Modernism, liberalism and morality, or the dual morality.
Note: this is a general attempt to get some of my own thoughts on paper, but they remain quite disorganised. I expect as I actually do re-reading, critique and expand my own understanding that this will become a more coherent post, but this servers as kind of a reminder to myself and way to help describe my own though process.
I think a major mistake that is made when attempting to analyze liberalism is to look at it in a vacuum, particularly without the lens of modernism attached to it. There are several linked ideas here, so I’m going to try to write them all out.
When trying to either critique or promote liberalism, one must define what liberalism is.
The problem with this is that liberalism is a very large ideology that is contextualised by time period, country and thinkers. There is no one single version of liberalism.
Every variation of liberalism acts as a mix-and-match of some of it’s component parts, and therefore the exact variation being critiqued has to be defined. A common theme in the analysis of liberalism is therefore trying to look at it in isolation, and distilling it to a single mode of social and economic relations.
This critique fails, because you inevitably end up arguing against a strawman. Component and complementary ideologies are necessary for the ideology to make sense.
I think one of the inherent problems within the critique is the age of some of the most important scholars, and how changes in thinking have moved liberal positions.
I would argue that from early liberalism the most important thinkers were Locke, Mill and Rousseau. The major shared component here is that they are mostly children of enlightenment thinking.
Within Locke, you can see the idea of rules (in this case, informed by ‘natural rights’) as the foundation of society, but not the end point of personal morality. Personal morality is left to the church, the state is left to be neutral and a simple executor of inherent social rules.
The surety of thought here is typical of enlightenment thinkers. Thinkers, Kant in particular, inform liberal thoughts on *personal morality* (which is defined as separate from government morality) during this period and this is important for later, but in general early liberalism requires the surety of thought that there is an inherent design of society.
Some branches of liberalism almost stop here. Libertarians sometimes take their cues directly from this era, and molds this thinking into a separate branch of thought.
Many critiques of liberalism also approach from this position.
Liberalism is distilled in many critiques to the idea of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”
From this several linked ideas follow.
We don’t judge who you sleep with, who you marry or who you interact with, as that is your private choice.
We don’t make laws about what you do with your money, because private property is protected.
We must give everyone equal, inviolable rules before anything else because those laws inform our morality.
It’s the foundation of modern democracy, including your right to vote, to not be tortured, and to receive due process in a trial.
The only people who are immoral are not selfish or cruel people, but people who break the rules.
This ignores a very important par of thought in the era, which is the interplay of church, religion and government. The government here is a vessel to enforce natural, god given laws which are the absolute of morality. An immoral person is not someone who violates the rules of the government, but instead violates the written rules of god, as defined by a chosen church. While you can create an irreligious version of liberalism based from this (something interrelated to contractualism, I would imagine) but mainline ‘enlightenment liberal theory’ does not utilise the government as the sole (or even the main) moral standard.
Kantian personal morality also intertwines with this style of thought where the morality of an action varies based on the duty. In this way, personal duty is given to follow the greater social rules, because just as every man has general personal duties, within greater society each man has a duty to god to uphold the rules of the state (which are given by god).
There is then debate on this point. If every man has a duty to god, should the state enforce that duty, or should it simply enforce the most basic rules possible that can be agreed on by a wider society? These two opinions would help inform liberal debate for centuries after, with different branches looking to different rules (but the rule based structure mostly unchanged.)
Within the Anglophone world, Mills (and partly by extension, Bentham, but Mills was always more wildly influential) is by far the most important other thinker in liberalism, I would argue. Mills is important because it is here, I think, you start to see the transition of the idea on the role of government. Mills (in addition to other things) promoted utilitarianism, the idea that an action is moral if it helps the most people. External to debate within utilitarian theory, the important part of the ideology is that it is the start of modernism and modernist political thought within liberalism.
Modernism represents a rejection of the unmeasurable. Society, Economics, Nature and even Morality can all be measured though observation, experimentation, new knowledge and technology within a modernist worldview. Utilitarianism, in particular the Bentham variant, represents a bridge between enlightenment and modernist thought. In order for utilitarianism to be a functioning, self contained unit you must be able to measure the harm and good of an action. In this way, morality is ‘now’ a measurable component.
