On The Correct Political Ideology
Thoughts: Be sensible: Be a selfish liberal
This is a rewritten form of something I wrote elsewhere
This is about a particular intellectual clash regarding 'liberalism' that I often see in discussion, particularly online.
What 'liberalism' actually constitutes is debatable; not all 'liberals' agree on the matter, and a lot of them couldn't give you a coherent answer at all. As in all political ideologies, a lot of the adherents are just latching on to whatever suits them in the moment.
But let us suppose that 'liberalism' is simply the idea that people should be allowed the freedom to do what they want so far as it doesn't harm the rest of us. Laws under liberalism are created to help us all get along peacefully and to keep us out of one another's hair.
Laws are not based on morality, and hence you often hear the claim that 'law shouldn't be used to impose morality on people'.
But whenever this claim is made, two criticisms quickly arise:
1) Some people claim that all laws are morally based, such as laws against murder, theft, and rape. It is held that to deny morality as a basis for law is ridiculous because all liberalism amounts to anarchy if followed through properly.
2) It is held that the claim 'laws should not be used to impose morality' is self-refuting because it itself is a moral claim. It's certainly an imperative of some kind, and it's true that its basis cannot be moral or else liberalism must be invalid.
The typical response to the first complaint is to point out the obvious difference between a law against such things as homosexuality and a law against murder. We can show how murder harms us, and takes away our freedom, we can't do that for homosexuality.
To the second complaint the typical response is distinguishing between moral imperatives against such things as homosexuality and imperatives against homosexuality. A law against homosexuality is based on what harm it does to people, whilst homosexuality doesn't. When a person calls homosexuality immoral they have nothing more to go on than their own moral l sentiments, whilst a law against murder can be shown to be prudent.
It is prudent because a free and liberal society cannot exist without laws against murder, but it can exist without laws against homosexuality. In fact, a free and liberal society must not have laws against homosexuality.
But this merely brings us to the second criticism. Why is it so good to have a free and liberal society? Sure, if we want a free and liberal society we should not base laws on morality, but why should we have such a society anyway?
The principle we are evoking is clearly liberty. In a society with no law against murder and theft I would have no liberty and no control over my life, and I would be in a fairly miserable state of affairs. My liberty over my own life and death thus must be preserved.
But why should the state protect our liberty? Whatever our justification for the state behaving this way is, it can't be a moral justification. As (sensible) liberals are committed to this 'no morality in law' principle, whatever justification we give must be non-moral.
Well, it seems clear to me that there is a distinction between a moral rule, and a non-moral rule, and the difference is found in the reasons for this rule. Some people deny that there is such a distinction, but this seems clearly absurd.
If I make a self-governing rule that reads 'I should donate x amount to charity a month' then this is the sort of rule that can clearly be understood to have moral basis. I'm doing this out of some moral obligation, rather than some non-moral interest.
The above rule is very different to the rule 'I must brush my teeth every day' which isn't based in moral concerns, but health and hygiene concerns.
Equally, if I'm imposing a rule I can do it for moral or non-moral reasons. I might want to force everyone to stop being mean to each other, despite me possible gaining from the situation I might feel this is 'the right thing to do'. Or I may be an employer who enforces rules to get a company working properly because I don't want to be sacked, and I rather want the money to eat, drink and keep a roof over my head, and whilst that's not immoral, it is a non-moral motivation.
Equally, if I'm a bully in the schoolyard and I enforce a rule that says 'you must give me your dinner money every day' I'm clearly enforcing a rule, but not a moral one.
The difference is clearly in why I make the rule. If finding myself hungry every morning at work/university I make myself a rule that 'I must eat breakfast every morning' I'd be a bit odd to claim it was a moral rule in any ordinary sense, clearly it wasn't a moral issue, it was just an issue of my own personal desires, nothing particularly moral about that.
Some rules may be moral or non-moral depending not on the rule but on my motivations for making it. If I have a rule for donating to charity but the rule exists only because I like to brag about it to garner like and respect, or possibly just to get laid, then my rule is not morally based, it's just based in a more ordinary desire to get laid.
