Nine—
The Gift of Society

The Breakdown of the Moral Consensus

In the years after World War II, Western liberal democracies developed a common solution for their political and economic problems which linked government and the market together in what Claus Offe has called the Keynesian welfare state.^[1] In a peculiar kind of way, political consensus seemed to generate moral consensus. So long as the Keynesian welfare state functioned, moral issues played little role in the public life of modern liberal democracies. Economic growth generated government surpluses, which in turn promised to provide for older people, take care of the dependent, and leave legacies to future generations. Between them, the market and the state made necessary neither guilty consciences nor sermons about obligation. It may not have been the end of ideology, but it might well have been the end of morality, at least as traditionally understood.

Just as the Keynesian welfare state has broken down as a political and economic compromise capable of containing the major conflicts in modern liberal democracies, so has the general consensus that moral issues ought to play little role in public life broken down as well. In the late 1970s, from both the right and the left, new issues came to the fore. Ecological consciousness, the peace movement, and feminism, on the one hand, and opposition to busing and abortion, support for prayer in schools, and hostility toward the teaching of evolution, on the other, began to dominate the public consciousness of the United States especially but, in varying forms, other societies too. As if being modern were not difficult enough, liberal democrats are now being asked to take positions on issues that would tax anyone's moral capacities.

Although the rise of new moral issues has contributed to the polarization of modern politics and increased demagoguery, one positive benefit can stem from the breakdown of the moral consensus. The very newness of such issues means that often no preestablished rules exist on which people can rely for answers. Morality, in that sense, is "in the making"^[2] —part of a process by which people try to make sense out of the dilemmas, experiences, conversations, and stories in which they participate. When morality is in the making, individuals are far more likely to construct their own moral rules out of their interactions with others. The new moral issues speak to the social construction of morality, and the social construction of morality speaks to the new moral issues. Perhaps the most widely studied of the new moral issues—abortion—indicates why this is so.

As L. W. Sumner points out, at issue in most of the debates over abortion in which moral philosophers engage is a matter of principle: how one views the moral status of the fetus. To use a Kantian distinction, if the fetus is viewed as a person, then abortion is immoral, whereas if the fetus is considered a thing, a woman is justified in exercising control over her own body.^[3] Opponents of abortion generally base their arguments on an obligation to a higher good, such as religious belief, and the resulting conviction that the fetus is a person from conception. A decision against abortion follows such a conviction, as in the following argument: "At some point between two and twelve weeks after conception, the fetus becomes a human being with all the rights to life (to use that phrase) belonging to such an entity. Thereafter—with the exception of one special case—it is wrong for the mother to abort the fetus, even if her life is threatened by its continued existence."^[4]

Moral advice of this sort tells a woman that her obligations to a potential life are so great that she has no obligation at all to those in her present environment, including herself, her mate, or her children. (As John Noonan writes, "Feeling is notoriously an unsure guide to the humanity of others.")^[5] This is a form of what I have called heroic morality in extremis. Not only are women expected to be ruled by nature—and thereby to reject modernity—but they are also expected to sacrifice themselves in the process. "There is no moral act that does not imply a sacrifice," Durkheim once wrote.^[6] Indeed, some sacrifice, as I argued in Chapter 3, is clearly necessary for the strength of the moral order. Yet to ask people to sacrifice their own futures for the sake of a principle is more than modern people will bear.

On the point of principle, however, the liberal position on abortion

echoes the conservative. Many supporters of unrestricted abortion, like their antagonists, also base their arguments on a principle—that of a woman's right to control her own body. In their view, the fetus is a thing rather than a life, and one of the principles of modern liberal democratic capitalism is that people have the right to dispose of the things that are theirs as they with.^[7] As Sumner (who takes a moderate liberal position) argues, because positions on these issues "must have a rational foundation," it follows that "personal feelings or sentiments cannot themselves count as reasons in favor of a moral view of abortion."^[8] From this perspective, a principle of obligation to the self and its needs takes precedence over feelings toward potential future generations, again requiring something of a heroic attitude toward the stirrings of and bondings with the thing/person that exists in one's womb.

How principled are most abortion decisions? Judith Smetana, who has studied women's reasoning about abortion from Kohlbergian premises, divided her sample into those who made a "moral" decision that life begins with conception and those who made a "personal" decision involving autonomy and control over their own lives.^[9] The problem is that such "domains", as she calls them, are rarely so bounded. For most women—indeed, for anyone—making a decision about when life begins is so demanding that abstract principles are not much help. Only by discussing these matters with others—by relying on practices rather than principles—can such an issue be resolved. The extensive sociological literature on abortion generally concludes that principles count for little in reaching this decision, while friends, feelings, and moral account-giving count very much. The ways by which people grow and develop as moral agents, through rules emphasizing situation, context, trust, reliance on others, and common sense, are in fact the ways by which most women make a decision regarding abortion.

Abortion decisions, first of all, rely on talk, and evidently a good deal of it. According to Arthur Shostak and Gary McLouth, approximately 85 percent of the women who obtain abortions tell the natural father of the fetus that they are pregnant and discuss what they are planning to do.^[10] Despite the possibility of hostile reactions from parents or siblings, especially in the first years when abortion was legal, Mary Zimmerman found that 60 percent of her sample in a conservative Midwestern city discussed their situation with a parent, brother, or sister.^[11] Many women turn to workers in family-planning clinics for advice on what to do.^[12] Although careful to keep the relationship professional and clinical, doctors also counsel women

who are making abortion decisions; and doctors themselves, caught between competing pressures, make their own decisions on whether to perform abortions not out of principle but based on what they hear.^[13] Even political movements can be a source of information as, through social interaction, both pro-life and pro-choice positions are reinforced and strengthened.^[14]

The conversations that inevitably take place during those formal episodes when people are forced to make decisions for which they have few guidelines are the very stuff of moral decision-making. Faced with conflicts for which principles are of little help, women construct the moral rules that regulate abortion socially in interaction with others. Thus do moral rules become the product of people's own activity as moral agents. Cultural sanctions are not fixed commands; with regard to abortion, what society views as morally unpermissible has changed, in large part because women took an active role in trying to change it. Nor are the decisions women make the result of fixed preferences that are somehow simply revealed; they are instead part of a learning process through which people make sense of the moral choices that face them. Civil society—ties of affection, friendship, and community—becomes, as I argued in the previous chapter, a kind of moral laboratory for resolving dilemmas for which existing moral codes seem inadequate.

