Government is Good for You

VIII*—GOVERNMENT IS GOOD FOR YOU

by Ross Harrison

ABSTRACT There is an argument that government cannot be good for individ-uals because it causes them to act through fear of punishment, hence for non-moral reasons. The obvious responses of accepting the conclusion (anarchism)and denying the premiss about moral motivation (utilitarianism) are first con-sidered. Then the strategy of accepting the premiss but denying the conclusionis pursued at greater length. Some arguments of T. H. Green and B. Bosanquetwhich attempt to do this are considered before an independent resolution isproposed.

Government is good for you. Why is it good for you? Howmuch government is good for you? We disagree about the

answers and also about what goodness is. In this paper I shalltake a set of contrasting moral assumptions and attempt to maptheir consequences for government. I stress the word ‘moral’here; I shall not be treating merely prudential considerations,although it is obviously possible to construct arguments, forexample in a Hobbesian spirit, which show why government is aprudential good deal. Yet, even restricting ourselves to the moreproblematic moral, the answer may still seem to be very simple.Morals is about the good. Government is about power. So allwe have to do is to use the power of government to produce themoral good. When we do, at least if we have the correct view ofmorals and the right people in power, philosopher kings perhaps,we have the answer. Government is good for you.

However it cannot be quite this simple. We cannot just take amorally correct view, use government power to force it intoeffect, and then suppose that we have thereby automaticallygained goodness. Some morally correct things are of the wrongkind to produce by power: they lack external evidence; they aretoo trivial; they are too subtle; they are recommended rather thanbeing obligatory. Therefore not all moral things should auto-matically be put into effect by government. However I wish to

* Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in Senate House, University of London,on Monday, 7th February, 2000 at 8.15 p.m.

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look at a much more fundamental and unsettling claim. This isnot just that government is not always appropriate but ratherthat it is never appropriate. Government is just not morally goodfor us.

Let me illustrate this claim by producing an argument whichsupports it as a conclusion. It has three assumptions, or premises,from which are derived three consequences, or conclusions. Hereit is:

(1) (1st assumption). Government works by commandingactivities and penalising non-performance.

(2) (2nd assumption). A moral act is an act done from moralmotives.

(3) (3rd assumption). Fear of punishment is not a moralmotive.

Hence, we get, relatively straightforwardly,

(4) (1st conclusion). Government can not produce moralacts.

Therefore:(5) (2nd conclusion). Government can not produce goodpeople.

Therefore:(6) (3rd conclusion) Government is not good for you.

Obviously these last two steps rely on further suppressed prem-ises. However, even with these premises being made explicit, weseem to have here an argument from plausible premises to whatmost people would think to be an absurd, or at least undesirable,conclusion. So I shall now attempt to track the source of theinvalidity in reasoning or isolate the premise or premises to berejected. In doing so I shall refer to a selection of texts, but Ishould make it clear that I am primarily interested here in investi-gating a set of moral views with prima facie plausibility ratherthan in giving an exact account of particular thinkers.

Whatever the precise exegetical details may be, the argumentI have just given is clearly Kantian in spirit, in particular thesecond assumption that moral action requires moral motives. A

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couple of remarks will illustrate this. We have in Kant’s Meta-physics of Morals the claim that what he calls ‘duties of virtue’cannot be ‘the subject matter of external legislation’ because, ashe puts it, ‘no external legislation can affect the adoption of anend (because that is an internal act of the mind)’ [p. 45]. That ispretty well our first conclusion, step four of the argument. Legis-lation will not make you virtuous. Earlier Kant allows that the‘incentive’ in ‘juridical legislation’, must, as he puts it, ‘be derivedfrom pathological grounds determining will, that is, from incli-nations and disinclinations’ [p. 19]. That is, the first assumptionabove. So here we have a Kantian endorsement of the first foursteps of the argument I have just given.

