A. The Morality of Honor

Rubin describes the morality of honor as a defining element of feudal governance and as central to answering the question: Why did it take so long for Europe to emerge from the “Dark Ages?” Rubin's answer is a cautionary tale about what real privatization looks like. With the decline of the Roman Empire, governance again became decentralized. But privately run estates, rather than more egalitarian cities, became the centers of the medieval society. A “morality of honor” arose that justified the power and defined the obligations of the lords who oversaw these estates (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 40). Rubin defines this moral system as “based on the principle of dominant status and involv[ing] the mode of behavior by which certain individuals in society achieve and maintain that status” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 41). In other words, the concept of honor was critical to a lord's ability to rule, and thus served as a source of empowerment as well as one of restraint. Honor-based morality required “the use of violence to defend one's status as a member of the ruling class” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 41). The lord of the manor was expected to defend his land, his home, and his family by killing or injuring anyone who threatened them. Rubin emphasizes that this idea of morality linked virtue with prowess in battle; the honorable lord was expected not just to fight, but to win (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 41). The ruler and his vassals were tied together in this system by bonds of loyalty, with the lord dependent on the support of his followers, and the followers gaining honor, as well as security, from their association with the ruler (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 42).

Rubin's account of the medieval morality of honor is the most engaging part of the book. He acknowledges that much has been written about honor morality in its various forms, and skips over the details of this literature. Instead, he tries to capture the medieval sense of honor by retelling tales from literature. Citing The History of the Franks, he recounts a series of violent retaliations that occurred in Tours in 585 a.d. (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 43–44). The moral appears to be the difficulty both citizen and religious tribunals had in restraining drunken hotheads, with the church agreeing to pay a fine to bring the feud to an end. Rubin goes on to relate the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as Sir Gawain's sense of honor compels his determination to appear for an unfair fight that seems guaranteed to produce his beheading (though readers unfamiliar with the tale are left on their own to discover Gawain's fate—no spoilers here) (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 46). Rubin also recalls The Song of Roland, a French epic poem describing events that took place in 778 a.d. (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 49), and retells in even greater detail the Spanish Song of the Cid (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 49–51) (without reference to the movie version), and then returns to Arthurian lore to discuss Lancelot of the Lake (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 51). The stories, which have survived the centuries, are still good reads and demonstrate the medieval preoccupation with honor, and its association with warfare, loyalty, hospitality, defense of one's own—and the wholesale slaughter of the other side.

Rubin's history is necessarily limited, and I am not qualified to say how accurate it is. Given that the morality of honor is about status, Rubin observes that it therefore “seems to apply only to a small group of high status males” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 51) with occasional references to high-born women's chastity.Footnote ⁸ Rubin refers to the system as “hyper-hierarchicalism” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 54). As befits a status-conscious society, medieval codes of conduct did not require the same behavior from everyone; instead, the “honor morality of the Early Middle Ages not only treated hierarchy as a moral imperative but also prescribed different rules of conduct on that basis” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 54). In short, the morality of honor was a conduct code that perpetuated the feudal order.Footnote ⁹

In the early Middle Ages, the system of governance that corresponded to this moral order was deeply personal. The lord of the manor assumed personal responsibility for those associated with him. His vassals saw themselves as loyal to the lord personally, not to the holder of a particular office or to the country in which the manor was located. The lord's honor, rather than hope of material reward or fear of earthy punishments, made him vindicate the loyalty extended to him. This notion of honor, in turn, determined worthiness to rule. A lord who dishonored himself by failing to avenge wrongs committed against him was a leader who could be challenged and replaced. In this society, might did make right. Rubin emphasizes that these notions even extended to religion. The depictions of Jesus that survive from that era do not show the suffering of the Crucifixion, but a triumphant Jesus sitting on the throne in heaven. Rubin concludes that the critical message of the era was that “our God is better than yours, not because he establishes a preferable ethical regime but because he has more supernatural muscle” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 59).