To be morally based we have to be talking about something a bit more special. Let's suggest a person has been raised to believe playing cards is immoral (and this has happened), and she makes for herself a rule not to play cards in the house. In such a situation she can't really justify a good reason for the rule in terms of ordinary self-interest, instead the only reason she has is 'it's wrong'.
Similarly, if a person believes 'you shouldn't talk about people behind their backs', and you ask 'why?', and they say 'because they might find and get hurt', and you say 'why is that a bad thing?' they might answer 'because then they might not like you very much, and it's better for you for people to like you!' they have a non-morally based rule, but if they answer 'its just wrong to hurt people! Don't you feel bad when you do it?' then they are referring to something morally based.
They key thing is these morally based rules aren't based in our normal non-moral drives. They're based on internalised values and rules. Some people think these values and rules are placed there by God, some believe they are placed there by our genetics, some believe they are placed by our culture, or early life experiences. It doesn't really matter, although to all accounts they aren't consistent across different people, people just don't agree on them, and for the liberal it shouldn't matter, the liberal has said none of these are relevant to law making.
For the sake of simplicity I shall say there are two ways to base a law then (1) Moral values and (2) Self-interest. Calling the second self-interest may be misleading as it seems that people do follow their moral values for some type of self-interest, after all, it feels good to be a morally good person, but in regard to liberalism this doesn't matter, we've still got two totally different ways basis for law.
A law against murder could be justified both ways. I hope most of us have some kind of moral objection, and if asked why we don't murder people we shouldn't need more of an explanation than 'it's wrong!'. However, laws against murder are easy to justify on self-interested grounds; if there was no law against murder society would be rather nasty and that would suck for me personally. Hence I could support a law against murder whilst not finding it immoral, heck, I could try my best to get away with murdering people whilst all the time having every reason to support a law against murder.
Equally for homosexuality we have two ways to try and justify a law against it. We can rely on our moral intuitions ('Homosexuality is wrong!') or we can try self-interested grounds for outlawing it ('homosexuality threatens the stability of society, and hence harms me personally, and thus I would like to see it get outlawed'). I personally don't have any moral problem with homosexuality, nor do I think it's a danger to society, so obviously I won't try to get it outlawed, the point is that if I could prove that homosexuality was a danger to society then I could make a convincing case for it to be outlawed.
One of the notable things here is that homosexuality and/or murder being dangerous to me is enough for me to desire it being outlawed, but I won't have a convincing case to have it outlawed unless I can show it to not just be dangerous to me, but to a majority of other people as well. This is simply a pragmatic issue, I can't outlaw something for purely personal reasons, everybody else wouldn't let me!
So, there are our two motivations for law, moral and non-moral, and they are quite distinct.
As a liberal I reject moral as a good motivation, and I do so for non-moral reasons. Whilst it would be utterly splendid to see my moral values enforced by the state in theory, in practice it would undoubtedly suck. For a start I won't get specifically my moral values enforced, we'll get popular/mainstream morality enforced, and you're a lucky person if you agree with all popular morality (or perhaps unlucky for being so repressed). Secondly, even if I do get something that resembles my own morality enforced, how long until the more powerful take advantage of the situation and corrupt it? Further, it is likely that in doing so I will have given the state the right to remove people's liberty 'for the greater good' and thus created a state more powerful than the people who are supposed to control it, and in doing so I have created something very easy to corrupt.
Hence this 'morally based state' is dangerous. However, if I instead choose to found the state on the political value of liberty I have set for the state a principle that keeps itself in check. Whenever the state wants to make a law it shall have to justify it in grounds of how it makes me more free, which makes it very hard for the state to be oppressive.
Note that the value of liberty is a political value, not a moral one. Liberty need not be my moral value, it's just the value that benefits me the most in non-moral terms, and the same for everyone else. I firmly believe that even a person of the staunchest most appalling Christian values should support the political value of liberty because they should recognise the same danger for them that I have outlined for me. A very strict Catholic may want to see their morals imposed on the rest of us, but not as much as they want to avoid a corrupted version of their morals being imposed.