If an issue such as abortion indicates why people need strong ties in civil society, it also indicates why, during moments of moral intensity, they look also to the market and the state to provide relief. The encountering of a new stage in the life cycle or a moment of sudden moral passage, in which moral dilemmas only dimly recognized before must quickly be grappled with, is not something people wish to experience often. Consequently, individuals often try to simplify the moral decision-making process by turning to government or the market. In the case of abortion, both the state and the market can ease access, thereby reducing the moral "costs" and making a decision to abort more routine. In the United States, despite ongoing contestation by conservative opponents, abortion has been medicalized and commodified, with largely beneficial results. Taking advantage of new opportunities becomes easier, the price drops, and the number of people who can avail themselves of the procedure increases. In Sweden, abortion is free on demand until the eighteenth week of pregnancy, and much of the stigma associated with the process has been removed.^[15] Because abortion is viewed as a public good, it undergoes the dynamics of bureaucratization—available to all, at prices well below the market price, it is also safer and more trustworthy because regulated by public authority.

As a practice becomes routinized when treated as a private or a public good, the intensity of the moral decision it elicits will decline. Yet abortion, because it does involve an issue, not only of life but also of the life of future generations, is inevitably morally complicated. Wherever it has been treated either as a medical commodity or as a fundamental right guaranteed by the state, moments of moral passage have not been eliminated. In Scandinavia, the moral debate over abortion did not end with legislation establishing a legal right to it; despite free access to abortion in Sweden, for example, numerous women still experienced emotional disturbances and strong psychological reactions.^[16] In the United States, mixed feelings about the commodification of abortion are well illustrated by Carole Joffe's study of family-planning workers, many of whom went into abortion counseling out of a principled commitment to a woman's right to control her own body. Many of these women found that all the ethical and social pressures on them presented almost inescapable dilemmas. "The only effective 'policy' for dealing with these tensions," Joffe concludes, "is to avoid, as much as possible, any rigid policy."^[17] To live at the whim of decisions made without the experience of moments of moral epiphany may be an improvement over living in an age of intense moral scrutiny, but only partly.

Abortion decisions, then, represent in a sense a case study of how modernity, morality, and civil society relate. Abortion exemplifies the process by which people reach decisions when faced with an unprecedented number of choices to make and little sense of how to make them. Although a menu of options seems to be the modern definition of freedom—having choice where there once existed only sanction—choice is constrained by the natural bonds that exist between a woman and the potential life she carries within her. With the social and the natural in such conflict, most women do not seek some universally just principle to guide their decisions but turn instead to others in their immediate environment to find a way to balance what they understand to be their obligations—to themselves, to their intimate others, and to future generations. Thus, if civil society has been weakened by the tendency of modern liberal democrats to rely on markets and states, so has the capacity to act as a self-producing moral agent.

Markets, States, and New Moral Issues

Markets and states, which between them cannot resolve some of the older moral dilemmas of liberal democracy, are even less helpful in confronting

the newer ones. Yet people, not always willing to experience the intensity of moral decision-making associated with civil society, will often look to them anyway for help in dealing with new moral issues. New moral issues, however, involve one major difference. When an issue concerns political economy, supporters of the state are usually on the left, while those who lean toward the market are on the right. In new moral issues, though, the positions are reversed: with respect to abortion, say, a free market is the preferred position of the left, while government regulation becomes that of the right. Since modern liberal democrats have only two major ways of thinking about their social obligations, when each no longer seems to work they simply flip them around.

One example of the inappropriateness of markets and states to the kinds of moral issues facing modern liberal democrats can be seen in the AIDS epidemic. Like abortion, AIDS poses difficult moral dilemmas, not only for those affected or potentially affected, but for the rest of society as well; in recalling the epidemics and plagues that characterized the premodern era, AIDS reminds us of how fragile, and recent, the civilizing process is.^[18] Two Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Denmark, illustrate two different ways of responding to the moral challenges of AIDS: the former relies, to an unusual degree, on the state, whereas the latter, at least in its initial response, respected individual choice much as in the market.

As part of its efforts to protect public health and safety, the Swedish state, long before the advent of the AIDS epidemic, already possessed the authority to declare certain diseases part of a "sexual epidemic."^[19] Once declared, governmental authority can be swiftly used to control it. Doctors are required by law to report to the authorities all patients diagnosed as having venereal disease. Those so diagnosed are given a certain period of time to report to the police, and if they do not the police will come and take them into custody. The purpose of meeting with public authorities is to make available to them a list of all the people with whom one has had sexual relations, so that the authorities can inform those partners of the situation. From the start of the process until the end of a quarantine, when the patient is declared free of disease, government is continuously involved.

The question facing Swedish authorities in the early 1980s was whether AIDS should be classified as a sexual epidemic. The problem was that AIDS is not like, for example, syphilis. Because AIDS has no cure, no limited period of quarantine after which matters will return to "normal" can be established. Moreover, one of the fears in using compulsion to deal with AIDS is that it might drive the behavior to be regulated underground,

which is why many governments have recommended against compulsory AIDS testing. In the end, however, these concerns had little impact in Sweden. AIDS was classified as a sexual epidemic, and the full force of the state was brought to bear. The government announced that drug addicts and prostitutes affected with AIDS, for example, would be transferred to prison, and immediately come under the supervision of not only doctors but also psychologists.^[20] Furthermore, the Ministry of Health, in November 1987, decided to convert a former mental hospital into a facility in which people whose behavior indicated that they were likely to spread AIDS to others would be confined.^[21] The same tendency to want to head off potential antisocial behavior as therapists used in matters involving family violence or alcoholism was thus transferred to AIDS.

