Ainda devemos falar de virtude cívica? O lugar da moral na política republicana segundo Rousseau e Sandel

• Autor(a) principal: Moscateli, Renato
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
• Texto Completo: http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/50222
• topic: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Virtude Cívica; Moral; Política

In several of his works, Jean-Jacques Rousseau stressed the political importance of the moral components essential to a well-ordered republic, where virtue should be present in all citizens, so that the common interest prevails. In his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, for example, by comparing his epoch to the times when Spartans and Romans gave great examples of patriotism, the philosopher commented that “Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money”, thus emphasizing a difference that showed, in his view, how much politics had deteriorated over the centuries. In opposition to such decline, the Geneva's thinker gave a central place to customs and public opinion, to civil religion and education in order to foster community's unity and sovereign deliberations in which the general will expresses itself clearly, in all the republican states worthy of this name. In our own time, it's noteworthy that the American philosopher Michael J. Sandel has produced texts to denounce the emptying of the public space regarding to moral and religious content ‒ according to him, a consequence of the liberal proposal of neutrality towards citizens' different conceptions of good ‒ which the author considers to be harmful to contemporary democracies, since it leads to the impoverishment of political deliberations. For him, it's fundamental that such content can contribute to promote the virtues necessary for the exercise of republican citizenship, without which the practices of self-government would be infeasible. In the light of this, my intention is to take the ideas of Rousseau and Sandel as a reference to discuss the place that morality can occupy in republics' politics, especially in the present context, not only as a potentially positive factor, but also by considering certain risks that its presence in the public space is capable of bringing. 1 Doutor em Filosofia pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Professor da Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Federal de Goiás. E-mail: [e-mail]