What ought we do politically? Throughout this essay, I plan to explore that question. I will look at a few dialectical tensions such as equality and excellence, liberation and freedom, collectivity and individuality, virtue ethics and political freedom, moral imperative and non imperative, and theories of good character and theories of good institutions. None of these topics will be explored exhaustively, but they will be explored as they relate to the beginning question of this paragraph. They will be explored through a libertarian socialist worldview, using tools that Arendt provides in On Revolution and The Human Condition.

Equality vs Excellence: A bridgeable Chasm

Equality is often posed against the ability to excel. Often this comes from a conflation of taxonomic hierarchies and institutional hierarchies. A taxonomic hierarchy is based on some kind of way of looking at relations and difference. This can take the form of a family tree or an evolutionary tree. There is also difference amongst things in regards to various metrics. An institutional hierarchy is based on ruling strata that command those below them through centralizing policy making power and maintaining that centralized policy making power over others. Hierarchies are based on top-down decision making through command, instead of bottom-up decision making through deliberation and free agreement and disagreement. Hierarchies are based on structural inequality, and structural violence and coercion (internal or external to particular hierarchies) maintain hierarchies and keep people within them against their higher order volition. By conflating taxonomic hierarchies and difference according to particular metrics with institutional hierarchies, institutional hierarchies are seen as natural (as in an aspect of first nature as opposed to something that is part of second nature ((social, political, and economic life))), and by extension impossible to abolish and a “part of life”. Further, if they were to look at first nature they would see diversity, complementarity, mutuality, and volition as factors in evolution and not merely competition and predation. Those positive metrics of diversity, complementarity, mutuality, and volition found in natural evolution are the very naturalistic metrics that should inform our conceptions of what should be, how we treat the non-human world, and how we treat each-other.

The abolition of hierarchy involves a formal equality of decision making power which is also participatory. Institutional hierarchies deprive people of the means of existence, production, and freedom in absolute and relative ways. The means of existence, production, and freedom enable excellence in the sense of virtues, and excellence within particular artistic, philosophical, scientific, and political fields. Therefore we ought to have a world based on equality. It is in fact inequality that makes it so people are, “not expected to aspire to excellence,” but merely to “make peace with mediocrity,” [10, page 5].

Structural violence can be defined as absolute and relative deprivation of access to resources people need and desire. If structural violence were to be eliminated and production was done with liberatory technology to meet human needs in an ecological way (as opposed to profit mechanisms), there can be a material standard of living for all that is nothing short of luxurious for all [6]. Equality (through a cooperative economy uninhibited by markets) in tandem with post 1960’s technology becomes a rising tide that lifts all boats psychologically [4] and materially (with few exceptions) [5], and starts with those most in need since that need is a relevant variable but eventually would enable a post scarcity economy for all. The 1960’s is relevant because it is in the 1960’s that there is a degree of automation, mechanization, and alternative energy sources that become available that create the potential to actuate a post scarcity economy [5]. This material foundation would enable for more participation in one’s own life and in political life. Solving the social question is needed for political equality, for the social and political spheres are in dialogue. When there is structural violence economically, not all have an equal opportunity to participate in political affairs. Social patterns of arbitrary and authoritarian double standards and discrimination (such as racism, sexism, anti Semitism, etc.) inhibit people’s ability to feel comfortable participating politically and being in the public sphere. More participation in political life enables paideia. If paideia comes out of political participation and is virtue forming, then depriving people of the means of politics and freedom (which includes the means of existence and production) inhibits paideia and virtues (along with scientific and philosophical development) throughout society (including both those more directly effected and even those who are depriving others through hierarchical rule). Arendt is correct that, “wealth and economic well-being… are the fruits of freedom” [2, page 209], but it also true that solving the social question to various degrees is a precondition for the fruits of freedom to ripen. “The Desperate urgency of the social question, [2, page 213]” is something that needs to be grappled with. Causality goes both ways in regards to politics being able to help us solve the social question, and solving the social question enabling freedom in politics. The social question should not be focused on in such a way that inhibits the very political forms that are able to solve the social question. The economic dimensions of the social question can be dealt with through a combination of politics and technics, through politicizing the economy (that is communalizing the means of production required for communities on various scales to reproduce themselves) and applying liberatory technology through embedded committees and mandated and delegated experts within communal councils.

