Gorgias: I think for many of us dialogue and critical inquiry are an important part of what a virtuous life involves. But for certain liberals, even Galston hesitates at this point, Socratic critical dialogue model is a problem because he knows that if critical inquiry is made as part of the definition of well-being, of the good life, that a large contingent of parents will complain. There are certain parents that will be sending their kids to public school... that would much rather have the virtue of obedience to legitimate authority in place of critical dialogues, especially critical dialogue with respect to one's own moral tradition.

And, that seems to me to be an important issue here. Does... I mean should a middle school or a high school have a course in critical thinking -- even critical thinking about big questions in life -- or not? I would say, yes. But, here I think value neutral liberals like Galston pull back.

Parmenides: It is interesting because the arguments of a Pat Robertson, not to mention Galston, would be that one of the problems you face is that there has been too much intellectual permissiveness along with other forms of permissiveness, and that maybe the two are related.

Gorgias: Exactly...

Laches: So, critical thinking would be like drinking... you can only do it when you are 21.

Parmenides: Yes, exactly. But the important thing is to show that it can be done in a way that respects the various religious and moral traditions.

Plato: I think that if you are going to introduce critical thinking in a proper way it must be done in a way that the impact on the whole family is also taken into account. The frightening image to many parents is 15 year olds armed with debating skills -- and not much life experience -- sitting around the table at night with their parents challenging every rule.

Laches: There are very powerful countertrends going on right now that think that critical inquiry and the liberal view is dead wrong.

Socrates: Yes, take someone like Alasdaire MacIntyre. MacIntyre is very dubious about what is ever accomplished by a debate between people holding entrenched beliefs on both sides, or what you might call incorrigible beliefs, ...

Meno: Do you share his scepticism?

Socrates: Not at all, the only hope for getting past entrenched beliefs is the mutual learning of a true dialectical exercise, which is the whole point of teaching critical thinking skills. MacIntyre himself is very aware of the pressure of critical thinking and dialectic argument at this point. But is it possible to debate this question with MacIntyre?

Parmenides: The answer is probably no, because from his point of view nothing comes of debate.

Socrates: At that point MacIntyre and people like him are may be retreating into a piety of some sort, though they might not call it that.

Plato: In denying the force of the dialectic at this point it is almost like MacIntyre is saying "you cannot hurt me!"

Meno: Right.

Socrates: Well the question isn't, "Can we hurt him?" The question is "Can we make him talk sense". Or, if talking sense is hurting him then so much the worse for him.

MacIntyre has some very sound things to say in After Virtue in terms of the current diagnosis of the problems but he is off-base, it seems to me, on the subject of the usefulness of dialectic and debate. And I would be happy to debate this point with him.

But, the putting out into the school systems of the dialectic in any serious sense of the term is a very real question. As mentioned, there are plenty of parents who are saying, we aren't sending our kids to schools to be critics of the things we hold dear...

Thrasymachus: But, there might not be that much resistance if the idea of critical thinking and the dialectic is presented carefully. I would like to say more about that in a second, but first a word of defense for MacIntyre and company.

First, In his last book MacIntyre allows in some way for a tradition to cope with the fact that there are serious opponents and suggests ways to speak to other traditions.

Second, people like MacIntyre's and Pat Robertson's skeptical view of the critical inquiry element of the Liberal tradition might have some basis. Look at the track record of the people who have come through our critical inquiry process at all levels. Critical thinking is the first article of faith of every liberal arts catalogue. All liberal arts colleges and great universities of our land, the best and the brightest, have all had critical inquiry.

It does give one pause to see that many of the issues that we have been talking about... the problems we have been talking about are here and with us in abundance despite the fact that the leadership of our country in large part is in the hands of people who have been through our courses in critical thinking.

It is probably a caricature even of Pat Robertson to say that he would be against critical inquiry. Almost nobody professes to be against critical inquiry. But aren't they saying that something must have been missing from critical inquiry, or is now lost, for Liberalism to have taken us up where we now find ourselves, a system in crisis with so many questioning the moral legitimation of our system? Maybe that is too strong a way to put it, but it does seem to be that they have a point here.

