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Liberalism Depends on Situational Ethics
Those of us on the right are often accused of being judgmental. We believe that we should be a nation of laws and not men. Everyone is subject to the same laws. Regardless of circumstance. Similarly, we tend to believe in, well, something. Conservatives come from many and varied religious traditions, but most of us tend to believe that human behavior should be governed more by a system of ethics and less by our desires of the moment. We may disagree about ethics, and we may practice different religions, but we agree on a dim view of human nature that benefits from outside guidance. If you’ve been taught that religion is antiquated and that it’s ok to do whatever feels right to you at the time as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, well, you can imagine that efforts to constrain human behavior with morals and ethics can seem, well, judgmental.
Meanwhile, the ethics of the left are more, um, flexible. What is the difference between right and wrong? Well, it depends on the situation. Killing a child is wrong. Unless the child is still in her mother’s womb. Or has very recently exited that womb. Racism is wrong, but affirmative action is ok. They profess to be open-minded but won’t allow conservatives to speak. A powerful boss taking advantage of a staffer young enough to be his daughter – that is wrong. Unless it’s Bill Clinton, or a Kennedy, or some other Democrat. That’s ok. Harvey Weinstein was astonished that this ethic recently changed so suddenly. I can understand his confusion, but again, his political and cultural fellow travelers are not known for their ethical consistency.
My point is that I don’t think this is an accident. The left’s central tenet of socialism doesn’t make sense ethically, either. So perhaps leftists are forced to master situational ethics as a sort of intellectual self-defense.
For example, stealing is wrong. I don’t have the right to take your money. Unless I’m poor, in which case I do have the right to take your money. So you may wonder, what does my ability to earn a living have to do with your property rights? When I lose my job, do you lose your property rights?
The ethics behind this sort of thing are…complicated. This is why charity is so important. We need a way to help the less fortunate without violating the rights of others.
There was recently a brilliant but unloved post on Ricochet suggesting that progressives demonize greed because if people start to believe that they have the right to their own property, socialism doesn’t make any sense.
I’m starting to think that the “do whatever feels good,” ethics-free zone of cultural liberalism is similarly important to the left. If ethics are viewed as timeless guides to happiness and social stability, and superseding human desires or the issues of the day, then socialism starts to fall apart.
We don’t have to agree on a system of ethics. We just have to agree that ethics are important, meaningful, and unchanging. If we agree on that, then people begin to ask, “So do I have property rights, or don’t I?”
How on earth could a progressive answer that question?
This is why progressives go to such lengths to ensure that such questions will never be asked. And if they are, this is why they so aggressively destroy whoever asks that question, rather than addressing the question itself.
Simply asking the question begins the descent of progressivism into madness.
I think this is why leftists are so bonkers right now, marching about transsexual marriage rights while wearing genitalia hats, instead of debating Republicans on tax policy. Progressivism is only half a step from madness to begin with, because it requires such ethical flexibility. Or, some might argue, it requires us to ignore ethics entirely.
I think this is one reason that leftism has sort of become its own religion. Because it doesn’t make sense in any other system of ethics that humans have come up with yet.
One who views himself as above ethics will tend to believe that there is no one qualified to advise him on his behavior. There is no one above him. That person, in a way, becomes his own God. It is hard to do that without tiptoeing along the precipice of madness. Or, in the case of many modern leftists, such as those in this picture, completely falling in.
But their devotion to socialism requires them to walk that line, to one degree or another. Because you do have property rights. Pretty much. Most of the time. On a relative scale. In many circumstances.
And you would understand that, if you weren’t so judgmental.
Published in General
Great post!
I would modify the word “intellectual” with one of the following:
phony
semi-
twisted
You get the idea. Much of their self-defense arguments aren’t intellectual or based on logic. They’re based on feelings, which are highly subjective for each individual. When the left tries to intellectualize something so varied into a group collective, they necessarily fail because they don’t recognize individuals.
This is why the Democrat party is composed of all sorts of tribes, mostly minority. I do get a little smug satisfaction whenever I read a story were one of the left’s tribes is angry at another tribe because of a particular position on an issue. One of my favorite divisions are feminists who don’t consider male-to-female transgenders “women”.
