Shoring the Foundation of Liberal Society [1 of 3]
addressing the why’s and how’s for governing a Liberal nation
First Segment: Personal Relations
[Second Segment: The Political Process; Third Segment: The Economy]
Introduction (seven paragraphs starting all three segments)
[The subject here is Liberalism. The other liberalism — with a lower-case ‘l’ — is one of several political ideologies that exist within Liberalism, each preferring certain policies and programs — or the absence of such things.]
Liberalism can be credited with a great many accomplishments. It has also been beset with limitations, however, both conceptual and practical, that have in turn limited the benefits of Liberal societies/nations to people. As time goes on, those limitations are overshadowing the accomplishments of Liberalism. As a result, people are beginning to question its value as an approach to governing society. It is becoming, as Brits are wont to say, ‘unfit for purposes’: cramped, cracked, and leaky. As is so often the case, its more observable flaws are the result of problems in the foundation.
A Liberal society is one in which justice is the goal of society and equality and liberty are understood to be the ‘twin pillars of justice’ upon which a just society must rest. Those two concepts are its foundation.
Since Liberalism was brought into the world we have learned that equality and liberty are not the ‘universal values’ the early Liberals claimed them to be. Indeed, there are no such things as universal values. As postmodernists have emphasized, the very notion of ‘foundationalism’, i.e., the existence of any universally accepted conceptual premise, is a nonstarter.
We humans do, however, have a universal propensity to form into groups. Groups are individuals who organize around premises they all accept (at least to a sufficient degree). Thus, Liberals are a group of humans organized (however loosely) around the premise that equality and liberty should underlie the governance of society.
So: a Liberal society/nation is one in which governance is itself governed by equality and liberty. That is, those two concepts determine in a general way — prior to any laws or even a constitution — how people should treat one another as they live their separate lives together in society and those two concepts inform the way the political process and the economy should be structured and how they should function.
Those are three universal aspects of all communities of human beings. Other people might name other universal aspects of communities, but there can be no such thing as a community of human beings that exists without personal interactions, a political process (the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole), and an economy (the process of producing/acquiring goods/services). Even a book club has all three of those elements of a community. Within Liberalism, then, those three aspects of social existence therefore comprise at the same time the minimum and the maximum of the reach of justice, in its most practical sense: how societal relations among human beings ought to be governed.
The purpose of this essay in three parts is to relate a way to fix Liberalism’s foundation, and how that can thereby fix other flaws in Liberal society that its foundational problems have caused. It would still be Liberal society, but it would be transformed.
Let’s consider, first, the part of the foundation that is most general, the part underlying personal relations. While underlying them directly, it also goes to how the political process and the economy should be structured and should function. Both of those aspects of society are still, after all, relations among people, only in more particular contexts.
Personal relations are not limited to people we know ‘personally’, people who are ‘in our lives’ because we want them to be there — or whose presence in our lives we must tolerate whether we like it or not, such as family or the knuckleheads where we work. At the same time, no relationships, regardless of how personal they are, can be beyond the reach of justice. Here, “personal relations” simply refers to any direct interactions (even if at a distance, via communications only) involving human beings.
Governing people’s interactions with one another even prior to, as noted above, the enaction of specific laws, requires the existence of a rule of some kind. Indeed, such a rule will largely determine what laws will be enacted. Such a rule will certainly be an organizing principle for a society, but, as will be seen, it can follow from some more general principle or concept. It will serve to ‘fill the gaps’ between the laws for governing relations among people in the society without the force — and the myriad costs — associated with laws and their enforcement.
No rule can keep people from acting contrarily to it: no mere abstraction can be enough to prevent people from violating it. Moreover, in a Liberal society, where vague, general ’catch-all’ laws are not allowed, any such rule is unenforceable in the way that laws are. Yet, a rule is needed for people to know ‘what’s what’ ethically; without some rule there is no line that is not to be crossed that is known to all.
One problem within Liberalism is that neither equality nor liberty is a rule for governing interactions among people. Equality is not a rule of any kind. Liberty is the antithesis of a rule to govern conduct. Liberals who believe liberty to be the predicate of justice (‘justice is liberty’) insist that liberty is somehow imbued with some self-limiting constraint on conduct, but that is not the case. In Liberalism, equality limits liberty: the familiar phrase, ‘every person’s liberty ends at the person and property of any other person’ is a direct statement about the intrinsic equality of all people, regardless of status, standing, relations of power, etc.
That is a rule of a kind, but it is much too vague to govern people’s relations with one another effectively. It is also much too incomplete: there is far too much of human interactions that it fails to address at all. Besides, that sentence does not exist formally as part of the governance of any Liberal nation, but is more of an aphorism to describe the ‘proper’ interpretation of ‘justice is liberty’.
