.

However, the work of moral philosophers can’t reach full development unless it becomes indispensable to social science. And to become indispensable to social science, it must engage and confront and solve moral questions for the social sciences. The source of knowledge in moral philosophy is the moral philosophy community. The tests or standards of knowledge in moral philosophy occur in the social sciences which confirms or rejects the capacity of the assertions of moral philosophy to aid the full development of the social sciences.

Our work on epistemology in moral philosophy has produced our source of knowledge, the moral philosophy community. It has also provided our structure of moral reasoning, Aristotle’s teleological structure of goals, virtues and vices; and standards of knowledge, our morally grounded purposes. But these standards only become real when operating in the social sciences. And we can’t even think about the organization of knowledge in moral philosophy because that organization occurs in the organization of knowledge in the social sciences. That discussion takes place entirely within our discussion of social science.

Is there a moral philosophy method? Yes, but it's like the mathematical method, not the scientific method. The mathematical method establishes mathematical axioms and uses strict rules of logic. Its proofs are largely mathematical. Its applications occur in science. Moral philosophy must establish morally grounded purposes and moral axioms, but ultimately, the truth, the standards used to evaluate moral philosophy’s conclusions, must be established in society by the social sciences acting within the public square and government.

As we will see, everything we think about how we think in moral philosophy, our entire epistemology of moral philosophy, makes more sense when combined with social science. So let’s get to that conversation.

Social Science Method and Epistemology:

There was something to be said for treating the social sciences as branches of moral philosophy. They're that connected. But the social science method goes way beyond what moral philosophy is capable of. It really is an advancement in thinking and learning to treat them as interdependent but different. From an epistemological point of view, they make little sense except as integrated fields of study: Moral philosophy provides answers to the question What ought to be? And the social sciences use What Ought to Be in so many ways that a list is helpful. The social sciences learn what ought to be from moral philosophy and use it:

As the criteria for evaluating What Is in society.

To decide what to change and what to keep in society.

To develop new laws, policies, and programs to aid society.

To evaluate those laws, policies, and programs.

We need to look more closely at social science.

Emile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) taught social scientists to study objects in society and to use the scientific method in that study, but the social sciences must do more than just use the scientific method when testing results. They aren’t just interested in being able to describe what is happening or predict what will happen, they must prove that what will happen when public laws, policies, and programs are implemented will be what ought to happen.

The social science method must commit to achieving both predictability and morality. Social scientists must strive to say with an acceptable level of confidence that if we do A we will get B and B is good. That gets us close to the social science method. Social scientists have developed the statistical methods that measure predictability. Now we turn to the social science epistemology. Again, an Epistemology tells us the source, organization, structure, and standards of knowledge in a discipline.

The Source of Knowledge in Social Science:

The most obvious source of knowledge in social science is society. That’s what the social sciences study. That’s what defines social science as a science: It studies what is. The fact that it studies what is in society defines it as a social science. But the social sciences must also study what ought to be. That’s what defines social science as social science, not natural science. So the social sciences have two sources of knowledge: What Is in Society and What Ought to Be in Society, or the morally grounded purposes of our society as established by moral philosophy. At the source of knowledge level, social science integrates science and moral philosophy. We will come back to that.

The Structure and Standards of Knowledge in Social Science:

Social science has both moral structure/standards and scientific structure/standards. Social science must structure the study of what is in the context of what ought to be. Social science must evaluate what is in society against what ought to be. Studying what is against what ought to be is one of the structures of social science and studying what ought to be is one of the standards. Using that structure and those standards, social science acts with moral philosophy.

(When I read this chapter, it feels like I am stating the obvious, being redundant. It's obvious now, but it took a ton of work to get here.)

But social science is also science. Social science constructs best guesses about what ought to be done to make society better and translates those suppositions into mathematically structured hypotheses.

That’s exactly what scientists do and it's exactly what social scientists do: They design mathematically structured hypotheses, experiments that accommodate the collection of data in a form that can be subjected to mathematical analysis, with the standard of a prescribed level of predictability. Social science uses the structure and standards inherent in the scientific method. That’s the scientific structure and the scientific standards in the social science method. But in the design of its research, the social sciences must also design research that pays attention to what they're trying to predict: That it works and is good. All social science research, in sociology and management and economics and education, all of it can be vastly improved, made more useful, by focusing on both mathematical predictability and morality.

When social scientists design their experiments, design what data they collect and how they analyze it, they must account for both predictability and morality. Predictability is required in science. Morality is required because the social sciences are useless if they can’t help us achieve what ought to be. Again, the epistemology of social science integrates social science with moral philosophy. It integrates the structure and standards of science and moral philosophy. In a nut shell: scientific/mathematical predictability and morality.

As we will see when we investigate Feuerstein in episodes on Education Justice, we’re talking about changing how social scientists think and what they do. We’re not talking about behavior modification, although behavior does change. We’re talking about structural cognitive modification, changing the structure of how social scientists think. How they design research is, of course, what they do, but to fix how they do it, they must change how they think about it. Cognitive modification. Then they can help We the People change how we think, modify our cognition, so that we can change how we behave, how we talk in the public square.

The Organization of Knowledge in Social Science:

We have talked about the source, method, structure, and standards of knowledge in social science. What about organization? This is where Thomas Kuhn is useful, and when combined with Piaget, is a game changer. Kuhn helps us expand our understanding of formal operations; he describes paradigms, the organization of knowledge that unites both knowledge in a discipline and the members that make up the discipline's community.

As we have seen, formal reasoning consists of syllogisms, formal conceptual frameworks, and theoretical models and paradigms. However, the development of paradigms has the greatest impact on how social scientists think and what they do, what unites them as a community. In our discussion of Education Justice we will discuss paradigms, their power and structure and impact on disciplines that have one. It's not enough to talk about paradigms. We must see how one works and its impact on a discipline that gets one.

Natural Science, Social Science, and Moral Philosophy:

We have seen that moral philosophy and social science cannot reach full development without each other. They're useless without each other. But what about natural science? How does it relate to moral philosophy and social science? In an important way, it does not. Natural science reaches its full development when it does what it does free of interference from moral philosophy and social science. But that does not mean that natural science does not have a role to play in the public square.

A vast percentage of the research in natural science is morally neutral. It has no need for moral philosophy. However, some scientific research begs social solutions. And we must listen to what scientists tell us when they come to the public square and say:

Hey, we found this out, and We the People (yes, scientists too are members of the body politic when they enter the public square) must do something about it.

But scientists have no way of studying what We the People “ought” to do to fix a social problem. They can discover problems that impact society by using scientific research, but they can’t fix problems that require social solutions. All scientists can do is tell We the People what the problem is and give some technical advice on how to fix it. But We the People must decide what we will do to fix social problems.

Now that scientists have proven scientifically that global climate change threatens all life on earth, both natural scientists and the rest of us must ask, What should we do? Natural science is not capable of answering an “ought” question. Immediately, social science and moral philosophy enter the scene. Social science and moral philosophy have roles to play and must play them well as our body politic, as We the People, respond to what natural science tells us about global climate change.

Natural science has given us unarguable scientific facts. These facts are unarguable using scientific reasoning. Of course, anyone stuck on stupid, stupidly committed to ignorance, can argue with them. But as we have seen, they cannot participate in arguments being conducted in the public square because they cannot participate in rational arguments. One cannot rationally participate in scientific arguments, accept or reject scientific evidence, unless one uses scientific knowledge and methods of reasoning. We the People must decide what we ought to do and how to do it. But we can’t deny the facts. We the People can’t ignore the truth of natural science regarding global climate change, and We the People must decide what to do about it.

Similarly, natural science is capable of developing artificial intelligence that rivals a kind of human intelligence. How should it be developed? How should it be allowed to impact society? How should it be restrained? What must We the People insist the government do to accommodate AI and continue to achieve our Morally Grounded Purposes. AI did not replace our Morally Grounded Purposes and must not be allowed to vitiate them. Again, natural science can’t answer those questions. Social science and moral philosophy have central roles to play and they must play them well. Indeed, what social science and moral philosophy bring to the challenges presented by AI are at least arguably more crucial to the fate of humanity than what natural science brings.

It's no small matter that today social science and moral philosophy play minor roles in the university compared to natural science and that all three have virtually no voice in the public square. Part of the problem is that moral philosophers and social scientists have been silent in the public square. They have abandoned their role of establishing intellectual leadership and moral certitude in the public square. They have left a vacuum that radical capitalists and Status Christians have filled with doctrines felt as facts.

We will see later that when Aquinas made the West safe for reason, he allowed reason to trump religion in the public square. That success was evident when Rome could not stop the Copernican Revolution and during other public battles waged between religion and reason over the centuries. But right now, reason is taking a back seat to radical capitalists supported by Status Christians. Social scientists and moral philosophers face enormous intellectual and political challenges to set things straight in the public square. They cannot do it alone. We the People must work with them. But first, we all must show up.

We need:

A critical mass of Americans to show up in the public square and support our arguments. Religious humanists who believe that social responsibility is a prerequisite to redemption. Secular humanists who believe that a good life requires that they help others. Americans who believe that they're members of and responsible for our community and our liberal democracy.

This entire blog is based on my book Let's Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some viewers may want to read it. You can order it from Amazon. be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy.

Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.

Email: Patrickconroy61@gmail.com.

Episode 5 MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE DOMAINS OF FULL HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

We’ve talked about how moral development matters. It’s threatened by some powerful Americans who seek their own ends over the ends that benefit society. In order to enjoy the benefits of our Democratic Republic, We the People must fight to keep our democracy alive, healthy, and secure. We need tools to help us fight. Mature moral reasoning is one of the most important tools we have at our disposal. We must pursue it and use it and shame those who ignore or oppose it. But first, we must make sure we have it.

Lawrence Kohlberg described more levels of moral development than we need to concern ourselves with. Some are too immature, some are a bit out there, not practical as far as we are concerned. The stages can be described fairly simply, but what we know and are able to do within each stage can vary considerably. We’re using Kohlberg’s work, but not all of it, and we add to it.

We are interested in three of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and we refer to them with names that I have given them: tribal moral reasoning, institutional moral reasoning, and universal moral reasoning.

Tribal Moral Reasoning:

It is important for children to enter into the stage of tribal moral reasoning and it is important for children to mature out of it. All of the growth we talk about that occurs in tribal moral reasoning is important to a child’s development.

Heck, it is kinda fun to watch kids mature into tribal moral reasoning but it can also be maddening.

Tribal moral reasoning is enormously important in child development because children make a huge leap in social perspective. They move from thinking primarily about themselves to thinking about themselves as members of a group such as the family or the classroom.

Parents benefit from recognizing the growth and development that occur at this stage. They can encourage their children when they enter it and then help direct them through and out of it.

