A notion of “social practice” should guide the way we think about morality and politics. The first in a three-part series.
In the contemporary American context, too often political and moral debates are cast as winner-take-all contests between the false alternatives of organic collectivism and atomistic individualism. Thus ‘conservatives’ are supposed to be individualists who assert the claims of the individual against society and ‘liberals’ are organicists who want to promote social goods by limiting individual freedom. But the rhetoric of either individualism or organicism renders the full range of human concerns inexpressible. We can see this when individualist conservatives suddenly backtrack towards organicism when, say, they defend the social importance of marriage against assertions of personal autonomy; so, too, when organicist liberals defend an extreme individual right to self-expression that conflicts with their professed concern for social welfare.
The puzzle’s solution lies in the conception of a ‘social practice,’ a conception that has played a central role in much of twentieth-century philosophy. Philosophers as diverse as Tyler Burge, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alasdair MacIntyre, Joseph Raz, John Searle, and others have shown how social practices are a significant feature of philosophical anthropology. In order to understand what social practices are, and to see their relevance to our problem, we need to shift the focus from human individuals to the acts performed by human individuals. We will also need to draw a technical distinction between what we’ll call social institutions and social practices, although these terms are interchangeable in everyday use.
In brief, the solution to the problem is this: social institutions, like a state or a university, are aggregates of the human individuals who compose them, and so the goods of human individuals are prior to the goods of the social institutions of which they are parts. Social institutions ‘host’ social practices like politics and education. Social practices, however, are comprised not of human individuals themselves, but of the acts of human individuals. Human acts are the parts that compose social practices, and human acts are determined by the social practices they compose. In other words, social practices are not mere aggregates, and the relation between individual acts and social practices is analogous to the relation between cells and the whole organism of which the cells are parts.
Thus both organic collectivism and atomic individualism have their kernels of truth, which the natural law account of social practices and social institutions preserves. The collectivist goes wrong in supposing that all social forms are, like social practices, organic wholes. The individualist goes wrong in supposing that all social forms are, like social institutions, aggregative. But the social world is populated both by aggregative social institutions (the NFL, the American Bar Association, the New York Philharmonic) and by the holistic social practices (football, law, classical music) that the corresponding social institutions promote and sustain.
On the natural law account, then, each individual human act has a dual dependency, both on the individual subject (the human agent) who performs it and on the particular practice (or practices) to which it belongs. The individual act draws its nature and its individuality from both sources: it wouldn’t be the very act it is if it had either a different subject or belonged to a different practice. For instance, consider your pulling of the voting lever in the booth on November 4, 2008; that action was what it was because of the social practices in which you were a participant. It was an act of voting, an exercise in justice of your civic duty, a parent’s teaching his child by example, and so on. You intended to pull the lever, and pulling the lever was part of the aforementioned social practices.
The human nature of each individual human being is the ground both for the capacity of the human being to enter into social practices and for the need to do so. It is in this sense that we are social or political animals. When an individual human being participates in a social practice, he allows himself to become an agent of the practice by taking into his intention the intrinsic end (telos) of the practice itself. For instance, in order to play baseball, I must act as a baseball player, which involves making the intrinsic end of the game (victory of my team in accordance with the rules) the end of my baseball-related acts. The nature or essence of the act does not depend solely on the agent’s internal psychology: it depends also on the essence of the social practice to which the act belongs.
Taking a page or two from MacIntyre's After Virtue, no?
Our actions can and should have a bearing on others and our associations, including that perfect association or community of the polis... the goods of individuals and goods of groups - same or different? I wonder if what is being expressed here through the use of "social practices" could be done more simply. Man is a social nature, and part of his good is living with others. There is o such thing as a "social" life without reference to other people; and that cannot come to be without those people existing first. When we look at groups or associations, we consider primarily the good of the friendship itself, and the good that is the foundation of the friendship, what unites the friends in the first place. We can think of social practices as those actions that are particular to the members of a group, qua members of that group -- either those that bring about the good(s) upon which the friendship is based, or the actions that belong to friendship itself.
Friendships in associations can become participations in the political common good (communal life), or forms of civic friendship. They are ordered to that, but they can also become "exclusive" and thus detrimental to the community.(E.g. the group desires its good at the expense of that of the community and acts unjustly, etc.) We are more familiar with abstract/institutionalized forms of associations, or we may not be aware that these are associations ordered towards friendship because of our mobility and lack of social cohesion/community. We treat such associations as merely friendships of utility and cease our participation once they are no longer useful to us.
Not all associations are potentially political? It may be easy of us to think of associations that do not involve Aristotle's "friendship of virtue" but is this because we conceive of those associations incorrectly, living the atomized lifestyles we do? What I mean is that many do associate with others for the sake of utility or pleasure, and there is no enduring basis for their association, but should we not be aiming at permanence in our relationships? Isn't that the "ideal"?
Perhaps it is time for me to re-read After Virtue.
