“What Am I to Be?”: Personal Loyalty, Thick-Thin Morality, and the Crisis of Conscience

Vogelsang-Coombs, Vera

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-49400-9_3

Vera Vogelsang-Coombs²

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes the interplay of career public servants’ personal loyalties and individual consciences in shaping their behavior in urgent situations. Drawing from moral philosophy, the chapter advocates a self-appraisal technique enabling them to review and reorder their personal loyalties, inner conflicts, and official obligations, when deciding their purposes and courses of action. The chapter next explores thick-thin moral expressions taken from American societal private and public morality that helps individuals account for morally objectionable, though necessary, political choices when fulfilling their constitutional duties. Illustrating how loyalties, thick-thin moralities, and personal conscience work together, the chapter uses the Gettysburg Address to show how President Abraham Lincoln resolved his crisis of conscience to exercise strong moral and political leadership during the Civil War.

Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties.

Publius (Alexander Hamilton), Federalist Paper #31

Politics is the world of moral attrition.

J. Patrick Dobel (1999), Public Integrity

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Notes

1.
Camilla Stivers, Governance in Dark Times: Practical Philosophy for Public Service (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 9.
2.
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 158.
3.
Michael W. Spicer, In Defense of Politics in Public Administration: A Value Pluralist Perspective (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
4.
Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1973): 168.
5.
Stephen K. Bailey, “Ethics and the Public Service,” Public Administration Review 24, no. 4 (1964): 239.
6.
J. Patrick Dobel, Public Integrity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ix.
7.
Bailey, “Ethics and the Public,” 238.
8.
Stuart Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire et al. (London, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
9.
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
10.
Mark Lilla, “Ethos, ‘Ethics,’ and Public Service,” The Public Interest 63 (1981).
11.
Abraham Kaplan, American Ethics and Public Policy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1963), 106.
12.
Stivers, Governance in Dark Times, 146, 66.
13.
Bernard Williams, “Postscript,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 252.
14.
Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 50.
15.
Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 2.
16.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1963), 33.
17.
Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Public and Private Morality, 8.
18.
Evan Berman et al., Human Resource Management in Public Service: Paradoxes, Processes, and Problems, 4th ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers, 2013).
19.
Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1960), 153, accessed May 8, 2015, http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/elections/election1864.html.
20.
Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Public and Private Morality, 4.
The term rational computational morality is drawn from Hampshire’s analysis of the American involvement in Vietnam. For Hampshire (1978, 4), the computational rationality of the leaders in the US Department of Defense (DOD) involved cost-benefit analyses that justified extreme cruelty toward the Vietnamese people. He (1978, 17) argues that the simplicity of the cost-benefit calculations, which later were proved wrong, subverted the consciences of the DOD leaders because their mechanical mindsets did not perceive the moral significance of the taking of human life only in relation to its association with other losses. Thus, rational-computational rationality is, for Hampshire (1978, 23), a term of reproach because it is the wrong model of decision making, especially in life and death situations.
21.
Ibid., 22.
22.
Stivers, Governance in Dark Times, 49.
23.
Ibid, 51.
24.
Hampshire, “Public and Private Morality,” in Public and Private Morality, 37.
25.
Stivers, Governance in Dark Times, 61.
26.
Ibid., 65–6.
27.
Eric Felton, Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
28.
Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
29.
Ibid., 220.
30.
Jill W. Graham and Michael Keeley, “Hirschman’s Loyalty Construct,” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 5, no. 3 (1992).
31.
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Books, 1991), 295.
32.
Ibid., 468.
33.
Ibid., 468.
34.
Virginia Sapiro, “Not Your Parents’ Political Socialization: Introduction for a New Generation,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004).
35.
Constance A. Flanagan, “Volunteerism, Leadership, Political Socialization and Civic Engagement,” in Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, ed. Richard M. Lerner and Laurence Steinberg, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Wiley & Sons, 2004).
36.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 85.
37.
Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed.
38.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 101.
39.
Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” Ethical Perspectives 4, no. 2 (1997).