Rubin thus answers the question “Why did it take so long to move on to a more productive system?” by explaining the mutually reinforcing bonds of such a society. Feudal lords could lose everything if they did not maintain their “honor” and the steps they took to do so made it harder to reassert centralized power. Part of the problem was structural. Kings depended on the lords to raise armies and collect taxes. The fact that the soldiers (and the tax collectors) were more loyal to their local lords than to the king prevented the greater concentration of power (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 65). Part of the problem as well was the threat of a loss of status. To defer to a king, to send resources into a centralized treasury, to adhere to impersonal bureaucratic commands risked a considerable fall from grace; in his own eyes, the lord who sacrificed local interests to centralized ones risked dishonor, with his place in society threatened and his position even within his own estate at risk. Yet so long as the decentralized landowners did not contribute to creation of a stronger centralized realm, kings lacked the power to impose their own rule on fractious nobles. In the Dark Ages, the nobles did “starve the beast,” and the funds available to create a central government, fund police forces, encourage markets, or invest in the public good were limited. It would take a much more powerful set of inducements to ultimately dislodge the lords on whom feudal governance rested.

B. The Morality of Higher Purposes

The excesses of the honor system did ultimately give way to a new moral system capable of restraining them—and to the creation of a new governance system powerful enough to dislodge the feudal order. This story is in many ways a familiar one; it involves the rise of the nation-state and the corresponding development of state-identified religions. Yet, Rubin's interest is the change in moral sensibilities, a change that took place over centuries and one that goes beyond conventional histories.

The transformation starts with a response to the excesses of the feudal era. Feuds, after all, were a costly means of dispute resolution, and a decentralized warrior nobility, much like modern gang leaders, feared challenges from rivals more than demands for accountability from their victims. Rubin identifies the beginning of an effective countermovement with the “Peace of God” movement of the year 1000, 500 years after the fall of Rome (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 69–70). The transformation to a new form of governance would not be complete, however, for several more centuries. It nonetheless started with the claim of a different moral order legitimizing those who sought to limit the violence of the landowner elite. The new order would take hold only when the moral justifications gave rise to alternative leaders who could enforce these claims. The process involved two overlapping developments.

One part of the story involves the recreation of stronger public institutions through the gradual strengthening of centralizing monarchies. Rubin argues that just as the Roman Empire was built on the foundation of the Greek city-states, monarchies became more successful in consolidating power as they co-opted feudal obligations. As every student of English property law knows, for example, William the Conqueror solidified the Norman conquest of England by installing himself as the owner of the entire country and issuing fiefs to vassals who served under him (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 72). Over the centuries, the increasingly powerful monarchs re-created a sense of public power and purpose that involved the reconstruction of cities, the assembly of standing armies loyal to the monarch, royal powers of taxation, and the eventual development of representative assemblies and more professional administrative structures. Rubin calls this process the “publification of governance” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 71). He uses this new term, which means the opposite of “privatization,” partly because we have become so accustomed to public governance that no term exists to describe the process of its creation, and partly to signal that he is describing a distinct historical period, not the modern systems of governance we take for granted today.

More central to his story, however, is the development of a new moral order that accompanied these shifts in governance. Rubin terms this new order “the morality of higher purposes.” Where the morality of honor operated within a web of personal relationships, the morality of higher purposes was more abstract. A vassal owed allegiance to a lord with whom he directly interacted; a citizen of a monarchy was loyal to a king he might never expect to meet. And while the morality of honor imposed limitations on personal behavior (the lord of the manor was expected to extend hospitality to any traveler who asked for it, even if the traveler were otherwise his sworn enemy), the extent of these constraints was limited. They extended to behavior that could be observed and to people to whom the individual owed an obligation. Feudal knights experienced fewer constraints in their interactions with serfs or those outside the group to whom they were bound.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast, the morality of higher purposes, particularly as it became tied to notions of personal salvation, governed individual behavior that no one might observe. It became part of individual identity as it served both to bind citizens to a larger state and to define one's spiritual as well as temporal standing. The latter required a change in the role and nature of religion.

The religious changes are in some sense subtle because they begin with what may not seem like a religious change at all. Europe, after all, had been at least nominally Christian since the latter part of the Roman era. In the feudal period, however, the majority of the public could not read, formal Christianity exercised little influence, and clergy did not necessarily have much of a restraining influence on the exercise of power (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 85). In the new era, Christianity became more spiritual, and more important in legitimizing the power of monarchs and in governing the daily lives of ordinary citizens.