Is there a way out? Well, there are at least two, fairly obvious,ones. We can illustrate them from other material from the samedecade as the work from which I have just quoted, the 1790’s;only now in English. First Bentham in his Critical Eûaluationof the French Declaration of Rights, the work usually known asAnarchical Fallacies. Here Bentham does not have the slightestproblem about government; indeed the whole point of govern-ment is that it is good for you, and anything good should beadopted or promoted. He says:

We know what it is for men to live without government and, livingwithout government, to live without rights; we know what it is formen to live without government, for we see instances of such away of life in abundance. We see it in many savage nations, orrather races of mankind; for instance among the savages of NewSouth Wales, whose way of living is so well known to us: no habitof obedience and thence no government; no government andthence no laws; no laws and thence nor any such thing as rights,no security, no property... [p. 269].

and so on and on. This is part of the rhetoric which leads up tothe infamous claim that natural rights are ‘nonsense on stilts’.For Bentham, by contrast, it is government which gives us rightsand other good things. Life without government is bad.

Here we have a consequentialist, a utilitarian, ethic. Thisclearly does not have a problem with the argument with which Istarted. It denies the premise about motives. In utilitarianism theimportant thing is not why you do something but what happenswhen you do. The goodness of an act depends upon the goodness

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of the state of affairs it produces. So changing someone’s motivesby the threat of punishment does not matter at all as long as itis a means of getting the right thing done; that is the thing withthe best consequences. Bentham says in his An Introduction tothe Principles of Morals and Legislation [VII, 1] that ‘the businessof government is to promote the happiness of the society, bypunishing and rewarding’ [p. 74]. So, as in my first assumption,punishment is agreed to be the business of government. Howeverthis now produces no problem because threats of punishmentincrease general happiness; and happiness is the only good thing.So government is good for you.

Utilitarianism, therefore, is one answer. But not everyonewants to be a utilitarian. What can other moral theories do?Well, here is something else written in English, in the 1790’s, thistime 1793. The author talks of ‘positive institution’, that is theinstitution of rewards or penalties to influence behaviour. Hethen comments:

Let us suppose positive institution to interfere, and to annex somegreat personal reward to the discharge of my duty. This immedi-ately changes the nature of the action. Before, I preferred it for itsintrinsic excellence. Now, so far as positive institution operates, Iprefer it because some person has arbitrarily annexed to it a greatweight of self-interest. But virtue, considered as a quality of anintelligent being, depends upon the disposition with which theaction is accompanied. Under a positive institution then, this veryaction, which is intrinsically virtuous, may, so far as relates to theagent, become vicious.

This sounds exactly as the initial argument. Without governmentwe could be good. But now I have these artificial motives, I can-not be good any more; I am forced to do things for the wrongreasons, so that they and I cease to be good. So how does thisauthor get out of the argument? He does not. This is an argumentfor anarchism, its author, William Godwin; the book Enquiryconcerning Political Justice [here from II, 6, pp. 201–2]. Govern-ment is not good for you.

But not everyone wants to be an anarchist, and it was preciselyanarchists for which Bentham was gunning in Anarchical Fallac-ies; terrorists as he calls them; the French. Yet, as I said, noteveryone wants to be a utilitarian. Some want instead precisely


what Bentham is here attacking, namely rights prior and ante-cedent to government. Nor, unlike Bentham, do they think thatthis is necessarily anarchical. Revolutionary, perhaps, but notanarchical. Indeed, if we go back two decades to another revol-ution we reach the thought engraved on the hearts of all Ameri-cans ‘that to secure these rights, Governments are institutedamong Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of thegoverned’. So here, at least if we have consent, we have govern-ment justified and anarchism denied. Government secures rightsby threatening punishment. But rights are good for you. Sogovernment is good for you. This is the conclusion we want andyet the first premise of the argument, that government works bypunishing, is also accepted. So far, so good. So how does it getaround the second premise, the one about motives which utili-tarianism brushes aside as simply mistaken? I think that, just aswith utilitarianism, it can again be ignored as irrelevant. For,again, the important thing is to secure or achieve a state ofaffairs. This time it is the preservation of rights rather than theproduction of happiness. But the basic point is the same. It is theend state that is important, not how it is reached. So motives donot matter. Perhaps you can moralise, socialise, or educate yourpopulation. Then you get rights protected. You do not needgovernment. Or perhaps this is not possible. It works better, peo-ple being as they are, with threats and the sword. Justicedemands buildings with ‘justice’ written over the door. So thenwe have government. Different motives, but same end result;and, because there is same end result there is no problem. So,again, we may drop the second assumption of the original argu-ment, the one about motives.

