We must have been composing our posts at the same time, since this one wasn’t there when I started my latest. I’m sorry mine was a minute or two later than yours. I’m not trying to keep my name at the top, honest!

I sympathize completely with your complaints here. When I was a teenager I had a brief dream of being a lawyer, but it didn’t last. There’s too many things about it that would drive me nuts. That said, and having heard plenty of horror stories about law school from various students and lawyers, from this observer’s standpoint medical school seems worse in nearly every way. Watching Rachel’s progress in detail as an interested non-participant has been fascinating and terrifying. She does so much work, as far as the hours go, that it’s astonishing. Working conditions for low-level doctors and other health professionals like her—thirty-hour shifts, etc.—are dangerous, foolhardy, and recklessly negligent of the welfare of the patients they’re supposed to be serving. Then again it scares me to death to see how little she’s actually learning compared to the medical knowledge that’s available, or that she’s “expected” to learn. No student could possibly master such a body of material in four years, and none of them do. It becomes more and more apparent that medical school is about learning (or beginning to learn) a techne, not achieving knowledge. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that something similar could be said for law school.

On an unrelated note, is your fourth paragraph attempting to use “inclusive language”, or is the inconsistent use of gender unintentional? If the former, I’m afraid I can’t approve.

Yeah, medical school seems like more of a crock. At least in the law, someone’s life isn’t always on the line and never so immediately. That said, my concerns with the school are many, but are mostly secondary to my concerns about the structure of our laws, which, as I said, seem to function all right practically, even as they might not encourage virtue. There was an interesting point when the Supreme Court tried to propagate a notion of natural law—actually it lasted for just under a century—but that’s for another post.

On your last question, I’ve picked up the habit (largely in law school, though not exclusively) of using both she and he for a singular gender-neutral third-person pronoun. For me, it’s not really about inclusivity, or whatever, so much as it’s just trying to eliminate a pointless rule from my use of grammar. Being needlessly rule-bound undercuts one’s ability to defend the truly important grammatical rules (though I still recoil from splitting most infinitives). My inconsistent use of he and she over the course of two sentences above, however, was unintentional, especially as it does seem to impede comprehension slightly.

I’d be very interested to see that other post, if you ever get around to writing it. It’s not entirely clear to me what it means for the laws to “function all right practically” even if they don’t encourage virtue. What practical goal do they serve? My question assumes, of course, that propagating virtue in the people is the most fundamental purpose of a government—at present a not uncontroversial position, I believe.

I think I’m on record as agreeing with you about the proper goal of the lawmaker. By practically I meant that America’s still chugging along and hasn’t descended into anarchy. It’s admittedly a pretty low standard.

I don’t understand the comments both of you have made in regard to medical school.

Michael, you say “Then again it scares me to death to see how little she’s actually learning compared to the medical knowledge that’s available, or that she’s ‘expected’ to learn.” This seems silly and I’m surprised you made this comment. Would you be scared by the physicist whose graduate education does not teach him everything that physics as a science has to offer: the philosopher who cannot recount all of philosophy? Asking for exhaustive knowledge from any program of study seems nothing short of quixotic, and not much short of impertinence. There is so much medical knowledge available because medicine is science that has been advanced by literally thousands of people for hundreds of years. You realize this, yet you still question medical schools in their inability to impart it in four (and only two of them about basic science)? You then say, “It becomes more and more apparent that medical school is about learning (or beginning to learn) a techne, not achieving knowledge”. I agree that much of medical school is about transforming a student from a layman into a physician. This is largely a matter of techne. But in terms of achieving knowledge you may not realize just how much knowledge Rachel has learned in her years. If she and I were to engage in conversation about a medical topic she would have to explain nearly EVERYTHING to me (the minor exception being stroke) and I am not even a complete naif. Her knowledge is voluminous, and she has undergone such a transformation while acquiring it that even she may not be cognizant of just how much she has learned or how ignorant she was of what now seems old hat. In short, you seem too quick to condemn medical education for not imparting absolutely everything without giving it credit for how much it does accomplish. No offense intended, but I think that you were wrong about nearly everything you said.