Meno: Basically, the idea of debate and critical thinking that has risen to the fore is that it is the rhetorical skill that is at stake. What is important is whether you can make the other person feel enough pressure by the weight of your prose, or whether your logic seems superior in order to get them to cave in. It is a game of power, not joint searching for truth. That is really what debate is about for most. When I started teaching, it struck me how deeply students had imbibed in this purely Sophistic or rhetorical form of liberalism, thinking it was liberalism. Maybe it is liberalism of a certain type. But it is not the type that forms moral character, or the proper moral substratum. It is the form of Liberalism where to be tolerant means never to think that certain values or duties have weight as binding on all.

This supports MacIntyre's analysis of moral discourse as basically emotive in his book After Virtue. Students are saying, so what... what other way could it be than just emotive?

Pythagoras: Emotive, and so tolerance of everything follows.

Parmenides: This idea of emotivism and tolerance is very much at the core of the "values clarification" movement that used to be a part of the public education. against which there has been so much reaction. I found it quite appalling. It was just this point... there is nothing that is in any way subject to assurance, and murdering people cruel, all these things are all of a piece, your appreciation of football is no different from your appreciation of honesty and loyalty. It is just all on par, you raise these questions to clarify values, but you make no further attempt to say that appreciating honesty is more fundamental for society than appreciating football. The question isn't what do you think are your duties, but "How do you feel?"

Pythagoras: Yes, that seemed to me to be utterly bankrupt and clearly mistaken. And it seems to me that if I am right, then that leads to an understandable reaction maybe explaining people like Pat Robertson and Alasdair MacIntyre and the many others who think things have gone too far in taking traditional values out of education, that we as a society have really misunderstood what is at stake. They worry about critical thinking they equate it with value neutral "values clarification".

The argument to make is that there are certain necessary moral requirements of the educational process which would involve things like honesty and so on... that would be built into the critical inquiry practice itself apart from what critical reasoning methods you might use in conducting. And it seems to me this emotivism is a kind of intellectual permissiveness which has bred a counterreaction which is in some ways understandable.

Gorgias: That idea of tolerance would be at the bottom of a contentless or neutral liberalism.

Pythagoras: Yes, right, exactly your point.

Gorgias: So, now we are moving beyond a neutral liberalism to that in which you see the ability to engage in critical dialogue is only one viable moral virtue to be promoted.

Honesty, loyalty, and some kind of patriotism and some sort of righteousness and conscientious are also a part of this idea of education in virtue that we are working toward.

Meno: So, we are agreed in rejecting the notion of an "amoral" or "neutral" Liberalism?

Gorgias: Yes, and looking for what kind of "purposive liberalsim" to use Galston's term. Then how far does one go with this? Not just committed to goods of process?

Thrasymachus: You would have some notion of well-being... some notion of the virtue of the citizen that is part of our responsibility, a kind of modest perfectionism or kind of commitment to the good. This is what I was thinking about in saying that there might not be that much resistance if the idea of critical thinking or the dialectic if presented carefully. As long as substantive values of civic good are a part of it, not just rhetorical skills there would be greater support.

Gorgias: But, then some people will ask how far does one go? Because then all of the problems of education which is illiberal emerge, where we have a very filled in specific notion of human flourishing. It is too easy to fall into the trap of saying "everybody is going to get this whether they like it or not" because we need it for society, and not leaving it sufficiently open to people to have the freedom to chose their own way of living, etc. And I think those are important issues that eventually need to be discussed, but not until we get beyond a crisis mode.

Laches" Just a second... Who did we leave behind when we left amoral liberalism, who got off the train at that point?

Parmenides: Those who follow values clarification, for example.

Laches: Is anybody associated with that you can think of? In terms of educational policy and practice at this point?

Laches: Aren't we leaving off Richard Rorty?

