An Englishman's Home

An Englishman’s home ceased to be his castle a long time ago. The state has 1000 laws allowing it to break into your home. It is not enough to streamline the law. We need wholesale repeal of much legislation.

It’s not just entering your home, though. Rafts of legislation prevent us doing what we want to or in our home,whether it’s minor building works or lighting a coal fire. The state intrudes even when you buy or sell your home.

Last year I read an article by Boris Johnson on government plans to put health warnings on alcoholic drinks.

“In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head; and Flint’s proposed act of desecration is all the more shameful and baffling when you consider - in your state of agreeable post-prandial rapture - that a bottle of wine is really a thing of quiet beauty.

For hundreds of years, the play of light on the glass and the liquid has entranced the eye of our greatest painters, from Caravaggio to Manet. Think of all those bottles twinkling away behind the bar girl in the Folies-Bergeres; think of that Van Gogh still life - the bottle, the bread, the cheese.”

No one would possibly argue that we need the state because without it we wouldn’t have these warnings. They are philistinistic: a bottle of wine should indeed be a thing of beauty, not a reminder of the power the government has over the minutiae our lives.

But worse, it represents an intrusion of the government into an Englishman’s home. My home is largely free of the government. I do not want government icons looking down at me from my drinks cupboard.

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.”

A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (1965)

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Hayek explains in “The Constitution of Liberty” that if people have freedom to do what they want without restriction by government, as long as they do not harm others, people can try things out. People can make mistakes, but better ways of doing things will be discovered, and copied. By a process of natural selection of ideas, we will all gradually make more efficient use of resources, and technology, and we will become richer. Government involvement in production will slow this process down.

Transcript: Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, 1981.

Margot James, Conservative candidate for Stourbridge:

“Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

I think gay people have got more angst on this issue than anybody else because gay people are paying in, through their taxes and actually using far less of the NHS because they tend not to have families, less of the education system for the same reason and all the more reason to be angry with this government for the waste of their taxes.”

“There is so much wrong with this government’s policy, gay people should not just vote Conservative, they have a duty to vote Conservative.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7644851.stm

The financial sector is in crisis. Lehman Brothers has collapsed, Merrill Lynch sold, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalised, and AIG looks like it may well go the same way. In the face of such market turmoil, it is to be expected that the old doomsayers are out in force, bemoaning the folly of the free market, and wallowing in the glories of nationalisation as our collective saviour. But such joy is misplaced. The free market is still only partial, and indeed too young to be blamed for the current economic woes.

To use an analogy, imagine that person A and person B have been given a chain saw. Person A has been given an instruction book, reads it, and follows it to the letter. As such they immediately and quickly get started trimming a few bushes.

Person B, on the other hand, has not been given an instruction book. Instead he must work out how to use the chain saw for himself. Because he is an intelligent person (and can learn from the work performed by A) B quickly works out how to use the chain saw. However, because B does not have an instruction book, he is quite happy to cut everything in site, while A checks each section to ensure that he does not attempt to cut something that is too thick for the chain saw.

Very quickly, B is able to take over A, and produces, because he is not stopping and starting, produces a cleaner and more even cut. Unfortunately, B is suddenly stopped in his tracks when he tries to cut something too thick. The chain saw jams; indeed, the chain saw backfires and B loses his grip. B is shaken for a few minutes, but he quickly recovers and starts again. This time he avoids the thick branch.

Soon, A and B find a poll in the bush made of a material neither has come across before. A can find no reference to the poll in his instructions. As such, both A and B decide to try and cut it. They both fail and the chain saws backfire. Afterwards, A is given a new instruction book, listing iron polls as another thing that the chain saw cannot cut through. B is not given any regulation.

Later, A and B come across a poll made of another material neither have come across. With his new instructions, A is told not to cut through anything that he does not recognise. As such, he does not cut it. In contrast, A tries to cut the poll and finds that it is made of rubber and cuts easily. He can then continue, ending up with a clean shaven bush with only a couple of thick branches and iron polls protruding.

What this is trying to show is that a regulated market is retrospective. With deregulation, banks have been able to make investments they have never been able to try before. Some of these investments, like the metal poll, have proved to be bad. But it is only after the investment was tried that this proved to be the case. As such, the free market has also learnt the lesson.

