5

VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

Michael Slote

V irtue ethics has recently been rousing itself from a long slumber.*
Although twentiethcentury hthical theoryhas been primarily concerned
with right and wrong action, we have lately seen a revival of interest in (the)
virtue(s) as supplementing or even grounding our understanding of right
action, and Aristotle and (to a lesser extent) Plato have had the greatest
influence on these developments. Over the last few years, virtue ethicists
have largely focused on the individual moral life rather than on issues of
social justice, and to the extent virtue ethics is content merely to supplement
other views, there may be nothing at all problematic about such an omission
or de-emphasis. But most philosophers who call themselves virtue ethicists
believe that (the) virtue(s) should play a foundational role in a free-standing
total approach to ethics that can take its place, e. g., alongside (utilitarian)
consequentialism and Kantian ethics; and they will want (one or another
form of) virtue ethics to develop its own distinctive account of social
morality and of social justice in particular.
Yet anyone who has such a hope will, presumably, recognize the consid-
erable obstacles that lie in its path. Virtue ethics has a proven record of siding
with anti-democratic social/political ideals, and when one considers that
neither Aristotle nor Plato favored democratic forms of government, one
may well wonder whether ancient models can provide any sort of plausible
contemporary basis for political philosophy or for ethics as a whole. Even if
individualistic virtue ethics is not incompatible with current-day democratic
values, the Aristotelian virtue ethicist may have to draw upon other tradi-
tions in order to give any sort of account of such values; and in that case she
will face an intellectually unpleasant choice. If she declines to develop any
sort of political philosophy, virtue ethics simply gives u p on any attempt to
develop a full-scale ethical alternative to currently dominant views, like
utilitarianism/consequentialism and Kantianism, that are clearly capable of
generating accounts of both individual and social values. (It is interesting
that Rawls’s contractarianismmakes no claim to account for the full range of
individual morality.)’ However, if virtue ethics has to borrow from Kantian
ethics or consequentialismin order to generate a plausible political philoso-
phy, then it acknowledgestheir strength and superiority in one major sphere
JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 24 No. 2, Fall 1993 5-37
Q 1993 Journal of Social Philosophy
6 MICKAEL SLOTE
of ethics, and that gives us at least some reason to prefer one or the other of
these general approaches.
Of course, in saying all this, I am assuming that as ethicists we cannot be
satisfied with anything less than an account and justification of democratic
and liberal values. But this is an assumption that many Aristotelian ethicists
even today seem unwilling to make, and, of course, the unwillingness plays
into the suspicion that virtue ethics is an anachronistic irrelevancy in the
current climate of political thought. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose
lustice? Which advances a basically Aristotelian ethics while
taking an openly critical stance toward liberal democracy. And in Justice and
the Human Good, William Galston conspicuously declines to defend the
superiority of democratic ideals and institutions over some of their tradi-
tional alternatives, in the course of advocating a neo-Aristotelian conception
of social ju~tice.~
These contemporary examples make one all the more skeptical of the
relevance of Aristotelian virtue ethics to contemporary political philoso-
phy: and, of course, Plato’s philosophy is an even less likely source of
sustenance for liberaldemocraticvalues. But I still believe that ancient virtue
ethics is capable of helping us to understand and justify modem-day
political ideals, and the main burden of the present essay will be to develop
a plausible virtue-ethical alternative to utilitarian/consequentialist and
Kantian accounts of liberal democracy. In order to do so I shall appeal to a
tradition of ancient ethics in which interest is currently reviving, but which
has recently had far less influence than either Platonism or Aristotelianism,
namely, Stoicism.

1.The Ethics of Self-Sufficiency

TheStoicsdidnot advancemodernviewsabout the rights of citizens, but

they were the first philosophers in the ancient world to advocate the ideas of
the brotherhood of all men and of the divine spark or element in all human
being^.^ AndsuchideasnotonlyseemfarfromPlatoand Aristotle, but move
us in the direction of modem democratic/egalitarian/liberal views of social
justice. However, I believe that we need to appeal to another, quite funda-
mental Stoicnotion, if we want to be in a position fully to defend such views.
The Stoics espoused an ideal of aufarkeia,or self-sufficiency, according to
which one should be free of all attachment to worldly pleasures and
privileges and care only about what was assumed to be within one’s own
control, namely, one’s own virtue and rationality. But we need not take self-
sufficiency to such an extreme to recognize it as an attractive human ideal.
For example, when we praise people for being moderate in their desires or
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 7

needs, we are not thinking of them as having to curb certain strong desires
in order to insure their long-run well-being-exercising what we can call
instrumental moderation. Rather we imagine them as simply not desiring
(or not so strongly desiring) certain things many of us do want, as capable
of being entirely satisfied or content with what would not be enough to
satisfy other people. Those who are not so easily satisfied-especially those
whose desires in certain directions are insatiabl-eem needy and even
greedy by comparison with someone whose desires are moderate, and such
moderation represents a kind of self-sufficiency, as opposed to neediness
and dependency, that most of us think well of. Even if the extreme degree of
self-sufficiency recommended by the Stoics is beyond human capacities, we
can recognize self-sufficiency as an ideal or admirable trait which, taken (as
it were) in moderation, has an appropriate and honored place in our lives.
And the defense of egalitarian and liberal democratic values and indeed the
entire virtue-ethical conception of social justice to be offered in the present
essay will take its primary inspiration from Stoic ideas about self-suffi-
ciency.6
However, the Stoics deployed the ideal of self-sufficiency within (what
is standardly regarded as) a fundamentally egoistic view of ethics, and one
may well at this point wonder how fairness between individuals and any
kind of egalitarianism can be grounded in such a seemingly self-centered
virtue. But the virtue is less self-centered than it may have seemed to the
Stoics and than it may initially appear to us, and, for all his self-proclaimed
egoism, it is, ironically, Nietzsche who shows us how to use the ideal of self-
sufficiency as a justification for certain forms of altruism.
In Beyond Good and Evil (section 2601, he writes:

The noble type of man ...honours whatever he recognizes in himself:

such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground is the feeling of pleni-
tude, of power, which seeks to overflow...the consciousness of a wealth
which would fain give and bestow:-the noble man also helps the unfortu-
nate, but not-orscarcely-out of pity, but ratherfromanimpulsegenerated
by the super-abundance of power.

What Nietzsche is pointing out here is that an individual who feels

entirely satisfied with what she has will not only seek nothing more for
herself, but, in the natural course of events, also feel she has enough to spare
for others. Thus the person who is self-sufficient in the way we have spoken
of can exhibit or express or exude that (sense of) self-sufficiency in acts of
generosity toward others. Consider, for example, a person who stands
everyone in a barroom to a drink when he wins the lottery or daily double.
8 MICHAEL SLOTE
Such an action comes from and exhibits a momentary sense of superabun-
dance, but that precisely doesn’t mean that it is motivated by the desire to
gain something for himself. To be sure, if he acts as he does because he fears
the envy of those around him, his generosity is self-interested and instru-
mental. But if the generosity stems from a sense of having more than enough,
it derives from his feelings about his own well-being but doesn’t aim to
enhance that well-being. Quite the contrary, the man gives something away
that he might use-the money that pays for the drinks-because he feels he
hasenoughtaspare for others,andinacting thusheexhibitsamomentaryself-
sufficiency and a momentary non-instrumental generosity that would be
lacking, for example, in any winner of the lottery who begrudged the drinks
to others and wanted to keep all his new-gained money for himself. (Nor
need the generous winner beaiming at his own glorification, or admirability,
though he in fact does act more admirabIy than a lottery winner who
begrudges drinks to others.)’
Of course, the justdescribed example is one that would hardly please
Nietzsche, since it illustrates a kind of generosity that can occur in the
everyday life of “the herd,” and Nietzsche speaks of superabundant gener-
osity only in connection with the extraordinary noble few. But if what is
admirable or noble in Nietzschean terms occurs in hornier and moregregarious
circumstances than Nietzsche suggests, perhaps such considerations can,
contra Nietzsche, beused to support democratic and egalitarian ideals of social
justice. We shall have to see. But let us now consider a further variation on
our homey example.
The person who stands everyone to drinks may not give very much of his
newly acquired wealth away and may make no move toward any form of
longer-term giving. But what if someone wins a large sum in the lottery and
decides to finance his poor but very deserving niece’s way through college
and medical school? Given the way things are, such generosity may repre-
sentasubstantialportion of what the person has just gained, andinany event
it has a long-term aspect absent in the case of buying drinks for everyone. It
represents, in effect, a large commitment to the niece over a long period of
time, and as such it exhibits greater self-sufficiency than is seen in the act of
standing everyone in the house to a drink.
Let me be clearer. The person who stands everyone to drinks may be just
as self-sufficient (or free from neediness or greed)as the person who finances
his niece (indeed,they may be one and the same person), but their respective
acts/gestures don’t exhibit the same amount or degree of self-sufficiency.
The standing to drinks bespeaks a sense of (at least) momentary flushness or
superabundance or sufficiency, but not a sense of having (more than)
enough for the indefinite future. The latter counts as greater self-sufficiency,
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 9