The changes in Christianity were both organizational and substantive. Rubin observes that eleventh-century reformers insisted on priestly celibacy, removing the clergy from family pressures, and that bishops and abbots be appointed on the basis of their religious, rather than their political, commitments (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 86).Footnote ¹¹ The church thus sought to disentangle the clergy from feudal entanglements (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 86). For Rubin, the symbol of the new era is St. Francis of Assisi, the saint who spoke to birds, rejected worldly goods, repaired churches, and kept the most important miracle with which he is associated secret until his death. He emphasizes that St. Francis's miracles were “internal experiences, not exercises of power over natural forces,” and that his conception of religiosity involved the individual's personal attitudes and commitment to his own salvation (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 89). The change in the nature of Christianity made religion more important and allowed it to serve as a check on the feudal nobility's power. It also offered individuals an alternative to their fixed (and often subordinate) status in a hierarchal society.

Rubin acknowledges the continuing tensions between church authority and monarchial power that ultimately led to the Reformation and the creation of nationally identified religions (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 108–110). The centuries-long story involves a gradual fusing of religious and political purposes. During the heyday of the morality of honor, secular power followed military muscle, and virtue was identified with physical strength. Centralizing monarchies, on the other hand, became associated with the idea of a people (the French, the English) united by a shared sense of purpose (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 81, 85). In this system, the king became the symbol of the nation, and reigned as part of what was seen as a divinely ordered set of relationships (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 110). He thus commanded the allegiance of priest, noble, and commoner alike.

This new system was “egalitarian in theory and hierarchical in practice.” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 111). Christianity treated every individual as possessing an immortal soul and therefore capable of salvation (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 110–11). Every person was therefore subject to the same morality and the same ability to ascend to heaven and, over time, the citizens of these states became freer as serfdom was abolished and the growth of cities made greater geographic mobility possible. On the other hand, individual obligations were seen as part of a “Great Chain of Being” in which each person had a distinctive role to play in advancing a collective higher purpose (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 111). The nation-state came to represent this collectivity, as the state became associated with a people who shared a common language, religion, leader—and an understood set of moral obligations.

Rubin emphasizes that that this new order had both public and private components, and that private morality came to govern an individual's sense of self, not just behavior toward others (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 104). Elites came to see themselves as superior because of cultivated traits that made them more civilized, rather than because of their physical strength or force of arms (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 107). Common citizens, in turn, while not always law-abiding, did share a sense of good behavior as something linked to the commands of God and their prospects in the afterlife. And the nature of family obligations and appropriate intimate contact also came to reflect the new moral code. In accordance with the morality of honor, the paterfamilias had an obligation to protect and supervise those under his purview. His honor required that he avenge assaults on his family; it also meant that a wife's infidelity or a daughter's failure to accept a dynastically negotiated marriage could dishonor him (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 94). In the new era, sexual morality became far more a matter of individual spirituality. The Catholic Church, eager to expand its jurisdiction, came to supervise the validity of marriages and thus the legitimacy of offspring and their inheritance rights, a critical matter as primogeniture became more dominant (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 93–94). While the transition from arranged marriages to matches chosen on the basis of love took centuries to complete, the church helped emphasize the importance of consent, a factor that represented the recognition of women as worthy of greater respect (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 95). The new era therefore involved much greater sexual restraint; repression would not be too strong a word.Footnote ¹²

In exploring the importance of these developments, Rubin eschews single-minded economic—or any other deterministic—explanations, but he does note that the Peace of God movement began in an era when the Viking and Islamic incursions into Europe had receded (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 69) and accelerated with the Industrial Revolution that the new regime made possible. The ideas themselves, however, take center stage as the morality of honor holds back the development of Europe and the morality of higher purposes, as it re-creates public order and private virtue, ultimately leads to larger, wealthier, and more powerful societies—societies that would in turn set the stage for the creation a new set of moral understandings.