Now, given the close connection of the pre-eminent import-ance of freedom with both Kantian ethics and also with thisloosely sketched rights theory, this is probably more suspiciousthan I have just made it sound. In any case, we have the questionof who government is meant to be for on this account. Is it, thatis, for the good guys or for the bad guys? Is it that, being basi-cally good people, we therefore want government to make usbetter? Or is it that, unfortunately, we good guys seem to besurrounded by a lot of potential or actual bad guys, so that wehave to have government to frighten them into keeping thingssafe for us. It sounds more like the latter. Government is con-ceived in sin. If only people were good we could live happily

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according to the natural law and without government. However,because we are fallen, sinful, doing injustice by invading eachothers’ natural rights, we have to have positive law as well.Government is for the wicked. And, if so, the kind of governmentwhich comes out is minimal, protecting basic rights but going nofurther.

Indeed we could combine the last two answers, that is therights answer and the anarchist one, and get something whichdoes sound rather Kantian. For Kant himself was not againstgovernment, memorably claiming that even if society was aboutto be dissolved, it was still important that the last murderer bejudicially sentenced and hung. The combination would be:government to protect minimal rights, but, once protected, nofurther government. Apart from rights, anarchism. Basic thingsshould be secured against the bad guys, but after that govern-ment should get out of the way, leaving us free to be moral. Justas it is thought that too much government can crowd out econ-omic activity, here we have the idea that too much governmentcrowds out moral activity.

I have been sketching positions rapidly and loosely to get aflavour of possible solutions to the initial problem. Let me nowsettle at a bit more length with two political philosophers sym-pathetic to the thrust of the original argument and yet who alsothink that government is good for you. These are two late Nine-teenth Century British Idealists, T. H. Green and Bernard Bosan-quet. Bosanquet describes in a footnote a person who claims thatat least compulsory religion is better than no religion, to whichhe gives the reply, ‘I fail to see the distinction’ [p. 179n]. That is,compulsory religion can not be better than no religion because itis not religion at all. Similarly compulsory morality is not moral-ity at all. Or, in the main text of this work, The PhilosophicalTheory of the State, he says ‘the enforcement of moral obli-gations per se [is] a contradiction in terms’ [p. 64]; and also, later,‘the promotion of morality by force, for instance, is an absoluteself-contradiction’ [p. 179]. Similarly, and before him, Green saysin his Lectures on Political Obligation, ‘the question sometimesput, whether moral duties should be enforced by law, is really anunmeaning one, for they simply cannot be enforced’ [§10].

So these two political philosophers clearly accept the first con-clusion of the initial argument. Government cannot produce


morally good acts. Yet they do not want anarchism. They wanta state, and furthermore they want it because it is good. The statefor Bosanquet is what he calls the ‘flywheel of our life’. He holdsindeed that government is essential for self-development, forsomeone, as he puts it, ‘becoming what he has in him to be’[p. 73]. Now the interest of this is not just that these philosophersaccept the first four steps of the initial argument yet deny its finalconclusion but that they also do this in a much more positiveway than the rights protection account I have just sketched. Thestate for them is essential for self-development; for freedom; forall the highest moral things in which they believe.

This is all very desirable as an aim and as a dissolution of theinitial problem; but they still have to work the trick. They dothis partly through Rousseauesque general will, whereby the stateis in some way ourselves rather than being an alien other overagainst us. However they also do it through a development ofthe split or double account I mentioned, only now given a morepositive spin. That is, they have a firm account both of whatthe state should do and also of what the state should not do.Government is needed for the good; but to gain the good,government should also keep out of the way. Furthermore, par-ticularly with Green, they think that the state should do morethan at that time it was currently doing. Green recommendsinterference with the entitlement of free citizens to make bargainsabout housing, land, education, work, drink, and so on. That is,he is in favour of inspection, regulation, and the possibility ofprohibition. These were all in his day increases of the reach ofthe state. This advancing state is argued to be good for you; andyet a central premise of the argument is that it is a contradictionto suppose that the state can make people moral or religious.