However, when thinking about our goal of healing our body politic, it is evident that this stage destroys public discourse for adults who operate in it. In order to conduct public discourse effectively, adults must outgrow tribalism.

The focus of adults who operate in tribes is easily understood as “Us vs. Them.” They think about and follow the norms their tribe sets for them.

Tribes have strong, domineering identities. Members know who belongs to their tribe and they know who is targeted by their tribe. Some are benign: football fans. Some are harmful, even malignant. When tribalism is malignant, the “We” are always more powerful than the “They:”

Think white racists who had all the power over black civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s who had none.

How do tribe members think? It’s not complicated: “We” decide what is right and what is wrong and if the “they” attempt to challenge what is right or do what is wrong, our entire group retaliates. A tribe’s retaliation can have few boundaries. It can be mean, even violent.

Tribal adults can be mean and even violent in how they treat others while being enormously loyal within their groups. That’s why members of tribes invariably talk about each other in glowing terms: Great person, good person, sincere person, trustworthy person.

We need to stop and think and feel this point. Members of tribes treat each other well. They come to each others’ aid. They make great sacrifices and will even risk their lives and for each other . All of which contributes to their powerful group identify. At the same time, they are incapable of understanding and feeling the effects of the indefensible ways they treat others.

Racism depends on tribal moral reasoning and the profound social experiences that support the group. Those experiences unite the tribe both as a group and in their rejection of their targeted “others.”

Whole police forces can get stuck in tribalism and tribal moral reasoning.

Obviously, the military benefits from tribal moral reasoning, especially when soldiers face combat ― which is reason enough for the military to be subject to civilian control.

That’s the short of it. What we must remember is that these adults operate at a level of moral reasoning that children enter while in junior high school. It is immature and it that supports how its members think and behave.

Members of tribes hold dear their doctrines felt as facts. They work with inherited doctrines felt as facts that their whole group shares.

One can point out to Southern racists (not all Southerners are racist) that the North won the civil war and invite them to join the union, become part of Our Democratic Republic and adopt and adhere to its values. But to no avail.

Not just the North, We the People have still not won the argument. What racists do is justified by what they think and the fact that the only group they care about agrees with them. Their doctrines felt as facts are wrapped up in what they call the unique and special southern tradition and culture. They can’t think differently. They are rationally incapable of questioning each other.

We will talk about our fellow citizens who are stuck in tribal moral reasoning when we visit the civil rights movement and the Americans who brutally attacked peaceful activists.

We’ll also talk about it when we discuss radical capitalist and economic justice. That discussion will reveal American oligarches for what they are and the force they apply to their goal of controlling our Democratic Republic in order to increase their wealth and power.

We’ve got some serious tribes operating in and threatening our Democratic Republic.

Institutional Moral Reasoning:

Unlike tribal moral reasoning, institutional moral reasoning has significant strengths in adult society, but it is experienced first in young adulthood.

When young adults achieve institutional moral reasoning, they know that family and school rules are important ― indeed, more important than the norms set by friends and peers.

Almost shockingly, these young adults can call out other students or friends for doing something they know is wrong. How’s that possible? That shift in loyalty?

Young people who have matured into institutional moral reasoning evaluate family and school and social norms in ways that go far beyond their earlier sense of fair ― “what my friends and I want.” Instead, they focus on whether or not these norms work or don’t work for the institution that has adopted them. This represents a huge change, among high school students and adults.

We need to take a deep breath. Maybe get up and walk around. We have just moved from the moral reasoning that supports tribes that aren’t capable of questioning each other even when they are engaged in mean or violent behavior, to moral reasoning that allows members of groups to call each other out if they have violated the norms of the institution to which they belong. That development can occur while students are in high school, in less than four years from their begin operating in tribal thinking.

Armed with institutional moral reasoning, adults follow the rules made by the institution, not by themselves. They can also question the rules made by the institution.

Leaders of institutions must be careful. These adults don’t reject rules because they aren’t what “we want.” They reject them because they are stupid. Why are they stupid? Because they don’t support, or even undermine, the institution’s goals.

By fairly obvious logical extension, we realize that laws made in the public square must have a rational connection to the public’s goals.

However, what are the public’s goals? Just the goals of institutions? Here we run into the limits of institutional moral reasoning.

The goals of different institutions can be great for the institutions, but may not be great for other institutions or for the local community or for the country. It’s great for a corporation to set cities in competition to win their new factory or corporate headquarters. They use the competition to get leverage when negotiating taxes and the acquisition of land.

However, that’s not so clearly in the interest of the city. It can be, but questioning the norms of the corporation doesn’t shed light on the benefits to the city. Kohlberg’s universal moral reasoning allows us to think about goals and norms that are even larger than institutional goals?

Universal Moral Reasoning

Kohlberg admitted that he had trouble conducting research on this level of moral development because so few adults operate at it with enough consistency to be studied.

In my opinion, the problem he faced is that universal moral reasoning is the first of his stages that requires formal operations, formal reasoning.

As I will discuss later, that was a problem for Kohlberg because he did not fully understand the nature of formal operations and its impact on moral reasoning.

As we have seen, when young adults begin to think formally, they venture into a whole new structure of reasoning,

New forms: syllogisms, formal conceptual frameworks, and theoretical models and paradigms.

Kohlberg did not fully understand formal reasoning which is why he had trouble understanding why adults could not operate at it consistently.

However, he did capture the key elements of universal moral reasoning.

With universal moral reasoning, adults take a social perspective that’s larger than my tribe or my institution.

They take the perspective of a rational individual who is aware of the values and rights of individuals prior to tribal attachments or institutional attachments. Prior to, we give priority to rational standards over tribal or institutional standards.

Everyone is treated the same. There is no “we versus them,” no “others.” There are no tribes. There are no institutions. There is only, We the People.

If We the People don’t operate with universal moral reasoning, we can’t complete the sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .,”

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that if We the People operate with universal moral reasoning, we can complete the sentence, “We hold these truths to be self evident. . . “ We can agree on and list those truths.

We will talk a lot about universal moral reasoning and we will do the work that needs to be done in moral philosophy to develop the intellectual tools we need to function consistently within it.

That work will represent a major intellectual achievement that will impact how we think about the nature of inquiry in the social sciences as well as how We the People conduct discourse in the public square. We will teach the public mind what it must know to develop and use universal moral reasoning.

I have referred to Kohlberg’s blind spot regarding formal reasoning and how it limited his understanding of his work on moral development. Now we can give it our attention.

Elliot Turiel on Learning and Moral Development:

Elliot Turiel was one of Kohlberg’s doctoral students. He wanted to confirm that children move sequentially through Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, that they are actually developmental stages that all children must pass through and not just various ways of thinking about different children.

In order to conduct his project in a reasonable time frame and not have to wait for all of his subjects to develop on their own, he provided instruction to aid their development.

It worked. His subjects moved sequentially through the stages. He noticed that offering instruction at one stage above their actual development was more effective than reviewing previous stages or instructing at two stages above their current level.

His findings were important: children develop sequentially through all stages, in order.

But he didn’t follow up on his other important finding ― that instruction aids development, that learning leads development.

Kohlberg had known that learning aids development, that when children encounter moral crises they are forced to think differently about morals. Differently. Their current level of moral development does not work and therefore they often advance their thinking. They learn to think at a higher level. But that interpretation of events left Kohlberg in the behaviorist theory of learning, for behaviorists acknowledge the role of experience in learning.

However, behaviorist think in terms of stimulus and response. In this example, the inability of their current way of thinking to work caused problems which became a stimulus to find a better way. That gives us: stimulus leads development.

Turiel seems to have overlooked the important new information he verified: it was instruction that aided his students’ development.

He assumed that it fit in his old schema that said learning through experience aids development, but just as stimulus and response. He assumed that in providing instruction, he had just provided a stimulus.

He remained stuck in the behaviorist theory of learning, that learning is a natural process of stimulus and response. It was not that the fact that instruction aided the development of his subjects’ capacity to reason was not interesting to him. Rather, the way he already thought made it impossible for him to notice this new, conflicting insight. This is an example of what we have talked about with paradigms: If one operates in one paradigm it is impossible even to think about or investigate a concept that exists is a different paradigm.

This is important for us to understand. His instruction aided his subjects’ development because he influenced how they think. He did not just offer rewards. He did not threaten grounding or offer trips to the ice cream store.

He engaged how they thought. The fact that instruction in how to think at a higher level of reasoning than they currently used impacted their development did not register with him.

Turiel did not recognize two of our fundamental assumptions:

He had provided intellectual leadership without noticing.

And,. he had proven that learning leads development.

Since many adults operate with institutional moral reasoning, many adults can help young people and other adults learn to operate effectively within institutions. Virtually every institution has norms and people learn to follow those norms, work for the good of the institution. Institutions can include training in institutional moral reasoning as part of their personnel development programs.

However, universal moral reasoning requires that we think beyond institutions,. As common as institutional moral reasoning is, it does not lead naturally to universal moral reasoning.

Indeed, one might argue that most institutions have a vested interest in keeping everyone focused on the needs of their institution and not the needs of the larger society.

Setting aside that rather interesting argument, the question at hand is:

“Who cares enough about developing a system of universal moral reasoning to do the work required to develop it?”

“Who cares enough about teaching universal moral reasoning to do the work required to teach it?”

Turns out, no one. We will, which is interesting and exciting, but obviously insufficient. What do we need?

A critical mass of Americans to show up in the public square and support our arguments. Americans who believe that they are members of and responsible for our community and our Democratic Republic.

We have talked about cognitive and moral development, their stages and even how to aid their development. But that does not tell the whole story of human development. Before we leave this topic, we must build a stronger foundation in moral reasoning by thinking about what it means to be fully developed human beings.

The Domains of Full Human Development:

I must begin this discussion with a fervent mea culpa. I found this information writing Let’s Get Civil. I used Goggle to investigate some questions I had about social science. What if found provided this information without attributing it to anyone. I concluded that it is the way social scientists think about humans.

Big mistake. It’s not how social scientist think. It belongs to someone I knew nothing about. That’s why I failed to acknowledge her and her work in Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. With a public apology, let me acknowledge her now: Grace Gredys Harris, 1926—2011, University of Rochester Department of Anthropology. Professor Harris was an anthropologist.

I may make more use of her work than anyone outside the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. She had died before Let’s Get Civil was published and no one complained. Her work is enormously important to mine and I should have acknowledge it.

Now, let’s get on with the work of Grace Gredys Harris.

Each of us lives our lives in at least three domains: that of the individual, the person, and the self. We’re fully developed human beings to the extent to which each of these domains is fully developed and properly ordered within us.

.

Individual: The biological human, the DNA and physical makeup which is unique to each human and distinct from all other species.

Person: The individual in society, all of the commitments and relationships the individual has developed living in society, in the family, with friends, at work, in school, and so on.