A. The Changing Nature of the State

The governmental transformation that marks the advent of the third system of morality involves the formalization of the administrative state; that is, the change in the state from the instrument of a monarch to a system designed to meet public needs. Rubin defines the new administrative system in terms of a process of “articulation,” in both of the term's meanings. The first involves the connection of “discrete elements by visible ligatures or joints in a manner that preserves their individual identities” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 117). Think of an organization chart. It might show the Department of Defense, overseeing the branches of the military (Army, Navy, and Air Force), and defense agencies assigned responsibilities for such things as finance and accounting, contracting and procurement, military intelligence, legal services, and the like (Organizational Policy & Decision Support Directorate 2016). The second meaning of the term involves expressing something in explicit verbal terms (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 117). The defense agencies, for example, are subject to commands assigning them specific missions and responsibilities. In short, the advent of the administrative state—and our modern system of morality—starts with the creation of bureaucracy.

This change is a further extension of the shift from personal to formal governance. Feudal relationships were personal; medieval officials might assume a variety of responsibilities under the supervision of a lord, to whom they were typically closely related. Within centralizing monarchies, the king's officials were seen as his personal agents (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 85), whom he could dispatch at will. The new administrative state, in contrast, divided responsibilities in terms of specific subject areas, required that agencies acquire subject-specific expertise, and developed ways to ensure continuity from one regime to the next (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 119). Perhaps as importantly, government positions ceased to be private offices that the king could grant, and that the grantee could use for his own private benefit. Instead, government officials were hired on the basis of credentials, paid salaries, and obliged to use their offices to advance the public good; public officials in the new era became professionals, and taking a cut from public revenues became a crime (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 119).

Rubin argues that these changes in organization involved a larger change in sensibility and function. The morality of higher purposes identified human aims with a higher order in an era in which monarchies were seen as divinely ordained. The administrative state, in contrast, exists to serve the public. Citizens constitute the state and the state exists to advance the material well-being of its citizens (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 121). Government officials therefore serve specified governmental objectives that must be justified in terms of their ability to advance the welfare of the public as a whole.

Given these definitions, Self, Soul, and Society views the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789 as the beginning of the new era because of its “articulation” of different branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) charged with distinct functions and, with the First Congress, the creation of four executive departments defined by subject matter: State, Treasury, Defense, and the Postal Service (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 125). By 1792, the French Revolution had also swept away the monarchal system of governance that relied on fees and favors to compensate the king's retainers, and replaced it with government ministries with defined missions, official positions with salaries and pensions, and a fixed chain of command (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 126). Joseph II, who became King and Holy Roman Emperor in 1780, modernized Austrian governance during his reign in a similar fashion. He forbade the sale or inheritance of offices, prohibited outside employment for government officials, and required regular reporting of qualifications, conduct, and accomplishments (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 126). Britain modernized more gradually, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing throughout the eighteenth (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 127). Rubin treats this period, from roughly 1780 to the mid-nineteenth century, as the marker of the shift to a new system of government and a new morality redefining the individual's place within in it.

B. The New Moral Order

Corresponding to a new governmental order that existed to serve individual needs, a new morality arose that reoriented the individual's position in a more materialistic society. Whereas individuals had once drawn meaning for their lives from their participation in a society oriented toward a higher, religiously identified purpose, they shifted their focus to a personal life plan designed to maximize “present pleasures” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 2). The idea of “self-fulfillment” is nonetheless more than mere hedonism because these pleasures are the product of self-development over the course of a lifetime (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 174). The individual may choose any path she wants, but she has an obligation to make some choice, and she should ideally make one that reflects a coherent and considered worldview. The identification of morality with self-fulfillment seems, at first blush, to be a contradiction in terms; the term itself obscures as much as it illuminates and Rubin spends more than half the book trying to explain it. He is most convincing in describing how this new morality underlies a different—and still emerging—societal order. This new order corresponds with the decline in the importance of religion, and with the increasing importance of mental health—that is, the belief that individuals can direct their own identity and development.