The problem is whether this can be made consistent, particu-larly since Bosanquet and Green also assume that evaluation ofthe state, like anything else, depends upon its success in realisingthe morally best life for people. Here is one way in which it couldbe made to work. Green and Bosanquet do not believe in naturalrights, antecedent to government. However they do think thatsome things are necessary to any kind of society in which free-dom is possible. These necessary things may properly be enforcedby the state. Freedom, understood here as self-realisation or self-development, is for them the ultimate moral ideal. Given that

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this is the ultimate ideal, and given that enforcement by govern-ment is only for its sake, such enforcement does not present amoral problem. In his analytical index to Green’s Political Obli-gation, Nettleship neatly sums up Section 15 as the claim thatthe only acts the state ‘ought to enjoin or forbid are those ofwhich the doing or not doing, from whateûer motiûe, is necessaryto the moral end of society’. Nettleship’s stress here on ‘whatevermotive’ is the key. It both recognises the force of the motivepremise in my initial argument, but also blocks some of its effect.It recognises that the identity of an act depends upon the identityof its motives; hence to change the motive is to change the act.It accepts that government changes motives by threatening pun-ishments and rewards. It accepts that if government attemptedto produce moral acts it would merely make these acts no longermoral.

All this is accepted. However this still allows the state toenforce behaviour where the motive is unimportant but the resultachieved is not. Green sets a necessary condition for any suchenforcement. It may only be for behaviour for which it is thecase that it is better for it to be done from an unworthy motivethan not to be done at all. Of course it still has to be shownthat anything meets this necessary condition; and hence that stateenforcement is ever legitimate. However the claim is that thosethings which are necessary for freedom, that is for morality, meetthis condition. So if there are things which are necessary for mor-ality or freedom, we justifiably enforce them. We do this, not tomake people moral (which is impossible), but as means toenabling them to make themselves moral. From the originalargument it follows that the people who are threatened with pun-ishment are not thereby morally improved. However we still geta moral result, because of the effect of this on others. Because ofthese threats people are able to live, plan, and make choices;without which it would not be possible for them to be moral.What we have here therefore is an indirect account; an indirectproduction of morality. Government sets the necessary con-ditions and then gets out of the way.

This indirectness is quite explicitly mentioned and developedby Green and Bosanquet. Bosanquet talks of ‘very delicate andindirect methods’ [p. xxxii]. He says that ‘the distinctive provinceof the state is rightly described as the hindrance to hindrances ofgood life’ [ib.]. Now Bosanquet may be correct when he says that


‘the state is in its right when it forcibly hinders a hindrance tothe best life or common good’ [p. 178]; and, if so, here we getboth a forcible state and also the good life, exactly the two thingswhich the original argument thought could not be conjoined.However this indirectness, this proceeding by double negation,leads to practical problems because of the difficulty of dis-tinguishing between negative and positive descriptions of an act.We are allowed, negatively, to hinder hindrances but notallowed, positively, to give help. This inevitably leads Bosanquetinto problems in practical application. He thinks that the personeager for education but lacking money should get the hindranceremoved, yet the person lacking the eagerness should not behelped to acquire it. However in both cases the end result wouldbe more education; more self-development; more (in his terms)morality. Nevertheless, practical problems apart, we do have herean answer to the initial question; an answer which allows a pun-ishing state, fully autonomous moral motivation, and yet alsoprovides a connection between them whereby the punishing stateis a necessary means, removing hindrances, to the autonomousmoral motivation.