Self: The interior life of a human, the psychological, intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual inner life of the human, all that the human has become through intent and accident, how we have internalized our life’s experiences. This is the location of our reason and will.

We can express this as a major principle, an a priori assumption, an axiom:

Full human development occurs in three domains: the individual, the person, and the self.

The individual is tied to the biological, physical nature of humans. It is important. A strong, healthy body is a sine qua non to everything else.

The older I get, the more I understand that health is everything. However, our bodies are meant to be lived in and to make everything else possible. They don’t provide us with what we think of as the fullness of our humanity. The history of humans has played out most obviously in our families and social/political activity and engagements.

The person is our domain that engages other persons in society. To achieve full development as a person, we and our society must develop.

It is difficult for any human to be better than his or her society. It is not at all difficult to be unworthy of one’s society, one’s family or friends or craft or profession or community or state or nation.

Each of us must learn the virtues that make us worthy, responsible, contributing members of our society. We must build social relationships and commit to them.

We also must learn the vices that undermine us as members of our society and participants in social relationships, and commit to not do them.

Merely acting in society does not reveal virtues and vices. The capacity to discern virtues and vices resides in our selves, our reason and will.

Our reason reveals virtues and vices, our will allows us to control our instincts and do what is right and not do what is wrong.

But of course our inner lives have to do with far more than controlling our social behaviors. Our inner lives have a whole wonderful world of their own. The self is the deepest domain of our humanity.

We have talked about cognitive and moral development. Both are huge parts of our selves, our inner lives, and the full development of our human capacity and must be a major interest for each of us. We will return to this topic often as we use mature cognitive and moral development as criteria for our evaluation of how we speak and act in the public square.

Each of us has enormous capacity to develop as human beings, but most of us have limited capacity to pursue that development alone. Just as most of us benefit from assistance when learning anything, we benefit from assistance in learning to develop our full humanity.

Parents and teachers are obvious mediators for children, but so are coaches, other children, relatives, and other influential adults.

That’s important to mention so that we understand how children develop their humanity.

But more important to this discussion is to identify the mediators, the intellectual leaders, who influence the full development of adults when they act in the public square.

Intellectual leaders help shape the public square, for good or ill. Which takes us back to our primary concern, our fractured body politic.

We will look at religion, moral philosophy, and social science. All three have contributed to the fracturing of our body politic and public square and all three can help heal it.

Readers and viewers may find all this interesting but doubt that most Americans are capable of full cognitive or moral development. In the chapter Education Justice I discuss learning theory and demonstrate that students and adults are capable of learning far more than they do.

That is why I wrote a chapter on education justice: to relieve the viewers’ concern, doubt.

Now, let me just say that when we establish an education or training program we have to decide if we are going to ask people to change what they do as a way of getting them to change how they think or are we going to ask people to change how they think as a way of getting them to change what they do.

The first is called behavior modification, the second, cognitive modification, and they represent the two competing theories of learning.

In education justice, I explain that behavior modification works both to change what people do and what they think when what we want them to think is concrete and simple.

However, if we want them to think and act with formal operations, we must help them change how they think. We must use cognitive modification, and to do that we must use the learning theories of Vygotsky and Feuerstein.

So yes, virtually all students and adults can learn to reason formally and to operate with universal moral reasoning, but not if our instructional methods are grounded in behaviorism.

In this episode, we identify a lot of things in our society that we have to fix. But some of them we must fix in the university in order to fix them in society.

Fixing how we educate and train students and adults is just one of them. When we learn how to fix education we see that once we institutionalize those solutions, educating our students and adults becomes a realistic goal. It is not simple and it is not easy, but it becomes realistic, and I should add, affordable.

Not only is doing it affordable, not doing constitutes a vast and tragic waste of human capacity and capital.

However, we need:

A critical mass of Americans to show up in the public square and support our arguments. Americans who believe that they are members of and responsible for our community and our democratic republic.

This entire blog is based on my book Let's Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some viewers may want to read it. You can order it from Amazon. be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy.

Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.

Email: Patrickconroy61@gmail.com.

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Episode 4 Introduction and the Science of Cognitive Development

Introduction

Becoming grownups. That’s what we’re talking about. A big part of becoming grownups involves intellectual development. Not becoming intellectuals, whatever that means. But developing our intellects, our ability to think and talk and act like grownups.

Intellectual development consists of both cognitive development and moral development. That’s our first Axiom. Cognitive development supports mature reasoning. Moral development supports mature moral reasoning.

Both cognitive and moral development are related to biological development, to getting older. However, for the most part, biological development only permits cognitive and moral development, only makes it possible. It doesn’t assure it.

Learning leads development.

That’s our second axiom: learning leads development.

Learning is the key to development and good teaching is the key to learning among students. Good intellectual leadership is the key to learning among adults.

By around the age that American students graduate from high school, virtually all humans have attained the biological maturity required for both mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning. And yet the majority of American adults haven’t achieved mature cognitive development and the vast majority haven’t achieved mature moral development.

More adults are smart and good than there are who can make mature arguments, arguments that use mature reasoning; or can make mature moral arguments, arguments that employ mature moral reasoning.

We use the arguments we make in the public square to decide on the laws we make. However, the vast majority of those arguments are made without mature reasoning and certainly without mature moral reasoning.

In order for We the People to operate with mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning in the public square, we need to develop the capacity to conduct mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning. We need to learn to do both so that we can develop the capacity to do both.

Again, Axiom 2: Learning leads development.

First, we are going to learn about mature reasoning and mature moral reasoning, then we are going to learn to use both.

We have two goals in this and the next episode.

First, we will learn about cognitive and moral development as they occur in individuals. How each of us grows up, as it were, matures cognitively (how we think and reason), and morally, (how we think and reason morally).

Second, we will learn about how we as a society, as a body politic, mature cognitively and morally.

Obviously, we don’t want to be immature adults or an immature body politic.

It’s not so obvious how we can become mature and more important, how we can attend, as a society, to the full cognitive and moral development of all of our people.

Even more difficult, especially today, is how we can assure the full cognitive and moral development of our Society, We the People, our body politic.

One thing is clear to me and will become clear to the reader: Healing our fractured body politic requires that we pay attention to the full cognitive and moral development of our body politic and our mind politic.

We’re talking about the majority of Americans who can develop cognitively and morally but too often don’t. And the more we learn about human development, the more shocking it is that so many adults don’t fully develop and that our society remains indifferent to that failure.

Indeed, some members of our society undermine the full development of our people. That’s an important point.

We can’t sit back as a society and ignore the full development of our people, and that includes taking on the forces that work against that development.

Here’s the real kicker. We can’t allow to go unchallenged people who find it in their interests to make arguments at low levels of cognitive and moral development. People can say anything they want, but not with impunity. Not all arguments are equal just because the right to speak is equal. So we all get to participate, we all get to speak. But those who are stuck at immature levels of cognitive and moral reasoning cannot be allowed to prevail.

Why do we care? Give a state or local community a critical mass of ignorant citizens and it gets stuck on stupid. They do not solve problems. They make a stupid commitment to ignorance.

Give a state or local community a critical mass of mature citizens, and they can solve problems, meet challenges, prepare for the future.

Everything is at stake, for our nation.

There is an old saying: “You can’t argue with stupid.” There is some truth to that, but it’s not the whole story. Many people are ignorant but not stupid; they lack cognitive and moral development. They haven’t had the learning experiences they needed to achieve cognitive and moral development. We show insight into these people by recognizing that they may need help but that does not make them stupid. Indeed, they may have been so exploited that they have developed doctrines felt as facts that inhibit their cognitive and moral development.

We will see that humans live in three domains: The Individual, the Person, and the Self. That’s true of immature people as well as mature. One does not lose one’s humanity by being immature. That’s rarely just the fault of the person who is immature. It is both wrong and ineffective to disdain people who are immature. They aren’t stupid and they aren’t deplorable. They are humans with all of the dignity and rights inherent in human beings, and we’re here to help them become fully developed human beings.

Additionally, there is no reason to bother learning about cognitive and moral development if we’re not going to act on that knowledge, if we’re not going to make decisions based upon mature thinking and reasoning.

This is not elitism. Elitism is out there and we will talk about it. But this isn’t elitism. It’s common sense. We want to think and act like grownups. But we must give intellectual attention to understanding the difference between immature and mature development and social attention to becoming mature.

We start with cognitive development because we must understand it to understand moral development. Although cognitive psychologists and educators must be interested in the development of young children, we will focus most of our attention on the stages of development as they exist and play out among adults.

Humans become capable of cognitive development at early ages. The problem is that too man adults have not developed, and adults who get stuck in low levels of cognitive and moral development bring serious challenges to the public square. We can’t help them if we judge them. We can’t reach out to them unless we care about them.

First let’s understand cognitive and moral development, then let’s work to develop it both in ourselves and in the body politic.

We start with cognitive development.Cognitive Development

Cognition deals with how we think and reason. Cognitive psychology studies both how we think and reason and how we develop the capacity to do so. I used three sources to ground my understanding of cognitive development: Jean Piaget, Reuven Feuerstein, and Lev Vygotsky. I confine this initial discussion to the work of Piaget who is especially helpful in understanding early development and later to Vygotsky and Feuerstein who help us understand mature development. Eventually, I use Thomas Kuhn, whose research helped me understand the highest level of cognitive development, formal reasoning.

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development:

Piaget identified two stages of cognitive development that interest us. Concrete operations, age 7 to 11; and Formal operations, age 11 to 15.

We are interested in the development of adults who find their way into the public square. They operate at least at the concrete operations stage.

Importantly, the ages associated with each stage of development refer to the ages at which the majority of children become biologically capable of that level of development. They are ranges that apply to virtually all children. There is a lot of time within those ranges, but we’re not concerned here with children. We’re interested in adults and their capacity to reason. We will talk some about how children develop because that helps us understand this theory. Our main interest is in how both cognitive and moral development impact how adults conduct themselves in the public square..

Four things interest to us. First, humans become capable of high levels of both cognitive and moral development at an early age.

Second, although all adults are old enough to have attained high levels of cognitive and moral development, their actual development covers a wide range. Age allows development. It does not guarantee it. Adults operate at different levels of cognitive and moral development.

Third, learning leads development at every level of cognition. Learning determines both development and the content of development, the fullness of development at every stage. Two people can operate in concrete operations, for example, and one can have vastly greater knowledge and skill than the other.

Learning ===> Development ===> Learning

Learning allows us to develop into a new, higher levels of cognition. Once we have developed that capacity, learning with that new capacity, that new stage of cognitive development, influences how much we can actually know and are able to do with that capacity.

Obviously, once we have developed the capacity to use concrete operations, we must learn the content of various disciplines, trades, and hobbies to actually develop concrete knowledge. Different people learn different disciplines, trades, and hobbies; and different people learn different levels of knowledge and skill within various disciplines, trades, and hobbies.

