Brazil: a recent and weak democracy

IN BRAZIL, POLITICAL participation is a recent phenomenon, overcoming a long tradition of apathy among the population with regard to politics. Although a National Health Council was created in 1930 and some national conferences on specific issues, in which citizens participated directly, had been held since 1941, these were local experiences, with sporadic activities and few people involved. In the late 1970s, still under the military dictatorship (1964–85), social movements and some organisations like churches and professional bodies began to demand what they called a ‘right to participate’ in the control of the state and the decision-making processes of public policy. Although their demand was unsuccessful at that time, popular councils were created in some cities. These experiences of voluntary participation were generally parallel, external and opposed to state agencies. In many segments of society, however, there was a growing desire to have more voice and influence in public affairs, even if the concepts were very different about how this right would be implemented.

A landmark for these aspirations was a national health conference that took place in 1986, soon after the return to democracy. It emphatically recommended the creation of a national health assistance system, with the direct participation of government agents, health care professionals and users of the new system. The implementation of this recommendation was the embryo of a new participation space called the public policy council. The Federal Constitution from 1988 created many different instruments to involve stakeholders directly in the formulation and management of specific policies by foreseeing direct participation in them. It paved the way for claims of power-sharing in many different areas, totalling around thirty articles that encouraged experiments in participatory public management. In addition to these policy councils, conferences continued to be held, and in 2001 mandatory participation in the masterplans of cities, expanding the formal channels of participation, was introduced.

Probably the best known mode of participation is participatory budgeting. It was first implemented in Porto Alegre in 1990 and quickly expanded to involve around 170 cities in Brazil (Ribeiro Torres and Grazia 2003). Although it is often associated with the Workers’ Party, participatory budgeting was implemented by local governments from various political currents.

CAPITALISM HAS UNDERGONE a number of important transformations and challenges. Wars, depression and imperialism created the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century. But within the West, capitalism responded to these problems with Keynesian solutions, creating an expanded social contract and growing middle class. Perhaps with the fall of the Soviet Union capitalism became drunk with victory. But alongside its triumphalism, capitalism was reaching its own limits of expansion within the Keynesian model. Without an external threat, capitalism was free to focus on the wage structures and social benefits that restricted corporate profitability. The middle class had reached their limits and the working class had overreached theirs. Neoliberalism, led by financialisation, transformed capitalism into an updated model of its pre-Keynesian existence. Austerity, the export of jobs, privatisation and attacks on unions overwhelmed the working class.

The Washington Consensus was not just about the United States. In reality it was a capitalist consensus developed as an economic and political strategy by the emerging transnational capitalist class (TCC) (Sklair 2001; Robinson 2004; Harris 2008). Capitalism was rapidly transforming from a nation-centric system into a global structure of accumulation and power. Austerity in the developed North and structural adjustment programmes in the developing South resulted from a break with industrial-era national capitalism by a hegemonic TCC.

The democratic dialectic

The bourgeois democratic revolutions in the US and France were based on a revolutionary alliance between the capitalist class, craftsmen, workers, farmers and peasants. This created a historic dialectic that encompassed a contradictory and tension-filled relationship, but that nevertheless allowed for the incorporation of popular demands into capitalist society. As a result the working-class opposition has always existed inside the capitalist dialectic to produce democratic outcomes. These movements took shape not only inside the factories, but also as social movements that have encompassed the demands of women, minorities and other identities.

Antonio Gramsci's theory on hegemony best explained the twin aspects of consent and coercion that have characterised bourgeois rule. While force and violence was always present, consensus was the main tool of more developed capitalist societies (Gramsci 1971). This contradiction, built into the very origins of political institutional structures, produced the flexibility that allowed capitalism to adopt and continue to evolve.

THE CONFLICTS AND revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East during the last few years have multiple causes; among the main but not always most visible ones, we can surely list excessive use of resources, environmental limits to population growth and consumption, and the resultant long-term inability of these countries to supply their inhabitants with food and drinking water from domestic reserves. Egypt, the world's top wheat importer, is an obvious case in point.

According to Terazono and Saleh (2013: 2), the Egyptian government had to back down in 1977 when riots broke out following a rise in the prices of staple foodstuffs, and since then food subsidies have been a sensitive issue. When the food crisis of 2007–8 made wheat more expensive than ever, many families had to rely on subsidised bread, and army bakeries helped to maintain supply.

The situation worsened in 2010 when, due to the drought and extensive burning of cornfields, Russia banned the export of wheat in order to reserve its supply for its own inhabitants. Wheat prices – and consequently the price of staple food items – increased to such an extent that riots broke out not only in Egypt (Palazzo 2014) but also in other North African countries reliant on its import. These riots destabilised the whole region and in many areas grew into a real Hobbesian war of all against all. The subsequent regime change in Egypt has not improved the situation. The liberalisation of the political system worked in favour of fundamentalists whose leader became the first democratically elected president of Egypt. However, this provoked resistance from the secular opposition supported by the army and so in 2013 the military regime in the country was restored. We might talk, then, of one revolution in 2011 and another in 2013, although the latter could be considered as a counter- revolution (Beránek 2013). The production and sale of oil, which has been the source of foreign currency for the purchase of wheat, is decreasing; therefore, the riots continue. Since 2010, Egypt has spent most of its foreign reserves on importing wheat, which it has not been able to grow because of the lack of suitable farmland and water for irrigation.

