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
