ESSAYS

Essays So Far:

Teaching Values By Fostering Appreciation

Happiness Is A Feeling

The Vital Heart of Liberal Education

Moral Motive

Educating Citizens

Justice and Happiness

teaching values by fostering appreciation

How we regard and treat others is the practical heart of morality. Treating others well is the common attribute of favored virtues, preferred values, moral codes, and systems of ethics. Behavior that benefits others is the practical expectation of most of what we deem moral and ethical, good and right, fair and just. We may find it difficult to definitively determine what behavior best benefits others, either generally or in specific cases, or to even agree on the meaning of “benefit,” but to more effectively motivate children to well-intentioned behavior—behavior meant to benefit others as one understands it—could be considered a success of profound practical consequence.

We fall far short of this aim when we appeal to fear, which is often the case with traditional “character” education. Fear is the underlying motive for heeding the inhibitions and impulsions we succeed in implanting in children, and fear is not really compatible with benevolent inclination. Exhortations to care about injustice, suffering, and the environment may elicit the natural sympathy of those already inclined to it and win the overt agreement of those disposed to meet authoritative expectations, but they are unlikely to plant any seeds of benevolence.

Teaching values by trying to improve students’ ethical reasoning may make students more aware of the connection between moral behavior and self interest, but does not go much beyond that. Contrary to presumption, reason alone does not supply its own volitional force. As Jonathan Haidt points out, “Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.” (2006, 165) Motive is a function of emotions, not the affect-barren reasoning of the mind.

Motives to Treat Others Well

I propose a simple classification of the normative motives that favor treating others well: those based on the fears born of the perceived insufficiencies of ego, and a more speculative category of motives based on a particular understanding of love, which are plausibly non-ego based.

Fear of contravening normative prohibitions or failing to meet social expectations of appropriate behavior is deeply inculcated in most of us. “Don’t” is a constantly recurring refrain of childhood, as is “You should.” Such admonitions are sometimes reinforced with physical and/or emotional punishments, which continue with the sanctions of law and the reactions of our fellows into adulthood. Normative inhibitions tend to be deeply embedded and most of us cannot easily violate them, or even think about it, without incurring considerable fear. Of course, fear is considered necessary to socialization. The inhibitions implanted in our childhood mostly steer us away from harming others, and they can make us anxious to avoid failing to respond to others’ needs to some extent. Fear is thought a more reliable motive and easier to inspire and reinforce than more positive motives. Even parents who would rather not instill fear in their children face many an occasion where appeals to reason, affection, and justice are not reasonable alternatives.

But however useful fear may be to render children fit for society, it carries considerable baggage as a motivation to treat others well. Fear contracts and darkens awareness, something we can physically feel in the associated tension of our bodies. Fear is one of the more painful emotions. It distorts perception of reality and inhibits reasoning, which are among the reasons fear is favored by those who would motivate prejudice, hatred, and violence. Fear also lends itself to anger, which may be a psychological means of dealing with fear. There is a mountain of evidence that fear and anger are harmful to physical and mental health. It is a cause of self-destructive behavior. Importantly in light of our present concern with motives for treating others well, fear is an emotion of aversion, which makes it incompatible with such feelings of attraction as sympathy, compassion, appreciation, and love. It tends to block or inhibit the sense of connection with others that naturally inclines us to kindness and benevolence.

We may not be consciously aware of the fear bound into the inhibitions and impulsions we learned as children. Our responses are often virtually automatic, so the general effects of fear may not seem to come into play. But however unconscious the fear at the core of inhibitions and impulsions, it does not incline us to treat others well for their own sake.

Fear is also involved in guilt. Guilt is a very unpleasant feeling and a powerful motivator, though fear of guilt is what keeps us on the straight and narrow. Many find guilt useful in governing people’s behavior. They believe guilt justly punishes transgressions even when the perpetrator avoids other punishments. And trying to manipulate people by making them feel guilty is ubiquitous in human relationships. But there is a close relationship between guilt and fear, and guilt shares most of the liabilities of fear. Guilt can be quite debilitating when one is consumed with it, and it is quite destructive of self esteem, which many believe is necessary to extend esteem to others. It is commonly held that how one feels about oneself greatly influences how one feels about everyone else. Indeed, guilt tends to be projected, probably as a means to cope. The self-condemned sinner is apt to see the sin in others as well. It is not a reach to suspect that guilt lurks in much of the condemnation, outrage, and attack that plagues our relationships and societies.

We also heed normative admonitions and expectations out of more or less calculated self interest. The threat of punishment obviously appeals to fear, but treating others well can also arise from intent to advance self-interest. I refer here to what I call the Strategic Golden Rule: Do unto others because it is the best way to get them to do unto you. Fear plays a less obvious role in motivating people to treat others well in order to serve their own material interests. But the desire to advance such interests implies a need born of perceived lack or insufficiency, which entails fear at some level of consciousness.

The same is true of serving emotional needs. Normative satisfactions are among the more positive motives for treating others well. By treating others well, we likely hope to gain the approbation of others, and even in the absence of such approbation, we may hope to strengthen our self esteem by feeling good about ourselves. The need for approbation and building self esteem implies a lack we seek to fill, for if we felt no lack of self worth we would have no motive to seek either external or internal validation. Filling this lack can yield a pleasurable feeling called satisfaction. For most people, such satisfaction is unequivocally among the preferable, or pleasurable, feelings.

But it has some relative deficiencies. For one, it arises from easing an insufficiency of self worth that is never long sated. Insecurity is an inherent characteristic of ego. No matter how self confident someone driven to seek power, fame, acclaim, and all else that glitters in the eyes of the ego may seem, the need to seek these things speaks to a deep insecurity of self that requires constant validation to appease. The self sufficient are not driven. The emotional need for external validation of worth tends to be insatiable—it can never be satisfied for long because the sense of insufficient worth from which it rises remains and is ever freshly provoked. The sense of insufficiency can be momentarily lulled, but it always wakens to attenuate and extinguish every satisfaction the ego demands. And every ego gratification is haunted by the certainty that the barbs of emotional need will return. Unfortunately for our happiness, every satisfaction in which the ego plays a role—and it is seldom completely absent—is contaminated by the underlying fear inherent to the premise for its existence.

The satisfaction of approval also shares a property of most satisfactions: it requires the preceding pain of perceived lack of approval or fear of it. No hunger, no sating. Without the contrast of discomfort, awareness of comfort recedes. Without the need for validation, the approval of others does not inspire the satisfaction of filling a need. This at least partly explains why satisfactions “habituate” or recede from awareness. The satisfaction of desire requires dissatisfaction, because desire entails dissatisfaction with present experience; with no desire to satisfy, satisfaction of desire is unavailable.

Some normative satisfactions are not so clearly associated with the ego’s need for approval. There can be a certain pleasure in obeying rules, performing rituals, and keeping traditions for their own sakes. There can be pleasure in being virtuous for the sake of virtue. There is relative pleasure in cognitive coherence with what one believes, especially when contrasted to the fear and confusion engendered by cognitive dissonance of acting contrary to one’s beliefs. Guilt arises from the dissonance of behavior and belief. Avoiding guilt may not be pleasurable in itself, but it paves the way for preferred feelings. People can find satisfaction in coloring within the lines, so to speak. They reap normative satisfactions in performing rituals and keeping traditions, perhaps because they endow them with higher purpose and meaning.

Whatever the source, pleasure in heeding rules, commandments, rituals, and traditions as such is not, strictly speaking, a motive to treat others well for their own sake. Heeding normative strictures may serve the interests of others, but when the attending satisfaction is based more on the heeding than the serving, it falls short of benevolence. Another deficiency of the satisfactions of heeding normative strictures and traditions for their own sake is that it can all too easily turn into resentment and condemnation of those who do not heed them. The satisfaction of obeying what one believes is God’s will, obeying the law as a normative imperative, practicing virtues to feed one’s sense of personal integrity, or heeding tradition as an emotional balm all too easily give way to anger and resentment when God’s will, laws, virtues, and traditions are flouted.

And such judgment is not reserved for others. Guilt lurks to punish the laxity of those who seek satisfaction in obedience to stricture, probably more cruelly than those who place less store in such fidelity. It may be that the greater the satisfaction, the greater the guilt from succumbing to temptation. Such is the treachery of ego.

We may not have exhausted the motives to treat others well born of the insecurities of ego, but let us turn to motives that plausibly have a different source. Some philosophers held that normative satisfactions are natural responses to virtuous acts, that they are almost instinctive. Some believe the satisfactions of virtue are affective tokens of grace from God or the natural expression of spirit. Or the brain may have a mechanism for creating a feeling of pleasure for consonance between action and belief. Proponents of natural law presumed a basic inclination of human nature to virtue that is inherently rewarding, and, in assuming virtue contributes to “win-win” situations, there are evolutionary explanations as well. (Wright, 2001)

Many agree with Schopenhauer that compassion is the prime moral motive. Compassion may be thought an aspect of a virtually instinctual sympathy with others that inclines us to not only share their pain, but their joy and mirth as well. Compassion and sympathy imply a felt connection with others that does not necessarily involve the fears and needs born of the sense of separation that defines the ego. We need not insist on this to make a useful distinction between motives that aim primarily at meeting our own needs and those that incline us to serve others.

Compassion is commonly understood as sensitivity to the pain of others, implying a sharing of the pain of others to some extent. Compassion seems a relatively selfless motive to serve others as it does not in itself seem to serve a selfish interest. Sharing pain is painful, and even a mild sensitivity to the distress of others suggests affective discomfort. And compassion lends itself to guilt when we fail to act as we believe we ought. As morally laudable and socially necessary compassion is, it is not in itself an intrinsically enjoyable feeling. The affective rewards we associate with compassion seem to lie in acting to alleviate the distress of others in some way, which, in addition to normative satisfactions, promises relief from the distress of our own sympathy.

Unfortunately, we can also seek relief from the distress of our sympathy by seeing those who elicit our compassion as victims of callous or malicious perpetrators. When convinced of injustice, our compassion renders us the victims in a sense, which may explain why compassion so easily incites our indignation and calls forth a desire for vengeance. When we see or hear of people who are poor, hungry, disadvantaged, or abused, we may find some relief from our pangs of compassion by diverting them into righteous anger aimed at those we hold responsible for such suffering. Though it seems an inherently benevolent impulse, compassion in itself does not save us from the ills of condemning judgment unless it includes perpetrators as well as victims.

Judging others ill entails an inescapable affective price. Anger and its underlying fear attend such judgment. This follows from the insight that emotions are responses to the judgments our thoughts entail. This is an enormously important insight, for it points to a major cause of unhappiness. It points as well to a plausible condition for intrinsically rewarding moral motives: they must neither entail nor invite judging others ill. This observation may not sit well with those who believe that judging the sin of others is morally obligatory, but it is backed both by reason and the testimony of people trained in inner awareness.

Fostering Appreciation

It is said that doing good feels good, and, with sufficient awareness of feelings, it is easy to experience the truth of this. Thinking well of others gives rise to lighter, more expansive feelings and thinking ill evokes darker, more constricting feelings. We unavoidably reap what we sow in terms of our judgments. If we could experientially demonstrate this, we could tap into a potent, self-reinforcing motive for moral behavior that has been relatively neglected. This would require training students in inner awareness, particularly in awareness of feelings and the thoughts that evoke them. Such awareness is best attained through the practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is essentially nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. This can be achieved by means of various techniques—focus on a particular present experience like breathing or a “meta-awareness” of all that transpires within and without, for example. Mindfulness can be focused on feelings and their associated thoughts, and can include experimenting with thinking well and ill to demonstrate their affective consequences. But mindfulness is also the doorway to the Now where the fears of ego disappear and a peaceful joy thought to come from awareness of our essential being shines through. Practicing mindfulness is thus a way to experience the incomparably desirable affective rewards of escaping the fears of ego.

Fortunately, there are international initiatives to teach mindfulness in schools. Organizations such as Innerkids are dedicated to training teachers in the art, and highly useful guides are proliferating. Among recent additions are The Mindful Child by Susan Greenland (2010) and Child’s Mind by Christopher Willard (2010). Deborah Shoeberlein’s Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness (2009) is excellent.

We should also address the conceptual barriers to the appreciation of others. What we believe about others determines how we see them, and how we see them determines how we feel about them. Though fear may inhibit us from objectively harming others, our treatment of them will fall far short of benevolence if we see them through fearful eyes. If we can change the cognitive filters that determine how students judge and therefore feel about people, we can foster a more appreciative regard.

Students should therefore be led on ever more extensive explorations of anger, grievance, resentment and associated feelings on the one hand and feelings of appreciation on the other. They should learn to recognize and analyze their judgments both experientially and conceptually. For example, they can be asked to pick a target of their anger, try to identify the apparent causes by noting what they feel when they think about different aspects of the person, and attempt to understand the motives of the person by imagining themselves in the person’s shoes and recalling when they acted similarly and why.

Finding the motives of others in one’s own heart is a good way to gain perspective and, hopefully, sympathy. It is among the various ways to temper rationalizations and mitigate the pangs of judgment. It is a way to become aware of the attitudinal lens through which we see others and learn to adjust it. We know a change in attitude can change both our perceptions and the responses of our hearts. A little change in perspective can change someone we regard with aversion into an inspiration of compassion. A new realization about someone can overturn current judgment and open new venues of understanding. Prejudice dissipates with the gaze of understanding, superficial images of people transform with the evidence of unsuspected depths.

Comfort with similarity and discomfort with difference is a clear predisposition of human beings, and it constitutes an emotional barrier to evoking feelings of appreciation. One means to lower the barrier is to strengthen students’ recognition of the similarities of human hearts and the human experience. It is easier to appreciate others when we recognize ourselves in them, because it is easier to understand them. Some aspects of common educational practice help promote such recognition. The shared environment of classrooms and the interaction that is encouraged there provide opportunities for broadening and deepening mutual understanding to some extent. The experience of education as a shared endeavor serves this end as well, though this is lost when competition is emphasized. Content that reflects recurring themes of the human story and shared conditions of the human experience may be thought to contribute to an understanding of what we have in common.

Hearing other students talk about their feelings and associated thoughts tends to lead to a realization of just how much one’s own inner experience accords with the inner experiences of others. Consciously bringing the inner dimension of experiences into the open to share with others can bring a real revelation. A student’s core motives become clearer the more he or she hears them described by others, for core motives are among the most universally shared aspects of the human condition. Our understanding of others is necessarily based on our own experiences, and the discovery of how similar our inner experiences are with those of others can deeply resonate.

A number of initiatives that aim to improve students’ views of each other and therefore their relationships have been implemented in schools with considerable success. Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, has helped bring “social and emotional learning” (SEL) programs to tens of thousands of schools. (Lantieri & Goleman, 2008) SEL emphasizes techniques based on mindful inner awareness.

Marshall Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication” inspired another promising initiative aimed at developing peaceful, compassionate relationships. The core methods of what practitioners call “relationship based teaching and learning” involve awareness and expression of feelings and needs that promotes understanding and reduces the sources of conflict. (Hart & Hodson, 2004) The program emphasizes awareness of the affective rewards of freely giving and receiving according to the particular talents of each student. Both the ends and means of the project are well-suited to fostering appreciation of others through understanding, recognition of what we all hold in common, and awareness of the rewards of the heart.