Liberation, being a precondition of freedom, requires negative liberties (freedom from) and positive liberties (freedom to), for positive liberties help negative liberties sustain through giving freedom to do that which is needed for such negative liberties to sustain. Such rights and duties should be in line with non hierarchical relations for them to be truly based on political equality. Further, they should be distributed to all universally. Isonomia, equality of the law, is the condition under which people are held to the same standards, given all relevant variables present. This entails the abolition of all political ruling classes and makes relationships participatory in the political sphere. Isonomia denotes where moral imperatives are and where non imperative is, and does so in line with equality. Equality of a law that legalizes political/economic hierarchy is effectively a law that institutionalizes inequality. A ‘free laborer’ under capitalism is not “admitted to the political realm” as a “fully emancipated citizen” [1, page 217], for the economic realm is one of inequality, and as far as the political realm is a republic, it is not one a realm equality but one of elected rulers at best. Under a republic the representatives make major policy and the citizens obey the commands from above. If representative policy makers represented the policies of the people, then there would be no need for them. Within the USA, “average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact,” making the USA an oligarchy [3].

Equality as in mutual recognition:

Another kind of equality is mutual recognition. This requires both mutual love and respect, closeness and distance. This kind of mutuality is based on different people recognizing each other as fellow persons without rulership of either over the other. Neither see their own gain in being over the other, and if they were to do so they would be accursed with the most painful of vices to endure, by extension defeating themselves as they try to be over an other. Mutual recognition enables people to treat each other in such a way that will enable that formal equality to endure. Lack of complementarity in regards to recognition between different persons “does not testify to …inferiority” of the person not given complimentary recognition, “but to… inhumanity and fear,” on the part of the persons not giving recognition [10, page 8]. “Whoever debases others is debasing himself,” [10, page 83].

Mutual recognition, between ruling classes and ruled classes, is not meaningfully possible. When there are not class relations between persons, mutual recognition becomes a desideratum. Class ought to be abolished rather than a recognition of the ruler as the ruler and the ruled as the ruled. Such a recognition between ruler and ruled is merely a mutual recognition of a lack of mutuality at best until class, and the function of the positions that ruling classes hold, are abolished. The process of mutual recognition of persons inter-personally should happen before, during, after the development of the the redistribution of political and economic power and infrastructure to people bottom upwardly (through and towards horizontal forms).

Collectivity vs. Individuality:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin poses an interesting thought experiment about an anarchistic utopia that has been subsumed to conformity. This poses an issue of individuality vs. collectivity, which comes up again and again in political philosophy as a core dialectical tension. There is a need for individuals to have freedoms to do things, and freedom from things, and simultaneously collectives need freedoms to do things and freedom from things to flourish. How ought we harmonize and balance the needs and freedoms of individuals and collectives? If we focus too much on groups we can lose sight of individuality which is needed to make such groups flourish and be rooted in freedom. If we focus too much on individuality we lose sight of the collective dimensions to individuals that allow individuals to flourish and be free. Ursula Le Guin in part answers the dilemma to her own problem at the end of the book by stating that “If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone.” [7, page 359]. The ability to dissent, and the duty to do so when one does dissent (given the dissent is within good boundaries and not against good boundaries), not only makes the agreements made between people meaningful, but also enables individual creativity. For, “it is the duty of the individual… to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive,” [7, page 359]. Institutional relations, and relations between persons, enable us to have the individuality that can then make sure that there is a plurality that expresses itself rather than conformity. Direct Democracy and free association create a tension of free agreement and free disagreement between collectives and collectives, collectives and individuals, and individuals and individuals, that ought to be continuously nourished by dissent and the expression of volition within participatory boundaries (boundaries that enable such volition, including liberation from that which should not be). “The only remedies against the misuse of public power by private individuals lie in the public realm itself,” [2, page 245]. Within a public sphere, each individual becomes able to make proposals, make objections, make amendments, raise issues, and freely associate. Yet that individuality is fostered by others, and the only sphere in which the individual can change the public is within the public sphere.