and the generosity to the niece, which exhibits it, is thus, in the ethical terms
we have been exploring, more admirable than the momentary buying of
drinks. So we can see how it is possible to explain and justify substantial and
long-range generosity-of a sort characteristic of friendship and other
relationships involving commitment to others-in terms of the ideal of self-
sufficiency.
It is worth noting, however, that I am not assuming that a sense of
superabundance will automatically or necessarily lead to short-term or
long-term beneficence. We can imagine someone so giddy or dizzy with his
own good fortune that he can’t spare a thought for anything else and so ends
u p giving nothing to others. But superabundance may-and often does-
naturally and understandably express itself in thoughts like “I have enough
to spare for others” and in generous actions; and our account can explain
why a person who thinks and acts thus is more admirable than someone, e.
g., who wins thelotterybutdoesn’tforamomentfeelsatisfied,thansomeone
who begrudges drinks to those around him at the time he wins the lottery.
The forms of generosity we have described above represent, however,
only part of the ethical account of self-sufficiency we need to draw upon in
framing a conception of socia1justice that is adequate to present-day ideals
and traditions. The kind of self-sufficiency we have so far been speaking of
is an admirable inner state or disposition, and it is a distinctive (or at least an
ideal-typic) feature of virtue ethics that it should base its moral and even its
political ideals on facts about character and the inner life, rather than on
(rational or moral) rules or goals of action. Self-sufficiency as we have so far
described it certainly conforms to this idea of what virtue ethics is or ought
to be and is quite relevant to a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian and liberal
democratic values. But the familiar idea of self-sufficiency has another facet
less stressed by the Stoics, but perhaps more central to the account of social
justice to be offered here.
Self-sufficiency can be exhibited in moderation and, as Nietzsche may
have to teach us, in generosity-and such self-sufficiency is a lack of
neediness or greediness in regard to, a kind of independence from, the good
things of this world. But there is also self-sufficiency, or independence, in
regard to other people, the self-sufficiency a child attains in learning to d o (and
to want to do) things for herself rather than relying on her parents or others
to do them for her. Learning work skills and developing the capacity to live
on one’s own and make one’s own way in the world represent accomplish-
ments in self-sufficiency, and this form of self-sufficiency is naturally re-
garded as a kind of self-reliance.However, self-reliance is also demonstrated
in learning to think and decide matters for oneself, and if we add these
further dimensions of self-sufficiency to our virtueethical picture, I believe
10 MICHAEL SLOTE
we have in hand the main elements we need in order to justify liberal
democratic ideals of social justice.s
The idea that the acquisition of work skills and habits represents a form
of heightened or enhanced self-sufficiency is relatively obvious, and if
anyone speaks of the need to learn or develop self-sufficiency in life, one is
much more likely to think of learning to work and live on one’s own than to
think of the self-sufficiencyinvolved in moderation (much less of the
connection Nietzsche points out and we have elaborated between being
satisfied with things and generosity). But not everyone wants or at least
develops the sort of self-reliantself-sufficiency we have just been speaking
about, and some individuals-typically the extreme cases of those most
pampered and those least well provided for in early lif-eek somehow
either to preserve the cocoon of childhood or to make u p for the lack of such
by getting others to provide for them throughout the course of their lives.9
Moreover, people born to wealth typically lack the practical necessity of
providing for themselves through work or a profession. And one may ask
whether such people have any reason to cultivate the self-reliant self-
sufficiency-the capacity for and actuality of work and taking care of
oneself-that most people need. Why, for instance, should a rich person
concern him- or herself with work and the capacity for work isn’t the whole
notion of leisure and of a leisure class completely antithetical to the idea of
work, or a career, as a universal human ideal or aspiration?
Our current exaltation of work and career seems to be a fairly recent
historical development and one arguably influenced by Protestant religious
thought and practice. Indeed, in earlier stages of Western history and in
other cultures as well, work has been seen as an obstacle to human dignity
and moral development, rather than as a source of dignity and moral
development, as nowadays it is so typically considered to be. But I think that
the latter view can be defended and undergirded, without appeal to any
specifically religious traditions or ideas, by reference to the considerable
value we place on (thedevelopment of)self-sufficiency. As we haveseen, the
ideal of self-sufficiency (and the value it places on certain kinds of personal
strength and independence) is of venerable philosophical origin and has a
perennial appeal, and on that basis I would like to defend the value and
validity of work and making one’s own way in the world along lines similar
to those we used just above in defending (non-self-interested)generosity
and moderation.
Perhaps the Zocus classicus of the historically emerging idealization of
work is the discussion of master and slave (“Lordship and Bondage”) in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel says that a master who relies on slaves
is in a certain measure the slave of his slaves. He depends on them in a way
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 11

they don’t depend on him for sustenance and survival. And given that the
slaves show a mastery of life’s problems and of their environment that the
master lacks, Hegel also holds that slaves are in some measure masters in
relation to their master. But we need not dwell on such paradoxes/meta-
phors or rely on any special ”dialectical logic” in order to make the relevant
point here about the connection among work and self-sufficiency and
human dignity.
Hegel connects the master-slave or master-servant relationship to the
idea of work and demonstrates a high opinion of (the capacity for) work.
Though the idea of self-sufficiency (or of human dignity) is not explicitly
mentioned, the whole master-slave discussion seems predicated on the
positive value, the admirability, of independence, self-reliance, and/or self-
sufficiency. What Hegel doesn’t mention or even imply, however, is the
obvious connection that can be drawn between the master-servant relation
and the way children relate to their parents.
A master may be or become dependent on slaves or servants in the way
children are originally dependent on their parents, and if it makes sense for
children to envy, admire, and/or emulate the self-sufficiency, self-reliance,
or independence of their parents or other adults, then there may also be
reason to feel shame, inferiority, or regret if, through reliance on slaves or
servants, one never learns to do things for oneself, if one remains parasitically
dependent on others. (Note that the charge of parasitism isn’t mitigated,
perhaps it applies with greater force, if one has the ability to make one’s own
way in the world but doesn’t in fact do so.) To be sure, it is tempting, if only
one can somehow manage it, to rely on the work or devotion of others and
go through life being taken care of in the way parents care for children or
servants/slaves care for masters and mistresses. Such a life seems, or is,
comfortable, easy, pleasurable. But that is compatible with regarding such a
life as less admirable than the more difficult and possibly less secure life of
someone who has learned, or had to learn, how to work and/or take care of
herself.
However, the self-sufficiency that can be achieved through work is no
moreabsolute and unqualified than what is associated with moderation and
generosity toward others. The Stoics seem to overestimate the human
capacity for indifferenceto pleasure and pain and to the presence or absence
of love or companionship, and our capacity for self-sufficiency in regard to
the so-called good things in life may, therefore, be somewhat limited. But by
the same token, it is pretty much impossible, and certainly inadvisable,
nowadays to achieve or aim for total self-reliance in one’s work. There exists
a division of labor, and we all have a general debt to the technology,
knowledge, and material infrastructure that have sedimented down to us
12 MICHAEL SLOTE
from previous generations, so even the present-day recluse in a log cabin in
the wilderness will not be entirely self-reliant. Rather, the self-sufficiency
that can be achieved or aimed for in this area is (roughly) a righting of the
balance as between self and other.
Where there is a division of labor, those who work (inside or outside the
home) provide for others and are in turn provided for by others in their
society or community, but for such people and unlike young children and
the leisure classes, the dependence is two-way and thus is no form of
parasitism. The degree of admirable self-sufficiency is thus greater than
anything attributable to young children or the leisured rich or powerful.
And even if it is very far from absolute, we should remember that such self-
reliance constitutes a life-accomplishment that it takes time and effort to
achieve.
Work was not idealized or valued in the ancient world in the way it has
typically been in recent times, but, properly understood, Hegel’s discussion
of master and slave can help us to see that work and the capacity/preference
for work exemplify a virtue that the ancient world in fact highly esteemed,
the virtue of self-sufficiency. It is at the very least ironic, then, that in
speaking of the self-sufficiency of the truly good or happy human life,
Aristotle should have ignored the ways such alife as he advocated lacks self-
sufficiencythrough its assumed dependence on the services of slaves.lo The
fact that Stoicism was a philosophy for slaves, and not just for the idle or
leisured, helps it elude the main brunt of this particular irony. But I have seen
no evidence that the Stoics ever emphasized or exalted work as an essential
ingredient in auturkeiu or as always necessary to playing one’s proper role in
life, and there may be a different irony lurking in the fact, if it is one, that the
grinding tedium and/or sheer horror of slavery may have blinded even the
Stoics to the admirability of work and the deplorability of leisured parasit-
ism.
So far we have been speaking of a kind of self-reliance that consists in
making one’s own way in the world and not being parasitically dependent
on other people. Such self-reliancerepresents an admirable form of (relative)
self-sufficiency that can be set alongside the (relative) self-sufficiency in-
volved in moderation. But as subsumable under the larger category of self-
sufficiency, the virtue of self-reliance has some other facets we have not yet
focused on, and in order to complete the (admittedly partial) picture of
individual virtue that we need in order to launch a virtue-ethical account of
social justice, we now need to consider self-reIiance informing opinions and in
making decisions.
Kant in the essays “What is Enlightenment?” and ’What is Orientation
in Thinking?’’ (and elsewhere) articulates perhaps better than anyone else
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 13

