This might seem a strange title for a
blogpost written by a political philosopher, especially one that tends to harp on about the importance of human rights. Am I trying to put myself out of
business? What on earth could I mean?
What I'm suggesting is that the only real, binding
principles (rules, virtues etc) we possess are moral ones, governing how each
person should treat each other. I’m suggesting we should resist believing that
independent, new moral principles emerge once we start thinking about the
domain of political authority and political community. Of course, I agree lots
of political principles remain immensely important—the separation of powers,
the rule of law, democracy, rights and so on. I doubt, though, that any of
these principles enjoy their own independent
moral validity. Rather, I think these principles draw their justification from
pre-existing moral principles—the same moral principles governing how you and I
should treat each other in general, including if we met on a desert
island. We wind up with the rule of law, rights, checks and balances, and all
the rest because these principles reflect our ordinary moral duties and
entitlements writ larger, and shaped out of the capacities and the threats of these
political institutions.
What's the big deal?
‘So what?’ you ask. I think denying
political morality matters because so many people throughout history believe in it. They hold that political morality exists as an independent entity.
It is autonomous. By ‘autonomous’ I
mean political morality inhabits a normative realm unto itself. It cannot be
derived from ordinary personal morality. Funnily enough, people who believe
this still tend to agree about all the ordinary, interpersonal moral principles.
They agree we should not lie or cheat, harm or kill; we should not seize more
than a fair share of things we have not created; we should help others in need.
And so on. But once we come together as a political community, now, they think,
entirely new ways of governing our
lives should rule! Now we can rethink everything! Now we are empowered to come
together as distinct parts of a single organic unit, a magnificent polis or
grand nation-state! Or we must all now start following and drawing our law from
exactly the same religion or from some community-constructed ‘form of life’! Or
(a present fashion) now we can start living by entirely new and deeper
principles of equality, seeing every material difference between us as crying
out for justification! Or (another present fashion) at last we can cast off our
chains and start upholding stringent notions of absolute human freedom!
Practically no-one would advance these principles
as ordinary rules of basic morality—as all of them effectively amount to using
violence against people who are for the most part minding their own business
and may well be upstanding and hardworking members of their local community. No-one
would imagine that Alf should convert his neighbour Betty at the point of a
sword, or force her to conform to some way of life he and his friends think
constitutes objective happiness, or cut her down to his level when she
prospers. But once we come together in a state, all this changes, and all these
things are now possible: we effortlessly and unthinkingly adopt new political
principles justifying all this and more.
So this is what I am arguing against: any autonomous
political morality that puts forward new principles of justice that we would
not propose as part of ordinary interpersonal morality.
John
Locke’s ‘State of Nature’
I think this rejection of independent political
morality helps us understand the views of the seventeenth century liberal
philosopher John Locke and the way he uses the ‘State of Nature’. Effectively, Locke’s
state of nature amounts to nothing more than ordinary people governed by
ordinary morality. We all respect each other’s rights; we tolerate their
religious practices; we make sure we don’t take up so much of the local
resources that others don’t have their own resources to work on; we acknowledge
that needy people in tough situations need help; and so on. And we never use
violence—unless someone has breached one of these rules against us, in which
case we may strike back and defend our rights. Sometimes theorists speak as if Locke’s
state of nature must be anti-social, pre-social or pre-institutional. I suspect
this view arises not so much from a misreading of Locke as from a failure to
read him at all. To the contrary, in Locke’s state of nature we all live in
communities, we travel, we trade, we build families and churches. We’re not
perfect, of course. But almost all of us share a solid understanding of what
the right thing to do is, and more often than not we do it.
Locke’s state of nature differs dramatically
from that of his fellow seventeenth century political theorist, Thomas Hobbes.
In Hobbes’ state of nature, no-one accepts any moral rules. Trapped in Hobbes’
brutal state of nature, fearful for my own security and unbound by laws, Hobbes
recommends I strike at my neighbours before they can strike at me, and his state
of nature collapses into the war of all against all. And this collapse renders
the life of man, in words that echoed down through the centuries, ‘solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
In comparison, Locke’s state of nature
sounds pretty idyllic, right?
