Charles Murray has, as usual, landed on an important subject that few people are willing to talk about, at least outside of the seriously religious communities. Thinkers on the left have for years inclined toward relativism in morals, the better to avoid having to judge and (especially) be judged and having to think twice about their inclinations to libertinism. The non-libertarian thinkers on the right have not shied away from moralizing, but their efforts are easily embarrassed as hypocritical when members of their own side are caught in one form of scandal or another, financial or aphrodisiac. (Think about the difficulties that Republicans living in glass houses faced in throwing the stones of impeachment against the disgraced and disgraceful President Clinton.)
But Murray needs to be more careful in describing what he thinks is missing. On the one hand, he appeals to the need for personal virtue; on the other hand, he calls for an ethic of duty. Both are good, but they are not the same. Virtue is a unified disposition of both heart and mind, which loves, seeks, and is able to find the beautiful and good thing to do, here and now. Duty, more rule than character based, is a call to do what is right, even when one’s heart may be otherwise inclined. A self-restrained man, even if his heart is not in it, can do his duty if he has been reared not to shirk it. To be sure, the exercise of the specific duties of office are easier for men and women of virtue; but since virtue is always in short supply, we should be looking for ways to cultivate the sense of honor in meeting obligation and to revive the stigma and opprobrium attached to failure. This is, we must recognize, a tall order in a culture that has almost completely eroded the distinction between public and private and all but eliminated the sense of shame, indispensable for upholding public norms and the fulfillment of obligation.
A small note on “responsibility.” “To be responsible” means, in the first place, “to be the cause” of something. The earliest meaning of “responsibility” was, in fact, “guilt,” as in, “Who is responsible for this crime?” It is a curious fact that an idea which was once at best neutral between good and evil is now deemed a substitute for virtue and obligation. Nonetheless, we can still call people out for being “irresponsible,” for not discharging their obligations and for not conducting themselves in a manner suited to their office and station. Yet once again, doing so requires the willingness to make the moral judgments that our opinion leaders are so little inclined to make.