Nonetheless, they will fight to allow MTF transgenders to compete in women’s sports, much to the chagrin of the biological women who’ve trained for years. I guess this is another example of situational ethics . . .
I very strongly feel that the invention of a discretionary Fed, the income tax, in the direct election of Senators whose only job is to get money and give it to their voters, is where this got confused. People can’t think straight about it.
So we had a system based on inflation which is regressive theft and income taxation which progressive taxation with deductions doesn’t add any value; a flat tax is the only thing that makes sense. In my opinion it looked like it worked until the Soviet Union fell, trade opened up, we got computers and robots and now there’s so much deflation (better purchasing power) and so many jobs being destroyed by it. Also the government can’t tax better purchasing power, it can only tax inflation. So people think we need socialism now, because our old socialist system is failing.
Something like that, anyway.
Then they engage in all kinds of Alinsky tactics and critical theory to get their way, and that stuff works.
In many ways I think this was “confused” right from the start with the lack of clarity in that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” line. You don’t have to dig very deep, say a mere year and half earlier, to find repeated mentions of ” life, property, or liberty,” While not as poetic but quite explicit…and note it got second billing.
Interesting. Thanks.
Something else I’ve noticed is, so many smart people don’t realize what central planning actually is, and why it’s normally a bad idea, and why so much of it is failing now.
I’ve been arguing for days now on Twitter with a guy that thinks that social security isn’t central planning. LOL
That is beautifully and succinctly put.
Once your “ethics” becomes unmoored from any [judgment inducing] foundation, you have no basis for deciding what’s right” except the whim of the person with the most power.
The person with the most power may say that in certain defined areas you can do whatever you want, but may also define other areas you much adhere to a very strict code. But it all depends on the whim of the person with the most power. When that person changes his mind, or a new person with different whims becomes most powerful you have to be ready to change also.
Good luck keeping up!
Great post. I think you’re right about all of it. Have you ever asked a progressive what they believe in, what philosopher, thinker writer, they have been guided by, on which their views are anchored?
Sounds like the Church under Pope Francis.
Agree 100% with the OP. “Exceptions to the rule” is not a bow to situational ethics, it is a recognition that all outcomes flowing from fundamental principles cannot be stated so clearly that seeming straight line analysis can be employed in any and all circumstances. Hence the commandment is not to murder, as opposed to kill. The simplest way to teach the principle is “Thou shalt not kill”. The refinement for murder is left to another day. The variety of killings that may be justified, is left for even later. They are not “situational” in the sense the OP is using it, but they are contextual. But the requirement for context leaves an opening for “situational ethics” which must be resisted.
If you need a “tell” for situational ethics, just look for words whose new approved meanings are the opposite of their original meanings.
Thanks @mattbartle!
There is a reason that college students don’t read dead white men anymore. Instead of reading Plato or Descartes or Aquinas or Nietzsche, they read Native American lesbian “literature.” If you’re trying to get these kids to believe in something that doesn’t make any sense, it’s best to avoid stuff that does make sense.
This is a profound observation.
Dr Bastiait’s comments are very well thought out and written.
He should replace Fred or Mona as a paid contributor.
Yes we’ve turned our kids over to these people and they’ve been brain washed, that’s acid washed, but the grown ups, those who were alive during much of the 20th century, what on earth do they use as foundational thought? They can’t admit to Marxism. Critical theory has no content except marxism. Progressives are also dead white males and they don’t want to drag them out lest we see their racism. Pragmatism mixed with socialism is what Lenin called opportunists, i.e. fascism, which actually describes them, but is there any body of thought they can claim?
This is so true. Central planning will work, but only on a small scale. Take a small business, for example. The owner is usually the only planner, so by default it is central planning. Families typically are centrally planned with the husband and wife acting as a team.
However, once the radius gets large enough, central planning begains to fail for many reasons: communication failures, individual actions, loss of control . . . I could probably come up with a dozen others (I’ll leave that as a homework exercise).
The bottom line: even smart people see how central planning works, and practice it themselves in many cases. What they fail to see is when extrapolating central planning to larger and larger organizations, the mechanism falls apart.
