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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
FWIW, the weak part of Dennis Prager’s argument is you have to pick a religion “that has good results” obviously the Islamists think they have a swell religion. Same with the Vikings back in the day.
One last point.
This post was about the importance of ethics. Not the origin of ethics. I did my best to make that distinction clear. With mixed results, apparently. Sorry for the confusion.
You have to set up a system where people can be productive by basically being themselves and get paid for it. You have to stop force and fraud.
We quit doing this a hundred years ago. So…
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
I wish I hadn’t seen that picture.
Good post, but I think liberals and progressives get mixed up. It started generalizing about liberals, but continued expounding on progressives as if there is no difference. Hence the difficulty connecting different systems of ethics. People on the left often self-identify or are identified interchangeably as such, but I don’t think they are the same. HRC self-identifies as a progressive (I think). Progressives put their trust in following the true and trusted arc of History (sic) that all governments will inevitably be run by experts. They say this will support the non-government plebs to pursue their freedoms/passions, but they can’t prove that it can/will works in the long run. Progressivism is a values-neutral word that goes down the path of justifying socialism. Liberals, like most people, will not be pleased with how much of their freedoms are taken away under socialism.
You are correct in that these terms have been used for so many different purposes that it’s hard to say exactly what they mean in today’s context. When I referred to progressives, I was following the lead of Hillary and other leftist politicians of today’s age. They use that self-descriptive term to mean someone who approves of socialism. I think. Democrats are generally very careful about revealing exactly what they intend to do, which they should be, considering how unpopular many of their policies are.
But as you pointed out, Hillary currently calls herself “…a progressive who likes to get things done…” In another interview, she was asked what the difference was between a Democrat (herself) and a Socialist (Sanders) – she couldn’t answer. She was asked the same question a few weeks later, having had time to think about it and consult her advisers. She still couldn’t answer it.
I take all that to mean that in today’s politics, a progressive is someone who can’t tell themselves from a socialist – so I guess they’re socialists. And that’s how I used the term in this essay.
But your criticisms are valid. I wish we had better terms with more consistent definitions.
If we did, though, the Democrat party would no longer exist. They change their names from liberals to progressives and back again for a good reason.
The vast majority of Democrat politicians don’t care that much in the moment if this ends up like liberal welfare capitalism or progressive North Korea. They just want power. The Alinsky-types are in control.
You’re restoring my hope for mankind!
If a Native American lesbian tentatively voted for Trump, she wouldn’t be included in the class. I’m fine with Native American lesbians as long as we grade their writing on the same scale that we grade everybody else. But in the leftist narrative, minority status only counts as long as you vote and think in a very specific way. The hypothetical Native American lesbian can’t even vote libertarian. She has to be a leftist to be college material.
Who says that “every individual has a right to life and their stuff is how they remain alive”? If the concept does not come from religion, the only other source is that somebody just made it up. I sympathize with your assertion that religion is not the only path to ethical behavior, but in some ways a secular moral compass does not work. Here is the most blatant example:
Why is it wrong for Ted Bundy, a sociopath, to kill all of those women to satisfy his primitive urges? Sociopaths have a complete lack of empathy for other people and do not feel other’s pain the way normal people do, and literally don’t care about anybody else. So from Ted’s perspective, he was doing the best thing.
Bundy would not have believed that everybody has a right to life and happiness, no matter how many of the rest of us might believe that.
I did. I don’t need a source. I’m sure you say it too. Do you need someone to tell you right and wrong? Why is it so hard?
Ted Bundy was a murdering psychopath. That you can even start to think that his behavior might be acceptable absent religion is a terrifying thought.
Like I said, someone made it up, and that was you. Of course, many people have made up the exact same right as you have, but others have come up with totally opposite rights. The real question is “why should this be a right at all”? Why can’t I just make it a right that I get to kill you and take all of your stuff?
Bundy’s behavior is not acceptable to me or you, but it was certainly acceptable to him. I’m not trying to be provocative, I’m just trying to get to the heart of the matter. Many people never give the origins of their own ethical behavior much thought and just kind of follow what they’ve been taught.
That is called moral equivocation.