However, although this is an answer, it is also a very indirectone. I shall now therefore suggest a more direct approach. Afterall, most people for most of the time have thought that there wasno problem about the state making people moral. Aristotle seemsto have thought that it was pretty straightforward that ‘legis-lators make the citizens good by forming habits in them’ [NE II,1]. After writing his Ethics the next work is to be on the politics,or how to put ethics into effect. Similarly Aquinas said that ‘law,even by punishing leads men on to being good’ [ST 1a2ae 92.2rep 4]. Or to take a more everyday piece of 16th century writing,Cranmer’s prayer for the church militant in the English Book ofCommon Prayer. Here we are to pray that all put into authoritymight ‘truly and indifferently minister justice, to the punishmentof wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy truereligion, and virtue’. Here again Cranmer seems to find no prob-lem at all in thinking that it is within the scope of the magistratesto promote virtue by the impartial administration of justice, thatis by punishing wickedness and vice.

I have just quoted a religious text because it is a means ofintroducing additional aspects of the story about rights protec-tion to which I alluded earlier. This story, in its 17th century

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form, is a story about transferring to the state a natural right topunish for the better execution (to use a Lockean word) of thenatural law. This natural law typically comes from God, forexample in Pufendorf or Locke. Now, whether or not we our-selves believe in the religious bit, it is worth seeing how Godfeatures in this story, if only as an example of a perfect law giver.Here someone with supposed natural authority gives us a law,and hence this law has authority. However God, at least in thisstory and at this time, also has formidable powers of punishment.The execution of the natural law has hell behind it. Only thusindeed are all those inner sins going to be reached which arebeyond the scope of external positive law.

Now the point here is that there is a double message aboutwhy you should obey the natural law, fear and reverence. Pufen-dorf, for example, talks about the ‘double weight’ exercised bycontracts. You should keep them because that is intrinsicallyright and but also because you are liable to punishment if youdo not. It is a double message. Or, to take another prayer ofCranmer, in his Litany he makes us pray ‘that it may please theeto give us an heart to love and to dread thee, and diligently tolive after thy commandments’. Obviously we pray that we maykeep the commandments, God’s moral law. However here wealso pray for the motivation which enables us to do this, and themotivation which Cranmer invokes is a double one. It is bothlove and dread; the same double message. Long before this, inthe endlessly discussed passage telling people to obey the powersthat be, St Paul in Romans said ‘ye must needs be subject, notonly for wrath, but also for conscience sake’ [AV, xiii, 5]. Again,he gives two reasons.

So this duality is typical, at least at that time. And our questionof course is whether such duality is compatible with the originalargument. Suppose that the state uses both love and dread, bothrespect for authority and also fear of punishment. The questionis whether this duality of motive falls foul of the motive assump-tion of the original argument, the assumption that moral actscan only come from moral motives. An act appears. The moralmotive is still there, still influential. We did it through love ofthe good; because of our reverence for the moral law. However,another motive has now joined it. We did it through fear of pun-ishment; because of our dread of the law giver. The question is


whether this duality damages Kantian purity. Of course we mighttry, as before, to split the good guys from the bad guys. Thegood guys are naturally just; they operate only through love,respect, understanding, conscience; they have a single motive.The bad guys need wrath and fear; another single motive. So, itmight be claimed, although there are two motives in play, eachperson is only subject to one of them. If true this would have theparadoxical consequence that the whole point of the state is toenable some people (the good guys) to behave as if it did notexist. However, it is not true. One problem is that most peopleare both good and bad, inseparable into sheep and goats.Another is that, even if you could separate them, the motivationof the good guys, as Godwin suggested, seems to be corruptedbecause of the added threats. It is all very well to say that walkingalong a narrow plank at ground level is the same as walkingalong a narrow plank over a thousand foot drop. You are notgoing to fall off, it might be said, and therefore the fact that therewould be different consequences if you did is not relevant. If youare a good guy, it might be said, you are not going to do wrong,and therefore the fact that there would be different consequencesif you did is not relevant. Nevertheless in neither case does it feelthe same when fear is added.