Fourth, formal operations is tricky. Most adults operate in concrete operations. The vast majority of adults who do operate in formal operations do so in areas of their work where they have been taught a formal operation.

A formal operation represents an intellectual achievement. They do not grow on trees and we do not mature into them. The vast majority of us must learn them. All this will become clearer when we get into our discussion of formal operations

Concrete operations:

Pre-operations is the stage prior to concrete operations. A classic example of the difference between pre-operations and concrete-operations involves a teacher and students. The teacher has two containers of equal size and shape each containing an equal amount of liquid. Kids look at both and see that they are the same. Then she pours the liquid from one into a big container and the liquid from the other into a much smaller container. Tricky!

Then she asks the children which of the new containers has more in it. Young children, children still in the pre-operations stage of cognitive development, almost always choose the smaller container because it looks more full.

Once children reach the stage of concrete operations, they remember that equal amounts of liquid were poured into the two containers and know that they hold the same amount of liquid, regardless of how full or empty the containers may appear.

They remember that the original containers held the same amount of liquid and apply that knowledge to the question regarding the second set of containers. They think about what they saw and apply it to what they now see.

Similarly, children who have reached concrete operations can go outside, walk some blocks from home, and turn around and follow the path they took back home. They can remember where they went and apply that knowledge to what they see on their return and use that information to find their way back home.

These children can find a toy or book by thinking about where they left it. There is a huge difference in the mental capacity of children when they move from pre-operations to concrete operations. The vast majority of adults operate in concrete operations.

It’s the content of their knowledge and skills that they have developed within concrete operations that vary.

Concrete operations are operations on things that are physically present, whether we can see them right now or not. According to Piaget, children become able to perform concrete operations from around age 7 to 11. They become able to perform formal operations as early as age 12. That’s 6th or 7th grade.

Formal Operations:

Formal operations dominates our attention as we talk about both cognitive development and moral development. Everything we do in this blog and everything required to heal our fractured body politic depends upon our capacity as individuals and as a body politic to operate in formal operations. Not in all facets of our lives, but clearly in the public square. We the people must achieve formal operations in both reasoning and moral reasoning.

With formal operations, we become able to think about how we think. If we’re going to argue about laws, we must be able to think about how we think about laws.

All laws are moral laws. That’s Axiom Three: All laws are moral laws. We must be able to think about how we think morally.

In Growth Spurts During Brain Development: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice, Herman T. Epstein demonstrated that the brain grows physically in stages that correlate closely with Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.

So we’re talking real physical and psychological growth. But when we talk about formal operations, we must focus on intellectual achievements.

We need formal reasoning to operate with universal moral reasoning. But formal reasoning receives little attention in education or psychology. We need to give it considerable attention because we must use it. When I Read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I began to understand it. First lets just talk in general about formal reasoning, then we can begin to see how Khun helps us understand it.

Formal Operations in General:

Concrete operations use abstract reasoning. With concrete operations, we can think about things we have seen even if we can no longer see them. But we can only think about things we have seen or touched or weighed or heard. Thus the term “concrete.”

With formal operations, we can think about what we have never seen. Here is a fun example. In The Making of Mind, A.R. Luria (1902 to 1977) describes the work he and Vygotsky (1896 to 1934) did to study the impact of literacy on adult cognitive development. They visited Russian farming communities that were still populated entirely by illiterate adults. They presented the adults of these towns this question:

In the far north where there is snow year round, the bears are white.

Novaya Zemlya is in the far north,

What color are the bears in Novaya Zemla?

The leaders of the towns invariably laughed and replied, “None of us has ever been to Novaya Zemlya. How could any of us know what color the bears are there?” They laughed, thinking it was silly that anyone would ask them to think about a place and things they had never seen. They were not capable of formal reasoning. Illiteracy, then, guarantees that one cannot perform formal operations. Literacy, however, does not guarantee that one can.

The term formal comes from the role of the form of a deductive argument, the most famous of which is the syllogism. The form matters because in a syllogism, if the form is followed correctly (and the premises are true), then the conclusion must be true. If these illiterate Russian farmers were capable of formal reasoning, then they would have known:

A. If all of the bears in the far north where it snows year round are white

B. And if Novaya Zemlya is in the far north where it snows year round,

c. Then all of the bears in Novaya Zemlya must be white.

But notice, even such a syllogism represents an intellectual achievement. We must learn about syllogisms, and practice constructing them in order to be able to invent one. Syllogisms are invented. They don’t occur in nature.

Formal operations allow us to think about what we haven’t seen or touched. We think using formal logical operations. In her wonderful little book, Children’s Minds, Margaret Donaldson (1926 to 2020) insists that children aren’t capable of success in school after a fairly early age if they can’t understand and perform the syllogism:

If A > B

And B > C

Then A > C

In other words, students must learn to think formally to succeed in school. Her example has the added benefit of using symbols which takes us immediately into mathematics where of course formal reasoning is essential.

Notice that this syllogism does not work:

If A > than B

and C > than B

Then . . . Nothing.

All we know is what we have stated, both a and c are greater that b. But we do not know which is greater, A or C. We do not have to have been trained in logic to see the difference between the two syllogisms, especially once the difference has been pointed out.

Now this is all well and good as an introduction to formal reasoning, but it doesn’t get to what finally allowed me to understand formal reasoning and develop the formal intellectual tools that contribute to my book and this blog. Deductive reasoning has been around since before Aristotle and he pretty well perfected the syllogism. So what did I have to figure out?

Kuhn and Formal Operations:

As I have mentioned, my insights into formal operations began to emerge when I Read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For a few years I had been baffled by Piaget’s claim that formal operations allow us to account for all of the hypotheses that can be constructed around a topic. What does that mean? “Account” for all the hypotheses? How does it do that? I wondered. Piaget, as far as I can tell, did not explain what that means, not in any of his works that have been translated into English.

First let me answer the question about what account means. Now remember, Piaget was a brilliant natural scientist, a biologist, before he became a developmental psychologist. It’s fair to assume that he knew what Kuhn was talking about, even if he never read Kuhn. Kuhn accounts for various questions or hypotheses with these responses:

Yes, we know that’s true; and no, we know that’s not true.

Interesting, and we’re studying that expecting to find an answer, either that it’s true or not true.

And finally:

Sorry, we don’t know if that’s true or false and there’s no way we can study it at this time, within our current paradigm.

That’s what “account for” means. Yes we have answered it, yes we’re studying it, no we can’t even study it. But jump back? What do we mean, We can’t even study it? How do we account for something if we can’t even study it?

Formal operations consist of structures such as syllogisms, formal conceptual frameworks, and theoretical models and paradigms. These do not grow on trees. Someone must invent them, or in the case of syllogisms, teach us how to construct and use them..

Kuhn studied scientific revolutions. As I read Kuhn’s descriptions of these revolutions, what he called paradigm shifts, I noticed that they were not just scientific revolutions, they were also cognitive revolutions. By understanding how science advances knowledge, I was able to understand how we can advance our understanding of cognitive development.

Scientists learn new stuff, stuff that’s so new and so big that it causes a revolution in how they think.

We also need to learn new stuff to advance from concrete operations to formal operations, to change how we think.

The more I understood The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the more I understood the structure of formal operations. Cool! Don’t you think? So let’s talk about Kuhn and paradigms. We will learn about the structure and content of paradigms.

Paradigms and Scientific Revolutions:

The first scientific revolution that Kuhn describes is the Copernican Revolution. You know, Copernicus and Galileo rejected the Ptolemaic view of the universe, the Ptolemaic paradigm, in which the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus argued and Galileo proved that the earth rotates around the sun.

Let’s explain what it means to say we don’t know something and can’t even study it. What does that mean? H does not being able to study something account for it?

Imagine 15th century astronomers talking about the sun and planets and one asks, “How long does it take for the earth to travel around the sun?”

Within the 15th century astronomy paradigm it was impossible to think about or study that question. So they could account for it as being impossible to study or answer within that paradigm.

However, as 15th and 16th century astronomers gathered more and more data on the movement of planets, they began to encounter more questions than answers. And a few, Copernicus in particular, began to consider the possibility that they didn’t even know how to think about some of these questions.

Copernicus began to think differently about the fundamental assumptions of the Ptolemaic paradigm. Copernicus changed those assumptions and thereby destroyed the old paradigm and invented a new one.

Not everyone agreed right away, but as astronomers used the new Copernican paradigm, it allowed them to answer questions about the movement of the planets that they had not been able to answer. Galileo employed the newly invented telescope to develop the evidence required to prove the new paradigm.

Notice, the new scientific paradigm which was developed by Copernicus and Galileo did not come fully developed. It won out over the old paradigm for two reasons:

First, the old paradigm was exhausted; it created more problems than solutions, more questions than answers.

Second, the new paradigm immediately allowed astronomers to explain things in new and better ways.

The new paradigm did not have all the answers immediately, but it provided a new way of thinking that researchers could use to investigate questions they had been unable to investigate, solve problems they had been unsolvable.

According to Kuhn, a paradigm is an intellectual achievement that provides the organizing principles that unite a scientific discipline’s knowledge into a coherent whole and its members into a unified community of scholars.

The Copernican Revolution was, first of all, an enormous intellectual achievement. It did not win out immediately, but when it did, it united the community of astronomers.

Copernicus crafted the theory, Galileo proved it, and Newton developed the whole system of scientific reasoning that has propelled scientific progress that continues to this day.

Kuhn made no scientific discoveries. All Kuhn did was figure out and set down in writing the structure and content of scientific revolutions by reflecting on what had happened.

Kuhn’s work is what turns out to be enormously helpful for us. For he helps us understand formal operations and formal reasoning in a whole new way. We can add to this understanding by considering formal conceptual frameworks.

Formal conceptual frameworks:

I learned about conceptual frameworks from Piaget. He was interested in how the brain works and how it develops. He taught us that the brain organizes information into different files, what he calls schema.

A formal conceptual framework is a schema that organizes a bunch of schema, a bunch of files. They let us think about how we think about the information in different files. How are they similar? How are they different?

Paradigms organize all of the knowledge in a discipline.

Formal conceptual frameworks organize a bunch of information on a topic.

I developed a formal conceptual framework that helps us think about economic theory. It provides us with a major intellectual tool that helps us think about economic justice.

Thinking about How We Think:

Knowing about syllogisms helps us think about the arguments we make that are fundamentally syllogistic. We know we cannot argue productively by just focusing on conclusions. We must ask two questions:

1. Are our premises, our assumptions, correct.

2. Is their a necessary logical relationship between our assumptions and our conclusions.

When we ask ourselves those questions, we are thinking about how we think. And when we argue about those questions, we can argue productively. The premises are either demonstrably true or not. The arguments are either logically necessary or not.