has what is at stake in regard to the issues of thinking for oneselfand (though
there is less emphasis on this) choosing or deciding for oneself.” Having a
mind and will of one’s own are essential to one’s fullest humanity, and,
according to Kant, to allow someone else to dictate to one what one should
do or to take one’s opinions wholesale from some other person or some
institution is a deplorable violation or betrayal of one’s own human dignity.
Kant is thus advocating self-reliance in thought and choice that represents
the very opposite of intellectual or volitional parasitism, of not thinking for
oneself and of being themere instrument of anotheis will or another person’s
creature or lapdog.
The varied language in which we find it natural to speak of this topic
gives ample evidence of the importance we place on intellectual and voli-
tional self-reliance, and clearly intellectual and volitional, especially voli-
tional, self-reliance are related to the kind of self-reliance that is exhibited in
making one’s own way in the world, e. g., by having a job and supporting
oneself. But it does seem possible for someone to accomplish the latter while
taking all her opinions and choices from, say, her parents-being told, e. g.,
what job she should take and where she should live, etc. Such a person, we
might say, is less than fully adult: although she may have in some degree a
life on her own, it is not a life of her own on her own. From the standpoint of
our virtue-ethical vocabulary, we can say that such a person or her conduct
is deplorable or criticizable for the parasitism she or it demonstrates, and the
fact that the same opposition of parasitism vs. self-reliance is naturally
applied to the issue of making one’s own economic way in the world and to
the issue of where one gets one’s opinions and choices gives us reason to
think that all the forms of self-reliance I have mentioned are related or
similar.*2
We may be further convinced when we consider what is involved in
forming an adult identity of one’s own-the sort of identity that is supposed
to be forged, if one is lucky, after what Erik Erikson (in Childhood and-Sociefy,
Identityand theLife CycZe,and elsewhere)calls a youthful “identity crisis.” For
such an identity seems to require both making one’s own way in the world
(a life on one’s own) and choosing a distinctive way of one’s own for doing
so (a life of one’s own), and in the absence of either, therefore, an agent-based
virtue ethics that stresses (among other things) self-sufficiencywill want to
say, and be in a position to say, that a person is less than (fully) admirable.
Moreover, the kind of self-reliance we have just been describing is
subject, for us humans, to the same limitations we earlier saw attach to
economic self-reliance and self-sufficient moderation. We cannot be fully
self-reliant in economic terms because of the division of labor and the
historical accumulation of technologicalinfrastructure and knowledge-we
14 MICHAEL SLOTE
can only counterbalanceour dependence on others and early-life parasitism
by independent work. But given the difficulties involved for us in achieving
even this limited or moderate self-reliance, there is no reason to deny that the
effortful achievement of such self-relianceis admirable (in us). Similarly, we
are not likely to be entirely indifferent to comfort, money, security,reputa-
tion, physical pleasure, and companionship, but if we are not greedy with
respect to such things, which is by no means easy for us humans, and are
consequently generous to others, then we are admirable (as humans).
All these points also apply to self-reliant thought and decision-making
(choice).Even someonewho displayssuchvirtues has to rely toa largeextent
on what others have thought and on habits of action and a sense of what
counts as a live option that may largely be inherited from or influenced by
other people. But the self-reliant individual forges from what she has learned
from others opinions of her own (at least on certain important topics) and
chooses a distinctive path in life, distinctive ways of living, even though her
freedom here will be limited by what others expect of her or have over the
years expected of her. Still, by comparison with those who are or let
themselvesbe overwhelmed, in their choices or opinions, by the decisions or
opinions of others, such a person counts as admirable. The limited self-
reliant thought and/or choice that sheachieves is difficult to achieve and not
all that widespread-people, especially parents during one’s childhood, are
always trying to influence one with overt or lurking bribes or threats, so such
limited volitional and intellectual self-reliance really is something admi-
rable.13
In addition, dignity attaches to these kinds of self-reliance in much the
way it attaches to the economic self-reliance of work. Being a parasite of any
kind seems ethically deplorable and contrary to human dignity. Someone
who takes his opinions and decisions from others lacks a certain dignity that
others possess,14and, of course, thesamecan be said as between the parasitic
master and the slave/servant/worker. Indeed, a similar distinction also
seems applicable to the self-sufficiency that connects with moderation vs.
greed and insatiability. Someonewho is not difficult to satisfy with respect to
pleasure, power, money, or fame is naturally regarded as being more
dignified with respect to these things (JuliusMoravcsikcalls this ”a touch of
class”) than someone who is very eager for and strives to get more and more
of these worldly things (the image of “grubbing after things” has force with
respect to more than money).
Notice that the familiar notion of (human) dignity at stake here is a
variable one: one can have or lack dignity, gain or lose one’s dignity. Given
the roots of this notion, as here explicated, in Stoic doctrines, this result
should be anything but surprising. For according to (at least some of) the
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 15

Stoics, human dignity consists in being virtuous, rational, and wise-all

three being equivalent for them-and, according to the Stoics and common
sense, people vary enormously with regard to these traits. The idea of human
dignity has its source in Stoic thought, and indeed the distinction Kant so
greatly emphasized between having dignity and having a price seems to
have been taken by him from Stoic sources (Seneca's Epi~tles).'~ But Kant's
notion of dignity applies in two ways (at least): to the actually good moral
will and to people insofar as they possess such a will, on the one hand, and,
on the other, to people generally in virtue of their capacity, however evil they
may be, for morally good choice. The first application allows for human
dignity to be variable, but the second applies to humans by virtue of their
essential freedom and rationality and is thus not variable between individu-
als or at different times within the same individual (I ignore the problem of
what to say about idiots or people who go insane).
The invariable notion of human dignity comes, as I have indicated, from
Seneca via the notion that all humans have dignity rather than (merely)price,
and I earlier noted that the idea that all men are brothers and the idea that we
all have a divine spark in us both also come from Stoicism. So it would seem
that Stoicism was capable of generating or inspiring two different notions of
(human) dignity, one variable, one not, but it is only the variable notion that
has entered into our account here of what is admirable about self-reliance
and self-sufficiency in general.I6Kant's invariant conception of dignity, with
its Stoic roots, has an important role in grounding Kant's political and
individualistic ethical ideals, and we shall return to it later in our discussion
of social justice. But what I hope to show you now is that wedo not need that
notion in order to ground an adequate contemporary conception of social
justice. We can provide for liberal and egalitarian democratic ideals through
a variable notion of dignity that is based in ideas about variable human self-
sufficiencyandself-reliance that also have theirStoicroots. Ourgoal,in other
words, will be to ground democratic values in human dignity as an ideal to
be emu2ated rather than as a universally posited metaphysical reality.

2. Self-sufficiency, Social Parasitism, and Democracy

Most moral theories treat the assessment of actions as primary and

evaluatecharacter or inner states favorablyor unfavorably depending on the
actions they lead to or are directed toward; or else, in the manner of direct
utilitarianism, separately assess both actions and motives/character in
terms of their consequences. By contrast, a truly "agent-based" virtue ethics
evaluates actions by reference to independent (and thus prior) evaluations
of the inner states of the individuals who perform them, and a Stoic-inspired
16 MICHAEL SLOTE
ethics that highlights self-sufficiency is (to that extent) agent-based in this
sense because it regards certain motivations as inherently admirable or
deplorable and evaluates human actions in terms of whether they express,
exhibit, and/or give realization to such motivations.’’ Thus greediness in
one’s appetites and a parasitic desire to let others do everything for one
exemplify the very opposite of self-sufficiency, and actions serving or
exhibiting such motivations can be regarded as derivatively deplorable or
criticizable, given the kind of theory I have been defending. The present
essay makes no pretense, however, of giving a general account of human
virtue or morality; its claim, rather, is to have uncovered a multifaceted
individual virtue-self-sufficiency-that can serve as the basis for a defense
of egalitarian and liberal democratic values. Other virtues and values have
an important role in any total virtue ethics, but since they don’t enter into the
present account of justice, we can leave them aside for another occasion.
Thus for the limited purposes of the present essay, self-sufficiency is the
fundamental intuitive value in terms of which acts, motives, customs, and
institutions are ethically to be assessed, and although we have so far been
discussing ethical issues concerning parasitism vs. self-reliance and greed
vs. moderation on an individualistic basis, much of that discussion can now
be extended to questions about the ethical admirability or criticizability, and
in particular about the justice and injustice, of larger and smaller social
units.18 The main idea will be that a society is just to the extent its people
exemplify all the forms of self-sufficiency we have been discussing. And we
might say that the schematism of our account-what enables us to move
from ethical evaluations of individuals to claims about the justice of a society
as a whole-is the fact that social groups and even entire societies can
naturally be characterized in terms of the same notions of self-sufficiency
and dependency (and consequent dignity or lack of dignity) that we have
applied to individuals. If an individual can be parasitic or dependent on
particular parents or slaves/servants, receiving a great deal, but doing little
or nothing in return, so too can we speak significantly of an individual’s
being a social parasite and of a social class or group’s being parasitic on other
classes or groups and on society as a whole. Although the issue of parasitism
can be raised about those who are (perpetually) on welfareand that topic will
be of concern to us later in this essay, when we talk about egalitarianism, I
want to begin our discussion of social justice by focusing on the parasitism
of the rich and powerful-what we might call (social or economic) parasit-
ismfrom aboveand the connections of the latter to issues of social justice.
Throughout history there have been dominant social groups/classes in
societies, and that dominance has typically expressed itself in terms of some
sort of social/economic parasitism. Dominant groups have certainly pro-
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 17