Nevertheless, some investments, like the graphite poll, were successful. In an ever changing world where regulations are often years behind progress, such investments would not have been realised had it not been for the free market.

Undoubtedly, the current economic crisis derives from banks lending to people who cannot pay them back. The fall-out from this has meant that the liquidity upon which banks depend has contracted. But what should be emphasised is that the free market can now learn from this mistake. As such, person B will not try and cut the thick branch with the chain saw again.

A deregulated market is in its infancy, and people are still learning how to use the freedom it affords. To finish with a final analogy, a child who has been playing virtual rugby for years is finally allowed to play it for real. During his first match he breaks his leg, and mother prevents him from ever playing again. So, he returns to his virtual game. Just imagine the opportunities lost by that child had he been able to learn rugby properly, especially now that he is an overweight couch potato in front of a television screen.

They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer. Not an easy answer, but simple.

Transcript of the 1964 “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech.

The early Wittgenstein thought that all philosophical problems were mere problems of language, and that if this was recognised, the problems with dissolve and not need to be solved.

If the state has a monopoly on a certain area of the economy, it will of course not produce things efficiently. We might try in vain to solve the problem: to improve the state and make it more efficient. But instead we should dissolve the problem, by ending the state monopoly and creating a competitive market.

This won’t be easy. The many employees and rent-seekers of the state will have to find new jobs. But in the long run, the economy will be more efficient and wealthy, and there will be more jobs.

Reagan’s phrase is as applicable to fixing the state by shrinking it as it was to defeating the Soviet Union.

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project”

“First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

This is a freedom I wonder if any of us has a right to take from any human being. I know how I’d feel if you my fellow citizens, that to be an actor I had to be a government employee and work in a national theatre. Take it into your own occupation or that of your husband. All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”

Transcript

“We don’t ask anything in particular of the accuracy of the judgment of individuals as to their own interests, which would suggest some extrinsic criteria. What concerns us is that it is for them to judge.

Autonomy of will, not calculating rationality, is at the heart of economic liberalism. De gustibus non est disputandem shall be the whole of the law. Which is why social authoritarians are seldom genuinely economic liberals, even though they often try to pretend to be. And, for that matter, why economic authoritarians are seldom really social liberals. They are almost always looking to penalise people who don’t live as they deem they should, but see economics as primary and so are most inclined to look there for carrots and sticks.”

Guy Herbert

It should be clear after ten years that the Labour Party are not social liberals; they are unreconstructed socialist authoritarians.

Centralisation has increased under Labour and they will not simply give people the money to buy education and healthcare. They are not content with redistributing money; they insist on spending it for us as well.

But the problem is more than economic. Whether they are trying to ban consensual prostitution, or incarcerating people in state schools, or banning “extreme pornography” with the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, they cannot resist the urge to interfere with people’s private lives.

The following was originally intended as a reply to Mr Gavin Rice’s post ‘On the Inadequacy of Liberty’ but I realised it had become quite long before I had said my peace.

Libertarianism does not have to be about defending individual rights, or freedoms, or paycheques. Rather, it is rendered best to me as a weapon against the might of government. Since we cannot defeat the police force or the Army without creating a chaos out of which a new and mighty government would rise to take their place, we must reign in such governments with limits that take advantage of the legalistic structure with which they deploy their might.

I do not believe, any more, that apologists for modern Liberalism really believe in relativism. Rights-speak often serves as buttery dressing for bitter hedonic calculation, usually made necessary because that calculation is in error. Take, for example, the notion that elective abortions must be legal and state-funded because a woman has a ‘right to choose’. This argument is often given even in reply to the claim that foetuses are humans, whereupon it collapses because we do not entitle anyone else the right to kill in any other situation. Rights-speak here disguises the hedonic calculation that abortion policy makes women happier and spare potential unhappiness to children born into poverty. It is necessary because the claim is in the first instance demonstrably false and in the second uncalculable (happiness units do not average out where they were never gained or lost).