It is worth noting that when we argue about conclusions, we have nothing to argue about. We must argue about the validity of premises and the logical necessity that allows us to move from premises to conclusions.

When we have developed or learned a formal conceptual framework, it helps us think about how we think about its topic. We need an example. Let’s use the one I developed for economic justice.

In our discussion of economic justice, we developed a formal conceptual framework of economic theory as it pertains to economic justice. In order to develop it, we used the Golden Mean as an intellectual tool that helped us identify mercantilism and communism as the extremes of our theory. Having identified both extremes we could identify both capitalism and socialism as our golden. Once we had the complete conceptual framework we were able to think more clearly about how our economy can work both to develop wealth and to distribute it justly. A lot of new thinking emerged, new solutions, because the complete formal conceptual framework helped us improve how we think.

A Formal Conceptual Framework for Economic Justice

Extreme Golden Mean Extreme

Communism Socialism ∼ Capitalism Mercantilism

But here is the key for all of us. We the People need to be able to think about what we think and how we think in order successfully to operate as a body and mind politic, in order to solve the moral challenges we face. To do that, we must be able to think about how we think about moral development and moral decisions: moral reasoning. We turn to that topic now.

This entire blog is based on my book Let's Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some viewers may want to read it. You can order it from Amazon. Be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy.

Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.

Email: Patconroy317@Gmail.com.

Episode 3 Individualism and Universal Moral Reasoning

Welcome to Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square. This blog is sequential, so if you are just joining, welcome, and please go to my website, Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square and read the earlier episodes.

How does this discussion of moral reasoning tie into what we have said about economic justice? A critical piece of that discussion involved authoritarian governing systems vs. democratic republics. We saw that mercantilism and communism can survive only in authoritarian governing systems. We also saw that freedom and liberty do not exist in authoritarian regimes.

With those discussions in mind, let’s talk about individualism vs. universal moral reasoning.

First, I do not reject individualism. I have distinguished freedom from liberty. The freedom guaranteed to all Americans in the U.S. Constitution is grounded in individualism. Nietzsche’s (1844 to 1900) most useful work, if I may be allowed a personal opinion here, was his contribution to the rights of the individual in western civilization. He rejected the controls exerted on the Prussian society of his youth by the rigid, moralistic Prussian upperclass. Individualism is a big deal. It matters.

However, let me repeat here how I began Let’s Get Civil.

“What should we do?”

“Wrong question.”

“What’s the right question?”

“What should I do?”

“But I already know what I should do. The question is, ‘What should we do?’”

“Impossible to answer. We can only answer, ‘What should I do?’”

It may seem obvious that We the People must answer the question, “What should we do?” But “What should we do?” is a moral question, and there is widespread popular and intellectual agreement that the only valid moral statement that any of us can make is one that applies only to oneself.

Let me repeat that claim: The only valid moral statement that any of us can make is one that applies only to oneself. That’s the major tenant of individualism.

We also know that We the People must make laws. We may not think about this, but we need to. All laws are moral laws because they tell us what we can and cannot do. Not just what we should do. We are not talking about just moral suggestions. We are talking about moral laws. They tell us what everyone of us can and cannot do in public life.

We make laws that require others to act or not act in ways they may not choose if it were just up to them. There is no question whether or not we as a society can pass laws. The question is: Which laws are right and proper to pass? No one of us can make that decision. In our Democratic Republic, we must make that decision together.

We must be able to answer the question, What should we do? And we know that some of those questions are easy to answer and some seem impossible to answer.

For too long, we have been answering too many of these questions through the electoral process rather than through public discourse that has built broad public understanding and agreement.

We cannot agree, heck, we cannot even talk about what we should do as a society. We need to be able to talk about these things in families and towns, in the public square. We the people must unite as the body politic. We can’t leave these questions to politicians, for if we the people can’t talk, how can we expect our elected representatives to talk? They represent us, and we can’t talk. Right now, their most accurate representation of us may be in their inability to talk with each other.

Indeed, we can no longer complete the sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

That’s a big deal, a big problem. It’s one of the defining statements in our Declaration of Independence. It defined our core values as a new nation. And it must continue to define our core values. It must continue to form the intellectual and moral foundations of our identity as Americans, as members of our Democratic Republic.

We the People must face challenging issues, argue about them, come to agreement, and guide our government. We can’t do that if we can’t argue productively. We can’t be Americans if we can’t argue productively. Our Democratic Republic can’t survive if We the People can’t argue productively.

“I may be ignorant, but I’m not stupid.” When I first heard that said, it sounded more like “Ah may be ignrant, but ah ain’t stoopud,” and I pretty much assumed that the guy saying it was both ignorant and stupid, but that was because of my sheltered upbringing and my own ignorance. I was an enlisted man in the air force, one of the great experiences of my life. The guy who said it was from rural Texas as I recall and turned out to be both very bright and filled with tons of expressions I had never heard. Down home expressions filled with insight and wisdom.

Pope Francis recently said that abortion is like “Hiring a hit man to resolve a problem.” The pope wasn’t stupid, but damn, that was ignorant.

Let’s not get into the abortion debate here. It comes later and will come.

Here’s the problem. Way too many really smart people are too danged ignorant about some topics to conduct productive discourse in the public square. Like all those academics who believe “The only valid moral assertion that any one of us can make is one that applies only to oneself.” We have some work to do to help many of our most intelligent fellow Americans develop the capacity to argue and reach agreement about what we all should do. Along the way, we will help regular Americans do it too and they may play a larger role in healing our body politic than our intellectuals will.

When We the People engage each other in public arguments, reach majority agreement, and direct our politicians; we act as our nation’s body politic. Body is a great image. One mind, one body, many parts. Majority agreement is required in our Democratic Republic, and it is also important that the minority has participated in the arguments and understands the majority’s opinion and has agreed either to support it or not to oppose it. To give it a fair shot and let it be fairly evaluated in practice. Recall our morally grounded pragmatic dialectic.,

Both individuals and the body politic must work to build one mind. It’s not easy. It is necessary.

We know that we aren’t talking and acting together as a body politic. What’s at stake? If we don’t protect our Democratic Republic, we won’t revert back to a monarchy, but we could very well descend into mercantilism with an authoritarian government run by an authoritarian leader and oligarches. They will destroy our Democratic Republic and along with it our liberty and our freedom.

How does this blog help heal our body politic? First, I explain how We the People became fractured: The forces that drove us apart and the innocent intellectuals and politicians who could have stopped it but didn’t because they got mixed up intellectually. They were smart, but ignorant. Second, I develop the intellectual solutions needed to heal our body politic. That may sound impossible. Let me indicate what we will do.

We the People can’t complete the sentence: We hold these truths to be self-evident. These truths are moral truths:

All men are created equal. That’s a moral assertion.

They are endowed by their creator. That’s both a religious and a moral assertion.

With certain unalienable rights. What is unalienable cannot be taken away or denied. That’s a philosophical and moral assertion.

Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s a moral assertion.

Our country was founded on moral assertions.

However, we have stopped thinking morally as a body politic. We don’t know how to conduct public moral arguments and that’s why we can’t agree on the moral truths we need in order to bind our nation together. To unite us, unite We the People, as a body politic, with all of our differences is a complex problem. I make it simple and solve it. Again, not easy, but simple.

I need to expand upon this point. We get it that we rely on intelligent solutions that allow us to conduct moral arguments. Also, these arguments deal with public morals, what we the people should do in public life. We don’t deal with personal morals beyond the obvious claim that what we do privately cannot hurt others. Whenever we hurt others we stop acting privately.

In order to develop and use intelligent solutions, we must improve how We the People think, how we think as a group, the mind politic, and how we think as individual members of the body politic. We must think about what we think, but more important, we must learn to think about how we think. None of this is obscure. After all, I’m talking about how all of us think. We recognize all of this. Some of the terms I use might be new, but the experiences they name are not new.

For example, we all think in “Doctrines felt as facts.”

That’s a new term. I need to give credit to its source. I found it in a book I read in college: Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry. It’s one of those books I read in college that stuck with me.

Think about “doctrines felt as facts” for a second. What do I just believe? Is it a fact or a doctrine? Some of our “doctrines felt as facts” are obvious. Do we believe that “All men are created equal” applies only to men, or only to white men and women? Or only to men and women who agree with us? Or do we believe that “All men are created equal” applies to all men and women, all races, all religions, all sexual orientations, all nationalities?

Which of those doctrines we believe has a huge impact on how We the People think about ourselves and each other. Can we conduct mature, rational arguments with someone who holds fast to a doctrine felt as fact that is different from ours? If we cannot, one or both of us is holding on to a doctrine felt as fact. “Doctrines felt as fact” may be a new term, but what it talks about is not at all new to us.

Even if we haven’t thought about it before, we immediately understand it. Maybe quickly rather than immediately, but you get my point.

Some of our doctrines felt as facts are obvious as soon has we begin to think about them. Others require a lot of work, a lot of self reflection and a lot of study. We inherit our doctrines felt as facts. We learn them within our family, church, and community without noticing that we have learned them. They become a part of who we are, “habits of mind,” that direct how we view the world and other people. They also direct how we feel.

How we feel. We are told, “Our feelings are true.” That’s a doctrine felt as fact. What we feel is indeed what we feel and is therefore true. There’s a kind of truth in that. But much of what we feel results from what we think. That’s an important fact that is too often overlooked. Some feelings are physical, tied to our genetic makeup and our biology. Others are the result of how we think. How we think leads to feelings that help us solve problems or feelings that make problems worse, impossible to solve.

We become empowered as individuals when we learn to control our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions.

Being a grown up has a lot to do with taking control of our thoughts. And that involves discovering our doctrines felt as facts and subjecting them to critical reflection.

We will notice doctrines felt as facts often in this blog. Noticing them will help us understand ourselves and others and the tasks we face as we strive to understand each other and argue productively.

Let’s look at another doctrine felt as fact that frequently frustrates arguments.

Many of us have heard someone end an argument by saying something like, “Well, be that as it may, I just disagree.”

No matter the other side of the argument, we all get to just disagree. We are “entitled to our own opinions.” That is absolutely true in our private lives.

But, it is only true, can only be true, in our private lives. We totally frustrate the purpose and demands of public argument if we rely solely on our personal opinions; if we are unable or unwilling to subject our personal opinions to argument and open our minds to the possibility of change.

The whole purpose of public argument is to move beyond personal opinions and build shared opinions in the public square.

Fortunately, I found a renowned intellectual who cautioned us about individualism. John Henry Newman defined assent as the individual’s right to just believe in God or anything else. Assent, individualism. We get to do that and no one can take that right away from us, in our private lives. But Newman explained that assent, the right to individual opinions, does not work in public argument. His language is a bit old fashioned, so let me paraphrase him:

Assent is appropriate to the individual. But it undermines rather than promotes productive arguments. It confines itself to in its own evidence and its own standard. It cannot be anticipated or accounted for because it is the accident of this person or that. (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 82―83.)