Promising means to harness the moral attitudes and behaviors of children to the motives of their hearts are ready to hand. Giving them a prominent place in schools would greatly improve the effectiveness of values education. A tall order, perhaps, but the stakes are exceedingly high. The lifelong quality of children’s lives and the health of the societies they inhabit as adults may well depend on it.

REFERENCES

Greenland, Susan K. (2010) The Mindful Child, New York: Free Press.

Haidt, Jonathan (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom New York: Basic Books, 165.

Hart, Sura and Victoria Kindle Hodson, 2004, The Compassionate Classroom: Relationship Based Teaching and Learning, Encinitas, California: PuddleDancer Press.

Lantieri, Linda and Daniel Goleman, 2008, Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children, Louisville, Colorado: Sounds True.

Schoeberlein, Deborah and Suki Sheth (2009) Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything, Somerville, Massachussetts: Wisdom Publications.

Willard, Christopher, 2010, Child’s Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Help Our children Be More Focused, Calm, and Relaxed, Berkeley, California: Parallax Press.

Wright, Robert, 2001, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Vintage.

happiness is a feeling

Saying happiness is a feeling may seem too obvious to need saying, but it does. Quite a few people either flatly disagree or insist the observation is only partly true. Some agree with Aristotle that “eudaimonia,” translated as happiness, is a quality of a virtuous life as a whole. The modern philosopher Julia Annas rejects the idea that happiness is subjective—a “smiley-face feeling”—in favor of the notion that it is a more objective quality of how a life is lived, particularly in terms of worthy achievement.

Many contemporary thinkers prefer well-being and flourishing to the word happiness. These concepts do not necessarily deny feelings are an aspect of happiness, but they encompass broader conditions of life than “mere” affect. Well-being includes presumably appropriate assessments of the objective conditions of one’s life as well as feelings. David Sosa prefers “flourishing” because it is not simply about feeling good, it is about “accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments.” Harry Brighouse says, “flourishing is a richer property than happiness, sensitive to many more features of a person’s life than just her inner states.” Alex Michalos contends we should not consider people happy because they feel good no matter what the circumstances; they should feel good “because the objectively measurable conditions of their lives merit a positive assessment.”

The objections to happiness as a feeling are mostly normative. They are based to some extent on value judgments of what the sources of happiness ought to be. They are also based on what the sources are objectively presumed to be. They tend to ignore the nature of the moment-to-moment experience of eudaimonia, well-being and flourishing. This is rather curious given that direct experience is only of a present moment.

The word happiness is meant to characterize a feeling in common parlance, either the most desirable feeling or one in the category of desirable feelings. I believe the common understanding is not only more accurate in terms of direct experience; it is also more fruitful in identifying the keys to the experience.

Imagine life without feelings. You would be aware of the information detected by your senses. You could reason. You could draw conclusions about the nature of what you perceive and about cause-and-effect relationships. But you wouldn’t care about what you were experiencing. Caring implies feeling. You would have no motive to prefer one experience over another, for motive implies an inner force that moves us, a force entailed in emotion. You would have no motive to seek alternative experiences. Your experiences would have no experiential value.

The subjective value of experience lies in feelings. As Robert Solomon puts it, “Every value and everything meaningful—as well as everything vile, offensive, or painful—comes into life through the passions.” This is in keeping with the affective theory of value. It differs from the emotive theory of value associated with such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume only in making a distinction between emotive and non-emotive feelings. Emotive feelings—fear, anger, desire, boredom, etc.—move us to seek a preferable feeling. Non-emotive feelings—joy, peace, love—are at least temporarily sufficient unto themselves; we want to keep feeling them and are therefore not moved to change what we are experiencing. Feelings in general are called affect, which includes both types.

We usually refer to value in its positive sense, which in this context is what we prefer to experience rather than what we dislike or loathe. The desire to feel better than we do at present is the core motive force of our lives. The attainment of a desired feeling is our real target in all we pursue. What we really seek in relationships, possessions, circumstances, ideals, entertainment and all else that glitters in our mind’s eye is a feeling we hope the objects of our desire will evoke.

The value of experience must be found in actual experience rather than concepts. The present moment is the only dimension of time we directly experience. Memories and imaginings may seem to extend experience into the past and future, but remembering and imagining, and whatever benefits or burdens they bring to an experience, necessarily occur in the now. For all that troubles us about feelings—as ephemeral, fickle, unpleasant, and uncontrollable they often seem—they are nonetheless the core subjective assessment of value, positive or negative, of the only experiential dimension of time.

We experience life one moment at a time, not all at once, so life as a whole is a conceptual construct beyond direct experience. Concepts of happiness as an assessment of the quality of life as a whole neglect the essential nature of experience, and therefore do not capture the essence of experiential value.

The concepts of well-being and flourishing also include temporal dimensions and qualities of life beyond immediate experience. Well-being is usually thought to include health, rewarding relationships, meaningful work and engagement, security, pleasing circumstances, etc. For the most part, those who prefer the term agree the value of these conditions is subjectively rather than objectively determined. Though the meaning varies, flourishing generally includes what are considered more objective assessments such as worthwhile accomplishments, contributions to society, admirable pursuits and lifestyles, status and esteem.

But if the present moment is the only temporal dimension of experience, we must ask how well-being and flourishing are experienced in the now. If not as a feeling, then how? To say “state of mind” offers no illumination; feelings in a broad sense are not only inherent attributes of mental states, they entail the value of such states. Without reference to feelings, well-being and flourishing are not experientially descriptive and do not identify the nature of experiential value. They may encompass plausible sources of feelings, but remain vague at best about the nature of the associated feelings.

External conditions and achievements influence what we feel, of course, but what we feel is the point. Whatever the causal relationship between the conditions of our lives and our feelings, feelings constitute the subjective quality of our lives. The causes of feelings are the means, not the end. So why not use more descriptive words for desirable feelings—happiness, joy, contentment, satisfaction, peace, etc.?

One might respond that the value of the concepts of a virtuous life, well-being and flourishing lies in identifying more conducive—and normatively appropriate—contexts or sources of feelings. One might consider this more fruitful than focusing directly on the chimera of feelings per se. This view is mistaken.

Directly engaging the question of feelings is far more likely to lead to deeper insight into the nature of what we seek and where we are most likely to find it. Inquiry into the nature and sources of feelings also greatly improves our chances of discovering the means to feel as we choose, or at least to feel better than otherwise. Before presuming the sources of happiness, we must first gain some clarity about its nature: what feeling or feelings do we prefer? Only then can we fruitfully inquire into the means of experiencing the feelings we desire.

Serious, open-minded inquiry into the causes of feelings leads to the insight that internal factors are far more important than external in determining what we feel. Our feelings are not direct responses to the raw data of our senses; they are responses to our interpretations—our judgments—of perceptions. Aside from instinctual programming, feelings are not automatic responses. Nor are the judgments our thoughts entail. We can determine, or at least influence, what we feel by managing our thoughts. This is the basis of cognitive therapy. This realization reveals both the source of feelings and the key to feeling as we choose.

Inner awareness of feelings and the thoughts that cause them is far more important to happiness than arranging external conditions. Such awareness is necessary to identify what feelings are most desirable, and it is necessary to observe and therefore manage thoughts and patterns of thought.

Rather than downplaying feelings, we should acknowledge their supreme value in the subjective quality of our lives. Then we should seek clarity about what we prefer to feel and the means to feel it. We would then stand a far better chance of aligning the affect-impoverished priorities of our minds with the deeper aspirations of our hearts. The first step is to acknowledge that happiness is a feeling.

Sources of quotes (numbered in order of appearance):

1. Julia Annas, “Happiness As Achievement” in Cahn and Vitrano, Happiness: Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy, pp. 238-244.

2. David Sosa, “The Spoils of Happiness” The New York Times: Opinionator, October 6, 2010. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/the-spoils-of-happiness/.

3. Alex C. Michalos, “Education, Happiness and Wellbeing,” a paper prepared for the International Conference on “Is happiness measurable and what do those measures mean for public policy?” at Rome, 2-3 April 2007. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/22/25/ 38303200.pdf on September 21, 2009.

4. Harry Brighouse, On Education, Taylor & Francis, Kindle edition, 2007, acquired June 8, 2008 from Amazon.com. Location 709.

5. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hacket Publishing, 1993) p. 71.

the vital heart of liberal education

What is the value of liberal education? The most insightful answer is found in the foremost theory of subjective value in the history of philosophy. Aristotle’s observation that happiness is the only “self-sufficient” end, for all we do is for the sake of happiness, echoes in the writings of thinkers through the ages. As the core human aspiration, happiness is the primary subjective good of the good life as well as the good society.

Many defenders of the liberal arts stress social rather than personal value. The social value of liberal education is in preparing students for the heightened cognitive demands of modern jobs for the sake of the national economy, for responsible and active citizenship for the sake of democracy, for enriching the national culture, for furthering the cause of truth and socially useful knowledge, and so forth.

Without doubt, liberal education addresses vital needs of complex modern societies. But giving priority to these needs over personal aspirations treats students more as means to social ends than as ends in themselves. This is not just morally dubious; it is dangerous. Dedicating the education of young citizens to making them useful to the purposes of the state disregards their intrinsic value and thereby weakens the obligation of the state to respect human dignity. It encourages the propensity of those entrusted with power to consider citizens as servants rather than the other way around. And it is shortsighted. The welfare of society consists of the welfare of the individuals that comprise it; the interests of society are better served by giving priority to the personal empowerment of citizens. As Dewey says, “Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.” (1980, 5)

Most answers to the question of the personal value of liberal education may imply the end of happiness, but few make it explicit. Perhaps the main reason for this is that the concept of happiness is deemed too ambiguous. The meaning varies from person to person. In my experience, most people tend to think of happiness in terms of what they think causes it rather than what it is. Happiness is virtue, the contemplative life, success, money, a good marriage, health, living in a sunny locale, a promotion, retirement, a new kitchen floor, or, in the Beatles’ song, a warm gun.

Though some disagree, I think the common understanding that happiness is a feeling is the most useful. I hold to the affective theory of value, which differs from the emotive theory of value only in making a distinction between emotions that move us to seek preferable feelings and non-emotive feelings that we prefer to keep feeling. According to this theory, the core subjective value of any experience is entailed in feeling. Remove feeling from an experience and you are left with a robotic awareness of sensory data and perhaps a sentient acknowledgement of cause and effect without a motive to seek experience, to care about what you are experiencing, or to establish a preference among experiences. As Robert Solomon says, “Every value and everything meaningful—as well as everything vile, offensive, or painful—comes into life through the passions.” (1993, 71)

The usual meaning of value is what we desire, appreciate, or find useful to our purposes. We usually do not speak of value in regard to what we loathe or do not care about. To value usually means to hold in positive regard. It is in this sense that feeling is the treasure we seek in experience; we seek preferable feelings. We are moved to gain a feeling preferable to what we are presently feeling, and experiencing the feeling at which we aim is the reward of attainment. The objects of our pursuits may be people, possessions, circumstances, expressions of love and esteem, truth, and all else that glitters in the eyes of our minds, but the experiential value of attaining these things lies in the feelings we hope they will evoke. Feelings are both the motive force and target of all our striving.

To speak of value without consequence to the human heart is to speak of value without consequence to human experience. It is the heart that bestows experiential value, not the affect-barren reasoning of the mind. The subjective quality of our lives is the quality of our feelings. Thus the ultimate value of everything we teach in schools is what it contributes to the aspirations of a human heart to experience what it yearns to feel.

As commonly understood, the word happiness is used to describe either the most desirable feeling or the category of preferred feelings. The most vitally meaningful answer to the question of the value of liberal education is what it contributes to each student’s experience of happiness in terms of what he or she prefers to feel.

Contemporary defenders of the liberal arts tend to stress their personal value in terms of getting better jobs and making more money in the 21^st century global economy. Most likely this is due to the current market and political pressures squeezing these disciplines, especially the humanities. I suspect, or perhaps just hope, most educators still believe they are more importantly the best preparation for life in general. But making a compelling case for the non-economic value of liberal education is hindered by lack of clarity about what it contributes to the non-economic dimensions of life.

The purpose of liberal education is variously described as helping students attain “a meaningful and satisfying life,” “human flourishing,” “insight into the meaning of life,” the “immortality of wisdom,” the “art of living a good life,” “self realization,” “self knowledge,” “joy in creative expression and knowledge,” understanding the “significance of what [one] does,” “consummatory appreciations,” the ability to “change the meaning of experience,” and “the possession of our powers.” “If a person’s life is to be sufficient and satisfying” Philip Phenix contends, “he needs above all to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile experiences and not only instrumental preparatory ones.” (1967)

What do these attainments contribute to the actual moment-to-moment experience of life? Without reference to the summative end of happiness, the answer remains vague. Let us therefore ask what a liberal education might contribute to students’ pursuit of happiness. Here we must confront the realization that little we teach at any level of education is directly aimed at students’ hearts. This is a failure of profound consequence. Still, the liberal arts disciplines are comparatively amenable to serving the aims of the heart.

The liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, explore the aesthetic dimension of experience. They can enhance what Alfred North Whitehead called “aesthetic apprehension.” Dewey said, “aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experience.” (2007, 166) Music, art, and literature are not the only subjects that open the door to aesthetic pleasures, of course. The appreciation of profound and clever ideas and formulations, the satisfactions of intellectual problem-solving, the wonder of new vistas of beauty, the fascination of the human drama, the grip of poignant moments, all the varied fruits of mind that sweeten our affective experiences and inform our pursuit of happiness are native to liberal arts subjects.

The world in which we subjectively live is the world of which we are aware, and the liberal arts expand students’ awareness of the world and potentially deepen their understanding of themselves and others. The advantages of greater awareness of the world seem obvious in common understandings of advantage. It increases opportunities for “aesthetic apprehension” and conceptual appreciations, of course. Beyond this, such awareness reasonably improves our ability to navigate the world to achieve what we desire. It expands our awareness of choices and therefore our freedom. It enhances our understanding of consequences, and therefore our discernment in choosing. Awareness of the world can afford greater insight into what we are, what we seek, and what is worth seeking. By extension, this enhances our understanding of others. A liberal education offers insight into the human condition and, importantly, it encourages self-reflection, which may yield the riper fruits of the examined life.

But greater external efficacy, freedom, and self-understanding are not direct causes of the feelings we seek. They are no doubt conducive conditions, but are not sufficient causes. Our feelings are responses to our judgments of outer and inner experiences. Our judgments of experiences—the meaning we give them in terms of how we perceive they might affect our purposes—determine what we feel, not the raw data of our perceptions. The contribution of a liberal education to students’ ability to feel as they choose ultimately lies in what it contributes to their ability to determine the meaning they give their experiences. This is more important than the ability to determine their experiences—the usual focus in the pursuit of happiness. This realization rather complicates the assessment of the personal value of liberal education.

The knowledge and understanding the liberal arts provide naturally influence the meaning students’ give their experiences to some extent. Knowing and understanding history, literature, philosophy, physical and social sciences, music, art, etc., offers ample context and content for meaning. What is usually missing, though, is the nurturing of awareness of the connection between the tenor of the meaning one bestows (positive or negative) and the tenor of his or her feelings. Positive meaning yields positive feelings, and vice-versa. Combined with the realization that meaning is indeed subjectively chosen and bestowed rather than objectively mandated, this awareness is key to the ability to feel as one chooses.