What is the equivocation? You and I have one set of values and Bundy has another set. It was perfectly rational for him to act the way he did. You still haven’t explained why it is wrong for someone to kill you and take your stuff (quoting Rufus) except to say that you have invented a right to keep your life and your stuff.
Ultimately everything boils down to axioms. X is X because it is X. Slavery and rape are wrong because they are.
I’m sorry. That’s sophomoric. Do you know it is wrong? Yes, you do. Do you know that if you don’t agree that it is wrong that none of us are safe? Yes, you do. It’s obvious and too many people want to make it complex. You don’t need the evil of making up imaginary beings to understand that murder is wrong. It’s MORE dangerous to assign the responsibility for understanding right and wrong to a magical deity, because magical deities are often considered infallible and sometimes, such as with Islam, turn morality on its head and encourage beheadings and other gruesome killings in the name of their magical god. Christians have been known to do that from time to time as well. So don’t try to tell me that right and wrong can only come from a magical god. Morality is self-evident, though some perceive it differently from others. It is the role of civilization to come to as accurate an understanding as possible. Some succeed better than others.
Here’s another answer to your question about how I can know right from wrong:
I don’t know “how.” I don’t need to know “how” I know right from wrong to know that the basics are pretty obvious. The difference between many theists and some atheists, is that I don’t pretend to have all the answers. This doesn’t bother me. Some things I just don’t know and likely will never know. I know murder is wrong. Do I know all the philosophical arguments why? Nope. But nor do I have to make up a magical being, or accept others’ claims of a magical being to know that murder is wrong. I don’t have to know how the universe was created, or came into existance. It is a matter of curiosity, but not critical to know. It is many of the religious who seem to think it vital to know the answer despite a lack of actual knowledge.
Within his universe.
Fair enough.
That’s true, but what happens if the familial central planning fails for possible reasons internal and/or external? The expectation in the Jewish and Christian world has long been some form of communal assistance. If the reason for the failure or near failure was external circumstances and an insufficiently capitalized but culturally adequate family enterprise, this was generally temporary; where the problem was an inadequate family culture or, heaven forfend, mental illness, not so temporary. Such individuals often tended to die young, too.
This, by the way, is one reason I’ve seen advanced for the Biblical institution of the “Hebrew slave” of Exodus 21:1-11, Leviticus 25:39-43, and Deuteronomy 15:12-18: Members of a failed family economy enter an indenture (either due to court action or due to the paterfamilias’ initiative) during which the expectation is that they will be taught by apprenticeship how to work and run a household. This can be to the extent that a young indentured woman might marry into the more prosperous household.
See also the Biblical agricultural “taxes” for the support of the poor, such as the poor tithe, collected every three years, and the annual mandates to reserve the “corners of the field,” dropped sheaves, and gleaning for the poor.
In organized medieval Jewish communities, there was internal taxation – both for communal needs and to meet demands imposed by the Muslim or Christian ruler under whom the community lived – and with some coercion in collection; a large enough community had homeless shelters. Usually horrendous, but they existed. For a glimpse, go to the “See Inside” for Yaffa Eliach’s There Once Was a World and search for the word “hekdesh.” The literal meaning of the Hebrew word is “reserved for holy use” but the conditions in the real world places brought the word into Yiddish with the meaning of “a chaotic and dirty room or building.”
I think he’s talking more about the kids individual initiative and political mentality as opposed to basic safety nets.
Of course, some families break down. And some kids don’t learn the necessary life skills to prosper in the real world. But to the comparative point – if small families cannot do central planning perfectly every time, how arrogant is it to assert that we can run a country of 300 million people without a hitch using central planning?
Which is intrinsically structured so as to destroy the family.
Now that’s an interesting and eerie observation. Kinda makes the head spin.
Why do we need “Full service schools”? Because the family and society is breaking down. Who benefits? The teachers unions.
You can ask any Democrat in Minnesota why we need hot meals at the school instead of just having this all taken care of with a parent, a welfare check, and the social worker. You will never ever get a straight answer. So now we need to turn the schools into a commune without the beds. It’s a fascinating subject.