The Politics of Civic Maturity v the Politics of Justice: Reflecting on Bernard Williams’ Separation Thesis 

Abstract 

In his paper “Voluntary Acts and Responsible Agents”, Bernard Williams rejects the view that being a person who is responsible for their actions coincides with being a mature person, including having civic maturity. The latter is the maturity of citizens who live in a specific community or state and robustly and fully engage with their laws as they shape their citizenship and exercise their practical reasoning. Williams rejects the view that when we are responsible for our actions, we are talking about the mature agent.  When we talk about the mature agent, we are also concerned with the full development of the requirements of deliberation, including self-knowledge. However, he states: “if we are addressing the ideas of being held responsible or regarded as a responsible agent, it is not clear why such an ideal should be relevant”.He continues by asserting that when we are dealing with responsibility for our actions that involves self-control, we are dealing with questions of justice. Thus, questions of justice arise among people living under a “common system of justice”, when we deal with strangers. Williams tells us “these people do not, just from this perspective, have any interest in one another’s power of self-understanding, that is, in the ideal of maturity”. I will call this thesis “Williams’s Separation Thesis”. 

Having this separation thesis as a starting point, Williams poses a pugnacious puzzle that arises in regard to civic maturity. If we ask the citizen to ‘take responsibility’ then this demonstrates precisely that the citizen either has not shown maturity or is not mature. A sign of maturity means taking responsibility through our own realisation and reflections, not because someone else has told us to do so.  

Underlying Williams’ Separation Thesis is a key premise. This is the idea that responsibility for our actions is determined in terms of our outcomes and that what we produce in the world cannot be reconciled with the ideal of civic maturity. The latter is a matter of self-knowledge or self-awareness. Psychologically realistic politics is the politics of justice and not the politics of civic maturity since we cannot reconcile our agency as being responsible with the ideal of civic maturity.  Williams thinks it is psychologically unrealistic to imagine that we can deliberate and be in control of our actions, and at the same time achieve self-knowledge and become a mature citizen. We need to satisfy ourselves with a modest conception of responsibility, he tells us, where we ask citizens to be responsible for the outcomes of their actions, even if not intended because this is just in terms of the harm we impose upon others.  

Contra Williams, I will argue that we can reconcile the politics of civic maturity and the politics of justice and will explore a philosophical conception of 'rights' and justice to shed light on a potential ‘reconciliation’ strategy. I will show that civic maturity is achieved when the citizen is engaged with the values of the law, ie. descriptions and re-descriptions of values,  and reasoning by courts. Descriptions and re-descriptions of values advanced by the reasoning of the judges are in the background of the judges’ attributions. Nevertheless, I accept Williams’ point that we need a psychologically realistic account of ethical and legal responsibility and I aim to precisely demonstrate how the conception of deliberation can be psychologically realistic. We start from basic engagement with values in concrete and particular circumstances. We develop the knowledge of these values due to experience. We describe and re-describe our values following the ‘internal logic’ of practical reasoning.  But the phenomenology of our temporal actions and thoughts teaches us that we do not stop here. It is not psychologically realistic to think that we do not change and become. We transform ourselves and achieve a more precise and accurate or perhaps, at times, less precise and accurate re-descriptions of our values, projects, ends, and commitments. We become and transform ourselves, and we can inhabit an aspirational perspective toward our values or a less-than-aspirational perspective. The law belongs to the ‘internal logic’ of values that expands itself, so to speak, and it is contemplated by our proleptic thoughts, or so I will argue. 

About the Speaker 

Professor Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Moral and Political Philosophy (Jurisprudence) in the School of Law, University of Surrey and member of the Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy. She studied law at Oxford University (MJur, Balliol College) and legal philosophy at the University of Cambridge (PhD, Corpus Christi College). Her research is located at the intersection of practical reason, philosophy of action and law. She draws insights from ancient, medieval and contemporary moral psychology and action theory to illuminate the nature of private law, legal authority and normativity. Further details on her current research can be found here:  http://www.philosophyofaction.com/in-conversation-with. Her research has been published in leading journals and she is the author of the monograph Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good (Oxford: Hart /Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014; paperback edition 2017), where she argues that the understanding of the structure of practical reason sheds light on legal authority and normativity (for a discussion on sections of the book, please follow this link: https://podcast2.ruf.uni-freiburg.de/ub/casts/14/Rechtswissenschaft/Fre…).

Veronica has also co-edited Dignity in Dworkin's Legal and Moral Philosophy ( Oxford: OUP, 2018) and Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). Prof. Rodriguez-Blanco was Alexander Von Humboldt Research Fellow (University of Heidelberg and University of Kiel), Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence) and Visiting Professor at the University of Stockholm and the University of Vienna. Prof. Rodriguez-Blanco’s research has been funded by the British Academy, the British Council, the Cambridge Overseas Trust, Centre Saint-Ignatius-Antwerp, and the Foundation for the Promotion of Research-Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ).

Veronica is co-editor of the journal Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought and has been invited to deliver keynote lectures and papers at Yale Law School, Chicago Law School, Toronto Law School, Melbourne Law School, Georgia State University, Uppsala, McMaster University, University Pompeu Fabra, University of Girona, Freiburg, Palermo, Antwerp, Belgrade, Austral University (Argentina), Navarra, Mexico City (UNAM) and Edinburgh.

Practicalities 

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