 from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I am currently serving as the acting law librarian. But this is a particular homecoming event for me because I was the law librarian of Congress when this Kellogg lecture was first inaugurated with Ronald Dworkin in 2009. And we are now on our fourth lecture. And it is just a pleasure to be here and to be able to welcome you on this occasion. We are so grateful to the John Kluge Center for co-sponsoring this event with us. And we are enormously in debt to Fred and Molly Kellogg. And I'd like them to just rise for a moment so that you can all see them and join me in applauding them. Both Fred and Molly have a long history of federal government service. Fred served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and was a special advisor to Attorney General Elliott Richardson during the Watergate crisis. He also was, and this was the first time I ever met him, general counsel at the National Endowment for the Arts. And it was a pleasure to sort of be exposed to his knowledge in a direct way at that time. Molly Shulman came to Washington as a newly minted undergraduate from the University of Texas at Austin and got herself a job in the office of JJ Jake Pickle, who I believe to this day is known as one of the longest serving members of Congress. He came from Austin and she remained in his office for 30 years in federal service. And so we are incredibly grateful that Fred and Molly have selected the Library of Congress for this lecture series. The Library of Congress, as I hope all of you know, is one of the greatest crosswords for conversation in the world. Our collections enable people in contemporary times to talk to scholars across the ages, across civilizations, across cultures, and across languages. But in addition to our collections, we offer phenomenal programs. We show films. We have poetry readings. And we have a number of programs that are lectures where our audience gets to hear the leading thinkers of our time. It is a marvelous coincidence in fact this afternoon that just one month ago today, Charles Taylor, the eminent Canadian philosopher who I believe was Michael Sandell's supervisor at Oxford as when Michael was a Rhodes Scholar. And you'll hear much more about Michael from Fred Kellogg in a moment. But it is a marvelous coincidence that Charles Taylor was given by the Library of Congress just 30 days ago today, the John Kluge Prize for Humanity. And so when we talk about the continuum of creativity and sharing knowledge across all kinds of bridges, we can also look to that event and applaud the relationship that you and Charles Taylor had. So with that, I want to just finally introduce the one member of the selection committee who is with us this afternoon. There were two outside veterans, Mark Medish, who could not join us, but the eminent Don Wallace. Don, would you please stand so people could give you an applaud? This is a very, very highly vetted process. And of course, we are very grateful to the time and effort that the library staff, as well as our external vetters and reviewers provide to us. I know we are in for an incredibly exciting and worthwhile afternoon, and without further ado, Fred Kellogg. So let me add my thanks to the staff of the library for their work on this event. And thank you all for coming. Thank you, Don, for your work. And thank you, Michael Sandel, for coming to honor us with your presence. Many years ago, right after graduating from college, I drove a school bus around the state of Maine filled with young children from families on welfare. They were budding actors, putting on plays in small towns. And I was their producer, as well as their driver. I was reminded of this by a passage in Michael Sandel's extraordinary book, Democracy's Discontent, America in Search, of a Public Philosophy. My Welfare Theater program was in 1964, just before what Michael sees as a turning point in our history when Americans lost two crucial things, our faith in government and our belief in the moral fabric of community. But he says that even before the 60s, we had already ceded our tradition of civic republicanism to the procedural state, the idea that individual rights trump ideas of the good. Civic republicanism is a tradition that we inherit from Aristotle. Michael recounts our experience with it over the past 200 years. My bus was financed by President Johnson's war on poverty. Although Johnson gets mixed reviews and mixed grades in Michael Sandel's book, the war on poverty gets an A. My wife, Molly, came to Washington from Texas during the Johnson years to work for Rep. Jake Pickle, where she served as his executive assistant. These lectures honor the U.S. Congress by promoting discussion and debate of a kind very important to Michael Sandel at the conceptual level, different perhaps from the presidential debates. Michael Sandel is deeply concerned with the subject of democratic debate, indeed with public reason. His work began at the conceptual level and he made a major contribution to political theory. He has applied his ideas to a reconsideration of our history and our future about civic life and good citizenship. Debates that we've had before, but are lost or forgotten. If Aristotle were suddenly reincarnated and asked for his opinion, he'd say, where's the assembly? Tocqueville praised the town meeting as the heart of American democracy, of candid and open debate. Where's the assembly in the town meeting today? The shopping mall? Social media? Celebrity magazines at the checkout counter? How about political campaigns? These are important questions and Michael's career has gone to the heart of them from top to bottom, from the conceptual level, to the historical, to the practical, to the question of what do we do now? It is a remarkable career of concern for the relation of human thought to human action and human flourishing. His scholarship is distinct from our previous lecturers, Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raas articulated opposing views of the philosophical conception of law. Amarcia Sen addressed the social and economic foundations of justice. Professor Sandel has reconsidered the