My point there was that the ‘liberalism’ that apologises for modern society and statism is founded in moral intention (the desire to maximise happiness units) and formed in its wonky shape by intuition and cowardice that rail against such an intention (happiness units would be maximised by injecting people with certain hormones for a few years until they die, not by allowing them to live full lives - few but Peter Singer himself would have the balls to bite that bullet). The fact that moral intention can, when misguided or misapplied, lead to destructive policies is why people are so reluctant to use the language of morality when talking politics or economics. Not only do they fear abusing the language. They also, for the most part, share the same ‘moral vision’ and so think it unnecessary.

Benthamite Utilitarianism is not a theory which has won humanity over in the last century or so. It could not. There is no good literature in its defense. Rather, utilitarianism in its most basic form - the belief that the feeling of happiness is what we are supposed to seek with our lives - is a constant temptation offered to human civilisation. Currently, in the vacuum created by the failure of atheism to come up with a coherent account of universal morality, we in secular European countries have reverted to selfish default. We egg our governments on to ‘make’ us feel happy. The men who tend to fill the chambers of these governments have in the most part been produced by the same philosophical, cultural circumstances as ourselves and embrace the task with baton-wielding, needle-jabbing relish.

Mr Rice has below implied that inviting governments to participate in, rather than get out of the way of, helping to create a better society is more effective. I do not agree with him and here is why. He proposes the recapture of virtues to reform and improve our situation. Virtues must, by their nature, be taught by exhortation, encouragement and example. This is the way that Aristotle taught them, that medieval priests taught them and Victorian gentlemen (the few real ones) taught them to the societies in which they lived. Governments have a very different way of enacting their ‘moral visions’. This is not because of which vision it may be, who is in them, or who elected them but because of what governments essentially are: monopolies of force. If you beat a man for ignoring a beggar, you will teach him violence, not charity.

Everything governments do stems from what they are. Taxation is carried out by the threat of force and so every action that governments carry out with the revenue raised is carried out by force. Laws are merely a means of teaching morals to people in the way that parents slap their childrens’ wrists when they try to steal. They impose by force the moral beliefs of a governing minority (or at best the original beliefs of electors filtered through that minority) onto their subjects, often remaking subjects’ beliefs in the minority’s ideological image. This problem is extended in proportion to how far the government extends. The messages given to the taxpayer by institutions like the NHS or the National Curriculum include “plastic surgery must be a human right because if I do not pay for someone else’s I will be imprisoned” and “global warming must be true because if I do not pay for it to be taught I will be imprisoned”. I did my best here to think of the least reprehensible of examples I could.

This is one reason why Libertarianism, primarily legal and secondarily fiscal, because money is power, is necessary if we wish to morally reform society. The alternative, where the power of government is utilised to teach people how to be better, is much easier in less democratic and stable societies - one needs only catch the young king’s ear, or have get together some fesity paramilitaries.

In modern Britain, however, it would require still the uphill struggle of moral education required by the civil method of reform, in order to get sufficient candidates and voters to be better than Utilitarians. The large influence of large government on people’s minds would, however, raise the gradient of that uphill struggle tenfold. Even if this mission were completed, I am sure that those very virtues we had wanted the government to inculcate in the populace would be rendered meaningless or destructive as it beat, cajoled and hollered them at Britain.

The key to all of this may be the term ‘moral reform’. It is a double-entendre. I believe that extortion, threat and violence are immoral. These are the tools government uses to bring about reform, the first made possible by the second and finally the third if necessary. How then can a government bring about moral reform? On the contrary, in order to prevent immoral reform we must restrict its ability to use these tools. The goal of Libertarianism is a muzzle on Leviathan.

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

Attributed to Christopher Hitchens

“Discrimination” is condemned widely nowadays, but usually not understood. Without committing the etymological fallacy, the word “discrimination” comes from the Latin “discriminare”, meaning “to divide”, which comes from “discernere”, to discern. Someone who can discriminate is someone who can tell the difference between things or people, and treat different things or people differently. We discriminate all the time: it’s part of ordinary life. Clearly, some (most) discrimination is good.

In the case of universities, an admissions tutor who admits the most intelligent or promising students is discriminating between candidates: namely, the good-enough candidates and the not-good-enough candidates. This discrimination is good because it is relevant. If we failed in our duty to discriminate between candidates, given the limited supply of places at Cambridge University, we would end up admitting worse candidates at the expense of better ones.

