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?

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

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.

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.

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)!

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).

Sorry, but no, that’s a cop-out, and it won’t do.

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?

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?

It can & has been justified &/or ignored which is my point.

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:

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.

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 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 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.

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 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”?

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.

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