What kind of morality fits in best with liberalism?
I won’t attempt a complete answer here, as it’s such a complex topic. I can, though, point to some of the features of a liberal morality.
Liberals want the individual, above all, to be self-determining. Therefore, for liberals the moral thing is that our autonomy in choosing what to do remains unimpeded. It matters less what we choose than that we have freely chosen it.
This means that the “moral” thing is the act of defining for ourselves what the good is. That is why Dr Leslie Cannold, an Australian ethicist, claims that,
Defining our own good, and living our lives in pursuit of it, is at the heart of a moral life.
But this makes a liberal morality, at least in certain respects, permissive. It means that whatever we do is moral, as long as we have freely chosen to do it.
According to Dr Mirko Bargaric, an Australian human rights lawyer,
we are morally complete and virtuous individuals if we do as we wish so long as our actions do not harm others
The permissive nature of this formulation is clear enough: we are made perfectly moral simply by doing what we want, just as long as we don’t harm others.
Where does this leave traditional morality? It was traditional to believe that there are enduring, objective, knowable moral truths. Some behaviours, therefore, could be judged as being inherently right or wrong.
This doesn’t sit well with the liberal understanding of morality. It means that our behaviour is not entirely ours to determine; that there are rightly limitations on how we act; and that the source of these limitation is external to our own will.
For liberals, this will seem both artificial and oppressive. In a liberal culture, a traditional moral code will often be explained away as an act of power by one social group over another and traditional moral restraints are likely to be challenged in the name of personal liberation.
This makes liberal morality, in one of its phases at least, transgressive. Those who break traditional moral codes or taboos will be looked on favourably as paving the way forward, or perhaps as being cool and cutting-edge.
As an example, consider the case of Clare Edwards. She’s a young Perth woman who advertised in her local paper for sperm donors and then raised the resulting children on welfare. Her local paper, the Subiaco Post, praised her as representing the,
independent and can-do spirit of her generation, young people unbounded by the conventions of older generations
She is morally virtuous, according to the paper, not because she followed an action that is inherently good, but because she acted independently (autonomously) by breaking a moral convention.
Finding a moral language
But what happens if you’re a liberal and you want to object to something on moral grounds? It might be difficult for you to find the language to express your moral objections. After all, if anything that people freely choose to do is moral, then how can you criticise someone’s choices?
One way that a liberal can object to something on moral grounds is to claim that a choice hasn’t been freely made. Perhaps the choice has been coerced in some way, or perhaps it isn’t an authentic want but has been made for the benefit of others.
As an example of this, consider the attitude of Mia Freedman to raunch culture. Mia Freedman was once an editor of the Australian women’s magazines Cosmopolitan and Cleo. When, though, she had a daughter of her own she turned against the raunch culture peddled to young women (in magazines like the ones she edited):
Raunch culture alarms me horribly, especially as I get older and now that I'm the parent of a daughter. Women embrace it because of the shock value, but that will wear off...
Her moral disapproval, though, met resistance from her own mother:
Ironically, I've found myself having to explain to my mother why raunch culture is not a good thing. She's like, "But hang on, isn't this what we fought for as feminists? For women to be able to express themselves in whatever way they choose and reclaim their sexuality?”
Mia Freedman made this reply:
I said, this is different. It's not about women having a threesome because they want to have one. It's about a girl pashing another girl in a nightclub to impress a boy. If it was an organic expression of how they feel, I'd say go for it.
This is all very liberal. The debate is not about whether the acts themselves are moral or not, but about whether women are truly following their own wants. The mother is still in transgressive mode: she is focused on the struggle to break down moral impediments to women’s behaviour. The daughter agrees that there should be no impediments, but she argues that young women are not following their own, authentic wants.
It’s not a very effective way to express a moral objection. All that the young women pursuing a raunch culture have to do to meet this objection is to affirm that they are, indeed, doing what they do to empower themselves, rather than to please boys.
And that’s why actions are often justified in a liberal society in terms of agency, empowerment and free will. These are qualities which are supposed to prove that our choices are authentically ours – which then makes our actions moral.
A good example of this is the controversy surrounding a Nandos TV advertisement. The ad featured a pole dancing mother, naked except for a g-string, thrusting her backside at men for tips, before returning home to her family with a chicken dinner. After public complaints, the ad was brought before the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau. Nandos defended the ad on the basis that the mother:
was clearly in charge of her own destiny. The woman we depict in the commercial is shown to be intelligent, in control and making her own choices. She is not being coerced by the man in any way. She is acting in accordance with her own free will … Many women see the open display of female sexuality as a forthright display of empowerment.