Virtue ethics: Elitist? Or for the people?

Virtue ethics can be used to draw distinctions between good and evil character in a way that draws conservative conclusions. Some people put people on a ranking of virtuous to vicious, where the harmed become deserving of their harm, and the lucky become virtuous due to their luck. Virtue ethics without an institutional analysis can lead to praising the lucky and cursing the unlucky. But to do so is not a virtuous thing to do.

In Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, she critiques a politics of virtue as that which influences people to try to appear virtuous, and by extension leads to hypocrisy through a war on hypocrisy, which is endless, and impossible to win. However, a virtue ethics argument can say that trying to display virtue in vicious ways, far from a problem of virtue ethics, is a problem of vices, a problem best explained by a virtue ethics approach. Patterns of trying to display virtue just to be seen as virtuous is vicious and distinct from a display of actual virtue. But virtues and vices of a person do not remain hidden; they are eventually revealed to others in the public sphere to some degree regardless whether one wants to display them or not (and sometimes in ways that they are not aware of).

Arendt goes on to critique compassion as being vicious if it is revealed in the political sphere. If the virtue of compassion is to be compassionate in the right ways, towards the right people, at the right times, for good reasons, etc., then Arendt’s critique of compassion might point more towards the vice of excess co-suffering to the point where good action is inhibited, rather than towards critiquing public compassion in and of itself. However, Arendt defines compassion as nothing more than co-suffering. If compassion is just co-suffering then it is something that should be limited in regards to action, and too much of it can inhibit action. Further, when people try to display to one another how much they co-suffer, it can then lead to hypocrisy, and she even says that it has no place in the political sphere. According to Hannah Arendt, if compassion is revealed in the political sphere, then something that ought to remain private is being made public. But as stated in the prior paragraph, such private virtues reveal themselves publicly to different degrees, and inform our public action.

Compassion is often meant as care for others, and is therefore not necessarily co-suffering, but does contain within it the capacity to co-suffer in the right ways towards the right people for the right reasons, etc. Care for others does not just mean suffering when others suffer, it also means feeling well when other people feel well, and wanting other people to flourish.The virtue of compassion requires that compassion is to be interwoven with “persuasion, negotiation, and compromise,” if it is not, then compassion is not well rounded. Its insufficiency does not show its lack of necessity or desirability. Without the capacity for compassion, even defined as crudely as co-suffering, there is no potential for putting oneself in another’s shoes by suffering when others suffer. The virtue of compassion (as well as virtues more broadly) helps bridge individuality and collectivity. The capacity for compassion becomes not only a factor that may contribute to solidarity, but a necessary factor for solidarity (and good individuality).

A false dilemma between co-suffering and rationality is being put forward by Arendt. The black and white thinking in regards to emotion and rationality makes “should” impossible. Unlike an emotivist who would reduce “should” and “shouldn’t” to emotion, the claim I want to put forward is that emotion is necessary but insufficient for should and shouldn’t statements that are politically prescriptive (even though many metrics we ought to consider good are naturalistic and pre human). Logic alone does not tell us what we should do beyond that which is logical. But saying something is logical, does not tell us that it ought to exist, and does not drive us to do something in and of itself. We must have care for others in order to want that which is good for others (beyond that which is merely instrumental for self interest).