If, on the other hand, admissions tutors were to be influenced by irrelevant factors, such as race or background, and discriminate on those grounds, we would also end up admitting sub-par candidates.

Too often, people criticise “discrimination” when they really should be criticising “irrelevant discrimination”. Discriminating on irrelevant grounds creates sub-optimal outcomes, but failing to discriminate on relevant grounds also creates sub-optimal outcomes. We have a duty not to discriminate on irrelevant grounds, but we also have a duty to discriminate on relevant grounds. Sloppiness with language prevents useful debate on this issue from taking place.

I was pleased, therefore, to read that Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard has condemned attempts by the government to encourage universities to recruit more pupils from state schools.

Obviously admissions tutors should only take into account a candidate’s ability. There is no such thing as “positive [irrelevant] discrimination”: any irrelevant discrimination is bad.

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “You are not doing anybody a favor by sending them where they are more likely to fail, rather than where they are more likely to succeed.”

In the case of “affirmative action” in the US, “where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating.”

Discriminating on the grounds of race is irrelevant discrimination and reduces efficiency and overall welfare. Discriminating on the grounds of what school someone went to is also irrelevant discrimination and will have the same effect, ultimately hurting those it is intended to help.

41% of the students at Cambridge went to private school, but private schools educate only 7% of the pupils in the country. Why do so many more (proportionally) private school pupils get into Cambridge?

One explanation would be discrimination in their favour. However, there is no evidence for this¹. Laudably, the copies of our UCAS forms that are given to admissions tutors do not mention which schools we went to. There is no reason to believe that Cambridge admissions tutors do not simply admit whichever candidates seem the best.

This leads us to the conclusion that private schooled pupils are better, on average. This may be because the pupils were better in the first place, because private schools are selective. Or it may be because private schools make their pupils better, through better teaching. It is probably a bit of both.

We can fix both problems by closing state-run schools, and making paying for education through a voucher system the state’s only involvement. That way, the market can improve the schools, something the government cannot do, but everyone would still be able to go to school regardless of their income.

The government are putting pressure on universities because they do not want to admit the real cause of state-schooled-pupil under-achievement: government involvement in education.

“A spokesman for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills insisted that any measures to encourage widening participation at universities were voluntary. ‘We value the independence of universities, but we also want to get the best students into the best courses,’ he said.”

Note the implication that universities are using their “independence” to discriminate against the “best students”, without any evidence to back it up. On the contrary, universities are using their independence to admit the best students, and the government wants them to apply other criteria. And voluntary measures are merely a prelude to non-voluntary ones, of course. There is a chilling effect here, because universities are likely to do what they know the government wants, even without it asking, in an attempt to forestall more government meddling, since the government provides the money. As another vice-chancellor said: “The Government gives me a cheque every year. I have a public duty to do what the Government says.”

I applaud Cambridge University’s long-term project to become financially independent of the government, so that it can pay for the education of the best pupils, regardless of their financial background, without being subject to government meddling.

—

1. There is a tendency to assume that disparity in figures automatically implies bad discrimination. Both of the poisonous candidates for the CUSU Women’s Sabbatical Officer mentioned that more men than women studied maths at Cambridge, and of those, proportionally more achieved firsts. They ignorantly assumed this was caused by irrelevant discrimination. Of course, it is actually due to the fact that maths geniuses are more likely to be men. While men and women have the same average ability at maths, variance is higher in men, so there are more male maths geniuses and male maths. This is explained by Charles Murray in “The Inequality Taboo”. The following diagram shows this intuitively:

See also http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/04/06/inequality-how-much-is-too-much/

In a response to my own request for non-libertarian articles, I have decided that it would be advantageous to make a case for the insufficiency of liberty as our sole aim and desire, and its inadequacy as a moral principle. The idea is inspired by an article in this month’s “Prospect” magazine by Edward Skidelsky, a philosopher at Exeter University, who makes a case for the importance of the taditional virtues, and the poverty of any attempt to reduce morality to a mere matter of rights and obligations. According to Skidlesky, there is much in the rich intellectual treasury of the pre-moderns from which modernity can learn.