foundations of Western thought about justice in his earlier critique of liberalism and then the lessons of the American experience. Having studied the problem now in his active life as a lecturer, he has begun solving it. He asks us why we have come to believe that it is dangerous to engage each other openly with our moral convictions. So get ready. I now give you Michael Sandel leaving time for questions but as you anyone familiar with Mr. Sandel knows, he may have some questions for you. Well, thank you all for coming. What an honor it is to be here at the Library of Congress and Fred and Molly Kellogg. Thank you for conceiving of this lecture series and for those warm words of introduction. They take me back to a summer I spent in Washington and I lived in an apartment just a few blocks from here. It was the summer of Watergate and I was between my junior and senior year in college and I thought I might be a political journalist when I grew up. That summer I applied to newspaper internships around the country and I got an offer from a Houston newspaper, the Houston Chronicles. So there's also Molly, a Texas connection. I'd never been to Texas, but they offered me a summer job in their Washington Bureau. This was the summer of 1974, the summer when the House Judiciary Committee was deliberating about the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It was also the summer when the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case about whether Richard Nixon would have to turn over the tapes. It was a small newspaper bureau, about five reporters only and so I had a rare opportunity to cover these historic events. I lived and slept and breathed Watergate. I knew who had said what to whom on any given day. At the Judiciary Committee issued, you may remember, volumes based on the tapes, factual volumes and findings of fact. They often were delayed and didn't release them. They couldn't release them online in those days. They released these volumes in cartons, the back of the Capitol. Usually it was six, 30 or seven at night by the time they got around to doing it. I volunteered to be the one in the office to go pick up the copies for the office. And I lugged them home to my apartment on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from here and spent the night pouring through to see if there were any new nuggets of information about this event. And at the, toward the end of the summer, the hearings were dragging on. And I was, I wanted to have the drama brought to a conclusion before I had to go back in September to start school again. So I began hoping for a resignation because that was the only way it would end in time. Richard Nixon obliged me. And in August he did resign. So I was able to help cover the resignation and I was able to sit in the press gallery in Congress when Gerald Ford gave his address to Congress upon assuming the presidency. Now, I was always interested, deeply interested in politics. An interest in philosophy came late, not really until I was in graduate school. When I graduated college, I thought maybe I would be a political journalist or maybe even go into politics. At the end of that summer, I was sitting with the bureau chief, my boss, and he said he was a man in his late fifties. He said maybe he would retire because the story would never be this exciting again. And I said to him, if you're saying that at the end of a career, what am I to think at age 21? If you say it will all be downhill from here. In the end, I wound up going into moral and political philosophy. I fell in love with it in Oxford as a graduate student. But I always retained my interest in politics and I always wanted to relate philosophy to the world, to the world in which we live. And so that brings me to the project that Fred has described, the kind of political philosophy I've tried to do. I would like to put to you some questions about political philosophy, one might even call it a public philosophy that informs much of our political and legal discourse these days. And I would like to suggest some difficulties with the reigning public philosophy. I'd like to begin with an observation about politics today. If you look at democracies around the world, certainly including in this country, there is widespread frustration with politicians, with political parties, and with the alternatives being offered. We see this in the rise of protest candidates. In democracies around the world, at the heart of this frustration, I think is an unhappiness with the terms of public discourse. People are frustrated and rightly so because they sense there is a hollowness, a kind of emptiness in the terms of political discourse. What passes for public discourse these days consists too often of narrow managerial talk which inspires no one. Or when passion does enter in shouting matches on cable television and talk radio. Ideological food fights on the floors of Congress. People want something better. They want not only a more elevated kind of public discourse, I think they want also a morally more engaged kind of public discourse. I think so the question arises, why don't we have it? There are two sources I think to the empty or hollow character of contemporary public discourse in this country. One of them has to do with what you might call the market triumphalist faith over the last four decades or so since the early 1980s. We've been in the grip of a certain market faith by which I mean an uncritical embrace of the assumption. That market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good. I think this faith is misguided. I think it should be subject to critical analysis and argument but it's had a remarkable staying power even after the financial crisis. When the financial crisis came in 2008, I think many people thought and hoped and expected that this would mark the end of an unquestioned faith in the role of markets and their ability to define the public good. And in the tendency of markets to reach into spheres of life beyond well beyond the domain of material goods into spheres of life, civic life, journalism, law, spheres of life where they don't belong. But the financial crisis came and went and still we have