Thinking multi generationally is necessary to deal with ecological ethics. Thinking beyond self interest through care for others is needed to think multi generationally, and compassion is needed for that care. If we ought to think ecologically when we are being political, then compassion is needed for ecological political action. Compassion in and of itself without rationality or other principles and virtues to guide it is unable to help people because one will merely suffer with people (and feel well when people feel well). For it to be channeled politically, in a good way, compassion must be mixed with other virtues and cease to be pure compassion. But compassion is still necessary to think multi generationally and ecologically, and in a way that does not instrumentalize all to self interest. For without compassion, as in a virtue of suffering when others suffer and feeling well when others do well, there is no reason to do more than instrumentalize all to the self as a metric (a kind of alienation from the world at the expense of one’s self and others). Compassion is not unique as a virtue in this regard. In the same way compassion can be well rounded with virtues of courage and wisdom which “put compassion in its place”, other virtues depend upon other virtues to put them in their place. This web of virtues requires us to balance virtues from mischief to justice to rational virtues to emotive virtues in order to be in harmony with any of them. The process of developing is a constant throughout existence and we never hit the Platonic ideal of being perfectly rounded out, but we can get closer and further to being in tune with a web of virtues even though we are incapable of perfection. This web of virtues shows the complexity involved in any virtue, and how compassion and seemingly distant virtues are relevant for the virtues that seem to be more directly desired for something particular.

The notion of compassion as necessary for morality, ethics, and politics comes from a meta-ethical worldview that claims should and shouldn’t statements based on care for others develop in part out of virtues, compassion being a necessary virtue for such development. It is well accepted that the inability for compassion is psychologically unhealthy for oneself, but also that it is a defining characteristic of personality patterns incapable of thinking outside of egoistic self maximization (which is ironically at the expense of self and other). In this sense, compassion is a keystone virtue, without which concern for others in the political sphere would be impossible. In this sense it is a political virtue of the highest order, due to its foundational characteristics, despite the fact that in the political sphere it must be “put in its place” and transformed into solidarity through being informed by reason. That does not make its place “outside of the political sphere” but a crucial drive of politics, without which persons would only be trying to maximize self interest. The fact that merely feeling the suffering of another will always be insufficient for any political goal does not take away its necessity. Further, compassion does not need to be on display for it to be experienced in the political sphere in a way that informs good action. Political philosophy and political decisions are an extension of ethics, and ethics rests upon care for others, a care for others that is intertwined with compassion. In this sense one can not bring goodness out of politics, for politics is based on that which should and should not be in the political sphere. To take the striving for that which is good out of politics is to take politics out of politics. Furthermore, to the degree that ethical virtues and political virtues can be distinguished, ethical virtues are foundational to political virtues. Ethics, the study of the good life, ought not only have a place in the political sphere, ethics ought to inform universals through which we filter particular policies through.

Hannah Arendt’s critiques of compassion point to either the deficiency of other virtues rather than a deficiency of compassion (or a problem of excess compassion and compassion in reduction), or a deficiency of compassion to those who have been othered (potentially othered through a compassion for a mass at the expense of persons as individuals. That problem is best solved through a process that would involve reasoning and emotions and a need for understanding persons in their plurality.).

Moral Imperatives vs non Imperative:

Hannah Arendt claims that the political realm is a realm of strict freedom, as opposed to the realm of necessity. The divide between moral imperatives and non imperative is an important one, for all political philosophies have some conception of where moral imperatives should be placed. Arendt is correct that the political realm is a realm of freedom, however it is also a realm that needs to be bounded. Hannah Arendt admits to this in On Revolution when she praises the formal political revolution of the USA in part due to its constitution. Hannah Arendt says constitutions and laws are of “great importance to the stability of human affairs,” [1, page 191]. The social contract model that is used to bound the boundlessness of politics is an important one that is able to rescue politics from an absolute unpredictability, and enables us to make collective agreements over time, and give us a standard to be held accountable to. However, formalized standards can be hierarchical. There is a danger in creating moral imperatives. A glimpse at history will reveal a relatively endless amount of unjust laws. There is also a danger in absolute no imperative. But the enemies of freedom are not moral imperatives, but hierarchical, authoritarian, and arbitrary imperatives (along with other social problems). Moral imperatives, in regards to how rights and duties are organized, are actually a necessary part of liberation (which is a necessary “condition of freedom”, [2, page 19] but not sufficient for freedom).

