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Virtue and Happiness in Early Modern Spain

At the last Providential Modernity seminar, Ph.D. candidate in history Elsa Costa discussed her dissertation project on two hundred years of Spanish political history, “The Bourbon Ideology? Civic Eudaemonism and Secular Regalism in Imperial Spain.” Crucially, her research raises the question of how societies define happiness and virtue, and why those understandings of virtue and happiness matter in our shared political inheritance from the early modern period.

She introduced her work with the generalization that, before the mid-1500s, political theorists tended to focus on “the common good.” In Catholic thought, this was the material and spiritual well-being of all citizens. The ‘common good’ was not entirely self-contained, since the possibility of access to “ultimate happiness of Heaven” ultimately determined spiritual well-being. This perspective is built on Aristotle’s pre-Christian claim that citizens ultimately have two choices to grow in virtue (the only possible source of happiness): political activism and the superior contemplative life. This was Christianized into the subordination of politics to clerical (and ethical) concerns. This meant, Costa explained, that discussions of happiness tended to focus on the blessed happiness awaiting the faithful in Heaven, and downplay earthly happiness as “fleeting.” Political theorists rarely discussed collective or material happiness.

When scholars and nobility started reading Machiavelli’s The Prince after its publication in 1532, the discourse changed. Machiavelli’s work deliberately turned away from Christian and Aristotelian virtue. Rather than seeking a higher good, whether spiritual or philosophical, Machiavelli’s ideal ruler does whatever necessary to maintain political stability. Costa’s research then picked up with two Spanish Jesuit thinkers who wrote forcefully against Machiavelli’s work in the 1590s. She explained that their contemporary opponents were elites who read Machiavelli (or commentaries on Machiavelli) uncritically. With an eye still on the “beatific vision of Heaven,” these Jesuit authors argued that, rather than seeking personal glory, rulers should practice personal piety as a way to obtain both temporal peace and temporal happiness, while teaching their subjects how to be good. By instrumentalizing the pursuit of virtue – a good ruler will lead a country of good citizens, which will consequently experience peace and economic prosperity as a nation – these authors laid the groundwork for a discussion of public happiness in later Spanish political writing. 

Costa uses “public happiness,” or her own term, “civic eudaemonism,” to describe attempts to reconcile classical virtue ethics (virtuous living brings both temporal and eternal happiness) and the public/collective sphere. She pointed out that while these Jesuit authors initially hoped to curb the amoral pragmatism promoted by Machiavelli’s work, and encourage rulers to pursue virtue, the somewhat unexpected development of this philosophy in subsequent years was to make the ruler the focal point of the nation’s well-being, and the protector and source of public happiness. Thus, she argued, the vocabulary of public happiness was ripe for exploitation by later thinkers, who could extend the logic of public happiness to bare economics. If the ruler was responsible for temporal public happiness, and if temporal happiness was as important as eternal happiness, then political expediency demanded that the monarchy sequester power away from the church and civil authorities like Parliament. In this way ‘public happiness’ became the official ideology of absolute monarchy.

Providential modernity

The Providential Modernity seminar series brings together faculty and graduate students from several area universities on a monthly basis to discuss work in the areas of history, political theology, and comparative sociology from Antiquity to the present. A key goal of the seminar is to place scholars of religion into conversation with one another and address scholarly challenges emerging from the post-secular age. At the core of these deliberations is an effort to deepen our grasp of the ways in which religions, Western and Eastern, both converge and differ in their understanding of providentialism, and how scholars may respond to the powerful working of religion in the postmodern age.


The Religions and Public Life initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics examines the role of religions in history and culture, exploring their interaction across time and geography, as they shape private and public life.

 

Kate Jackson talks to Kenan Graduate Fellows

newsKate Jackson discussed her work on how to determine what sort of legal rights corporations ought to have with the Kenan Graduate Fellows in Ethics at the bimonthly Monday Seminar. Jackson started her career majoring in engineering at West Point, but transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy and economics. Following her undergraduate studies with a law degree, she practiced corporate derivative and securities litigation for the next six years. She had never lost interest in philosophy, but recalled that the turning point in her career came when she was working on a case where a coal mining company’s CEO had violated health and safety regulations for years until an explosion killed a number of miners and the company’s stock dropped. She said the company’s shareholders had ignored the problems and continued reelecting this CEO until the explosion, and her law firm was brought in to represent the directors who were suing to recover some of the money lost because of the company’s drop in value.

At that point, she explained, she quit because she could not in good conscience represent those clients. She matriculated in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in political theory because “political theory cares about institutional design” – but because political theorists have not traditionally paid a great deal of attention to markets, or to the independent power of corporations, she developed a truly interdisciplinary project drawing together economics and business law with the political theory literature.

Jackson’s dissertation, Corporate Autonomy: Law, Constitutional Democracy and Big Business, examined the rights and internal governance of business corporations in constitutional liberal democracies. Standing within the liberal egalitarian tradition, she argued that in constitutional liberal democracies, corporations deserve some autonomy rights if and only if those rights will help vindicate individual human liberty.