Not surprisingly, Swedes who want to know if they have been infected with the AIDS virus will travel to other, less restrictive, countries to find out. One place they often go is next door to Copenhagen, where confidentiality in AIDS testing is guaranteed. Indeed, the Danish response to AIDS could not be more dissimilar to the Swedish.^[22] (The first Westerner known to have died of AIDS was a Danish doctor who had worked in Africa.) Just as Denmark is more liberal in economic matters than Sweden, it is also more laissez-faire in moral matters. When the Progress party, the most right-wing party in parliament, proposed applying Denmark's epidemic laws to AIDS, three of the other major political parties responded by proposing that the epidemic laws be abolished entirely. Yet the more marketlike respect for freedom and confidentiality in Denmark does not solve the problems of AIDS either. Danes were long reluctant to close bathhouses, for example, even when it became known that rapid transmission of the disease was because of them.^[23] As in San Francisco, this approach to AIDS, emphasizing tolerance for the individual life-styles of gay men, courted disaster by refusing to take collective responsibility for a problem that transcended the individual's freedom to have sex in any way at any time.

Neither approach—the one based on the market's respect for individual choice, the other on the coercive powers inherent in the state—seems appropriate to resolve the moral dilemmas raised by AIDS.^[24] Danish authorities, in viewing AIDS as a matter of individual choice, failed to recognize the need to move beyond immediate preferences, to use the conscience of society early enough and forcefully enough to create a moment of moral scrutiny. (Admittedly, once the crisis became more serious the government changed its policies, bringing gay voluntary organizations into the process

and developing a public advertising campaign that stressed both the seriousness of AIDS to society and the idea that individuals themselves must be relied on to hear and act on the message.) Swedish authorities, in contrast, relied so much on government that individuals and their needs counted for little (although by leaving the country to be tested for AIDS, individual Swedes are reacting, in a fairly commonsense way, to a punitive approach that fails to respect individuals as able to understand their own moral dilemmas).

The notion that people with AIDS are suffering for their sins and we ought not give positive reinforcement for the behavior that got them into trouble seems as inappropriate as the idea that it is not our business to tell people how they ought to conduct their sex lives when sex is capable of killing others. To respond to a new moral issue such as AIDS, the institutions and practices of society have to allow room for moral growth by encouraging individuals to reach out to others during moments of passage. Modernity will continue to frustrate people if it raises ever more difficult issues and then relies on moral codes that distrust the ability of individuals to resolve those issues.

Abortion and AIDS by no means exhaust the range of moral issues facing modern liberal democrats. If the parents of an all but officially dead infant want to express their sense of altruism by donating its organs, should they be allowed to, despite rules that define their desire as murder? In a conflictful decision involving surrogate motherhood, is it the interests of the child, the natural mother, or the mother by contract that ought to prevail? Should new technologies be developed that will enable older people to live ten years longer when so doing may take away funds that could be used to cure childhood diseases?^[25] There are few easy answers to any of these questions, for in most cases they involve a clash not between good and evil but between one good and another. We may, if we have to deal with such issues, want to turn them over either to the rational calculation of self-interest or to the rule-making capacity of bureaucratic agencies, but we will probably find out that with respect to issues so unprecedented in their moral demands, if people cannot decide for themselves what to do, no other methods will help them much either.

As so many of these moral dilemmas indicate, a certain hesitation ought to be involved in suggesting to people the moral courses they should take. A sociological approach to moral obligation involves a shift in our thinking about moral obligation. Rather than asking which of a number of possible courses of action is more moral (having an abortion or not having

one, being sexually promiscuous or not), it seeks to clarify the conditions under which individuals can bring their own capacities as moral agents to bear on the decisions they must make. There is an obvious risk in doing so. Even if people experience a moment of moral passage in which they confront the views of others, they may decide to do what liberal humanitarian opinion would not have them do. (AIDS victims, for example, might continue to have unsafe sex; women who have had many abortions may have more.) Short of creating conditions under which no one could act as a moral agent—the one condition that clearly violates the standard of morality as a social practice (and a condition that is more than just a theoretical possibility when discussing AIDS)—this risk might be worth taking. If, for example, a person has been exposed to the issues of busing and school integration and, having heard and considered the views of others in intense moments of moral passage, such as a series of demonstrations and confrontations, still believes in neighborhood schools, it becomes difficult to judge that person's views or behavior as immoral, no matter how much it may violate one's own sense that racial integration is a moral imperative.^[26] One hopes that self-producing moral agents do what one considers morally just, and people who are exposed to other positions through moments of moral passage often will, but it cannot be insisted on beyond a point.

A sociological approach to moral obligation is not, to use a philosophical term, consequentialist; it does not judge the morality of an action by the morality of its consequences. Nor is it proceduralist, seeking to find the proper rules within which moral judgments can be made. Moral obligation is instead found in process, in the degree to which the everyday conditions of ordinary life allow individuals to bring their social capacities to bear on the issues that confront them. Market-oriented societies tend to focus on procedures; in their concern for property rights or the rule of law, they emphasize formalism and specificity in moral obligation. Welfare states, especially those in Scandinavia, tend to be consequentialist: if government can produce morally attractive results, that is justification enough to rely on government. (That the Scandinavian societies have achieved such good results, yet in the process have sacrificed personal moral responsibility, explains my ambivalence toward them.) Even if the best of both worlds were combined—if proper procedures led to consequences generally agreed to be just—a moral dimension would still be missing so long as individuals did not mature and develop as agents through their interaction with others.

