Yesterday we asked the eternal question, “Why Have
Standards?” Today we start getting down
to basics, and ask “What Are Standards?”
Yes, we answered that in part yesterday, but we need to expand on it a
bit in order to get to the point we’re eventually going to make in this series. Yes, there’s a point to all this, believe it
or not.
Legally speaking, it’s pretty simple, unlike some legal
concepts. As Black’s Law Dictionary has it, a standard is “[s]tability, general
recognition, and conformity to established practice.” It’s also “[a] type, model, or combination of
elements accepted as correct or perfect.”
(Okay, it’s also “[a]n ensign or flag used in war,” but that’s not our
concern. Today.)
We’ve heard something like this language before, in
discussions about social justice. Social
justice is the particular virtue directed to the common good, specifically, to
the institutions — social habits — that constitute the environment we call the
common good, within which human beings as political animals and moral beings
carry out the business of living through the application of individual and
social ethics.
In other words, the common good is the environment within
which people become both good people and, because it’s social, good citizens. The act of social justice ensures that there
is no conflict between being a good person and being a good member of the
community. If there is a conflict
between being a good person and being a good member of the community, people
are supposed to get organized and remove the institutional barriers preventing
people from being both good citizens and good people.
Thus a standard is, in a very real sense, an
institution. This is both in the sense
of having been “instituted” by duly constituted authority, and also being a
“social habit,” i.e., something that
everybody in that society agrees on.
Both of these senses of standard are fully consistent with the legal
definitions and with the virtue of social justice.
Having standards is thus really, really, really important. It’s so important that people almost always
delegate setting and enforcing standards to the State, society’s only
legitimate monopoly that controls the instruments of coercion, e.g., the police, the law courts, the
prisons, the tax system, and so on.
Standards simply cannot be left to chance or
expedience. People have to know where
they stand, if only to know where they are.
That’s why We, the People delegated the power to set standards to the
federal government in the person of the Congress. It’s right there, in Article I, § 8 of the
Constitution.