A. The Reconstruction of Public and Private

The morality of self-fulfillment is a system that ultimately rests on public tolerance and private discipline. Its most critical public obligations are procedural (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 177): a commitment to freedom of speech and religion and equal rights of political participation (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 262). This commitment to tolerance and equality in the public square is necessary to the ability of each individual to choose for herself a life course that unfolds in the private sphere (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 286). No external authority has or should have the power to impose any particular religious, political, or other view of the good life (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 177). This means, however, that the substantive values associated with the state or community must remain open and subject to change in accordance with shifting individual views. In fact, tolerance appears to be among Americans' strongest commitments (albeit today with greater support from liberals than conservatives) (Wolfe Reference Wolfe1999),Footnote ¹³ and Rubin finds that even religious observance has become reconciled more with commitments to tolerance than insistence on orthodoxy (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 194). The harder part is explaining the nature of the corresponding notions of private discipline. The morality of self-fulfillment, while ultimately leaving values content to the individual, depends on a societal system that develops the individual capacity to reach such judgments, and that system starts with the family. Rubin is insightful in the degree to which he integrates his discussion of morality with both public policies and family functions, and sex, family formation, and childrearing have become important markers of differences between the two moral systems.

Discussion of Bristol Palin's pregnancy illustrates the way the two systems rely on different assumptions about the nature of public and private and the ways that their adherents talk past each other. In 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Not long after, Palin disclosed that her teenage daughter Bristol was pregnant. Bristol announced an engagement to the father of the child, Levi Johnston, but the couple parted ways without marrying. Bristol later become an advocate for abstinence-only approaches to teen sexuality, rather than sex education and comprehensive provision of contraception. In December 2015, she also gave birth to a second child with a different man, again after canceling an engagement to the father before the child's birth.

The responses in the liberal and conservative blogosphere illustrate contrasting views of the nature of morality. The blogs my coauthor and I followed in 2008 involved discussion by Democratic and Republic women. They were in agreement on two things: Bristol had no business becoming pregnant at 17, and there was no point in marrying Levi (Cahn and Carbone Reference Cahn and Carbone2010, 41). The bloggers, then and now, disagreed about everything else. Their disagreements frame the cultural clash between the systems:

1. Sex: For adherents to the morality of higher purposes, sex is sacred. That is, it is divinely created for the purpose of procreation, and marriage is the institution that sanctifies the act and creates the circumstances suitable for childrearing. Sexual morality is therefore an appropriate subject for public regulation. For adherents to the morality of self-fulfillment on the other hand, sex is natural (Luker Reference Luker2007, 99). That is, it is a naturally pleasurable act that should be responsibly managed to promote mutual satisfaction. Its acceptability between two consenting adults is a matter of private choice.

2. Contraception: For those who adhere to the morality of self-fulfillment, contraception is not only permissible, but morally compelled unless the adults are prepared to accept responsibility for the resulting child. Societies should accordingly ensure universal access. For those who see sex as sanctified by its connection to reproduction within marriage, advocacy of contraception undercuts the message that sex outside of marriage is intrinsically sinful. Accordingly, even if contraceptive use is permissible, there should be no public efforts to ensure availability for the unmarried.Footnote ¹⁴

3. Abortion: Abortion goes to the heart of these differences and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor captured the way that the issue involves fundamentally different attitudes toward the relationship between sex, reproduction, and personal responsibility. She described the opposition to abortion as “based on such reverence for the wonder of creation that any pregnancy ought to be welcomed and carried to full term no matter how difficult it will be to provide for the child and ensure its well-being.” Support for abortion, on the other hand, is based on the view “that the inability to provide for the nurture and care of the infant is a cruelty to the child and anguish to the parent” (Planned Parenthood of S.E. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 852 [1992]). In accordance with the latter system, abortion can be not only an acceptable, but a morally superior, choice, whereas in accordance with the former, it is inconsistent with respect for human life and should not be sanctioned.Footnote ¹⁵

4. Parental responsibility: Parents who embrace the morality of higher purposes seek to promote their children's ability to recognize right from wrong (i.e., no sex until marriage) and expect the community to reinforce these messages. Parents who adhere to the new morality, in contrast, “strive … to enable their child to achieve that child's own desires in accordance with the concepts of self and its fulfillment” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 233). To organize the child's upbringing instead around some higher purpose, including “their family's honor, the salvation of their souls, or the good of the nation—is now regarded as profoundly immoral” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 233). In accordance with these precepts, a parent should raise children to make their own choices—about sexuality, contraception, and abortion—and equip them with the information necessary to make such choices meaningful (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 235–36).