With such difficulties, delicacy is required. Nevertheless, I wishnow to show that, whatever may be the case with walking alongplanks, adding fear to our reverence for the moral law need notessentially alter the moral situation. I shall do this by first look-ing at an example of duality of reasons for action of a quitedifferent kind. This is indirect utilitarianism. In indirect utili-tarianism, for example rule utilitarianism, the ultimate reasonwhich justifies action is only indirectly connected with particularactions, which are done for other reasons. Thus, for example, Ihave it as a rule to keep promises, and my reason for keeping aparticular promise is because of this rule. However the ultimatejustification for the rule is that people keeping the rule promotesgeneral utility. I have two reasons to keep my promise, a directone and also an indirect one. A direct reason and also a reasonwhy this reason is the right reason.

Now such indirect accounts are supposed to have severaladvantages, but the one which is particularly important for thepresent problem is its supposed motivational efficiency. In

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indirect utilitarianism we can distinguish between the position ofimmediate action and the position of contemplative endorse-ment. When I am in the heat of the action, I operate just by therules, by the social expectations, by my painfully acquiredmotives, or by whatever the particular indirect account pre-scribes. However as well as this position of action there is also aseparate position of contemplation. From this position I canendorse these actions from a utilitarian point of view as being ofthe kind which will in fact bring about the right results. I actimmediately but I also think correctly and at leisure, and theseparation between them has advantages for my ultimate successin action.

This becomes pertinent for our particular problem if, in theheat of the moment, I am liable to act in a self-interested or shortterm way. Then the ideal situation would be if I could safely giveway to these immediate motives and yet discover, in the coollight of my subsequent studious contemplation, that I had in factbeen doing the right thing. The whole Benthamite theory ofgovernment is an attempt to follow this policy, making it ineveryone’s interests to do what they ought; that is, to do thosethings which as a matter of fact promote general happiness. Ben-tham called it the ‘duty and interest junction principle’; my dutyis joined to my interest, so in following my interest, I will infact achieve my duty. This is an indirect strategy: I behave self-interestedly while acting, but cool contemplation tells me (at leastif I am fortunate enough to live in a state with properly utilitarianlaws) that I am in fact also doing the right thing.

We have here a duality of moral and self-interested reasons, aduality of reverence and fear, and we need such a duality to solveour original problem. However the answer I have just given tohow such a duality can work is a utilitarian answer whereas ouroriginal problem requires a non-utilitarian one. With utilitarian-ism the problem of combining motives, or indeed anything else,is merely technical. It is all a matter of plumbing. Providing theright stuff comes out in the right places, it does not matter howtwisted the pipes are. So the next question is whether there needbe more than such technical problems even if we shift to anothermorality. The question, that is, is whether we can change ouridea of duty from a utilitarian to a non-utilitarian one but stillretain a duty and interest junction principle, allowing both kindsof reasons to operate together.


In such an account the ultimate reason, that is the reasonendorsed from the position of cool contemplation, has to be amoral reason. This reason also has to be the reason which counts,the reason which ultimately motivates (for this is now to be amorality centred on motivation rather than on consequence). Letus first try this with a single person version. I have these Kantianstyle moral reasons. However I discover that I would do betterin getting what these reasons prescribe if I could also give myselfmore immediate reasons for action. So I fix some additional,immediate, self-interested reasons for action. I then do better (inrealising my ultimate reasons); indeed I discover that I do betterstill if while acting I never think of anything apart from theimmediate reasons. Here we have something structurally similarto my earlier indirect account. When I act, I act immediately,and my immediate motivations are self-interested. However, Ialso have a position of cool contemplation and in this position Imorally endorse my actions. Since this position of endorsementis the ultimate position, my ultimate motive is moral. My reasonsare double but my heart is pure.