Any way of thinking that is based solely on the views of the individual and disregards any other evidence or standards of knowledge makes public argument impossible. We will give a lot of attention to the challenge of developing methods and standards that guide public arguments. But for now, we must agree or at least open our minds to the proposition that We the People cannot rely only on individual opinions and disregard any other opinions if we want to conduct productive public arguments.

Let me share a personal experience to help us not underestimate the challenge we face.

Richard Rorty was an esteemed American philosopher. A few years after I finished writing my first book, Intellectual Leadership in Education, I called him to discuss concerns I had regarding education leadership. He took my call, was respectful and congenial, and listened while I explained the problems I was trying to solve:

When principals hold faculty meetings to discuss with their teachers how their children learn and how best to teach, they need their teachers to come to agreement. Their students need their teachers to agree, especially that vast majority of students who need good teachers if they are going to learn. But, I explained, education research is all over the place. Education researchers don’t agree with each other nor do teacher educators, so there’ s no way that teachers can work toward agreement. No matter how hard principals may work, it is impossible to get teachers who disagree to learn to agree. As a result, principals end up with divided faculties who can’t even speak to each other. And their students, who move from classroom to classroom and grade to grade, encounter contradictory, incompatible teaching and motivation.

When I finished, Rorty replied, “But Pat, if principals end their faculty meeting and none of their teachers agree, they can be confident that they have done something right.”

Rorty was a brilliant man, no doubt about that, but he was flat ignorant about public education.

That was a few years before he died in 2007, and I am confident that at that time Rorty would have said that one of the best features of our Democratic Republic is that people don’t agree. I’m not sure he would have said that like teachers it is a good thing if they can’t reach agreement, but it seems so.

Now, as we face the fact that our body politic is fractured, it is fair to blame him and all the philosophers and other intellectuals who came before and followed him or did not challenge his views.

But I must admit, I didn’t challenge him. I realized that I had no chance of even discussing my concerns with him. I turned my attention to getting off the phone gracefully.

That story helps us appreciate the challenges we face. Esteemed intellectuals don’t share our goal of building agreement in the mind politic and the body politic so that we can build agreement in the public square. Instead, they teach views that undermine our goal.

Not only have we done a ton of useful and practical intellectual work that has helped us see a path to economic justice, we have introduced intellectual work that we will do that will help us conduct productive discourse in the public square and among politicians. We can see that we are doing and will do intellectual work that is enormously practical and important.

We are going to start that work by learning about the science of cognitive and moral development. We will learn how we develop, what stages we must go through, and that means get through, to gain higher levels of development. We will learn about the levels of development we must attain in order to be able to act like grown ups in our Democratic Republic.

What’s our goal?

To conduct discourse in the public square that allows us to agree on what is right and what is wrong in public life so that we can make laws and develop public policies that support what is right and reject what is wrong.

Right now, we can’t do that. We can’t agree on anything as We the People, to say nothing of agreeing on what is right and what is wrong in a way that guides us when making laws. Let’s get started figuring out how we must think so that we can do that.

This entire blog is based on my book Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some readers may want to order it from Amazon. Be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy, not Pat Conroy.

Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.

Email: Patconroy317@Gmail.com

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Episode 2 How Capitalism and Socialism Form The Golden Mean

Analyzing and Evaluating Economic Theories:

When thinking about our four economic theories (mercantilism, capitalism, socialism, and communism), we placed them in a formal conceptual framework. We will talk more about formal conceptual frameworks when we talk about cognitive development. For now, we just need to note that formal cognitive operations is the highest level of cognitive development. One of its striking characteristics is that formal conceptual frameworks account for all of the critical variables in a topic we are thinking about. What that means may not be obvious to the reader, but it is a big deal and we will discuss it when we discuss cognitive development. We get a glimpse at its importance now.

Our economic theory was obviously flawed when it consisted only of capitalism, socialism, and communism. We used the golden mean as an intellectual tool that helped us realize that communism is one extreme, but we did not know what the other extreme is.

The golden mean served as an intellectual tool. It sent us in search of the other extreme and we found mercantilism. All right! We could account for both extremes, mercantilism and communism, and that let us see that some how capitalism and socialism make up the golden mean. We have accounted for all of the key topics of our economic theory, now we must figure out how capitalism and socialism can be understood as the golden mean.

Before we turn to that discussion, let me re-emphasize what we mentioned earlier: the dangers that both capitalism and socialism face when entering the slippery slope to their extremes.

The more capitalism moves toward mercantilism, the more corrupt it becomes. The more capitalism slides down the slippery slope to mercantilism, the more it destroys both capitalism and socialism, both capitalist and socialist enterprises. Mercantilism accumulates wealth in the hands of authoritarian rulers and oligarches. It destroys capitalism’s ability to develop and distribute wealth among people and has no interest in economic justice.

Similarly, the more socialism moves toward communism, the more corrupt it becomes. The more socialism slides down the slippery slope toward communism, the more it destroys both socialism and capitalism, both socialist and capitalist enterprises. Communism rejects capitalism and as a result cannot generate enough wealth to distribute.

The more capitalism and socialism move toward each other, the more effectively they work together, the more they enhance each other, and the better each is.

Both capitalism and socialism risk getting on a slippery slope: capitalism toward mercantilism, socialism toward communism. The more they engage each other and work together, the safer and better each is.

I just learned something from Sarah Paine when she was hosted on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast in an episode titled “The War in India.” Paine pointed out that socialist countries like India viewed capitalism as a way station toward imperialism as capitalists viewed socialism as a way station toward communism. That’s an important point in political science, but it is not helpful when thinking about economics. Still, it is interesting when thinking about countries that fought for their independence from imperialist powers, as India did, while the U.S. aligned itself with those imperialist powers and developed imperialist tendencies of its own (the Philippines, etc.). As we will see, the American commitment to imperialist countries was at the heart of our mistakes in Vietnam.

Back to our discussion of economics.

We the people must understand the threat that the two slippery slopes toward communism and mercantilism make to our economy and to our Democratic Republic. We must make laws that protect each from those threats.

Now let’s turn to the question: How do we think about the unity of capitalism and socialism so that we have a golden mean?

We cannot merge capitalism and socialism. They each have different jobs to do and must preserve their separate identities to do them.

Let me say that again: we cannot merge capitalism and socialism because they each have different jobs to do and must preserve their separate identities so that they can do them.

We seek neither to be capitalists alone nor socialists alone. We seek to help each maximize its ability to do its job in concert with the other. That is a new way of thinking about capitalism and socialism: Capitalism and socialism work best when they work together.

How do they do that? How do they work together? To answer that question, we must figure it out. We must be able to think about them working in concert.

Here I get to provide some intellectual leadership. I get to introduce a new concept: A Morally Grounded, Pragmatic Dialectic. Let’s discuss those three key terms: dialectic, pragmatic, and morally grounded.

I start with the oldest: dialectic.

Dialectic

Aristotle used the term in describing the back and forth we have in conversations: Two people talking, agreeing and disagreeing, and working through their disagreements in a way that enhances their thinking and allows them to reach a conclusion that is better than the one either started with.

When we make a statement in a conversation, we do well to anticipate an argument. Doing well means that we have thought about how others might think. We think about our position, what we think and why, and we think about what others may think and why. By doing both, we prepare for arguments. (Full disclosure: I learned that from Sarah Paine in another one of her lectures.)

We may not have thought of every argument that others might present, but we have prepared ourselves for there to be different points of view. We have prepared ourselves to say something like, “I hadn’t thought of that. Tell me more.” And the conversation goes on.

As we hear more from the “other side,” we can agree and change our way of thinking. But we do not need to do that. We can also say, “Let me think about that and get back to you.”

Taking a little time lets us think more and it even lets us do a bit of research. We don’t want to quit our position too easily. (I learned that from Alysdair MacIntyre when reading his book After Virtue.) The person we are arguing with has thought about their position but maybe not about ours. Someone must give it its due to make sure it is not abandoned when it could work.

Those are little intellectual rules or guidelines about arguments. State your view thoughtfully, listen to other views, think about the other views, and think more about your view. Don’t just quit your view as the others must not quit their views. A little work is called for to reach the best conclusion. That is the dialectic process.

Hegal (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 to 1831) described the dialectic as a thesis confronted by an antithesis. The confrontation or argument can go on for some time, but if all goes well, it results in a new view that uses both the thesis and antithesis and is better than either. Hegal called that improved conclusion a synthesis. Again, the Hegalian dialectic calls for listening and thinking and working to arrive at the synthesis.

The concept of a dialectic provides a practical and efficient way to think about and construct the relationship between capitalism and socialism in our economic theory and arguments.

When We the People talk about economics and ponder what laws and policies we need, a major question we must ask is: Which areas of our lives operate best as capitalist enterprises with private ownership, private control, private profits, and free markets; and which areas of our lives operate best with socialists enterprises with social ownership, social control, social revenue, and socially controlled services?

With just a little thought it becomes clear that perfect answers don’t exist for many topics. We use a dialectic process to guide our best efforts to answer those questions and create appropriate enterprises.

Since we can’t come up with perfect solutions, we must recognize that we’re dealing with a work in progress, a process, and that process is usefully thought of as a dialectic. Thinking of it as a dialectic is useful because we anticipate arguments, prepare for arguments, and listen to the other side. We state arguments prepared to listen to the other side. We don’t just keep restating our original statements or positions. Which, to be sure, frustrates others because it sounds like we’re not listening. We listen, and respond to their arguments

We want an economic system that constructs a balance between capitalism and socialism. Economic arguments in the public square aim at developing economic laws and policies that establish and maintain this balance. Our dialectic process helps us resolve arguments and develop these laws and policies.

Now, what do we do once we have developed, adopted, and implemented these laws and policies? Live with them? Not exactly. We give them time to be fairly evaluated. How do we evaluate them?

That’s a huge question that has not been adequately answered in the public square or in our government. We are going to answer it and in doing so continue to provide intellectual leadership in the public square and in government, journalism, and universities.

We the people make laws and evaluate them in terms of their ability to achieve our morally grounded purposes. I call this process morally grounded pragmatism. But we have added not just a new concept in dialectic, but a new form of action. We create two new terms: morally grounded and pragmatic. (Well, new at least in this context.) Again, we start with the easier one.

Pragmatic, Pragmatism

We elaborate that approach, a morally grounded pragmatic dialectic, and make it more concrete in economics by acknowledging that it requires an ongoing attempt to find a balance between capitalism and socialism. Two different approaches to solving problems. Evaluate them, and see which produces the better solutions. That’s what a dialectic process does. That process is carried out in arguments. But what about once our arguments have produced laws and policies that have been implemented. Now we must evaluate laws and policies that exist. That’s where pragmatism comes in.