despite some debate about regulatory policy, we have not really had a larger debate about what should be the role of money and markets in a good society. So the question arises why the staying power of this assumption even after we might have thought this faith would have been called into question by the financial crisis. I think the reason for the appeal of the faith in markets as instruments for defining the public good goes beyond the ability of markets to deliver the goods or prosperity or rising GDP. I think the appeal runs deeper and it's this. Markets seem to be neutral instruments for deciding hard public questions. They seem to be mechanisms that can spare us from having to contend with one another in messy, controversial debates about hard ethical questions. When two consenting adults make a deal to buy something, to sell something, all that matters the economists teach us is that there is mutual gain. Both parties to the deal freely choose. It's a voluntary transaction. No one needs to ask whether they have rightly valued the goods they've exchanged. This is true whether the thing being bought and sold as a toaster or a car or a flat screen television or in principle a kidney, an organ for transplantation. All that matters on a certain economic picture of efficiency and of freedom of choice. Is that the parties themselves make a voluntary exchange. And so there's no need on this economic picture. There's no need for the rest of us, for citizens generally to pass judgment on whether they've placed the right value or the wrong value on the things being exchanged. Rit large, this idea that voluntary transactions among consenting adults can set the value of goods. This idea is attractive because it seems to be neutral. It seems to be non-judgmental. And it therefore seems to spare us as a political community the hard questions that arise when people get to debating how to value goods. And for that matter, according to what conceptions of the good life we should govern our lives together. I mentioned two sources to the hollowness or to the emptiness of public discourse. The appeal of the market faith as a seemingly neutral instrument points to the second source. And the second source is not something I would call a faith. But a principled argument, a certain view about what public reason consists in and how it should proceed. This principled position says that a just society is one in which people are free to choose for themselves what ends, what conceptions of the good life to pursue. And therefore the basic laws, the basic constitutional structure of a just society should not affirm or endorse or depend for its justification on any particular conception of the good life or of virtue. According to this principled view of public reason. We should not try to embody in law any particular conception of virtue or the good life. According to this conception, a just society doesn't try to cultivate or form citizens with certain virtues or dispositions in relation to the good life. That's up for each citizen to choose for himself or herself. And so the project of a just society, project of constitutional law in this picture is to devise a basic structure of rights, neutral among ends within which individuals can choose their ends and their conceptions of the good life for themselves. I've called this way of thinking about a just society in the social practices and the constitutional interpretations that attend it. The procedural republic. Procedural in the sense that according to this conception of politics and law, government should try to be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good life. It should not try to form any particular character among citizens whose justification depends on some view about virtue or the best way to live. Another way of putting the appeal of the procedural republic and to the requirement of what some have called liberal public reason understood in this way is that it is non-judgmental that it doesn't require citizens to pass moral judgment on the ways of life and on the virtues that their fellow citizens espouse or aspire to. Now I said this seems to me a flawed ideal. And I think it's flawed in two ways. First, often with some of the most important questions, public questions we face, it's not possible truly to be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good life. Second, even where it may be possible, it is sometimes undesirable to aspire to neutrality of this kind. Undesirable because in so far as we try to set aside substantive moral and spiritual questions in public life, we hollow out public discourse. We contribute to the kind of empty public discourse that is the source of so much frustration today. These are general thoughts and principles. I would like to illustrate them with three or four examples, examples that will be familiar to all of you about the way we debate. Some big questions, including some big questions bearing unconstitutional law. One example is drawn from freedom of speech. Now, one doctrine of First Amendment jurisprudence that has become deeply influential over the last roughly 60 years or so is the doctrine of content neutrality. The Supreme Court, since roughly speaking the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, has embraced the idea that the way to interpret the meaning of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech is to insist that governments, be they state legislatures or Congress, should not decide and embody in law what is worthy content for speech and what is unworthy content. And the Supreme Court itself has struck down restrictions as it sees them on freedom of speech for violating content neutrality. Now, there was a case in 1952 when the Supreme Court did uphold a law in Illinois that prohibited racist or hateful speech. The president of a white supremacist league had been convicted under an Illinois statute, prohibiting the portrayal in any publication of depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens that exposes the citizens of any race, color, creed, or religion to contempt. It was a hate speech regulation. And the Supreme Court upheld it by a vote of five to four. The