Perhaps nothing seems clearer to us and more pervasive in our lives than ethics. We live constantly with a sense of our obligations and duties, and with whether we have failed or succeeded in living up to them; and it is generally not considered bad form to remind others of their own. We are taught from our earliest ages that it is important that we “be good” or “do the right thing.” Unlike some concepts that can be difficult to understand, ethical norms seem to be readily cognizable. Indeed, we believe they need to be of such a form that virtually anyone can follow them. Of course, at the same time that we recognize how pervasive ethics is in our lives, we also recognize that there are many complicated ethical questions that do not seem to lend themselves to easy answers. Yet, for all the potential difficulty in finding some answers, we seem readily able to comprehend the nature of those difficulties in a way that would not be true of, say, a problem in theoretical physics. And although we at least sense that complicated ethical theories may occupy the time of philosophers, we also believe that philosophers are considering matters we generally understand, and which are not themselves simply products of the philosophers’ own reflections. Ethics is something real for us all, not a theoretical construct. It would still be of concern to us even if ethical theorists did not exist.

Whatever else might be said about ethics, then, its universality is palpable. We have phrased this last sentence carefully. We are saying that ethics is of concern to all of us—not that it should be, or that the world is a better place when it is, but that it is in fact of concern to all of us. The first question, therefore—and, we would venture to say, the last, as well—is simply: What is it about which we are so concerned?

After having completed a work on political philosophy, our hope was to do a work on ethics. In thinking the matter through, however, we found it was not so easy to simply begin a discussion of ethics. We discovered that although everyone pays lip service to the notion that ethics and politics are distinct, understanding how and why they are so is not so easily accomplished. Indeed, it turns out that the structure of typical ethical arguments today is integrally like the structure of most normative political arguments. Both tend to culminate in what we call a juridical form of normativity. The sort of ethical theory we desire to advocate, by contrast, takes on a different structure. We were thus required to say more about political theory in order to find a space for ethics. In our work on political theory, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), we link politics largely to what we call “metanorms”—or norms that provide a context for the exercise of actions in accordance with ethical norms. Such norms do take a juridical form. But how to move from metanorms to norms? That, we argue, requires a fuller appreciation of the nature of a perfectionist ethics. To make that turn, it was necessary to traverse still more political theory, because rather than taking its cue from ethics, almost the reverse seems true today: ethics is taking its cues from the political.

Hence, besides laying out our framework, much of the early part of this book is involved in showing how what we term “individualistic perfectionism” can be employed as both an alternative ethical theory and as a basis for criticism of other political and ethical approaches. By contrasting our individualistic form of ethical perfectionism with some currently predominant frameworks, we can expose the doubtable assumptions and implications of these other approaches to ethics and politics while making room for our own approach.

In the second half of this book we attempt to defend the foundations we have employed in the first half and to give some indication of their meaning in practice.

In order to fully grasp the exact character of individualistic perfectionism, we think it is worthwhile to contrast the theory we have developed with the thought of two very important philosophers: Stephen Darwall and Mark LeBar. We have chosen these thinkers because they are, in some fashion or other, advocates of constructivism— that is to say, the metaethical view that evaluative or normative claims are seen as true or false because they are based on principles that are constructions of moral thought, and not because they are discovered, detected, or grounded in anything real apart from such thought. We have benefited from considering these thinkers, because they have been instrumental in our clarifying the ways in which the individualist perfectionist position we hold stands apart. What follows indicates some of our reflections and conclusions in this regard.

Darwall

We take the works of Stephen Darwall to be one of the most prominent examples of the paradigm of respect. Anyone familiar with Darwall's work has learned from it, and we ourselves have come to understand our own views better in light of it. It would be folly to suppose that we could provide a full analysis of Darwall's views here. Instead, we seek to contrast some of his major tenets with our own, more as a way of further clarifying our own position, and less as a criticism of Darwall. The spirit with which we undertake the following reflections is thus one of illumination rather than depreciation.

There seem to be three major points of comparison between Darwall's work and our own.

In Norms of Liberty (NOL), while in the process of arguing for the moral necessity of a political/legal order whose fundamental structural principles are individual basic negative rights, we discovered that there is much confusion about the role and function of universality in ethics and political philosophy. Moreover, we discovered that the role and function of universality varied greatly, depending on how one conceived not only the nature of what is good and obligatory, but also deeper issues in philosophy. We were thus drawn to questions about the nature of ethics and the difference between practical and epistemic universals—matters applicable to both politics and ethics.