vided leadership and to that extent have fulfilled a social function, though
when the leadership consists in starting wars and other projects that simply
glorify or aggrandize the leaders, it is hardly clear that the leadership isn’t
parasitism (and/or greed) masquerading as other things. But at least in
larger civilized societies dominant classes are also leisure classes, and leisure
classes are socially parasitic.
To be sure, some members, many members, of dominant leisured classes
will hold office or otherwise work. However, typically such individuals will
not have to work (to a large extent this will be true even of hereditary
monarchs, who can almost always find people willing to take decisions and
governing off and out of their hands). And in any event their working allows
a typically larger group of other members of the dominant group to be free
from any need to work ruling classes are thus also leisure classes. And a
leisure class is by and large parasitic on the work and contributions of others,
taking, not giving.Ig
We earlier characterized parasitic dependency as the opposite of admi-
rable in individual cases, and basically the same considerations can be
invoked in connection with the parasitism of classes, where, again, there will
be large numbers of individuals (though not too large, since we are talking
about an elite) who are content to be dependent on others, not self-reliant, in
the conduct of their lives. (Remember that this is always a matter of degree,
given the division of labor and the sedimenting of social benefits from the
labor and inventions of previous generations.)
Such (willing or intentional) dependency is deplorable, according to an
individualistic ethic derived in the above manner from Stoic aufarkeia, and
where a society is characterized by such dependency, it is the very opposite
of ethically admirable and we can call it unjust. Moreover, the features of
social and individual life in such a society that express, exhibit, and give
realization to this parasitism will also, on an agent-based view, be character-
izable as deplorable or unjust, and of course dominating elites tend to
support, insist upon, work through institutions that preserve their preroga-
tives. In traditional monarchies, ordinary people will, for example, have no
vote or any real say in the running of the government or of other institutions,
and to the extent these features of the society reflect and serve the motives
of an elite bent on and capable of allowing no inroads on, no erosion of, its
leisured prerogatives, they thus count as unjust and ethically deplorable on
the present view.
However, it is possible for the absence of civil liberties and powers/
rights of political participation not to be an expression of self-interested
parasitism on the part of some dominant class or group. This can occur for
a limited period, for example, when a national vote is postponed or certain
18 MICHAEL SLOTE
liberties are suspended as part of an effort of national self-defense against an
invading army or widespread flooding. But more importantly the absence
of the sorts of democratic institutions we cherish might to a large extent
reflect the attitudes of the ruled rather than that of rulers. In Making Sense of
Man,Jon Elster reviews a large body of literature devoted to this topic and
points out, among other things, that in traditional monarchies the politically
powerless classes may actually not want to vote or otherwise participate in
the political process (or have the civil liberties we now insist upon).20 By
faulty intellectualreasonings that Ekter describes in interesting detail, such
people may persuade themselves that any more democratic system couldn’t
work. Or the learning or beautiful manners of their social superiors may
make them willing to defer to them politically and in other ways as their
evident superiors. Finally, those who are dominated may say they are not yet
ready for political responsibility and a “sour grapes” adjustment to the
harshness of their lot in life may in any event make them cease to want
anything better.
To the extent the absence of democratic political institutions and civil
liberties expresses the preferences or wishes of people outside the parasitical
ruling elite, it is not an expression of economic parasitism (at least on the part
of the rulers, but let me simplify)and cannot be considered unjust according
to our conception. Willing (or chosen or intentional) parasitism on the part
of the elite or anyone else is always unjust, but on the present view, and not
implausibly, it is unjust only to deny civil and political powers to those who
seek them; there is no injustice merely in the fact that people lack civil liberties
and political powers they don’t want.*I (Nevertheless, there is at least an
empirical connection between the absence of certain powers and intellec-
tual/volitional parasitism, and we will shortly have to consider how this
bears upon issues of social justice.)
However, for an agent-based account, the idea of social justice seems to
involve more than the idea of the (relative) economic non-parasitism of
social groups and/or individuals. For even if it is humanly impossible and
a mere myth, Plato’s ideal republic seems far from ethically ideal or just in
contemporary terms; yet it is precisely a society where thedominant class or
ruling elite does not govern in its own leisured interests. Although the
philosopher-rulers in his republic are politically in total charge, Plato imag-
ines most economic wealth and benefits to accrue to the merchant or artisan
class, and the rulers, far from being a leisure class, are one and all to be
involved in the hard work of governing. Their main privileges, if these are
privileges, are privileges of education and political effectiveness or influ-
ence, not of enjoyment or comfort, and since Plato characterizes his just
republic as a place where everyone does his or her job, the charge of social/
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 19

economic parasitism presumably cannot be brought. So if there is anything

ethically wrong with such a society, we must go beyond the ideas of
parasitism, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency or, better, we must recognize a
further dimension to these notions.
This is precisely what we did above in describing the different (though
related) aspects of admirable individual self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
Kant and Rousseau (among others) insist upon the ethical value and signifi-
cance of thinking and doing for oneself, and yet this is a value that is largely
absent from Plato’s republic. The philosopher-rulers may or may not think
for themselves, depending on how one conceives the guidance/influence of
the Form of the Good and of their particularly rigorous and rigid form of
education. Arguably, though not obviously, they learn to think for them-
selves, and are not (merely) indoctrinated. But even if we are led, under
certain interpretations of what Plato (must have) had in mind, to regard the
rulers as having minds and wills of their own-as being more than mere
instrumentsnot,in thiscase, of themvine Will, but of theFormof theGood-
we clearly cannot make this statement about anyone else in the republic
Plato depicts. The lower orders are intellectual and volitional parasites,
taking direction in all major matters from the philosophers, and indeed they
are supposed to imbibe false opinions, nobles lies, from the elite in the
interests of social harmony.
We nowadays find the position of the lower orders in such an imagined
society degrading or degraded, and that judgment stems not from any
imagined facts of economic parasitism, but from the parasitism of opinion
and action that characterizes everyone other than the philosophical elite.
Thus earlier we spoke of the dignity inherent in making one’s own way in the
world, and that dignity is to a substantial extent absent among a parasitic
leisured elite. Where it is, that absence of dignity redounds morally badly to
the society that contains and is governed by such an elite. For in the present
agent-based virtue ethics, judgments about the justice or admirability of a
social unit depend on ethical judgments about the groups or individuals it
contains.
But where, as in Plato’s ideal republic, there is no social/economic
parasitism, there are no privileges of leisure, we cannot speak (so readily) of
the lack of human dignity among the dominant or ruling elite; the lack of
dignity, the degradation, if you will, is to be found among those who are
dominated and take their lives and opinions ready-made from their rulers.
The dialectic of master and slave imputes ethical failure to the master, and
one side of our understanding of social justice and the human dignity and
self-sufficiency it requires stresses the ethical disvalue of the privileges of a
leisured elite. But if we want to say what is wrong with or unjust about
20 MICHAEL SLOTE
Plato’s republic, we must refer to the lack of human dignity in the lower
classes, and the basis of the indignity is a failure of self-reliance and self-
sufficiency that is not particularly economic in character. The lower classes
don’t think for themselves and are willing to let others bear all the burdens
of political thought and activity, and this clearly represents a kind of
political-cumcognitive parasitism that we might wish to condemn as unfair
and unjust.”
Thus (at least) two aspects of human dignity and self-reliance/self-
sufficiencyseem relevant to a virtue-ethical conception of social justice that
is firmly based in an account of what makes individuals ethically admirable
or criticizable (we are not talking about evaluating people as artists, scien-
tists, or wits). As a result, our evaluation of social institutions or circum-
stances may allow virtue-ethical considerations a foothold, as it were, from
twodifferentdirections. Andlet meat this point expandalittleon this theme.
The political powers and civil liberties possessed by the citizenry in a
democracy are largely absent in autocratic or non-democratic forms of
government, and I have said that in the latter, the absence of democratic
political prerogatives and liberties can reflect the power-cum-motivation of
some larger or smaller leisured elite. Thus where freedom to criticize the
government openly or, for that matter, the freedom to organize unions is not
permitted, the denial of what we nowadays think of as rights functions to
preserve the hegemony and privileges of an elite, and although such an elite
may really believe in the justifications it offers (or offered in its behalf) of
why, e.g., unions shouldn’t be allowed, it, or its most sagacious members,
may surely in some way recognize and act upon the fact that various
democratic institutions or liberties would endanger its economic position or
way of life. Indeed, given what we know, it doesn’t require any controversial
social theory, it just seems common-sensical, to make such an attribution.23
But if the denial of democratic liberties and prerogatives is in given
instances criticizableas the expression of the parasitic motivations of an elite
(and I have simplified because there may be class or other forms of stratifi-
cation even within such an elite), then the presence of such liberties and
prerogatives can be said in some measure to counteract the parasitic tenden-
cies of an actual or potential elite. That does not make such democratic
institutions or circumstances insfrumentally admirable (i.e., admirable be-
cause of their consequences): agent-based ethics has no room for such a
notion. But it does mean, first, that democratic institutions constitute the
(ethically acceptable) absence of certain conditions which, because or to the
extent they serve and express deplorable parasitism, are themselves deplor-
able and unjust according to our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics. Thus for such
cases ”just (democraticinstitution)”operateslikea trousers word in Austin’s
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 21

sense, and it is the idea, so to speak, of positive injustice that wears the
trousers according to our conception. (In other instances, as we shall see
later, liberal democratic institutions can exhibit positively admirable mo-
tives like group generosity.)
Secondly, and here again there is an interesting contrast with utilitari-
anism, democratic prerogatives and liberties, to the extent they counteract
the accumulation of parasitic privileges by an elite, are instrumental in
preventing the lack of human dignity that accrues to an elite as a result of its
ability to provide many or most of its members with full-time leisure.24
Utilitarian authors like Mill regard democratic institutions as counteracting
the self-interest of the ruler(s), where the latter is thought to run counter to
the larger good of society, or the people in it.” So democracy has, for Mill,
a role to play in the advancement of social good or utility, whereas according
to the present account of virtue ethics, democratic institutions are means to
greater human dignify on the part of those who rule or would rule.
But as I mentioned earlier, the idea of human dignity gets a foothold from
a second direction, from the consideration not of the dignity of those who
rule, but of those who are ruled or are worse off. Having the voteand/or the
freedom to organize a union will more frequently (we hope) lead people in
socio-economicallyworse-off groups to think for themselves about political
or economic matters, rather than taking their opinions cut-and-dried from
their ”betters.” Mill in ”RepresentativeGovernment” stresses precisely this
advantage of universal suffrage and/or representative government, but
misses the significance such an advantage has under an agent-based virtue
ethics of the present sort.26 For Mill, again, the instrumental value of
universal suffrage lies in the fact that if everyone has a vote and everyone
thinks about politics, then society will be better off on the whole. (For one
thing, according to Mill, people do better on their own behalf than others can
do for them.) But for the present virtue ethics, everyone’s thinking for
himself or herself is admirable in itself, because it constitutes a form of
admirable self-reliance and dignity. So if everyone’s having a vote helps to
make people who are worse off (or everyone generally) think more for
themselves, its instrumental value lies in its being a means to virtue and
human dignity, rather than (merely) to utilitarian ends like pleasure, happi-
ness or similar benefits. The main stress is on human dignity and self-
sufficiencyand admirability even as regards instrumentalities, but, of course,
in the present instance, the dignity at stake is not that of actual or potential
ruling classes, but most particularly that of those individuals potentially or
actually not of the elite who would lose in dignity if, through not having a
vote, etc., they were or became demoralized and thought less for themselves.
(Remember I am not yet talking of welfare dependency.)
zz MICHAEL SLOTE
However, the above picture somewhat simplifies the phenomena by
assuming that the parasitism of elites is chiefly economic and that it is
primarily those who are ruled or disadvantaged who are in danger of
displaying intellectual or cognitive parasitism about the larger social and
political issues that bear upon their lives. But in totalitarian states (as well as
in many primitive societies), certain basic views are held dogmatically, and
the absence of permission to dissent and of certain other freedoms may result
from self-protective ideological rigidity rather than from specifically eco-
nomic motivations. To be sure, dogma or a party line may be enforced from
above, but it is still possible that the elite (together perhaps with almost
everyone else) in a given society should fall under its spell and be unwilling
to think for themselves, and the absence of certain civil liberties in such
circumstances may, according to the present virtue ethics (and barring
certain forms of total economic determinism), be deplorable and unjust for
exhibiting/serving (the elite’s) intellectual, rather than any sort of economic,
parasitism. We see, then, that the absence of human dignity and self-
sufficiency allows of a wide variety of social patterns and causes, but the fact
that agent-based virtue ethics can make a common charge against all (or at
least all seemingly unjust) anti-democratic social orders clearly supports the
contemporary relevance and plausibility of a Stoic-inspired approach.
It is worth noting that even though the present virtue ethics gives the
notion of humandignityamorecentral position than doesutilitarianism, the
latter cannot be said entirely to lacka notion of dignity, and since, moreover,
Kantian ethics and political philosophy accord a place to human dignity just
as great as, though in many ways different from, that accorded it by our
Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, it might be quite helpful at this point to say
something comparatively about the place of the idea of dignity in utilitari-
anism, kantianism, and our virtue theory.
To begin with, utilitarianism does make use of something like a notion
of human dignity insofar as it insists, with respect to the calculations of
consequences that determine the rightness or admirability of any given
action, that the well-being or pleasure or preferences of each individual
counts equally with that of any other (”each person to count for one”). As
Dworkin points out in Taking Rights Seriously,both utilitarianism and his
own form of liberalism embody an ideal of according equal respect to every
individual-they just differ in their conceptions or theories of (what it is to
accord) equal re~pect.2~ Utilitarianism’s ideal of equal respect is to be found
in the way it sums up consequences. An aristocratic system of morals might
give greater weight to the happiness of a duke or a king than to that of
commoners, but utilitarianism insists that everyonemust count equally in its
calculations, and this represents equal respect for everyone in a way that
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 23