“The act of founding the new body politic… involves the grave concern with the stability and durability of the new structure,” [2, page 215]. Unfortunately “the concern with stability and the spirit of the new have become opposites in political thought and terminology [2, page 215]. The kneejerk responses of neophilia and neophobia inhibit us from creating changing systems that none the less have certain boundaries and structures. The question of what kind of structure we want is different than the question of whether or not we should have structure to begin with. This anti structuralism can be seen in anti organizationalist anarchism which seeks to abolish all institutions rather than proposing what kind of institutions we ought to build. We need forms that have boundaries yet are adaptive and developing rather than static. We must both search throughout the history of freedom for that which should be, leave behind that which should not be and learn from history appropriately, and move forward with new dimensions, new ideas, and new practices. If being historical and building structure becomes the near monopoly of conservative backwards looking authoritarian and authenticity centered movements, then the forces of revolution will have forfeited the future to the forces of reaction. “Councils… were spaces of freedom. As such they invariably refused to regard themselves as temporary organs of revolution and, on the contrary, made all attempts at establishing themselves as permanent organs of government,” [2, page 256]. This libertarian socialist, yet not anarchist (depending on how anarchism is being defined) form of government includes freedom and form, government and non hierarchy. Libertarian socialists who try to create these forms of freedom (directly democratic and self managed institutions) are seeking to create a revolution unlike the anarchists who want to abolish institutions altogether. Anti institutional anarchists want nothing more than periodic insurrections and a world without structure, rather than a world without authoritarian structure. “The legal use of power to maintain and extend power,” [7, page 166] is not equivalent to a hierarchical mode of law and power. The conflation of all government with statecraft (hierarchical government) has been a thorn in the side of anarchism that inhibits anarchism in practice from attaining and maintaining the forms of freedom.

There are political philosophies that are based on voluntary means and ends. Such voluntarism, under the influence of whatever the boundaries of the current society, claims that those boundaries should not change but people should voluntarily change. However, this just begs the question; Why ought we accept the given boundaries of any given society/polity/economy as legitimate?

The philosophical anarchistic approach is that such boundaries are not self justified, and that the burden of proof is on any given set of boundaries (and moral imperatives) to be justified. If such boundaries and moral imperatives cannot be justified, then they are illegitimate and require a change, that might happen largely voluntarily, but potentially coercively to the degree voluntary change is unable to attain such new boundaries. Revolutionary coercion, which itself requires a burden of proof, is justified when such coercion is less coercive than keeping the current boundaries, and when such coercion is effective and principled (in harmony with the naturalistic and social ethical gestalt of mutuality, non hierarchy, freedom, diversity, complementarity, ecology, virtue, direct democracy, technology etc.). So called voluntarists are using a rhetorical trick to shift the burden of proof away from the current imperatives of society/politics/economics which are treated as given rather than in need of justification.

Politics is not a realm of absolute non imperative, it is a realm of freedom, and requires participatory boundaries rather than no boundaries. All political philosophies advocate for non imperative within the limits that they put forward. The question then is “what limits ought we have that enable the kinds of moral imperatives that are conducive to freedom?”. A Moral imperative (or a gestalt of moral imperatives) without adjectives does not in and of itself destroy political, economic, and social freedom. The anti authoritarian solution must not be to abolish moral imperatives, but to abolish moral imperatives that organize institutions hierarchically, irrationally, or arbitrarily. No imperative, if it is an imperative, eats itself. No imperative, if it is not an imperative, essentially legalizes all potential forms of imperatives. Doing so enables tyrannical imperatives.

As Hannah Arendt says, “the remedy for unpredictability… is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises” [1, Page 237]. “The force that keeps” people “together… is the force of mutual promise or contract,” [1, page 244-245]. A social contract’s “superiority” relative to no law and absolute autonomy “derives from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the present,” enabling for an “enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective,” [1, page 245]. A realm of absolute autonomy is a realm of no rights along with no duties, and is by extension less free than rights and duties, given that those rights and duties are assembled rationally, with care, and in a non hierarchical, democratic, and isonomia based way. Social contract and law, far from inherently making action programmatic, enable action to be more powerful along with making it so decisions are bounded by limits. “It is a right and duty bearing person, created by the law, which appears before the law,” [2, page 97] as opposed to an autonomous individual without rights and without duties. The truth is that “responsibility is” a part of “our freedom. To avoid it would be to lose our freedom,” [7, page 45].

