I don’t think that people deserve to be treated badly because of their professed or perceived sexuality, because physical/verbal bullying is a horrible thing and nobody should have to be the victim of the emotional torture associated with anti-homosexualist abuse.

Having said this, I am reasonably sure (and do forgive my optimism) that if someone were being seriously victimised because of certain character traits, he could file a complaint with the official police who, I’m sure, would be able throw the book the culprit for assault or affray or intimidation. There are already laws in place protecting innocent people persecution at the hands of ruffians and bigots and the like  (I do acknowledge –on occasion from firsthand experience – that the police sometimes fail to defend the meek, but that’s not really the point of this entry).

This latest amendment to the law, however, issuing an interdiction forbidding incitement of hatred“against a group of persons defined by reference to sexual orientation” is a different matter entirely. I’m sure that there are members of the government who genuinely (and ill-advisedly) believe that passing a myriad of acts of Parliament against discrimination is an effective and reasonable way to protect the innocent. I’d like to believe that the legislators in the Labour party who came up with this had nothing but the best of intentions, however misguided. Needless to say, I rather struggle with this article of faith.

First of all, I’m not entirely sure how one incites hatred against a group of people. One might try and convince others that a certain practice is inherently disordered and that all persons should refrain from this practice. One might try and label that practice as perverted or disgusting or a vile abomination. Obviously some might object to these terms – still, that’s really a matter of opinion. Saying unpleasant things isn’t a particularly awful thing to do. That is, provided it isn’t a specific attack directed at an individual person with the intention of harming them. There is a world of difference, a big thick marker of distinction between making a criticism of a practice and personally harassing those that enjoy that practice.

As an aside, it’s a tolerated maxim that racist jokes are unacceptable in public, but between individuals they might raise a few chuckles. I don’t think that jokes based on the colour of a person’s skin are all that hilarious per se, rather, because they’re forbidden and cheeky, they create humour simply as a result of their illicit nature. Prepare yourself, therefore, for a deluge of off-colour remarks about the male genital tract. I might be wrong, but over time I suspect that the risk of being incited to hatred will turn those frowns upside down. Putting homosexuals on some sort of pedestal, protected from criticism, probably isn’t a good thing – time will ultimately tell whether or not there’ll be some unexpected consequence of doing this.

The minutiae aside, this law has rather disturbing ramifications on the old free speech thing. First of all, the Government has now reduced the number of possible combinations of words that one can say without fear of prosecution. There’s a good chance that this will result in various comedians having to reshuffle their repertoires – (Rowan Atkinson, for example, notably spoke out against laws that tried to immunise religious groups from ridicule) – this might mean that the output on the BBC is even less amusing than usual. It might mean that Stephen Green of Christian Voice gets another visit from the police. These, however, are minor side-effects of the legislation.

What i find particularly awful about laws of this nature is that it promotes and propagates a culture of censorship, of policeman reading through websites looking for questionable comments. The law doesn’t just apply to fringe politicians;  it covers “publishing or distribution of written material, but also the public performance of a play, distributing, showing or playing a recording, broadcasting a programme and the possession of inflammatory material”.

Even worse, when a government takes this sort of attitude, it prompts a fear of the state. It prompts a negative, worried society of self-censorship, where people have to consciously modify what they say out of fear of being arrested. We were once proud of the fact that even though we feared communism, we allowed Communist Party candidates to run for election. We were once a bastion of civil liberties and the freedom of expression. Now we’re descending into a horrible dystopia where people are going to become worried that a seemingly innocuous comment will result in them being hauled before a judge and sent for compulsory rehabilitation.

Edit: Grahame Archer on ”CentrerRight” also covers this.

Edit again: Susan Wilkinson runs a Swiss Bed and Breakfast in Berkshire. She quite recently turned away two men who wished to sleep in the same bed (at the same time) because it is “against her convictions”. Given that she’d already accepted the booking, and that the blurb states that “warm & friendly welcome awaits all guests”, I think that this was rude. I do think that she should have the liberty to refuse to house whomsoever she pleases – however, she should probably have made this more obvious.

