Beyond the two cultures: Democratic virtues and the case for a model of mutuality

Abstract

Fifty years ago and still relevant today, C.P. Snow argued that the university is divided into two cultures, with humanities on the one side and the sciences on the other. This paper proposes a model of mutuality to overcome this ongoing divide as applied specifically to political philosophy and its cognate scientific disciplines of political science and political psychology. On the model of mutuality, not only can political philosophy inform theorizing and hypothesis-formation in political science and psychology, the latter fields also serve as data for political philosophy. More importantly, collaboration between philosophers and scientists can inform a conceptual dialectic that significantly benefits both areas of inquiry. The second half of the paper develops the example of democratic virtues as a case study. Capitalizing on existing work in philosophical virtue theory and related areas of psychology, I propose that the topic of democratic and not merely civic virtues is a novel area of inquiry that would profit from mutual engagement between political philosophers and political scientists and psychologists.

Keywords:

• Civic virtues
• democratic virtues
• philosophy of social science
• political psychology
• virtue theory

Notes

Notes

1 One reviewer has suggested that the situation is not as bleak as this, and the fact that political theorists cohabitate departmentally with political scientists suggests much more mutual engagement than what I have painted here. The hypothesis is easy to test, either directly by survey or by assessment of the number of papers co-authored by theorists and scientists or (more modestly) by the number of citations in scientific papers of current theoretical work. My own impression is that the number of co-authored papers and even citations is vanishingly small, however much informal engagement may occur at the department level. Stronger empirical evidence, however, is needed.

2 One might attempt to go further and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for democratic patriotism. While this is a conceivable task for a future project, it is worth noting that such a task is contrary to an influential line of thinking in virtue ethics suggesting that such efforts are misguided, and we should instead work on identifying exemplars of the virtue in question. While this is a large discussion beyond the scope of this article, I will observe that the exemplar approach has some empirical merit and is among the areas of inquiry which a model of mutuality may support. See, e.g,, Zagzebski, 2017, Colby & Damon, 1992.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gregory R. Peterson

Gregory R. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of the SDSU Ethics Lab in the School of American and Global Studies, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD.