First a confession: I understand what is going on with the global wunch crunch far less than I’m comfortable with. The world’s leaders seem to be making up as they go along, adopting a throw everything at the market until something sticks approach. Gordon Brown’s plan looked like it was going to pay off at the beginning of the week; now it looks like we are rapidly heading back to square one. None of it makes sense to me; I find it highly ironic having people complain about the “complexity” of Georgism earlier this week when it is kindergarten stuff compared to the very monetary theory which currently has the whole world prolapsing.
All I know is this: the last period of recession (also known as the Thatcher years, named after the genius who deregulated the UK money markets in the first place) sucked. Trust me, I was there. The one good thing that came out of it was Ghost Town by the Specials.
I’m a religionist by degree, and the City currently looks disturbingly like a millenarian cult run by a bunch of lapsed members of gamblers anonymous. Any day now I half expect the monkeys to hole themselves up with their partners, their children and lots of guns in One Canada Square and start chugging down the Kool Aid.
I know that people were slapping their foreheads over the Enron debacle, learning absolutely nothing in the process.
In the early nineties I worked in a comic shop for my Saturday job. As the recession carried on, some other bunch of geniuses decided that their money was better invested in comics than stocks and shares. Result? Spider-Man #1 sold 2.5m copies, X-Force #1 sold 4m copies and X-Men #1 sold 8m copies. All three were dire and most of the latter are still sitting in dusty boxes in the few remaining comic shops that survived the inevitable crash, but their awfulness was totally eclipsed by all the other cash-ins, cover variants and stunt publications that were to follow. Lesson learnt? People are short-sighted idiots and will lose their shirt investing in anything once the mania sets in.
If I’m brutally honest, I don’t think there are any regulatory reforms that will fundamentally change this. I certainly do support land value taxation which would at least make our housing and property market relatively immune to the vagaries of speculation. At least land doesn’t go anywhere. Other ideas such as the Tobin Tax may sound good in theory but will always be undermined by tax havens. And past experience suggests that even the tightest of regulatory regimes will have loopholes that can be exploited, and it was loopholes that got us into this mess.
The real problem appears to be rooted in the fact that people just love a free buck. The National Lottery has been a massive success, and not because of its “good works.” When George Osborne called for the threshold of inheritance tax to be risen, benefiting just the richest in society, it was enormously popular. Liberal Vision assure us that the public wants tax cuts not just for people on low and middle incomes but for the rich because that’s what they aspire to be. Now they may be over-egging it (our tax cuts policy doesn’t appear to have gifted us with a sustainable rise in our poll ratings), but there is no denying there is a grain of truth in it.
My question is, isn’t all this naked greed and individualism, well, wrong? Isn’t it enough to be able to live comfortably and securely? Isn’t it leading to environmental degradation? And is it really making us happy?
My fellow liberals tend to get terribly upset with me when I bring up morality, but isn’t that at the heart of the problem? I don’t offer any solutions here, but it does strike me that until we recognise that fact and start talking about it seriously, we won’t actually get anywhere.
I for one think that liberals should talk about morality. Not the shallow kind that organised religion is obsessed with; denying children life-saving vaccines for fear of recognising they might have sex one day while embracing war criminals into their flock. I’m talking about the sort of morality that values humanity above all else. The sort of deeply felt morality that inspired social entrepreneurs such as Joseph Rowntree.
Liberals accept that it is almost always counter-productive to censor; but why does it follow that we should be shy of censure? I say it is high time we reclaimed morality from the likes of the Daily Mail. We have big problems and we need nothing less than a shift in global consciousness in order to solve them. To achieve that, we need to start talking about big concepts. It’s time we did.
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38 Comments
Er, amen.
So you want more of this or this?
You ask isn’t greed bad? It reflects bad intentions, maybe, or maybe not.
Look at big pharma. Probably the least ethical business practises on the planet, huge profits, yet the work it does saves millions of lives, and is virtually free to us after a brief interlude of patent protection. Bad motives and good consequences. Which is more important? Is this related to deontology v consequentialism?
I don’t think you can say that aspiration is immoral, and claim to be a liberal.
Every utopian socialist in history has claimed “we have enough now for our needs, let’s just share it out fairly and live happy secure lives”. I’m quite glad that people in the 16th century didn’t believe Thomas More when he said it, and that people in the 4th century BC didn’t buy it from Aristotle when he did.
You’re right that greed can become immoral when you’re willing to screw everyone else to do it. In those cases, censure is fine, but regulation and legislation are more important…
In so far as what you are proposing is a humanist morality then I agree…i suspect the reason it doesnt get talked about is because it’s ok in the abstract but when it comes to policies and their possible enactment it’s always likely that somebody will lose a little bit of liberty or have to trade it which some extreme liberterians seem unwilling to do….
Greed is bad because it usually does harm to others as you so elequently express with your example of the City where a few peoples greed brings the whole system crashing to its knees….however, greed is not innate to human nature it is mostly socially created in my eyes by consumerist culture…
I agree James. The problem is that morality is clear and understandable with the public when it judges others and victimises people.
A Liberal morality of tolerance and that there is no one path of truth alone is a hard one to sell. It ends up as being presented as about fairness and equality. But terms like this are so abused by others they have little value.
I would say that we need to return to a morality of voluntarism in the earlier 20th century context, with the promotion of self help, of mutuality and of encouraging the voluntary sector. This links into the theories of community politics before it became just about delivering FOCUS and getting EARS data.
I worry sometimes when I see people singing the Red Flag at Glee Club or advocating state regulation of every aspect of our lives at conference. We need a morality that cares about society but is free of a statist vision. It’s available in spades from our Liberal predecessors, we need a politician of greater ability than me to put it together in a bold way.
“greed is not innate to human nature it is mostly socially created in my eyes by consumerist culture”
But who created that consumerist culture in the first place? It hasn’t been imposed from outside, it is simply the sum of human endeavour to date. Consumerist culture bobs up and down throughout history usually in inverse relation to the economic cycle.
In fact, James’ article, coming at the cusp of economic crossover, is one of the early calls for restraint, both moral and economic, which always accompany economic downturns (and which were of course once associated very specifically with religiosity – God is punishing us for greed, etc).
None of which means we shouldn’t adopt attitudes of moral concern on a party political basis, of course (and I personally, as a charity shop shopper, find them imical to me, anyway). History can be a bit irresistable like that – if it’s time to start ringing the morality bell for twenty-odd years, then it’s time. Just let’s not kid ourselves that it’s got aught to do with an abstract concept of “good” or what is “right”.
Well I largely agree with you James. However I suggest that one book you read is “The Corporation”, which has been turned into a film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation
Many years ago there was a problem with investing in companies; you were personally liable if they went under, and that could cost you a fortune. So laws were introduced by the state that brought in limited liability and legal personification.
Thus a company could go bankrupt rather than your investors. And if the company broke the law, the company could be taken to court in the same way a person can.
The setup ensured that as far as the management of the company is concerned, the company was obliged to maximise profits for shareholders, regardless of the “externalities” ie pollution, exploitation. In theory Governments can regulate and prevent the excesses, and some do. But because of the concentrations of wealth within corporations, they can lobby governments to weaken regulations. They can fund free market think tanks and claim that they are “liberal”. They have a lot of power, which is why I advocate state funding of political parties to reduce that power.
The invention of modern capitalism by the state has on the one hand produced a system whereby up until 2007 we have experienced remarkble prosperity that it is hard to imagine could have been acheived any other way.
But it is also seriously flawed and always has been. The ever-worsening problems with pollution, of which global warming is likely to be catastrophic, is one of these externalities we have not dealt with. And now of course we are experiencing the fallout of short termism and deregulation that has led to financial meltdown in the global economy. And on the horizon there is the nightmare of derivative implosion, the financial “weapons of mass destruction” that Warren Buffet warned of.
Now I happen to the that the people in the eye of the storm are mostly decent people with generally good morals. However when you work for a company that needs to make a profit, it is very hard if not impossible to widen your personal moral values to that of the company.
It is the system that is immoral.
The Anglo-American model of capitalism is one that is about to experience an abrupt decline.
It would be nice if socialism works as an alternative, but there is no sign that it does.
The next best thing is to re-engineer capitalism so that the state has a stronger role in regulating it and ensuring the will of the public good, which as we now know does not coincide automatically with whatever makes the biggest short term profit.
The state should also ensure that no bank is “too big to fail”, although in the short term that is not practical.
I don’t think you can say that aspiration is immoral, and claim to be a liberal.
I’m not sure who you can set up enormous straw men like that and claim to be illiberal.
Since when did “naked greed” equate with aspiration?
Where did that illiberal come from? I meant liberal?
Damn you typey fingers – ask the brain first!
Well James, you seemed to suggest buying a lottery ticket, or wanting to cut the 40% tax rate were within your definition of “naked greed and individualism”.
I wouldn’t say either of those things is immoral.
There is something that distinguishes immoral greed from moral aspiration; which is whether you use your power (political, social or economic) to exploit other people.
Is it because it doesn’t make for good Focus copy?
‘Cllr Smythe said that the newly painted railings at the end of Acacia Avenue would increase the wellbeing of society and would make people more well disposed towards each other generally.’
I take your point Chris, I could have worded that better.
I would say there is aspiration and aspiration however. The is the aspiration that, if I work hard over the next few years I could earn £X and if I get lucky I could earn £X. The Liberal Vision pamphlet I refer to states “Just because you are earning £ 15,000 per annum now does not mean that you can’t reasonably seek to earn £50,000 per annum in a few years’ time.” Well, actually that is quite unreasonable. A handful of people do indeed go from £15,000 to £50,000 in five years but they are a tiny minority and the economy would implode pretty quickly if it was the case. It goes on to say “Frankly, even if such an aspiration is unrealistic, the individual concerned will not necessarily look kindly on a political party who wishes to cap or limit it,” which may well be true but it is not a rational attitude.
Should we really indulge such irrationality? If so, then where do we stop? Replace the NHS with homeopathy clinics? Entitle all school children to have astrology charts made up for them at Key Stage 3?
That definition doesn’t count as “moral aspiration” in my book, but nor does it breach the harm principle. I’m not suggesting that we categorise it as a thoughtcrime (at all), but I do think there is a place for liberals to make the case that it is not good for society for such a sense of entitlement to be so prevalent.
Well, I’m not going to start defending Liberal Vision. 😉
Me neither: but “A handful of people do indeed go from £15,000 to £50,000 in five years” strikes me as unlikely. Twenty years ago you could move from 8k to about 32k in the public sector in around five years just by starting as a graduate recruit and qualifying as a CIPFA accountant. I would guess that a gradient like this is fairly common for graduates moving into a professional job. I have seen much bigger leaps for people in IT.
“Liberals accept that it is almost always counter-productive to censor; but why does it follow that we should be shy of censure?”
That’s exactly how I feel James, but then when I censured Islam earlier this year, you called me a bigot. But moving swiftly on . . .
I totally agree that we should talking about morality and its relevance to the present financial crisis which has been engineered by deeply immoral behaviour. But I find your article is slightly infected with lefty thinking. Perhaps this is because you are a lefty! The reference to inheritance tax is a giveaway. I think that inheritance tax is itself immoral. There’s a word for nicking 40% of a large estate just because somebody has died – it’s called theft, and it’s immoral. I so wish Lib Dems would be on board with this instead of sneering at ‘Tory tax cuts for the rich.’ Morality is absolute, not relative, and stealing from the rich is little better than stealing from the poor.
Of course, some people are earning their money in an immoral, though not illegal, manner – rip-off boardroom pay and bonuses, for instance. This is what needs to be tackled and regulated. But earning huge sums of money is not per se immoral. Isn’t it enough to be able to live comfortably and securely? No, not really. It depends on what you want to achieve in life. One of the richest guys in the world is Bill Gates, but he is putting his money to good use – a great example of non-religious philanthropy.
So yes, let’s hear about morality, but please let’s not hear about ‘rich bastards’ and the like. Not all rich people are bastards and plenty of poor people are bastards too. The solution to city fat cats ripping us off cannot be for the government to rip them off in turn through the taxation system. There are shades of Oliver James in your article, and I don’t think we should be gong there.
Ugh I really shouldn’t get involved with this.
What exactly is immoral about greed and/or individualism? Assuming you’re not committing fraud, or stealing, or cheating, or using force on others – if you’re engaged in open, honest transactions why is it immoral to want to be rewarded properly?
You say you want to bring morality into politics but you’re starting out with an inherently collectivist morality and assuming that individualist morality is just ‘immoral’.
Would you prefer to appeal to our reason or our emotions?
Politics and morality make bad bedfellows because it is rarely the business of politics to censure individual conduct. The proper exceptions to that rule occur in the individual conduct of persons with political responsibilities. For the conduct of others, the business of politics is to supply rules for individuals to keep to so that they will not damage their fellows.
But we cannot make that sort of statement about the proper business of politics unless we start from a foundation of morality. We liberals have that foundation. A large part of it is expounded by John Stuart Mill in “On Liberty”. The companion values of equality and community, and the resolution that “no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity” appear on our LibDem membership cards.
