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Ethics in a plural society [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-03

Pluralism is here to stay: the alternatives required to eliminate it are too terrible to consider. That means that we have to think again about how the whole (‘society’) and its parts fit together, how the state relates to religious, altruistic and ethnic communities, and where the ethics come from. If a society has one culture, as was once the case, that culture nurtures the virtues which the state needs. But no society now or in the future can have one culture, one set of common values, yet the state still needs most of its citizens to be law-abiding most of the time, it needs virtuous citizens. So how can we have virtuous citizens without common values?

I think we need to envision the sub-systems such as religious and ethnic communities and school systems (private, public, faith-based) as providers of virtuous citizens to the state. That means that the state has a stake in fostering those that do in fact produce virtuous citizens. But it doesn’t matter to the state what values produce the virtues. I think of ‘values’ as a ranking of virtues: for instance, Christian values give a high ranking to forgiveness, Sikh values give a high ranking to courage, the Boy Scouts movement gives a high ranking to helpfulness and preparedness, and so on. This diversity – the lack of common values – is an asset to the state, for in different contingencies different virtues need to be prioritised. An all-absorbing war does not demand the same set of social values to be practised as a deep recession, or a bouyant-to-bubbling surge of prosperity. Common values therefore are a liability, while a diversity of virtuous citizens are an insurance policy.

The lack of ethics we observe today on is not due to pluralism in society, it is the legacy of the modern era in which the centralised and rationalised modern state itself tried to be a producer of virtuous citizens, by creating a common culture (national education, radio, a national language), by outright nationalism, or by making one or other ideology the state ideology.

All of these have failed, partly because mobility and freedom of choice mean that a mono-cultural society is now impossible, but more profoundly because the core business of the state is the security of all its citizens, which requires it to be the monopoly provider of coercion. I pay my taxes willingly – so long as I know my neighbour will also do so. He feels the same. We have established the state as a provider of coercion precisely so that we both know the other won’t cheat. So coercion is the core product, in the state’s core business, which limits the state to work according to a certain kind of logic. ‘Reasons of state’ really are different to “reasons of the heart” or “market logic” or “the logic of science.”

Now the product “virtuous citizens” — that is, citizens who are self-actuated to behave ethically, at least most of the time — demands the absence of coercion. Virtue, to be a moral virtue, must be freely chosen; and what the state needs is not just pliable citizens, but self-actuated citizens who freely choose to be ethical, and preferably altruistic. So we see that the path in which the state attempted to produce its own virtuous citizens was as much a dead end as the paths in which the state tried to manage the economy, or direct the workings of science.

It is the cultural providers, with ethnic and religious communities in the lead, who have the continuity to pass on the lessons of one generation to the next, who offer the role models and mores to elicit virtues and altruism. To assist them, the state needs to see clearly why it needs them, and the state has to embrace multiculturalism, and see the leaders of civil society as its partners and the suppliers of its most crucial resource: virtuous citizens. It needs to work with the ethnic, ethical, and religious communities on the basis of that need; that is, not because one ethnicity is the leitcultuur and must be protected, or one religion is favoured for historical reasons, but for transparent and equally applied “reasons of state.” Something like the “lemon test” must be formulated for government partnerships with the communities in civic society. Such a model of pluralist partnerships between the state and civil society also requires that the ethnic and religious communities bury any hatchets there may be between them. And it requires an input from the various communities of interest to the legislative process.

Abdu’l-Baha writes:

“Universal benefits derive from the grace of the Divine religions, [note the plural] for they lead their true followers to sincerity of intent, to high purpose, to purity and spotless honor, to surpassing kindness and compassion, to the keeping of their covenants when they have covenanted, to concern for the rights of others, to liberality, to justice in every aspect of life, to humanity and philanthropy, to valor and to unflagging efforts in the service of mankind. It is religion, to sum up, which produces all human virtues, and it is these virtues which are the bright candles of civilization.”

(The Secret of Divine Civilization, 98)

I should add one caveat about this pluralist model of state-community relations. It is not the same as the millet system which applied in the late Ottoman empire, and similar systems elsewhere, in which the state delegates some of its coercive and judicial powers to sub-communities. In those systems, Jews would enforce Jewish law on Jewish subjects, Christians on Christian subjects, and the various communities would also be taxed as communities, paying through their community leaders. The postmodern state has to treat citizens as individuals and not as members of a community, for two reasons: because people today can enter and leave communities and be members of multiple communities — a freedom they will not surrender — and because a non-ideological state exists to foster the development and serve the purposes of the individual.

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