Given these differences, it understandable that those rooted in the different worldviews talk past each other. In the 2008 blogs, Republican women applauded the Palins' public support for Bristol's decision to have the child rather than an abortion. These women also supported Bristol's role as an abstinence spokesperson, at least after the first child's birth.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, even after her second pregnancy, a defender commented:

In this analysis, Bristol is not a hypocrite. She accepts externally derived values and tries to live up to them. Doing so is difficult. When she fails, she repents and tries again, but she remains true, at least in her public statements, to continued belief in Christian teachings.

Democratic women, in contrast, viewed the Palins' actions in failing to equip their daughter to make responsible choices of her own as inexcusable, and Bristol's actions in becoming an abstinence spokesperson as both hypocritical and potentially harmful to other women's ability to make responsible choices on their own (Williams Reference Williams2015). These women believed that Bristol had a right not to elect abortion (Thériault Reference Thériault2015); the problem was Bristol's failure to commit to a coherent life plan (one blogger called her “the biggest child in the family”). These differences involve the source of private discipline: the morality of higher purposes locates the source of moral behavior in community support for the right values, while the morality of self-fulfillment ties it to a high degree of parental investment that allows the child to develop and live up to a personal code.

These contrasting views of morality go to the core of the way we organize society. Rubin observes that the morality of self-fulfillment, while it encourages children to develop their own distinctive life plan, is consistent with the more intensive parenting associated with helicopter parents who carefully script their children's activities all the way through college graduation (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 235–36). These parents seek to cushion their children from trauma and often from the consequences of poor choices (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 233–35). Parents who escort their pregnant daughters to abortion clinics, however, are not just embracing the morality of self-fulfillment; they are also contributing to the class divisions in US society.

What Rubin describes as the new approach to parenting, after all, places a high emphasis on parental investment, as children given greater freedom to choose their own life paths also need more supervision and guidance in navigating the process. The new parental roles are that of “coaches, tutors, planners and motivators” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 235). Christian and other religious parents, while they may perform the same roles, prefer to see their children embedded in communities that reinforce the right values, which the parents see as given, not chosen (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 225). The increase in home-schooling has been a response to these developments. Not all parents, however, can marshal either the intensive cultivation the morality of self-fulfillment seems to require or the home-schooling some parents adopt to insulate their children from divergent viewpoints. In a more economically unequal society, these shifts contribute to class-based inequality, which in turn increases the perception of working-class parents, who are more likely to favor the morality of higher purposes (Pew Research Center 2014), of societal decline. Yet, efforts such as abstinence-only sex education to shore up traditional values make matters worse. At their best, they delay the beginning of sexual activity for the most religious teens, but they also make it more likely that poorer or less motivated teens will have an unplanned pregnancy (Cahn and Carbone Reference Cahn and Carbone2010, 43), which in turn increases the demands for stronger efforts to reaffirm the morality of higher purposes. While elites may choose schools and communities that affirm their own moral choices, the bottom half of society may be neither embedded in communities that enforce the morality of higher purposes, nor equipped with the resources that allow them to engage in the chosen life plans central to the morality of self-fulfillment. This raises the question of whether the morality of self-fulfillment can fully take hold, particularly in societies characterized by greater inequality.

B. The Recognition of Positive Rights

While Rubin eschews overly material or deterministic explanations of morality, he does emphasize the dynamic interaction between systems of governance and morality, and he sees the morality of self-fulfillment as a consequence of the greater ability of the state to meet basic human needs. The Industrial Revolution and the greater prosperity it brought have thus made possible a morality rooted in a search for personal expression and fulfillment (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 114–15). He argues further that the new morality carries with it not just negative rights (both state and citizen have obligations not to interfere with the lives of others), but positive ones. In accordance with this account, Rubin argues that the state has an obligation to ensure that all its citizens enjoy access to the means to construct worthwhile lives (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 278). His analysis also suggests, however, that the state's ability to deliver on such commitments may be a precondition to sustaining the morality of self-fulfillment as the dominant societal order. This may be true for at least two reasons. First, a certain level of material well-being and personal development is necessary to be able to meaningfully exercise the responsibilities implicit in the new morality. Second, to emphasize the importance of self-fulfillment without delivering the means to achieve it to the entire population is likely to undermine the society itself. These factors require considering the meaning of equality within the new order.