In the regulation of the financial markets, the rules were defective and many people will suffer as a result of individual behaviour which in itself may have been greedy but was otherwise innocent. The lesson is to improve the rules (a few countries had rules which avoided the trouble).
Incidentally, it is an error to see the wish to gain money as necessarily greed. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, for example, have gained incredible amounts of money; and given the incredible bulk of it away to help others.
The answer to this false antithesis between moral principles and pragmatic consequentialism is simply – you must have both. If you adopt a moral standpoint but don’t bother to put it into practice, then your moral stance is devalued. If you only set out to get rich, but you achieve something socially useful along the way, then you have a moral justification for what you have done.
Liberal politics is the art of putting moral principles into practice. James is right. The Tories have always had pretty much of a stranglehold on the appeal to self-interest and greed. We need policies that both appeal to moral principle, and will work in the real world.
Yes David, but what do you mean by “pragmatic” consequentialism?
Consequentialism is a branch of ethical theory that says that an act can be judged good or bad by its consequences.
And what is the alternative? Judging intentions? Or obedience to arbitrary authority? It’s all hogwash unworthy of the name morality. JS Mill was a utilitarian – a kind of consequentalist, because he saw this.
Paino, I’ve seen “The Corporation” – it was a two and a half hour whine that corporations don’t have good intentions and often do bad things. (Just like lots of people.) There was little regard to the question of what the consequences of banning corporations might be.
What is immoral about greed and individualism?
It comes down to whether it is “naked self interest” of “enlightened self interest”.
Companies that manufacture goods that produce carbon pollution as an externality do so out of naked self interest. If they then lobby against regulations that prevent them from doing so, and fund free market think tanks that also lobby against these regulations, then that is also naked self interest.
And yes, there is a lot wrong with that.
Sometimes if you are lucky wealthy people do not have that kind of greed, and spend the money to create a better world.
There is also the wise words of Mahatma Ghandi; “Theres enough for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed”.
I think we should consider before we carry on destroying for ourselves the only planet we can possibly live on.
Come on then Joe, educate us please. If it’s hogwash to judge an act on the basis of whether the intentions were noble, and it’s also hogwash to judge it on the basis of whether the outcome was (morally) a good one, what kind of moral judgment can we ever make that is not hogwash?
James,
I absolutely agree that liberalism should be moral. Indeed the only valid mechanism for judging all human activity including politics has to be about morals. If I bring my children up as liberals, it is because I believe that being liberal is the correct way to treat others and because none should be enslaved by ignorance, conformity or poverty. If I believe that I and a small number of people like me should be in total control and tell others what to do, I will support an authoritarian party like Labour (New or Old – no difference in that regard). If I believe it is right that the rich and powerful get to keep most of what they can extract from the system, I will be a Tory. Finally, if I believe that it is wrong for our generation of humanity to take everything we want and ignore future generations and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet I will be a Green.
People who suggest Liberalism is not about morals do not seem to realise the immense debt we all owe to old Liberals and all the great things they did in the late 19th and early 20th Century and who very definitely did it from the perspective that it was the right thing (a good thing) to do. Likewise those who kept the flame of Liberalism alive after the War, when we were down to 5 MPs, and through to the 1960s when Community Politics came along very clearly did it from a moral perspective. I would strongly suggest that anyone who doesn’t understand this aspect obtains a copy of “The political insight of Elliot Dodds” which sets out clearly how the independent, liberal philosophy of the chapel going Christians clearly underpinned their determination to continue to support Liberalism at a time when it was on the verge of extinction as a political force.
In the members’ forum, there has been a debate about the pay and bonuses received by the bankers who have got us into this mess and I have been astonished and disappointed to find how many consider it the fault of the system and too complex to assign blame to (and extract any form of recompense from) the senior executives who ran the system. Not sure why this is, but it is something that I am trying to explore further, as you are here.
David
David, I think that is an excellent post. How can the party of William Gladstone be anything other than moral?
I agree that the liberal legacy is one unbroken line of moralists. I am proud to trace my heritage back to the Parliamentarians, the old Whigs, & the Liberal Party as it has always existed & always will.
Yes, there is a lot of immorality in society, much of which is due to government policy, & none of which has anything to do with the Daily Mail’s opinion.
It is immoral that countless unqualified students are sent to “uni” every year when they are not up to the demands of a rigorous academic degree, because government policy is to herd them in.
It is immoral that non-degrees are created & whole “universities” exist to cater to the dimmer scions of the middle class, while talented youngsters from poor families are burdened with debt & put off from applying by the failures of the education system & society in general.