What is pragmatism? Google is helpful:

Pragmatism began in the united states in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."

The practical effect of something is the concept of it. That’s a start, but it’s a bit abstruse and obtuse, difficult and annoying. Rather than getting into the whole philosophical discussion, let’s talk about what it became.

We judge a program or policy by its outcome: Did it work? Social scientists adopted pragmatism and added, “As we said it was going to work” and adopted the scientific method to measure whether it worked or not. They were being pragmatic, scientifically. We’ll get into the discussion about social science in more detail later when we have laid a foundation for it.

For now, let’s just know that what we now call social science used to be called moral philosophy. Moral philosophers (over quite a number of years) adopted the scientific method as the foundation of their inquiry, both their research and teaching, and thus became social scientists. The scientific method allowed them to establish, scientifically, whether their conclusions were reliable and valid. Reliable just means they get the same result over and over. It’s reliable. You can count on it. Valid means that they get the result that they predicted. So, we keep getting it and it is what we want. Reliable and valid.

Pragmatic. Pragmatism tells social scientists, “that’s all you need to know.” Now, let’s not be glib and underestimate the importance of the contribution that the scientific method has made to social science. It brought a new kind of disciplined inquiry to their disciplines and produced incredible advancements in their knowledge.

So what’s the problem? We know that if we do X we get Y virtually every time and Y is what we expected, what we wanted. What could be better?

Well, it might be better if we also knew that the result we get is good, that it does not do more harm than good. That it does not do any impermissible harm?

We will talk about why pragmatists rejected moral philosophy. Let’s put it this way for now: They had good reasons, but they should have fixed the problems rather than just totally rejecting moral philosophy.

See what I mean. This discussion of intellectual leadership is and will be interesting. It will be interesting and useful because it will include our developing a system of universal public moral reasoning that we can use when we implement our morally grounded pragmatic dialectic.

We can look forward to two enormous intellectual achievements. We will develop a system of public moral reasoning that we can use as a tool when faced with, when arguing about, moral questions in the public square.

And we will use that tool to make our pragmatic work overcome the major flaw of pragmatism: It is incapable of moral reasoning because it does not just ignore it; it rejects it.

Before we turn to those other major topics, I think it’s important to deal with a topic we have skipped. As I mentioned earlier, this blog is based on my book, Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic.

I started this blog with a discussion of economic justice in an attempt to demonstrate, convince the reader, that intellectual work is valuable and practical.

However, that’s not how I started that book. I started it by introducing an argument to replace individualism with universal moral reasoning in the public square. The meat of that argument came much later in the book, but I got it started right from the get go.

Since it is so important to everything we do, and since it is not at all obvious to most readers that universal moral reasoning has a vital role to play along with individualism, I’m going to present the whole argument in the next episode.

This Entire Blog Is Based on My Book Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some readers may want to order it from Amazon. Be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy, not Pat Conroy.

Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.

Email: Patconroy317@Gmail.com

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I will post episodes on Thursdays.

Episode 1 Introduction: Economic Justice

Welcome to “Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square” I’m Pat Conroy. This Blog is not a spur of the moment thing, although this “moment” in our history calls for it. It draws directly from my book, Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic, 2019. That book grew out of Intellectual Leadership in Education, 1999, which I spent most of the ‘90s writing. Twenty five years of research, thinking, and writing have gone into this blog. If the title of this blog and I seem audacious, well, I must admit I recognize that, but I want to assure the audience that it is not casual. I just ask the audience to give it and me a shot. I worked to make your work worth it. Let’s get started

Intellectual may not sound inviting. Just intellectual? You might ask. Not Practical? Let’s talk about those terms.

Intellectual is Practical when well done.

Intellectual is not just abut what we think. It is also, and more importantly, about how we think. Paying attention to how we think improves what we think.

The United States is a Democratic Republic in which citizens enjoy both personal freedom and political liberty.

We must not take our freedom and liberty and Democratic Republic for granted. We must be aware of them, think about them, value them, and protect them. The ability to protect them depends on how we think about them because that drives what we will do to protect them.

With all of this being true, for all the good that comes with our Democratic Republic, we still have problems to face and solve. Our Founding Fathers may not have given us a perfect system, but they designed it so that we can improve it. To do that, we must pay attention to how we think and what we think and how we conduct discourse in the public square. We need intellectual leadership to help us think, act, and argue effectively.

Why intellectual leadership? Because to solve these problems we the people must conduct rational discourse that leads to agreement, commitment, and action. Actions that support the laws, policies, and programs we create to solve these problems.

It’s not just about making laws, it’s about making laws that we the people either support or agree not to oppose.

Reaching that kind of agreement represents an enormous intellectual and emotional challenge. Reaching that kind of agreement is enormously practical. It is about what we think and what we do. And it depends on how we think and how we argue.

In order to “win this argument,” in order to demonstrate the importance of intellectual leadership, let me start with a major question facing our country, a question that we the people already feel and even talk about, but have not been able to solve.

The question, actually some versions of the same question are: Why can’t we the people win an argument for economic justice? Why does the gap in wealth keep growing? Why can’t we fix our economic system so that it is just? Answering all of these questions depends on how we answer the question: How do we think about economics?

Answering that questions helps us understand what we must do to fix our economic system because it tells us how we must think about economic justice.

Here is how most of us think: Capitalism is good, Communism is bad, and socialism leads to communism so socialism is bad. That’s not accurate, there is far more to it, but it’s how far too many of us think.

What is true is that if socialism is practiced within an authoritarian government, it can’t be distinguished from communism.

However, if socialism is practiced in a democratic republic along side capitalism, both capitalism and socialism can thrive. That’s the conclusion of my argument, and it is useful to present it up front. Of course, stating a conclusion is not the same as making an argument for it. Let’s get to my argument, see how that conclusion is reached, and see how convincing it is.

Let’s ask, How do we fix our economic system so that it is just?

To help us think, let’s use an intellectual tool. Tools help us work. (I love tools.) Intellectual tools help us think. “The Golden Mean” is an intellectual tool. How does it work?

To find the golden mean, we must identify the extremes of our topic. Identifying the extremes helps us think about the mean, the middle ground. Let’s see how it helps us think about our economic theory.

What are the extremes of our economic theory? Our parts are capitalism, socialism and communism. Obviously, communism is one extreme. But what is the other extreme? Notice, our tool is making us think, making us work while also helping us work. It confronts us with a question that has not been asked and that must be answered: What is the other extreme of our economic theory?

Isn’t that interesting. No one talks about the other extreme of our economic theory. Everyone knows about communism, but no one can even name the other extreme.

We know that capitalism is good. We know capitalism generates wealth, and that’s good. We also know that capitalism is not good at distributing wealth justly.

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI," He also was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2004.

He has recently been quoted in Fortune predicting that artificial intelligence will lead to a surge in unemployment and also a surge in profits as companies replace workers with AI. But it’s not the technology’s fault, he told the Financial Times, attributing it instead to capitalism.

Notice his expertise: computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist. And yet, he seems incapable of thinking beyond our current theory of economics: capitalism is good; socialism and communism are bad. He may be ignorant, but he’s not stupid. Indeed, he is brilliant. We will discuss this duality, ignorant but not stupid often.

Hinton predicts that AI combined with capitalism will increase economic injustice and has no explanation for it. He seems more interested in making sure we understand that AI will not be the cause.

We know that capitalism can create economic injustice. It’s fair to say that left to itself, capitalism creates economic injustice. Still, capitalism is too good to be an extreme of our theory. Without capitalism, we cannot generate enough wealth to distribute.

I have provided intellectual leadership by providing the golden mean as a tool to help us think about our economic theory.

Now I’m going to provide intellectual leadership by providing the other extreme of our intellectual theory. First I will provide it, then I will demonstrate that it is actually an active and dangerous economic system that must be included in our economic theory.

The answer: Mercantilism.

We need to know and think about mercantilism so that we understand that it is the extreme of capitalism.

Knowing that our economic system includes mercantilism, capitalism, socialism and communism demonstrates the power of the Golden Mean. It has forced us to identify the extremes of our economic theory and has revealed the mean, although we have some work to do with it since both capitalism and socialism appear as the mean.

The Golden Mean has helped us identify mercantilism and thereby complete our theory.

Notice: I am attempting to win the argument for intellectual leadership by increasing our understanding of economics. We have improved how we think, how we reason, and we will use that increased capacity to reason as we continue this discussion.

We have some idea what capitalism, socialism and communism are, but what is mercantilism?

First: it is the economic system that our Founding Fathers rejected and replaced. Our Founding Fathers did not just reject the monarchy. They also rejected mercantilism and replaced it with capitalism.

How is it possible that we know so much about the monarchy and so little about mercantilism? Let’s fix that.

European monarchs used mercantilism from the 16th to the 18th century. America was the first country to reject it.

During Feudalism (9th to 15th centuries) European monarchs claimed personal ownership of all their nations' wealth and resources (lands, mines, forests, rivers, lakes, etc.). The monarch distributed such wealth to nobles and reclaimed it as they saw fit, mainly as a means of controlling those with whom they shared wealth and power. That authoritarian control of wealth and resources preceded mercantilism and continued in it. What changed was the kinds of controls that monarchs exerted over their economies.

Monarchs used mercantilism to take control of their economies as they had their political systems and foreign policy.

Mercantilism views economics as a zero sum game: for every winner, there’s a loser.

Mercantilists compete to win in a most hostile manner. Thy don’t seek just to be victors. They also seek to make their competitors lose. They have no sense of “mutual benefit.” It’s dog eat dog.

Mercantilists make laws that help them and harm others, other countries and even their own subjects.

Monarchs placed tariffs on other countries and suppressed fair wages for their subjects.

Monarchs collected taxes to enrich themselves, not to benefit their subjects.

Mercantilism serves authoritarian rulers and dictators even today.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of Xi Jinping uses mercantilism to enrich Xi and members of the CCP.

Putin is a dictator with oligarches he has created and controls. His economic system is mercantilism

The point: mercantilism is alive and operating today. It is a threat to both our economy and our Democratic Republic.

Mercantilism is all about increasing the wealth and power of rulers and the ruling class at the expense of other nations and their subjects.

Mercantilism and communism must be rejected because they do not work and they cannot work in a democratic republic. Mercantilism rejects democracy because a functioning democracy would vote out authoritarian rulers and mercantilism.

The rational argument for rejecting mercantilism is so persuasive that it feels like we don’t need a moral argument.

Where the moral argument becomes helpful, even necessary, is when we argue that We the People must control capitalism so that it does not slide into mercantilism.