It is difficult for social scientists (who are nearly always moral philoso-

phers in disguise) to stop telling people what rules they ought to follow and instead to concentrate on helping people make their own rules. Yet what we lose by doing so—a finely designed and morally just set of rules that most people will wind up altering anyway—may well be compensated for by a recognition of the important contribution a sociological approach to moral obligation can make to the paradoxes of modernity. The more modern we become, the more likely we are to rely on markets and states for our moral codes. And the more we rely on markets and states, the more the spaces within which relations in civil society flourish break down. Yet the weaker civil society becomes, the harder it is to be modern, for it becomes more difficult to find practical ways of balancing obligations in the near and distant spheres of society. Allowing people to be wrong may be less risky overall than insisting on rules by which they may be right, if so doing permits them to keep vibrant a place in which they can cultivate their social capacities to act as moral agents.

Joining, Waiting, Leaving

About the only thing that can be said with any confidence about the moral issues that future generations will have to face is that they cannot be predicted on the basis of the moral issues that we currently face. Just as issues involving AIDS would have astonished people twenty years ago, we simply cannot know what kinds of decisions people living twenty years in the future will be expected to make.

Whatever the moral issues that will define the social fabric of the future, their resolution will be smoother if individuals have a place in society that allows them to take personal responsibility for the moral decisions they make. The contribution of sociologists to an understanding of moral obligation in modern society should be to facilitate the process by which individuals come to recognize and appreciate the importance of civil society. Because the intimate sphere of society is fragile, modern liberal democrats need to think more about how they can preserve it. They will be better able to do so if they think about three aspects of the groups to which they belong: Who should and who should not be members, since membership brings in its wake obligation? How ought groups to establish rules for distributing the benefits they offer? And what are one's obligations to a group that one wishes to leave in order to join another? A sociological approach to moral obligation requires that we think about what can be called entrance rules, waiting rules, and exit rules.

Some people feel an obligation to all humanity, and sometimes even to all animals as well, but for most people moral obligation is more meaningful when obligations are limited in scope. Communities, Michael Walzer has written, "must have boundaries."^[27] One of the most difficult issues in the business of defining moral obligation is deciding on entrance rules, criteria for determining who should belong to the group to which one is presumably obligated.

Entrance rules are now hotly contested in all modern liberal democracies. In Scandinavia, international movements—of both people and capital—have begun to have a strong effect on the welfare state.^[28] As relatively small countries with relatively small economies, the Scandinavian states cannot be tempted by protectionist economic policies but must compete internationally; yet in this open arena, the level of expenditure that the welfare state can tolerate is necessarily affected by international currency movements, balances of trade, and other economic events outside the control of policy makers. Even more significant is the international movement of people, which in the Scandinavian context has considerably changed the ethnic and racial profile of these countries (see table 10). Because Scandinavian societies offer so many benefits, the question of who should be allowed into the country to take advantage of them becomes an emotionally charged issue;^[29] meanwhile, the existence within the society of people from many different cultures makes it less likely that the welfare state can operate on the basis of informal understandings and more likely that its rules will be formally codified.

A major political issue facing Scandinavian society today concerns who has a right to belong. A feeling that society is being overwhelmed by foreigners has led to an increase in efforts at exclusion: Sweden, for example, decided that people from Lebanon are no longer to be considered political refugees seeking asylum, while the Social Democratic mayor of a working-class suburb of Copenhagen complained loudly that his city was turning into a Turkish one. It is relatively easy to condemn such actions and complaints as racist, yet the notion that everyone ought to be allowed in, while workable on a case by case basis, is hardly a satisfactory entrance rule. Not everyone who deserves admission to Sweden, Norway, or Denmark can buy the illegal transportation (generally through East Germany) to arrive at a Scandinavian airport and plead their case. Because citizenship is inherently exclusionary—one can be a citizen only if someone else is not—some method of closing borders will always be found.

The case of refugees to Scandinavia poses clearly the moral problem in-

volved in most entrance rules. If such rules are drawn too tightly, obligations to people already in the group are more likely to be satisfied, but at the risk of ignoring any obligation to people outside. If, however, they are drawn too loosely, a commitment to people outside the group can cause a lessening sense of obligation to those inside. This is a real dilemma in Scandinavia, because fiscal limits on the welfare state mean that public resources spent on new members of society reduce the funds available for other kinds of programs. A position that everyone should be allowed into the country is as shortsighted as a position that no one ought to be allowed in.

These dilemmas over entrance rules apply not only to the borders of the nation-state, but also to the borders that define any group within the nation-state. In corporatist-type political systems such as the Scandinavian, group membership tends to be characterized by formal obligations and tightly drawn entrance rules, all of which reinforce a sense of belonging and of loyalty to others. But once again, when obligations within a group are tightly drawn, obligations to those outside the group suffer. On the one hand, life becomes more difficult for those who are not members of any group at all: when day care for small children is as well organized as it is in Scandinavia, the streets are extremely lonely for children not in day care; when unemployment compensation is administered by unions, life can be rough for women and young people who are unemployed and have never been in the labor market. On the other hand, each group demands what is best for itself—even at the expense of its own members. In Scandinavia, tightly organized politics falls victim to what Gunnar Heckscher has called "collective bribery": each group wields enough power to force

consideration of its immediate needs.^[30] Thus, for example, perfectly sensible reforms in the area of child care—such as relying more on older people to watch young children or encouraging part-time work for one parent when children are small^[31] —are opposed, in this case by unions, because the rights of child-care workers take priority over any general sense of obligation to society as a whole, even though child-care workers themselves have children who will be affected by the inflexibility of the rules that their group membership demands. Similarly, both labor and capital share an interest in limiting the hours that stores can legally open, and both use their group power to prevent changes in the law, which results in inconvenience for everyone, including very members of the groups that block the changes.

