Socities have a Unity of Order, constrasted with the Unity of Substance, a useful example is a human person, and mere aggregation, people in a line, say.

This Unity of Order is a real Unity. At the end of the six days of creation, creation is crowned not with a new natural kind, or an aggregation of parts but the first society, the marriage of Adam and Eve.

This proper ordering of Adam and Eve in society, in specifically marriage, is the last act God performs before declaring creation “very good.” What made creation very good, is not yet another kind, but the proper ordering of creation. The typology of Adam and Eve’s proper ordering in marriage is of keen interest to both Jewish and Catholic exegesis. It is considered a type of Israel and the Church, respectively.

Indeed Augustine tells us that “Creation is for the sake of the church.”

Within the Social Doctrine we can discern different ways of being social in the world.

We can be in a situation of spontaneous agreement, like traffic, or the aggregation of a marketplace, or a queues in a bank. There is intersubjectivity of a sort, but no pretext of striving for unity as a good held in common.

We can exist in partnership where the goal is what is stressed and the good of the partnership can be divided up. A mutual fund is an example. I contribute to the fund and expect a private good in return. The difference between a partnership and a society is that when a partnership is dissolved it can be entirely cashed out and divided. Another difference between partnerships and societies is that societies survive the failure to achieve their external end. A failure to provide the goods contained in a contract will tend to end buisness relations. The failure to produce children will not end a marriage. The failure to win a game will not end the team. The church choir doesn’t dissolve after a bad performance

We can exist in society, a communion of multiple rational agents working in united action toward a goal where unity is among the common goods sought. In society the group constitutes in itself a moral person, something distinct in dignity. The common good is indivisble. I can divide the items of a marriage. But I can’t divide a “marriage” as such. I cannot give you 50% of a marriage, though I can give you 50% of the shared mutual fund that was held in the marriage.

from this we can discern two errors:

The Error of what John Paul II calls “Real Socialism” asserts that partnerships are ipso facto unjust, and that cordination of goods can only take place in a situation of justice under the society of the nation state.

There are no partnerships, only societies with conditions of injustice, partnerships are covers for exploitation, to recify the injustice of partnerships we must transfer these cordination of resources into society, into the nation state.

On the other side there is the error of liberal individualism which takes there to be no societies as such. There are only aggregations of individual interests.

The line of thought goes that there is no society as such, no good common to all, and positing such a good thwarts at times the aggregated good of individuals, as such the state should take pains to eliminate the good of society as society wherever it contradicts and supersedes the good of aggregated individual interest.

Sam reminds us that lies and violence are the system, and suggests that the worst get on top.

I had the pleasure of dining with Richard Wagner, Gerald O’Driscoll, and Dan Hammond two summers ago at the illustrious, but now-on-hiatus Adam Smith Summer Institute that David Levy and Sandra Peart organize at the University of Richmond. The other gentlemen were gracious enough to not split the check evenly amongst us that evening.

In conversation I discussed my work on William Wilburforce for abolition in Great Britain. My model argues that reform came at a great cost, and that the same results could have been achieved if the abolitionists had directed their resources toward purchasing manumission directly, in order to generate sympathy between slaveowner and slave. My general premise is that reform that does not redeem the oppressor in situations of systematic injustice will inevitably give rise to new injustices.

I was leaning hard on Wilburforce, suggesting that ambitions in Parliament drove his efforts toward abolition. Creation of a dedicated set of Baptists (evangelicals) makes it easier to identify Bootleggers from whom to collect tidy rents.

But O’Driscoll urged me to give Wilberforce the benefit of the doubt, in order to make my case more robust. T’was not the ambition nor the latent self-interest that drove Wilberforce’s efforts toward a second-best solution. Rather, the nature of the beast that is representative democracy is the root source of the emergence of special interest groups. Evangelicals became an internally cycling loose coalition that effectively captured the median voter for most of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in Great Britain and the United States.

The lesson is that we can assume the very best of intentions by the agents within our models of government, but where there is occasion for faction, it will emerge, with negative consequences for the whole.

Adam asks me,

…what is the ideal here, and when is enough enough? This directly parallels “all-things-considered” rationality; when is a citizen’s policy position “all-things-considered” enough to make one a good citizen tout court?

I fear I may not have been as clear in my original post as I could have been, because I believe Adam’s taken a different point than I’d intended to make.

Admonishing those who don’t acknowledge the full costs of XYZ public policy preference is admonishing those who’ve adopted a telescopic morality. The state is the terminus of legitimate power. There are very few recourses to an unjust state action. So, if you outsource to the state, I’d ask that one fully understands the nitty-gritty necessary to have your plate of pork chops, and that, just because one chooses to act through a mostly-unimpeachable third party, it is not an excuse to outsource one’s ethics. I’d argue, instead, it becomes more important to “get right” your politics.

If you outsource your law enforcement, you are, at least by some greater-than-0 amount, complicit in its methods. If you outsource your children’s education and their safety, you are, at least by some greater-than-0 amount, complicit in its methods. We all work on the margin, and, through marginal reforms, hope to make police abuses less prevalent and school administrators less insane. However, these trade-offs are ever-present, just the relative magnitudes may change.

Now, this is not to say that government cannot be a potential answer to a given problem. Maybe whatever cost-benefit analysis a person chooses to employ shows a clear advantage. Government is the gun in the middle of the room, and just because someone really, super-duper likes a given policy goal’s implementation, that doesn’t absolve him of the ethical duty to understand the costs of their super groovy, state-violence-backed public policy preference. Don’t blink at the implications.

Anyways, to answer Adam’s actual question: #phronesis