The Board agreed that the woman was portrayed in a way that made it clear that she was not coerced and that therefore there was nothing to object to in the ad:
The Board noted many complaints about the depiction of a mother and wife as a pole dancer/prostitute … The Board considered that this advertisement depicted a strong in control woman who went about her work in a professional manner (wearing a suit to work), enjoyed her work, enjoyed being 'sexy' and enjoyed time with her family. The Board considered that this advertisement depicted the woman as being a strong and empowered woman.
The moral issue is no longer whether it is right to show a mother prostituting herself for money in a TV ad, but whether or not the woman is portrayed as making an authentically free choice. And to make it clear that it really is an authentic choice the person doing it is described as strong, empowered, in control and enjoying what they do.
Here’s another example of this logic at work. In an American newspaper burlesque dancing was defended on these grounds:
DeLuxe said burlesque ... represented a rebellion against the restrictive morality of the time ... Modern burlesque performers are clearly in charge of their own destiny ... "The woman doing it is completely in control of her own sexuality. She decides."
This is a dual defence. First, burlesque is defended as being transgressive: as liberating individuals from “the restrictive morality of the time”. Second, it is emphasised that the burlesque dancers are entirely uncoerced, that they are in control and in charge of what they doing.
In short, it is difficult to express moral disapproval of an act by claiming that a choice is inauthentic. This is too easily met by the counterclaim that a choice is empowering or is a genuine expression of someone’s agency.
There are other ways that liberals can try to express moral disapproval. They can argue about whether someone has genuinely consented to an act, but this in practice places few limits on what people might do.
Liberals can also invoke the no harm principle, the idea that anything is permissible as long as it doesn’t harm others. But the general thrust of this principle is a permissive one; it seems to be understood as meaning “As long as you don’t physically injure or steal from anyone else, you can do whatever”. So, again, it’s not very useful for expressing moral concerns.
Finally, liberals can talk in a more abstract way about the need for people to show respect. This is a more useful option for liberals as the notion of respect doesn’t necessarily rule anything out and at the same time it can be used to appeal to people’s moral natures.
This can sometimes result in mixed messages. For instance, men might have it drummed into them that they must respect women, whilst at the same time living in an “anything goes” lad and ladette culture.
A case in point involves an Australian ethicist, Professor Catharine Lumby. She rejects morality on the basis that it isn’t something that is self-defined:
Morality is a blueprint for living that someone hands to you.
She prefers the idea of “ethics” as this is something that can be individually negotiated:
Ethics is a zone we all enter when we find ourselves, by choice or necessity, negotiating those rules.
What matters to a liberal like Professor Lumby is not what is chosen, but that we ourselves get to do the choosing.
In 2004, she was appointed by the National Rugby League to educate rugby players about sexual ethics, following complaints about some players having group sex with young women. She made it clear that she did not believe in an objective, knowable moral good:
The idea that group sex is abhorrent is a very particular view. What matters is that we avoid asserting moral beliefs as moral truths.
What did matter was the issue of consent:
ABC reporter: There have been stories of a culture of group sex in rugby league. What do you think of group sex? Do you think it's OK if it's consensual?
Lumby: Speaking as an academic, I think that there's no problem with any behaviour which is consensual in sexual terms.
She also added that there must be respect:
[Lumby] has since said what matters isn't that players use women in group sex, but that they treat these women with respect...
But here’s the problem. The police who investigated the complaints against the rugby players found no evidence of a lack of consent. Whatever damage was done happened despite consent being given.
Second, if Lumby were right we would have to believe that young rugby players are going to develop an attitude of respect for women who consent to casual group sex. It’s that mixed message that tells young men that there are no real moral standards, and that therefore anything goes, but that they should still in a more old-fashioned way have respect for women.
Andrew Bolt picked up on this point when he questioned how Professor Lumby could,
imagine sportsmen boozily sharing some groupie they've picked up for a gang-bang and treating her with courtesy. As an equal. With respect...
Yes, Lumby really seems to think that's how gang bangs work. Or could, if only we left our sad old morality on the chair with our jeans.
Intrusive
So far I have described the permissive side of a liberal morality, the one which is focused on the idea that something is moral if you freely choose to do it.
