Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

16 Piet J. Naudé
personal toward the ethical importance of institutions. From asociological perspective,
institutions encompass all forms of regularized human behavior and
“exist in the enchainment of self-similar action-reaction effect flows involving
at least two, but often very many, spatially and temporally distributed persons.”
Human beings, living their lives in and through institutional arrangements,
not only are formed by those institutions, but their acts in turn impact the formation
of institutions. This impact is designated as “political,” because it remakes
“the world in and through which alarger community acts and as such
they are part of the res publica.” And the consequences of reforming institutions
“could become subject to political effort if actors would be made aware of them.”
If ethics is, inter alia, concerned with the consequences of one’sactions, and
if most consequences of human action are mediated by institutions, then the
goodness of those institutions should be the subject of ethical reflection. Itis
thus not merely the moral quality of individual actions but rather the goodness
of “institutionalfabrics” that is at stake. The Kantian question of “what ought Ito
do?” is not wide enough in scope and should much rather be framed as “what
assemblage of institutions ought we to form, such that we are all more likely to
act ethically in the sense stipulated by us together?” The task of building good
and better institutions is the political imperative of ethics.
Glaeser proceeds to propose three “general evaluative criteria” or “metaethical
principles” against which the goodness of institutions could be ethically
judged.
Transparency, without which accountability is impossible, refers to the open
and ethically relevant knowledge of consequences that an institution generates
in its interaction with concrete others and the environment. Alterability or malleability
refers to the degree in which people through various means (personal
effort, social movements, or state policy) are able “to intervene positively in reshaping
the institutional fabric through which they live”—in other words, making
institutional changes for the better. The third principle is called public goal
and value conformity, by which institutions are assessed regarding their embodiment
of acomprehensive vision in which agood life and agood society are
closely intertwined. Glaeser argues for open fora in which all people can deliberate
and participate equally in answering the question of agood life and agood
society.
Late modern societies are “morally unhinged” because “the privilege of ignorancehas
made possible the creation of an institutional world in which people
not only do not know, but they are kept from knowing what they are doing.”
What Glaeser calls “a new civic ethos” will become possible only if the ethics
of institutions enables us to know, assess, and change the consequences of our
institutionally mediated actions.
“Philanthropic Formation at the Intersection of Mercantile and Religious
Networks: The Thornton Family in Their Eighteenth-Century Contexts” is the