HB, as for what you said: “Yeah, medical school seems like more of a crock. At least in the law, someone’s life isn’t always on the line and never so immediately.” Would the life of any patient be any less on the line regardless of the style of medical education? Furthermore, to reiterate what I said to Michael, medical students progress from someone who is simply dangerous to patients in their care (i.e. a layman) to someone who can save their lives (i.e. a physician). If the student is a good one he will through the course of this education realize that he is a scientist as much as he is a clinician. That medical schools start with the dangerous and create the life saving is simply a fact. How is their instruction then a crock? What would you propose to change in medical education in order to make better physicians? Your post demeans your own education as a law student largely because of its arbitrary and capricious nature, but I ask you what else is the law but arbitrary and capricious? If it arrives at anything close to justice is seems more of a muse-like accident, or common sense, than anything derived from an in depth study of the human person and his rights and duties. If you see this and want to enter law in order to advance it, then I bless you, but then you should also realize the present rules of the game you signed up for.

Forgive the curt tone. I see it now, but for better or worse I feel that it is justified given the off-handed remarks which were thrown at medical education, the beginning of what I consider to be one of the most fantastic endeavors undertaken by mankind, an endeavor that fuses spirituality, ethics, science, and humanity into a single activity. I’ll let George Eliot close my comments: “…the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate’s nature demanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study.”

Hmm. Is encouraging virtue the “most fundamental purpose” of a government, or is it perhaps the goal? The most fundamental purpose of a car is to transport people in space, and any car with no wheels would be considered non-functional - i.e. unable to achieve its fundamental purpose - to the point of not even being a car. Such a “vehicle” could be replaced by a cucumber with no loss, from the perspective of achieving its fundamental purpose. However, one of the goals of a car is to achieve that purpose safely, comfortably, and reliably. I remember my father used to own a certain Ford Tempo that, while minimally functional, could hardly be said to have met that particular goal. It couldn’t have been replaced by a cucumber, because it was able to achieve its most fundamental purpose, but it was hardly the ideal of cars.

I have never seen any evidence that any government, let alone ours, has successfully ensured the virtue of the citizens under its command, yet the fact that the American goverment fails the cucumber test - a cucumber is not as good at governing as a representational democracy with separation of powers governed by checks and balances - suggests that the propagation of virtue might not be the most fundamental purpose of government. HB suggests that the purpose of government is to prevent anarchy. This seems more accurate. Until the Islamists took over Somalia last year, the “government” of that “country” pretty much was interchangeable with a cucumber.

Further, I would argue that the most fundamental purpose of something can’t be something that can be rationally questioned. People all agree that cars need to get people to other places, but the higher goals of a car are up for debate. Hummer-lovers might say the primary goal should be style. Hybrid-lovers might argue for minimal environmental impact. Minivan-lovers might say comfort and safety. And so on. Similarly, everyone seems to agree that governments must prevent anarchy to be considered functional - those who argue that anarchy is actually a good do not suggest a type of government that would ensure anarchy but rather claim that government as we understand it is unnecessary - but I don’t think everyone would agree that “encouraging virtue” is the highest goal of their government. Even assuming that one can define “virtue” non-controversially, plenty of people would say that they’re more concerned about protecting the nation’s borders, or that government’s role in daily life should be minimal to the point of invisibility, or that government’s primary goal should be eliminating inequality. There are dozens of positions which people have suggested are more important than the propogation of virtue for a government, but no one claims a car should aspire more to something else than to basic mobility. Based on all of this, I’d argue that despite the feelings of the monadology community regarding the lawgiver as encourager of virtue, it’s inaccurate to say that this is the “most fundamental purpose” of government - or even to say that it’s uncontroversially the most important goal.

G: Sorry for dissing your schooling. I didn’t mean to diss doctors or hate on medical students or medicine. My complaints are entirely practical, having to do with the awful working conditions of most residency programs, so I was more than a little cavalier in calling med school a crock. I definitely think there are ways to improve the medical education system, starting with entirely changing the scheme by which doctors and medicine are paid for in the country. Relieving the unnecessary economic pressures on doctors and med students would do a lot to free them to act like Lydgate, whose lot, I would point out, is almost unattainable for an American medical professional today.