opinion was written by Justice Felix Frankfurter. Given the history of racial and religious strife, the state of Illinois was not without reason, he said, in seeking ways to curb false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups made in public places and by means calculated to have a powerful emotional impact on those to whom it was presented. Now, this case was called Boharney, the Frankfurter opinion. Boharney did uphold, it's often forgotten because it's not been overturned but it's never been, it's not been used since as the basis of First Amendment jurisprudence. The Boharney case did uphold a hate speech law. But in practice, the idea of hate speech has been rejected under a First Amendment doctrine on the ground that, well, it's not content neutral to take one example. This involves a case that did not reach the US Supreme Court. The case of Skokie, a neo-Nazi group, you'll remember, wanted some years ago to march through Skokie which had a large population of Holocaust survivors. The town of Skokie enacted an ordinance preventing them from doing so. The neo-Nazi party challenged it in the federal courts with the help of the ACLU. The ordinance was struck down and the march was permitted. Now, what about the doctrine of content neutrality in regard to Nazis marching in Skokie? Was this truly neutral? Well, how reasonable it is to set aside or abstract from a judgment about the content of the speech depends on competing and contested ideas about the relation of speech to social practice and the relation of individual to communal identity. The content neutral case for protecting hate speech by setting aside any judgment about its content, about its worth actually presupposes a controversial theory of personhood and speech. It rejects the idea, which Frankfurter accepted, it rejects the idea that respect for persons may sometimes require or involve respect for persons not just as individuals, but as members of the particular communities they belong and on whose status their social esteem may depend. It also depends on the controversial idea that speech can only advocate. It can never by itself constitute an injury in and of itself. It can only be regulated on the content neutrality doctrine. If it can be shown to produce some harm, some physical harm independent of the insult or the expression of hate itself. Now these are both controversial and debatable questions but the content neutrality doctrine answers them in a certain way. And you might say that paradoxically this way of thinking about freedom of speech, the procedural republic way, the content neutrality way, the non-judgmental way actually tolerates speech more by respecting it less because it fails to take seriously the power of speech as speech to inflict injury on a particular group or persons, quay members of that group. But this is in line with the dominant line of interpretation of the First Amendment. I'd like to contrast this with another federal court opinion ruling on a contested march. And if you've seen the movie Selma, you will have been reminded of the famous march in 1965 when Martin Luther King led a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Alabama governor, George Wallace, tried to stop the march. The case went to the U.S. District Court and the judge, some of you may remember, Judge Johnson, Judge Frank Johnson, he heard the case. He acknowledged the claim by the state of Alabama and the governor that the states have the right to regulate the use of their highways for the safety and convenience of the public. Judge Johnson acknowledged that a mass march along a public highway reached to the outer limits of what is constitutionally allowed if the state said no. Nevertheless, Judge Johnson ordered the state to permit the march, and this is the interesting part, on grounds of the justice of its cause. Quote, the extent of the right to assemble, demonstrate, and march peaceably along the highways should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs being protested and petitioned against. In this case, the wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly. So, Judge Johnson's ruling. Now in some ways, he's a hero in memory and he's a hero in the movie. He's the one who rules permitting this historic march, but the reasoning he used was judgmental. It was at odds with the precepts of liberal public reason embodied in the procedural republic. It would not, his ruling, his reason, have helped the Nazis in Skokie. It was, in this sense, a judgmental, you might even say illiberal, decision. And yet, in retrospect, we honor and valorize the courage of, in the principle of Judge Johnson, who permitted Martin Luther King's march, a march that helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So here's a departure from neutrality, a departure from the strictures of the procedural republic that is avowedly and explicitly judgmental, evaluating the moral worth of the speech. Let's shift from freedom of speech to consider two familiar political questions that also test the idea of neutrality in justice and law. Abortion and stem cell research take first abortion and consider the shape, the structure of the debates we have about abortion and consider also the way the Supreme Court deals with the abortion question. Now, some people believe that abortion should be banned because it involves the taking of innocent life. Other people disagree, arguing that law shouldn't take sides in the moral and theological controversy over whether, over when human life begins. Since the moral status of the developing fetus is a highly charged moral and religious question, they argue government should be neutral on that question and therefore allow women to decide for themselves whether to have an abortion. The second position reflects the version of liberal public reason that I've been describing. It claims to resolve the abortion question on the basis of neutrality and freedom of choice without entering into the moral and religious controversy. But this argument doesn't succeed and it's easy to see why. If it's true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infaticide. And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to