weightings in favor of the aristocracy or king do not.

A similar point can be made in regard to the idea of human dignity.
Utilitarianism, we can say, respects the dignity of each human by treating no
human as more important in its calculations than any other. However, in one
respect utilitarianism is very inadequate as a means of expressing either the
ideal of equal respect for every person or the ideal of human dignity. Most
forms of utilitarianism treat the pleasure or pain of animals as just as relevant
to their calculations as that of humans, so if utilitarianism accords equal
respect, it seems to be equal respect to all sentient creatures; and if it gives
expression to an ideal of dignity, the dignity it honors is such as to be shared
by all sentient creatures, rather than constituting any sort of ideal of (distinc-
tively) human dignity.
By contrast, the present virtue ethics embodies ideals of dignity that as
a whole serve to distinguish humans from animals. To be sure, the fable
about the fox, nearly starving but free, who prefers such an existence to the
chained but comfortable existence of a dog can be thought to show that the
distinction between motivational parasitism and the dignity of self-reliance
can be made, anthropomorphically, within the animal kingdom. But the
dignity of thinking for oneself and autonomously making one’s own deci-
sions has little or no foothold with regard to animals. By and large, the
dignity we have been speaking of in articulating the present conception of
justice is, considered as a whole, a dignity that many humans lack and that
othersshare only withother humans (or other rational beings wedon’t know
about). What is more interesting, at this point, would be briefly to compare
and contrast the dignity at stake in our virtue-ethical account of social justice
with Kant’s powerful alternative conception of human dignity as it applies
to the political sphere.
The Kantian idea of a dignity or worth that is beyond price derives from
Stoic ideas, but makes its own distinctive reference to the noumenal charac-
ter of human moral freedom and rationality. The good will, making the
morally right conscientiouschoice, has dignity, but dignity and worth also
attaches to human beings in virtue of their capacity for such choice. Accord-
ing to Kant, both moralIy good choice and the capacity for it must be seen in
the light of our noumenal status, and our dignity consists in our being, as
moral persons, above nature.**
By contrast, of course, our virtue-ethical view of human dignity makes
no such demands. It holds that dignity can vary from person to person,
depending, for example, on whether the person is a parasite or has a life of
and on her own. But Kant too allows variation in how morally good people
are and thus in the dignity or worth that is displayed or exemplified in
morally good choice. However, he also places great weight on our capacity
24 MICHAEL SLOTE
for moral choice as a basis of dignity relevant to political values, and
although our account here of social justice can certainly allow that even
people who have let themselves become economic or intellectual parasites
may well retain a distinctively human (though not noumenal) capacity for
self-reliance, it is actual self-reliance or self-sufficiency that plays the crucial
role in its account of how democratic ideals and social justice are and can be
realized. (However, there may be some minimal degree of actual self-
reliance in letting someone dictate to one.)
For Kant, it is because people have the capacity for choosing morally that
we cannot rightly treat them as mere means. Even morally bad individuals
must be treated in the light of their capacity for moral goodness, and if the
denial of democratic liberties and powers involves treating people as means,
then that, according to the "End in Itself" (or "Formula of Humanity")
version of the Categorical Imperative, is what is wrong with and unjust
about traditional monarchies and the like. But this form of political argu-
ment, this way of approaching social justice, rests on a picture of human
nature that relies on the idea of the noumenal, an idea that most of us would
beintellectuallyuncomfortablewith. And without reference to thenoumenal,
it is not clear how a distinctively Kantian approach can or should proceed.
One can still say that where there is the capacity for rationality and
morality, there is also dignity and a right not to be treated as a mere means,
but if we are thinking of things more empirically, we run into problems about
morons, psychopaths, and others who seem to lack one or both of these
capacities. When one thinks of political values under the aegis of the "End
in Itself" formulation of the Categorical Imperative, it is natural to think of
the dignity Kant ascribes to all humans as giving rise'to a right not to be
treated as a mere means and then, derivatively, to certain particular familiar
democratic rights. Then, if one ties dignity to certain empirical human
characteristics, one avoids the noumenal, certainly, but there is the risk that
one will assign rights to too narrow or too broad a group of individuals or
sentient beings. However, that is a risk many political philosophers have
been willing to take.
Notice that Kant's view, whose fundamental ethical category is often
said to be the notion of duty, seems to be able to accommodate the idea of
human or political rights. But no less is this possible for our agent-based
account of political morality. To begin with, and as Allen Buchanan has
pointed out, the language of social justice and of political rights are by and
large intertran~latable.~~ One has a right to something if and only if one
possessesitasa matter of justice,and what we earliercharacterizedasunjust,
e.g., on the part of an elite can also readily be viewed as a violation of rights,
according to our agent-based view. Where ruling elites defend their leisure
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 2s

and power by preventing or repressing freedom to criticize or to organize

unions or to have a say in who governs, we have seen that they act unjustly
and that the institutions that exist are unjust. But we can just as easily tie the
notion of rights to self-sufficiency and non-parasitism and say that one has
a right not to be treated in a certain way (e.g., denied freedom of speech) if
such treatment exhibits parasitism and thus the opposite of self-sufficiency
on the part of an elite or if full self-sufficiency can be exemplified only if
institutions are set up for the prevention of such treatment. (Note that in the
light of what was said earlier, one may in some circumstances have no right
to unionize beyond the right not to be prevented from unionizing if one so
chooses.)
But now we have another whole side of social justice to attend to. We
have so far ignored issues of equality and rights connected with issues of
equality, and although, once a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian values
has been offered, we can say about rights to (greater or lesser) equality what
we have just been saying about civil and political rights, it is high time we
spelled out the account itself.

3. Virtue-Ethical Egalitarianism

In order to treat relations between justice and equality in agent-based

terms, it is necessary to bring in another aspect of self-sufficiency, one
familiar from our earlier discussion but largely dormant, so far, in our
discussion of social justice/admirability.
We earlier said that there was something admirable or virtuous in the
self-sufficiency that is exhibited in an attitude of satisfactionwith, and desire
for no more than, what one has already had or enjoyed and in a generosity
that gives out of a sense of having enough or more than enough, a super-
abundance, of what one wants. We also saw that a larger or longer-term
commitment of generosity can be the sign of an even greater, more secure
sense of sufficiency or superabundance, and we must now draw on such
considerations in order to give a virtue-ethicalcharacterizationof egalitarian
ideals and the role they play in a proper theory of social justice.
The issue of equality in connection with social justice arises most force-
fully and relevantly for societies where conditions of moderate scarcity
obtain, societies like those in the West nowadays where there is an economic
surplus beyond what is necessary for people’s survival and the issue can
arise of how fairly that surplus is distributed within the given society. In
some measure, I think the (instrumental and in some circumstances consti-
tutive) conditions of social justice already set out in this essay have a
substantial equalizing tendency, because the democratic institutions or
26 MICHAEL SLOTE
powers and liberties that we have defended-. g., universal suffrage, free
speech, organization into unions-operate as a brake on any ruling class or
elite's penchant for running things entirely to its own economic and political
advantage. But the existence of such institutions is nonetheless arguably
compatible with society's operating on a meritocratic or libertarian basis,
with thoseleft behind in the race for good jobs and economic rewards largely
dependent on the charity of the more successful for anything that takes them
beyond, or even to, a subsistence level-consider the possibility, for ex-
ample, of widespread unemployment and no welfare or unemployment
insurance to mitigate that condition.
In a libertarianmeritocracy, then, there will tend to be vast differences of
economic benefits or well-being unless there is an extraordinary amount of
charity donated individually or through corporations or other organizations
(the Church), yet the spirit of competition seems likely to foster a "devil take
the hindmost" attitude toward those who lose out in the struggle for
prestigious jobs, high pay, and even steady wages. (I am aware that many
will not see themselves as engaged in such a struggle.) Such a society is far
more likely to display a kind of unconstrained greed and an obsession with
upward mobility that are by and large incompatible with the kind of
charitable giving that would lessen the tendency to large socio-economic
differences in any significant way.
When a meritocratic society is greedy, its upper echelons obsessed with
and seemingly insatiable with regard to their own power, prestige, and
wealth, it lacks the moderation and generosity characteristic of those who
are not, so to speak, slaves of the enjoyment or possession of the good things
of this world, those whose desires for such things are limited and who at a
certain point are satisfied with what they have (had) and feel they have
enough to spare for others. So our earlier discussion of the ideal of self-
sufficiency, as it relates not so much to making one's own way in the world,
to self-reliance, as to the self-sufficiency of not feeling the need or desire to
have or enjoy more and more, gives us a basis for ethical criticism of typical
meritocracy. The better-off members of such a society will display a lack of
self-sufficiency, a greediness and lack of generosity, that makes them ethi-
cally unadmirable or deplorable, and our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, which
bases its evaluations of societies and groups on the evaluation of their
members, can then say that such a society is very far from being ethically
admirable or just. (By the same transpositions we saw operating earlier, it
can also say that such a society denies some people their rights.)
But couldn't there be a libertarian meritocracy where greed was not the
rule and where charity largely took of the edge of distinctions of success and
salary?I really doubt it-don't you?But weneednotbasewhat wearesaying
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 27