It is, in fact, immoral that tuition fees were levied at all, as Jo Grimond was at pains to remind us.
The fool’s paradise of unlimited credit was a nest of immorality. It was immoral for people to spend money they didn’t have on buy to let mortgages, hoping to profit from other people, while they couldn’t sustain this “business model”, & their greed blinded them to these economic facts which are being brought home to us, largely as a result of their irresponsibility storing up problems.
It is also immoral to confuse & burden low incomes with the tax credit fiasco. This is not incompetence, it results from a vision of society which is flawed.
It is immoral for Camoron & Gideon Osborne to want to abolish tax on unearned income for themselves & their wealthy mates, whilst those who work & pay their own way & want to better themselves in what is indisputably a hard world are held back by taxes direct & even more so indirect taxes such as VAT. Even frank foes of tax & spending have declared IHT to be the least worst tax, & it can in fact be defended on moral grounds. (practical being another matter, but still).
It is NOT immoral to drink unlimited quantities of alcohol, smoke marijuana, & engage in consensual sex of any variety with another consenting adult (I would add so long as this occurs behind closed doors).
It is not immoral to oppose the demands of certain Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or followers of whatever for society to conform to their wishes, & suppress anyone who thinks otherwise.
I appreciate that these putrid right-wing types have made us uncomfortable with the word “morality” but it is ours rather than theirs, & should be reclaimed.
Additionally, the word “puritan” should be reclaimed: it has been used to describe joyless authoritarians, but in fact the old Puritans had noble ideas, & were instrumental in creating the modern world & liberalism as we currently understand it.
…
&, as always, when I reveal my undiluted opinions, I stress that I have no connection to the LDs & they will doubtless rush to stress that they have no connection to me & disown my views.
Sorry David, I misread you. Not hogwash.
I’m not sure how much people want morality & how much they merely want self justifying lies. A couple of days ago I was at a public lecture at which Shirley Williams acknowledged that Britain’s politicians including the Liberal Democrats had supported genocide, ethnic cleansing, child sex slavery & cutting teenagers open so our hospitald could get their organs. She justified this on the, untrue, grounds that the Serbs had done the same.
The point I am leading to is is that talking to a member of the audience afterwards he insisted that this was just what Britain “perfidious Albion” had always done, stabbing our allies in the back & that there was consequently nothing immoral in it. This was an eductated guy & I am quite sure would have accepted the common view that Hitler was a bad guy for carrying out such atrocities. How much, therefore is what we agree is right or wrong (killing Jews to improve the gene pool, vanning DDT to save birds, censoring anybody who says blacks show lower IQs, reducing standards of living to save CO2) a function of individual moral decisions & how much of handing over our consciences to politicians who may thus already have to much to say imposing their “morality”?
Neil, is it perhaps possible that you have put into Shirley Williams’ mouth some words which she didn’t actually, you know, like, really use? And which perhaps, she didn’t entirely go along with?
Mightn’t it be better if you just expressed your own opinions, claimed them as your own, and, explained what it is you are talking about?
The thing that strikes me about all this hoohah is that, well, wasn’t everybody complicit? And if so, wasn’t everybody immoral, to a certain extent? Hands up who has bought a house in the last ten years (not pointing any fingers, James)? You must have known that house prices were too high and that by buying into the market you were just fuelling the bubble and pricing first-time buyers and low income individuals out of the market. Was this the moral thing to do? Same goes for anyone selling a house. Was it moral to make a profit you hadn’t earned? Wasn’t it just, well, naked greed and individualism?
Well, yes it was but still it was the entirely rational thing to do. You would have had probably many reasons for buying/selling a house. You wanted to upsize or downsize, move to a different area, or just want to invest money in a system with (at the time) guaranteed profits.
So there is an obvious dichotomy here between what is moral and what is rational. So why when most chose the latter over the former do people rail against the banks for doing the same thing.
What happened here is that a system was set in motion that lowered the risk in the equation, creating a moral hazard. Banks found themselves in a situation where, due to government intervention, their risk was increased. To counter this they devised a system that spread the risk throughout the sector, thus minimizing individual risk, thus creating moral hazard. And so on and so forth until someone walks into a bank and says “er, actually, you know on my mortgage application I said I was the 4th Earl of Bancroft and ran my own Ironing company worth £1.3 million? Well that wasn’t strictly true.”
The trick is to try and get rational behaviour in some alignment with moral behaviour by creating the right incentives. Whereas in fact the opposite happened here. Bankers were disincentivised to behave morally and thus didn’t. Quelle surprise.