commit infaticide. So the pro-choice position in the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question. It implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church is teaching on the moral status of the fetus, that it is a person from the moment of conception. It rests on the assumption that this teaching is false. Now, to acknowledge this assumption is not to argue for banning abortion. It's simply to acknowledge that neutrality and freedom of choice are not sufficient grounds for affirming a right to an abortion. Those who would defend the right of women to decide for themselves whether to terminate a pregnancy. Should, it seems to me, engage with the argument about the moral status of the developing fetus. They should acknowledge their view that the developing fetus is not equivalent morally speaking to a person. And they should try to defend that view. So it's not enough to say that the law should be neutral on moral and religious questions. The case for permitting abortion is no more neutral than the case for banning it. Both positions presuppose some answer to the underlying moral and religious controversy. The same is true in the debate over stem cell research, embryonic stem cell research. Those who would ban it argue that whatever it's medical promise, research that involves the destruction of human embryos is morally impermissible. Many who hold this view believe that personhood begins at conception, so that destroying even an early embryo is, for them, morally on a par with killing a child. Proponents of embryonic stem cell research reply by pointing to the medical benefits the research may bring. And they argue that science shouldn't be hampered by religious or ideological interference. Those with religious objections, they sometimes argue, shouldn't be allowed to impose their views through laws that would ban promising scientific research. But the case for permitting embryonic stem cell research can't be made without taking a stand, without thinking through and debating the moral and religious controversy about when personhood begins. Because if the early embryo really is morally equivalent to a person, then the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have a point. Even highly promising medical research wouldn't justify dismembering a human person. Few people would say it should be legal to harvest organs from a five-year-old child to promote life-saving research. So the argument for permitting embryonic stem cell research is not neutral on the moral and religious controversy about when human personhood begins. It presupposes an answer to that controversy, namely that the pre-implantation embryo destroyed in the course of embryonic stem cell research is not yet a human being. So with abortion and with embryonic stem cell research, it's not possible to resolve the legal question without taking up the underlying moral and religious question. In both cases, neutrality is impossible because the issue is whether the question in practice involves the taking of a human life. Now you might say where a human life is involved, okay, maybe we do have to argue it through. But maybe this is an exception. Maybe other debates about justice and rights can be resolved without taking sides in moral and religious questions. But I don't think so. It's not only when questions of the beginning of life, human life, enter. Consider the debate over same-sex marriage. Can you decide whether the state should recognize same-sex marriage without entering into moral and religious controversies about the purpose of marriage and the moral status of homosexuality? Some people say yes. They argue for same-sex marriage on liberal, non-judgmental grounds. They say whether one personally approves or disapproves of gay and lesbian relationships, individuals should be free to choose their marital partners. To allow heterosexual but not homosexual couples to get married wrongly discriminates against gay men and lesbians and denies them equality before the law. If this argument is sufficient, then the issue can be resolved within the bounds of liberal public reason, without recourse to controversial debates about the purpose of marriage and the goods it honors. But the case for same-sex marriage can't be made, so it seems to me, on non-judgmental grounds. It depends on a certain conception of the purpose of marriage. And as Aristotle reminds us, to argue about the purpose of a social institution is at least in part to argue about the virtues that it honors and rewards. The debate about same-sex marriage is fundamentally a debate, not about autonomy and choice. It's a debate about whether gay and lesbian unions are worthy of the honor and recognition that in our society, state-sanctioned marriage confers. So the underlying moral question is unavoidable. To see why this is so, it's worth noticing that a state can take three possible positions toward marriage, not just two. It can take the position that only traditional marriage between a man and a woman will be recognized. It can take the position that same-sex marriage should also be recognized. Or, and here's the third option, a state could take the position of not recognizing marriage of any kind, but of leaving this role to private associations, religious and otherwise. What's striking is, now the third policy is the truly libertarian or neutral policy because it says the state will not decide anything to do about the moral worth of gay and lesbian unions. It'll get out of the business of deciding what marriages are worthy of honor and recognition. But for all the debate we've had in this country about same-sex marriage, and for the different answers provided by different states and courts, until now we've heard from the US Supreme Court, few, if any, have argued for that third position. Because what's at stake for advocates on both sides is the question of the moral judgment about the purpose of marriage. What is marriage for and what unions are worthy of the honor and recognition that marriage confers? Now, if you look at the court opinions that have wrestled with the same-sex marriage question, it's interesting. There are two reflexes, two