Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy

Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy

Description

Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone who can't take his own side in an argument. A bit harsh, but there is something paradoxical about liberalism, at least on the surface, and something obscure about the foundations of the sort of impartiality that liberalism professes. That is what I want to discuss. Ethics always has to deal with the conflict between the personal standpoint of the individual and some requirement of impartiality. The personal standpoint will bring in motives derived not only from the individual's interests but also from his attachments and commitments to people, projects, and particular things. The requirement of impartiality can take various forms, but it usually involves treating or counting everyone equally in some respect-according them all the same rights, or counting their good or their welfare or some aspect of it the same in determining what would be a desirable result or a permissible course of action. Since personal motives and impartiality can conflict, an ethical theory has to say something about how such conflicts are to be resolved. It may do this by according total victory to the impartial side in case of conflict, but that is only one solution. The clash between impartiality and the viewpoint of the individual is compounded when we move from personal ethics to political theory. The reason is that in politics, where we are all competing to get the coercive power of the state behind the institutions we favor—institutions under which all of us will have to live—it is not only our personal interests, attachments, and commitments that bring us into conflict, but our different moral conceptions. Political competitors differ as to both the form and the content of the impartial component of morality. They differ over what is good and bad in human life, and what kind of equal respect or consideration we owe each other. Their political disagreements therefore reflect not only conflicts of interest but conflicts over the values that public institutions should serve, impartially, for everyone. Is there a higher-order impartiality that can permit us to come to some understanding about how such disagreements should be settled? Or have we already gone as far as necessary (and perhaps even as far as possible) in taking up other people's point of view when we have accepted the impartial component of our own moral position? I believe that liberalism depends on the acceptance of a higher-order impartiality, and that this raises serious problems about how the different orders of impartiality are to be integrated. To some extent this parallels the familiar problem in moral theory of integrating impartiality with personal motives; but the problem here is more complicated, and the motive for higher-order impartiality is more obscure.' It is so obscure that critics of liberalism often doubt that its professions of impartiality are made in good faith. Part of the problem is that liberals ask of everyone a certain restraint in calling for the use of state power to further specific, controversial moral or religious conceptions—but the results of that restraint appear with suspicious frequency to favor precisely the controversial moral conceptions that liberals usually hold. For example, those who argue against the restriction of pornography or homosexuality or contraception on the ground that the state should not attempt to enforce contested personal standards of morality often don't think there is anything wrong with pornography, homosexuality, or contraception. They would be against such restrictions even if they believed it was the state's business to enforce personal morality, or if they believed that the state could legitimately be asked to prohibit anything simply on the ground that it was wrong. More generally, liberals tend to place a high value on individual freedom, and limitations on state interference based on a higher-order impartiality among values tends to promote the individual freedom to which liberals are partial. This leads to the suspicion that the escalation to a higher level of impartiality is a sham, and that all the pleas for toleration and restraint really disguise a campaign to put the state behind a secular, individualistic, and libertine morality-against religion and in favor of sex, roughly. Yet liberalism purports to be a view that justifies religious toleration not only to religious skeptics but to the devout, and sexual toleration not only to libertines but to those who believe extramarital sex is sinful. Its good faith is to some degree attested in the somewhat different area of free expression, for there liberals in the United States have long defended the rights of those they detest. The American Civil Liberties Union is usually glad of the chance to defend the Nazis when they want to demonstrate somewhere. It shows that liberals are willing to restrain the state from stopping something that they think is wrong—for we can assume most supporters of the ACLU think both that it is wrong to be a Nazi and that it is wrong for the Nazis to demonstrate in Skokie. Another current example is that of abortion. At least some who oppose its legal prohibition believe that it is morally wrong, but that their reasons for this belief cannot justify the use of state power against those who are convinced otherwise. This is a difficult case, to which I shall refer again. Of course liberalism is not merely a doctrine of toleration, and liberals all have more specific interests and values, some of which they will seek to support through the agency of the state. But the question of what kind of impartiality is appropriate arises there as well. Both in the prohibition of what is wrong and in the promotion of what is good, the point of view from which state action and its institutional framework are supposed to be justified is complex and in some respects obscure. I shall concentrate on the issue of toleration, and shall often use the example of religious toleration. But the problem also arises in the context of distributive justice and promotion of the general welfare—for we have to use some conception of what is good for people in deciding what to distribute and what to promote, and the choice of that conception raises similar questions of impartiality.

Source Publication

The Ethics of Citizenship: Liberal Democracy and Religious Convictions

Source Editors/Authors

J. Caleb Clanton

Publication Date

2009

Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy

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