We will get into protecting capitalism, keeping it from sliding down the slippery slope to mercantilism, next; but before we go on, let’s be sure to notice that we have done intellectual work that is practical.

We learned to think differently about economic theory and that has helped us think differently about economic justice. We are doing intellectual work that is practical.

I hope that my providing intellectual leadership has helped win the argument for its importance in the public square. Let’s go on.

We used a bare bones description of mercantilism to establish it as the other extreme of communism in our economic theory. Now let’s take a minute and learn a bit more about it before we discuss capitalism.

Mercantilism’s goal was to maximize the nation’s wealth as measured in the accumulation of gold and silver by the monarch. Today, wealth includes precious metals and much more. Still the goal is clear, accumulate wealth for the monarchs, the authoritarian leaders, and ruling class.

Mercantilism promoted governmental regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. With the establishment of overseas colonies in the 17th century, mercantilism became both nationalistic and imperialistic. Americans can quickly acquaint themselves with the abuses of imperialism by recalling the economic abuses heaped upon the American colonies by the British crown:

Imposing high tariffs in England on goods imported from the colonies.

Forbidding colonies to trade with other nations.

Forbidding goods to be carried in foreign (not English) ships, the Navigation Acts.

These rules were imposed upon the colonies as subjects of the crown. There was no discussion, no input, no liberty.

Policies applied in England that aided that nation’s trade and the monarch’s accumulation of wealth included:

Subsidizing exports to create a competitive edge.

Banning the export of gold and silver, even for payments. It was too precious and belonged to the crown.

Promoting manufacturing and industry through research or direct subsidies but mainly for the enrichment of the monarch.

Limiting wages which increased profits that went to the crown.

Maximizing the use of domestic resources as opposed to free trade.

Some of these policies seem to make sense for any nation. It is helpful to focus on the fact that any good, any profits, that resulted from these policies, accrued mostly to the benefit of the monarch or oligarches.

Building wealth was understood as a zero-sum game: If someone gains wealth someone else must lose wealth. As Americans, we can recall the abuses of mercantilism to the colonies. But a quick review of it also allows us to realize that when the major goal of an economic system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the monarch or oligarches, no attention is paid to the just distribution of wealth.

Putting a premium on low wages promotes both of mercantilism’s major goals: It accumulates wealth in the hands of the monarch and ruling class, and it increases their power.

It also creates widespread poverty. In Russia, it creates laws and policies that benefit the oligarches and impoverishes a vast majority of the Russian people. It can only be sustained by a totalitarian form of government, which Putin with his abundant skills learned while in the KGB and has mastered while in power. If an economic system can be sustained only within a totalitarian form of government, it must be rejected. Let’s turn now to capitalism.

Again, our purpose: We are attempting to win the argument for, demonstrate the benefit of, intellectual leadership in the public square by demonstrating its value in understanding and promoting economic justice.

Capitalism:

Adam smith (1723-1790) published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. He invented capitalism.

He also launched a vigorous attack against mercantilism and for free trade and capitalism.

Smith called the economic system used by monarchs during that time the “mercantile system.” It later came to be called mercantilism.

What we must remember is that capitalism was invented as an argument against mercantilism and as an economic system to replace it. One of the goals of capitalism, from its creation, has been to extinguish and replace mercantilism. And yet, radical capitalists put capitalism on the slippery slope to mercantilism.

Capitalism creates free trade and private ownership of resources and production in order to create private profit and private wealth.

Wealth moved from the monarch to people. That’s what “private ownership” means. It’s owned by people. By individuals, not by “the people,” not by the collective. That’s communism.

Capitalism promotes the economic well being of individuals which results in capitalists supporting individualism in moral reasoning. We will discuss that later when we’ll see that it’s a big deal.

Our Founding Fathers rejected and replaced both mercantilism and monarchies when they instituted capitalism and our Democratic Republic.

That historical fact allows us to see that capitalism is irreplaceable in our Democratic Republic. Most Americans realize that there is something wrong in our economy: economic justice is missing. But we have trouble thinking about how to fix our economy without doing irreparable harm to capitalism and therefore also doing harm to our Democratic Republic.

Identifying both extremes of our economic theory has allowed us to identify both mercantilism and communism as extremes that must be avoided. Now we can see that we do not need to harm capitalism, we need to protect it from mercantilism just, as we will see, we must protect socialism from communism.

Why are mercantilism and communism extremes, why are they bad? Both require authoritarian forms of government to survive. Both destroy democracy which destroys both liberty and freedom. They don’t work. They destroy themselves in practice.

Capitalism and socialism work best when they work together in a democratic republic. That is one of my important conclusion. I must explain it, demonstrate it, make and win the argument for it.

When capitalism operates within an authoritarian governing system, it cannot be distinguished from mercantilism; just as when socialism operates in an authoritarian governing system, it cannot be distinguished from communism.

Capitalism worked in China under Deng Xiaoping because it combined capitalism with socialism. It also created very successful capitalists who sought greater liberty which threatened the CCP’s power and authority, its very existence.

It is this economic system that Xi Jinping is destroying in order to reclaim the CCP‘s authority. He is returning to communism and CCP authoritarianism. He is making sure that democracy doesn’t replace the CCP’s authoritarian rule. This was not as clear to me when I was writing Let’s Get Civil. It is unarguable today.

Actually, an argument can be made that what Xi is doing is installing a form of Putin’s mercantilism in China. He is making members of the CCP into oligarches. It won’t work. It will destroy the Chinese economy.

We have a brief but useful understanding of mercantilism and capitalism. Now let’s take a look at communism and socialism. Obviously, there are ways in which they are similar. What is really important to know is how they are different.

Communism:

Communism creates public ownership of all property, resources, and means of production. Everything belongs to “The people.” Ownership does not belong to individuals. It belongs to “the people” which, in practice, means that it belongs to the state, the government.

The government makes all decisions about what is produced and sold and how much everything costs. It also controls hiring and wages. It has not worked anywhere for a few reasons.

1. Communism rejects capitalism. That’s the problem: no economic system generates wealth like capitalism.

2. Communism tries to distribute wealth justly but it doesn’t generate enough wealth to distribute. And even where it does generate huge amounts of wealth, think Russian oil, it doesn’t distribute it justly. That is evident in every place it has been Tried: Russia, China, Eastern Europe, etc.

3. Communism requires an authoritarian form of government and those in authority use their authority to accumulate excessive amounts of wealth. (Human nature.)

Communism destroys itself in practice. However, because it can only operate in an authoritarian governing system, its economy fails but its dictator and oligarches remain in power. The government can be replaced only through revolution. There are no democratic processes available to replace the government.

Clearly, it is one extreme of our economic theory.

Socialism:

There are different versions of socialism that make quite a bit of difference. I have selected some useful generalities. They all help us understand that socialism is compatible with capitalism.

1. As it relates to political systems, socialism can thrive in a democracy if it works side by side with capitalism. It does not require a totalitarian form of government to sustain it.

2. If socialism operates within a totalitarian form of government, it cannot be distinguished from communism.

3. When socialism works along side capitalism, in a democratic republic, the state collects taxes on wealth earned by capitalists and capitalist enterprises and distributes this wealth through socialist policies and enterprises.

4. The state uses the revenue it collects from capitalist enterprises to pay for products and services delivered by the state or socialist enterprises created by the state.

5. Socialism also distributes wealth by making laws that require fair wages and benefits.

6. Socialism does not generate wealth. It is a cost center in any economy. All capitalist enterprises have cost centers that support the programs that generate wealth, the profit centers. It shouldn’t be a surprise to capitalists or anyone else that a nation’s economy, like any business, must have cost centers.

7. All successful applications of socialism are accomplished alongside successful capitalist enterprises. Both systems work best in concert with each other. Capitalist enterprises generate a tremendous amount of wealth and socialist enterprises distribute some of it justly.

Capitalism generates wealth for individuals. That fact must be preserved. In a sound economy capitalism thrives. It generates a tremendous amount of wealth and a huge percentage of that wealth goes to capitalists and their employees and other capitalists in other capitalist enterprises.

It is not that capitalism does not distribute wealth at all. The problem is that it does not distribute it justly. Again, just some of the wealth generated by capitalists and capitalist enterprises is collected and distributed justly by socialists and socialist enterprises.

These seven points change how we think about both socialism and capitalism. How we think, our ideas, our intellect. This is intellectual work. Let’s keep thinking.

Socialism calls for social ownership and democratic control of some areas of the economy.

Which ones? This is one of my favorite discussions. Why? Because the answer is so clear, so unarguable, and yet it seems to be unknown or at least rarely discussed in universities, journalism, and the public square. It’s not a secret, but it is not part of hardly any conversations about economics and economic justice. Let’s have that convesation here.

Those segments of the economy that don't involve a willing buyer and a willing seller cannot be fair. Therefore, they cannot be run as capitalist enterprises.

My wife and I have had a lot of success buying cars and pick-up trucks. Why?

Because if we don’t like what the seller is asking, we can walk away. And we have. And we’ve come back. And the seller has come down in their price. If they don’t come down, we can walk away and have. And they can sell it to someone else.

We can’t make the seller reduce their price and the seller can’t make us buy at the price they want. We are willing buyers working with willing sellers.

One of the ways that capitalism distinguishes itself from mercantilism is that capitalism is designed to operate among willing buyers and willing sellers. Capitalism seeks win/win arrangements except where it is run by radical capitalists.

If parents need medical care for their child, they cannot enter into equal negotiations with a health provider. Yet that happens all too frequently within our current health care system.

The government must intervene to make health care available and affordable to all. However, we cannot expect the government to make health care just If We the People don’t demand it.

We the People are still working to understand, think clearly about, and implement adequate socialist enterprises that will provide affordable health care to all. This is a major intellectual challenge in our society and government.

It becomes a lot simpler when we think clearly about it. Not easy, but simple.

Without economic justice there can be no social justice at all: No education justice, no medical justice, no food justice, no housing justice, no social justice at all.

Where private ownership doesn’t work, state ownership is required. We discuss health care and other social issues in our discussion of social justice. Education gets its own episode.

This has been intellectual work.

We have more work to do so that we understand how capitalism and socialism can work together in our economic system and our democratic republic.

We understand that if socialism is not controlled it can lead to communism which destroys socialism and capitalism and our Democratic Republic.

If capitalism is not controlled, it can lead to mercantilism which destroys capitalism and socialism and our Democratic Republic.

We have done a lot of good intellectual work and it helps us think more clearly and pursue economic justice more confidently.

Next, we must look at how capitalism and socialism can form our golden mean and preserve our Democratic Republic with our liberty and freedom.

Before we go, please subscribe and give us a thumbs up. We need a large audience from all over the social and political spectrum. We need to rebuild the group that can call We the People.

You can contact me at patconroy317@gmail.com.