Banks and the finance sector does need good regulation, in fact it requires it to work efficiently. What it doesn’t need is bad regulation, nor necessarily a lot of regulation, because if people deem it unfair, they’ll just find a way around it and we’ll be back to square one.
David Evans suggests recovering the bonuses of the bankers to teach them a lesson, so they have an incentive to behave morally next time. Well, okay, but shouldn’t we also fine every government minister who stood up and said everything is fine, every opposition MP you chose not to study the legislation or chose to keep schtum so that everything would go tits up and they would then look better? Every regulator who chose to enjoy the privileges of a quango without being able to do their job sufficiently? And lastly, but by no means least, shouldn’t everyone who bought a house for their own means be penalised? As I said, why aren’t all these people to blame as well? And why didn’t we let the banks go under if we wanted to teach them a lesson?
The reason why I detest so much of the schadenfreude that has materialised due to this debacle is that everyone’s answer seems to be more government. This doesn’t make sense as the government doesn’t have the incentives to correct the problem either. This whole problem all started because, funnily enough, politicians want you to vote for them. The best way to get you to vote for them is to make you richer. The easiest way to make you richer is to get you to be a property owner. The easiest way to get you to be a property owner is to remove the barriers to owning property. Just as it is not in the governments best interest to let banks fail now. I have no idea whether overall it would be better that banks failed or not, but the government is taking its decision purely from a political point of view, not an economic one, so the problem is not going to be solved.
And while we’re at it, hands up who has a private pension plan? Wouldn’t you have been a bit miffed to turn 65 and had your pension manager hand you a check for £6.53 and say “well, we thought about making money but in the end thought greed just wasn’t our thing. We understand you won’t be able to pay your heating bill so we have bottled some of our self-righteousness to keep you warm at night. Take care. Cheerio.”
As for:
No matter how many time I read that I can’t quite make sense of it. Almost all aspirations are irrational to some extent, no? And it does strike me as profoundly illiberal. Most of the no-hopers on pop idol have, well, no hope but at least they are trying. Isn’t it an unwillingness to admit defeat to the soul-destroying drudgery of your life that pushes you to greater things? From a personal note, I grew up in a council house in a port town having come from a long line of Belfast shipbuilders. If my dad hadn’t aspired to more than the Troubles of Belfast, and myself further than a job on the docks, then I wouldn’t be sitting in the US working on one of the greatest scientific projects around. What is wrong with what I did? Fine, I used skill, but a lot of luck came into the equation as well. The problem is not that people aspire irrationally, it is that people denigrate other worthwhile jobs. Rather than saying “you shouldn’t be a popstar”, we should be saying “being a plumber is a great job, you’ll earn shitloads”.
My answer to those four questions are sometimes, sometimes Comrade Graham, sometimes, and yes.
As for Joseph Rowntree, he is a great role model. But of course what he did was go out and make a shitload of money first, before then ploughing it back into the community. He should be celebrated and lauded as should the vast amount of other business people who put money back (that is of course after they have employed thousands of people and made our lives easier and cheaper). But is it moral to make money from feeding kids sweets?
Paul Marshall, the hedge funder who is a great boon to the party, also set up a very successful children’s charity. So is he an evil banker, or a lovely philanthropist?
We should be lauding these people, and we should also be persuading them to part with their cash for mankind. But until we are happy and willing to accept that making money is okay instead of labelling them as greedy, individualists then it isn’t going to happen.
A kind of moral hazard come into play here as well. We have got ourselves into a situation where we think the answer to social problems is the state, and therefore as individuals we don’t have to take responsibility. Joseph Rowntree built houses and schools, paid for doctors and education. How can people do those things now? The only answer is by giving to the state who then decides how to spend their money. Does this make sense? If I am ever rich (and I certainly aspire to be, however irrational this may be for a lowly scientist from Suffolk) then I would love to build schools to teach liberal ideas, science, art, maths and thought. I would love to build good social housing that was a joy to live in. But I wouldn’t be allowed. My money would have been taken off me to fund whatever whim of the government of the time. Or the rules, regulations and permissions would leave it near to impossible.
It strikes me as strange, and again, profoundly illiberal, that people think that the best way to get people to help others is to restrict them.
Sorry for a comment that is longer than the original post. 🙂
This could all have been summed up as:
Q: “Why don’t liberals talk about morality?”
A: Due to the problem defining both “liberal” and “morality”.
Their is one upside to this whole sorry mess: the word “spiv” has come back into common usage. I like it.
