Let’s Get Civil
Healing Our Fractured Body Politic
By: Patrick Conroy

Let’s Get Civil enables We the People to conduct productive arguments that lead to good laws and public policies. To do that we must improve both how we think and what we think. That requires full intellectual development. Full intellectual development consists of both cognitive development, the ability to reason; and moral development, the ability to reason morally.

We all become capable of mature reason and mature moral reason around the time students graduate from high school. But too many of us do not develop as we can. Let’s Get Civil shows us how to fix that in families, schools, and society. It also explores the forces that work to undermine our full development, exposes them, and rejects them.

We fix moral philosophy, which has virtually ceased to exist in the U.S., and we reunite moral philosophy with the social sciences. That marriage makes both better. The social sciences are good at studying what is in society, but they also need to know what should be in society. And only moral philosophy has the tools to answer that question. By working together, moral philosophy and the social sciences become more effective and efficient and moral.

Finally, we use the intellectual tools we have developed to build a mature understanding of Economic Justice, Education Justice, Women’s Health Justice, and Social Justice. That understanding allows all of us, all of We the People, to conduct civil, grown up arguments about the laws and public policies we need to become all that our Founding Fathers hoped for us.