Why the Civil Society is not Good Enough
Amitai Etzioni
When examining the State's role in cultivating the character and personal qualities of its citizens, liberals traditionally argue that the State should only be concerned with cultivating good citizenship while social conservatives maintain that the State has the wider responsibility of promoting general moral behavior. In contrast, communitarians argue that moral behavior should be promoted, and society, not government, should be responsible for the task. Communitarians believe that developing and sustaining a good society requires extolling values such as trust among society's members, stewardship of the environment, marriage, and care for the elderly. In contrast to the liberal State, the good society envisioned by communitarians defines shared formulations of the good. But unlike social conservatives, the good society only seeks to cultivate a limited set of core values.
The means of nurturing virtue that good societies chiefly rely upon are subsumed under the term "culture". Culture includes: a) agencies of socialization instilling values into new members of the society; b) agencies of social reinforcement supporting the values members have acquired through socialization; and c) societal institutions with positive values built into them. An active culture, composed of these elements, is necessary to cultivate and sustain values because of the basic fact that without continual external reinforcement, the conscience tends to deteriorate.
To those who warn of the potential for a culture's moral voice to be coercive, communitarians respond that the moral voice leaves the final judgment and determination of how to proceed to the acting person -an element notably absent when coercion is applied, for instance, by an authoritarian government. The basically voluntaristic nature of the moral voice is the profound reason the good society can, to a large extent, be reconciled with liberty, while a society that fosters good persons through the State cannot.
The communitarian good society should not be confused with a civil society. Civil society has two components: a rich array of voluntary associations that countervails the State and a citizenry that acts with civility toward one another. Communitarians are concerned that little difference is drawn between voluntary associations on the grounds of the substantive values that they promote in such a society. Beyond encouraging voluntaryism and engagement, the basic standpoint of the civil society is that one voluntary association is, in principle, as good as any other, providing no guidance as to which association should volunteer for or which values should be promoted.
In good societies, however, voluntary associations help shape the society's moral voice, promote its core values and thus receive its approbation. Communitarians may tolerate associations and life-styles that do not promote the core values, but this does not mean they must treat them all as equally compatible with the society's values. Civil society is not a good society as here defined because it does not promote one set of core values but rather provides simply the forum in which a plurality of such values can be debated without end. Communitarians argue that as religious fundamentalists and secular authoritarians race to fill the moral vacuum widely felt around the world, the concept of the good society holds the most promise of upholding a substantive set of values while preserving liberty.
Boletín Reforme N° 397