American society represents a sharp contrast to Scandinavia in terms of entrance rules. While formal entry into the United States is often difficult to obtain, informal passage in and out of the country, especially by immigrant workers seeking low-paid jobs in the South and Southwest, is so easy that people constantly complain that there seems to be no border at all. Likewise, the existence of fifty different states, each with its own entrance rules, encourages liberal entry, for states compete with one another to welcome capital within their borders, making it more difficult for any one state to tighten its borders. Changes in political and social consciousness, such as the breakdown of clubs composed entirely of white male Protestants or the impact of first the civil rights and then the women's movement, have similarly contributed to a loosening of entrance rules within groups of all kinds. American interest-group liberalism, in contrast to Scandinavian corporatism, does not insist that every public policy be decided through negotiation with well-organized groups. (An exception involves New York City, where tightly organized groups such as public school custodians or taxi medallion owners can, much as in Scandinavia, protect their interests irrespective of the consequences for the rest of the city.) Even the entrance rules into families, traditionally the tightest groups of all, have been liberalized as people have been met with more choices, not only over birth control but also over adoption, surrogate motherhood, and other developments that make family membership less a matter of biology and more one of policy.^[32]

This ease of entry, both into America and into the groups that compose its public life, constitutes one of the attractions of American society. It is surely a sign of progress when the ease of entry associated with the market replaces strictly defined entrance rules associated with caste and class. Yet when entrance rules are loosened, problems of moral obligation do not go

away so much as change their character. It is not that those who are already members will ignore the needs of people outside the group, but rather that group membership itself will carry little sense of obligation toward those who already belong. I hope a personal example is not out of place. The group that pays me a salary, the City University of New York (CUNY), took the courageous step of opening its admissions to all, a step that I supported. Yet it seems clear to me now that in easing entry rules we seriously underestimated the effect our actions would have on institutional loyalty. By essentially announcing that joining CUNY did not entail any special qualities of character, we cheapened group membership for all those who did enter. A decline not only in academic standards but also in the meaning of the experience of education followed, not because poor and minority students took advantage of open admissions (actually the policy, especially at my own institution, led to a rise in the number of lower-middle-class whites who otherwise would have attended religious schools) but because no criteria of entry existed to define who we were and so commit us to be obligated in some sense toward one another.

If no group (or society) can let everyone in but also cannot keep everyone out, obligations to the self and to others can be kept in balance only when groups have entry rules strict enough to give their members a feeling that it means something to be a member, yet at the same time flexible enough to admit strangers and to prevent obligations from becoming so parochial as to be stifling. Somehow a balance will always be found, for modern liberal democracies have neither fully closed guilds nor completely open entry rules. Failure to address the issue out of the mistaken belief either that everyone deserves entry or that no one does means that money becomes the criterion of entry, either because a privileged group becomes expensive to join or because, if joining costs little, the benefits the group offers deteriorate and other groups costing more will be formed as a result.

Since some criteria will always be used to define entry, then, conceiving of entry as a moral passage may help liberal democrats steer a course between groups that are completely closed and groups that cannot define their boundaries. The benefits one obtains by becoming a member of the group ought to impose some costs so that membership is not a frivolous or cheap affair, but those costs can just as well involve membership rituals, time, and obligations to existing members as they can money. Groups ought to be allowed to differ in purpose and membership without being accused of elitism, but those differences can involve commitment and friendship as much as social class, gender, or income. It is certainly not

easy to develop entrance rules that are simultaneously tight and loose, but if societies do not, then obligations to groups will come at the expense of obligations to strangers, or vice versa.

Waiting rules attempt to establish criteria for the distribution of scarce goods within any collectivity whose entrance rules have already been defined. Since scarce goods by definition cannot be distributed to everyone who wants them at exactly the moment they choose to want them, there will always be some rules that establish who goes to the front of the line and who waits at the rear. Effective waiting rules rely on a sense of obligation to strangers. If I wait for a benefit to which I am otherwise entitled now, I am allowing someone else to claim it and in that sense recognize that the moral claims of others have priority over mine. Such waiting rules presuppose substantial social trust. If everyone else is unwilling to wait, it makes little sense for me to do so. My freedom to allow others to get in line ahead of me so that I might in turn be allowed to advance in the line when I need to is dependent on extremely fragile social ties that are easily destroyed.

For much of their history, societies that relies on the market did not have to worry much about waiting rules. Those with the right kinds of funds did not need to wait at all, while those who lacked the proper funds had to wait so long that it made sense for them to give up waiting entirely. A market solution to the problem of waiting was as elegant as it was unfair: lines were shortened by eliminating the right of people to wait in them. But whatever its past advantages and disadvantages, reliance on the market to organize waiting rules under modern conditions of economic growth brings about new kinds of problems. Since place in line is literally a positional good, to use Fred Hirsch's term, the market, in lowering the costs of what is available, encourages people to believe they can cut in the line, thereby breaking down the order for which the line was formed in the first place.^[33] It is perhaps metaphorical, but one of the consequences of Mrs. Thatcher's efforts to revitalize the market in Britain in the 1980s is much public discussion about the unwillingness of Britons to wait in line with the tolerance, patience, and deference they once showed.