on such an assumption. A society where such charity really became the

(statistical) norm would arguably be far more just than the society described
above,and our virtue ethicscan characterizethat differencein its own terms,
obviously, because the charitable meritocracy and its meritocrats would
precisely be less subject to the accusation of greed and ungenerosity. Given
moderate scarcity, those who have the better jobs in a meritocracy really will
be displaying immoderateness if they seek to keep everything they have for
themselves and wish to gain further power and wealth. But if they don’t,
then the claim that the meritocratic class or the better-off members of the
meritocratic society display a deplorable lack of self-sufficiency and/or act
unjustly is substantially mitigated and so too is the accusation that the
society itself is, froma virtue-ethical standpoint,unjust (or, given the earlier-
mentioned transpositions, that it denies the worse-off their rights).
But we need at this point to make a further distinction regarding self-
sufficiency in order to see that there is also something unjust and rights-
denying and less than fully admirable about any libertarian meritocracy, if
such a thing is possible, where everyone well off is always very charitable
toward the less successful and less fortunate. Notice that as we have
described it, such a society contains no institutions that take the giving of
such charity out of the hands of the usual donors. They give, but, as with the
lady of the manor who brings soup to sick or indigent families, the giving is
entirely at their discretion. But, you say, if everyone gives, there may be
social pressure to give and this undercuts the idea of total discretion. Yes,
perhaps it does, but if we bring in the hope or assumption of such social
pressure, that may well be because we feel that there is something less
generous about a society where charity is given that doesn’t tie its own hands
and those of its members with regard to such giving. It is somehow less
generous if one gives to others but entirely reserves to oneself the right or
decision to stop giving at any future moment one pleases. For as Imentioned
earlier, there seems to be something especially generous about a long-term
commitment to giving, as opposed to momentary acts of generosity; and the
distinction can be well be accounted for in terms of the notion of self-
sufficiency. If one feels not only enough for the present, but in secure
possession of enough, or indeed of a superabundance, in regard to a more or
less indefinite stretch of the future, one displays a greater (sense of) self-
sufficiency than if one merely thinks one has enough or more than enough
for the moment, and the kind of longer-term commitment to giving that we
find, for example, in love and friendship is thus more admirable than mere
momentary giving, because it evinces greater and more admirable self-
sufficiency. (Of course, someone more securely self-sufficient may also
display momentary generosity, but the latter doesn’t exhibif the greater self-
28 MICHAEL SLOTE
sufficiencythat lies behind it and isn’t, according to the theory, as admirable
as what does.)
But institutions or laws that take charitable giving out of the hands of
members of a given society-not absolutely, but at least for the foreseeable
future-are another instance of the kind of long-term commitment to giving
that evinces more admirable self-sufficiency than momentary acts of gener-
osity or a succession of such. Laws that provide for social welfare payments,
progressive taxation, and the like are precisely of this kind, and thus any
society with such laws and institutions that back them up will, other things
being equal, count as more just, than a libertarian meritocracy whose
members retain the discretion to give or not to give charitably.
Moreover, even where there is strong social pressure to give substan-
tially to charity, what the worse-off receive is still chanty and seen as such,
whereas in a society with laws providing for progressive taxation and social
welfare, those who receive such benefits can regard what they receive as a
matter of legal right and, far from being beholden to particular individuals,
can see themselves as benefiting from decisions and arrangements that,
assuming suffrage and majority rule, they themselves have had a part in
making. This seems psychologically far more compatible with individual
self-respect on the part of those worse-off individuals who receive relevant
benefits, and so on grounds ofgenerosify ifself and in the terms to which our
agent-based conception of justice wishes to appeal, there is reason to prefer
to see the differences that arise from economic competition reduced via the
long-term commitment of laws rather than through the similarly long-term
inertia of socialcustom and pressure, and thus to see the institution of liberal
democratic social arrangements in place of a libertarian meritocracy, how-
ever benign.
This accords well with what many of us are antecedently inclined to
believe about what kind of society is ethically preferable or most just, and it
has further implications that should briefly be noted, If, for example, there
is to be progressive taxation that expresses the sense of having enough on the
part of the better-off members of a society, then there need to be effective
laws that make them secure in what they do have, in what remains to them,
laws against stealing that apply equally to all members of the society.
(Where, as often occurs,such laws effectively apply only to the worse-off, we
have yet another expression of greed rather than generosity on the part off
those who are better-off.) Furthermore, the possibility cannot be ruled out
that a virtue-ethically just society might have laws that prohibited forms of
behavior that at least on certain occasions would not count as individualis-
tically criticizable or wrong according to the same virtue ethics. But the
possibility of such cases is hardly limited to virtue ethics and has long been
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 29

familiar from discussions of the connection between law and morality: e.g.,
intuitively speaking, there is nothing morally criticizable in exceeding the
justly instituted legal speed limit in order to get someone to the hospital in
a medical emergency.
It is also interesting, at this point, to compare what has just been said
against meritocracy with Rawls’s criticisms in A Theory offustice. Rawls says
that meritocracy fails to conform to the dictates of his ”differenceprinciple’’
and as such fails to embody an ideal of fraternity that the latter can be seen
as giving expression to. He thinks fraternity can be understood in terms of
the generous spirit of sharing that one expects or hopes to find in families, a
feeling natural to family life and not imposed by larger legal/social institu-
tions, to the effect that one wants to benefit only if other members of one’s
family also benefit (though perhaps to a lesser degree).30 Rawls’s wording
in this passage taken by itself suggests something a bit weaker than the
difference principle: his description of fraternity doesn’t tie it to a desire to
benefit only to the extent that other family members reach the highest level
that is possible through one’s own good fortune. And it is not at all clear that
family spirit and real fraternity require such a stronger spirit of sharing.
What does seem obvious is that Rawls’s fraternity and the legal enact-
ments to which it gives rise can also be viewed as a kind of generosity on the
part of society and/or its better-off members (to the extent the latter by and
large accept and support those enactments rather than trying to undermine
them-if they do seek to undermine them, then on our account, the society
is lacking in admirability and justice, and, given the power of money, neither
will it be well-ordered or conform to Rawls’s overall social ideal.) And just
as Rawls’s view does not require absolute equality, but has strongly egalitar-
ian implications, the present account of social justice is strongly egalitarian
for reasons we have mentioned, and indeed there may be reason to suspect
that it will recommend a degree of equality fairly close to, possibly even
greater than, anything that follows from Rawls’s understanding of frater-
nit~.~l
One reason for suspecting this is the way in which Rawls’s employment
of the idea of fraternity undergirds or reinforces the contractually arrived at
difference principle with an argument from (something like Humean)
natural feeling and natural virtue. Our account of social justice also appeals
to something that can without impropriety be called natural virtue, for
although many people are not generous or generous-spirited, still when
people are generous from self-sufficiency and a sense of superabundance,
they need not be consulting conscience, convention, or ethical principles,
and in that sense their virtue comes naturally. Of course, it may be rarer to
find people willing to share with poor people outside their own families than
30 MICHAEL SLOTE
with worse-off family members, but it doesn’t follow that there is anything
less natural or less than natural about it, and Rawls must certainly be aware
that some familiesdon’t exhibit his kind of fraternity, not just some societies.
But the point is that for Rawls this natural or familiar family spirit and
generosity is the proper basis for larger social arrangements, and our virtue-
ethical conception of justice can likewise say that the self-sufficiency and
sense of having more than enough-enough to spare-that helps to launch
or at least preserve the love and friendship that in turnunderpins family life
can also serve as a standard for the evaluation and criticism of larger social
groups and social arrangements. As I have indicated, it s e e m that such
considerations can be brought to bear in defense of liberal egalitarism in
much the way that Rawls’s defense of the difference principle can be seen to
do.J2
However, one doubt will now perhaps seem particularly pressing in the
light of what we said earlier about the institutionalization, through law or
even through force of custom, of anything amounting to social welfare. If
people willingly live on chanty or on the legally instituted dole, they are
(what we might call) economic parasites from below, and if parasitism in the
well-off is to be condemned on grounds having to do with the ideal of self-
sufficiency,it must be condemned in the welfare poor. Do I then want to say
that social welfare is unjust or ethically deplorable, but that if the rich refuse
to allow it, that too might be unjust or deplorable?
Not quite. The term “self-reliance” has both a motivational sense and an
achievement or success sense, and from the standpoint of an agent-based
account but also more generally, the term ”parasite” applies with greatest
force only in connection with the motivational sense. So if someone really
does desire to be self-reliant (success sense) but has, in fact, no other way to
keep alive than by accepting charity or welfare, we may not consider her a
parasite, and in any event our agent-based view will treat her motivation,
rather than her success, as the basis for moral evaluation. Such a person will
presumably prefer workfare to welfare, but if there really are possible
economic conditions of moderate scarcity under which the worst-off cannot
be provided for in any way other than by charity or passive (non-workfare)
forms of welfare, then it will be ungenerous andunjust if the better-off don’t
provide such help (through relevant institutions).
The same point applies to the problem of individual handicapwhal-
lenges. We are learning more and more about how handicapped people and
the legally insane can be helped to useful, productive lives, and there may be
something to criticize in earlier social attitudes that, one might say,
ungenerously, condemned the challenged to total uselessness by not even
trying to devise ways in which they could be useful. But where someone
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 31