Currently, she is a DeOlazarra Fellow at the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy & Law at the University of Virginia, researching how our normative commitments – both legal and political – both intervene in, and are driven by, the economy. As she explained to the graduate fellows, if market constraints are real and can infringe on people’s freedom, “we shouldn’t be ascribing very robust autonomy rights to corporations because we’re not protecting the corporation as its human individuals, we’re protecting the system. And maybe the system may not merit protection; maybe we should change the system.”


Each year, the Kenan Institute for Ethics awards 10 to 15 fellowships to outstanding graduate students at Duke University.  Students from any Duke graduate program may apply. What each cohort of Graduate Fellows has in common is that their dissertation research engages in interesting ways with significant normative issues.  
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Providential Modernity seminar discusses “the Justice of God”

Nelson Keynote photoCan we make sense of modern approaches to politics without coming to terms with their origins and evolution over time? Does it matter where ideas come from? Eric Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University, wrote his latest book, Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God, to address these questions.

During his visit last week, Nelson discussed the origins of his book with the Providential Modernity seminar at KIE. In 2010, gathering with a group of fellow scholars for informal conversation about political philosophy, one of his friends suggested they read (renowned liberal theorist) John Rawls’ senior thesis. Nelson said he was not excited at first, but found the thesis “extraordinary.” Having joked to his political theory students over the years that “Rawls is secularized Augustinianism,” he then realized that the young John Rawls in fact approached political philosophy with a strong commitment to Augustinian theological beliefs (an idea of “original sin,” that humans are by nature inclined toward bad actions, and that the good actions of humanity owe more to divine grace or providence than to any individual’s own merit).

Nelson was struck by “something deep” connecting this early religious thought and theology of the young Rawls to his mature (secularized) political theory. Although the mature Rawls was no longer religious by the time he wrote Theory of Justice, Nelson argued that work revealed an understanding of human nature that was startlingly similar to Rawls’ former theological beliefs. In Theory of Justice, Rawls described inequalities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity as morally arbitrary. The good that people might experience due to accidents of birth – good health, social position, access to education – were truly unmerited accidents. At the same time, Rawls placed individuals’ moral responsibility for their bad actions squarely on their own shoulders.

In contrast, Nelson explained to the seminar, the early modern scholars who built the liberal intellectual tradition undergirding Rawls’ work held just the opposite view of human nature. These earlier scholars — from Milton, to Locke, Rousseau, and Leibniz, and later to Kant – were primarily worried about how to reconcile the pain, suffering, and evil in the world with “the justice of God.” They concluded that there had to be objective moral principles governing the world that humans were capable of understanding and following. In this way, he explained, a strand of liberal thought developed that framed human dignity, agency, and autonomy as necessary in order for God to be just, and therefore humans were capable and free to earn or deserve divine favor.

Thus, these early thinkers imagined a liberal society premised on the idea that humans are truly free, and deserve the credit for all of their good actions as well as all of their bad ones. By contrast, in Nelson’s telling, it does not make sense to reject this earlier view of human dignity tied to human capacity for merit while arguing (as Rawls did) that human dignity means a liberal democratic society owes its citizens distributive justice. Nelson believes that one can hold an Augustinian perspective and be a liberal in the sense of supporting religious toleration, promoting non-domination, and building institutions, in order to restrain humans’ bad actions. But, he insisted, that perspective leads to a different political argument, and perhaps a different approach to liberal institutions, and does not obviously demand state policy based on distributive justice.


 The next Providential Modernity seminar on Thursday, March 5, will feature Elsa Costa (Ph.D. candidate, History), discussing some of her work on the Spanish Empire during the transition from Habsburg to Bourbon rule. Her research, recently conducted while on a Fulbright fellowship in Spain, documents the brief existence of a specifically post-Christian ideology of public happiness (or civic eudaemonism) intimately tied to Spanish regalism.

 

Yolonda Wilson back at Kenan

On Monday, the Kenan Graduate Fellows in Ethics seminar series welcomed back Yolonda Wilson, a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Philosophy department and former Duke employee. Dr. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Howard University and is in residence as a 2019-2020 fellow at the National Humanities Center in RTP. Her research spans bioethics, social and political philosophy, race theory, and feminist philosophy.

She explained to the graduate fellows, “Anything I do has to matter.” For Dr. Wilson, this means not only conducting research on pressing social issues, but communicating that research through op-eds, public commentary, and other media as well as through traditional academic channels. She blogs regularly on her own website as a way to explore new ideas and avenues of research and writes op-eds and longer-form pieces for outlets like USA Today.

"anything i do has to matter" - yolanda wilson

 

She encouraged the graduate fellows to think about how to meaningfully share their expertise with public audiences. Public scholarship also feeds back into her academic career, Dr. Wilson explained. A piece she wrote for The Conversation, “Why black women’s experiences of #MeToo are different,” was picked up by multiple news outlets across the country, and led to a contract to edit an academic volume on feminist philosophy and #MeToo. As a 2019-2020 Encore Public Voices fellow, her writing on bioethics, race, and gender has been widely recognized. In blog posts such as “Dying while black,” which was featured in Salon, Dr. Wilson explored ideas of justice and trust in medical care. Now, she is developing these ideas into the book project she is writing during her NHC fellowship, Black Death: Racial Justice, Priority-Setting, and Care at the End of Life.