But there is another side to a liberal morality, one which is experienced by many people as intrusive or even authoritarian.
How does this aspect of a liberal morality come about? If the liberal aim is a self-determining life, then liberals will want to make predetermined qualities like our sex and ethnicity not matter, at least in a social setting.
But these predetermined qualities are basic to life. They help to shape our identities and our relationships and are not easy to suppress.
In an effort to make this suppression work, liberals have strictly enforced a moral code on the rest of society. As part of this, they have treated objections to their programme as being morally indefensible (sometimes using highly charged moral terms like “sexism” and “racism”).
Liberals have used state power to enforce speech codes, they have created at times a stifling atmosphere of political correctness, and they have used their influence in the institutions to intimidate those who would otherwise speak out.
At a more personal level, some liberals are so passionate or vehement when it comes to certain issues that there is no arguing with them. They simply treat opposing views as being morally inadmissible.
Liberalism therefore generates two very different moral attitudes, depending on what kind of issue is under discussion. If it is a case of discussing what is inherently moral or immoral, a liberal will usually take a permissive view, based on the idea that something is moral as long as it is freely chosen.
But if it’s a case of sex or race (or some other predetermined quality) being thought to matter, then many liberals will see this as a major moral failing in society requiring vigorous intervention from the authorities.
And so, despite the existence of a permissive attitude within liberalism, it is sometimes the more intolerant and intrusive side of a liberal morality which people find most striking.
Privilege
There is another aspect of a liberal morality that deserves discussion. Liberals believe that it is the act of choosing for ourselves that makes something moral. But this then requires a system in which everyone gets to choose for themselves equally.
What this means is that liberals will hold it to be dangerously wrong for one person, or a group of people, to pursue their own self-determining choices at the expense of others seeking to do the same thing.
So it is part of the liberal mindset to focus on the possible injustice of some groups in society holding more power to pursue their self-determining choices than others.
What causes some groups to hold more power? There are liberals who believe that there are certain groups of people (e.g. men, whites) who have created artificial categories (of gender or race or sexuality) in order to uphold an unearned privilege in relation to other groups.
The results of this kind of moral thinking are problematic. First, people are encouraged to see society not as an organic unity, but as a collection of groups standing in a relationship of privilege and oppression to each other.
Men and women, for instance, are no longer thought of as working in different ways towards a common, mutually beneficial aim. Instead, the focus is on the way that men and women stand in opposition to each other as agents of oppression or resistance. This can lead to a general attitude of bad faith. For instance, the efforts of men at work might no longer be seen as a sacrifice that men make to support their families. Instead, these efforts might be interpreted as a hostile act by which men deny women opportunities in the workplace.
An even greater problem is that some groups get tagged as agents of oppression (most usually whites and males) which then leads them to be treated as morally exceptional – in a very negative sense. It becomes possible to lose moral status and standing, not because of the quality of your actions or character, but because of the group you belong to.
What consequences does this loss of moral status have? One of the milder outcomes is that if you do well it might be attributed to your privilege, whereas for anyone else it might be explained by hard work or talent. Or it might be considered just if there is “positive” discrimination against you in employment or education, as you will be marked as privileged regardless of your personal circumstances.
The loss of moral standing goes further than this. The assumption is that white males organised themselves together as an artificial category in order to benefit from an unearned privilege at the expense of everyone else. This is the sense in which white males are tagged as morally exceptional.
Therefore, if a white male defends his own tradition it is assumed that he is motivated by an immoral desire to uphold a white supremacy (privilege over others), rather than, as with other groups, being motivated by a love of his own culture, history or people.
Similarly, some liberals have come to believe that a society with an historic white majority is morally unacceptable. In part, this is simply because a majority group is thought to dominate a society and this is held to put them in a privileged position relative to other groups. You can lose moral standing (and be stigmatised) merely for belonging to a majority population.
However, this logic is applied more severely to white societies, as these societies are thought to be based on a systemic racism designed to privilege the white majority. The result is that a society with an historic white majority is considered illegitimate in a way that societies with non-white majorities wouldn’t be.
But the worst manifestation of this aspect of liberal morality is that some radical liberals come to see white males as a “cosmic enemy” – as being the group that is holding back the achievement of a just and equal moral order. The aim of these radical liberals is to deconstruct whiteness and white communities as part of the onward march of human progress.