Our beliefs, lessons of experience, and immediate desires shape our judgments of experiences. Education informs all of these, but for the most part only indirectly in a hit-or-miss fashion. This need not be the case, though. If we could orient the teaching of the liberal arts to a more conscious, integrative attempt to provide the cognitive wherewithal to enhance students’ ability to feel as they choose—a practical understanding of empowering their pursuit of happiness—we would greatly enhance the value of liberal education.

Students should be prepared with core insights into the human condition and with exercises in inner awareness. They should arrive at a conceptual understanding of the importance of feelings through considering both philosophical insights and scientific evidence. Students should experience the importance of feelings through conscious, nonjudgmental observation of feelings. This is called inner mindfulness. Learning and practicing mindfulness is fundamental to all else, for it heightens awareness of feelings, provides a basis for deciding preferences among them, and experientially demonstrates the connection between judgments and feelings.

Experience is the best teacher, and mindfulness would afford students far greater awareness of the experiential lessons of the heart. It would also make them more aware of the immediate affective fruits of learning these lessons, which would greatly strengthen the intrinsic motive to learn.

The arts and practice of inner awareness are taught in some schools, but they are obviously missing from most core curricula. At present, education is oriented almost exclusively toward external experience. Yet, the meaning of experience and the feelings that entail the value of experience are internally bestowed. The value of all knowledge and skills is determined within. Slighting inner awareness is a far more consequential failure of contemporary education than the failure of schools to adequately prepare students for jobs in the 21^st century global economy.

Fortunately, internal experience is a natural dimension of interest and inquiry for liberal arts subjects. They reveal not only the terrains of social conditions and relationships, but also the varied landscapes of hearts and minds. But to make sense of any of this, these courses of study must also point to what human beings have in common. Psychology obviously focuses on shared aspects of internal experience, but a student cannot truly understand history, literature, the social sciences, the arts, philosophy, etc., without understanding the universal dimensions of internal human experience.

Students must understand what moves people, what they feel, to make sense of any course of study that explores the dimensions of the human condition, experience, and aspiration—the natural purview of the liberal arts. To reach such understanding, they must draw from the well of their own inner experiences. How else would they know what anger, fear, love, and joy feel like to others? This is among the many compelling reasons students should be taught the arts and skills of inner awareness. This would make the study of any liberal discipline more meaningful and effective.

Armed with insight into the human condition and inner awareness, students would be better able to determine the subjective meaning of all they learn with the purpose of their hearts in mind. What and how they are taught should also be adapted to this purpose. The focus of history, for example, might become what insights can be gleaned from the story of the conditions and events of human striving for happiness. Such insights should be the aim of studying literature, the sciences, the arts, and philosophy.

If liberal education is to lead to meaningful freedom, it must broaden students’ awareness of choices, inform their discernment in choosing, and enhance their ability to realize what they choose to experience. The methods of philosophical inquiry are tailor-made for these attainments.

Philosophical inquiry involves an attempt to answer an open-ended question rather than master a body of knowledge per se. Such inquiry calls for exploring different answers to the question by examining assumptions, implications, evidence, and logic. It allows for examining the affective implications of adopting a specific answer to the question at hand. Questions of value are at the heart of all disciplines, and such questions are philosophical in nature. All liberal disciplines are characterized by controversy and by contending perspectives on matters of knowledge, theory, scope, and value. The analysis of alternative perspectives found in philosophical inquiry has a natural home in these courses of study.

All liberal disciplines are but different windows on the same core questions of the human condition, experience, aspiration, and the nature of reality that conditions these dimensions of life. The methods of philosophical inquiry—in particular the methods of “communal inquiry”—are therefore not just suited to the study of all disciplines; they should be a core pedagogical approach in each of them. Not only is this approach a superior way to teach the vaunted job-related skills of liberal arts—critical thinking, written and oral communication, individual and group problem-solving, social awareness, creativity, thinking outside the box, persuasion, etc.—the focus on finding an answer to an overriding question is a more effective way to motivate learning.

Ultimately, the relevance and value of every discipline is determined by what it contributes to students’ prospects for experiencing happiness as each sees it. The question of happiness should therefore be the common focus of inquiry in all liberal disciplines. The core value of liberal education should be the focus of core curricula. Empowering the pursuit of happiness should be the foremost integrative principle of integrative education. I am convinced that dedicating education to serve this purpose would rejuvenate the entire enterprise to the benefit of all concerned: students, educators, parents, and society at large.

By making the case—and experientially demonstrating—that the liberal arts can build students’ ability to feel as they choose, thus empowering their pursuit of happiness, we would establish the supreme value of liberal education. That which enhances the experiential quality of life in all its dimensions is far more meaningful and practical than merely enhancing students’ job and earning prospects. In the main theory of value through the ages, there is no more important outcome. Once the overriding importance of this outcome is acknowledged, we can dedicate our efforts to making the liberal arts even more vital to the hearts of our students.

References

Dewey, J. 1980. The School and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Solomon, R.C. 1993. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing.

Phenix, P.H. 1967. “Liberal learning and the Practice of Freedom,” retrieved May 26, 2009 from www.religon-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2533.

Dewey, J. 2007. Democracy and Education.Teddington, Great Britain: The Echo Library.

moral motive

For the most part, the approaches employed in our schools to teach favored values and virtues are motivationally weak. They do not reflect much depth of understanding of what motivates moral behavior. Approaches that mostly appeal to reason implausibly presume that reason supplies its own motive. Those that aim to implant morality by assertion, threat, and extrinsic reward primarily appeal to fear and guilt. Even those approaches meant to elicit the natural sympathy of students appeal to fear as well. Fear, guilt, and even the normative satisfactions born of ego are the least desirable motives in terms of improving children’s regard and treatment of others.

We fall short of this aim when we appeal to fear, which is often the case with traditional “character” education. Fear is the underlying motive for heeding the inhibitions and impulsions we succeed in implanting in children, and fear is not really compatible with benevolent inclination. Exhortations to care about injustice, suffering, and the environment may elicit the natural sympathy of those already inclined to it and win the overt agreement of those disposed to meet authoritative expectations, but there is little evidence that they are effective in changing hearts and minds. Exhortation does not seem to awaken new motives or build on preexisting ones.

Neither does the approach of simply making students aware of injustice, suffering, and problems. Teaching values by trying to improve students’ ethical reasoning may make students more aware of the connection between moral behavior and self interest, but does not go much beyond that. Contrary to presumption, reason alone does not supply its own volitional force. As Jonathan Haidt points out, “Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.” (2006) Motive is a function of the heart, not the affect-barren reasoning of the mind.

This proposition is based on several core insights. The first is that feelings in a general sense are both the wellsprings and the target of motive. Emotions move us to seek preferable experiences, and the subjective essence or value we seek in a prospective experience is a preferable feeling. We can distinguish between emotions such as anger, fear, desire, and boredom that entail dissatisfaction with present experience and states of mind such as joy, contentment, satisfaction, and peace that are at least temporarily sufficient unto themselves. The former are the wellsprings of motive—they move us to seek something other than what we are presently feeling—and the latter are the core experiential value we are moved to attain—a feeling we at least temporarily wish to keep feeling. I include both types of affective experience in a broad sense of the word feeling.

Remove feeling in this broad sense from an experience and we can presume one is left with a robotic awareness of sensory data and perhaps a sentient acknowledgement of cause and effect without a motive to seek experience, to care about what one is experiencing, or to establish any preference among experiences. As for the sensory aspects of experience, sensory perceptions have no experiential value shorn of the feelings that arise in response to our interpretation of perceptions. Even considered solely as sources of information about our environment, the value of such information derives from a purpose we are moved to pursue and, as just asserted, feeling in a broad sense is both the motive force and the target of human purpose. Survival, capability, and opportunity serve such purpose, but they are the necessary conditions of attaining the affective experience we seek, not the attainment as such.

A second core insight is that feelings are responses to the judgments entailed in our interpretations of experiences and in our thoughts. We may have a more or less automatic response to perceived danger or someone or something we associate with strong feelings in the past, but even these involve interpretation at some level of consciousness. Once aroused, feelings also influence what we think, of course. Mood can keep us on a self-reinforcing train of positive or negative thoughts. Yet there is no doubt that the judgments entailed in our thoughts are the main source of most feelings, though some contend that the most desirable feelings—peace, joy, and love—are inherent to an awareness of being beyond thought.

If we combine these two insights—desire for a preferable feeling moves us and the judgments of our thoughts are a primary source of feelings—we have the foundation for a potentially transformative understanding of moral motive.

Motives to Treat Others Well

As with all else we pursue, we tend to have mixed motives for doing good unto others, or for doing what we consider good period. If we are to discover the motives best suited to the purposes of moral education, we must sort them out. But feelings are often so entangled it is difficult to separate them, making it hard to identify and compare feelings. Mixed motives obscure the relative merits and desirability of unalloyed feelings. Think, for example, of all the negative baggage the word love carries because of its association with fear, anger, sorrow, infatuation, lust, etc. Still, a great deal rides on our ability to identify prominent motives for normative behavior and to compare their relative merits.

We also heed normative admonitions and expectations out of more or less calculated self interest. The threat of punishment obviously appeals to fear, but treating others well can also arise from intent to advance self interest. I refer here to what I call the Strategic Golden Rule: Do unto others because it is the best way to get them to do unto you. Fear plays a less obvious role in motivating people to treat others well in order to serve their own material interests. But the desire to advance such interests implies a need born of perceived lack or insufficiency, which entails fear at some level of consciousness.

Compassion is commonly understood as sensitivity to the pain of others, implying a sharing of the pain of others to some extent. Compassion seems a relatively selfless motive to serve others as it does not in itself seem to serve a selfish interest. Sharing pain is painful, and even a mild sensitivity to the distress of others suggests affective discomfort. And compassion lends itself to guilt when we fail to act as we believe we ought. As morally laudable and socially necessary as compassion is, it is not in itself an intrinsically enjoyable feeling. The affective rewards we associate with compassion seem to lie in acting to alleviate the distress of others in some way, which, in addition to normative satisfactions, promises relief from the distress of our sympathy.

If there are intrinsically rewarding feelings associated with treating others well, we have reason to suspect they involve the sense of connection that gives rise to compassion. We know this sense of connection can be the source of great joy, but must we pay for our joy with the coin of pain? Is pain inherent to moral motive? To answer to this question, we must look deeply into our hearts.

Love

If we were all angels, perhaps we would have no need for laws and moral commandments, no need of admonishments and punishments, no need for the pangs of guilt or the shared pain of compassion to move us to treat others well. Benevolent behavior would flow naturally from our angelic hearts. We can only speculate about angels, but many claim to have experienced a blissful state of peace, joy, and love in which only pure, unselfish benevolence can be expressed. Benevolent behavior is not the source of the bliss according to advanced practitioners of inner awareness; rather such behavior is simply its natural expression. If so, this source of benevolence is beyond motive, for one in this state is not moved to seek a preferable feeling. Rather they are but moved to express the sufficiency they feel, if they are moved at all.

Advanced Buddhist practitioners, people considered to be enlightened by many, mystics through the ages, and wisdom traditions hold that this state of mind is not learned. They teach that it already exists within us obscured by identification with our ego concept of self and the emotions that attend this identification. Bliss and benevolence is held to be inherent to the essence of what we truly are behind the veils of ego, and awareness of this but awaits our discovery once we pierce the veils. In this state, the perceptual walls of separation vanish to be replaced by recognition of the connection of all existence. Self now includes all aspects of experience, all we experience is the experience of Self. This state has various names, but here I call it the agape state of mind, for this Greek biblical word is translated as an accepting, inclusive, unconditional, and blissful love reportedly at the heart of this state of awareness.

Such a state of mind, if it exists, may seem beyond the reach of all but a rare few, but it suggests a direction to look to discern the nature and possible source of highly desirable feelings without the deficiencies of ego satisfactions, without the need of desire born of a sense of lack to precede them and revive them when they habituate. We need not presume a transcendental nature of reality to illumine our search; clarity about the experiential attributes of love suffices to illumine some supremely useful insights.

Consider the essence of the experience we call love, the pure experience of love without the mixture of emotions associated with the yearning for it. Such yearning arises from the perception of lack, of love denied or threatened, not the experience as such.

What does love pure and simple feel like? Of course, to describe a feeling we are forced to use words for other feelings: expansive, connected, fond, captivated, attuned, joyful, fulfilled, worshipful, electrified, obsessed, etc. I propose that the best descriptive word for the feeling of love is joy, the joy of enjoying or appreciating someone or something as they are, rather than for what we wish them to be or what we expect to get from them. We do not love whom and what we wish to change, for in the desire they change is the lack of acceptance of who and what they are. Love enjoys what is without the conditions judgment places on our joy. And it is not love we feel when we see others as means to fill a perceived lack. Fear is the underlying emotion of need. When attraction inspires the desire to possess, it inhibits the appreciation of love.

Appreciation implies the feeling of valuing, which entails enjoying someone or something. Joy likely comes closest to depicting what valuing feels like. Yet the joy of love is different than the energized joy associated with being granted a sudden wish, for example. In love’s acceptance of what is, it harbors no sorrow, pain, fear, anger, or jealousy. It sees no wrong to be righted or provision to be made. Love pure and simple acknowledges no need or lack, places no condition on the future, issues no call for completion, is uncontaminated by fear. The absence of all sources of fear and disturbance yields peace.

Perhaps you can remember moments of peaceful joy when you basked in warm affection for others, or were captured by the beauty of a sunset or landscape, or simply appreciated the experience of the moment relatively unbothered by doubts and fears. What you felt in those moments plausibly comes closest to what deserves to be called the essence of love, the uncontaminated experience of love. Those rare moments when the burdens of the past and worry for the future fade in the quiet enjoyment of the moment hint at what the true experience of love may be. The roiling clouds of thoughts and emotions part for a moment to yield a ray of sunshine. Here the mind rests, laying down the urge to do and basking in the reflection of being.

The source of this experience is not found in the expressions of what others feel for you, but rather the love you feel. You are the source of the essential experience of love. The experience lies in the love you feel, or give, rather than what is usually meant by love you receive. The love you give is its own reward; the more you love, the more joy and peace you experience. Since you are the source of this love, you do not, and by the nature of the experience cannot, depend on circumstance or the presence and behavior of others to experience its blessings.

Many hold that love is an involuntary response to the attributes of someone or something, and is therefore largely dependent on what the world presents us. But the foregoing notion of love is more in keeping with the understanding that love is inherent to what we are, that when we ease the fears and lower the defenses of ego, we naturally extend loving kindness to those we behold, and thereby bring the innate peaceful joy hidden in our hearts to awareness. Whether the source of this propensity is Being, the grace of God, or a disposition encoded in our genes through evolution, there is a great deal of at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that this is indeed a general attribute of the human condition. Thus the higher aspirations of our hearts may be best fulfilled by learning to lower the barriers to awareness of what we are beyond ego.

Of course, what we essentially are cannot be completely hidden; it must shine through the cracks of the ego’s defenses and provide the initial force of volition, however distorted and unrecognizable fear may render it. Our natural sympathy, for example, likely originates in the innate love of our being. That this sympathy brings pain as well as joy suggests contamination by fear. Without training in inner awareness, it may be difficult to tell which moral motives arise from identification with ego and which may be expressions of our innate loving kindness, but there is one sure indicator: peace is missing in all motives born of ego.