Or perhaps it is not; perhaps I have already parted too farfrom a morality of motive. Yet, as long as I retain knowledge ofmy ultimate motives, this is not obvious. However pure we wishto be in making morality a matter of motive, clearly some kindsof self manipulation are permitted. Purely physical manipulation,that is the choice of which arm or muscle to use, must be a matterof moral indifference as long as the intended deed is done. I mayconcentrate on exactly how to reach the light switch, even if themoral point of doing this is quite independent of how it is actu-ally done. I may manage to induce in myself the morally desirable(because reassuring) attribute of calm confidence if I pretend tomyself that I am sitting on a beach. And so on. These casesinvolve intervening psychic, as well as intervening physical, steps.However this does not seem to matter for the validity of themoral motivation. All that is necessary is that these manipu-lations are mere means to achieving a morally motivated ultimateend.

However such strategies of self manipulation tend to run intothe following problem. The reason for adopting indirect stra-tegies is that I do worse if I try to act directly on my ultimatereasons. The less contaminated my immediate actions are by

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thought about my ultimate ends, the better I do (in terms ofthese ends themselves). Hence, it would seem, I would do bestby avoiding any thought at all about these ultimate ends. Butnow comes the problem. This greater success suddenly becomesa failure, at least in Kantian moral terms. If I never occupy theposition of moral contemplation, moral reasons can no longerbe said to be among my reasons for action, let alone the over-riding reasons. Yet, by the second initial premise, moral actsrequire moral motives. I now no longer have these motives orreasons. Hence the moment of greatest apparent moral successturns out to be in reality a complete moral failure.

That is a problem we naturally run into with indirect accountswhich involve single persons attempting to manipulate them-selves. However with government we have many people. Thisimmediately changes things. Firstly we do not need any kind ofdeception, or attempt not to think about the ultimate motivesfor action. We can have both positions, the positions of actionand of contemplation, in complete mutual transparency; yet eachstill able to fulfil its role. As Bentham puts it in the Preface tothe Fragment on Goûernment, ‘under a government of laws, whatis the motto of a good citizen? To obey punctually; to censurefreely’ [p. 10]. We have both contemplation and action. At thepoint of action I obey punctually. I act to avoid punishment. Atthe position of contemplation I censure freely. I judge whetherthe laws I am being subjected to are the right laws. This, or so itseems to me, should also work in a non-utilitarian account.

One reason why government is good for us is that governmentis a device whereby we can collectively manipulate ourselves. Wewould not otherwise naturally do the right things, but govern-ment enables us. If by some story (social or hypothetical con-tract; democratic decision making) the government is ourgovernment (rather than a wholly alien power over and againstus), we can say that we ourselves are using government to makeourselves better. Being influenced by self-interested consider-ations, we use this in order to get good. With the highest moralreasons, aiming at the good, we use government to work on ourlower natures, and so help us to achieve it. We have self-manipu-lation in the interests of the good; but this time, and unlike theprevious first person story, we also have continuous full trans-parency and continual full moral endorsement. At the moment


in which we seem to win, we win. We do not have to forget,disguise, or otherwise eliminate our ultimate reasons. Further-more these ultimate reasons may be, as with Kant and the BritishIdealists, the protection and enhancement of our and others’moral freedom. We may have full endorsement with a Kantianstyle of morality at the contemplative, or top, level; our free cen-sure may be Kantian censure. So we have reverence, reverencefor the moral law. However, from this moral position, we usegovernment to give ourselves endorsable self-interested motives.Then when we act, we obey punctually. So, as well as reverence,we have fear. We have the required duality. So, even if our ideaof the good is more motivationally pure than that of theutilitarians, government may still be good for us.

Ross HarrisonKing’s CollegeCambridgeCB2 [email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, volume 28 of Blackfriars translation, 1966 (Lon-don: Blackfriars).

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, 1925 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press).

Bentham, J., 1973, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, as in (ed.) Bhikhu Parekh, Bentham’sPolitical Thought (London: Croom Helm).

Bentham, J., 1988, A Fragment on Goûernment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press).

Bentham, J., 1970, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation(London: Athlone Press).

Bible [Authorised version] 1611, London.Book of Common Prayer, 1662, London.Bosanquet, B., 1923, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th ed. (London:

Macmillan).Godwin, W., 1976, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth:

Penguin).Green, T. H., 1931, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London:

Longmans).Kant, I., The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd, 1965 (New

York: Macmillan).

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