Hence this is all self-interested. Odd perhaps given how concerned a liberal like me might be about other people? Well, obviously I do like to think of myself as a moral person, but that's not the issue here.
It's to do with the protection of rights. If a minority is having their rights taken away I might, for the moment, be able to sit back and watch that happen, and then to the next one, and to the next, but eventually it will come around and get to me. If the state can do it to them, it can do it to me.
How can I rely on my rights if the state is allowed to take them away from entire segments of the population? If a Muslim is not allowed to express his or her religious beliefs, how do I know my own are going to be always free to be expressed? If a homosexual is not allowed to engage in those particular sex acts, how do I know my own aren't free from government scrutiny? If a muslim woman isn't allowed to express her deviance from mainstream British culture by wearing the veil, how do I know I will always be allowed to be in my own way?
In short, by protecting the rights of other people, I protect my own rights. Protecting other people's civil rights is not a moral crusade, or at least it needn't be, but it can be a completely self-interested action.
I actually don't like the veil as worn by muslim women, I find it sexist if nothing else. If it was an isolated act I can't actually say that I'd care much for them to lose the right to wear it, but it isn't an isolated issue, it's a much wider issue, because not allowing Muslim women to wear the veil (and I mean mostly in such occasions as in the street) is a violation of certain principles that it is in my own interest to defend.
Hence I'm not a liberal out of concern for other people, I'm not a liberal because I'm a 'bleeding heart', and I needn't care at all about anyone other than myself to be a liberal. My support of liberalism is not me being morally self-righteous, it's much closer to me being a selfish brat and looking out for myself.
And that's why everyone should be a liberal regardless of their moral values and systems. It's too dangerous for any of us to use the state to enforce our moralities, not only are we not likely to get the moral system we want enforced, even if we do get our own moral system enforced it will become corrupt and twisted until you no longer recognise it.
So don't do that, look out for yourself instead, defend key rights, defend your liberty, and you can only do that with the cooperation of the rest of us, we all have to get together and protect each other from each other, and we can only do that through being liberals.
This is a rewritten form of something I wrote elsewhere
This is about a particular intellectual clash regarding 'liberalism' that I often see in discussion, particularly online.
What 'liberalism' actually constitutes is debatable; not all 'liberals' agree on the matter, and a lot of them couldn't give you a coherent answer at all. As in all political ideologies, a lot of the adherents are just latching on to whatever suits them in the moment.
But let us suppose that 'liberalism' is simply the idea that people should be allowed the freedom to do what they want so far as it doesn't harm the rest of us. Laws under liberalism are created to help us all get along peacefully and to keep us out of one another's hair.
Laws are not based on morality, and hence you often hear the claim that 'law shouldn't be used to impose morality on people'.
But whenever this claim is made, two criticisms quickly arise:
1) Some people claim that all laws are morally based, such as laws against murder, theft, and rape. It is held that to deny morality as a basis for law is ridiculous because all liberalism amounts to anarchy if followed through properly.
2) It is held that the claim 'laws should not be used to impose morality' is self-refuting because it itself is a moral claim. It's certainly an imperative of some kind, and it's true that its basis cannot be moral or else liberalism must be invalid.
The typical response to the first complaint is to point out the obvious difference between a law against such things as homosexuality and a law against murder. We can show how murder harms us, and takes away our freedom, we can't do that for homosexuality.
To the second complaint the typical response is distinguishing between moral imperatives against such things as homosexuality and imperatives against homosexuality. A law against homosexuality is based on what harm it does to people, whilst homosexuality doesn't. When a person calls homosexuality immoral they have nothing more to go on than their own moral l sentiments, whilst a law against murder can be shown to be prudent.
It is prudent because a free and liberal society cannot exist without laws against murder, but it can exist without laws against homosexuality. In fact, a free and liberal society must not have laws against homosexuality.
But this merely brings us to the second criticism. Why is it so good to have a free and liberal society? Sure, if we want a free and liberal society we should not base laws on morality, but why should we have such a society anyway?