Self, Soul, and Society is unequivocal in linking positive rights to the idea of self-fulfillment. The whole point of modern welfare systems, which range from Medicaid to free compulsory public primary and secondary education to Social Security, is to allow individuals to pursue their life paths and fulfill themselves. Indeed, Rubin emphasizes that the “modern administrative state is designed to serve the needs of its citizens, including the basic material needs that every citizen requires, at a minimum, to pursue his or her chosen life path” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 278, emphasis added). The new morality thus involves a set of reciprocal obligations: the individual must seek to advance a life plan that involves development of one's personal commitments and capacities, and the state should ensure that each individual has at least the minimum means to do so. Rubin argues not just that these state benefits are entitlements, but that citizens have a moral obligation to support them and to vote for politicians who will do so (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 279). While there can be legitimate differences about the best way to accomplish these objectives, Western societies, in Rubin's view, have reached the point where it is deemed immoral to allow “fellow citizens to starve, go homeless, sicken or die for lack of medical care, or remain uneducated” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 280).

Part of the justification for this obligation comes from notions of equality. The morality of higher purposes made citizens equal in their quest for salvation and their roles in contributing to state-identified higher purposes, even in steeply hierarchical societies. The modern state, by emphasizing the greater importance of self-fulfillment, must offer each citizen the opportunity to play a socially meaningful role. To do so, the state must engineer at least a measure of equality. Thus, when Rubin states that social benefits are a right, he emphasizes that the “articulated goal” of the modern state “is to empower the poor, not to glorify the rich” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 279). He observes further that:

These notions reflect the fact that the morality of self-fulfillment creates no foundation for passing judgment on others' objectives (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 304); an individual does not necessarily become “unworthy” because he prefers not to work. They also acknowledge that it is impossible to deny aid to one person, without also affecting that person's children, parents, and others who may bear no culpability for the individual's failings. The refusal, for example, to provide medical care to an alcoholic with a damaged liver may, as a practical matter, shift the burden of care to the alcoholic's family, who may be already stretched thin, thus denying them the means to realize their own life plans. The ultimate justification, however, is a moral one, with “every member of the nation, by virtue of membership alone, … guaranteed his or her minimal material needs” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 282). This justification does not necessarily rest on the worthiness of the citizen, but with our collective sense that a just society cannot stand idly by when someone suffers because of a lack of resources the society could easily supply.

In a larger sense, however, societies built on the morality of self-fulfillment also depend on an educated, sophisticated, secure citizenry capable of contributing to the collective well-being (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 285–86). These societies let go of higher purposes defined from without. They depend instead on citizens who are capable of forming their own coherent worldviews, and developing the capacities to be good citizens (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 284). Societies that marginalize minorities, create glaring inequalities, and lock a high percentage of the population into poverty or prison cannot sustain a morality of self-fulfillment.

A recent Pew study, for example, found significant differences in the priorities of the better versus less educated in what they would teach their children. College graduates placed higher priority on “empathy, curiosity, tolerance and persistence.” In comparison, those with no more than a high school education were more likely to emphasize “teaching children obedience, religious faith and being well-mannered” (Pew Research Center 2014). These differences overlap both with different levels of security (those who see their children as at risk may be inclined to emphasize obedience) and different moral systems (tolerance is clearly a central commitment of the morality of self-fulfillment, but not the morality of higher purposes). In addition, a different Pew study found that, in an era of growing inequality, wealth and income determined political participation, not just because of the influence of wealthy donors to political campaigns, but because the poor became less likely to vote at all or to feel that they influence events in their communities. The study concluded that:

In a system in which the wealthy are much more likely to vote than the poor, it is harder to sustain the commitment to welfare benefits as entitlements.