As for your comments about the law, there are certainly plenty who believe that it’s as capricious as you describe, many of them not unacquainted with the law’s actual workings. Certainly contradictory arguments abound in the profession, which in men’s souls and actions does not have as consistent a subject as does the medical art. But just because it’s got built-in weaknesses like the adversarial system does not, I believe, make it impossible to find reasonable (and unarbitrary) bases for laws and decisions.

I, for one, have never understood the antipathy that seems to exist between doctors and lawyers—it makes no sense to me. I would hate to contribute even slightly to it, even inadvertently, so apologies for speaking harshly of medical school.

Martin: I suspect Michael meant purpose in the sense of telos—end or final cause, the thing at which the statesman’s art aims. I certainly mean it in that sense. I think the word may incorporate something of what’s meant by “goal,” but you mean by that word to point out particular ends of government, a category that I certainly admit as existing and being important. Whether they’re the final and most important end is up for debate.

I suspect most Monadologists would agree that the goal all men probably should seek is the best life. That goal seems to me to underlie the examples you gave as other statements of government’s purpose (e.g. the best life includes minimal governmental intrusion or not being shot by your neighbors). From there, it’s a few short arguments (though not uncontroversial ones) to getting to virtue.

Mr Gaudinsky,

I certainly don’t mean to hate on medical school either, much less suggest that it’s a “crock”. What Rachel has learned in the last two and a half years is phenomenal. Much of the problem, as your own comment suggests, is that there’s too much to learn. The amount of medical science available has increased exponentially in recent decades, but the time allowed to learn it has not. I’m not sure that this is a surmountable problem.

What this means is that students spend years learning huge amounts of material often only distantly or tangentially related to probable clinical practice, and then are thrown into practical hospital conditions for which they are not really prepared. I’ve heard more than one med student come home from the hospital and admit that they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. As specialty training gets longer and longer, this means that a doctor hasn’t mastered his craft for many years, often enough, after he’s graduated. There are safeguards and supervisory checks, and so forth, I know; but your average patient may have little or no idea whether the nice young-looking doctor examining him really knows what he’s doing yet or not. This is what I meant when I said it was terrifying. Of course these new doctors have ways of quickly accessing and understanding the information they need to treat a given patient which a layman does not. Still. It’s a little scary. Add the dangerous working practices and complete unquestioning confidence in your medical specialist is not always possible.

What would make me prefer doctoring to lawyering on the purely theoretical level (I think I would be much more suited to the latter) is that you can be fairly confident in most cases that the doctor is trying to achieve health, but not that the lawyer is trying to achieve truth or justice.

Mr Marks,

I acknowledge that “fundamental purpose” is rather vague. I’m not sure that “purpose” is meaningfully different from “goal”.

Classical political philosophy as opposed to modern—Plato and Aristotle, not Hobbes or Machiavelli—thought that the telos of the city was the happiness of its citizens. We can’t achieve complete happiness on our own as solitary individuals, so we need a society to work in. Government’s ultimate telos, fundamental goal, or whatever, would then be at least to provide for the necessary preconditions which make happiness possible.

Now a certain amount of material preconditions obtain before the spiritual or intellectual ones can be realized. Higher goals cannot be obtained without food or shelter or safety from being shot by your neighbors. But, the argument goes, money-making, honors, or pleasures are not the ingredients of happiness: virtue is. Happiness is more possible with virtue and without the others than with the others and without virtue. Ergo, etc., Q.E.D.

Order or lack of anarchy then would not be the most important thing, if the established order tends to systematically eliminate the preconditions of happiness rather than provide them. In such a case the replacement of order by (hopefully temporary) chaos, while not supplying those preconditions, would at least remove the positive impediments. I’m not saying that I myself think this is the case in any given situation, least of all ours. But I imagine that some such line of thought is in the back of the minds of many revolutionaries.

It seems to me that governments are particularly ill-suited for propagating virtue, unless, perhaps, we understand government very broadly (at least to include, as we technically might, public education). Though I am still unsure whether virtue can be taught or if it comes to men by other means, it seems dubious to me that bodies of laws and enforcement mechanisms can do it.

I know that I am prone to sentimentalizing America — however critical of it I am — which may be the result of an upbringing as the first in my paternal line to be born here, after my family left a country that was under a military dictatorship. But I’m inclined toward the Jeffersonian notion: “Governments are instituted” “to secure [certain unalienable] rights,” and that “among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Forgive me for rearranging the clauses; I think I maintained the sense of them.