Finally, there is one other problem with the particular way that liberals focus on relationships of privilege: it creates the wrong kind of incentives. It means that you improve your moral standing not by cultivating character but by demonstrating that your group is more oppressed or disadvantaged than others. This can encourage a contest for victim status, in which people look to their weaknesses rather than their strengths. It means, too, that there is a danger in a group improving its position through hard-work or self-discipline, as this can leave it vulnerable to accusations of a privilege and the loss of moral standing that comes with this.
Non-interference
I wrote earlier that the liberal focus is on the danger of one person or a group of people pursuing their own self-determining choices at the expense of others.
This has another peculiar consequence, namely that liberals will tend to emphasise moral qualities of non-interference. The aim will be not to infringe on how other people define the good, and so liberals might recognise as virtues qualities such as tolerance, openness, inclusiveness and respect, as well as an acceptance of diversity, non-discrimination, pluralism and non-judgementalism.
One problem with defining morality this way is that it makes it difficult to hold together a particular tradition. In other words, it will tend to be a dissolving morality, rather than a sustaining one.
Why? At one level, the problem is that a morality of non-interference is silent when it comes to the kinds of qualities that might uphold a tradition, such as loyalty or love of country. All that is required of the liberal moral actor is a kind of neutrality, a willingness to accept whatever other individuals define as the good.
Furthermore, when people are persuaded that neutrality is the correct moral position, they are more likely to take the role of passive observers who move amongst other cultures and traditions rather than asserting one of their own.
And even if the liberal moral actor does identify positively with his own tradition, he is likely to see this as his own self-defined or self-created good that applies to himself alone. His love for his own tradition loses the status of an objective good to be defended more generally at a public level. This effectively leaves traditions undefended; they can be appreciated individually, but not upheld as a common good.
A morality of non-interference dissolves traditions in another way. If what counts as moral are qualities of diversity, non-discrimination and inclusiveness, then it will seem immoral to uphold a particular tradition of your own. Such traditions will be criticised as being too homogeneous, monocultural and exclusive of others. You cannot, in other words, have particularity and still be perfectly inclusive or non-discriminatory. The defence of particularity requires boundaries and distinctions that a morality of non-interference doesn’t allow.
So the problem is not just one of neutrality, but of an active bias against upholding a tradition.
There’s another way that a morality of non-interference leads to such a bias.
If you believe that the most virtuous person is the one who is most committed to qualities like diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination, how will you attempt to show your superior virtue?
Perhaps you will choose to identify with whoever is thought to be the most “other” to your own society. This, after all, is a strong way to show the degree of your commitment to inclusion and pluralism and other similar qualities.
But if this is how superior virtue is demonstrated, then it can become a mark of elite moral status to demonstrate solidarity with those most alien to your tradition, rather than with those you are most closely related to.
This encourages a split between the social elite and the rank and file. The elite see the rank and file as morally backward in comparison to themselves and instead of a solidarity based on a shared tradition the elite look instead to those who are thought to be the least connected to this tradition.
There is one other criticism to be made of a morality based on qualities of non-interference. This morality is supposed to prize tolerance, respect and non-judgementalism. In practice, though, it can produce fiercely intolerant attitudes.
It has to be remembered that liberals see the process of making self-determining choices as a key aspect of what makes us human. So if someone is thought to violate the morality of non-interference, it is held to be a most offensive and dangerous act – it is considered to be denying an equal status to others and infringing on their human rights and dignity.
This can make liberals very intolerant of what they see as intolerance (but which for non-liberals might simply be a defence of other positive goods in life). Non-liberals quickly pick up on this two-sided nature of liberal morality. They see how liberals express hatred toward or harshly judge non-liberal beliefs, behaviours or institutions, whilst otherwise condemning intolerance or judgemental attitudes.
Demoralising
If a single, general criticism of liberal morality had to be made it would be that a liberal morality is not “moralising” but rather demoralising.
The liberal approach makes our moral acts largely meaningless. If something is made moral because I freely choose it, then it doesn’t really matter what I choose. One act is as good as another as long as it is my authentic want.
It’s true that a liberal might see the act of choosing itself as a moral thing, but that is hardly a great moral achievement. It’s not that difficult to follow our own wants.
In contrast, the challenge in the preliberal past was to discern a moral course of action and to discipline ourselves to it. That was part of the cultivation of character and a quest for moral excellence.