While Rubin discusses opposition to the new morality (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 8–14), he does not fully assess the nature of the coalition opposed to it. This coalition involves three groups, all of which favor more hierarchical values. Rubin does discuss the first group, the religious, and he ends the book with a discussion of the possibilities for the reinvention of Christianity (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 294–414). Christianity certainly has a foundation that could lead to greater emphasis on tolerance (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 304) and support for the poor and the powerless in society (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 304, 314). Moreover, Rubin predicts that steady church opposition to the new morality, particularly on issues of sexuality, “condemns them to more defeats” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 300) and mainstream Protestant denominations have already embraced aspects of the new morality (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 301). Nonetheless, he also recognizes that these mainline congregations are in decline, while “evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist churches that are adamantly opposed to self-fulfillment morality attract increasingly membership and support” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 301). Rubin does not really explain why, but Cahn and I have argued that part of what attracts these worshippers is a preference for hierarchy (the elect are better than the nonelect) and certainty (one's own religious beliefs are true and universal) (Cahn and Carbone Reference Cahn and Carbone2010, 63). Principles of tolerance would allow those who crave the certainty of religious belief to continue their forms of worship, but deny the claims of universal truth used to justify imposition of these beliefs on others.

The second group are those motivated by in-group loyalty. In a footnote, Rubin acknowledges that some of the opposition to the administrative state's provision of social welfare benefits as a matter of entitlement may be “coded racism” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 322), but he does not discuss the issue more systematically, other than to note the new system's unequivocal moral commitment to racial equality in the new system. Yet, in 2012, the white South voted as a monolithic bloc, with 90 percent of whites voting Republican in some southern counties (Cohn Reference Cohn2014). Eighty-four percent of Republicans also favored greater restriction of immigration in comparison with about half of Democrats (Dugan Reference Dugan2015). Moreover, in the South and in states such as Utah, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska, monolithic white support for the Republican Party tends to overlap with heavily religious portions of the country—and with opposition to treating government benefits as entitlements (Chokski Reference Chokski2015).

The third group are the wealthy. Wealthy voters tend to be more conservative on economic issues, and more likely to oppose government spending on social programs (American Values Survey 2012; McElwee Reference McElwee2015). They also vary depending on where in the country they live, but as a group they tend to oppose the principle that the state has a moral obligation to provide for all its citizens. When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney referred disparagingly in 2012 to the “47 percent of the people who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to food, to housing, to you-name-it” (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 14), he was speaking to a group of wealthy Republican donors.

The existence of these three groups is neither new nor surprising. The combination of the three groups in a single party has, however, made the clash between the different forms of morality a source of political division in the United States.

Moreover, greater inequality and a shrinking pie increases social divisions in ways that further undermine support for the morality of self-fulfillment. The successful, who have succeeded in the face of greater competition than their parents, become more inclined to believe that they have earned their success, and more committed to safeguard their earnings for the children (Parker Reference Parker2012; Szalavitz Reference Szalavitz2013). Those in the middle, in turn, resent those a little farther down. The New York Times reported that:

Rubin, in emphasizing the “co-causal” relationships between governance and morality, tends to focus on the positive developments of the last two centuries. As societies have grown wealthier, and the capacity of the state has grown, the moral obligations to tolerate difference and secure the minimum basis for a meaningful life have also increased. But what happens when the state fails to deliver either equality or prosperity? The answer seems to be that the forces supporting the morality of higher purposes increase in strength. Yet, the policies they support are likely to further increase inequality, and perhaps further undermine prosperity and community solidarity—the very foundations for the morality of self-fulfillment.

Soul, Self, and Society repeatedly emphasizes the dynamic interaction between governance and notions of morality, but as the feudal example illustrates, the dynamic can produce vicious cycles as well as virtuous ones. Recognizing these interactions reinforces Rubin's conclusion that the morality of self-fulfillment necessarily entails a commitment to provide each citizen with at least the minimal requirements for human flourishing and to adopt measures that advance collective welfare. Yet, since the democratic state also necessarily acts in accordance with the wishes of its citizens, Rubin concludes that citizens have a moral obligation to vote for politicians who support public welfare programs (Rubin Reference Rubin2015, 260, 286). By these terms, anyone who voted for Ted Cruz (given his determination to eliminate public welfare programs), Donald Trump (given his statements on Latinos and Muslims), and perhaps the entire Republican field could be deemed immoral.