really is incapable of doing any useful work or performing any useful

services, this may not involve any parasitism or failure of self-reliance in the
motivational sense relevant to the present theory of justice. (If an irrerusably
helpless person feels temble about her total dependency, that may involve
a realistic sense that she lacks one of life's goods, but from the standpoint of
our theory it can be said that such a person is mistaken, if she feels guilty
about not being able to do more, and her moral illusion is itself, ironically,
evidence of and perhaps even constitutes admirable motivation in this area,
thereby freeing her from any justifiable moral or ethical criticism.)
Our agent-based theory of justice thussays that where there is deliberate
or willing parasitism (and this doesn't require the parasite to recognize that
she is a parasite; she need only prefer to act in a way that obviously counts
as parasitical, but that is compatible with not wanting to face the fact that she
is a parasite), people and therefore society are to that degree less admirable.
Thus welfare cheating and the leisured existence of the rich are chosen as
such and constitute injustices according to our view,%but this doesn't mean
that those who really prefer to be independent but cannot manage to
accomplish this (and this may include some children and adolescents) are
criticizable in its terms,and that, I believe, is a desirable or at least a plausible
result.
It also follows from the present view that if the worst-off in a given just
society came (gradually) to prefer passive welfare to workfare and/or if the
well-off in that society eventually became restive under progressive taxa-
tion, then the society would no longer be just, even if the institutions of
workfare and/or progressive taxation-the husk or shell of justicewere
somehow to remain in place for a while. One thing that seems attractive
about an agent-based approach to social justice is the way it conceives the
justice of any society as dependent on the "(ethical) soul" of that society as
embodied/realized in the persons who make up the society. But that
precisely means that the justice of a given society cannot simply be "read off"
from the way institutions are at a given time (from the fact that institutions
are as they would be if the society were just)."
Let me, then, by way of conclusion say a little more, briefly, about the
overall structureof theaccount of justicedefended in these pages. The theory
we have offered begins with a view of how ethically to evaluate individuals
and their actions and uses this as the basis for its larger-scale social evalua-
tions. That stands in marked contrast with Rawls's ethical views, where a
theory of the justice of the basic structure of society is supposed to precede
any account of individualistic moral norms. It also is the opposite at least of
Plato's procedure in the Republic, where justice "writ large" in society or the
state is treated as a heuristic for a correct understanding of justice in the
32 MICHAEL SLOTE
individual. To that extent Plato is working (to use John McDowell’s conve-
nient phrase)from oufside in. Yet when one focuses not on the analogy; with
the state, but simply on what Plato says about individual justice itself, it is
apparent that he understands right or just action as derivative (in the order
of being, not necessarily in the order of knowing) from an inner state of
justice, and, under that aspect or to that extent, Plato is clearly working from
inside out.
By contrast, the present defense of liberaldemocratic values moves
consistently from inside out. It bases its evaluations of actions on or in
evaluations of the inner life of the individual, and it also derives its evalua-
tion of any given institution or society from its ethical judgments about the
individuals in it.% And this is a reason for regarding the present view of
justice as more purely agent-based than Plato’s ethical views. However, our
view is not the only treatment of social justice to base the evaluation of social
justice on the evaluationof individuals and/or individual behavior. Nozick‘s
libertarian conception of justice is essentially of this kind; and certain recent
and very interesting attempts by Kantians/kantians to deal with questions
of social justice in terms that have their original home in Kant’s account of
individualistic morality-onora O”ei1l’s view, for example, that capitalis-
tic institutions can be criticized for treating workers as mere means-also
work from inside out in this way.% And I think there is no reason, before we
begin to work out one or another conception of social justice, to assume that
we have to base individual justice/morality on larger scale evaluations
rather than vice versa. The test of our account of justice depends, rather, on
its theoretical and intuitive merits as compared with other conceptions of
justice. And I might just mention at this point that the agent-based account
we have offered of justice wifhingiven societies seems naturally extensible
to issues of international justice as well-though there is no space to discuss
the matter further here.
Having now seen that a virtue ethics seeking relevance to contemporary
thinking has no need to borrow a political philosophy from outside its own
traditions, virtue ethicists must nonetheless eventually consider how to
integrate a virtue-ethical political philosophy into an endogenous general
account of ethical phenomena. But whether we should at this point combine
an Aristotelian virtue ethics of the individual (perhaps along lines devel-
oped in From Morality to Virtue, but highlighting the considerations of self-
sufficiencythat that book only occasionally discusses) with a Stoic-inspired
account of social justice or whether we should prefer a consistently Stoic or
Stoic-inspired approach overall to such an internal hybrid is a question best
left to a future occasion.37Under either eventuality, virtue ethics will have
shown its capacity to function as a total ethical view that is far from
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 33

anachronistic or irrelevant to currentday ethical theory. If any plausible

total ethics needs to be able to account for democratic and liberal ideals and
values, then virtue ethics is a worthy alternative to the Kantian and utilitar-
ian/consequentialist views that have for so long dominated the scene in
moral and political philosophy.

Notes

*I want to thank Bill Galston and Jerry Schneewind for helpful suggestions.
'SeeA Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971, p. 512.
*Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1988.
3Universityof Chicago Press, 1980. In his recent Liberal Purposes (Cambridge U. Press, 19911,
Galston defends liberalism, but not in a distinctively Aristotelian way.
'Of course, it is possible that a distinctively Aristotelian justification for liberal democracy
may someday be successfully formulated, but in the light of history this seems highly
unlikely. Recently, Martha Nussbaum in "Aristotelian Social Democracf' (in R. B.
huglass, G. Mara, and H. S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good, Routledge, 1990)
argues that Aristotle advocated a relatively egalitarian social democracy among citizens
of the state. But since Aristotle thinks that in the best state only those with non-manual
occupations, leisure, and virtue are qualified to be citizens, the social democracy is far
narrower in extent than what we normally think of under that title. Nussbaum clearly
believes that this defense of social democracy can be extended via Aristotelian consider-
ations to all the people of (permanently living in) a given society, but she doesn't make it
clear how she proposes to do this. (See,esp., pp. 239f. of her article.)
Ssee John Rist, Human Value: A Study of Ancient Philosophical Ethics, Leiden: Brill, 1982.
Lof course, both Plato and Aristotle appealed to ideas about self-sufficiency in a number of
ways and their views had a great influence upon Stoic doctrines, but neither made self-
sufficiency as central to individual virtue as the Stoics did, and the view to be offered here
grounds its account of social justice on self-sufficiencyas a virtue of individuals.
'One certainly shouldn't say:the man in the bar is satisfyinghis own desire to be generous and
is possibly gaining pleasure from acting generously, so he is not giving anything up and
his motivation is hardly altruistic. As Bishop Butler taught us, such arguments prove too
much.
T h e term "autonomy" is naturallyused both in connectionwith earning one's ownliving and
with thinking for oneself/making one's own decisions, but the term has so many other
uses in ethical theory that I think it best largely to avoid it in favor of the term "self-
reliance."
91n his Italian Journey, Goethe mentions visiting the houses of some rich Italian noblewomen
who were so pampered that they had practically lost the use of their legs and had to be
carried up and down stairs.
'OFor interesting criticisms of Aristotle's depreciation of (manual) work, see Terence Irwin's
Aristotle's First Principles, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, sects. 221-22. But Irwin makes no
connectionbetween leisureand the lackof self-sufficiency.Sucha connection is mentioned
or at least hinted at by Sarah Broadie in Ethics With Aristotle (Oxford, 1991, pp. 424f.); but
she doesn't try to draw out its implications in anything like the direction taken in the
present essay.
I might just add at this point that the idealization of work that has developed recently in
Western culture and that I am calling upon here need not preclude a Marxian (type of)
critique of the deadening or dehumanizing quality of much repetitive labor. But such
34 MICHAEL SLOTE
critiques often ignore or downplay the fact that even purely repetitive labor has an asped
of nobility or admirability to the extent it represents a self-reliant adult making his or her
own way in the world. (For simplicity, I won't now try to make sense of child labor in the
present virtueethical terms.)
l1Seealso Rousseau's Emile.
I2InA Theory ofFredom, Cambridge Univiversity Press, 1988,p. 213,Stanley Benn explicitly
uses the term "parasite" to describe intellectual/volitional non-self-reliance.
I3F0r discussion of how those who are volitional parasites can be said to allow themselves to
operate as the ',mere instruments" of others and of how pressure is put on people to
become volitionally/intelletually non-self-reliant, see Benn, op. cit., esp. p. 194.
"For example, in "Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics" (Political Theory 12,
1984,p. 343),GeorgeKateb says: "One'sdignity resides in being, to some important degree,
a person of one's own creating, making, choosing.. ., .
'This point ismadeby H.J. PatoninTheCategoricaZImperutive,fifthedition,Hutchinson,l965,
p. 189.
Wist (op. cif., pp. 1,30-32,, 41-47,70,112f., 151f.l makes it clear that the Stoics, despite their
views about the "divine spark," regarded individual dignity as contingent on individual
effort and variable among human beings.
"Aristotle's virtue ethics is arguably not agent-based in this sense, because of the emphasis
he places on the virtuous man's perceiving what it is right or noble for him to do in various
circumstances.But Plato's idea that right action is what serves or enhances the (indepen-
dently specified)health, harmony, or virtue of the soul does seem to make the evaluation
of inner states prior to that of actions. Perhaps the clearest example of agent-basing in
recent times can be found in James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory. For M h e r
discussion of agent-basing and the differing forms of virtue ethics, see my From Morality
to Virtue, New York Oxford, 1992,esp. Ch. 5.
'?%&ties can be more or less admirable for Teasons having little to do with justice: e.g., for
producing great composers generation after generation or for the gracefulness of their
manners. But I shall confine the discussion to considerations that, at least from a virtue-
ethical standpoint, arguably bear on issues of social justice.
19Accordingto Man, any landlord is a 'louse," a "parasite on capitalist production." (See
Theo~iesof Surplus Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972, vol. 2, p. 328.)And he
elsewhere says similar things about financiersof capital or what we call coupon clippers.
But he accuses industrial capitalists not of parasitism but of exploitation. Although the
Marxian notion of exploitationhas interesting connectionsto what I am callingparasitism,
I shall rely on the latter notion, which fits in better with agent-basing and is less likely to
invoke Marxian views in the midst of the arguments I actually want to make.
*%Elster's Mnking Sense of Man, Cambridge University Press, 1985,esp. pp. 413,420,428,
505.
?'Elster points out that Marx frequently confuses what serves the interests of the rulers with
what they consciously or unconsciously do in order to advance those interests. Ideology,
for example, might benefit rulers, but be a product of faulty reasoning or sour grapes on
the part of the lower orders. The present account of justice attempts to avoid such
confusion. For example, I am saying that certain ideological institutions count as unjust
only if the ruling classes are, consciously or subliminally, using them to advance their
interests and, in particular, preserve their prerogatives of leisure.
Wnwillingness to participate in the political process may count as politically parasitic
analogously with the way in which, for example, making false promises or failing to keep
them is parasitic on a long accumulating and beneficial practice of promising. In that
degree, requiring people to vote (as is done in some countries) may be just or a condition
of justice. If those who don't want the vote, in a traditional monarchy, are expressing a
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 35