Meno: One might suppose, but one of his recent popular pieces in the New York Times Magazine suggests otherwise. Thrasymachus: We might be leaving behind John Rawls as well, with his "Thin Theory of the Good," which is a procedural theory of the good.

Plato: We are getting to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the dialectic and the purpose of critical thinking. Neutralist liberalism never was clear on the value of criticism. Now, the Socratic dialectic had a clear upshot. Clarification on the route to self-knowledge - to truth. That is one thing that the original Socrates was not prepared to argue about, and he makes it very clear.

Parmenides: What is he not prepared to argue about? The importance of critical inquiry? The value of critical inquiry?

Socrates: Yes, the value of critical inquiry seeking self knowledge is beyond debate. Done correctly it will reach solid ground!

Parmenides: Because it has a moral objective.

Socrates: That's right.

Socrates: There are problems involved looking for the missing elements that we have called attention to, that whether there are groundshifts in our ethos where it no longer delivers what it has delivered in the past. Finding solid ground on which people can say this is who we are and this is how we got here... and this is the way that the "is's" the imperatives are grounded. In fact, this is who we are and this is how we got here, and this is where we propose to take our stance.

But, first you really do have to ask, and you can't really ask

children to answer this question, "What is the value of the question and answer process? In other words, what order of discourse do the questions we are asking in a critical inquiry process make any sense? To think about what it means to ask the value of a question, take some simple examples. In dealing as parents with obstreperous children, who want to push the question "why" to the ultimate. Or take the proposition "God created the world." I overheard a Sunday school teacher wrestling with this one. The student asks, If God created the world, who created God? And the teacher says you can't ask that question. He said, but I just did. And so by asking this question the student changed the order of discourse of the questioning process. The question has value in a different order of discourse.

So, you have this tricky issue popping up all over. When a bully hits me in the eye and I say, you can't do that. He'll say, I just did, and here's one for the other eye. The bully and I were talking in a different order of discourse. Well, what are we talking about here is the force of can't in my usage of the term, and it is clearly moral. "You ought not do this," and if you do it, in a good society you would be held responsible.

So we need to try to address this issue of different orders of discourse, when we ask the question of "what is critical inquiry and the dialectic for?" The moral is the order of discourse of the questioning processes of critical inquiry. The dialectic must have a purpose, a point, not merely to ask questions and play debating games with each other. Not simply to raise doubt but to seek moral truth.

So we have to ask, What is it aiming to produce with its dialogue back and forth? What ground to stand on does it seek? What case is it trying to make? Socrates has one answer, Plotinius has a very different answer, and Aristotle still a different answer. But they are all clear answers. So making a case somewhere along the line must hit pay dirt.

Parmenides: And in not seeking pay dirt or admitting there is pay dirt to be sought, there is a kind of failure of nerve on this aspect among Liberals who themselves won't face up to the fundamental moral assumptions of the liberal project, which to a considerable extent rest in religious sources. If anybody has any question about that they need only look closely at John Locke or Madison and the other founding fathers.

But to say there are religious sources is not to say there is a specific conception or a set of rules rooted in religious belief that must be followed. A very clear distinction must be drawn and this is where some in the religious right go overboard.

And yet most of the liberals won't defend their own sources. They won't say "we believe in these principles, these are beyond question."

The question raised earlier about whether there could be a religious left or a religious progressivism was a very good one. Maybe a religious center is a better description so as not to attach it to a particular part of the political spectrum.

Plato: Sometimes this failure of nerve is informed by a kind of skepticism and relativism and sometimes it's informed by, I think, a misled version of tolerance.

Parmenides: Yes, exactly. Tolerance gone wild.

Meno: By a real fear that absolute judgements or rules are tied in with any attempt at grounding, that it is almost inescapable.

Plato: Exactly... that was Richard Rorty's line. He would say "If you take a position on any moral absolute, it is tyranny by implication."

Parmenides: Tolerance is also a deep part of the Liberal tradition, but it is not the only principle.

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