Patriotism and Pride beyond Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum

Old and new complicities of collective political attachment in violence give patriotism a bad name. Simplistic positions often view collective attachment as either entirely bad or as sanitizable merely by adding to patriotism the adjective ‘critical’. Patriotic affectivity, as illustrated with the political emotion of pride, stands out within philosophical debates. This article argues that, to think about patriotism differently, we need to look more closely at ‘optics’ of patriotism and pride that have escaped debate although they are crucial for avoiding older pitfalls. To this end, I revisit Richard Rorty’s and Martha Nussbaum’s positions on pride by introducing more challenging examples of what being/feeling patriotic should mean. I reframe patriotism so that an ‘outward’ ‘optic’ acts as a strong corrective of the usual inward preoccupation with domestic issues within the polity and the state.     

Patriotism, War, and the Limits of Permissible Partiality

This paper examines whether patriotism and other forms of group partiality can be justified and what are the moral limits on actions performed to benefit countries and other groups. In particular, I ask whether partiality toward one’s country (or other groups) can justify attacking enemy civilians to achieve victory or other political goals. Using a rule utilitarian approach, I then (a) defend the legitimacy of “moderate” patriotic partiality but (b) argue that noncombatant immunity imposes an absolute constraint on what may be done to promote the interests of a country or other group involved in warfare or other forms of violent conflict.     

Patriots in the Making? Migrants, Citizens, and Demos Building in the European Union

Almost 20?years ago, Jürgen Habermas launched the idea of constitutional patriotism as a proposed solution to the tension between citizenship and national identity in the European Union. Since then, constitutional patriotism has remained a key concept in debates on European Union (EU) citizenship and democracy. This article, as so many before it, scrutinizes the meaning and viability of the concept. Unlike most others, however, it focuses less on the content of the concept and more on the subjects to which it is assumed/supposed to apply. I argue, firstly, that constitutional patriotism is not a viable or even desirable ideal for the European demos in its totality. The potential patriots of the EU are not the large majority of European Union citizens who live in their home country but migrants from other member states and nonmember states who are foreigners in their host countries. Secondly and accordingly, I argue that advancing constitutional patriotism means improving the status of foreign nationals in general and third-country nationals in particular. Connecting the acquisition of EU citizenship to domicile as opposed to member state nationality is one venue for such improvement. I discuss what this could imply and defend it as a means of building a truly European demos.     

Impermissibility and Kantian Moral Worth

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action’s maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the moral rightness of an act. I argue that Kant cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth.     

The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the “nonworseness claim,” it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as “better-than-permissible acts”—acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a “sweatshop” in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.     

Patriotic Conscientious Objection to Military Service

The purpose of this paper is to show that conscientious objection (henceforth CO) to military service is essentially not a dilemma of freedom of conscience versus the duty to obey the law, but above all a dilemma between two conflicting patriotic moral obligations. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that CO is justifiable on the basis of what is known as moderate patriotism, that is, out of a patriotism which is committed simultaneously to universal and particular values. The paper begins with a critical discussion of theoretical weaknesses in liberal thought of CO. Then, the concept of moderate patriotism is presented, followed by a discussion of the notion of patriotic CO (PCO). The next stage presents a step Towards A Theory of PCO to Military Service and shows how it differs from other liberal theories of disobedience. The conclusion is that if CO on patriotic grounds is morally justifiable, it follows that this is an act committed within the framework of legitimate political discourse. Therefore, PCO is politically legitimate even if it is not always legal. In other words, the discussion of PCO offers a theoretical distinction between political legitimacy and legality.     

The Roots of Patriotism Across Political Contexts

Why do some Americans feel more patriotic than others? We argue that feelings of national pride are reinforced by cues from people's political and social environments. When Americans reside in contexts that align with their values, traits, and civic orientations, they are more likely to express pride in their country. We consider both civic and ethnic pathways to patriotism. We expect that minorities and those who particularly value political equality will feel increasingly patriotic as the racial and ethnic diversity of their state climbs. For those who see politics through a partisan lens, we expect that environments defined by political competition will enhance feelings of national pride. We test our theory using data from the 2012 American National Election Studies (ANES). We find that Americans are more likely to say that they feel love for their country when they reside in political contexts congruent with their values and approach to citizenship.     

A Modest Historical Theory of Moral Responsibility

Is moral responsibility essentially historical? Consider two agents qualitatively identical with respect to all of their nonhistorical properties just prior to the act of A-ing. Is it possible that, due only to differences in their respective histories, when each A-s only one A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so? Nonhistorical theorists say “no.” Historical theorists say “yes.” Elsewhere, I have argued on behalf of philosophers like Harry G. Frankfurt that nonhistorical theorists can resist the historical theorists’ case against them, and that, therefore, a nonhistorical thesis remains a live option. Nevertheless, I have remained officially agnostic in this debate, as I acknowledge the pull of the competing considerations speaking on behalf of each view. In what follows, I turn from defending the nonhistorical position to fashioning a new historical theory, a relatively modest one that captures what is especially gripping about the kinds of examples that seem to commend an historical conclusion.     

