Understanding the Constitution #15: It Relies on Two Views of Human Nature

Americans take just pride in what the Constitution’s framers achieved in 1787.  They constructed a form of government that understands the dark and potentially dangerous side of human nature: people are often selfish.  James Madison, writing in Federalist #10, warned of the danger of “factions” formed by self-interested people intent on seizing the electoral majority so they could achieve their ends against the “aggregate interests of the community.” The Constitution thus contains what we call “checks and balances” to contain selfishness and preserve freedom. 

This view of human nature, with deep roots in philosophy and history, showed the delegates in Philadelphia were wise and prescient.  Yet, there is another side to human nature perhaps less visible but no less important in their work – and they understood its importance too.

Adam Smith, best known for his 1776 The Wealth of Nations where he described how markets could promote human betterment, wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, which emphasized this other side so essential for social living:

“And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.”

Or, as he put it more succinctly, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”

Thomas Jefferson, in Paris as our foreign minister while the Convention was at work, also understood the danger of self-interested thinking and believed, as did Smith, that we have a “moral sense” that is also at work to help us do the right thing.  Writing to his nephew, Peter Carr, in August, 1787, Jefferson said:

“Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”

The Constitution does not talk about our “moral sense,” or conscience yet relies on it just as much as it is wary of its absence.  James Madison articulated this dependence in Federalist #55:

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

Americans had left “kingly” government behind.  Deference to the King’s commands and the palace guard could no longer be called upon to rein in popular passions.  Republican government – self-government - relied on virtue among the people, even if the Constitution never named what those virtues are.

As articulated in his bicentennial reflection, The Constitution and the Moral Order, conservative writer William Bennett reminded us that “[T]he constitutional order embodies values it does not generate…”  The Constitution and the laws that follow depend on civic virtue that predates the Constitution as a necessary condition for a republican form of government:

“The Constitution was certainly intended to have moral force, but that force was to be drawn from fundamental sources, which the framers perceived in the moral environment of the new nation rather than in the document itself.”

In these days when our public sphere is filled with conflict, government does not talk much about the importance of empathy, altruism, love of others, tolerance, civility and other moral virtues.  We act as if such essential traits are solely the province of parents and religious teaching and that fostering moral behavior is not a legitimate focus of government or its leaders.  This leads us to place too much reliance on laws to tell us how to behave, as if laws can fill a moral absence in the American character.  We behave as if the courts, interpreting the Constitution, can force us into right behavior under threat of legal sanction. 

This misreads the wisdom of the Constitution’s framers.  They knew that moral virtue and the Articles of the Constitution were two sides of the same coin, not separate spheres of thought and action.  While parents, faith-based institutions and schools are essential to developing the virtues on which self-government depends, government and its leaders must acknowledge the importance of these virtues and support them.  Without that attention, the Constitution is a piece of parchment whose foundation for governing rests on sand.

Photo Credit: National Archives