Reliance on the state to organize waiting rules, by contrast, tends to be much fairer, because government acts as a referee to insure that people do not cut in line in front of others. Yet because everyone is guaranteed a place, the lines will obviously be longer. In Scandinavia, for example, even benefits that in theory are universal are in practice characterized by waiting periods that can be unusually long. Health care is generally the most dis-

cussed area in this regard. As table 11 indicates, Danes may wait as long as four years for an operation, and the difference between those who wait a long time and those who wait a short time can vary considerably (while the distribution of services is fairer when organized by the state than by the market, it is still not perfectly fair: middle-class people have better access to day care, and at least some of the variation in hospital waiting lists can be explained by class). It is for such reasons that two Norwegian writers have talked about Scandinavia as a køsamfunn, a society of lines.^[34]

Although waiting rules are often fairer when organized by the state rather than the market, both markets and states can cause bottlenecks in other ways. Few politicians wish to risk arguing for priorities that will better organize waiting, because it is always safer politically to insist that the goal of universality can be met, even if everyone knows that it cannot. This situation is quite similar to Hirsch's "social limits to growth," only with government, not the market, as the focus. Without a consensus over waiting rules, everyone will claim the rights they have to benefits at the same time, which can have the paradoxical effect of reducing real access to such benefits by increasing the costs of providing them.

One area where a better understanding of waiting rules applies is in Scandinavian efforts to universalize day-care benefits. Because in most families both parents work, the need for day care is inexhaustible. Yet it is also expensive—about $10,000 a year for every Swedish child, for example.^[35] Since universalization under these conditions is impossible, many areas have waiting lists for public day care so long that children will be in school before their turn to use preschool facilities comes up (two-thirds of Danish counties have waiting lists, especially for very young children).^[36] People thus turn instead to various "gray markets," often with government encouragement. While this conflict between a universal principle and fiscal reality exists in theory, in actual practice it is softened by the fact that many families prefer to alter their claims while they have small children: women would rather work part time, have more maternity leave when their children are young, or stay home and watch their children themselves. The problem is that labor markets tend not to be flexible with respect to waiting rules: if a woman takes five years of her life to raise a small child, she will sacrifice advancement in her career. Here is a case where the state and the market, acting together, not only discourage people from doing what common sense tells them they ought to do, but also prove unable to supply satisfactory guidelines of moral obligation themselves.

Responding to problems of this sort, the American writer Neil Gilbert

has suggested awarding credits for childrearing that could be exchanged for a higher entry position in the labor force or for educational advancement later on in life.^[37] Somewhat similarly, conservative parties in Scandinavia have proposed that women who choose to stay home with their children (and thereby offer to the public sector the gift of some fiscal relief) be paid for doing so. Such reforms would help to relieve the tension between universal claims and fiscal realities and at the same time would show respect for people's own commonsense understandings of what their obligations to others ought to be—a combination of advantages that should make them popular. Yet they remain off the public agenda. Women's groups oppose them on the grounds that they will interfere with the drive toward equality in the workplace; likewise, the general lack of a sense of reciprocity across time works against them, as individuals find it difficult to allow the claims of others to take precedence over their own claims, in return for similar favors later. People want strict rules and commonsense exceptions simultaneously, a difficult balance to find.

In both the United States and Scandinavia, reliance on markets and states has created new problems with respect to waiting rules. In the United States in the early 1980s, the social security system lost some of its popular support when fears that increasing longevity would combine with lower birth rates to deplete the system of money in the future. Although such fears turned out to be incorrect, they reflected the heritage of the otherwise brilliant popular legitimation for social security, first advanced by Franklin Roosevelt, that the system ought to appear to conform to the marketplace principle that people are getting equal benefits in return for what they are putting in.^[38] In Scandinavia, the conflict between benefits that in theory are universally available but in practice require waiting has begun to put a strain on the consensus and sense of fairness that have always made the Scandinavian welfare state such a model. The task of establishing effective waiting rules is anything but easy, but at a minimum society should recognize that those who are willing to wait, whose common sense tells them not to exercise a claim even when the market and the state make a benefit available to them, ought not to be discouraged.

A third social practice that requires greater understanding if people are to use their capacity as social beings to create moral rules concerns exit rules . Ease of exit is always tied to ease of entrance: it is much easier to leave a group when you know that another is prepared to take you in. Yet although one group's entrance is always another's exit, it is often difficult to treat exit and entrance as moral equivalents. As Walzer puts it,

[The] right to control immigration does not include or entail the right to control emigration. The political community can shape its own population in the one way, not in the other. . . . The restraint of entry serves to defend the liberty and welfare, the politics and culture of a group of people committed to one another and to their common life. But the restraint of exit replaces commitment with coercion.^[39]

Of course, Walzer is correct in the absolute sense of complete restraints on exit. Societies that use the powers of government to prevent people from leaving, such as the Soviet Union, deny the moral capacity of their members to participate in shaping the social practices that will govern them and thus force an obligation to the state, as symbolized by the police, rather than to society, as symbolized by obligations to others.^[40]

Yet an unrestricted right to exit under any conditions is also morally problematic, if not to the same degree. If one has been the member of a group or political community and has received benefits from that group for some period of time, an automatic, unconditional right to exit is a right to escape from the obligations such benefits carry. Numerous examples exist of how the ease of exit so valued by the market corrodes moral obligation, nearly all of them involving firms that received benefits to locate in a particular place (including tax concessions, easements, public services, and the willingness of individuals to give time and effort) only to close up and move—not when profits disappeared, but when profits were not as great as they could be in some other place.^[41] Societies need exit rules to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. It is not unreasonable to believe that Scandinavians who have received benefits from generous welfare states owe something to society if they decide to move to America to make more money, just as corporations should be allowed to leave communities only after some meaningful repayment of the gift the community offered them in the first place.

There is one final area where a sociological approach to moral obligation ought to search for rules that are neither as restrictive as those of the state nor as permissive as those of the market. Here the importance of exit rules applies not to those who plan to leave but to those who decide to stay behind. If exit rules are too loosely drawn, it becomes difficult for remaining members to invest much in their obligations to others, for those others can always escape. Moreover, obligations in society as a whole are not likely to be taken seriously when migration becomes so dominant a response to tight situations that it is continuously rewarded over staying. Leaving should, therefore, be made somewhat more difficult than auto-

matic. This does not mean the use of state police force, merely that those who want to leave be asked to donate something in return. Whether we are talking of marriages, clubs, neighborhoods, or societies, separation anxieties ought, in fact, to be anxious. Leaving should not be prohibited, but exit rules should be established to remind both those taking their leave and those left behind that, because they once had obligations in the old group, they will likely have obligations to others in the new social arrangements that are formed when old ones change.

