Comment by thegrimmest
2 years ago
Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms:
1) All people are moral equals
2) There is no moral oracle
It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answer.
Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity. Liberal literature is also pretty clear about what it is:
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
Centralized authority, no matter how well-meaning, has failed at every turn. Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else. More fundamentally, I think it's critical to separate your personal moral compass from a moral framework you are comfortable using force to impose on other people. The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
> Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms
Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle and setting yourself up as a moral oracle.
The core of liberalism is not an underlying system of ethical axioms: Mill was both a liberal and a utilitarian, but you can just as easily argue against liberalism from a utilitarian standpoint—moreover, the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian. No, the unifying source of liberalism is the political status quo which produced it. The real champions of liberalism were the capital owners who stood to profit by it, and who had the influence to bring it about, ousting the aristocracy in the process. The idea that liberal hegemony is a moral triumph and not a political one is simply history being written by the victors.
> Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity.
It's more correct to say that liberalism and industrial prosperity were both products of the industrial revolution, rather than one being responsible for the other. Illiberal authoritarian powers like China and India are demonstrating that industrial prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism, although I wouldn't consider that an endorsement of their respective ideologies.
> The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
The first step to literally anything is thinking you know better. You can't escape the duty of having to make judgements. Inaction is itself an action that can cause harm, and there's no a priori reason to privilege the choice not to act.
> Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else.
It injures the children. Besides which, raising a sufficiently hateful child does injure others if you ultimately induce that child to commit a hate crime.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The operant question here is what it means to "injure someone else" and how we intend to "limit the rights of other men to assure others' enjoyment of the same rights." Natural rights are a very flexible concept. Do I have a right to healthcare, or do hospitals have a right to deny me care for profit? Do I have a right to dump my garbage in the river, or do you have a right to clean drinking water? "Natural" rights are an oxymoron; every right is contrived, and deciding which rights we choose to legitimize and prioritize allows us to sculpt a flavour of natural rights theory to suit any belief system whatsoever. For example, just about anyone would agree that a person has a right to evict a violent burglar from their home. A conservative might further argue that Americans have a right to violently detain illegal immigrants in defence of their borders. Finally, a Nazi might plead that Aryans have an absolute right to defend their homeland from ethnic invaders. By tweaking exactly which rights you get and to what extent you get them, you can justify practically anything. That's why I find utilitarianism so much more rigorous.
Just want to say thank you for your comments here. Impressive writing and argumentation.
Thank you! That really makes my day.
> You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
> it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal.
You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.
> The answer, should you produce it
The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.
> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.
The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.
> Power is either diluted or concentrated.
Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.
> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.
Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?
I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.
Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.
Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.
I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.
I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.
> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.
The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.
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