The principle we are evoking is clearly liberty. In a society with no law against murder and theft I would have no liberty and no control over my life, and I would be in a fairly miserable state of affairs. My liberty over my own life and death thus must be preserved.
But why should the state protect our liberty? Whatever our justification for the state behaving this way is, it can't be a moral justification. As (sensible) liberals are committed to this 'no morality in law' principle, whatever justification we give must be non-moral.
Well, it seems clear to me that there is a distinction between a moral rule, and a non-moral rule, and the difference is found in the reasons for this rule. Some people deny that there is such a distinction, but this seems clearly absurd.
If I make a self-governing rule that reads 'I should donate x amount to charity a month' then this is the sort of rule that can clearly be understood to have moral basis. I'm doing this out of some moral obligation, rather than some non-moral interest.
The above rule is very different to the rule 'I must brush my teeth every day' which isn't based in moral concerns, but health and hygiene concerns.
Equally, if I'm imposing a rule I can do it for moral or non-moral reasons. I might want to force everyone to stop being mean to each other, despite me possible gaining from the situation I might feel this is 'the right thing to do'. Or I may be an employer who enforces rules to get a company working properly because I don't want to be sacked, and I rather want the money to eat, drink and keep a roof over my head, and whilst that's not immoral, it is a non-moral motivation.
Equally, if I'm a bully in the schoolyard and I enforce a rule that says 'you must give me your dinner money every day' I'm clearly enforcing a rule, but not a moral one.
The difference is clearly in why I make the rule. If finding myself hungry every morning at work/university I make myself a rule that 'I must eat breakfast every morning' I'd be a bit odd to claim it was a moral rule in any ordinary sense, clearly it wasn't a moral issue, it was just an issue of my own personal desires, nothing particularly moral about that.
Some rules may be moral or non-moral depending not on the rule but on my motivations for making it. If I have a rule for donating to charity but the rule exists only because I like to brag about it to garner like and respect, or possibly just to get laid, then my rule is not morally based, it's just based in a more ordinary desire to get laid.
To be morally based we have to be talking about something a bit more special. Let's suggest a person has been raised to believe playing cards is immoral (and this has happened), and she makes for herself a rule not to play cards in the house. In such a situation she can't really justify a good reason for the rule in terms of ordinary self-interest, instead the only reason she has is 'it's wrong'.
Similarly, if a person believes 'you shouldn't talk about people behind their backs', and you ask 'why?', and they say 'because they might find and get hurt', and you say 'why is that a bad thing?' they might answer 'because then they might not like you very much, and it's better for you for people to like you!' they have a non-morally based rule, but if they answer 'its just wrong to hurt people! Don't you feel bad when you do it?' then they are referring to something morally based.
They key thing is these morally based rules aren't based in our normal non-moral drives. They're based on internalised values and rules. Some people think these values and rules are placed there by God, some believe they are placed there by our genetics, some believe they are placed by our culture, or early life experiences. It doesn't really matter, although to all accounts they aren't consistent across different people, people just don't agree on them, and for the liberal it shouldn't matter, the liberal has said none of these are relevant to law making.
For the sake of simplicity I shall say there are two ways to base a law then (1) Moral values and (2) Self-interest. Calling the second self-interest may be misleading as it seems that people do follow their moral values for some type of self-interest, after all, it feels good to be a morally good person, but in regard to liberalism this doesn't matter, we've still got two totally different ways basis for law.
A law against murder could be justified both ways. I hope most of us have some kind of moral objection, and if asked why we don't murder people we shouldn't need more of an explanation than 'it's wrong!'. However, laws against murder are easy to justify on self-interested grounds; if there was no law against murder society would be rather nasty and that would suck for me personally. Hence I could support a law against murder whilst not finding it immoral, heck, I could try my best to get away with murdering people whilst all the time having every reason to support a law against murder.