Wrong.
In
technical philosophical terms, Locke’s state of nature sucks. Why? Because its
members acknowledge no settled and known law, they lack an agreed person to adjudicate
when violations to the law occur, and they possess no accepted authorities to
exact punishment or ensure compensation for wrongs done. Even if most of a
community’s members really try to do the right thing most of the time,
conflicts routinely erupt and foment further conflicts in turn. Each of us has
the power to be judges in our own cases, exacting punishment as we see fit, with
predictable enough results. Each person sees themselves as performing just
retribution and compensation. Everyone else sees them hell-bent on revenge and
theft. We didn’t start where Hobbes thought we did—but, on Locke’s telling, we sure
do finish there.
Still, humans often rise to the level of
creative, problem-solving creatures. Can’t they fix things? Hobbes and Locke
both thought they could. However, because Hobbes thought humans were so selfish
and bereft of human virtue, he thought they needed a radical solution to the
state of nature. They needed to hand over almost all their rights to a supreme
political sovereign, who would wield enough absolute power to keep them all in
check. So far as any morality enters into Hobbes’ scheme, it enters here.
The violence of the state of nature horrifies the people so much that they create morality to defend against it. So
Hobbes’ position turns out to be the exact opposite of Locke’s. For Hobbes, people
possess no ordinary everyday morality, only political morality.
Locke’s people in the state of nature suffer the same threat of violence, but here’s the good news: they have more to work with than
Hobbes’s warmongers. They don’t need to invent morality—they already possess
it. And while things would be improved if there were settled and
reliable punishments for doing the wrong thing, they don’t need fear of
punishment to do all the work in driving their moral action. They already possess
the capacity for virtue and decency. Their problems are alarming, yes, but
rather specific for all that. They just need to get together, in a good faith
and an amicable way, and work out ways of setting down stable laws, coming up
with independent judges to adjudicate on them, and on a police force and army
that will execute them. I mean execute the
laws, that is. The people must remain vigilant not to make a police and
army that executes them, the people.
That would just swap the problem of local internecine violence for the problem
of systematic slaughter and oppression. That problem may not have worried
Hobbes (seriously, what was he thinking?), but it worried Locke; and rightly
so.
So what’s the result? The citizens come
together and create institutions to fix their problems. They create democracy, the
rule of law, rights and the separation of powers. They don’t do this because
they came to any profound moral realizations about new ethical principles that must
suddenly apply because they have joined together into one political community. To
the contrary, they craft these new political principles because given empirical
descriptive facts about humans, power and institutions, practices like
democracy and the rule of law prove necessary to realise the original moral
principles they all held in the state of nature.
So that’s what I mean when I say there exists
no political morality independent of ordinary morality. We derive all of our
political principles from our pre-existing moral ones. I don’t pretend this will
prove an easy or straightforward process. In fact it poses a raft of challenges. Instead of invoking some abstract political theory—some exciting new
contract theory from an original position, for example—we have to slowly learn,
through trial-and-error as much as theory, about how institutions and practices
both protect and threaten the common-sense rights we held in the state of
nature.
Why
believe it?
But why believe this idea about the
non-reality of political morality? Here are four quick reasons. One, we find
much less disagreement about what ordinary common-sense morality requires, as
compared with political principles. Lots of moral theorists suggest that there
are striking similarities across cultures regarding proper treatment of one’s
fellows. Now maybe you think this is taking it a bit far, but no-one would even
pretend to make the same claim about political morality. For when it comes to
what a political regime should do, theories and practices clash violently. If
we can get by without provoking all these disagreements by relying on an area
of moral thinking where we find more substantial agreement, then that seems a
welcome result.