reflexes, two ways of thinking and arguing that one can find. There's the nonjudgmental reflex, and here let me speak about those court opinions that have upheld the right to same-sex marriage. There is the nonjudgmental reflex trying to base the right on neutrality, being nonjudgmental, on liberal toleration, on respecting individual autonomy and choice. But that strand, that liberal procedural strand, coexists with and is in some tension with another strand, which is what you might call the judgmental strand, the one that affirms the worth and the moral importance of gay and lesbian unions. One sees this if, when it looks back at the court opinion in the state of Massachusetts, which announced a right to same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. It was written by Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. And her opinion starts out by saying there is this great debate in our society, these two competing views, but that we're concerned here with defining liberty. We're not concerned with choosing sides in this moral debate. So Justice Marshall's opinion begins describing the moral issue in terms of autonomy and freedom of choice, respect for individual autonomy, equality under law. The issue is not the moral worth of the choice, but the right of the individual to make it, the right of the plaintiffs to marry their chosen partner. But later in her opinion, she, and in the most powerful part of her opinion, she takes on directly the argument about what the purpose of marriage is. She takes on the claim advanced by many opponents of same-sex marriage that the purpose of marriage is to honor and to encourage procreation. Justice Marshall doesn't pretend to be neutral on that question. She says that's wrong. The essence of marriage, she argues, is not procreation, but an exclusive loving commitment between two partners, straight or gay. She disputes the claim that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage by showing that the ability or the willingness to procreate is not a test of marriage between a man and a woman. And she affirms the moral status of gay and lesbian relationships. She argues that they are as worthy of respect as heterosexual relationships. And it's on that ground ultimately that she've indicated a right to same-sex marriage. And if you look at Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell, the same-sex marriage opinion, you find the same thing. He gives a number of reasons. One of them has to do with personal choice and individual autonomy, as if that were decisive. But then he also makes the second, the substantive argument. As the state itself makes marriage precious by the significance it attaches to it, exclusion from that status has the effect of teaching that gays and lesbians are unequal. It demeans gays and lesbians. To deny same-sex couples the right to marry, he writes, is to put the imprimatur of the state on an exclusion that demeans or stigmatizes those whose liberty is then denied. So this is a language of moral judgment. This is not being morally neutral. Now I've tried to show, using a few quick examples of controversies in politics and law, that it's often not possible to be neutral. And even where it is possible, it may not be desirable to be neutral on competing conceptions of the good life, competing moral and spiritual convictions. I'd like to end with some by going back to the terms of public discourse and the state of democratic life today. Some would consider that to engage publicly with questions of the good life is to commit a kind of civic transgression to journey beyond the bounds of liberal public reason. Politics and law should not be entangled in moral and religious disputes. We sometimes think because such entanglement opens the way to disagreement and maybe even to coercion and to intolerance. After all, we live in pluralist societies in which citizens disagree about the meaning of the good life, about the virtues worth cultivating, about the meaning of important social practices, including marriage. And so if we disagree on moral and religious questions, isn't it safer, less contentious, but also more tolerant to try to conduct our public discourse without reference to those underlying moral and religious disagreements? I don't think so. What about a tolerant society? What about respect for pluralism? Does a judgmental kind of public discourse undermine appreciation for a pluralist society? Not necessarily. Here I'd like to distinguish between two different ways of understanding the mutual respect among citizens who disagree on hard ethical questions. One way of understanding mutual respect is to say that we respect our fellow citizens by setting aside or ignoring our moral disagreements. This is a mutual respect based on avoidance, but it's this attempt to base mutual respect on avoidance that contributes to an empty hollow public discourse. It contributes to our tendency to shy away from engaging in moral and ethical reasoning in public. It's a tendency that has dulled our civic capacities to reason together in public about hard moral questions. And it's contributed I think to the creation of a kind of moral void at the heart of our democratic life that could well be filled by narrow intolerant voices. And we see this in democracies around the world where politics too readily avoids engaging with big moral questions. Instead of mutual respect based on avoidance, it seems to me what we need is the mutual respect based on engagement, engaging with rather than avoiding the distinctive goods and moral convictions our fellow citizens express. A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker basis for mutual respect rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions our fellow citizens bring to public life. It seems to me we should attend to them more directly, sometimes by challenging and contesting them, sometimes by listening to and learning from them. There is no guarantee that public deliberation about hard moral questions will lead in any given case to agreement. Or even to appreciation for the moral and religious views of others. It's always possible that learning more about a moral or religious