First Things, by Hadley Arkes

...On conscientious objection, Arkes demonstrates that exemption from law cannot be a matter of rights, but is rather one of legislative grace, and that citizens cannot exempt themselves from law merely by invoking their own personal beliefs...

...Arkes shows that abortion is morally wrong...

...This distinction also is relevant to understanding why moral relativism—probably the most common confusion about morality today—is wrong...

...Hadley Arkes, a professor of politics at Amherst, has written a good book that is also a badly needed book...

...Thus does Arkes conclude, as Immanuel Kant did, that republican government is the only government over men that may lawfully be established...

...law that does not arise from morality is unjust...

...But "privacy cannot be morally justified in the name of a freedom to do things that are unjustified and wrong...

...Arkes argues that the principle of equality before the law is implicit in the very idea of law, and thus of morals...

...Moreover, he continues, "we have law only because we have morals—only because it is possible to speak of things that are right and wrong...

...And so does law itself, since a polity pursues justice through law...

...Confusion about morality abounds in many segments of our society, particularly among those who hold positions of intellectual and political leadership...

...11.95 paper Terry Eastland 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 judgments...

...Subjectivism also, and correctly, takes a beating in First Things...

...One is told, for example, that racial preferences in hiring are morally imperative because they promote integration or boost minority employment rates...

...The case against slavery arose from this very insight...

...For Arkes, the first things or principles of morals and justice derive from "the idea of morals itself" and the notion of a "rational being" who has the capacity for moral judgment...

...As a result, government may arise only from the consent of the governed...

...Arkes, quoting Lincoln, points out that no one has a "right" to commit a wrong...

...Such conduct would violate natural rights and majority rule, and the threat to liberty is obvious...

...Moreover, Arkes says, majority rule, while not itself a moral principle, is nonetheless the only "arrangement compatible with the principle of natural equality...

...It follows that privacy cannot insulate abortion from the law...

...First Things, of course, concerns morals and justice...

...First Things does most of these things well, that is to say persuasively...

...In these arguments about the nature of law and polity, the place of justice in political life, and republican government, Arkes is also challenging ideas advocated by many elites, including some who profess to be conservatives...

...Arkes understands prudence and statesmanship, not only morals and justice...

...Arkes observes that if lawmakers legislated only morality, there would be far fewer laws and much greater freedom...

...But agreement or disagreement about moral truth is an empirical matter from which one may not logically draw inferences about morality itself...

...As Arkes says, if these were the only ends of a polity, then they could be achieved without law, or at least without law having a moral content (a contradiction, Arkes would point out), for instead they could be pursued through contracts based strictly on self-interest...

...This, of course, is another way of saying that morality is built into us and our world, that it is an undeniable given of our existence...

...W hile much of what Arkes says about politics and justice is persuasive, questions do arise in respect to Arkes's contention that the highest end of politics is justice...

...On welfare and redistribution, Arkes makes a persuasive case, on moral grounds, against the progressive income tax: "Since there is no ground of principle which can establish the right allotments of income and pleasure, there can be no moral ground fortaking more money in taxation merely because some people have more money or feel less pleasure...

...It teaches something to its members in a public way about . . . what is right and wrong, just and unjust...

...Arkes patiently considers every argument that a skeptic could make and shows that skepticism is untenable because, in the final analysis, it denies the very nature of man and his world...

...This point has particular relevance in a moral and political culture such as ours in which judgments alleging moral claims but lacking in moral content are a regular feature of daily (particularly Washington) life...

...And because moral judgments must derive from the idea of morals, any ostensibly moral judgment that cannot be traced back to that core, as Arkes points out, "cannot have any pretension of expressing a valid moral statement...

...Therelativist seeks to infer from the presence of disagreement about moral truth that no such truth exists...

...and a series of reflections on such issues as conscientious objection, justification for war, intervention abroad, welfare, taxation, privacy, and abortion...

...an argument in behalf of the relationship between morals and justice...

