In order to form a more perfect union

We have said that certain things ought to be.

Now I wish to turn to political philosophy, using the last two posts, Moral Realism and the ways in which we may discover which moral principles are true, as a foundation. To me this is reasonable, for we have just been discussing the idea of what ought to be in general, and now we are addressing what ought to be in society.

Now, we must first ask whether a specific type of government is a fundamental good, for if it is, then the whole business is complete, we have reduced political philosophy to a tautology (the type of government which ought to be is the type which is fundamentally good). However, I at least have no evidence that any government or type of government is fundamentally good, as the good of all forms of government seems to be related to other moral principles. Furthermore, others feel the need to appeal to other principles to decide the rightness of a political action, which seems to indicate that others believe as I do that government does not represent in itself a fundamental good (I will take this as an axiom, for I do not know how to begin at an earlier point than this, or if one could find a more basic applicable axiom). Therefore, to evaluate the good of a specific government or form of government, or to develop the best form possible, we must appeal to other moral principles. In fact, it is meaningless to talk about "good government" without first having an idea of "good."

So, if the good in any government must be developed from (or at least evaluated by) moral principles, then the government that allows and provides maximum adherence to moral principles, and which itself adheres maximally to moral principles, must be good. We might restate this as, "Government and law exist (or at least ought to exist) for the sake of those things which fundamentally ought to be."

Now, here we must be careful, because, as we noted in the last post, it is often difficult to discern what constitutes moral truth. We have established that government ought to exist for the sake of moral principles, but without knowing what constitute moral principles, this is a worthless fact. Of course, most people have some ideas about morality, and I noted in the last post that we may presume that the human conscience or innate sense of right and wrong represents at least an approximation of moral truth, so we have that as a starting point. However, as I also noted, people don't always agree on what is moral. Then we might say that we have only taken the basic question, "What is right?" and replaced it with the question, "When conceptions of morality conflict, whose morality do we follow?" Well, there is one obvious answer to this question: We should follow God's morality, since, as noted before, God's perfection establishes His morality as objectively preferred. The answer, then, for the perfect government would be a true Theocracy, in the most literal sense of the word: that is, for God to come down and rule among us.

However, there is a big problem with that approach to government. As noted before, we can't control God. He won't come down and rule among us except as He chooses to. And He has not physically come down for all to see, so we simply don't have that option. Yes, there are those who are in communication with Him, so you could suggest that someone who has a particularly good relationship with God would be the best to lead (and you would even be right, so far as I can see), but there is a catch: People could always lie, saying that they receive instruction from God when they do not. In this case, you could easily have a person who has fooled everyone, saying that he is a prophet speaking for God, who people would then follow into all sorts of behavior that is, in fact, against morality. So it may be true that a prophet is the best possible human leader, but you have to know that it is really God in charge, and not a charlatan. And then, if we're looking for prophets, we're just faced with another question: "How do we decide who is the false prophet and who is the true prophet?" In the end, we could say that this is another dead end, at least in the sense that we still need to figure out a way to decide.

So we cannot seem to appeal to a preferred morality to follow. If we cannot find an individual's morality to follow, then perhaps an alternative is to follow what we might term the average of everyone's morality. This may seem arbitrary, but perhaps we can justify it as such: As I discussed in the previous post, we suppose that a person's conscience represents a fairly good approximation of moral truth. Further, let us suppose, though experience suggests that it is not true, that everyone's morality is independent of everyone else's, and is primarily based upon that person's conscience. Then we may suppose that the errors in morality will vary from person to person, so that agreement on an error will be less common than agreement on a truth. Thus, in the mean, you get something that is probably even nearer to moral truth than the consciences of the individuals.

However, there is the assumption that I noted to be faulty from the beginning: experience demonstrates that people often influence one another, and sometimes these influences cause errors to be magnified, rather than averaged out, so this system of popular sovereignty can't be anticipated to produce laws based perfectly on moral truth. Indeed, it is a common maxim that the opinions of the masses do not prove anything to be true. All the same, as I do not know another solution to the question of "whose morality" to follow, this is the best that I have; and though we cannot suppose that the errors in morality will be "averaged out" as we could hope if everyone were to honestly and independently seek out moral truth, we can at least hope that this will give us something of the truth. On top of this, we can hope that in whatever measure individuals seek to independently understand and act on moral truth, this system will offer better and better results. So we essentially put the burden of good government on the people, saying that if we have a moral people, we will have good government. Furthermore, there is a significant advantage to popular sovereignty over other methods of determining whose morality to adopt: Other methods may well be incompatible with alternative political philosophies, whereas popular sovereignty is, in fact, robust, being compatible with several Ethical philosophies. The differences that tend to arise can be manifest in the voting: a Hedonist will vote for whatever measures are for his own good, or those which he believes will most likely secure his own pleasure; a Realist will vote for whatever measures he believes are in harmony with moral truth; and so forth.

Thus, at this stage, I conclude that the ideal must be some form of popular sovereignty, at least so long as we don't have God ruling on earth, though there is considerably more to explore on the subject. I have not even addressed what type of government of the many that fall under the heading of popular sovereignty, nor have I at all considered such principles as liberty and justice which are so strongly connected to government. In fact, I feel that this opens up a wide array of possible discussions. But this post is already very long, so I will begin again next time.

Title: US Constitution, Preamble