Rather, Liberalism has based the governance of personal interactions on rights and laws. The citizens of Liberal nations enjoy political and legal rights that come into play in particular instances. In our day-to-day lives we have one right: the right to do or say anything that has not been rendered illegal (with freedom of speech — stretched to mean ‘expression’ — perhaps the most jealously guarded component of that right).
Since in a Liberal society everyone has the right to do and say whatever is not illegal, within the infinite forms of legal actions that people can take that involve other people (including ‘speech acts’), there is nothing in a Liberal society to regulate any of those interactions. Even worse, everyone is not only acting how they want to act, doing what they want to do, saying what they want to say, but at the same time they are ‘exercising their right’ to do/say/act that way. If challenged, on top of simply wanting to have their way, they feel self-righteously empowered to ‘defend their right’ to do whatever they’re doing. If no one in a conflict is intent on doing anything illegal, there is no rule to which to refer for an informal, person-to-person adjudication of any dispute.
Since a ‘right’ is, after all, the formal recognition of a capacity to exercise power, that is a fail-proof recipe for incessant, irresolvable “contests of power” (Michel Foucault). It invites constant friction and worse: outright clashes that are primed to turn violent at the drop of a hat.
The concept underlying all of that within Liberalism is ‘individualism’. It is all about recognizing people as separate and independent beings. Even though we live together in formally organized groups, Liberalism emphasizes that we are still each of us our own being. Like the concepts of liberty and equality themselves, individualism is loaded with different implications for governance among Liberals. Even so, for all Liberals it is a necessary concept within Liberalism. Most emphatically, this renovation of Liberal society would not involve removing it.
There is a spectrum of interpretations of individualism ranging from more to less self-centered. As things now stand, though, ‘individualism’ exists as an enabler of self-centeredness in all Liberal nations. I submit that the more self-centered the interpretation of individualism in a Liberal nation, the more violence in personal relations that land experiences.
One consequence of that societal setup is a need for too many laws. Since, in the absence of any general rule, laws are needed to regulate behavior in order to prevent social friction — and worse — there is a tendency to need a law for every form of interaction that can arise. Thus, under the existing understanding of individualism within Liberalism the goal of maximizing liberty ironically turns upon itself, leading towards a country of stultifying lawmaking for the very excellent reason of minimizing conflict between individuals within society. (One of the U.S. Supreme Court justices recently observed that we have “too many” laws in this nation.) Again, the more self-centered the interpretation of individualism is, the more “too many” laws become necessary.
Maximizing liberty and reducing the need for laws on the books can be achieved with a different approach to individualism. It would still be individualism: the focus would still be on every person as a separate and independent being.
The basic concept could not be simpler: an other-centered individualism. Instead of the focus being on one’s own ‘right’ to do and say anything that is not against the law, the focus would be on refraining from acting unjustly towards any other person(s).
That has nothing to do with altruism. It is not ‘sacrificing’ anything of one’s own to benefit other people. It is self-constraint — self-governance — for the sake of justice.
All of that takes us back to John Locke, the original Liberal. He emphasized that people are separate and independent beings. He famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will of” any other person(s). Since the opposite of injustice is justice and the opposite of being subject to anyone’s arbitrary will is liberty, justice must be liberty. [Thomas Jefferson basically plagiarized Locke in the most famous words in the Declaration of Independence of which he was the primary author, even to the point of including “separate and independent” in referring to “all men” in his original draft of that document — as I learned in reading Liberalism Proper and Proper Liberalism, by Gottfried Dietze (1998), a book I do recommend.]
That ‘old, white man’ Locke failed to see back in 1689 (the year his book, Two Treatises of Government, was published) that if injustice is “being subject to the arbitrary will . . .” (and it most assuredly is), then what justice requires most immediately of us humans is to refrain from subjecting any other persons(s) to our own “arbitrary wills.” That is, justice requires all people to respect all others in that basic, fundamental way. [Though I, too, am now an old white man (72 next month) I started on this quest to update justice when I had just turned thirty.]
Instead of ‘justice is liberty’, it would be, ‘justice is mutual respect’: justice is present when people are respecting one another that way — not acting arbitrarily where other people are concerned, but taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in society. Mutual respect in that form would maximize the liberty in our personal relations that co-existing individuals can share simultaneously .
Yet, while that is an ethically satisfying concept, it is also too vague to be of much practical value. What we need — what Liberalism needs — is a way to locate ‘respect’ in some more specific and less abstract concept and still be broad enough to cover all pertinent interactions among people.
The goal must be a rule that will not just prohibit violating the “person and property” of other people, but will extend into all aspects of their being. People should be free from any unwarranted intrusion into their lives. That is as close to a land of perfect liberty as co-existing human beings can hope to attain in our personal relations.