David Cameron was right when he recently warned that we are “becoming quite literally a demoralised society, where nobody will tell the truth any more about what is good and bad.” In a previous edition of “Prospect”, Richard Reeves argues that Britain’s poor lack not only the material but also the moral resources to better themselves. Put simply, Britain’s underclass are by and large lacking in the basic virtues of hard work, self-restraint, a sense of discipline and respect for authority, and consideration for the needs and rights of others. Such moral poverty is the cause of much crime, but also of an ethically impoverished culture that has descended into little more than hedonistic barbarism. Sadly, this is often as true for the rich as it is for the poor, only the rich have enough money to indulge themselves without falling foul of the law. Mr Cameron’s comments would come as a breath of fresh air from the stagnant moral framework called liberalism, if only he had any idea of how it ought to be challenged. The notion of returning to traditional notions of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, is a step in the right direction, but it is of no use if one’s frame of reference has been so defined by liberal, relativist orthodoxy that one is unable to draw conclusions that differ in any way from those of a utilitarian Benthamite.

The liberal “big idea” (to use employ a disgustingly trendy phrase), is that individuals are sovereign in their own sphere, and that only when they infringe upon the rights of others may they be rebuked. Unfortunately, this nice-sounding principle, which underpins both liberalism and libertarianism, is totally inadequate. Firstly, I would argue that individuals are an awful lot less free and sovereign than John Stuart Mill (possibly, in pure academic terms, the worst moralist of ethical intellectual history) would like us to think. For example, a hallmark of modern liberal values is sexual libertinism. However, I would argue that it is very difficult to decide at what point a person infringes the rights of his sexual partner, since, especially on this most animalistic and irrational of activities, we can hardly be described as cool, calculating agents, fully capable of calm decision-making. Someone who is emotionally pressured into sex has, according to the liberal mind, consented, and under the rule of sexual contract, has not been offended by their partner. I would argue that a moral offence has indeed been committed, which has damaged the emotional welfare of the pressured partner. As such, a far more rigid set of rules for sexual behaviour is needed, based on external, general principles, since allowing a contractual model is inadequate, fails to take proper account of the complexity of human emotional behaviour, and as such is downright dangerous.

This is but one example of the failings of the idolatry of liberty. A wonderful diagram for the liberal view of mankind is one of many gardens with fences erected between them, each gardener being free within his own domain but unable to interfere with his neighbour’s garden. This view of human behaviour is simplistic and simply wrong. Humans are by their very nature social, each forms is frame of reference in terms of the influences of others around him, and each is reliant on the activities of others for his very existence. From this much more comprehensive view of human interaction I do not draw the Marxist conclusion that all men must therefore by subordinated to an impersonal state; by disempowering individuals and (dare I say the “c” word?) human communities, the statist philosophy is just as inhuman as the notion of dogmatic individualism.

Skidelsky argues that humans must cultivate virtues in order to give purpose to their existence, but also to improve their relationships with other human beings. For the libertarian, an individual is sovereign in his own sphere, and may indulge himself as much as he wishes so long as he does not inflict upon the rights of others. The problem is, the libertarian concept of not infringing upon the rights of others is not broad or detailed enough. By being selfish, unpleasant and malicious in one’s personal relationships, one may damage other people just as much as if one took property from them (to the libertarian’s mind the greatest capital sin). Skidelsky uses the example of a man who, having completed his “obligations” towards others (e.g. having completed a day’s work and therefore satisfied his contract with his employer), sits down with a six-pack to watch porn all day. To the liberal, who’s moral outlook is shallow and incomplete, he isn’t offending anybody, and is within his “rights”. On the contrary, there is immense fallout from such a self-destructive activity. The man’s attitudes to women and sexuality will become (possibly slowly and subtly, but nevertheless surely) selfish, centred around his own gratification. The man has failed in his obligations to respect women and to treat them as individuals worthy of respect, and to uphold this general principle in terms of society’s moral fabric. By being so irresponsible in cultivating virtues and indulging vice, he will mould himself in such a way that he is likely to behave badly towards others in the future. To the liberal this is irrelevant: the man is operating within his own garden. But the garden fences are permeable. Since we may not propogate any system of coherent values without offending the man’s right to detemine his own lifestyle, we as a society fail that man, since his behaviour will not ultimately result in happiness. Liberalism is unable to distinguish between long-term happiness and short-term hedonism, or to criticise the latter in order to protect the former.