How then does this interface with the previous understanding of morality? Within the liberal framework, (and a modernist rejection of organised religion) utilitarianism simply directly replaces religion. Kantian morality is not abandoned, but instead is modified as such that because we wish to improve the world (and that improvement can be measured) everyone has a duty to the utilitarian cause, but at the same time is not required to abandon the ideas of local morality or duty. One might say that this system of dual morality is incoherent, where every action is measurable, and you might be morally correct (through duty) in taking a morally incorrect (though utilitarianism) action.
They might also be at least partially right.
The expression of utilitarianism and its relationship to religion is also a highly complex one, with major regional variance, one with enough material to easily write a book on, but in short one can say that utilitarianism. The church, once the ‘single’ detemir of morality, is now replaced by a mix of church, scientists, philosophers and the state itself, when it acts as a collective voice on morality.
When interfaced with “mixed republicanism” (and the early elements of humanism) the lack of a single moral authority becomes a problem. Democracy is chosen as the answer in the eyes of many liberals, where the general opinion of the voting public decides what the state should view as moral, external to the state itself, and freedom of religion and the much discussed ‘neutrality of the state’ then has to appear.
This interrelation of religion, Kantian morality and utilitarianism becomes more complex when concepts like the real inability to measure the final result of an action come into play. One kind of morality looks at the duty of a person, or what they know when they took an action, but the other is based on utilitarianism, or the result of the action. There are of course other moral frameworks that can fill this roll, and different liberal thinkers have proposed different ones.
The law of the state, this core component of liberalism, then is not based on any one single moral framework. The example of the crimes of attempted murder and murder are a good example, where neither final result nor intent are the single determinants of a crime. There is thus a dual morality, that must be judged holistically though democracy (a jury) and a systematic authority (a judge).
The nature of the liberal system is then such that elements can be removed, expanded on and changed while still retaining the same structural liberal core, but strangely because of slow evolution might contain almost none of the elements that existed within the original idea of liberalism. I would currently posit that just about the only unmovable core of liberalism is that there is a state enforcing the rules of an external morality through a system.
Liberalism can be constructed without republicanism (beyond simply early thinkers, Latin American liberal dictatorships like under Diaz existed). It can be built without utilitarianism, without religion (indeed, the distinction of freedom from religion is made in some liberal countries like France, and different incantations have taken it to different places). It can exist without Kantian thought or the more recent Rawlsian ideas (pure utilitarian liberalism is but one example of liberal utilitarianism). It seems to thrive without natural rights (many modern liberal branches reject natural rights), can reject the more modern ‘human rights’ (consider all of the liberal slave-holding nations of the past for just a single example). In fact, Liberalism seems to be able to function without the belief in the expansion of either economic or social freedom.
The state enforcing an externally derived set of rights based on an external morality while acting as a centralised actor is then just about the only consistent element. In “Anarcho-capitalism” this is removed, along with some libertarian variants but it is just about the only single factor that causes a distinct separation from liberalism. Other groups that interact and intersect with liberalism sometimes change this, but as far as I can tell none are considered liberalism by adherents or critics (excluding the ‘everyone I don’t like is liberal group’).
This comes back then to the thrust of my argument, that liberalism is a name for a group of linked moral theories placed inside a consistent structure of the state. Not all theories that possess a state and external morality are therefore liberalism, because liberalism can additionally be defined by adherence to thinkers who have built within the liberal tradition of a particular place. The definition of liberalism must then be contextualised to who is being critiqued, as a mass critique of liberalism and all of its principles must inherently be contrarian and contradictory, because there are contradictions and debates within liberalism itself.
The dual morality common within liberalism is another deep component to the ideology, one of the role of the state and the role of the moral voice. I think it may be even worth arguing that even if not in all cases, the dual morality of liberal systems is a component that defines them as liberalism, because the very structure of liberalism encourages it. Even in a system with natural rights and a biblical morality, it may be both moral (through the system of morality) and immoral (through the system of natural right) to take a particular action if there is a mismatch. The logical idea must then be that the government must follow the first system and the individual must follow the second.
I would posit that it is partially this relationship that fuels the liberal general dislike of social regulations, the belief that even with a moral government with moral laws sometimes it might be moral to break the law, and therefore punishments based solely off that concept are dangerous, but at the same time liberals may wish to add social regulations in order to make their personal morality and the government morality better align, for example protections for violence against children or restrictions on some types of substance use/abuse.
Any critique without dealing with the chosen liberal moral philosophy, the chosen way to implement it (for example, the ‘reasonable man’ test) and the functional reasons for that implementation (for the same example, the fact that resources for constant votes and jury trials are impossible to distribute, and the reasonable man test is judged as a reasonably functional alternative).