KILLING FOR THE HOMELAND: PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND VIOLENCE

Political choices favoring one's country or one's nationality are wrong if they conflict with a principle of universal free acceptability, prohibiting choices that violate every set of rules to which any willing cooperator would want all to conform. Despite its universalism, this principle requires patriotic favoritism in political choices and permits individuals to assert nationalist interests in claims for state aid. But it deprives patriotism and nationalism of any distinctive role in establishing the legitimacy of wars and uprisings. These restrictions are appropriate even if stronger forms of patriotism and nationalism are psychologically indispensable for achieving social goals required for universal free acceptability.     

Agent-Basing,Consequences, and Realized Motives

According to agent-based approaches to virtue ethics, the rightness of an action is a function of the motives which prompted that action. If those motives were morally praiseworthy, then the action was right; if they were morally blameworthy, the action was wrong. Many critics find this approach problematically insensitive to an act’s consequences, and claim that agent-basing fails to preserve the intuitive distinction between agent- and act-evaluation. In this article I show how an agent-based account of right action can be made sensitive to an act’s consequences. According to the approach which I defend, an action is right just in case it realizes an agent’s morally praiseworthy motive. Conversely, an action is wrong just in case it realizes a morally blameworthy motive. Specifying act-evaluation in terms of the realization, rather than the expression, of an agent’s motives allows an agent-based approach to distinguish between agent- and act-evaluation. This is because an agent may act from a morally praiseworthy motive, but fail (either through bad luck or poor judgment) to realize that motive. Her action will therefore not have been the right one, despite its being the expression of morally praiseworthy motives.     

Soviet patriotism in a comparative perspective: a passion for oxymora

The official patriotic narrative that emerged in the USSR during the Stalin period shows the continuity of imperial models that served to constitute “love of the fatherland”. This article presents several concepts about the formation of imperial patriotism prevalent in the course of history; it identifies tendencies of interaction between cultural tradition and foreign models. It also shows the principal possibility of combining patriotism with other forms of unifying and mobilizing discourses. The official patriotic discourse of the Stalin era is analyzed as an eclectic ideological construct that, to a large extent, relied on the tradition of imperial patriotic education. The constants distinguishing Russian-Soviet patriotism include the representation of Russia’s imperial past, viewing the question of a multi-national state through the paradigm of the empire’s “civilizing mission”, and patriotism as an integral part of public political education. Some of the elements fundamental for Soviet “love of the fatherland” are preserved in modern Russian patriotism as for instance in the form of “Soviet” nostalgia or representations of militant “statehood”.     

On being motivated

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being motivated or solicited to act has recently been the focus of extensive investigation, yet work on this topic has tended to take the general notion of being motivated for granted. In this paper, I shall outline an account of what it is to be motivated. In particular, I shall focus on the relation between the affective character of states of being motivated and their intentional content, i.e. how things appear to the agent. Drawing on Husserl’s discussion of perceptual awareness, I suggest that the intentional content of states of being motivated has a horizonal structure, in which both affective and perceptual features are implied. In states of being motivated, the agent becomes aware of certain possibilities for action, towards which they feel drawn. This structure is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “intentional arc” (1962, 136).     

Shame,Publicity, and Self‐Esteem

Shame is a puzzling emotion. On the one hand, to feel ashamed is to feel badly about oneself; but on the other hand, it also seems to be a response to the way the subject is perceived by other people. So whose standards is the subject worried about falling short of, his own or those of an audience? I begin by arguing that it is the audience's standards that matter, and then present a theory of shame according to which shame is a response to the subject's perception that he is not thought of in the way he intrinsically values himself for being thought of by someone else. Then I go on to suggest some refinements to this basic view. First, the subject of shame is primarily concerned about his audience's attitudes toward him, not what they believe about him. And second, there may be one particular attitude which he values himself for inspiring. There is no very perspicuous term for this attitude, so I call it ‘proto‐respect’ – the attitude a social animal directs toward those it regards as valuable allies or bad enemies.     

Blameworthy Action and Character

A number of philosophers from Hume on have claimed that it does not make sense to blame people for acting badly unless their bad acts were rooted in their characters. In this paper, I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this claim. The claim is false, I argue, if it is taken to mean that agents can only be blamed for bad acts when those acts are manifestations of character paws . However, what is both true and important is the weaker claim that an act is not blameworthy unless it is rooted in some enduring aspect or aspects of the agent's character that may or may not be flaws, and that, if flaws, may or may not be bad in the same way that the act itself is.     