There are left-overs in our minds from the days when virtues were cultivated and vices looked down upon. People find the beer-guzzling porn-watcher instinctively disgusting, and many are revolted by gluttony, obesity and binge drinking. There is a (often culturally suppressed) negative gut reaction when we see another person smoking, as we are aware of the damage they are irresponsibly inflicting on themselves. However, liberalism has rendered us incapable of expressing this revulsion except in liberal terms, hence the (spurious) stress on passive smoking; it “infringes” upon the rights of others.

However, modern society has no frame of reference with which to make sense of these instincts. In centuries past the Church was the bearer of this ethical tradition, but it is now a casualty in the war with the dogma of individual sovereignty. Some churches have embraced individualism and as such have merely leapt into bed with the enemy, and as such will have nothing of relevance to say except to prop up the liberal orthodoxy. The conservative churches who have refused to be reconciled to modern liberal values have been exiled to the cultural fringes of society. Marxism provided a clear sense of values, direction and purpose, as well as a way of explaining the way in which people ought to relate to each other (albeit within the framework of a philosophy with which I profoundly disagree), but it has been superseded by global capitalism.

A quote from Skidelsky: “The erosion of these languages, sacred and secular, explains the ploriferation of targets and guidelines that has overwhelmed the public sector. Targets are an attempt to codify the uncodifiable, to substitute bureaucratic directives for professional honour and wisdom. Their implacable logic denies hospital beds to the sick and swells academic journals with unreadable articles. Yet the main damage they do is to the self-respect of those who must implement them. There is no surer way of destroying public spirit than to deny its existence. Those treated as jobsworths will become jobsworths.”

The academic field of economics is a further domain within which liberal individualism, assuming the sovereignty of the individual as an isolated logical agent, has taken hold. An methodology that treats humans as earners and spenders, producers and consumers, as collections of numbers rather than as morally equipped individuals is a poverty for academia. Economists are debarred from talking about “morality”, except as an instrument of growth - “moral capital”. Furthermore, they can only talk about happiness in terms of the absurdity called “happiness economics”.

Skidlesky is enthusiastic about contemporary virtue ethics, which led Oxford philosophers such as Iris Murdoch away from the prevailing consensus that morals are a matter of personal choice towards the realism of Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics. It allows us to make a moral judgment about another’s actions, and indeed about the person who performed them, without risk of being told that we are imposing a mere opinion, and impeding the object of our criticism’s rights to moral sovereignty. I am less certain, since society takes many years to catch up with academic opinion, if it catches up at all. The inadequate theories of Bentham and J S Mill have become so ingrained in the public mind, the concept of choice valued so highly, the notion of one’s own preference or what one personally feels comfortable with reigns so supreme, that it is hard to see society’s mass retreat from the moral abyss.

Libertarians and conservatives have much in comman - politically, at least. We both know that taking individual human behaviour and locating it within “society” rather than individuals is artifical and wrong: if a criminal commits a crime then it is his fault, not society’s. However, for libertarians the matter stops there. The criminal is sovereign in his own moral garden, chose to break down a fence, and will pay the price. For the intellectual cultural or social conservative the question must penetrate deeper, and we must find ways of attributing blame to individuals while also identifying and tackling the sources of immoral (and I mean immoral) behaviour. We must abandon garden-fence theory, and look more closely at the complex ways in which individuals interelate, and realise that while the market is useful for producing wealth, it is not universal explanatory theory for human behaviour. The consequences of our actions are much more widespread than we like to think, and we must not abdicate moral responsibility by using the excuse that we are individually sovereign. A common values system, allowing us to make judgments about what is really right and really wrong, must be rediscovered, and we must realise that humans have an obligation to cultivate behaviour that is good, not merely behaviour that doesn’t adversely affect others in a direct, immediate sense. We need to replace “liberty” as an end in itself with a rather old-fasioned idea, which Plato called “the Good”, and we need to realise that there is a lot more to being good than to keeping within the boundaries of one’s own garden fence. In order to set about achieving this societal redirection we could do a lot worse than rediscovering and applying virtue ethics.

This article draws on ideas and arguments from “The return of goodness” by Edward Skidelsky, in “Prospect” magazine, September 2008