Democracy and the Need for “Healthy Moral Selves”

A fairly precise vision of a healthy physical self can serve as motivation for undertaking the means to that end. The same cannot be said with regard to “healthy moral selves”. By definition, democracy is about living with others and, as we argue, a healthy moral self is one that lives well with others. However, precisely what “living with others” entails is ambiguous, particularly in a capitalist economy that presumes that the greatest happiness results from antagonistic competitiveness. In an attempt to demystify how self-focused individuals may nonetheless thrive in “the space between”, we will examine, with the help of Kant and Foucault, the Enlightenment Project that promoted maximal reasonableness (or what we are referring to as “healthy moral selves”) and then, with the help of Steven Pinker and Alisdair MacIntyre, explore the factors that have led to its seeming relatively recent failure. We will argue, following Iris Murdoch and others, that the best hope for its revitalization, and with it, democracy, lies, on one hand, with the debunking of counterfeit moral selves who use a “moral stance” to deliver what Frankfurt refers to as “bullshit”, and, on the other, with the reinvigoration of our understanding that healthy moral selves require a steady diet of engaging in “objective practical reasoning” with those who think differently, thereby potentially starving our fat relentless egos that are so often the source of divisiveness and, in so doing, become happy by becoming worthy of being happy. In animating the value of this goal, the hope is that the means, i.e., education for the reinvigoration of practical reason (the forgotten twin of theoretical reason) and genuine deliberative dialogue across difference will become sufficiently attractive that it will energize democratic practice and dialogue to such an extent that democracy, as a form of government, may yet flourish despite the atomizing forces of capitalism.