One can acknowledge that the expression of innate peaceful joy would incline us to regard and treat others kindly, but doubt it would inspire sufficient ardor to take on the problems and injustices that beset humanity, or even those that beset one’s immediate neighbors. Indeed, when one finds the source of happiness within, and learns that the experience of happiness precludes judgment and attack, they are unlikely to fight for justice and to be certain that the problems of the world are best solved by changing external conditions. When the shared pain of compassion moves us to alleviate the pain of others by reducing the perceived external sources of their distress, we validate the fear that may obscure the surest, likely only, source of peaceful joy. Perhaps our fellows would be better served by showing them per example the joy hidden within them.

Gandhi did not “fight” injustice; he brought it to glaring awareness so it could not be ignored, and by his example bade both perpetrator and victim to look within. Seeing our judgments staring back in the mirror of self reflection can bring a change of heart. A change of heart brings a change of consciousness, and Gandhi was clear that there are no true and lasting solutions to our problems short of such a change. I personally know people who ease the pain of others by expressing a warm and sincere joy. They speak of loving people, even those they have just met. Perhaps you know such people as well. At any rate, I believe that the innate appreciative love within us has a better claim to being a source of moral behavior than the pain of fear and anger.

I therefore submit that the aim of teaching values should be to lower the barriers to our children’s awareness of the love they harbor. This begins, I believe, by helping them experience the affective blessings of such awareness.

Fostering Appreciation

It is said that doing good feels good, and, with sufficient awareness of feelings, it is easy to experience the truth of this. But the feelings that attend the doing have less to do with the act itself than with the impulse to do it. If it is motivated by a sense of obligation, expectation, calculation, or guilt, then ego motives are the impulse and ego emotions the harvest. If the act is the expression of appreciative joy, then joy is both the impulse and the reward.

The peaceful joy of the love at the core of our being may be an exception, but all other feelings are responses to our interpretations of perception and the judgments our thoughts entail, which yield our intent. Thinking well of others gives rise to lighter, more expansive feelings and thinking ill evokes darker, more constricting feelings. We unavoidably reap what we sow in terms of our judgments. If we could experientially demonstrate this, we could tap into a potent, self-reinforcing motive for moral behavior that has been relatively neglected. This would require training students in inner awareness, particularly in awareness of feelings and the thoughts that evoke them. As I shortly explain, such awareness is best attained through the practice of mindfulness.

But ego satisfactions, with their underlying fear, consequent impermanence, and susceptibility to judgment, will likely be among the feelings interpreted as “good.” If we are to tap the purer, less deficient, and more intrinsically rewarding feelings that lead to the natural expression of benevolence, we must help students lower their ego defenses.

Mindfulness lends itself to this aim as well. Mindfulness is essentially nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. This can be achieved by means of various techniques—focus on a particular present experience like breathing or a “meta-awareness” of all that transpires within and without, for example. Mindfulness can be focused on feelings and their associated thoughts, and can include experimenting with thinking well and ill to demonstrate their affective consequences. But mindfulness is also the doorway to the Now where the fears of ego disappear and a peaceful joy thought to come from awareness of our essential being shines through. Practicing mindfulness is thus a way to experience the incomparably desirable affective rewards of escaping the fears of ego.

Another promising initiative aimed at developing peaceful, compassionate relationships was inspired by Marshall Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication.” The core methods of what practitioners call “relationship based teaching and learning” involve awareness and expression of feelings and needs that promotes understanding and reduces the sources of conflict. (Hart & Hodson, 2004) The program emphasizes awareness of the affective rewards of freely giving and receiving according to the particular talents of each student. Both the ends and means of the project are well-suited to fostering appreciation of others through understanding, recognition of what we all hold in common, and awareness of the rewards of the heart.

The means of planting the seeds of moral attitudes and behaviors in our children, where they must grow if they are to possess motivational potency, are ready to hand. They would constitute a reorientation of current efforts from external experience to internal, which would constitute a transformation of values education. But the stakes are high for our children, ourselves, and the societies our children will inhabit as adults.

REFERENCES

Greenland, Susan K.,2010, The Mindful Child, New York: Free Press.

Haidt, Jonathan, 2006, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom New York: Basic Books, 165.

Hart, Sura and Victoria Kindle Hodson, 2004, The Compassionate Classroom: Relationship Based Teaching and Learning, Encinitas, California: PuddleDancer Press.

Lantieri, Linda and Daniel Goleman, 2008, Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children, Louisville, Colorado: Sounds True.

Schoeberlein, Deborah and Suki Sheth (2009) Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything, Somerville, Massachussetts: Wisdom Publications.

Willard, Christopher, 2010, Child’s Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Help Our children Be More Focused, Calm, and Relaxed, Berkeley, California: Parallax Press.

Wright, Robert, 2001, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Vintage.

educating citizens

A society that is free cannot educate its children in anything less than freedom. | Steven Harrison

Empowering the pursuit of happiness as each sees it is the primary purpose of education in a liberal democracy. But this mission presumes the vitality of democracy for it is only in such states that the precept that governmental authorities should treat citizens solely as ends and never as means has real prospect of taking root. Modern liberal democracies afford the broadest and most genuine choice of paths to happiness thus far realized in human history. A supporting mission of liberal education is therefore to help meet the requisites of both freedom and democracy by preparing young citizens for adult citizenship.

This is usually thought a matter of teaching civic responsibility, but it is much more than that. Liberal civic education is not merely a means to meet the needs of democracy; it should also be preparation for the exercise of the freedom democracy affords. According to Philip Phenix, “Liberal learning is not only a privilege of free persons and a right within a free society. It is also, thirdly, a source of freedom.”1

Our aim should be to help students attain the riper fruits of freedom and democracy as well as dispose them to meet the requirements.

As with all else we pursue, the motivational roots of freedom and democracy are found in the hearts of citizens. Neither our normative nor our utilitarian appeals have much chance of success if they do not resonate with the aspirations of students’ hearts. Of course, we must also cultivate their minds where the attitudes, understandings, and skills of freedom and democracy must be nurtured. Hearts determine the end we seek, but minds supply the means, and the ends of the heart are often garbled and diverted by the contradictory beliefs of the mind and defeated by its cognitive deficiencies in terms of knowledge, understanding, and skill. Freedom is an illusion unless the mind is free and able.

Before we can discern the best way to educate citizens, we must first be clear about the desired outcomes of civic education. To this end I offer what I believe are the cardinal civic virtues of liberal democracy.

Liberal Civic Virtues

All the preferred characteristics of democratic citizenship are predicated on respect for human dignity. The arguments for tolerance, the acceptance of equality, and commitment to such practical means of liberty as democracy, rule of law, and guaranteed rights either explicitly or implicitly begin with the precept. Preferably a citizen would believe in inherent human worth, but we cannot insist. Mandating belief obviously contradicts freedom. We can, however, expect a citizen to act according to the requirements of respect, for they are the fundamental requirements of freedom. And we should aim further to firming young citizens’ commitment to seeing the requisites of respect for human dignity met by their fellows and their government. As just argued, when such commitment arises from actual appreciation, we reap affective rewards as well as external protection. Fostering appreciation for others is the most promising means to nurture this foundational civic virtue.

The need for tolerance of others and their divergent views is a lesson taught by the daily news. Legal freedom loses its meaning when one must constantly defend it against resentment, hatred, petty social and political obstacles, threat, and, as is prevalent in some countries, violence. Democratic processes are defeated and the public good sacrificed when the possibility of compromise is precluded by intolerance. The reasoned deliberation and open communication required by democratic decision making falls victim to paranoid, demonizing rancor. In so many ways the prevalence of tolerance is a measure of the health of democracy. It is also a measure of the quality of relationships and affective wellbeing.

Liberal democracy is predicated on legal and political equality. Attempts to deny such equality make a mockery of democracy and have often threatened its health or prevented its realization. Acceptance of equality is therefore a core liberal virtue. The current generation of students in most democratic countries is probably more accepting of political and even social equality than previous generations. This may be due in part to efforts made in schools and in the media. Challenges are ever recurring, however, and students remain susceptible to appeals to prejudice that imply that some are or ought to be more equal than others. Shorn of the more primitive rhetoric of previous eras, such appeals remain both pervasive and seductive. The younger generation is more inoculated against crass appeals to racial and ethnic prejudice, but belittling and callous judgments based on presumed social merit, legal status, religious and ideological views, and sexual orientation are still prominently voiced and young people still echo them. They echo in my classroom.

We should therefore not relax our efforts to nurture acceptance of equality. Rather we should reinforce them by trying to engender not only greater understanding of the political and social advantages of equality, but the personal benefits as well. Acceptance of equality is important to personal empowerment, especially in regard to influencing—and even more importantly enjoying—other people. Accepting the equality of others lowers the cognitive barriers to accepting, relating to, engaging, and appreciating others. It removes the cognitive barriers to the full realization of the riches of relationship.

Compassion understood as wishing and being moved to serve the wellbeing of others is implied in most of the virtues of liberal democracy. Leaving aside the issue of the affective experience implied by the word, our empathy for others is a prime motivational source for respecting their dignity, tolerating their differences, and accepting their equality. What we might do to better anchor any of these virtues in the hearts of students would help anchor them all. But such anchoring requires revealing the affective benefits of these virtues, which I believe calls for a more amenable understanding of compassion.

Among the virtues of liberal democracy is commitment to its ideals. We should hope to buttress students’ commitment to freedom, democracy, and justice. I’m not talking about the brittle, unthinking commitment implanted by means of repetitive intoning of ideals without examining their meaning and implications—or worse, the blatant brainwashing techniques such as a daily pledge of allegiance—aimed at instilling blind patriotism that yet plague what passes for civic education in some prominent democracies. Genuine commitment able to withstand challenges and give clarity in the face of ambiguity and competing claims comes from a deep, clear-eyed understanding of the difference freedom, justice, and democracy make in your own life.

Students should arrive at commitment by having considered the dimensions, problems, and ambiguities of democratic ideals. They should understand why these ideals came to inspire such devotion, and why they continue to inspire allegiance in the face of competing ideals and the problems that arise because of our allegiance. It is crucial that students are led to understand the personal relevance of freedom, equality, and democracy through awareness of their daily manifestations in their lives. They should gain an experiential understanding of these ideals, and learn to weigh the benefits against the costs. Only then have we prepared young citizens for commitment based on free and informed choice that honors the spirit of democratic ideals in contrast to the nationalistic brainwashing that betrays this spirit.

Of course, we also seek to infuse students with a commitment to civic responsibility. Democracy depends on the active, willing participation of citizens to maintain the integrity of its processes and meet the needs of society. Voting, jury duty, military service, respect for law and the rights of others, and paying taxes are among the traditional responsibilities of citizens. Willingness to help in times of crisis and community need is a civic responsibility as well. The full expression of the virtue implies more than a willingness to perform duties seen as burdens, though; it calls for a positive valuing of shared purpose and participation in the enterprise of democracy. Such valuing is more likely to develop if they are made aware of the affective benefits of communal participation and service through experiencing these benefits.

It is also important for students to understand that civic responsibilities derive from freedom itself. They should be afforded a much clearer understanding of the relationship between freedom and responsibility, an understanding based not only on historical evidence, but also on their own experiences. They must repeatedly experience the fact that personal freedom requires accountability for the consequences of exercising free choice. But they should also learn that responsibility is a function of freedom, and should not be divorced from freedom. Coercion robs obligations of their moral character, as many philosophers have argued. It would not be amiss for students to learn to insist that responsibilities be attached to commensurate freedoms, because people in positions of authority tend to be either insufficiently aware of the relationship or are prone to forget it.

An attitude of efficacy is also a civic virtue. Civic engagement is fueled by the expectation that it can make a difference. It helps for students to know that the fruits of engagement are not limited to achieving a specific aim—for example getting someone elected or getting a bill passed—but also what they learn from it, the message of accountability it sends to those in positions of power, and the example of democratic spirit it provides fellow citizens. I tell my students there is nothing I can teach them in class that comes close to what the frustrations of real-world engagement in some cause will teach them, even a relatively small cause like championing a student demand in the face of administrative opposition at the college. Such frustrations will hone skills that will come in handy for the rest of their lives. And if they stick with it, they will have wins among their losses. Experience of efficacy is the sine qua non for developing an attitude of efficacy.

A crucial virtue of liberal citizenship is skepticism in regard to power. Beyond a certain degree of order, there is an inverse relationship between freedom and power, and it has ever been understood that freedom must be constantly defended against the abiding temptation of those in positions of authority to abuse their power. I am not speaking of a judgment of persons here. I am speaking of awareness of an almost universal human foible. A judgment of the worth of others is not implied in the refusal to accept the validity or wisdom of what authorities would have us believe or do. If such acceptance were inherent to appreciating their worth, such appreciation would preclude our freedom and likely our material wellbeing. We are all prone to folly and artifice; power just amplifies its effects. Liberal citizenship requires us to resist the sway and discern the wiles of those in power for the sake of freedom, democracy, human rights, and the general welfare. Though the state is necessary to our protection, our need for protection from our protectors is dire as well.

In a democracy, citizens should never adopt an attitude of subservience to those in authority, should never simply trust that those who wield power know the interests of citizens better than the citizens themselves, and never presume those endowed with authority will give precedence to the interests of the People over their personal interests in the fruits of power. “Respect” as in recognition of a person’s right to decide is due those in positions of authority only to the degree it is necessary for order and addressing common needs. Respect so understood is an obligation to one’s fellow citizens rather than an obligation to those with authoritative positions in government. A wielder of authority has the same claim to respect for their dignity as a human being as everyone else; their office does not afford a greater claim in a society where government is the servant rather than the master of the People.

I belabor the point because there seems to be a great deal of confusion in the minds of citizens of liberal democracies on their responsibility for skepticism, and because so much of what passes for civic education glosses over this vital virtue of democratic citizenship. Democracy is indeed subversive from the standpoint of those entrusted with authority, but democratic authority is granted for the good of the citizens, not their leaders, and neither leaders nor citizens can allow this fact to be forgotten without peril to their freedom and much else they cherish.

The virtue of skepticism regarding authority also serves personal empowerment. Learning how to effectively deal with the myriad forms of authority in society, knowing how to avoid undue sway, is one of the most crucial skills to master on the path to success in many social endeavors. The virtue of skepticism whereby a citizen willingly cooperates with authority for the common good but resists abuse is better suited to the sort of personal integrity that wins respect and trust. And it is requisite to the citizen who would be master of his or her own destiny.

The virtue of skepticism leads to consideration of the cognitive virtues of liberal citizenship as it is obviously allied with the cognitive skill and liberal virtue of critical thinking. Critical thinking is critical in the sense that it requires an initial skepticism toward claims in keeping with the requirements of informed and reasoned independent thinking. It subjects such claims to the rigors of reason: the considered examination of the evidence for a claim, the consistency of its logic, and its relative plausibility and desirability in light of alternative possibilities and claims.

Robert Ennis defines critical thinking more simply as “reasonable, rational thinking that helps us decide what to believe and do.”2 Whether narrowly or loosely defined, critical thinking is inherent to discerning choice. This is obviously a civic virtue when it comes to choosing candidates on a ballot or choosing a party or cause to support. But the discerning choice of religion, career, or lifestyle also has civic implications as well as it captures the essence of the exercise of freedom. We ought to consider the discerning exercise of freedom a civic virtue in its own right.

Developing critical thinking in students also has a defensive aim. In this regard Matthew Lipman observes that, “Insofar as the question of knowledge and belief is concerned, I would say that the role of critical thinking is defensive: to protect us from being coerced or brainwashed into believing what others want us to believe without our having an opportunity to inquire for ourselves.”3 Fortunately, efforts to develop the attitudes and skills of critical thinking have not been lacking in liberal education, though these efforts have proven far less consistent, sustained, and serious than advocates had hoped.4 To my mind, they fall far short of what is necessary to immunize young citizens from the sway of demagogy.