“To act means to take initiative” [1 page 177], and the “content of freedom is participation in public affairs” [2, page 22]. “The Public Spirit” exists “only in ‘assemblies where the citizens could occupy themselves in common with these public matters” [2, page 232]. Freedom, having the precondition of liberation, must have good limits to exist within the bounds of. Freedom is the development of collective and individual higher order volition within non hierarchical and participatory limits. Freedom nourishes virtues, and is nourished by virtues. Virtues are often thought of as dealing with individual responsibility as the major (if not only) factor in the development of virtues. Virtue is defined as relatively stable character traits that lead to eudaimonia/flourishing in self and others. A person with virtues can “identify one’s own will with the will of the people” [2, page 65], and an inability to do so and feel concern for others inhibits one’s own eudaimonia. If virtues and vices and character traits are politically, economically, and socially mediated, then responsibility is not the only major factor in regards to the development of character/psyche. We must see the amount of volition one has in developing themselves to be on a continuum and never absolute. Virtues and vices are possible under even the most oppressive of conditions, given that under such conditions there is even the slightest degree of ability to develop character. Yet many conditions inhibit virtues and fuel vices, and inhibit the amount of participation we have in the cultivation of ourselves (one factor being a communal dimension to individuality). Institutional positions that shouldn’t exist, due to the nature of such institutional roles being evil, inhibit the ability of persons to act as virtuous persons to the degree that they follow the orders and limits of their evil positions. Such institutional positions are fueled by vices, and fuel vices, in persons acting in such positions and in others (due to the contagious dimension of virtues, vices, and character traits). Likewise, poverty and oppression creates vices. Those who are part of a ruling stratum, and those who enable avoidable social and political inequality to continue by perpetuating it and not acting to stop it, are constituted by having certain vices. In general the vices of ruling strata are far more brutal than the vices of the non ruling strata, both to their own character and to others due to the sheer inhumanity of the vices needed to attain and sustain power over others.

“If we din it into a person that it is unnatural for him to learn certain things, if we din it into a person that he is incapable of learning, then he is less likely to learn,” [11, page 24]. Rather than the idea of the absolutely virtuous oppressed, we must understand that oppression does not necessarily correspond to virtue, and that the virtues and vices of the oppressed do not mean that the oppressed should not be liberated from oppression, and further that virtues of the oppressed are more often in spite of oppression than because of it. As controversial as a statement as that is in an era where standpoint theory often claims oppression corresponds to virtue, other views water down oppression and make it something less bad than it is by failing to see how oppression is so bad that it can be a causal factor for character traits that inhibit eudaimonia through shaping people’s volition in ways that inhibit self actualization through limiting volition in arbitrary and authoritarian ways. “Action is never possible in isolation,” [1, page 188] and neither are virtues, for “wherever you go, you will be a polis,” [1, page 198]. Patterns of abuse and unmet needs (and lack of positive stimuli) fuel patterns of addiction [8] which inhibits temperance (which is interwoven with every virtue [9]).

Rulership, as in ruling classes politically and economically, inhibit virtues for people throughout hierarchical systems. To deny that fact is to deny just how bad such hierarchies are, or to see humans as atomized isolated individuals, or to view volition as a factor in cultivating virtues as an all or nothing kind of component (as opposed to one that is a factor in virtue/vice cultivation that is limited and variable). Virtues, far from being elitist, enable us to address such issues as a virtuous subject would, and allow us to diagnose institutional hierarchies and social inequality as vice developing mechanisms, in the ruling class, the ruled, persons throughout society, the exploited, the oppressed, and dispossessed relative to the character traits that would be developed under participatory, horizontal, and democratic political relations. Persons are both under the influence of conditions that they are under and able to act upon intentions and develop themselves within such bounds, and develop themselves in such a way that create new bounds. In this sense Freedom–>Virtues–>Freedom, and The decimation of freedom –>Vices–>The decimation of freedom. The idea that we are not conditioned beings that are shaped by institutional and social relations presupposes a supernatural metaphysics.