Central planning works in both of your examples because they are, necessarily, a sort of dictatorship. Hopefully, the dictators (especially in the case of the nuclear family) have the best interests of their subjects (children) at heart. Similarly, a smart business owner will also keep the interests of his/her employees in mind, as well.
In the case of the family, the central planning tends to be temporary. Good parents know instinctively their children need to learn to make decisions for themselves. So, the central planning generally dissolves as the “subjects” grow up and leave the nest.
With the small business, the smart boss avoids being too heavy-handed with the central planning, knowing that employees may grow weary of it and leave for better jobs.
What Progressives haven’t figured out (They are really quite thick-headed) is that you cannot always take something that works on a small (and temporary) scale and expand it infinitely to run an entire country. We have literally hundreds of years of recorded evidence proving that it cannot be done, yet they continue to charge ahead blindly, always at the peril of their fellow citizens.
This is exactly what Deirdre McCloskey says, and in her opinion it is a very big deal. If you don ‘t get all of this right, you are screwed. She says that the transition from the central planning of the family to where people need to be more circumspect about it politically and personally is very hard.
We have a local economist who contributes on ricochet sometimes, King Banaian, and he’s a big fan of her for good reason. I didn’t quite get it first when he would talk about her, but she’s very smart. Long interviews are really worth it.
***EDIT***
Deirdre McCloskey identifies as an Austrian economist, too. If ricochet had a podcast for Austrian economics…
I just finished this. Exact same topic.
Charles Hugh Smith On Why Many Millennials Are Promoting Socialism by Financial Repression Authority. Link
There should be a transcript in a few days. 30 minutes.
Thanks Doc! What a nice thing to say!
Sign me up!
The whole article was great, Dr Bastiat! I’ve got nothing more to add.
Excellent, but you err in asserting that proper ethics requires a religious inspiration.
Why is it a bad idea to kill someone and take their stuff?
I understand your point of view, but I disagree. I don’t understand how any restraint on human nature can come from inside the human. That’s a big topic – probably best left for a separate post. In the meantime, you and I can certainly agree to disagree on that point.
However, I did not say that in my essay. At least, I did not intend to:
I may have blurred the lines a bit there, but again, that was not my intention. I apologize if I was not clear.
The reason I tried to avoid that point was so that those with differing points of views on the ultimate source of ethics, like you and I, could at least agree that it is important to recognize that ethics exist. Regardless of their source, ethics are important. When you play a game that has no rules, the strongest or most ruthless man wins.
That’s the point I was trying to make. Sorry if I unintentionally made a point that I did not intend to address.
Because every individual has a right to life and their stuff is how they remain alive.
I sympathize. You are hampered by your religion that teaches you that there is only one way to think.
Edit: I want to say that this came out more combative than I meant for it to be.
Classical liberalism says that logical people will set up a good system for individual rights and property rights based on observation. I don’t think so. The other thing is The Constitution has to live in peoples hearts or it won’t work. We see evidence of that today. I heard part of a Justice Scalia speech where he said that if the people aren’t against centralized government that’s what they’re going to get in spite of The Constitution.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
No. Might makes right. Who says it doesn’t?
Ha! The weak one?
But I’ve been politely requested to not talk about the foundation of an ethical system in a post about the foundation of ethical systems, so I’ll decline to further that part of the discussion.
Actually, murder is the original meaning of the Commandment, not a refinement.
Believe me, I’m very sympathetic to what you’re saying (Mostly because I dislike the religious life I was born into. It has nothing to do with religion though), and I wish it was that way, but I don’t think it is. Dennis Prager is very good at explaining this.
Look at what progressive churches do now. They all believe in stealing. And I’m not even against some socialism just to slow down the fact we have so much socialism. This country’s got a big problem with centralized government and Keynesianism. Then throwing all the crazy critical theory. This is bad.
I did not request that. Discuss whatever you like.
I simply pointed out that I did not intend to address that topic in my OP.
In the comments, take the conversation any direction you like.
Like Rufus, I’m sympathetic to your point of view. I simply disagree. I respect your views, and I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about them, whether I ultimately agree with them or not.
That’s why I’m here, for Pete’s sake.