40.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral.
41.
Rorty, “Justice as a Larger.”
42.
Ibid.
43.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 4.
44.
Rorty, “Justice as a Larger,” 141.
45.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 17.
46.
Ibid., 17.
47.
Ibid., 17.
48.
Ibid., 4.
49.
Ibid., 6.
50.
Howard F. Stein, “Days of Awe: September 11, 2001 and Its Cultural Psychodynamics,” Journal for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 188.
Public actions involved increased blood donations for the injured, the establishment of relief funds for the families of victims and for survivors, and a surge in military enlistments. Moreover, public reactions included overwhelming support for President George W. Bush, who received an approval rating of 90 % and, with congressional authorization, established the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to securing a safer and securer American homeland (Gallup Poll, 2015; DHS, 2015).
51.
Richard J. Regan, The Moral Dimensions of Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33.
52.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 94.
53.
Ibid., 95.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid., 98.
56.
Ibid., 99.
57.
Ibid., 100.
58.
Ibid., 95–6.
59.
Ibid., 99.
60.
Ibid., 97.
61.
Ibid., 103.
62.
Ibid., 98.
63.
Ibid., 99.
64.
Ibid., 100.
65.
Ibid., 103.
66.
Ibid., 102.
67.
Ibid., 103.
68.
Ibid., 103.
69.
Ibid., 101.
70.
Ibid., 103.
71.
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Lincoln was a self-educated lawyer but an inexperienced commander-in-chief as compared with Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate and former Secretary of War. Lincoln’s personal military action was as a part-time militiaman in the Black Hawk War of 1832 under Andrew Jackson’s leadership, and it left him with such a negative view of war that in Congress he opposed “the greed and mendacity” of President James Polk’s Mexican-American War (Wills, 1992, 179). Given his inexperience, Lincoln relied on a succession of generals to command his military operations, most of whom were ineffective, until he appointed the victorious General Ulysses Grant, “a comparative failure” before and after the Civil War (Ropp, 1962, 179). In contrast, as commander-in-chief for the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis led the top professional military leaders of the time, including the charismatic and seemingly invincible Robert E. Lee (Ropp, 1962, 178).
72.
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 182.
Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World, revised ed. (New York, NY: Collier Books, 1962).
73.
Richard A. Katula, The Eloquence of Edward Everett, America’s Greatest Orator. (Peter Lang Publishing, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010).
David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
74.
Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 482.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 36.
75.
Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: The Improvised War (New York, NY: Scribner & Sons, 1959), 1:29.
76.
Clausewitz cited in Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words.
77.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 181.
78.
Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 148.
79.
“West Point: Notable Graduates,” United States Military Academy West Point, accessed May 24, 2015, http://www.usma.edu/wphistory/SitePages/Notable%20Graduates.aspx.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 99.
80.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 27.
81.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 99–100.
82.
John C. Waugh, Lincoln and McClellan: The Trouble Partnership Between a President and His General (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
83.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 29–31.
84.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words.
Ropp, War in the Modern.
85.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 26.
86.
Kent Gramm, Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 258.
87.
Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1952).
88.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 21.
89.
I am grateful to U.S. Park Service Guide John Nicholas for sharing this insight during a tour of the National Military Cemetery at Gettysburg in August 2013.
90.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 20.
91.
National Park Service, “Gettysburg National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” National Park Service, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/national_cemeteries/pennsylvania/gettysburg_national_cemetery.html.
92.
Ibid.
93.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 65–6.
94.
Ibid., 71.
95.
Ibid. 67.
96.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 95–6.
97.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 479.
98.
Donald, Lincoln, 461.
99.
Psalm 132:14 (King James Version).
100.
An Act to Grant Pensions, 12 Stat. 566 (1862).
101.
Claire Prechtel-Kluskens, “‘A Reasonable Degree of Promptitude’: Civil War 51 Pension Application Processing, 1861–1865,” Prologue Magazine (National Archives), last modified 2010, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/spring/civilwarpension.html.
102.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words.