Avoiding Modernity's Pitfalls: The Four Constraints

It is our contention that we need to free ourselves from certain epistemological and metaethical assumptions of Modernity—to wit, the following interrelated claims (to be referred to as “the Four Constraints”): (1) in order for moral or ethical claims to qualify as knowledge, they must have the same form as those of theoretical or speculative science; (2) universality is necessary for objectivity; (3) universality can replace objectivity; and (4) the ethical is essentially legislative. As we shall see, both in this chapter and in the ones to follow, our conclusions with respect to the Four Constraints will affect our arguments in both the political and the ethical realms. Moreover, by indicating how we may not actually be bound by these constraints, we will be taking some necessary steps toward our goal of liberating ethics from modalities more appropriate to politics.

In order to bring about this philosophical liberation from the Four Constraints, it is necessary first to consider the proper use of abstractions. Our starting principle is that although abstractions are tools for knowing reality, they are not the realities themselves; and thus we should be careful not to ascribe their form or mode to the realities they disclose.

When all is said and done, perhaps the problem nagging all forms of eudaimonistic virtue or perfectionist ethics within the Aristotelian tradition might be the problem of “big morality.” Given the focus in such theories upon the agent's own flourishing, one wonders whether this type of ethics can ever capture moral experience that seems to be “global” in proportions. Here we might be thinking of something like an evil so great, it does not seem possible to appreciate its depth by saying that it results from a “failing to flourish,” or that it exemplifies actions which “impede flourishing.” The examples of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. The horrific nature of their actions is so profoundly devastating that it seems almost insulting to our moral sensibilities to think that the depth of their evil can be measured by reference to a lack of flourishing. The reverse may hold as well. There could be some moral goods that go beyond what seems necessary to support or even encourage flourishing of particular individuals or groups of them. Perhaps Jesus, Socrates, or some other saint-like person in one's pantheon of moral exemplars would come to mind in this connection. Either way, flourishing, especially when it is as individualized as we would have it in our foregoing arguments, seems somehow small when paired with the kind of evil or goodness that transcends particular circumstances and times and places.

The problem of big morality thus resurrects the old charge leveled against eudaimonistic ethical theories that, by not appreciating the other and by being too focused upon the self, they are too narrow. Various ethical theorists in the eudaimonistic tradition, including ourselves, have given responses to this charge; and these responses are, in their own way, no doubt adequate and successful. But with big morality, there seems to be a remainder. Yes, sociality is both necessary and important for flourishing, but we are talking here about deeds that go beyond the encouragement or destruction of sociality. Eudaimonistic theories may be adequate for ordinary moral discourse, but that's precisely the problem: How well do they really do with the extraordinary?

The deliberately provocative title of this chapter is not meant to suggest that business is somehow a superior form of activity relative to other occupations. The value of any pursuit, as should be clear by now, is a function of individuals and their various talents and circumstances. Rather, our point will be that although we have been operating at a theoretical plane throughout this work, moral theory is meant, finally, to issue in action—and, therefore, that some of the essential features of market entrepreneurship are also essential components of ethical conduct as we have been advancing it here. So, the question now becomes: What general models of action are best suited to the type of moral theory we are advocating? We noted in the last chapter that Darwall claims that modern ethical theory and practice is essentially juridical. This claim is no doubt accurate; but it does not follow that it represents the only, or even the best, way to understand morality. We have tried to offer in the preceding chapters an alternative perspective—one that might be called an “evaluational” approach to moral action, in opposition to the “juridical.” The contrast between the evaluational and the juridical forms may generally map onto our two basic paradigms of an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of respect, with the juridical being more likely to be found in the latter and the evaluational in the former.

In general, the juridical form seeks to render ethical prescriptions in terms of universal claims or rules grounded in a theory of value that is at least partially agent-independent, if not directly agent-neutral. The object of moral action, then, is to find the rule or norm that covers the kind of case at issue and to direct one's conduct according to that rule or norm.

Imagine a scenario much like Plato describes at the end of the Phaedo, where Socrates, in his jail cell, surrounded by friends, having been condemned to death by the court of Athens, is about to receive the hemlock. Suppose, further, that Socrates, as in Plato's dialogue, drinks the hemlock, but does not die. Instead, a messenger rushes in to announce to those present that Socrates was pardoned from his sentence and that the messenger has an antidote, which he then administers and which will restore Socrates back to his former state of health. The only catch is that Socrates is no longer allowed to practice philosophy in any way or form. Being both obedient to law and opposed to suicide and self-exile, Socrates continues his life without philosophy. He can make love to his wife, play with his children, and chat with people about the weather and politics; but he can do no philosophy—either publicly or in private. We might suppose that Socrates has an immense capacity for philosophy and a compelling disposition toward doing it. But he is equally strong-willed, and each time he is tempted toward philosophy, his daimon says no, he must obey the law. It would be commonly said of this Socrates that he now cannot live up to his potential, that he no longer is able to perfect himself. But would we necessarily say he has lost the ability to achieve well-being or human flourishing? Could Socrates not obtain well-being or human flourishing by taking up some other activity with pleasurable and satisfying dimensions, even if they are not philosophical activities? To what degree can one's perfectibility be separated from one's well-being or human flourishing, and how might the latter be dependent upon the former, if it is at all? Is someone's good necessarily good for that person?

Consider another scenario regarding Socrates and the hemlock.