We should more consequently aspire to the virtue of free and open minds. Independence from external claims and demands does not suffice to the realization of freedom. Awareness and reduction of the walls and filters that already exist in one’s mind is necessary as well. Certain and unexamined knowledge and beliefs are the walls and locked doors of the mind. Free minds are free to follow wherever thought and the logic of inquiry may lead them without fearing to transgress the cognitive perimeters of authoritative assertions of fact and appropriate belief. Students should therefore be encouraged to recognize these perimeters and be taught how to transgress them without fear. Open minds are open to the consideration of other perspectives that remove these perimeters or at least render them more porous. As we shall see in the next chapter, cultivating the habit of philosophical inquiry is well suited to freeing and opening minds.

Discerning political choice and effective political engagement require a foundation of civic knowledge and understanding, of course. Students should be well grounded in the what of their political systems—what a former colleague at the Delaware Department of Education calls “factoids”—and it is essential that they also understand these systems in terms of why and how. Understanding implies knowledge of purpose and cause and effect relationships. One might think that, whatever other failings contemporary civic education may exhibit, surely the provision of knowledge and understanding of students’ own political system is not among them. After all, there are subjects and courses devoted to national history and government. And civic knowledge is measured by some accountability tests. But as I have learned to my dismay and regret in my own classes, and as is consistently evidenced by numerous questionnaires, the presumption of a firm foundation of civic knowledge and understanding is woefully mistaken.

Though it is the grist of the mill of discerning political choice and effective political engagement—indeed of the adequate performance of civic duties—civic knowledge and understanding is not enough of a priority in the education systems of the democracies with which I am familiar to move the educational powers that be to take it seriously. There is indeed a great deal of rhetoric and token effort, but the lamentable outcomes do not seem to inspire much interest in a shift in educational priorities.

It is not just the practical matter of the health of democracy at stake here; it is the contributions of civic education to personal empowerment as well. The free exercise of choice is not just a right, it is a skill that must be nurtured and developed. I place the developed skills of freedom among the virtues of liberal citizenship. Much of the foregoing either predicates or entails these skills.

Both political and social efficacy also call for the skills of democracy. These are the skills necessary to collective decision making, public advocacy, staying aware of current political and social issues and developments, effective participation in political parties and civic groups, etc. Such skills facilitate classroom and organizational deliberations. They grease the wheels of social intercourse in innumerable ways. In addressing the reasons for increased interest in engaging students in discussions of controversial issues, Harry Brighouse contends “One is that it is more widely recognized than it once was that citizens have a responsibility not merely to press their own interests, but to deliberate in a more impartial and well-informed manner about issues at stake in public life.”5 Democratic skills also serve personal empowerment by enhancing the effectiveness of a person’s social engagement with family, work, and community.

It is widely recognized that awareness and understanding of one’s own social and political system no longer suffices, though this is often seen more as a matter of economic than civic efficacy. Citizenship remains nation-based, of course, and its responsibilities do not extend beyond borders in the traditional understanding of the word. We the People, after all, refers to a distinct nation that excludes the rest of humanity. Citizenship is therefore associated with nationalism with all its attendant ills and amply demonstrated dangers. We would do well to stress the interconnection and interdependence of peoples. After all, the world in which our students live, work, entertain themselves, and consume is a world in which borders no longer contain the forces that condition their pursuit of happiness. Globalization is a reality despite the pretense of national leaders that our common fate lies in their hands. We would be woefully amiss were we to make no effort to prepare our students for this reality.

An awareness of the global forces that increasingly ignore borders, a recognition that our welfare is connected with those of people around the world, an appreciation of the humanity and shared needs of all peoples, and an understanding of how civic virtues and responsibilities are human virtues and responsibilities upon which the fate of humanity as a whole may depend are aspects of global citizenship. Global awareness is a modern civic virtue. A student possessed of such awareness is both more empowered and more desirable as an employee, as we are repeatedly reminded in the contemporary discourse on educational reform. As the world in which we live is the world of which we are aware, a student with heightened global awareness would also live in a larger, richer world of possibility and aesthetic appreciation. And such a student would have fewer cognitive barriers to relationships with people all over the world as technology has reduced the physical barriers to travel and communication.

The preceding list of virtues does not exhaust all we might aim for in the preparation of our young for adult citizenship, but it suffices for identifying some of the more glaring needs of contemporary civic education and points us toward ways to better prepare and empower our youth for their role as citizens of liberal democracies.

Cultivating Liberal Civic Virtues

I previously suggested some approaches to more effectively nurture the seeds of respect for human dignity in the hearts of children. Greater awareness of the affective fruits of appreciation for others would foster the virtues of tolerance, acceptance of equality, and compassion. My focus here is the other civic virtues we might build on this affective foundation. The base material, if you will, of the remaining attitudinal and cognitive virtues of liberal citizenship is civic knowledge and understanding. I recommend that such knowledge and understanding should be given a higher priority than it currently enjoys. In keeping with a trend in education, though, I would emphasize understanding. The “factoids” of history and government are necessary to understanding, of course, but we can do far more to infuse the facts with meaning by having students seek answers to the questions of why and how.

The question why in regard to social behavior requires us to consider the fundamentals of the human condition and our shared aspirations. Questions regarding human behavior that begin with why invite the consideration of human nature and the wellsprings of the human heart. As it relates to civics, the query is more precisely formulated in the classic question Why do we need community? and the more modern question Why do we consent to be ruled? These questions lead into fertile territory for imagination, insight, and perspective. Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and a host of less famous philosophers have all explained the purposes of communities and governance in terms grade school students can understand. These purposes can be imaginatively explored in literature; The Lord of the Flies was once frequently assigned with this end in mind. The Giver is used to introduce some troubling aspects of community and governance. There are even games based on meeting the needs of imaginary societies.

I and other educators use the device of simulations in which students assume roles in imaginary scenarios. I have asked students to imagine they are post-apocalyptic survivors faced with collectively deciding how to meet the needs of survival without the aid of established society and government. They have to collectively decide how to meet economic and security needs and fashion structures and processes of governance.

Real-life illustrations of the need for government and its dangers are easily found in recent and current news. Examples also abound in students’ own lives. They are daily faced with the tensions between freedom and authority in their families, schools, and other venues of interaction with adults. It is here that the abstractions of civic life are animated with the experiences and feelings of students. There are many ways to imaginatively and affectively engage students in exploring the why that affords a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the what and how of political systems.

The questions Why freedom? Why democracy? and Why is democracy better than the alternatives? invite the exploration that leads to deeper understanding and appreciation of the advantages of freedom and rule by, for, and of the People. To my mind, such understanding and appreciation should be considered a core aim of civic education. It is fertile soil for cultivating all the virtues of mature commitment. It affords the commitment of conviction rather than unreflective obedience and parroting. It fosters awareness of the problems and abuses of freedom as well as its promise. And exploring the why of democracy necessarily involves repeated reference to examples of the problem of power—the persistent temptation to abuse power—that is the main reason for the rise of democracy. It would encourage skepticism in regard to power that would serve students well in negotiating the social terrain of their own lives.

A deep understanding of freedom would heighten students’ awareness of the context of their lives, the constraints and opportunities they might otherwise not perceive. An appreciation of freedom would offer affective benefits, for it is the essence of enjoying freedom. Students should engage the questions Why freedom? and Why democracy? throughout their years in school, ever broadening the focus of inquiry as it delves deeper into the common aspirations of the human heart.

The method of posing open-ended questions for communal inquiry directly engages critical thinking as well as the skills necessary for such inquiry.6 As long as the questions are understood to have a number of plausible answers, such questioning avoids the inhibiting effects of authoritative assertions of knowledge. Done well, it would help counteract some of the dispiriting effects of schooling. As Lipman says, “Before long, children become aware that schooling is enervating and dispiriting rather than animating or intellectually provocative.”7 How civics is taught influences the values learned. Palmer observes that,

Students may take a course on democratic values that is full of solid information. But if the teacher does little more than dictate that information and then demand that students memorize and parrot it on tests, they are not learning democratic values. Instead, they are learning to survive as subjects of an autocracy: keep your head down, your mouth shut, and repeat the party line whether or not you understand it or believe it.8

The spirited pursuit of answers to questions that teachers intentionally avoid giving can enliven classrooms. That has been my experience and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is the experience of many others as well. The quest to answer open-ended questions highlights relevant information and infuses it with meaning. Students find knowledge that helps them solve a problem more interesting than disassociated facts. Such knowledge has more apparent utility than helping students get a better grade on the next test. It is a means to an end they might find intellectually and affectively engaging. I have found it is often the stimulation of communal inquiry itself that motivates the search for answers. Whatever the motive, the communal search for answers to open-ended questions strengthens problem solving skills as well as the skills of freedom. In seeking answers, students increase their awareness of choices and learn how to reach independent, well-considered, and informed conclusions of their own. It fosters free and open minds.

Exploring questions such as What does “the People” mean? How do the citizens of a democratic country manage to make collective decisions? What is the relationship between the People and the government in a democracy? What does “represent” mean? Why do we elect representatives rather than have wise people choose them for us? What do we expect from elected representatives? Why is respect for authority necessary? Why is it conditional? lead to a deepening understanding of why the structures and processes of democracy are what they are. It shows them as devices designed to solve practical problems rather than as mere given facts of government and politics.

A host of other questions should guide students toward a robust and sophisticated understanding of freedom. One might presume that such an understanding is generally considered crucial to the education of free citizens in free societies, but the evidence does not support this presumption. I frequently ask students if they spent much time exploring the concept of freedom in any of their pre-college schooling. Only a rare few remember spending any time at all exploring the concept itself. I have had the opportunity to ask a number of teachers engaged in civic education at various grade levels if they spent much time exploring the concept of freedom. They are usually perplexed at first, but with a little coaching some relate they obliquely address the concept with the examples of history—the War of Independence and slavery, for example—and an occasional discussion of rights. The exploration of freedom is not absent in schools, but I have yet to find it given anything close to the emphasis a robust and effective civic education reasonably demands.

There are likely a number of reasons for this. A robust understanding of freedom probably does not seem as apparently useful as other aims of education, which may explain why the matter is not given much thought. Another reason is the way we teach. The traditional emphasis on knowledge rather than understanding still prevails. Knowledge is authoritatively transmitted rather than offered as grist for the mill of open-ended questions. The students ask questions, the teacher provides answers. Also, the question why is an essentially philosophical question, and philosophical inquiry is not a common—and is even more rarely a formal—pursuit in modern schools.

But still one would expect more than a few isolated voices expressing concern that there is no deep exploration of freedom afforded the future free citizens of free societies. There is a great deal of asserting the value of freedom and its fundamental importance as a national and humanistic ideal, of course, but the deep exploration that leads to the understanding and appreciation necessary for mature conviction is rare. In the words of Harry Brighouse,

While we are aiming to produce good citizenship, we are also aiming to do so legitimately. That means citizenship educators are required to instil, at the appropriate age, habits of sceptical enquiry into their students; inclinations to subject all values and principles, including those on which the state is founded, to rational scrutiny. They should avoid deploying misleading myths in the service of citizenship education.9

It has occurred to me that conviction based on a genuine understanding of freedom and democracy might appear somewhat problematic for those in positions of authority—from teachers to elected officials—especially if it entails a heightened awareness of the need for skepticism in regard to authority. But I do not want to emphasize such suspicions. I wish, rather, to emphasize the personal and social benefits of conviction based on deep consideration of the dimensions, problems, and advantages of freedom and democracy as well as an honest consideration of the alternatives. Such conviction is not guaranteed, of course, because free and serious consideration exposes students to plausible arguments for preferring otherwise. And such conviction would not be based on the simplistic understandings that characterize the platitudes and manipulative appeals of common political discourse.

Yet I am quite confident that most students guided through a multi-year process of critical and comparative analysis, deep philosophical reflection, and heightened awareness born of experience involved in a serious exploration of freedom and democracy would arrive at an appreciation far deeper than the repetition of platitudes and nationalist sentiments and slogans could ever hope to yield. Conviction born of thorough critical investigation is a far more robust and reliable inspiration for civic responsibility than programmed conviction by means of non-reflective processes of socialization that appeal to children’s deep-seated need to belong but bypass their reasoned consideration. The former promises stronger motive, clearer guidance, and greater breadth of vision.

Knowing why one believes as one does affords resilience in the face of challenges and protection from undue sway. And the processes leading to conviction based on understanding exercise some core skills of freedom: investigation, critical analysis, and discerning choice. Of course, the skills of freedom cannot be learned and honed in the classroom alone; they must be practiced in real-life situations.

The Experiential Dimension

If there is an educational assertion beyond reasonable dispute, it is that experience is the best teacher. All the wise advice we try to pass on as parents counts for little until our children experience the consequences of ignoring it. One touch of a hot stove is more effective than a thousand admonitions. All the skills necessary to navigate the complex social terrain of life are acquired and honed through having to use them to realize one’s desires. The knowledge enforced with the emotional impact of success or failure in real-life situations endures while most of the conceptual knowledge taught in classrooms is forgotten. And experience is the corrective to the inevitable holes and flaws of received knowledge.

A child does not learn the responsibilities and skills of freedom if he or she is not allowed to experience freedom. Children learn such responsibility through the gradual extension of the boundaries of autonomy within which they are allowed to make their own decisions and are not buffered from the consequences of their choices. That such boundaries must be judiciously placed to prevent real harm is obvious, but the autonomy within them must be real if they are to learn the lessons experience has to teach.

For example, circles of autonomy can be created by allowing a child or teenager to spend a set portion of their money as they wish, to determine their own free-time activities, or to decorate their space or room as they see fit. They may be given an equal vote in deciding such matters as the destination for a family outing. Autonomy is always limited by considerations of safety and the interests of others, but otherwise parents must allow their children to decide contrary to what they think wise within the circles of autonomy. Paternalism must be curtailed for the pedagogical magic of experience to work.

The principle applies to civic education as well, of course. Students must have circumscribed areas of autonomy where they are free to make meaningful collective decisions. As Nel Nodding advises, “schools should be organized democratically—as places where the best forms of associated living are practiced. Schools are, then, minisocieties in which children learn through practice how to promote their own growth, that of others, and that of the whole society.”10 Schools usually provide some measure of civics-relevant experience. A rare few private schools are actually dedicated to student freedom and democratic governance.11 Most have some form of student government in the United States. Student committees and clubs are usually afforded at least a modicum of autonomy. A few primary and secondary teachers make provision for collective decision making in their classes, and the practice is more prevalent in college. At the college level, community and civic engagement is encouraged or even required.

Yet my experiences as a student and a professor, my experiences as advisor to a number of student organizations, the experiences of my children, my discussions with students regarding their educational experiences, my discussions with student life staff who claim broad knowledge of practices at other institutions, my discussions with primary and secondary teachers, my discussions with colleagues in higher education from other institutions, and what I have read concerning the matter have consistently reinforced my view that something is vitally missing in the experiential dimension of civic education. From what I can gather, it seldom allows for any real autonomy and therefore little genuinely meaningful exercise of democratic skills.