Second, if we want peace and prosperity to
reign, then people need to comply with and support the laws and institutions
governing them. If the community-members recognize that the coercive institutions
governing them ensure that they perform duties they readily acknowledge as
morally required, then their own moral emotions, habits-of-life and ways of
thinking bulwark those institutions. For example, they contribute to
institutions to help the needy because they can all imagine small-scale
situations (children drowning in ponds, for example) where they would be
duty-bound to help nearby people in desperate need. While people can agree to exacting
political principles in the abstract, in my experience this is never
accompanied by a revolution in their moral psychology and habits of life. Divesting
ourselves of autonomous political morality helps forge a match between our
moral emotions and what the institutions around us are trying to do.
Three, this theory accords with many
intuitions I think we might share regarding political institutions and their legitimacy.
If trying to create ordinary morality on a political scale led to lots of crazy
results, then that would be a reason to doubt what I am saying. But instead we
can move—as Locke himself described—from the dictates of ordinary morality to
show how their institutional implementation gives rise to many of our most
prized political institutions and principles, including democracy, rule of law,
separation of church and state, toleration, separation of powers and so on. In
other words, from a concern with ordinary morality we arrive at a decent
picture of political morality, upholding many of the most important
institutions of western democracies, and sitting neither to the extreme left or
right of the political spectrum.
Four: Ockham’s razor. If we can derive a
decent theory of political morality from ordinary morality, then why complicate
matters by appealing to something altogether new? The simplest solution appeals
to as few elements as possible, using one set of (moral) principles to explain
a different set of (political) principles.
Conclusion
Of course, I can’t pretend to have said
everything that needs to be said to vindicate my position, or even to fully
explain how it works in practice. But I hope I have done enough to open your
eyes to the possibility of a distinct way of thinking about political morality—namely,
that it doesn’t exist in its own right! If I am correct—and if thinkers like
Locke were correct—then we build political morality from the scaffold of
ordinary interpersonal morality.
6 comments:
Unfortunately we seem to get far too much morality in politics and very little ethics.
I'm sick and tired of unethical decisions being stood up on the grounds of some politicians moral stance.
The distinction between the two should be a pop quiz for all pollies. Failure means loss of seat.
Thanks Bill. It is strange the differences between the two words: I've heard so many conflicting accounts of which word means what, and whether it matters that we get one word from the Greek and the other from the Roman.
But you are right that morality seems more preachy, more sanctimonious. Ethical seems more welded in to the character, not focused outwardly on what others are doing, but inwardly on the self.
Hi Hugh, this is an interesting topic! I think I agree with you quite a bit. I’ve got a few questions - no pressure to answer them, they’re just thoughts. The first and second are clarificatory, the third and fourth are challenges.
1. Given that (as I assume you’d agree?) there was not historically a state of nature, what do you think the role is of a state of nature argument? What do we learn from it?
2. If I argue that the diversity of different moral views in the community should lead us to accept a state modelled on a normative theory that few if any people accept (perhaps some kind of consequentialist or libertarian view that I create for the purpose), would that be compatible with your view? It is a political ideology totally dependent on personal morality for its shape, but still making very different prescriptions from personal morality.
3. I feel that you are using ‘political morality’ very narrowly, to mean pretty much just the theory of the state. If so, then personal morality is broad enough to be partially a product of the institutional and interpersonal politics around us, and so is probably already equipped with the tools to create a political system. (c.f. Rawls “The basic structure (of society) is the primary subject of justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start.”) If so, then you’re probably right that political morality is supervenient (using the term a bit loosely) on personal morality, but I think people would just be tempted to go for a broader definition of political morality and a narrower definition of personal morality.
4. Ignoring my concerns above, mightn’t there still be some kind of uniquely political philosophy? I feel like the methods used for transmuting personal morality into political morality, or reconciling personal morality with political realism, might be complex and interesting enough to deserve the term.
Ok, so that's quite a few questions - but again, I'm just writing down ideas, for my own benefit (keeps the mind active) as much as anyone else's!
- Michael V
Just to clarify –
in the second point I mean an argument like “There are a wide variety of different personal values (moral and otherwise), so we need a libertarian or utilitarian political system to best accommodate them all.”
In the third – my use of the Rawls quote is a bit misleading there. (Or needs explanation.) I mean that our values are heavily shaped by the political system in which we grow up. This is true as a description of the world, but also I think as a factor to take into account when discussing *justified* personal morality – a good personal morality must be compatible with a good political order.
