Introduction

Institutions are powerful forces in our lives because they exert an influence over our choices and actions, giving them meaning and significance. Whereas much of the contemporary literature on institutions stresses the importance of interests and rights, less attention has been given to the goods that institutions deliver. This chapter defines what we mean by institutions, and introduces the idea of practical wisdom from the tradition of virtue ethics. Linking institutional analysis to virtue ethics helps us to better appreciate the need for wise practitioners and to understand why the aims (or goods) of institutions cannot be achieved without them.

Hyper-Partisanship

Hyper-partisanship is a form of competitive utility-maximizing. Good or ethical partisanship is found in the mean between non-partisan detachment and hyper-partisan devotion to a cause, and finding this mean requires practical wisdom on the part of citizens and rulers. Excessive partisanship can undermine democracy by weakening and ultimately displacing the deliberation necessary to compromise and find common goods in political institutions like legislatures. Recognizing that good institutions are not enough to guarantee the proper functioning of a democracy, this chapter considers the possibility of educating politicians. It asks a question political theorists have grappled with since Aristotle’s time: Can practical wisdom be taught?

Runaway

Institutions often fail, sometimes spectacularly. A tragic train derailment provides an example of an institutional failure that can be analyzed through the prism of three schools of ethics: Bentham’s utilitarianism, Kant’s deontological or rights-based approach, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. By stressing the importance of the wise practitioner, a virtue-ethics approach offers a way of thinking about what makes an institution good or bad. Institutional failures are often due less to the absence of well-specified rules and incentives than the erosion of the capacity of practitioners to perform the activities associated with their roles and offices. Good institutions enable practitioners to focus on the aims of these activities. To do so, however, competitive utility-maximizing must be restrained.

Citizens’ Democracy

Aristotle argued that the supreme good of human life was eudaimonia, which means happiness or flourishing. Scholars working on both human development and the quality of democracy have converged on the idea that democratic citizenship is part of human flourishing. Citizenship implies agency, the set of capabilities necessary to play a part in self-government. Agency has a basis in natural and cultural evolution: it emerged with the development of the self as a human person, as a legal person, and finally as a self-legislating sovereign. The functional differentiation of roles in a balanced constitution is necessary for human flourishing and the cultivation of the virtues associated with self-government.

Conclusion

Practical wisdom is necessary in the practice of the social sciences. The embrace of competitive utility-maximizing within positivist theories of institutions reflects an untenable desire to separate facts and values, and an unwarranted skepticism about the good. The result is a social science that neglects the moral dimension of politics and denies the centrality of first-person experience, which is the basis for any conception of the good. The fact that the unity of the virtues is an impossible ideal in complex, pluralistic societies does not diminish the importance of diverse constructions of the good in politics, much less does it eliminate the tensions between these diverse constructions and the pressures arising from market forces that destroy institutions and drive human activities toward catastrophic outcomes. Against these pressures, the cultivation of practical wisdom is our best response.

Neoliberal Oligarchy

Practical wisdom in political institutions is threatened by an ideology that is radically hostile to politics as a means to attain common goods. Neoliberalism promotes competition in all spheres of life in order to foster utility maximizing behavior. A major consequence of the resulting failure to balance goods has been the rise of inequality, which has damaged democracy by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the rich, by reinforcing the power of corporations, which are incapable of good citizenship, and by increasing the corrupting influence of money in politics. Aristotle warned that oligarchies emerge when the rich hold power and govern only for themselves, and this tendency has been a conspicuous feature of politics under neoliberalism.

Wise Practitioners

What kind of rulers and citizens do we need to attain the aims intrinsic to democracy? Two activities are central to democratic politics: citizenship and rule (or statespersonship). The performance of these activities, especially the latter, demands practical wisdom. This chapter explores three examples of the need for practical wisdom in politics. In the first, a political novice learned the importance of good judgment in politics, the primacy of the particular, the value of entering politics for the right reasons, and the need to use persuasion tailored to specific audiences. In the second, an expert politician with an instinct for doing the right thing in the right way and for the right reasons demonstrated a capacity to bend the rules in order to achieve the intrinsic aims of an institution. Finally, a practitioner who was unable to accomplish the aims of her practice within an institution created a new one, and in the process helped to redefine a major social problem.

Activity and Agency

Aristotle argued that every action or activity aimed at some good. Through experience, wise practitioners acquire the character and judgment necessary to attain their aims. These aims are often intrinsic to the activity, they require cooperation, and only rarely can they be compelled. Whereas incentives and rules motivate people through rewards and punishments, excellence in an activity demands more. Since we cannot easily assess knowledge superior to our own, nor can we always know whether a practitioner is motivated by the right aims, and we may not even be able to judge the effectiveness of an action by its results, institutions rely on practitioners who possess the disposition to perform to the best of their abilities.

Competitive Utility-Maximizing

Competition between individuals seeking to maximize utility can lead to perverse outcomes like the tragedy of freedom in the commons. Cooperation to achieve common goods—like preventing the tragedy of the commons—requires the suspension of some forms of competition, but political theorists since Hobbes have been skeptical about the possibility of agreement on the good. Hobbes criticized Aristotle’s emphasis on wisdom or prudence based on experience. In defense of Aristotle, I argue that common goods are rooted in experience, in pro-social sentiments like empathy, and in the capacity to see the self and others from multiple perspectives. But Aristotle also believed that reason and judgment played a role in the cultivation of the good.