The freedom to make meaningful decisions is almost invariably restricted by close paternalistic control, often manipulated to serve the purposes of those in positions of authority, and not infrequently quashed by arbitrary suppression without even a pretense of due process. I have often had occasion to witness or hear accounts of the pretense of seeking input from students that is for the most part ignored and at times angrily rejected. Perhaps even the pretense might seem comparatively enlightened, but consider what it teaches students. Students learn from the school environment that authoritarian governance is the norm and general preference. All too often, they are subjected to arbitrary, petty tyranny with little recourse from which they no doubt draw the conclusion that such behavior is a prerogative of authority that the ruled are obliged to abide.

From what I have been able to determine, most students graduate and don the rights and responsibilities of adult citizenship with little actual experience of political efficacy, the responsibilities that adhere to the exercise of freedom, and the democratic processes that produce meaningful and binding collective decisions. Most student governments in secondary schools have faculty or administrative advisors who exercise censure or veto over student challenges to school policy, for example. I suspect few school administrations fail to react adversely to open student protest. Strict censorship of protest is endemic to secondary schools and, rather perplexing in light of the tradition of student protest at institutions of higher education, is exercised at many colleges and universities, the “finishing schools of democracy,” as well.

The purview of student government is usually limited to school events and student clubs with some management of budget, though their decisions are ever subject to authoritarian intervention. That the democratic forms of student participation are mostly symbolic without much democratic substance tells students what their adult educators really think about democracy and the importance of civic education. John Taylor Gatto hits a raw nerve when he says,

The lesson of my teaching life is that both the theory and the structure of mass education are fatally flawed; they cannot work to support the democratic logic of our national idea because they are unfaithful to the democratic principle. … Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation.12

Many people agree with Gatto that this characterizes the practice of public education. Almost everyone I talk to about it at any length has tales to tell. These circumstances do indeed teach practical lessons about the social realities students will face as adults. Most will work in private dictatorships in order to make a living. But the lessons are largely about the authoritarian and paternalistic aspects of social reality and very little about genuine freedom and democracy. Students are steeped in the lessons of authoritarian rule; few have experienced much else in their personal lives. Unless this is balanced with real experience of freedom and meaningful democracy, we are not seriously preparing them to be free citizens with the desire and skill to maintain free societies.

Of course, the autonomy of students is less circumscribed at most universities and many colleges, but my unsystematic research reveals that the experience of genuine democratic independence is curtailed everywhere within the reach of my inquiry.

An expert in academic law who is well-versed in the practices of American colleges and universities told me that appointing a student life administrator to be the advisor to student government is the most common practice. This was the case for the past eight years at my college until both the students and faculty protested the practice. As any observer of bureaucracy knows, people entrusted with even a modicum of bureaucratic authority tend to seek to suppress challenge when possible, extend turf and prerogative, and place self interests above the mission of the organization they serve. The tendency is so prevalent it is called an iron law of bureaucracy. An independent student voice, especially if expressed in public action, can be an acute and frequent source of embarrassment for top administrators. Low-level student life administrators have good cause to worry that the ire of their superiors will fall on them should they refrain from using their authority as SGA advisor to spare their bosses such embarrassment. I can cite a long list of examples from my college.

I have pondered why so few seem to see all this as a blatant betrayal of the civic mission of our schools. Why is it not apparent that young citizens must progressively experience genuine freedom and democracy if we would deepen their understanding and hone their skills of freedom and democracy? But then, as a keen observer of human proclivities, I am not really surprised at the pervasive disregard of the pedagogical value of student autonomy in affairs appropriate to their self governance. It is the same propensity found in government bureaucracies.

That citizens can and should resist what they consider incursions on their interests and liberties by agencies of government is a given in liberal democracy. But it is unlikely that citizens so inclined learned the skills of resistance in school. In an interview with former U.S. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, David Glenn reports “Mr. Graham says that too many Americans have no idea how to organize their neighbors to affect public policy. Even the students he encountered a few years ago during a visiting position at Harvard University, he says, lacked basic knowledge about how to leverage public power.”13 The fact few students are ever afforded hands-on experience with leveraging power of any kind might account for this.

Students are presumably the citizens educational institutions exist to serve, though this fact does not seem to carry much weight in educational practice. Students are at the bottom of the chain of command of school bureaucracies not only in practice but in theory as well. Schools are not democracies and students are not formally accorded even the theoretical right to question mandates from on high. However necessary this may appear in terms of safety and the orderly conduct of pedagogy, to refuse all venues of student resistance to the policies and practices imposed on them emphatically impoverishes their preparation for adult citizenship in free societies.

For the sake of such preparation, students should be afforded democratic venues for genuine input into the making of policy, a plausible prospect of effecting a change in policy, and the means of public protest of measures they find repugnant. They should be taught the means of democratically legitimate, constructive, and effective engagement in the governance of their lives and be afforded the experience necessary to attain the requisite skills. They should be taught that respectful, constructive resistance to what they consider abuse of authority is not only legitimate, but is also a healthy expression of democratic virtue. And they should occasionally experience the efficacy of their efforts to encourage the development of an attitude of democratic efficacy.

If students actually possessed the attitudes and skills of democratic efficacy, the problems of authoritarian overreach would be held in check. But the evidence strongly indicates that students in general do not possess them. Hence it comes as a new realization to even college students when they hear that administrative intrusion into student government and activities is not foreordained by the natural order of school governance. They have been conditioned by prevailing attitudes and practices to believe it is. They have never experienced actual independence from authoritarian intervention and those in positions of authority see no good reason to allow them such experience. The Sixties are indeed dead.

Such attitudes are among the considerable obstacles to changing our educational ways in regard to civic education. At first blush, such a change does not seem particularly difficult to effect. We need only take the forms and means that already exist more seriously. We need but better define the boundaries of existing circles of autonomy and allow more genuine freedom and thereby more meaningful democratic participation. But we would confront not only administrative resistance and student resignation; we would confront the relative lack of recognition of the value of the virtues of liberal citizenship.

Behind the façade of professed preference for democracy a great many people consider it inconvenient and rather subversive in practice. Until concern rises to a sufficient level of potent insistence to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles, we are unlikely to get beyond the rhetoric and pretence that traditionally plague efforts at reform. Still, there is much to gain and little to lose by trying. To this end I offer a more explicit rendition of the direction I believe we should take in regard to the experiential dimension of civic education.

I propose a general rule: the more genuine autonomy we allow and encourage, the better. The more student autonomy we can responsibly honor, the more likely they will learn the lessons of responsibility and gain the skills of dealing with real adult problems. In those areas involving their own governance, genuine autonomy within the boundaries of legitimate school needs and responsibilities is central to promoting the virtues of citizenship and the personal empowerment they afford. Though areas of student autonomy must be bound by necessary rules, rules that primarily serve the convenience of those in authority or, worse, their emotional investment in control, should be challenged and revoked. Paternalistic policies in which we rob students of personal choices and responsibilities in order to protect them from the consequences of their choices are similarly to be reconsidered. We are not truly doing them a favor, are not promoting our mission of empowerment, by robbing them of the lessons of consequences. Beyond the limits of protection from significant harm, paternalism is poison to the aims of civic education.

Administrators, faculty, and students should be perennially reminded that the core function of student government is to represent the interests of students, and that the exercise of this responsibility requires an independent voice as well as independent choice. They are not junior members of the administration. Within the areas of clear student responsibility such as student activities and organizations, student government should be accorded as much autonomy as legally responsible. Student media should be allowed to report real news, for example, even when it is inconvenient to the powers that be, whether school officials or officers of student government. Administrators and teachers should be reminded as well that attempts to manipulate and suppress the legitimate functions of student government and student activities would be viewed as a betrayal of the school’s civic mission as well as a betrayal of the best interests of the students. For this to provide much motivation, of course, there would have to be more than a few lonely voices holding them accountable.

There has been discussion of bringing more democracy into the classroom, though experimentation in this regard seems mostly confined to a few subjects and a handful of teachers at any institution. I do not know how much pedagogical value these efforts presage, but I am convinced that some of the less structured methods of communal inquiry into open-ended questions have great promise for nurturing most of the virtues of liberal citizenship. I agree with Jack Meacham when he says “Specific content on civic engagement and diversity does make a difference. But how we incorporate this content—by modeling the democratic process of discussion, debate, and the search for more informed judgments—is the key to empowering our students to be better citizens in our pluralist American democracy.”14

Since I crossed the line of radical advocacy in proposing that empowering the pursuit of happiness is the main purpos of education, I do not fear to further propose the radical step of better modeling democratic virtues in the democratic governance of educational institutions. I believe the health of the institutions themselves would be served, but, more importantly, the civic mission of these institutions would be better served by students seeing those preaching the virtues of liberal citizenship actually walking their talk.

Of course, the current emphasis on civic engagement in the larger community is necessary as well. There are limits to the experience campus life can afford. The roots of civic virtue must grow outside the hothouse climate of academe if they are to be any use to society at large and to the personal aspirations of students beyond graduation. I but add my voice to much that has already been proposed or is occurring in this regard. I also applaud the measures designed to foster a better sense of global citizenship. I especially believe study abroad while in college should be highly encouraged. I know from experience that there is no substitute for travelling and studying abroad to gain an understanding and appreciation of the world beyond the borders of one’s country. For me it was a lesson in the commonality of human hearts.

I discussed the affective benefits of appreciation, acceptance, and wishing well in Educating Angels. Nurturing these attitudes are therefore personally empowering in regard to the pursuit of happiness. There will be many occasions when students’ commitment to liberal democratic ideals freely and judiciously arrived at will inform their personal aspirations. The cognitive skills they exercise in reaching an understanding of the relative value of the ideals will inform their social engagements and help free and open their minds. They will feel a deeper sense of sharing a worthy purpose with their fellows, which is an affective reward in itself. And their enhanced awareness of the uses and abuses of freedom, democracy, and justice will better inform their choices.

An attitude of efficacy is crucial to civic engagement, and the experience of efficacy is crucial to the attitude. This is among the compelling reasons that students need to experience genuine freedom and meaningful democracy. Civic knowledge will often serve students in life, and the honed skills of freedom and democracy will find their uses in all manner of social endeavors, substantially increasing the prospect of success. In all these ways and more, a more consequent and enlightened civic education will personally empower students as it contributes to the health and vitality of liberal democracy.

NOTES

1. Philip H. Phenix, (originally published in 1967) “Liberal learning and the Practice of Freedom,” retrieved May 26, 2009 from http://www.religon-online.org/showarticle.asp? title=2533
2. Quoted in Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education, (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 37
3. Ibid, p. 47
4. Ibid, p. 45
5. Harry Brighouse, “The Role of Philosophical Thinking in Teaching Controversial Issues” in Michael Hand and Carrie Winstanley, eds., Philosophy in Schools, (New York: Continuum, 2009) p. 62.
6. The word “communal” is inspired by the “community of inquiry” methods advocated by Lipman and others.
7. Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education, p. 13.
8. Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Jossey-Bass, Kindle edition, 2011, Acquired August 24, 2011 from Amazon.com, Location 2743.
9. Harry Brighouse, On Education, Taylor & Francis, Kindle edition, 2007, acquired June 8, 2008 from Amazon.com. Location 1783.
10. Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2007) p. 39.
11. An example of various efforts at “freedom schools” is The New School in Newark, Delaware where students pretty much spend their time doing what interests them. See Edward L. Kenney, “New School gives students freedom to explore, think” in The Delaware News Journal, April 30, 2008, p. A1.
12. John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriole Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers, 1992) p. 69.
13. David Glenn, “Students Are Poor Citizens, and a Former U.S. Senator Pushes Colleges to Turn That Around” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2009, acquired August 6, 2009: http://chronicle.com/article/Former-US-Senator-Pushes-/47944.
14. Jack Meacham, “Teaching Diversity and Democracy across the Disciplines: Who, What, and How” in Diversity & Democracy, vol. 12, no. 3, Fall 2009, p. 3.

justice and happiness

Love is justice, justice is love. | Joseph Fletcher

Though I am optimistic about the difference we could make in the lives of children by focusing on empowering their pursuit of happiness, the path to this difference admittedly leads through quite challenging terrain. Awareness of the link between thoughts and feelings is just the beginning of the journey that leads to the ability to feel as one chooses. Among the realizations along the way to this ability is that feelings are responses to the judgments our thoughts entail. Thoughts reflect the symbolic meanings we bestow on aspects of experience, meanings derived from judgments at some level of consciousness. Mastery of our feelings thus confronts the formidable challenge of mastering our judgments.

The challenge is formidable partly because our judgments seem like automatic responses to perception. We are constantly judging aspects of experience. Usually we are not consciously aware of the beliefs and attitudes from which they arise; they seem visceral. But there are ways to gain some measure of control over the negative judgments that darken our affective experiences. I suggested awareness of feelings, mindfulness, and perspective in Educating Angels. Sizable libraries of self-help books offer other methods to escape the deleterious effects of our routine judgments about spouses, children, colleagues, competitors, and circumstances.

But judgments are often protected from attempts to avoid or detoxify them by the strong tendency to rationalize them in terms of right. When our sense of what is right enters the domain of what we consider morally and ethically obligatory, we venture into the affective if not the conceptual domain of justice. Justice is the concept most commonly invoked to render judgments matters of duty. We use the concept of justice to sanction and thereby fortify and defend judgments.

For example, when we or others for whom we have sympathy are unduly denied a raise or cheated in a business deal, our anger is deemed not only justified but required by what we view as an unwarranted, objective injury. Judgment of abuse, faithlessness, selfish disregard, and all manner of perfidy is thought morally obligatory. We believe judgment of evil acts that visit bodily harm on others is especially imperative. To refrain from judging sins or forgiving them would be tantamount to condoning them in the eyes of many. If there are affective costs to judgment, some will insist they must be borne, for to refrain from condemning the perpetrators of harmful acts would weaken the fences on harmful conduct, would be unfair to victims, and would cast one’s commitment to justice in doubt.

Yet when we place our judgments within the protected perimeter of what we pronounce matters of justice, we limit our willingness to examine, and therefore ameliorate, their considerable ill effects. If we would show the way to the mastery of judgment necessary to mastery of feeling, we must venture onto the hallowed ground of sanctified judgments with clear, assessing eyes focused within as well as without. We must give students the wherewithal to see judgment as a choice rather than an inescapable obligation by making them aware of reasonable alternatives.

Common understandings of morality are largely encompassed in a general understanding of justice. Aristotle observed that, in one sense of the word, justice “is not a part of virtue but the whole of virtue; its opposite, injustice, is not a part of vice but the whole of vice.”1 But he admitted this is not true of other senses of the word.

Mill agreed, distinguishing between moral prescriptions that involve presumption of rights, which he held to be the purview of justice, and those that do not, which he held to be the morality of “generosity or beneficence.” “Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right. …Wherever there is right, the case is one of justice, and not of the virtue of beneficence…”2 The morality of “beneficence” is more generally concerned with wishing and treating others well, of heeding the golden rule not because it is a rule, but because it is a natural inclination of one’s heart. Such beneficence is not usually considered a matter of right: “No one has a right to our generosity or beneficence, because we are not morally bound to practice those virtues towards any given individual.”3

The subjective meanings of all concepts have their roots in the inclinations of the heart. Concepts, even concepts of the ideals to which we aspire, have no motivational power in and of themselves; we employ them to serve the desires of our hearts. Even when concepts are themselves targets of our affections, it is the desire for the feelings we believe the concepts inspire that is our true aim. In accordance with the affective theory of value, the underlying motive in all we pursue is the desire for a preferred feeling, a feeling that entails both our momentary determination and the experience of value. The value of our ideals therefore lies in what we expect them to contribute to our affective experience.