“Unwarranted” differs from ‘unwanted’ in that the latter can be a legitimate aspect of an experience one has undertaken. Consider ‘pop-up’ ads. We might hate those ads, but we engage with the internet having accepted that that (unless we have taken action to prevent them) they are going to be part of that experience. So they are unwanted but not unwarranted (as they exist for creators of content to be remunerated for producing/posting it).
The distinction between those two words gets us to the crux of the matter at hand. In that context “unwarranted” means ‘arbitrarily imposed without permission’ and “unwanted” means ‘unwelcome but voluntarily accepted’. It comes down to a matter of choosing or not (in that case, to be subjected to ads). Concerning justice, the heart of the matter is the given capacity we all have as human beings to choose for ourselves.
In fact, the only way any person can affect in any way the life of any other person is if one is effecting some choice (i.e., choosing among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). The choice might or might not be intended to affect any other person(s), but whether intended or not, affecting other people — for that matter, involving other people in any way when anyone is effecting any choice — is the issue. Conflict of the kind described above arises when people do things that involve other people who don’t want to be involved, at least not in the way they are being involved or to the extent to which they are being involved. That suggests that the rule we seek is that everyone must respect the capacity to choose of all other people whenever anyone is effecting any choice. [Warren J. Samuels discussed “effecting choices” in his scholarly contribution to Perspectives of Property, edited by Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson (1972).]
It is a material fact that we humans have no choice but to effect choices. That makes choosing integral to being human. That gives a rule to respect the capacity of other people to choose an impelling ethical force: to act otherwise is to deny in some way or to some extent the very humanness of those other beings.
That takes us to a different place than ‘equality’. We Liberals don’t like it, but the fact is that anyone can legitimately deny ‘equality’, since it is only a belief we Liberals happen to hold. Lots of people insist that their are ‘natural’ hierarchies based on gender, ‘race’, and even nationality, and most religions have a place in them for hierarchies among people.
While we Liberals abhor such beliefs, no one can prove that any belief is more/less true than any other. That is just the nature of beliefs. We must also note that tolerating divergent beliefs is one of the core tenets of Liberalism. It is true that a claim to hold any belief sincerely, whether equality or any other (secular/ideological or sacral/theological), and not merely as a means to some other end — such as, say, in the pursuit of some political goal — is a claim that cannot be verified. So an appeal to a belief in equality weakens Liberalism.
With a rule to govern personal relations that follows from the undeniably valid observation that we humans have no choice but to effect choices, we can strengthen Liberalism by going away from belief, to the simple reality of human being. While anyone can legitimately deny ‘equality’ by simply rejecting the truth of it, for anyone even to try to deny humanness is another matter. Knowledge that all of us human beings can know to be true as a matter of our experience of life on Earth can legitimately overrule — indeed, must overrule — any claim to any personal, immaterial truth (however many people might claim it) when it comes to the governance of society.
Unlike any immaterial truth, a universal experience of life as all humans necessarily live it provides the commonality that justice requires. Without such commonality the only option is for some people to be imposing some ‘truth’ on all others in determining how the governance of society will be governed. That brings arbitrariness, i.e., injustice, into the very core of society, no matter what immaterial truth(s) — belief(s) — might be involved.
To be more specific, then, what we must respect is other people’s capacity to choose — beginning with their capacity to choose whether/how/to what extent to be involved whenever any choice is being effected. So the rule governing people’s personal relations must be something like, ‘no co-opting or otherwise preempting the capacity to choose of any other person(s) in effecting any choice’. That is, in effecting any choice, any other person’s involvement must be sufficiently informed and voluntary. Again, we see how that would only further liberty in our personal relations.
More specifically yet, that boils down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) in effecting any choice. Anyone who is refraining from any such actions in effecting any choice is being just enough. In the end, that is all justice requires of us in our personal relations as we live together in society — keeping in mind, though, that those prohibitions are only the enumeration of the absolute minimum of acting justly, taking one another into account, respecting one another’s capacity to choose.
[In one way or another all of those prohibitions relate to “harming.” Sorting out issues related to harm is the (legitimate) purpose of any community’s laws and their system of enforcement/adjudication. So one can see how a rule prohibiting harm while specifying certain forms of harm would enhance the governance of personal relations in society while reducing the need for specific laws.]
Finally, we must note that those prohibitions apply to any choice anyone is effecting. They not only apply to choices anyone is effecting for oneself, but apply as well to any choice anyone is effecting on behalf of any other person, or organization, or cause. In short, there is never a valid excuse, other than oneself acting as the victim of some injustice (such as coercion), for violating any of those prohibitions.
Admittedly, it would take generations for that change in Liberalism to work itself into the culture enough to change the nature of society. Still, as it is said, ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’. One big step would be to recognize formally, as in a nation’s constitution, that respect for the capacity to choose of all other people is the ethic of justice.
That brings us to the political process. That will be the topic of the second segment of this series.