Hi Michael,
Interesting ideas, thanks for your thoughts.
1. The historical state of nature: Actually I do think there have been and continue to be states of nature in the Lockean sense, namely situations without an agreed political authority. There can be lots of social and economic activity, but we don’t leave the state of nature until we possess a settled law and authoritative adjudicator of that law. Still this is a murky grey-zone, rather than an either-or dichotomy. (Consider the grey-zone of international relations, where we have governance but not government.)
Different theorists want us to learn different things from their different states of nature. Locke’s purposes differ from Rousseau’s and Hobbes’. But I think what Locke was trying to tell us was that our personal moralities and moral intuitions about what happens in cases where we lack a political authority remain relevant when we do have a political authority. Our political thinking should be based on our moral thinking.
2. Diversity: I think observing the diversity of cultures and individuals in society should make us rethink our personal moralities, rather than shifting immediately toward political ones. We need to realise that our goals, lifestyles, religion and desired social relationships are not the same as other people’s, meaning we must get better at tolerating them and seeing virtue in leaving other people alone as much as possible. Then we extrapolate out from our revised personal morality (newly infused with the learned need for tolerance) to derive our political morality.
In the process you sketch, Michael, we move directly from diversity towards political rights or some other ‘neutral’ system of government (such as consequentialism). That might indeed occur, but it’s not what I was referring to (or recommending: I think the first change should be in ourselves and our behaviour and perspective—only then should we revise our politics).
3. The political system shapes our personal morality: Ah, now that’s a really interesting point, and deserves a fuller response than I can give here. Suffice to say that I think people develop their moral compasses out of their everyday interactions and relationships. Political processes can shape these interactions and relationships, but only in a quite indirect way. What definitely doesn’t happen in any routine way, I think, is that people ‘internalize’ political principles and feed them in to their everyday lives. So I accept that the political system can impact on people’s personal moralities, but this is not to acknowledge that political moralities themselves precede personal moralities in any important sense. Still, I agree that’s only the beginning of an answer to your query.
4. Political morality once more. As I understand the thought you’re expressing: even if Locke and I were right about the idea that political morality follows from personal morality, couldn’t we still talk about political morality (e.g. democracy, rule of law) as a separate subject from personal morality?
You are right that we could, of course, and that particular concerns and issues will emerge in our investigations of political morality that do not rear their heads in personal morality. But I remain wary. The more we think about political morality as a separate subject, the more likely we start to picture democracy and law in abstraction from ordinary personal morality. And then we wind up where we are now, where theorists brazenly propose political principles that are entirely divorced from people’s existing personal moralities. (And, I tend to think, entirely divorced from their own existing personal morality.)
Thank you very much for such a lengthy answer! I do think that we agree on quite a bit, apart from point 1.
An anecdote related to your answer to point 3: I recently realised that the presumption of innocence was the state’s duty, and so only indirectly mine. Sure, it’s polite and generous to give credence to someone’s claim that they are innocent, but that’s totally different to a judge and jury’s requiring no reasonable doubt when convicting. In the past I’ve defended people accused of doing the wrong thing by saying that they deserve to be presumed innocent (i.e. other people, not just the state, should presume them to be innocent), but now I’m not so sure that I was justified in doing so. Maybe I’m just weird for having taken so long to figure this out (I probably am!), but it’s an example of someone taking a principle of governance and internalising it as a principle of personal morality.
But that can maybe just be dismissed as a mistake on my part. I’m more interested in examples like ‘we should obey laws (as opposed to just any sort of rules)’ and ‘we should all pay tax to fund infrastructure projects’ – I’m sure there are plenty of other, likely more interesting, examples. I’m assuming that the state is the only mechanism of coordinating some kinds of large-scale cooperation. If so, then moral duties to the state (or to large-scale cooperation) are totally dependent on the existence and nature of the state.
Now I feel like I’m getting back to point 1 – are there states of nature? – but we can leave that argument for another day!
Cheers,
Michael
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