Yolanda Wilson

The Monday Seminar Series is part of the Kenan Graduate Fellowship in Ethics.  Each year, the Kenan Institute for Ethics awards 10 to 15 fellowships to outstanding graduate students at Duke University whose dissertation research engages in interesting ways with significant normative issues. 

Visions of the End Discussed at Kenan

Religions and Public Life at KIE hosted a vibrant discussion around Professor John Martin’s (History) new book project, Visions of the End: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of the Modern World, 1492-1648. Martin explained that his years of research on early modern European history showed a thread of both hope and fear about the future running through many of these texts. Some of these thinkers took comfort in believing that human history depends on the will of God. For others, from Muslim writers looking for the coming of the Mahdi or the “last world emperor,” to conquistadors convinced that bringing Christianity to the New World would hasten the return of Christ, the future was mysterious and full of as much terror as possibility. It was hope for a better world that, Martin argues, carried forward even into the later rationalist schools of thought that set the stage for modern secular politics. He described scholars like Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza as drawing from these older ideas even as they sought to de-mystify history and the natural world. As several of the seminar’s participants suggested during discussion, properly understanding such ideas and their origins could lend insight into conflicting 21st century reactions to everything from politics to the environmental crisis. Overall, the seminar series, which will continue through the spring, has explored a variety of social and political hopes, as well as anxieties, about the promise of history.

john martin

Providential modernity

The Providential Modernity seminar series brings together faculty and graduate students from several area universities on a monthly basis to discuss work in the areas of history, political theology, and comparative sociology from Antiquity to the present. A key goal of the seminar is to place scholars of religion into conversation with one another and address scholarly challenges emerging from the post-secular age. At the core of these deliberations is an effort to deepen our grasp of the ways in which religions, Western and Eastern, both converge and differ in their understanding of providentialism, and how scholars may respond to the powerful working of religion in the postmodern age.


The Religions and Public Life initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics examines the role of religions in history and culture, exploring their interaction across time and geography, as they shape private and public life.

TechRight Hosts Dinner Roundtable on Tech/Corporate Ethics

tech and corporate ethics roundtable photo

Technically Right at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, in collaboration with the Future of Privacy Forum and the Duke Law and Technology Review, hosted a dinner roundtable on Monday, November 11th, on tech ethics and corporate ethics. Suzanne Shanahan, Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, started the night’s discussion with opening remarks on the importance of robust conversations in addressing the ethical challenges and implications of technological innovation, particularly with regard to considerations of security and privacy at the intersection of technology policy and corporate responsibility.

tech and corporate ethics roundtable photo

Margaret Hu, KIE Visiting Professor, along with guest speakers Jules Polonetsky (CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum), and David Hoffman (Director of Security Policy and Global Privacy Officer at Intel Corporation and Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law), kicked off the discussion, with contributions from Duke faculty discussants Richard Biever, Vincent Conitzer, Jolynn Dellinger, Wayne Norman, Matthew Perault, David Schanzer, Christopher Schroeder, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

Margaret Hu highlighted the need for ethical reflection in dealing with questions that fall beyond the purview of the law, acknowledging that philosophers and ethicists will hold an important role in shaping how technologies are developed and implemented within societies, as well as in considering how these technologies and the companies that are responsible for them are regulated. As David Hoffman noted, not only should we be concerned about how personal data are collected, but also how algorithms use those data to reach certain conclusions – which raises the question of where regulators ought to move first. Jules Polonetsky followed this line of reasoning, stating that “easy answers are pretty easy,” but the real challenge lies in having a good grasp on the nature of risks and benefits within an ever-changing digital economy in which data is one of the most significant commodities.

tech and corporate ethics roundtable photo

Many discussants agreed that some sort of ethical framework is needed in thinking through issues relating to data, but emphasized different approaches. Matthew Perault pointed out that being fast-acting – the very feature of tech companies that is often criticized in conversations about privacy and ethics – can be a benefit when we’re looking at companies’ responses to pressure from policy-makers or the press. Wayne Norman pointed out that the information asymmetries between tech companies and both the general public and policymakers complicates the problem, while David Schanzer argued that we can’t discuss the content of new regulations until we address the basic question of “what is ‘private’ and what is ‘public’” in contemporary society. Jolynn Dellinger observed that we don’t have a lot of historical evidence for companies successfully self-regulating, and argued for a shift in how we think about innovation and technology – perhaps building ethics into computer science and engineering curricula across the board. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong suggested an alternative approach, focused on understanding people’s values and how they actually want to see those values reflected in the technology they use.

Throughout the discussion, and the Q&A that followed, participants affirmed that centering ethics in discussions about regulation and corporate behavior is paramount. What is needed is analysis and action that takes seriously both good and bad uses of data, and anticipates how consent and intentionality are susceptible to new modes of data usage that we might not otherwise have predicted.


Technically Right advances ethical tech policy and innovation through interdisciplinary research, coursework for undergraduates and graduate students, and convenings of scholars and practitioners.