Institutional virtues include but are by no means limited to the political, economic, and social virtues of direct democracy, horizontality, free association, communality, and intercommunality/federalism. Institutional virtues also include qualities such as mutual-aid distributive justice, justice more broadly (justice as related to the criteria of freedom and equality), practical reasoning (phronesis on an organizational and collective level), wise development and use of technics (techne), deliberative/communicative virtues, the virtue of unity in diversity, etc. Various virtues that Aristotle described–such as phronesis, techne, episteme, and justice– are not reducible to being mere properties of persons; they can also be properties of collectives.
Institutional and relational qualities can shape one another and can round one another out. For some examples: direct democracy with a form and content of horizontality is distinct from direct democracy that is entangled with hierarchy, domination, exploitation, and oppression. Direct democracy without deliberative/communicative virtues will negatively impact decision making and decisions made. Communal self-management without federalism and intercommunal mutual-aid can lead to and/or be caused by vices of parochialism and xenophobia. Self-managed production without distribution according to needs leads to distributive injustice. Horizontality without free association would inhibit the kinds of options people should have about what groups they join and what activities they do. The right kind of equality in the right ways is distinct from equality of squalor or equal rights to compete within an unjust/hierarchical system. Institutional virtues are the right kinds of specific qualities, in the right ways, in the right contexts, for the right ends. Some good institutional qualities can develop lopsidedly, yet only be made sufficiently virtuous through the mutual flourishing of multiple institutional virtues as a gestalt. Sometimes an institutional quality may merely approximate the virtue thereof rather than be sufficiently virtuous– and sometimes this happens because it is not rounded out by other institutional and/or relational virtues and gradations thereof. And even when an institutional quality is sufficiently good enough to be virtuous, it does not make it perfectly/ideally virtuous; virtuous qualities can be further rounded out and are in need of being developed overtime and recreated in differentiated and emerging contexts. And even in a good-enough society, there are additional good institutional and relational virtues that can be developed.
Given what human needs are and what human wellness consists of, flourishing virtuous institutional and relational qualities entail, include, contribute to, and are in harmony with non-hierarchical rights and duties and an expansive realm of permissibility. In contrast to statist and liberal notions of good rights so in vogue within social contract theory, good rights would at least include rights to the means of production, rights to the means of existence, rights to the means of horizontal politics and economics, rights to participatory activity and free association (and the means thereof), as well as freedom from hierarchy, domination, and exploitation. Good duties at least include the duties towards the above rights for persons and groups. Good rights and duties by themselves are not sufficient for their actuation– they require sufficient means thereof. And good rights and duties far from exhaustively encompass what is good; merely acting within such minimal bounds is not enough for a person or group to act wisely. Good rights and duties benefit from and contribute to a wider array of institutional and relational virtues. Sets of good rights and duties are institutional virtues themselves (as properties of institutions that contribute to the flourishing of volitional beings), are related to other institutional and relational virtues (in terms of cause and effect AND in terms of containing some dimensions of other institutional and relational virtues within such good rights and duties), and can be evaluated in relation to coherence and correspondence to webs of institutional and relational virtues.
https://usufructcollective.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/gestalt-of-the-good-2023-remix/
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