‘Can’ and the Consequence Argument

The consequence argument is a powerful incompatibilist argument for the conclusion that, if determinism is true, what one does is what one must do. A major point of controversy between classical compatibilists and incompatibilists has been over the use of ‘can’ in the consequence argument. Classical compatibilists, holding that abilities to act are dispositions, have argued that ‘can’ should be analyzed as a conditional. But such an analysis of ‘can’ puts compatibilists in a position to grant the premises of the argument while denying the conclusion. Incompatibilists remain unconvinced, and this corner of the debate over free will has reached a dialectical impasse. The present paper has two aims. First, to offer a new dialectical point of entry into this dispute on behalf of incompatibilists. By making use of Angelika Kratzer's influential semantic work on ‘can’ and ‘must’, I argue that incompatibilists are in a position to offer a plausible, positive treatment of ‘can’ that favors their view. Second, even if one does not think incompatibilism is thereby true (for as we shall see there are places to push back), the Kratzer semantics yields a number of important insights concerning the consequence argument that should be of broad interest. ¹      

Scalar Properties, Binary Judgments

In the moral realm, our deontic judgments are usually (always?) binary. An act (or omission) is either morally forbidden or morally permissible. ¹ 1 I realize that I appear to be omitting the category of ‘morally required’ here. But that category does not affect my analysis in part because we can always substitute for a morally required act a morally forbidden omission to act. The question would then be whether the omission to act is permissible or forbidden. In any event, my focus is on deontic boundaries, and it is immaterial how many there are. Thus, I shall continue to speak of acts being morally forbidden or permissible.
Yet the determination of an act's deontic status frequently turns on the existence of properties that are matters of degree. In what follows I shall give several examples of binary moral judgments that turn on scalar properties, and I shall claim that these examples should puzzle us. How can the existence of a property to a specific degree demarcate a boundary between an act's being morally forbidden and its not being morally forbidden? Why aren't our moral judgments of acts scalar in the way that the properties on which those judgments are based are scalar, so that acts, like states of affairs, can be morally better or worse rather than right or wrong? I conceive of this inquiry as operating primarily within the realm of normative theory. Presumably it will give aid and comfort to consequentialists, who have no trouble mapping their binary categories onto scalar properties. For example, a straightforward act utilitarian, for whom one act out of all possible acts is morally required (and hence permissible) and all others morally forbidden, can, in theory at least, provide an answer to every one of the puzzles I raise. And, in theory, so can all other types of act and rule consequentialists. They will find nothing of interest here beyond embarrassment for their deontological adversaries. The deontologists, however, must meet the challenges of these puzzles. And for them, the puzzles may raise not just normative questions, but questions of moral epistemology and moral ontology. Just how do we know that the act consequentialist's way of, say, trading off lives against lives is wrong? For example, do we merely intuit that taking one innocent, uninvolved person's life to save two others is wrong? Can our method of reflective equilibrium work if we have no theory by which to rationalize our intuitions? And what things in the world make it true, if it is true, that one may not make the act consequentialist's tradeoff? I do not provide any answers to these questions any more than I provide answers to the normative ones. But they surely lurk in the background.     

On being and holding responsible

In his Responsibility and the moral sentiments, Wallace develops the idea that we should think of what it is to be morally responsible for an act in terms of norms for holding someone responsible for that act. Smith has recently claimed that Wallace's approach and those like it are ‘fundamentally misguided’. She says that such approaches make the mistake of incorporating conditions for ‘actively blaming’ others into the basic conditions for being responsible, when in fact the conditions for active blame ‘go beyond’ the basic conditions. In this essay, I argue that Smith's otherwise illuminating discussion of these ‘Normativist’ approaches does not undermine them. Specifically, I maintain that being actively blamable by certain persons with the relevant standing is actually constitutive of being responsible for at least some acts. By distinguishing between persons with different sorts of standing, a Normativist approach can avoid Smith's challenge. My larger aim is thus to clarify and defend the Normativist approach.     

Should We Teach Patriotism?

This article examines a particular debate between Eamonn Callan and William Galston concerning the need for a civic education which counters the divisive pull of pluralism by uniting the citizenry in patriotic allegiance to a single national identity.The article offers a preliminary understanding of nationalism and patriotism before setting out the terms of the debate. It then critically evaluates the central idea of Callan that one might be under an obligation morally to improve one's own patriotic inheritance, pointing to the ineliminable tension between the valuation of one's own patria by its own terms and a detached critical reason.It concludes by suggesting that we are, in advance of our education, members of a particular patria and that any education must be particularistic. Finally, the danger is noted of presuming that, in each case, there is a single, determinate national tradition.