No she did like so say that. What I am talking about is “that Britain’s politicians including the Liberal Democrats had supported genocide, ethnic cleansing, child sex slavery & cutting teenagers open so our hospitals could get their organs” in Kosovo which doesn’t seem to me to be like a difficult concept & that all those who supported such crimes are guilty of supporting them. Nor one which can seriously be, or indeed has been, disputed.
It can & has been justified &/or ignored which is my point.
“Q: “Why don’t liberals talk about morality?”
A: Due to the problem defining both “liberal” and “morality”.”
Sorry, but no, that’s a cop-out, and it won’t do. Of course there is no universal definition of morality. The South African apartheid regime described racial integration as an issue of morality (or immorality). They did of course take a stance which we would all see as morally wrong. But they were quite right to recognise it as a moral issue.
All the more reason for us to recognise the moral dimension in everything we do – and also, to recognise that moral issues will not always be simple.
…And James, I’m really pinching myself now. You have felt it necessary to argue the case that Liberal Democrats should talk about morality. Wouldn’t all our political forbears, from Gladstone right through to people like Steel, Ashdown, Ming Campbell and Shirley Williams, have found it frankly astonishing that in 2008, a Liberal Democrat might not be able to take that for granted?
I would completely agree with you, it won’t do, but that is (at least part of) the problem, in my view at least – why don’t you think it is the problem?
The point I was trying, and obviously failed, to make is that it is very difficult to say x is good, y is bad.
If you are talking on a grand scale then consensus is easier to achieve – most people, even perhaps daily mail readers, will say that apartheid is immoral. But when it comes to individual behaviour it isn’t so easy to be that resolute. Were all white South Africans immoral? Surely they were all complicit to a certain degree. And, therefore were the opposing side always moral? Mandela admitted that the ANC committed human rights violations, but most wouldn’t see Mandela as an immoral character. The sheer ambiguity involved makes making such sweeping statements very hard indeed.
James asks the question about whether it is enough to live securely and comfortably. But what is security and comfort? Surely each individual has a different idea. Do you need that widescreen TV? Do I need my laptop and broadband internet connection? Does someone need a house with en-suite bathrooms and an open living space?
And if we decide that we all don’t need widescreen TV’s then what happens to all the people making them? Surely if you are greedy and go out and make lots of money, you want to spend that money on the things that make you happy, thus spreading the wealth as it were. Then all the people that make money from selling you stuff go on and buy the stuff they like, and so on and so forth. Where is the immorality in these transactions?
All I am trying to say is that it is almost impossible to decide what is moral and what is immoral, even for an individual, beyond the most simple ideas. The sheer number of variables make morality ambiguous. This also goes back to Joe’s very first comment about what are you trying to measure with morality – the outcome or the process. To go again for the personal example, I work in medical research using animals. I think my work is morally justified by the eventual outcome of the research, but without that ‘means to an end’ thinking the work could become very ethically dubious because surely it is immoral to kill an animal?
It is a dilemma, but just not one that is best served at a ‘party’ level.We don’t agree on what is liberal, so how can we agree on what is moral. To go back to my own personal tale, there may well be people in the party that don’t even think the ends justify the means with regard to animal research. It is the policy of the continuation Liberal Party to ban it, for instance. So am I moral or immoral?
I get why, as a party or group of ‘liberals’ we should think about morality but I think that we should aim it far more at getting people to understand the consequences of their own actions rather than trying to impose a set of strict guidelines on them structered from our own views. It should be a much more individual approach, both from the moral-er and to the moral-ee. If you want to walk up to Paul Marshall at the next Conference and say “Hey Paul, thanks for destroying the world you greedy bastard” then feel free, but maybe I want to walk up to him and say “Hey Paul, like the charity work”. After all, isn’t that what liberalism is about – allowing people to make their own choices?
I’m all for morality, but the problem is that morality can only be adjudged accurately with hindsight.
Prescriptive morality (which is what we’re really talking about here) is based on the flawed premise that the person making the prescriptions knows for certain what they’re talking about and therefore isn’t required to back up those prescriptions with any evidence – doctors at least go through years of training to ensure they can make fairly reliable diagnoses (and even then it’s still only their best guess).
Andrew,
Yes, it is often very difficult to say what is morally good or bad. I quite agree, that is a problem. The issue is whether you should avoid moral questions which are difficult or impossible to answer in an intellectually rigorous way, or, to tackle them because it would be unreasonable (immoral even) to leave them unanswered.