103.
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 332.
104.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Threnody,” in The Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1950), 781.
105.
Ibid., 781–2.
106.
Ibid., 783.
107.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 5.
108.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 4.
109.
Gramm (1994, 258) provides a different view from mine. He argues that Lincoln should have solved the political problems in antebellum American rather than resort to an unpardonable mortal combat. In Gramm’s view, the Gettysburg Address failed to provide comfort to the Southern and Northern patriots and the families of the fallen soldiers.
110.
Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1946), 2:89.
111.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 480–1.
112.
James Tackach, Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), xviii.
113.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 6.
114.
Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches, 4:190.
115.
Tackach, Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second, 113.
116.
Donald, Lincoln, 514.
117.
Ibid., 514.
118.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 4.
119.
Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches, 4:240.
120.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 480; Donald, Lincoln, 456–6.
121.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 199.
122.
Ibid., 4, 22.
123.
Ibid., 250.
124.
Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches, 5:388.
125.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 5.
126.
Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches, 5:389.
127.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery, 201.
128.
Ibid., 5.
129.
Ibid., 199.
130.
Ibid., 224–7.
131.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 103.
132.
“Antietam National Battlefield,” Civil War Trust, last modified 2014, accessed May 7, 2015, http://www.civilwar.org/civil-war-discovery-trail/sites/antietam-national-battlefield.html.
The Civil War Trust reports that 23,000 soldiers were killed, maimed, or lost in the 12-hour Battle of Antietam.
133.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery.
134.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 25.
135.
Jamie L. Carson et al., “The Impact of National Tides and District-Level Effects on Electoral Outcomes: The U.S. Congressional Elections of 1862–1863,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 4 (2001).
The Republicans lost 23 seats in the House and the Democrats won 28 seats, shifting more than one quarter of the lower chamber’s representatives. Thus, the Republicans went from controlling 59 % of the seats to 46.2 % of the seats in the House of Representatives. They maintained control of the lower chamber only by forming a coalition with the pro-war, pro-Emancipation Unconditional Union Party in the border states (Carson et al., 2001, 887–888). Lincoln viewed these election results as referenda on his administration (Guelzo, 2004).
136.
Oscar Osburn Winther, “The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864,” New York History 25, no. 4 (October 1944).
Library of Congress, “Presidential Election of 1864: A Resource Guide,” Library of Congress, last modified September 30, 2014, accessed May 8, 2015, http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/elections/election1864.html.
137.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 464.
138.
William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York, NY: Knopf, 2002).
139.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 478.
140.
Ibid., 480.
141.
Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical, 297.
142.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 58.
143.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 17.
144.
Donald, Lincoln, 465.
145.
Katula, The Eloquence of Edward, 118.
146.
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words, 37–8.
147.
Ibid., 52.
148.
Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery 250.
149.
Ibid., 235.
150.
Stivers, Governance in Dark Times, 153.
151.
It is difficult to comprehend fully the magnitude of deaths produced in the Civil War. Perhaps the starkest comparison is with World War II, some memory of which still lingers in the American mind. The number of Civil War deaths was almost eight times the number of deaths in World War II by per capita population (Hacker, 2011; The National WWII Museum, 2015).
152.
Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral, 101.
153.
Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 480.
154.
Ibid., 479.
155.
Michael Walzer, “What Does It Mean to Be and ‘American’?,” Social Research, an International Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2004): 639.
156.
Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical, 408.

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Cleveland State University, Beachwood, Ohio, USA
Vera Vogelsang-Coombs

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Vogelsang-Coombs, V. (2016). “What Am I to Be?”: Personal Loyalty, Thick-Thin Morality, and the Crisis of Conscience. In: The Political Ethics of Public Service. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49400-9_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49400-9_3
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