politicallaziness, then they may beacting unjustly by being unwilling to do their fair share,
and the absence of the vote, for example, might be unjust for what it expressed about the
political parasitism of the lower classes, rather than for what it showed about the
economically parasitic elite.
uFor an interesting discussion of how, in particular, labor union organization, the absence of
monopoly, and respecting the "rights" of minorities all help to prevent exploitation/
parasitism, see Stephen Worland, "Economicsand Justice," in R. Cohen, ed.,Justice, N. Y.:
Plenum Press, 1986, esp. pp. 62ff.
"Bringing baskets of food to the poor in times of sicknessis a kind of sop thrown to the ideal
of self-reliant non-parasitism, and to the extent upper class women and men managed to
convince themselves by such occasional charitable activities that they were not living as
parasites, the ethical deplorability of their basic parasitism is compounded with that of
self-deception in the face of presumably unpleasant factsabout themselves.This is but one
exampleof how the desire for ease and comfort can contend with an aspiration most of us
feel toward self-sufficiency (think of how insistent many teenagers are on making their
own money and doing things for themselves, even when they might have things easier if
they allowed their parents to do all the things the parents are willing to do for them).
=Mill makes this point in various places including the Logic (first edit., pp. 557f.) and
"Representative Government."
%ee Chapter 3 ('The Ideally Best Polity"); also his Political Economy V, 11,sect. 6 and passim.
27SeeDworkin's Taking Rights Seriously, Harvard, 1978, esp. ch. 12.
"If we thinkof Kant's metaphysicsof noumena as fundamentallyan "asif" metaphysics,then
we should say, instead, that as moral beings we must regard ourselves as having a status
above/beyond nature and a special dignity or worth consequent upon that status. There
is more to be said, but this is not the time to say it.
29see his "Justiceas Reciprocityversus SubjectCenteredJustice," Philosophy and Public Affairs
1990, pp. 227-52. Incidentally,our agent-based theory of justice and rights is not based on
reciprocity in the sense criticized by Buchanan in his article.
3osee Rawls's A Theory of Justicz, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 105f.
3'A more or less egalitarian principle like the difference principle could be put into effect
through (piecemeal) legislation or actually be enshrined in a country's constitution,
though this too would require supporting legislation. (Onthe constitutionalizing of the
differenceprinciple or somethinglike it, seeJoshua Cohen and Joel Rogers's On Democracy,
N. Y.: Penguin, 1985, pp. 157ff.) In that case, the reasons Rawls gives for thinking the
difference principle (among others) can function as the just basis of a well-ordered society
can be harnessed to our virtue-ethical conception of justice.
However, in "Social Justice" (Journalof Social Philosophy XX, 1989, pp. 72f.), Bernard Williams
says that American social philosophy has tended to ignore the problem of getting to the
ideal state and concentrated, instead, on the character and institutions required to maintain
socialjustice-and certainlywe find this tendency in Rawls'semphasison well-orderedness
and the very little he has to say about building the just society. The present essay is open
to the very same criticism, and indeed from the standpoint of a commitment to social
justice, it is unsatisfying to be able to say little or nothing about how social justice is most
likely to be achieved. But that may be because theory taken by itself may be unsatisfying
for someone with practical hopes and aspirations, not because the theory itself is at fault
as a theory of justice. Moreover, as Cohen and Rogers point out in their Chapter 6, a
theoreticallydefended picture of what a just social order would be like is practically
relevant and potentially useful, because it gives us something to aim at and primes us to
be alert for certain justice-building opportunities, if and when they arise. Of course
theories differ among themselves, and no single justification of democracy or relative
equality is likely to gain the support of the majority of moral/political theorists;but to the
36 MICHAEL SLOTE
extent the theories (or most theories) converge on something like the difference principle,
their foundational differences may appear less practically debilitating and aspirations to
work toward social justice may become better focused through having an agreed-upon
ultimate target of legislationand/or constitutional amendment. (Compare Rawls's meth-
odology of overlapping consensus in "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,"
Philosophy and Public Affairs 14,1985, esp. pp. 248-50; also his remarks in A Theory oflustiw,
pp. 315-20, about the ways in which various "mixed conceptions" of justice might
ultimately have to appeal to the difference principle.)
=For defense of the idea that liberal democratic egalitarianism need not commit itself to
absolute equality or even to something as strongly egalitarian as the difference principle
see Amy Gutmann's DemocmticEducation, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1962, p. 262and also
her Liberal Equality, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 149.
=In the case of most welfare dependents and "chiselers," the injusticeis far less clear, because
of the injustices that have been done to them. People brought up in wretched poverty and
in a milieu whereeducationalopportunitieseither areunavailableor made toseem useless
may despair of economic success and perhaps understandably take the course of least
resistance by living on welfare and preferring not to get a job. But to the extent their own
society's lack of generosity is responsible for their impoverished circumstances, any
virtueethical injustice there is in their actions and life-style may be ethically mitigated.
Moreover, if we think of what societyhas done to them or failed to do for them as blighting
their human potential, asdamging them, then their welfaredependency and cheating (and
who knows what else) may seem like "getting their own back" and "recouping something
from life" and thus possibly more compensatory than parasitical and unjust. Here, the
contrast with parasitism from above, where we find people who have been brought up
with every advantage living entirely off the labor of those who have not, couldn't be
starker.
MTheconnectionoftheseideastoKant'sideaofaKingdomofEndsand to thedisputebetween
(e.g.1 Rawls and Nozick on the importance of actual, rather than hypothetical, consent is
an interesting question, but best left to a future occasion. (I am indebted for helpful
suggestions here to Larry Dobbs and Scott Gelfand.)
T o m p a r e Brian Barry's claim (in The Liberal Theory of lustice, Oxford, 1973, p. 126) that "a
liberal...must hold that societies ought to be organized in such a way as to produce the
largest possible proportion of people with an admirable type of character...."
Incidentally, one doesn't want to say that the justice of a society depends on every member's
displaying all the forms of self-sufficiency we have discussed. But the kinds of depen-
dency/parasitism/greed we have considered are not simply a matter of individual
failings hereand there-they have a structural character and certain infectioustendencies.
More needs to be said on this topic, but I might just point out that the present view doesn't
have the implication that absolute monarchy is juster than oligarchy because parasitism
from above is less widespread in it. In an oligarchical form of government, after all, more
people play a creative, determinative role in deciding political issues, and more self-
reliance in thought and choice, therefore, is presumably to be found. How these opposing
factors weigh against one another is a matter of fine tuning and further discussion beyond
the scope and programmatic intentions of the present essay.
Jdsee Onora 0"eill's Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy,
Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 122ff.
T o r a discussion of social justice that combines Aristotelianand Stoic/Kantian elements, see
Martha Nussbaum's "Human Functioningand SocialJustice," PoliticalTheory 20,1992, pp.
202-46. Nussbaum's essay does not, however, focus on the problem of justifying demo-
cratic institutions.
the agent-based theory of justice presented here is, from an historical standpoint, a hybrid of
 VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 37

Stoic ideas and resonant borrowings from later philosophy, but as a thoretical account it is
highly unified, since it is based on the singleleading notion of self-sufficiency.Having this
bird in hand, I have not, however, explored the possibility of giving a persuasive defense
of liberal democratic ideals on a more purely Stoic basis. Given Stoicism's historical
reliance on metaphysical assumptions (and arguments from naturalness) that would
nowadays seem highly suspect, sucha task seems a daunting one. But in work that has just
come to my attention, Julia Annas seems to be moving in something like this direction. See
her 'The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others," Social Philosophy and Policy 9,1992, pp.
133-48;and The Morality of Happiness, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.