Under the influence of the market, we tend not to take seriously our group obligations but rather enter them and leave them as our self-interest demands. Under the influence of the state, groups become vital to the definition of who we are, identifying our rights and determining our obligations. Although quite different, both ways of thinking about the obligations that membership brings have one thing in common: neither asks that individuals themselves play an active role in determining the character of the groups to which they belong. Groups should not be viewed as if membership in them were, like birth, a biological act, but they also should not make up so much a part of our collective identity that we become prisoners to the political logic by which they operate. If modern liberal democrats are going to accept a greater role in shaping the rules that govern them, they will need to pay as much attention to the ways groups constitute and reconstitute themselves as political and economic approaches to moral obligation pay to the benefits that membership in groups can bring.

Ecologies: Natural and Social

The paradox of modernity, I argued in the Introduction, is that individuals whose sense of moral commitment in the small-scale world of civil society is being weakened need to develop rules to govern their obligations to strangers and even hypothetical others. By now it ought to be clear that demands of this sort are so difficult to meet that people quite possibly will not be able to, with consequences for the future (and for distant others in the present) that are painful to contemplate. It ought furthermore to be clear that if people can meet these demands, it will not be because they are furnished with a set of universally applicable moral rules that require only that they do their duty or claim their rights. Markets and states are good for many things, but when used for finding the right way to balance intimacy and distance they tend to overweight one or the other.

I have in this book suggested that a better way to find a balance be-

tween intimate and distant obligations is to view the construction of moral rules as a social practice, one that requires groups in civil society for the learning and development of moral rules, yet also requires that what is learned in the intimate realm be extended to people whom we will never personally know. It is not enough simply to praise civil society and condemn the market and the state. That path would surely lead to a situation in which obligations in small-scale worlds would be satisfied at the expense of obligations in the larger world—a situation just as frustrating to the paradox of modernity as one in which obligations to strangers took precedence over obligations to family members and friends.

This unsatisfactory result is even more likely to be the case because the intimate world in modern liberal democracies in fact is , as I have suggested throughout this book, threatened both by markets and by states. In Scandinavia, consequently, the language of community control and family integrity is used to protest every plan to close a school or a hospital during periods of fiscal restraint. One's instincts are to support such protests, but in so doing one fails to recognize that such efforts may deprive future generations of schools and hospitals, as well as prevent the construction of new institutions in areas that do not yet have them. (In a similar manner, the rise of what in the United States have been called "NIMBY" movements—for "not in my back yard"—tend to be accompanied by the attitude that so long as a nuclear power plant or highway extension is not built here, where exactly it is built need not concern us.) Individuals who use the language of civil society to protect in-group privileges against the claims of strangers thus forfeit the right to have strangers consider their needs. Civil society, viewed as an end in itself, leads directly to Hobbesian struggles over turf.

There is, however, evidence, some of which I have presented in this book, that the protection of the intimate sphere of society can act to give individuals a personal stake in the fate of others. When people have strong ties in the intimate sector, they are more likely to give to charity (in societies that emphasize the market) or to pay their taxes (in societies that emphasize the state). People who have experienced caring for others, no matter how difficult, tend to understand the importance of providing for the young and the old. (While caring is something that generally takes place in families, it need not; the extraordinary degree of caring shown by many homosexuals toward individuals dying of AIDS calls on emotional resources that few family members will ever need to muster.) When local communities are protected against the full intrusion of the market, greater voluntary activity and respect for others will result; when they are pro-

tected against the full intrusion of the state, not every response to every social problem need be an institutional response. When the satisfaction of self-interest becomes difficult to resist, reliance on common services—even when self-interest might dictate an exit—improves everyone else's capacity to rely on common services. When reliance on government to provide services becomes difficult to resist, individuals who can and want to provide for themselves can ease the fiscal burden involved in having government provide services for those who cannot. When people know that they share with others a common culture, restraints on self-interest (in market-oriented societies) or on claims to rights (in state-oriented societies) are more likely to exist. When, in short, civil society exists as a sphere alongside the market and the state, it contributes to the more effective working of both of them; when the market and the state exist without civil society, neither can work as promised. If the question is whether we use abstract rules that regulate our relationships with strangers to organize our relationships with intimates or we rely on the recognition of our dependency on intimates to help us codify our relationships with strangers, the latter seems to make more sense. Most people find it easier to move from the particular to the general than the reverse.

Still, when all is said and done there is not and can never be any guarantee that stronger relations in civil society will create the practices that enable people to take personal responsibility for the fate of abstract others. All the social scientist can do in such a circumstance is to remind modern liberal democrats that they do not live in tribal clans. If people are not aware of a world outside the intimate sphere, social science must make them aware of it. Sociology in particular ought to reinforce the idea that moral obligation can become a social practice only when—as the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment proposed and the classical tradition in sociology carried forward—society is understood as a gift. Moreover, it is a gift that we give to ourselves, since no one put it in place for us. It is difficult for modern people to remember these things, because we take for granted society's independence from nature in a way that eighteenth-century theorists never could. A social bond, now in place, is simply assumed to be. Society has become part of the scenery of modern life, the backdrop in front of which economics and politics play their roles.