Sophie’s choice (which of your two children will you sacrifice?) is the extreme example. Of course there is no good choice. And of course, if your enemy is going to murder both your children if you fail to make a choice, then you must make a choice.
When you make a moral judgment, you are not making the flawed premise that you know for certain what you are talking about. You are doing your best, with your inadequate moral and intellectual equipment, to decide which way to go. Sometimes, however humble and uncertain you are about it, you really ought to make a moral decision.
Anyway, who said moral decisions were the only difficult ones? Read the thread about libertarianism, and you’ll see just as dense a fog of irreconcilable differing views, even though the subject matter is nominally a purely practical one (how to organise the perfect banking system)!
Sure,
I don’t think each of us should avoid moral questions, no doubt most come across them everyday.
Personally, I have a problem with trying to come up with a coherent moral strategy within the party. If Nick Clegg wants to talk about morality then I am fine with it as long as he identifies it as his morality and doesn’t look to speak for the party as a whole.
It is more that I am railing against the simplistic notions of morality that some seem to have. In the article James asks isn’t greed wrong – too many people just answer Yes, rather than Yes, but… and look at the wider sphere of thinking.
In that, I think that both you and James are completely right, we should be talking about morality. As long as we are actually going to talk about it, like we have here, rather than use the opportunity to easily label as immoral those that we don’t agree with, as others are eager to do.
The point is that governments are un fit to establish morality. political parties generally less so & those parties involved in genocide & worse definitely less so.
Wow, so no mention of how Clinton, the original modern day liberal leader himself, wanted everyone to own a home, even if they could not afford it? No mention of how he then made government loans to hand out one after another to people who obviously could not pay them off? Gee, I wonder how much THAT helped out economy? This just really makes me want to give MY hard earned money away to lazy ass welfare users, illegal immigrants, and fat couch sitting liberals like YOU! HA
Wow, McCaingirl, have you noticed that this is a British blog talking about British politics.
Anyhoo, I’m guessing that if you were right, there would be republicans on record at the time opposing Clinton, and that as soon as Bush was elected he would have reversed the policy. Right? No? Better luck next time then.
You’ll probably end up jobless if McCain has his way anyway, just as the credit crunch will through Daily Mail readers & sneering “libertarians” out of work, so they can in fact become “scroungers” themselves.
But, of course, it’ll be different for them. They’ll insist that they are a cut above everyone else in the dole queue. It wasn’t their fecklessness & irresponsibility, like it was with everyone else. Oh no. It was the Tartan McZaNuLieBore that put them out of work.
In 10 years, there’ll be a more humane approach to people on benefits, mark my word. & maybe then, policies will be put in place to actually get people into sustainable work.
Sorry, had to get that one off my chest. This is probably deletion fodder 🙂
A couple of points:
First. You seem to imply that all “organised religion” has an “obsession” with a shallow moral imperative. Such broad brush strokes were very suprising since you seemed to be making sense up until then. I don’t feel it fair (or liberal) to apparently tar all organised religions with that brush.
I recommend some bedtime reading about the humanitarian help “organised religions” give almost every day to people of other faiths and no faith at all. You know, shallow things like feeding the starving, giving essential medical aid, building schools and hospitals ;-D. Paid for in large part, if not totally by the generous donations, sometimes given at great personal sacrifice, of people of faith who have never seen the people they are trying to help.
I guess all I am saying is, be careful that your personal views of the notion “organised religion” do not lead you to make indiscriminate statements apparently about all organised religions. Organised religion is used to taking a knocking these days, but in most cases it is unwarranted.
For me, as a member of an organised religion, love for all humanity, life and liberty are at the very core of my beliefs. I am sorry if this has not been your experience of organised religion up to now… but it is true for mine.
Second. I agree with your stance on morality however. We need more Joseph Rowntrees. The thing with Joseph Rowntree is that he did “it” off his own back. The challenge with governments is that they don’t trust people to do “it” themselves, and so take the funds they want through taxation and do “it” (whatever “it” is) on our behalf. Problem is that they waste so much of it in the process, and/or spend it on causes that I didn’t agree with/want to support.
With Tax and NI taking around 30% of a person’s income, that doesn’t leave much left for the would be Joseph Rowntrees out there – not in the current economic climate anyway.
Even so, some people are still being mini JRs in their own right. Some of them religious as I mentioned earlier, and some not.
Smaller government, lower taxes, and you might just see that “the people” are better, wiser and more efficient at supporting good social causes than the wasteful government machine.
Which party dares to try it?