There is a history of institutions that foster eudaimonia, and the means of eudaimonia (which include virtues). More participatory institutional relations consistently foster more virtues than more authoritarian institutions [12, 13, 14]. Institutions shape character traits of persons. Virtues and vices are relatively stable character traits. Therefore institutions can foster virtues and vices. Rather than merely looking at what kind of character we ought to have for various points in time and space, we need to look at the kinds of institutions we ought to develop that will create the character traits than tend towards eudaimonia in self and others.

To further see the relations of institutional hierarchies to virtues and vices, we must draw on the connection of hierarchy and competition. Hierarchies pit persons against each other, not just ideas against ideas. Hierarchies institutionalize competition and are defined by a stratification, and are opposed to mutuality and cooperation and the freedom to meaningfully agree and dissent. They cause people to “regard others… as stumbling blocks” on their path “and correctly so” within the parameters of the system itself [13, page 136]. Capitalism for example institutionalizes competition between buyers and sellers, sellers and sellers, buyers and buyers, workers and workers, workers and bosses, businesses and businesses, etc. The state institutionalizes competition between the ruling strata and the populous that it commands from above, and states must attain and sustain such relations through hierarchical competitive violence towards the people that they govern. The “lords” and “bondsmen” are put into a relation based on opposition to one another. These relations cause people to adapt and form patterns of behaviors that can form into vicious character traits. Hierarchical relations create vices and inhibit virtues relative to other relations where the adaptive patterns of character are based in complementarity, plurality, and freedom. Although not all degrees of competitiveness indicate particularly vicious patterns, the greater the competitiveness the “lower the self esteem, the worse the problem,” [13, page 105], and in competitive relations “self esteem depends on the uncertain outcome of a contest, and this means self esteem is conditional” [13, page 110]. Conditional self worth according to how well one relative to others is at the expense of a healthy sense of self worth. In competitive relations, “self-validation depends on triumphing over others” which creates fragile senses of self worth [13, page 123].

Not all conflict is rooted in competition. Conflict can be cooperative, as seen in dialogue, participatory political, economic, and artistic deliberation, and differences in preferences amongst people. The “cooperative process leads to the defining of conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved by collaborative effort,” [13, page 156]. That process of collaborative conflict as seen in horizontal, participatory, and democratic institutions (and relations) thrives on (and fosters) emotive and rational virtues and ultimately prudence and wisdom (the virtue par excellence). Vita activa can create the kind of conditions that enable the kind of vita contemplativa the philosophers who “privileged” contemplation to action have always wanted. Examples of social revolutions that have created such cooperative relations as the dominant mode of political economy include the Paris Commune, The Free Territory of Ukraine, Shinmin, Anarchosyndicalist Spain, EZLN, and Rojava.

Because “the limitations of law are never entirely reliable safeguards,” [1, page 191], virtues are needed to help enable the very politics that nourish virtues. Virtues enable us to steer our volition against itself to enable higher order volition. Our volition is not free if we defeat ourselves through our vices.

Equality can take many forms, from isonomia, to mutual recognition, to the abolition of hierarchy. Those kinds of equality provide us the foundations for the kinds of excellence we ought to have. This is in part because virtues, vices, and character traits are politically, economically, culturally, and socially mediated. A free political life is constitutive of the good life along with virtues. Virtues and the development of free politics are interwoven with each other. In regards to normative ethics, that which is good should be the development of free politics and virtues. Such a normative ethics mixes political theories of freedom and good political, economic, and social processes, a virtue ethics based theory of good character, and a focus on achieving such metrics developmentally (a prudent consequentialism). Without the development of good institutions and rules, good character, good contemplation, and good action, the development of all of the above will be inhibited, for they are all handmaidens of each other.

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