Furthermore, in the past it was thought that in acting morally we were connecting with a higher good, that is to say, with objective, enduring, moral truths that transcend the self. But a liberal morality does not transcend the self, it remains at the level of our own subjective wants.
Nor can a liberal morality satisfy our need to belong to a moral community. It is difficult to establish moral ideals or standards when the emphasis is on each individual defining his own good and tolerating others doing the same. How can a moral standard, in the sense of a limit on what is considered acceptable, be upheld within this framework? Whatever the least morally refined are willing to do will set the new low point of what is acceptable within society. You end up with a morality of the lowest common denominator.
Yes, liberals attempt to overcome this loss of moral community by focusing on the values of non-interference as the new moral standards. We are thought to be good people if we hold to these qualities and villains if we don’t. And if our community keeps to the values of non-interference we are allowed to hold it in positive regard; if it doesn’t, we are supposed to feel a collective moral shame.
But this reworking of moral community is in itself demoralising. Did communities in the past keep to liberal values of non-interference? They didn’t because they were concerned to defend their particularity. There is a good chance, therefore, that when liberals do ask whether they can hold their community in a positive regard, that they will answer negatively. The past will never measure up to liberal values and so liberals might either turn away from their heritage, or focus on the idea of a morally progressive present generation starting anew, or else have a sense that the past is something to associate with collective shame or guilt.
There do exist liberals who take a more upbeat approach. These liberals take pride in how their society has led the way in promoting liberal values. They have a positive sense of their society as a moral community.
But this too puts the members of that society in a difficult position. They are being asked to base their positive regard for their community on the observance of a moral code that is, as we saw previously, dissolving of their own particular tradition. What is given with one hand is taken away with the other.
A liberal morality also has a demoralising effect when it sets apart groups of people by focusing on how they stand in relationships of oppression and privilege to each other, rather than seeing them as working together for the good of society.
This is particularly true of the relationship between men and women. Normally we would bring a certain amount of moral idealism to our roles as men and women and to the way that we support the opposite sex in a relationship. But it is difficult to maintain this idealism when the focus is on how men and women stand apart from each other as agents of oppression and resistance.
Finally, a liberal morality is demoralising to those who are tagged as belonging to an oppressor group, such as whites and men. If you are categorised this way, you lose moral standing regardless of how you act in society or what your personal circumstances are. There is a moral stigma that stays with you and that cannot be redeemed.
Who?
In a liberal morality, we ourselves make something moral by choosing it freely. We ourselves get to define the good (for us).
I hope I have succeeded in suggesting the kinds of problems that this starting point leads to. But there remains one last question to be answered. If we ourselves don’t get to define the good, then who does?
That’s the response often made by liberals when their moral system is questioned. Liberals are fearful that someone else will assume the responsibility for determining how they should act morally. Who, they ask, could possibly be entrusted with the authority for deciding what is moral?
The answer is that there is no single person with such authority.
The way that individuals within a society come to an understanding of what is moral is complex. We might have a moral intuition, or a sense derived from conscience, of what is inherently moral or immoral. We might also learn from the consequences of actions what brings harm to ourselves or others. We might use moral reasoning to ensure that our moral beliefs are logically consistent. Our moral sense might be derived as well from the inherited experience of a community, of what the best minds have thought over time, or of how a community has learnt over many generations from its mistakes. Or perhaps we might learn from role models within the community who we particularly admire. It is possible that we might be influenced as well by our function in society; a soldier, for instance, might be oriented to qualities like courage and loyalty, whilst for a small trader qualities of industry and honesty might loom larger. It will usually be the case as well that religious texts and traditions will influence the moral code of a society.
And the moral sense we derive from all this has to be fitted together, so that the different aspects of reality, such as the natural, the social and the spiritual, are appropriately and harmoniously ordered.
It is not the case that one person in society can be delegated to suddenly decide on all this. Instead, it is an ongoing process of a whole society, a continuing attempt to refine the moral understanding. This process takes place within families, schools, universities, churches, political parties, parliaments and the media. Both the fine arts and popular culture have an influence.
It is impossible to guarantee that a society will get it completely right, but the closer a society approaches to a true understanding, the more likely it is to stay on course in its development and to retain the loyalty and love of its members.
So the aim is to get as close as possible to a rightly ordered moral framework, and to use the collective intelligence and wisdom of a society over time to get there.
0 comments:
Post a Comment