The motives that interest us in the concept of justice determine its subjective value and therefore its subjective purpose. We are therefore afforded deeper insight by considering our motives for invoking and pursuing justice and their affective consequences than by parsing the conceptual constructs devised to rationalize and govern our use of the concept. As Solomon sagely observes, “Justice…consists first of all of a constellation of feelings, which alone can provide the psychological soil in which our grand theories can take root.”4

One reason justice is such a compelling ideal is because it serves what Mill called a “powerful sentiment”:

We have seen that the two essential ingredients in the sentiment of justice are, the desire to punish a person who has done harm, and the knowledge or belief that there is some definite individual or individuals to whom harm has been done. Now it appears to me, that the desire to punish a person who has done harm to some individual is a spontaneous outgrowth from two sentiments, both in the highest degree natural, and which either are or resemble instincts; the impulse of self-defence, and the feeling of sympathy. … The sentiment of justice, in that one of its elements which consists of the desire to punish, is thus, I conceive, the natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance, rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to those injuries, that is, to those hurts, which wound us through, or in common with, society at large.5

The desire for vengeance is undoubtedly a prime motive for invoking what is called retributive justice, which is concerned with the punishment of the perpetrators of crime in regard to law and of harming others without just cause in regard to general moral understandings. The desire can be provoked by any slight, real or imagined, or by frustrations blamed on others, so it is woven into the fabric of daily experience for most of us. Grievance and an attendant desire for vengeance can so pervade our lives, we may not even be consciously aware of being under their sway at times.

These feelings seem to hold a powerful appeal. People commonly invite and nurse grievances and angrily defend them against challenge. Perhaps we savor the prospect of satisfaction when retribution is exacted. After all, we seem to seek such satisfaction when we read books and watch movies with the expectation that the manufactured tension of evil deeds will be relieved when the bad guys get what they deserve in the end. It is a most lucrative motive for much of the entertainment industry. Some may see vengeance as a cause that gives them purpose. Some may have an addiction to anger. An attraction to anger might account for the popularity of commentators who specialize in expressing condemnation and stoking outrage.

As for Mill’s self defense thesis, grievance certainly serves the defense of our egos, whether or not it contributes to our welfare in a larger sense. To my mind, the deep insecurity engendered by the perceived vulnerabilities and insufficiencies of our ego image of self is the most plausible source of grievance and desire for revenge. I question whether these “sentiments” are instincts that developed due to evolutionary advantage as they inspire a great deal of individually and socially inexpedient behavior in terms of order, cooperation, and security. Those prone to them tend to reap the belligerence they sow.

My doubts about the utility of anger and desire for vengeance are not generally shared, though. Many who have given the matter due consideration point to at least some utility, usually in terms of defense. Whatever the case may be in terms of evolutionary or social utility, I am quite sure these feelings are inexpedient in terms of personal happiness. Though we are apparently drawn to grievance and desire for revenge at times, I doubt anyone capable of detached observation of thoughts and feelings would describe them as pleasant. They accompany perceived injury, so they largely consist of fear and anger. Grievance due to perceived injury is likely deeply rooted in fear. The perception of injury or threatened loss strengthens the sense of vulnerability that engenders fear.

Prospective loss may be anything we value, material or psychological. There are many dimensions to psychological loss. They include esteem, the emotional benefits of a relationship, cherished beliefs, and the fate of a cause. Identification with others or sympathy with them makes their loss ours in a psychological sense, and it heightens our sense of vulnerability. Identification with people and groups such as family, a sports team, and nation extends the perimeter of ego as well as sense of self, making threat or insult to members of the group seem a personal affront.

Placing offenders with presumed malign intent in our mental spotlight tends to magnify the perception of threat in our minds. What we dwell on generates associated thoughts and patterns of thought. Focus on threat tends to make it loom large in our minds. The fear engendered by grievance is therefore often deeper and more generalized than what seems objectively justified. This helps explain the many examples of the contagion of unreasonable fear when the headlines scream of a calamity with remote chance of affecting us or people we know except, perhaps, through the overzealous reactions of our government in responding to such fear.

A great deal has been written about the effects of fear. It is widely considered either a or the primary source of anger, so the effects of fear are thought to largely encompass the effects of anger as well. Anger is a means for dealing with fear. Initial fear usually transforms into anger, possibly as a means to mitigate its effects by projecting it. The causal relation between insecurity and anger is well known. And expressions of anger by others are also a source of fear. Fear and anger cause considerable tension in both mind and body. If one can manage to mute these feelings by means of detached observation for a moment, the ensuing relief from tension reveals their relative unpleasantness. Consciously experiencing this contrast is the beginning of the path to controlling it.

But relatively unpleasant tension is but one of the more observable aspects of a constellation of pernicious effects of fear and anger. They endanger physical and mental health according to a mountain of evidence. Whether or not they cause a contraction of spirit, as Thomas Aquinas argued, fear and anger bring a contraction of conscious focus and therefore awareness. Unfortunately, the narrowed focus accentuates the negative, creating feedback loops of thoughts of threat, vulnerability, grievance, and vengeance. For many, such thought patterns are compulsive; they are difficult to interrupt or contain. They become temporary imprisonments of the mind. For the obsessed and deeply depressed, they can prove lengthy prison terms in a dark dungeon of painful thoughts and perceptions.

Perceived grievance not only darkens one’s thoughts, it also greatly distorts them. While in its grip, it is difficult to see anything but the relatively repellent aspects of the target or targets of our grievance. So grows the enmity that can turn love into hatred and tear marriages, families, and friendships apart. Grievance tends to blind us to attractive traits and understandings that would normally win our sympathy. Our image of the antagonist is darker and more unidimensional than a neutral observer would think justified. We project malicious intent that justifies our own ill will and gives credence only to evidence that supports our case against the perpetrators of perceived injustice. The image of the feared and resented other easily becomes a caricature.

Psychologists consistently deal with this phenomenon in relationship counseling. The social consequences of the psychology of this enemy making are particularly pernicious. As Sam Keen illustrated in his book and subsequent documentary, Faces of the Enemy, when we turn others into evil caricatures in our minds, we dehumanize them to make them fitting targets for prejudice, hatred, persecution, and sometimes elimination.6 As a spectator to the many wars my country has fought in the past half century, I recall the willing participation of the media in hyping the evil nature of the enemy in the lead up to the wars in every case.

It is easy to conjure demons and monsters by sowing fear and anger. Actually it is easy to sow the seeds of enmity by engineering simple rivalry. In order to demonstrate the emotional roots of nationalism, I sometimes divide an international relations class into three groups named Blue, Green, and Orange. I then have each group write a list of ten reasons their group is the greatest, saying it is a competition. After a spokesperson of each group shares their list, usually accompanied by hoots and derision from members of competing groups, I have each group make up a list of ten reasons the other two groups are inferior. It is not uncommon to see flares of resentment during the sharing of such lists. I remind them at the end of the exercise that both feelings of enmity and solidarity are the result of pure imagination without objective cause. They were manufactured with the same basic techniques employed by some politicians. This is but a small example of how easy it is to conjure animosity, which all too easily becomes malice.

Politicians may justify unidimensional, dehumanizing portrayals of potential enemies as serving the greater good, but we should not downplay the consequences. One consequence is that the manufactured fear and anger are not readily controlled; they can all too easily become sustained filters to perception that can paint a sizable portion of humanity with the hues of enmity and diminished worth. This is evident in racial and ethnic prejudice, ideological and religious rivalries, and the callous views of criminals and other “undesirable elements” as unworthy of humane treatment. Less obvious is how seeing the world in hues of good and bad affects interpersonal relationships.

Fear and anger are not easily bracketed, and distrust of some can lead to suspicion of all. Grievance and enmity are easily transferred to new targets. You have probably noticed how you or others transfer anger to those around you, sometimes becoming snappish with anyone who offers the slightest provocation, or who just happens to be within earshot of venting. Some are completely seized by paranoia; most of us are possessed of at least a mild case of paranoia while under the sway of fear and anger. In a fundamental sense, thinking ill of others subjectively devalues them to some extent at least, whether or not it reaches the level of impugning their inherent worth as human beings, which is the meaning of dehumanizing. This devaluing has pervasive consequences, both social and personal.

The cognitive walls that separate self from others grow higher. Though shared fear and anger can beget common cause, these feelings tend to banish awareness of affection so long we are possessed by them. Over the years I have become increasingly aware of how easily conversations with colleagues can turn into virtual competitions of venting and recrimination. Complaints usually center on administrators, colleagues, campus politics, politics in general, and students. Too often venom directed at particular people surfaces.

I have noticed what might be called the camaraderie of shared grievance does not leave me with feelings of affection for my partners in complaint. Indeed, it would be unusual to feel anger and genuine affection at the same time; they tend to be mutually exclusive in my experience. And the venting itself seems to amplify rather than relieve the sense of grievance. The sharing tends to make me more sensitive to the prevalence of injustice by bringing fresh injuries to my awareness, compounded by the social pressure to embrace them as my own. Sometimes I walk away with the sense that malice and perfidy abound, though I have learned to dispel the gloom by recalling that my thoughts rather than an objective assessment of reality are the cause.

Though it cannot be decisively proven, it is plausible that at least some of our feelings toward others are projected feelings about ourselves as psychologists have claimed since Freud. That ill will toward others brings ill effects to our own hearts is certain. The first victim of wishing another ill is the one who wishes it. Adam Smith observed in his treatise on moral sentiments that,

Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquility of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love.7

Certainly hatred and anger preclude peace and expansive joy. If feelings of aversion are unavoidable consequences of judgments obliged by a sense or notion of justice, the pursuit of one may at least temporarily preclude the experience of the other.

Of course, the concept of justice, including retributive justice, is not employed solely at the urging of fear and anger in response to perceived injury. The concept is deemed both individually and socially useful in terms of related values. Retributive justice is thought a deterrent to crime and injury, for example. The prospect of retaliation is thought to inhibit personal affront.

All notions of justice have appeal to utility, as Bentham and Mill famously argued, and they held that the ultimate measure of utility is the greatest happiness for the greatest number. If happiness is the motive for justice, Mill’s vengeful “sentiment of justice” must give way to Smith’s “social and benevolent affections.” In his defense of utilitarianism from the accusation of cold and superficial calculation, Mill highlighted the benevolence at the core of the doctrine:

In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.8

Mill implies that utilitarianism is both inspired and fulfilled by a motive of perfect benevolence toward each and all. According to Michael Sandel, “Mill saves utilitarianism from the charge that it reduces everything to a crude calculus of pleasure and pain, but only by invoking a moral ideal of human dignity and personality independent of utility itself.”9

I agree the ideal Mill invokes is independent of the calculus of social utility in the mind of those who express it, but believe there is considerable personal utility in benevolence in terms of affective experience. As I argued previously, it is most difficult to separate the affective fruits of benevolence from the attitude. Whether or not it is as compelling as the desire for vengeance, the desire for the wellbeing of others inspires most notions of justice to some degree. It is at the heart of the notion of restorative justice, for example, which aims at repairing damage to victims and rehabilitating offenders. This notion aims justice at mutual benefit and abjures punishment as revenge.

Some measure of benevolence born of compassion is also the implied motive for theories of distributive justice, which involves the just distribution of social values. John Rawls’ theory of justice, for example, is ostensibly motivated by the desire for fairness in the distribution of social goods. He abjures utilitarian calculus in postulating that “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override” and that “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.”10 Yet presumably the practical point of his theory is to advance the welfare of at least those most disadvantaged by prevailing circumstances.

Without reference to divine will, the security of rights is also ultimately a matter of utility. The aim of greater individual and social benefit can also be presumed for most of those who advocate the primacy and inviolability of rights, whether it is freedom alone or a more extended range of human rights they hold on high. As Mill observed, the concept of justice presumes rights, but few of those who proclaim the inviolability of freedom or property rights—the basis for distinctly liberal notions of justice—insist that these rights preclude consideration of consequences. Rather they believe insisting on the inviolability of rights serves the general welfare better than admitting to exceptions.

Yet, the originating benevolent intent usually falls victim to perceptions of fairness denied, rights violated, and obligations unmet, yielding grievance and a presumed moral obligation to resist such injustice and struggle to right its wrongs. In other words, the desire to do good unto others seems to set us up for frustration, anger, and conflict. It is often argued that condemnation for the sake of others is essential to morality. Solomon insists “A sense of justice requires engagement, not detachment. It requires a keen sense of what it is to be offended, not just an abstract sense of fairness.”11

So speak the adherents of every cause that flies the banner of justice. But if we are obliged to pronounce condemning judgment by the myriad causes that invoke justice, there is no moral avenue of escape from the unpleasant affective consequences of such judgment. Fortunately, the morality of benevolence does not inherently entail this dilemma.

Before looking deeper into the attributes of benevolent intent, we should acknowledge a range of normative satisfactions that arise more from fidelity to cherished sanctions than benevolence per se. Obedience to God’s commandments or those of acknowledged religious and secular authorities, to the law, and to social expectations has affective benefits for those who believe in their rightness. There is satisfaction in obedience, in performing traditional rituals, and in living in harmony with the expectations of a community. The expectation and rules of fairness result from the keen sense of the rightness of being fair that seems to run deep in our nature. Being fair as one understands it therefore yields both normative satisfaction and social approval.

The satisfaction of living in accordance with prevailing norms accords with the assumption that happiness is the product of virtue. Plato ascribed greater normative satisfaction to living within the limits prescribed by our individual nature than aspiring beyond these limits. For our own good as well as the good of our community, he argued, we should be content with a role in society commensurate with the talents nature bestowed on us.

Many find satisfaction in living in harmony with the requirements of nature in general. Those of a scholarly bent tend to find gratification in abiding by the dictates of reason. Philosophers cherish satisfaction derived from discovering symmetry and harmony in the rules of reason; scientists find pleasure in the traditions of science. Such satisfactions may not be all that different from those derived from performing religious rituals.

Whatever the strictures, they are endowed with normative qualities that inspire satisfaction in heeding them. The quality of rightness brings moral admonitions within the conceptual purview of justice. Such strictures often become entwined with the concept or even define it in the minds of many people. For them, justice includes fidelity to cherished commandments and moral guidelines, injustice is the violation of these strictures. Justice is invoked to highlight the goodness of the obedient and the perfidy of the disobedient. Heeding normative strictures may well serve the interests of others, but normative satisfactions often arise more from the heeding than the serving, thus this motive for invoking justice falls short of benevolence.

The satisfaction of abiding by cherished sanctions is diminished by the concurrent condemnation of those who do not abide. Condemning others for their disregard of strictures by no means avoids a sense of grievance and the fear and anger that attend it. Indeed, invoking justice to enhance the normative credentials of strictures positively invites judgment and its affective consequences. The satisfaction of obeying what one believes is God’s will, obeying the law as a normative imperative, practicing virtues as matters of personal integrity, or heeding tradition due to social sanction all too easily gives way to anger and resentment when God’s will, laws, virtues, traditions, or the rules of reason are flouted.

Such judgment is not reserved for others. Though normative satisfaction is experientially preferable to the fear and anger that give rise to the desire for vengeance, it comes with a price if it is a satisfaction of a need born of ego. The insufficiency of ego is insatiable; feeding it guarantees the return of the pangs of ego hunger. As previously observed, the satisfaction of heeding norms often lies in the comparative avoidance of guilt. Yet guilt lurks to punish the laxity of those who seek satisfaction in obedience to stricture, probably more cruelly than those who place less store in such fidelity. It may be that the greater the satisfaction, the greater the guilt from succumbing to temptation. Such is the treachery of the ego. Guilt is not the unavoidable price of goodness, though.