Equally for homosexuality we have two ways to try and justify a law against it. We can rely on our moral intuitions ('Homosexuality is wrong!') or we can try self-interested grounds for outlawing it ('homosexuality threatens the stability of society, and hence harms me personally, and thus I would like to see it get outlawed'). I personally don't have any moral problem with homosexuality, nor do I think it's a danger to society, so obviously I won't try to get it outlawed, the point is that if I could prove that homosexuality was a danger to society then I could make a convincing case for it to be outlawed.
One of the notable things here is that homosexuality and/or murder being dangerous to me is enough for me to desire it being outlawed, but I won't have a convincing case to have it outlawed unless I can show it to not just be dangerous to me, but to a majority of other people as well. This is simply a pragmatic issue, I can't outlaw something for purely personal reasons, everybody else wouldn't let me!
So, there are our two motivations for law, moral and non-moral, and they are quite distinct.
As a liberal I reject moral as a good motivation, and I do so for non-moral reasons. Whilst it would be utterly splendid to see my moral values enforced by the state in theory, in practice it would undoubtedly suck. For a start I won't get specifically my moral values enforced, we'll get popular/mainstream morality enforced, and you're a lucky person if you agree with all popular morality (or perhaps unlucky for being so repressed). Secondly, even if I do get something that resembles my own morality enforced, how long until the more powerful take advantage of the situation and corrupt it? Further, it is likely that in doing so I will have given the state the right to remove people's liberty 'for the greater good' and thus created a state more powerful than the people who are supposed to control it, and in doing so I have created something very easy to corrupt.
Hence this 'morally based state' is dangerous. However, if I instead choose to found the state on the political value of liberty I have set for the state a principle that keeps itself in check. Whenever the state wants to make a law it shall have to justify it in grounds of how it makes me more free, which makes it very hard for the state to be oppressive.
Note that the value of liberty is a political value, not a moral one. Liberty need not be my moral value, it's just the value that benefits me the most in non-moral terms, and the same for everyone else. I firmly believe that even a person of the staunchest most appalling Christian values should support the political value of liberty because they should recognise the same danger for them that I have outlined for me. A very strict Catholic may want to see their morals imposed on the rest of us, but not as much as they want to avoid a corrupted version of their morals being imposed.
Hence this is all self-interested. Odd perhaps given how concerned a liberal like me might be about other people? Well, obviously I do like to think of myself as a moral person, but that's not the issue here.
It's to do with the protection of rights. If a minority is having their rights taken away I might, for the moment, be able to sit back and watch that happen, and then to the next one, and to the next, but eventually it will come around and get to me. If the state can do it to them, it can do it to me.
How can I rely on my rights if the state is allowed to take them away from entire segments of the population? If a Muslim is not allowed to express his or her religious beliefs, how do I know my own are going to be always free to be expressed? If a homosexual is not allowed to engage in those particular sex acts, how do I know my own aren't free from government scrutiny? If a muslim woman isn't allowed to express her deviance from mainstream British culture by wearing the veil, how do I know I will always be allowed to be in my own way?
In short, by protecting the rights of other people, I protect my own rights. Protecting other people's civil rights is not a moral crusade, or at least it needn't be, but it can be a completely self-interested action.
I actually don't like the veil as worn by muslim women, I find it sexist if nothing else. If it was an isolated act I can't actually say that I'd care much for them to lose the right to wear it, but it isn't an isolated issue, it's a much wider issue, because not allowing Muslim women to wear the veil (and I mean mostly in such occasions as in the street) is a violation of certain principles that it is in my own interest to defend.
Hence I'm not a liberal out of concern for other people, I'm not a liberal because I'm a 'bleeding heart', and I needn't care at all about anyone other than myself to be a liberal. My support of liberalism is not me being morally self-righteous, it's much closer to me being a selfish brat and looking out for myself.
And that's why everyone should be a liberal regardless of their moral values and systems. It's too dangerous for any of us to use the state to enforce our moralities, not only are we not likely to get the moral system we want enforced, even if we do get our own moral system enforced it will become corrupt and twisted until you no longer recognise it.
So don't do that, look out for yourself instead, defend key rights, defend your liberty, and you can only do that with the cooperation of the rest of us, we all have to get together and protect each other from each other, and we can only do that through being liberals.