doctrine will lead us to like it less, that's possible. But we cannot know until we try. Politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also, it seems to me, a more promising basis for a just society. Thank you very much. Could you take some questions? Thank you. Thank you. Questions, arguments, disagreements. Yes. I have no idea what your political opinions are and they're really irrelevant here. But it's somewhat rem, your talk of engaging with moral and religious questions about the good life. Somewhat reminiscent of Alistair McIntyre's After Virtue and or Alan Bloom's book in the 80s which caused so much controversy that younger people especially now are turning away from virtue and character toward what he calls values, which are more individualistic freedom of choice you know and so forth. If we do though, take a higher platform and a more philosophical view of the questions involved then it seems to me you could run into on what ethical principles do you avert to? Is it Kantian absolutism or utilitarian, the greatest good for the greatest number? And there are, I don't see how in the culture wars, I mean you're going to get the fundamentalists, the absolutists in one hand and then you're going to get the liberal utilitarians on the other hand. I don't know how much that would bring to you. Right, okay, well I would say, thank you for that question. I don't think we're doing a very good job right now of bringing people together. I would begin there. And so the question arises, how might we do better? How might we make politics, civic life, public discourse more meaningful and more engaging for more people? I think that people are right including young people are right to come to the conclusion that much of what goes on in presidential campaigns and in political argument doesn't concern them, doesn't interest them, doesn't engage them, doesn't address big questions that matter. I think that's where we are today. And so the question is what's led us to this condition and what might make for a richer, more meaningful kind of civic life? Now you raised the question of ideology, would this mean that kind of fundamentalist politics would predominate? I think the tendency of narrow intolerant fundamentalisms to enter is partly to do with when there is a moral emptiness, there's a tendency for fundamentalist voices to flow in, to fill the space. I think there are different political and ideological ways of engaging with moral and civic and spiritual idealism. From the 1980s onward, for example, we associated bringing spiritual and religious voices into politics with the Christian right with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the Christian majority and a Christian coalition and nowadays some say, well, that's ISIS, that's Islam, that's what you get when you allow religious and moral and spiritual arguments in politics. But it isn't only, that's not the only expression of a morally engaged, spiritually informed politics. I mentioned Martin Luther King briefly. If you go back to the political rhetoric and arguments of Martin Luther King, they drew on the American tradition, on the Christian tradition, as well as on secular arguments. If you look at the, well, think of that speech that President Obama gave when he sang Amazing Grace in the church, the eulogy in Charleston. Now that was not a holy secular speech. It was a very powerful, perhaps the most powerful piece of political rhetoric and argument in his presidency. I would say precisely because it connected with the spirit, what for him are the spiritual sources of his political convictions. If you look back at the American abolitionists, they drew on the argument that slavery is sin. They were evangelicals. So to argue for a more, for a richer engagement with moral and spiritual sources in political debate is not to decide ideologically between left, right, or something in between. It's to invite, it's to reconnect with strands in our tradition that have at times inspired a greater moral and civic energy and idealism than we find in politics today. And that's what I'm arguing for. Yes. Thank you for a great talk, but I disagree. I think you're stacking the deck. You say on the one hand we have this great spiritual matter we have to engage with. On the other hand, we have these selfish people who won't engage because all they want is to their own personal enjoyment and values. Why don't they confront the other? You're making this into an unequal fight by valuing spiritual values per se, more than secular values. And I just think that's unfair and distorts the argument. When someone says I want to have, my wife have an abortion because we want a fuller life and all that, I don't think we're neglecting the spiritual argument. We have made a secular choice. And I think that is confronting the kind of thing you say that people are not confronting. And you have opted intentionally or unintentionally, wisely or not, to value spiritual concerns more than secular concerns. Yeah, I don't see it as secular versus spiritual. I wouldn't think of it in that way. I would put it differently. I would say that what's missing is a more explicit engagement with the moral arguments underlying the positions we have when we debate. Now for some people, their moral convictions may derive from secular sources, from Immanuel Kant or from Aristotle. For other people, their moral convictions may be connected with faith traditions. I would not, I would not admit the first kind of argument into public life and to reject the second kind of argument. I would welcome all comers. I think we should engage more directly with the moral questions underlying the legal and political controversies that we have and the positions we take. But whether those moral arguments come from secular sources or whether they are indebted to spiritual sources, that will depend on who the citizens are who are engaging in the argument. What I think is missing is moral argument whether it be inspired by Immanuel Kant or by various religious traditions. So to rejuvenate our public life, I'm not saying we should pick and choose secular versus spiritual. I think that what we need is a morally