PASSAGES FROM BELLAH ET AL., HABITS OF THE HEART (1985)

The fundamental question we posed, and that was repeatedly posed to us, was how to preserve or create a morally coherent life. (xli)

We . . . decided to concentrate our research on how private and public life work in the United States: the extent to which private life either prepares people to take part in the public world or encourages them to find meaning exclusively in the private sphere, and the degree to which public life fulfills our private aspirations or discourages us so much that we withdraw from involvement with it. (xlii-xliii)

The primary focus of our research was not psychological, nor even primarily sociological, but rather cultural. We wanted to know what resources Americans have for making sense of their lives, how they think about themselves and their society, and how their ideas relate to their actions. (xliv)

Brian says "values" are important, and he stresses the importance of teaching them to his children. But apart from the injunction not to lie, he is vague about what those values are. "I guess a lot of them are Judeo-Christian ethics of modern society, that certain things are bad." Even the things that may be "absolutely wrong," such as killing, stealing, and lying, may just be matters of personal preference - or at least injunctions against them exist detached from any social or cultural base that could give them broader meaning. (7)

Values . . . continually slip back for Brian into matters of personal preferences, and the only ethical problem is to make the decision that accords with one's preferences. (8)

Joe's vision of the good life, seemingly rooted so firmly in the objective traditions of his community, is in the end highly subjective. Perhaps he has to hide his hopes of returning to the good old days because even he realizes that most of his fellow townspeople would find them faintly ridiculous. (13)

[Margaret Oldham] is caught in some of the contradictions her beliefs imply. She is responsible for herself, but she has no reliable way to connect her own fulfillment to that of other people, whether they be her own husband and children or the larger social and political community of which she in inevitably a part. (16-17)

Wayne thus has a much better idea of what he is against than of what he is for. As a result, the idea of justice that provides such a powerful focus for his life's commitments is weak in substantive content. (19)

The common difficulties these four very different people face in justifying the goals of a morally good life point to a characteristic problem of people in our culture. For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know exactly what we should want. Thus Brian, Joe, Margaret, and Wayne are each in his or her own way confused about how to define for themselves such things as the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice. Those difficulties are in an important way created by the limitations in the common tradition of moral discourse they - and we - share. The main purpose of this book is to deepen our understanding of the resources our tradition provides - and fails to provide - for enabling us to think about the kinds of moral problems we are currently facing as Americans. We also hope to make articulate the all-too-inarticulate search for those we have described in this chapter to find a moral language that will transcend their radical individualism. (21)

Throughout this book, we will be wrestling, together with Brian Palmer and many others, with this question of how to think about the relationship between economic success in our centralized, bureaucratized economy and the ultimate goals of a successful private and public life. (23)

Freedom is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and public life . . . [Yet] if the entire social world is made up of individuals, each endowed with the right to be free of others' demands, it becomes hard to forge bonds of attachment to, or cooperation with, other people, since such bonds would imply obligations that necessarily impinge on one's freedom. (23)

It is an ideal of freedom that leaves Americans with a stubborn fear of acknowledging structures of power and interdependence in a technologically complex society dominated by giant corporations and an increasingly powerful state. The idea of freedom makes Americans nostalgic for their past, but provides few resources for talking about their collective future. (25)

Our society has tried to establish a floor below which no one will be allowed to fall, but we have not thought effectively about how to include the deprived more actively in occupational and civic life. Now have we thought whether it is healthy for our society to give inordinate rewards to relatively few. We need to reach common understandings about distributive justice - an appropriate sharing of economic resources - which must in turn be based on conceptions of a substantively just society. Unfortunately, our available moral traditions do not give us nearly as many resources for thinking about distributive justice as about procedural justice, and even fewer for thinking about substantive justice. (26)