From Virtue to Values: Shifts in Moral Philosophy and its Impact on Political Culture Studies.

This paper examines how a shift in moral philosophy between America’s founding and the mid-twentieth century fundamentally altered the way political scientists understood the relationship between political culture and democracy. The earlier approach was grounded in a philosophy that posited an objective morality that could be discovered by the empirical and introspective study of human beings. This view, in turn, supported the dominant paradigm of democratic political culture, which saw public and private virtue as requisites for a successful republic. By the early 1960s, this paradigm was supplanted in comparative politics by a subjective understanding of morality, which replaced the concept of virtue for social “values” and “orientations.” This shift, in turn, was driven by changes in moral philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, including emotivist theories of ethics. By applying the two approaches to contemporary problems that affect democracy, the paper argues that the newer paradigm leaves us with intellectual blind spots in our understanding of the cultural requirements for a quality democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]