Of course one might argue that the fullest realization of those rights (to most fully “secure” liberty) requires that the government in some active way propagate virtue, but so far as I can tell nobody has figured that out yet, and if it is for the government a doable thing it will happen not through legislation but education.

(And the Jeffersonian model is, I think, somewhat explicitly sympathetic to anarchy anyway, since governments seem so much more prone to being “destructive of these ends” than otherwise. But for what it’s worth, Jefferson did propose a national public educational system — he envisioned farmers reading Homer — but couldn’t get the legislature to fund it.)

Mr Pollack,

doesn’t it seem to you that (for instance) the Spartan laws and constitution had something to do with the existence within Sparta of the peculiarly Spartan virtues (and vices)? It seems so to me, and I’m not alone. I find convincing Aristotle’s argument that virtues come about by habituation, neither by “teaching” in the academic sense nor by divine inspiration. If so than it seems laws and societal structures, while not sufficient to bring virtue about in an individual, may be essential to bring it about in a community.

Whether the American constitution can encourage or propagate virtue is another question. Americans love and value their “democracy” (though our system is of course mixed with non-democratic republican “impurities” [take care to note the small d and r]); and by and large we have democratic souls. Meaning that we love liberty, our freedoms, more than we love virtue. Our constitution is not designed to produce virtue but to secure and protect freedoms. The democratic soul does not believe that the root of happiness is in virtue, but in being able to do as it pleases. No wonder then that attempts to “legislate morality” are met with severe resistance and that the Supreme Court has “found” in the constitution a fundamental “right” to decide for oneself what the nature of reality, morals, and happiness consists in.

It does seem to me as you say, Mr. Sullivan, that the peculiarly Spartan laws and constitution are tied to the peculiarly Spartan virtues and vices — but I thought your assertion was not concerning what was peculiarly Spartan or peculiarly American, but concerning what was virtue. What’s more, it is not clear to me that the peculiarly Spartan laws and constitution are sufficient or essential to the propagation of those peculiarly Spartan virtues and vices — though they are clearly a formalization of them, and may therefore begin to ossify them and help to sustain them. It is not clear that Oklahomans could adopt the Spartan legal edifice and thereby become Spartans, or that the US government could legislate us into virtuousness.

Whatever Socrates or anyone else says about democratic souls notwithstanding, the American model of government makes no claims or guarantees about happiness — only that its pursuit is an unalienable right. Whether it be best pursued by means of virtuousness, philosophy, or some other means, the state makes no claim.

I’ve updated the original post in response to something Michael said.

I second much of what Michael says about the lawgiver’s role and the truism that the state habituates its citizens, whether it intends to or not. I would clarify, however, that virtue is the habit of making the right choices for the right reasons, and that this crucial step is harder to achieve on a state-wide basis than, say, making children exercise once a day.

Robbie: You’re right, America’s government tries to disavow explicit statements about the best life, largely leaving prescriptions and proscriptions to the religious side of life. I think it’s an error in analyzing human nature to do so, but it’s a part of our liberal enterprise and so can’t really be done away with. And I for one cannot deny that living under a 17th- and 18th-century religious state would really suck, and that America’s dichotomy has allowed much of my own happiness. It’s just probably not the best form of government in respect to helping its citizens be happy.

Now, should a government take on that role? As I’ve said above, a government already habituates its citizens (e.g. bankruptcy laws, drug laws, public education, and the manner of enforcing its laws), so clearly there must be a best way in which to do that. It’d take some pretty careful lawmakers to figure out that best way; probably not many in Congress are qualified for the task, especially on our huge scale. But we’d be better off if our children got good habits in school rather than bad.

I too am sympathetic to the Jeffersonian model, probably for sentimental reasons, but it’s been long since deserted. Congress directly regulates your everyday life, and you’re just 1 in 650,000 to your Representative. (I’ll probably have a post on this change at some point.) But the notion of protecting people from their rulers is probably the best argument against Michael’s and my position, since there’s a little bit more history of rulers being bad men and tyrants than of having their people’s interest at heart.

Also, further evidence for G’s point can be found here.