If modern liberal democrats are going to learn to live with the difficulties of moral obligation, they will need to put behind them the temptations of Rousseau. We are not born free and corrupted by our institutions. If anything, as I argued in Chapter 8, we are born as selfish egoists, and

only our institutions and practices save us from ourselves. A long tradition in social theory holds that individuals are anything but angels. Put them together with no rules to help them define their moral obligations—in prisons or market situations lacking any moral restraint—and they will act as pure market theorists or neo-Hobbesians assume. That they do not act that way all the time is because they have accepted the gift of society—which is why it is so risky to flirt with the idea of taking the gift back. Having rules to regulate our social interaction is what makes everything else possible.

It is only because modern liberal democrats take society for granted that they can even consider relying on the market or the state to structure rules of moral obligation. What makes the approach of the Chicago school of economics so tantalizing is its suggestion that we can do without society and all its difficulties. The issue is not that Chicago school theories are wrong in their description of how ubiquitous self-interest can become; it is the disturbing possibility that they may be right. When we make self-interest the guide to all our moral decisions, we are in a sense proclaiming that we no longer wish to enjoy the gift of society but wish instead to be ruled by something called human "nature," as if society were not put in place to prevent us from acting like selfish genes. To the degree that Chicago school economics describes what is taking place in society, it describes a society that is in decline because its members are not willing to adhere to the rules that make it work. The problem with the Chicago school recommendations is that if we choose to go back to "nature," it will take a social decision to do so. Nature, as Karl Polanyi emphasized, looks different when it is socially created.^[42]

Much the same is true of neo-Hobbesian approaches to politics. The conditions of modern life are nowhere near the state they were at the time of the English civil war, when Hobbes was prompted to call for sovereign authority. But numerous reminders of the fragility of the social bond exist, even in the most modern of liberal democracies. The "normal accidents" of complex technology, the precariousness of the compromises between labor and capital, racial and ethnic hostilities, increasing homelessness and marginality, the savagery of urban life, and the transmission of AIDS (which shows that we are capable of killing each other through love just as Hobbes's Englishmen killed each other through war) are just a few reminders of how thin the line is between the natural and the social.^[43]

The promise of the Hobbesian approach to social order is that government will protect us from our own animalistic instincts. To some degree,

of course, this is true: instill enough fear in people, and they may well obey. Yet no society can rely on the police forever. In fact, it is not government that separates us from a state of nature, but society, the invisible links of trust and reliance on others that enable us not to carry guns whenever we face unknown others. When society makes civilized life possible we tend, as with the market, to assume its existence. We are thereby tempted to take the shortcut of keeping order through use of the state instead, forgetting that the state is a product of society, that substituting the former for the latter is to return us to the state of nature from which we have emerged. It is at this point that pure statists and pure market theorists recognize the need for each other: since both take society for granted, each reinforces the distrust that proves the other's view of human nature correct.^[44]

Society and nature are radically different ecologies. It is a serious mistake to believe that respect for nature can help us develop rules for respecting society.^[45] The common response of people concerned with protecting the natural environment is laissez-faire: intervention—to alter genes or redirect rivers, for example—is best not done, for who can tell what the consequences will be if we tamper? When the same notion is applied to society, however, the social order is understood to be so self-regulating that any effort to give it a conscious direction will be self-defeating. Yet while there is evolution in nature, there is no evolution in society—except in those movements that are the product of will and deliberation. By applying the rules of laissez-faire to society, we strip ourselves of the capacity to engage in social growth: we are forced to sit and watch as our social ecology crumbles. Then, when it seems almost too late to stop the process, we call on the authority of government to save us from our worst instincts; yet because government intervention is premised on the notion that our nature drives us to escape our obligations, we thereby acknowledge our inability to trust one another instead.

It seems strange to justify modernity on the basis of a premodern conception of moral agency in which individuals can control everything in society except their own natures, but that is essentially what we do when we rely on the rules of markets and states to codify our obligations for us. Under the rules of contemporary economics and politics, society, modernity's greatest invention, is brought into being to regulate our interactions with one another but then is stripped of its power to do so through deemphasis of the social skills we have at our disposal. In the constant shifting between economic and political rules, society has little role to play at all; the dialectic of freedom and constraint is fought out between indi-

viduals whose nature impels them to want more on the one hand and a Hobbesian source of authority that once in a while has to call a halt to the process on the other.

The gift society has given us lies in the benefits we receive—including high rates of economic growth, large and centralized economies, a government capable of delivering services, and rapid social and economic mobility—by coordinating our actions with those of others. Yet all gifts, even when altruistically offered, are given in the expectation that the receiver will reciprocate. In return for the gift of society, modern liberal democrats are asked only one thing: to recognize that in return for these benefits they relinquish "pure" freedom, the ability to do anything they want in any way at any time. It is in this sense that the constraints on freedom imposed by modernity are social, not natural; it is not our inability to transcend gravity or overcome the anarchy of a state of nature that restricts our freedom to do what we like, but our inability to transcend our dependence on others.

When we recognize society as a gift, we realize that we are free because our preferences can change through interaction with others, not because they are constant. We are free because we can give meaning to the way our situations are defined. We are free because we recognize that the condition of being modern sets internal limits on free-ridership, even if there were no external obstacles to impede us. We are free because we elevate loyalty over exit and voice, because we have strong intimate relations that enable us to resist mass society's pressure to conform. We are free because we fulfill our obligations to society because we want to, not because government does it for us. We are free, not to express our nature, but to create it. We are free because we accept the regulation and discipline needed to make social cooperation work but then challenge that regulatory process to take account of real people in real situations of time and space. We are free because we can grow and develop. We are free only when others are also free, and they are free only when we are.

The message that sociology offers modern liberal democrats is neither complacent nor apocalyptic. It is commonsensical: here is society; you have given it to yourself as a gift; if you do not take care of it, you should not be surprised when you can no longer find it. That message by itself cannot tell people how to satisfy their obligations to intimate and distant others simultaneously, but it at least makes it clear that if people themselves do not continue to try to meet those obligations, no one else will do it for them.