If we were all angels, it is said, we would have no need of laws and moral commandments; benevolent behavior would flow naturally from our angelic hearts. We need not presume we are angels to suspect that if a means exists to resolve the affective dilemma posed by the concept of justice, it lies in the depths of our hearts.
Mill’s distinction between the morality of justice, which requires the assertion and judgment of right, and the morality of beneficence is reasonable, but the solution to the affective dilemma requires extending the gravitas of justice into this farther realm of morality. We might thereby hope to discover a perspective on justice that does not necessitate the ills of condemnation.

Schopenhauer saw compassion as the prime moral sentiment and it is generally agreed that compassion is at least among the main motives for caring, beneficent behavior. The distress of not only our fellows but of other sentient beings often elicits sympathy at variance with calculated selfish interest. Perhaps it arises from an instinct developed through evolutionary advantage, or from the psychological identification of self with others, or from the subconscious recognition of the metaphysical unity of will and being that Schopenhauer posited.12

Whatever its source, compassion speaks to our propensity to “derive sorrow from the sorrow of others” as Adam Smith puts it, to feel emotional discomfort at the perception of the pain of others.13 As such, compassion is a motive of affective discomfort which, if acted upon, moves us to seek to alleviate the distress of others at least partly as a means to relieve the distress of our sympathy. Feeling the pain of others is painful.

Compassion thus moves us to serve the perceived wellbeing of those who suffer, but it by no means precludes condemnation when we believe they are the victims of callous or malicious perpetrators. When convinced of injustice, our compassion renders us the victims of such perpetrators in a sense, which incites our indignation and calls forth attending desire for vengeance. When we see or hear of people who are poor, hungry, disadvantaged, or abused, we may find some relief from our pangs of compassion by diverting them into righteous anger aimed at those we hold responsible for such suffering. Though its original aim is benevolent, the motive of compassion understood as shared suffering does not save us from the ills of condemning judgment.

Compassion so understood is probably an aspect of our natural empathy with others by which we tend to share their mirth and joy as well as their suffering, their “weal” as well as their “woe” in the translated words of Schopenhauer. We are easily affected by the expressed feelings of others. We are moved not only by their sorrow, but by the contagion of their laughter and smiles as well. But such natural sharing of feelings does not in itself provide a motive aside from the qualities of the feelings we share. We are moved to escape uncomfortable feelings and wish to retain those we find pleasant. Shared pain moves us to seek release while we would like to sustain shared joy.

Motives for benevolence are not exhausted, however, by the desire to do right unto others for the sake of doing right or the wish to relieve the shared pain of compassion. It may be the natural expression of something akin to the appreciate love I describe in the book that is uncontaminated by emotions associated with ego.

This is the pure love of the agape variety. First, it requires acceptance of what a person or other aspect of experience is. It is contradictory to claim love so understood for whom and what you do not accept. To say you accept some aspects of a person but not others by no means resolves the contradiction; the love so claimed is for preferred aspects of a person rather than love of the person as such. But love is obviously more than mere acceptance; it entails appreciation. An affective consequence of acceptance is the relative lack of tension, of peace. The experience of appreciation is the experience of valuing. It is the subjective bestowal of worth. The affective experience of valuing unmitigated by emotions associated with ego is joy. Such love is not only independent of judgment of the accusing variety, it precludes it. We must shed negative judgment to reap its rewards.

Such pure, nonjudgmental love may seem beyond the reach of the average mortal, including the followers of Christ who are expressly admonished to strive for it, but we all can experience the commensurate rewards of less perfect acceptance and appreciation. Moments of quiet enjoyment when our thoughts are relatively accepting and appreciative of the people and environment of current experience, or of recalled experiences, are moments of comparative lack of tension, broadened and brightened focus of awareness, absence of compulsive thoughts, and relief from perceived obligation to condemn and contend. Just as grievance incites negative thought patterns, acceptance and appreciation engage positive patterns of thought. Though simplistic, we might reasonably discern the general rule that negative thoughts about others entail negative affective consequences while positive thoughts entail the opposite.

There is justice of the reaping-what-one-sows variety, a sort of instant karma if you will, in reaping undesirable feelings for wishing ill and pleasant feelings for wishing well. This might be thought the retributive justice of the heart. Such justice automatically rewards benevolence and punishes vengeance. There is what I call a strategic golden rule widely understood as the prime motive for benevolence: Do good unto others because it is the best way to get them to do good unto you. Here we revise this rule: Not only do, but wish unto others what you would experience, for what you wish and do unto them determine the quality of what you feel.

This implies an immediate balancing in the accounting of the heart, however much the ego may despise an accounting that punishes what it pronounces the obligatory judgment of others’ sins. Yet there is an elegant perfection of balance in the justice of the heart as well as a potent motive for benevolence.

The higher aspirations for affective wellbeing—the higher aspirations for happiness—entail the acceptance and appreciation of others. If, as many contend on the basis of personal experience, the wish for the wellbeing of others is entailed in appreciating them, that it is a natural expression of appreciation, then we have found a source for benevolence beyond the insufficiency implied in the word motive. Nonetheless, the benefits of this state of mind provide a compelling motive to seek it. One reaps rewards in appreciating the worth of another and wishing them well whether they are victim or perpetrator, while one is denied these rewards and subjected to affective ills in condemning them. Wishing well, even when someone has violated the asserted rules of justice, serves the heart that wishes it.

The appreciation of love implies no obligation to judge and provides no cause for judgment. It does not posit a good that entails its opposite in contrast to prevailing notions of justice, where justice necessarily defines injustice; they are two sides of the same coin. Love so understood does not set qualifying conditions that determine whether appreciation should be given or withheld. Love so understood must be unconditional to be experienced.

The accounting of the heart affords an alternative perspective on distributive justice. In keeping with the affective theory of value, ultimate value exists in feelings. The true value of all goods to be distributed therefore lies in their contribution to the experience of preferred feelings. They have no value aside from this. Feelings have a peculiar attribute the goods of the world do not possess. The “giver” does not lose in the “giving” of feelings for others. The more we wish another ill, the greater the affective ill our malice inflicts on us. The more we appreciate, the greater our joy.

The gain of the “receiver” of appreciation may seem intangible, but in truth the affective gain of the receiver of worldly goods is intangible as well. The perceived joy of the receiver enhances rather than diminishes our own joy; the “supply” grows with the giving. There is no sacrifice involved in terms of affective value, no balancing of gain with loss. And there are no inherent limits to how much one can give or to the number of beneficiaries. In the rule that one must receive as one gives, there is a fairness and equality in the accounting of the goods of the heart that is impossible to realize in the accounting of the goods of the world.

This notion of justice as nonjudgmental appreciation has deep roots. It is the explicit heart of the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is admonished in the Quran. It is advised in the ancient Upanishads of the Hindus. It is held to be both a requirement and an expression of enlightenment by Buddhists. It is reflected in both Eastern and Western systems of ethics. It can be found in core teachings of all modern religions and reasoned humanistic philosophies.

Joseph Fletcher expounded a Christian-based “situation ethics” based on an understanding of love similar to the one presented here. He explained that

Christian situation ethics has only one norm or principle or law (call it what you will) that is binding and unexceptionable, always good and right regardless of the circumstances. That is “love”—the agape of the summary commandment to love God and the neighbor. Everything else without exception, all laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms, are only contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love in any situation. … Love is for people, not for principles; i.e., it is personal—and therefore when the impersonal universal conflicts with the personal particular, the latter prevails in situation ethics.14

In regard to the relation between love and justice, Fletcher asks

How are we to love justice, how are we to be just about love, how are love and justice related? If to love is to seek the neighbor’s welfare, and justice is being fair as between neighbors, then how do we put these two things together in our acts, in the situation? The answer is that in the Christian ethic the twain become one.15

Though I do believe love understood as unconditional appreciation has a plausible claim to being the foundation of morality, I shall leave it undefended at present. Rather I offer what I shall henceforth call the angel notion of justice for two reasons. First, I offer it as an alternative to notions of justice that imply an obligation to condemn in order to undergird a student’s decision to minimize such judgment should they so choose in light of their enhanced awareness of the affective consequences. Unless they see a reasonable defense against social pressures to condemn, they may not be able to consider it a reasonable choice.

Second, I wish to propose a way we might try to connect the higher aspirations of the heart with a fundamental moral premise of religions and humanistic philosophies and what I believe is an essential premise of liberal democracy: inherent human worth. To respect such worth is the core virtue of democratic citizenship, the virtue on which all others are founded. I believe it is incumbent on institutions of liberal education to seek to ground this virtue in the hearts of students as a requisite of both the farther reaches of happiness and of the future health of liberal social order. To the degree we might succeed in this, the better we would serve the higher affective aspirations of each child and the better we would serve the more benevolent purposes for which we commonly invoke the concept of justice.

The angel notion of justice offers a conceptual blueprint of the connection between heart and respect for human worth by pointing to the rewards of going beyond conceptual respect to the actual experience of appreciating the worth of others, of bestowing worth through our appreciation. The notion favors the effort to strengthen the motives for respect and thereby inspire greater commitment to seeing it honored.

Yet in order for the angel notion to qualify as a plausible alternative to other notions of justice, we must meet the objection that it would prove insufficient to the causes of social justice and security. How would it move us to avert what harm we may, to serve the needy it is in our power to serve, and to lend our aid to efforts to improve the lot of at least some portion of humanity? How would it address the practical concerns for which we employ the concept of justice and harness the passions of judgment? Appreciation may involve the wish to share the joy it entails, but joy does not focus on pain, therefore it is unlikely to fuel the desire to alleviate shared pain. And how can we hope to deter those who would harm us and others without relying on fear? Do we not depend on fear to inspire our wariness and fuel our resistance, and on inspiring fear in the potential perpetrator to deter them?

Let us approach these questions with a narrow example that reflects a common experience. Consider the just treatment of someone you deeply love. For the sake of example, let it be a daughter. Though you may believe it necessary to punish her transgressions for her own good or the protection of yourself and others, love uncontaminated by the emotions of ego would never move you to inflict pain for the sake of vengeance, for the sake of balancing the scales of justice. The wish for her greater good, her happiness, would guide even your punishments, which would not exceed what you deem necessary to the aim of preventing future transgressions. Her “mistakes” would not diminish her worth in your eyes or curb your desire for her happiness. Love would not allow you to magnify her imperfections at the expense of your deeper sense of her worth.

You need not take on the burdens of her cares and suffering to be nonetheless sensitive to them and gladly seek to relieve them. What you feel you could prudently give her for the sake of her happiness, you would enjoy giving. The aim of justice in regard to your daughter would have the same aim as love: her happiness. And in the accounting of the heart, you thereby serve your own happiness as well.

Such is the justice we deem meet for those for whom we hold special affection. Note that Mill’s vengeful “sentiment of justice” need play no role in it. The appreciation of love affords no opening for fear and anger. It is not love so understood we experience when we are under the influence of these feelings. It does not depart from benevolent intent in seeing the requirements of justice in anything but the good of the beloved “perpetrator” as well as the victims of her acts. It does not accord rules a value beyond their contribution to this good; it does not render them an end in themselves.

The justice of love does not impugn the worth of loved ones by pronouncing them deserving of pain. It does not imply that their worth lies in what they do rather than what and who they are, or that their worth is conditional. It does not condemn them to be henceforth indelibly branded with the mark of sin. In other words, this justice neither obliges nor gives grounds for condemning judgment and its attendant ills.

I know this seems a rather high standard to apply to those beyond our circle of special affection. It implies a Christ-like ability to love those most would consider enemies as well as those most would see as annoying neighbors. But there are more earthly examples in Gandhi and Martin Luther King who emphasized love and abjured condemnation and hatred to advance causes that inspired—and changed—the hearts of many millions. There are thousands of less famous examples of those who served causes without condemning those who opposed them even in the face of vitriol and abuse. The lack of judgment arguably strengthened rather than weakened their causes. Lack of judgment can lower psychological defenses, open the door to sincere communication, and move people to examine their motives. It speaks to a higher image of self than the condemning visage we see in the mirror of honest self reflection.

Movements that avoid impugning the moral worth of opponents and remain passive in their resistance can seem woefully weak in the face of the anger and aggression at first. But they have inspired the one change capable of sustaining the gains of social progress: a change of heart. Martin Luther King, for example, left a legacy of progressive change far beyond anything militancy did or could achieve. Militancy provokes fear and justifies enmity that undermines the sustainability of every step forward. King’s message bade us look within for our better selves, which he seemed confident we would find. And his confidence, I believe, proved largely justified.

Our acceptance and appreciation of those around us has more profound effect than putting our shoulders to the wheels of causes. I have experienced and often heard how the accepting and appreciating attitude of one person can change a small social environment, a change that can ripple far beyond its source. Accepting and appreciating a person can be a greater gift than any other we might bestow. Much of what we do in life is motivated by the desire to gain this from others in the belief it is necessary to our happiness. It is no small matter to find it freely given.

Whether due to the natural contagion of feelings or the awakening or unblocking of the love that ever bides within us, we tend to respond in kind. The response may not be as quick and sure as fear and anger due to our wariness and emotional defenses, but love understood as acceptance and appreciation feeds the deepest yearning of our hearts while feelings of aversion betray it. People tend to gladly respond to such love when they come to believe it is sincere.

There may be no practical alternative to relying on fear of punishment to deter criminal behavior, but the utility of punishing for revenge is worthy of great doubt. It hardens and distresses the hearts of both criminals and those who would visit revenge on them. Future security is better served by softening their hearts with our acceptance and appreciation of their inherent worth. I suspect that in all dimensions of social utility, heeding the angel notion of justice would eventually prove superior in its practical results.

But it is not my purpose here to mount a defense this speculation. My present purpose is to suggest that presenting the notion to students as an alternative and providing them the experience of its benefits might show them a more propitious path to happiness and foster the virtue of respect for inherent human worth. I believe each student personally stands to benefit, and this is reason enough to suggest the notion. Still, I harbor some hope that an understanding of justice more aligned with the aspirations of the heart would benefit future generations as a whole.

I dream of a far friendlier social climate and more constrained use of power than presently prevails. The realization of this dream will require more than a less judgmental understanding of justice, of course. Along the path to this vision, future generations must learn to consider all their cherished ideals and values in the light cast by their hearts.

NOTES

1. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics” in Aristotle: On Man in the Universe (Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, 1943) p. 157.
2. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Classics-Unbound, Kindle edition, 2008, acquired May 27, 2008 from Amazon.com, Location 810.
3. Ibid. Location 812.
4. Robert C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice: Emotions and the Origins of the Social Contract (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995) p. 30.
5. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Location 820.
6. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991).
7. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Evergreen Review, Kindle edition, 2008, acquired September 1, 2008 from Amazon.com. Location 683.
8. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Location 270.
9. Michael J. Sandel, Justice, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Kindle edition, 2009, acquired November 26, 2009 from Amazon.com. Location 1029.
10. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) pp. 3-4.
11. Robert C. Solomon, A Passion for Justice, pp. 42-3.
12. See Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1998).
13. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Location 25.
14. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966) pp. 30-31.
15. Ibid, p. 88.