more robust kind of public discourse but the sources of moral principle and moral conviction can for some citizens be secular, for others spiritual and for many citizens some complicated combination of the two. Yes. Right. It's an interesting question. I don't know if everyone could hear the question. Was there a problem with the founders of the Republic thought about things that have contributed to the present difficulties? With regard to the questions we've been discussing today about the role of moral and spiritual argument in public discourse, I think the founders for the most part were on my side of that debate. The procedural Republic, the insistence on liberal public reason conceived as neutrality toward character formation, civic virtue, questions about the good life. That comes later in our political history, especially in the period after the Second World War, second half of the 20th century to the present. If you look at Thomas Jefferson, the namesake of this splendid setting, he was very concerned with what I've called the formative project. He didn't think that it was possible to have a democratic Republic without worrying about the character of citizens, without worrying about civic virtue and how it would be cultivated. In fact, if you look at the debates about the economy, between Jefferson and Madison on the one hand and Hamilton on the other, those debates were not only about GDP and economic growth and affluence and prosperity. Those were also debates about how the structure of the economy would make a difference to shaping the character of the people. And Thomas Jefferson thought he worried about concentrated power in a financial elite and in an overbearing federal government indebted to the financial elite. He worried about that because he thought that would undermine a kind of political economy and lived experience that would cultivate the independence of mind that made for virtuous citizens capable of deliberating about the common good. And Hamilton had a different idea. He thought national greatness and power were necessary, but Jefferson in particular cared about the formative project, about shaping character of citizens. He saw that as central to the creation of a democratic Republic. And in many ways, I think we've lost that appreciation, the view that Jefferson had that we do that a successful democracy has a stake in and needs to care about the character of citizens and needs to care about how to cultivate and encourage civic virtue and can't be indifferent to those things. And so I think we've drifted from that in the last half century, roughly speaking. And so I suppose another way of putting my case, my claim is that we need to learn something and reconnect with that older appreciation of civic virtue. All right, do we have time for one more? Toward the back, yes. The existence of a prior form of politics that has been lost. So then, of course, it becomes important to ask, what is it that produced the loss of that earlier form of politics? And in the context of a sort of proliferation of public spaces in an age of sort of online communications, couldn't it be argued that there's all sorts of robust public discourse, including public discourse that involves moral questions? It's just not happening in one place. Well, it's a great question and it's an important one. It certainly is true that if we're to take seriously the project of cultivating substantive public discourse that addresses moral, big moral questions, we have to look to civil society, not just national elections for the arenas and venues in which this kind of civic project can unfold. I agree completely. And you're certainly right that we do have important and successful examples within civil society, of public spaces and institutions where these kinds of discussions can take place. My worry is that these public places and common spaces of shared democratic citizenship and deliberation are becoming fewer and fewer and more difficult to sustain and that they're having less and less an impact on the American political community as a whole. And one reason for this, I think, is that for democracy to flourish and for citizen deliberation to have its occasion requires public spaces, just of the public spaces of the kind you describe, not only deliberately created ones but also chance inadvertent public spaces where men and women from different economic classes, different social and ethnic and religious backgrounds can encounter one another in the ordinary course of life in downtown areas, in public parks, in public schools, in public health clinics, recreational facilities. This is the civic infrastructure of a shared common life. I think part of the challenge we face today is the erosion of these inadvertent gathering places and common spaces for democratic citizens. And I think it's connected the erosion of common places with the widening inequality of recent decades. And when the gap between rich and poor becomes too pronounced those who are affluent and those who are of modest means will come to live increasingly separate lives. And today this is largely the case. We live and work and shop and play in separate places, are in different places, our children go to different schools. This isn't good for democracy and it's not a satisfying way to live even for those of us who may have the ability to opt out or buy their way out of public places. Because encountering one another in the ordinary course of life is how we learn to abide and to negotiate our differences and it's how we come to care for the common good. So another way of describing the challenge I think that American democracy needs today is to reconstitute a deliberate project of cultivating a shared citizenship and we can't do that in a purely hortatory way on the national level. We need to ask how can we restore and reinvigorate public places and common spaces where people from different backgrounds can meet and negotiate and encounter one another and through that those encounters sometimes of inadvertence come to see themselves as fellow citizens engaged in a common project. Thank you all very much. This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.