...On war and the morality of intervention, a discussion that focuses on Vietnam, Arkes shows that there was a "presumptive moral obligation" on the part of the United States to act in Vietnam...

...We have experienced enough judicial activism, particularly in recent years, to understand the dangers posed by a. judiciary working on its own, cut adrift from the law as written...

...Moreover, the idea of morality itself does and should have political consequences...

...Thus, writes Arkes, does polity arise from morality...

...the moral sense of man—built into his nature—has not been extinguished, not even in the twentieth century...

...and because it is true, then no man has the right by nature to exercise power over others...

...Much of what Arkes has to say cuts against currently fashionable ideas...

...a brief for the centrality of justice in political life...

...The logic and language of morals," he writes, "are simply built into us...

...an argument for democracy as the only justifiable form of government...

...Arkes argues that man's unique capacity for moral judgment leads him to form "ethicalassociations"—i.e., political societies—whose "highest end" is justice...

...That people disagree about morality, as Arkes points out, only means that people disagree...

...Not only, for Arkes, may one legislate morality...

...One such idea is that moral truth cannot be known, that morality does not exist...

...The idea of morals and the notion of a rational being thus provide the grounds not only for the refutation of skepticism but also for moral judgment itself—indeed, for all such judgments...

...Nevertheless, First Things must be judged an exceptional book, brilliant in its theoretical discussion of morals and justice, and brilliant, too, in its analysis of particular issues, which occupy its final chapters...

...It is thus incoherent to say, as is often said today, that morality is simply a subjective matter, with each person deciding according to his own standards...

...Arkes is also right to conclude, against the many moral and cultural relativists who say otherwise, that the only form of government that may by right exist is a government of the people founded upon the moral idea of equality...

...Nor is this all...

...The skeptic "who seeks to deny the existence of morals," Arkes correctly observes, "will spend most of his days trying to flee from the perils of contradiction and the tangle of his own argument...

...Terry Eastland is director of public affairs for the Justice Department...

...On privacy and abortion, Arkes is at his best...

...By definition, this principle is of necessity true...

...Arkes plainly would not subscribe to such versions, yet there are passages in First Things that suggest the federal judiciary should act purely on the basis of natural or moral law...

...Arkes is right to say that the purpose of a polity cannot simply be, as some argue, to provide security against assaults on life or property, or to establish the conditions that facilitate commerce and advance material comfort...

...The logic of morals is such that moral truth, which is of necessity true, applies universally—to everyone...

...In this he largely succeeds...

...Moral conduct is right or wrong—objectively so...

...As he puts it, one may legislate only morality...

...Still, "the public has not been uniform in its understanding of the grounds on which abortion ought to be regarded as wrong, and this uncertainty about the ground of judgment must complicate the task of the statesmen who would frame a law that could at once tutor the public and gain its assent...

...This is the ancient teaching, from Aristotle, and there are versions of it that seek to subsume the individual within society, that trample natural rights and majority rule, that give little place to freedom...

...Law arises from morality and, in turn, law teaches morality...

...In fact, however, we have laws, and many of them do express moral FIRST THINGS: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND JUSTICE Hadley Arkes/Princeton University Press/$50...

...The implication of this point should be obvious: that republican government is morally superior to all other kinds...

...So it is, as Arkes observes, that questions of principle are "confounded" with "empirical predictions or contingent propositions...

...They "are as much a part of our natural world as trees, rocks, air, and water...

...One of the worthy attributes of First Things is its insistence on the difference, in philosophical terms, between categorical and contingent propositions, between, that is, propositions that are true of necessity, as all moral judgments must be, and propositions whose truth depends on circumstances that, by definition, always could be otherwise...

...Privacy," he qbserves, has become "a source of insulation from the law, a shelter in which we become free to do things the law may condemn...

...All nations are not created equal, but all men are, and this is the moral truth that at bottom distinguishes the United States from the Soviet Union...

...Citizens would be unjustly required to behave in accord with the judiciary's understanding of morality, which may or may not be correct...