Two Underappreciated Reasons to Value Political Tradition
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Two Underappreciated Reasons to Value Political Tradition Gregory Robson1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Some departures from political tradition have been vindicated as historic advances: the rise of democracy and the abolition of slavery, for instance. Others have led to death, destruction, and despair: Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for instance. Should citizens and political leaders follow or deviate from tradition? Deviation’s mixed record makes it hard to say. But the welfare of countless persons depends on the answer.1 I shall defend two interlocking theses about the value of political traditions (henceforth sometimes just “traditions”) that any adequate argument for deviation must consider. After preliminaries in section I, section II defends the thesis that traditions enable citizens and civic groups to forge meaningful links between a society’s past, present, and future. This argument extends some of Samuel Scheffler’s recent work on traditions generally to the case of political traditions in particular.2 In section III, I defend the thesis that traditions interpret abstract principles of political morality, rendering them determinate enough to be realized in particular, diverse societies. I develop a model of how this process works, building on and proposing revisions to a fascinating recent argument by Steven Wall.3 The last section addresses possible worries about whether members of political societies with settled traditions really are self-determining. Overall, we will see that political traditions are valuable largely because of the temporal meaning they provide for citizens and how they render abstract principles of morality determinate enough for citizens to realize in practice.
1
I am very grateful to the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University for supporting my research. For their generous feedback, I thank the anonymous referees and Sameer Bajaj, Jacob Barrett, Daniel Cummings, Adam Gjesdal, Tristan Rogers, David Schmidtz, Robert Van’t Hoff, and Steven Wall. 2 Samuel Scheffler, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 See Steven Wall, “Political Morality and the Authority of Tradition,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2016): 137-161.
* Gregory Robson [email protected] 1
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
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1 Traditions Samuel Scheffler sees traditions, including political traditions, as “complex, multigenerational enterprises comprising elements of ritual, practice, historical memory, and collective aspiration no less than bodies of doctrine and individual conviction.”4 John Kekes offers a similar definition: A tradition is “a set of customary beliefs, practices, and actions that has endured from the past to the present and attracted the allegiance of people so that they wish to perpetuate it.”5 And Steven Wall says that political traditions are multigenerational, give their adherents reasons to comply, and are not reducible to legal
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