However, the new law goes a step further in criminalising those who dare to vocalise their convictions. Should copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church be judged “inflammatory” and banned from publication because of #2357? Should Mrs Wilkinson should be reported to the police because she doesn’t want intrinsically disorderd activities going on in her guest house?

In today’s issue of The Tablet (the international Catholic weekly Founded 1840 – Britain’s oldest journal bar The Spectator), that publication’s characteristically hysterical Obamamania has been taken beyond all moral acceptability, orthodoxy, or any pretence of Catholic sensibility. This time its about healthcare, or “Obamacare”. I shall elucidate.

On political issues the Catholic Church has always been a bit split; prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) the Church mainly focused on critiquing liberalism, secularism, “Modernism” (a sceptical and anti-authoritarian outlook), socialism, Communism, in the 19th Century democracy itself, sexual liberalism, divorce and all the traditional thorny medical ethical issues – abortion, euthanasia, artificial contraception, etc. However, since Vatican II there has been an increasing focus on social issues, including “social justice”, workers’ rights, the evils of excessive capitalism, and re-focusing economics in such a manner that the human being is seen as the end rather than merely the means of economic activity. Laudable moral intentions, for sure, but often displaying a lack of awareness of how economics really works. How do we MAKE people care about each other? The answer to this is pretty unclear, other than everyone becoming Christians and being charitable towards one another voluntarily.

However, The Tablet chooses to interpret these moral imperatives solely according to a narrow, statist understanding. This is certainly a long way from Pius IX’s 1846 pronouncement that socialism is “a pest”, and reflects an uninformed and naive outlook. Having championed Obama during his election campaign, the (highly unorthodox) editorial of The Tablet  has proudly asserted from on high that “U.S. Bishops must back Obama.” The argument presented is dangerous and wrong – that the Church in America ought to shelve its problems with state-sanctioned abortion (in the Church’s view mass state infanticide) and all the other areas where monolithic healthcare systems, such as the NHS, trample over traditioanl Christian moral values, in order to pursue the “general principle of the common good”. In contrast to this “common good” of public healthcare, the issue of abortion is passed off as a “specifically Catholic issue”, and the editor attacks the Bishops for failing to “put the promotion of social justice above their churchly priorities.” Sorry, one issue, that of the moral imperative to heal the sick, cannot be so warmly lauded as “social justice” while an equally important imperative – not to kill the unborn – is given the mere rhetorical status of “their own churchly priorities”. This is unfair, un-Catholic, cheap and incredibly one-sided, and a Catholic publication ought to know better.

Furthermore, The Tablet presents the Obamacare issue as solely one of a distinction between people either having healthcare or not – it’s either given to them graciously from Their Lord Barack or denied them by greedy capitalists, apparently the “robber barons” of our age. The subtleties of the difficulties of state funding, the inefficiencies and abuses generated by a universal “free-at-the-point-of-use” principle, as weighed against the evil of people not having healthcare, are dealt with using one sweeping, blunt conclusion: the state must provide universal care, so saith the Lord, and the Bishops are obligated to pressure for this. All else, even the rights of the unborn, are secondary.

Even if one accepts that Church teaching on imperatives to heal the sick must translate directly into state-run healthcare (a highly contentious assumption), one must surely accept that this is less clear and more tenuous than Church teaching on abortion, which is thoroughly clear-cut. What’s more, the Church must fight the battle of attitudes: we in the West generally do not see any intrinsic evils in state healthcare, but are morally apathetic about abortion – the Bishops must draw a line in the sand and defend it, because once Obamacare is accepted in principle it is only a small step further to sanction state-funded abortion en masse. Even if you personally agree with abortion, or believe in the right to decide for oneself whether it is acceptable, then surely on the latter principle one must oppose the confiscation of taxpayers’ money to spend by the state on abortion “services” against the will of many of the taxpayers? Opposition to abortion in the US is widespread and many will be outraged to see their money spent in this way. The Bishops are entirely right to focus on this issue and the need to keep abortion out of the state system. This is not a “mistake” and The Tablet, if it makes any claim to retain the name of a Catholic weekly, ought to be ashamed of itself.

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.

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