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Moral Renewal: The Lessons of Eastern Europe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Terry Nardin
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Abstract

Nardin uses the Eastern European experience of the late 1980s and the works of Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel to demonstrate the traditional cosmopolitan Kantian notion of morality in the “appeal to universal human values.” Nardin uses three major elements to argue the impossibility of such a concept: “the law of nature,” based on Stoic and Judeo-Christian foundation, focusing on reason and rationality of the individual rather than custom or divine authority; the uniqueness of various cultures challenging the universal “cosmopolitan” outlook on morality; and the differences among universal principles of morality relative to personal human experiences throughout time. Nardin concludes that the moral renewal in Eastern Europe is evidence that destructive consequences of moral diversity do not preclude a civil society once agreements on authoritative principles and laws are institutionalized. Each individual's own ethical conduct and internal moral guidance offer the basis for criticism and reform of law through membership in particular communities and common humanity.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 5 , March 1991 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1991

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References

2 New York Times, October 24, 1989, p.1.

3 My discussion of common morality is based on Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

4 For an argument from inside the Rawlsian camp that Rawls' conception of justice is in some ways consequentialist, see Thomas W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 36–47.

5 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

6 For a historical account of the idea of national self-determination, see Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1966); Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz discuss the philosophical issues in “National Self-Determination,”Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), pp. 439–61.

7 Adam Michnik, “The Two Faces of Europe,”New York Review of Books, 37, no. 12 (July 19,1990), p.7. Michnik has himself been accused of chauvinism for invoking the ideal of “Europe.” For example, Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis, who supported Lech Walesa in last year's presidential election, complained that she doesn't understand “what this Europe is that Michnik keeps talking about…. It's part of that parochial provincialism of Eastern European intelligentsia, this romanticization of Europe.” The line of the Walesa partisans, against Michnik and others aligned with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became in effect, “Fine, you be Europe, we'll be Poland!” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1990, p. 128.) What's wrong with Michnik's outlook (if anything) is that he romanticizes the ideals of civility and conscience, not that these ideals are inappropriate.

8 Adam Michnik, Letters From Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 68–69.

9 Reprinted in Václav Havel, “Politics and Conscience”Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), pp. 136–57.

10 Ibid., pp. 137.

11 Ibid., pp. 137–38. The argument that the revolutions of 1989 were revolutions against the hubris of Marxist consequentialism is developed by Steven Lukes, “Marxism and Morality: Reflections on the Revolutions of 1989,”Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 4 (1990), pp. 19–31.

12 Niccoló Machiavelli, Discourses on Liv, Book I, Ch. 26. My discussion of these passages relies on Harvey C. Mansfield. Jr., Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 99–100.

13 Havel, Living in Truth, p. 142.

14 Ibid., p. 142.

15 Ibid., p. 141.

16 Ibid., p. 149.

17 Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 51.

18 Havel, Living in Truth, p. 150.

19 Michnik, Letters from Prison, p. 148.

20 Havel, Living in Truth, p. xiii.

21 Michnik, “The Two Faces of Europe,” p. 7.