Up to a Point
Norm has more on the paradox. He also had more a few days ago, answering my mutterings on the subject. To jump to the end first, he explains further what he had in mind.
So why my suggestion of a tension or paradox in the first place? I suppose because I think some liberals disguise from themselves that there are substantive moral commitments underpinning the ‘neutral’ political framework that they favour. Neutral in many ways it is, but only up to a point.
Ah. Is that it. Right – well then I won’t try to resolve the paradox any more, because I entirely agree with that, and bit that bullet long ago. (I scribbled four pages in my notebook on the subject yesterday morning and kept returning to and emphasizing the phrase ‘up to a point’ [and didn’t see Norm’s comment until today], so we’re on the same page here.) Yeah – if there’s one thing I don’t do it’s disguise from myself that there are substantive moral commitments underpinning the ‘neutral’ political framework I favour. I’m sharply aware of that; the awareness is basic to the ‘Cultural Relativism’ In Focus among other things. Hence the insistence on ‘up to a point’ – that point is where neutrality or pluralism or tolerance or liberty or multiculturalism or cultural relativism bump up against, for instance, subordination of women, or persecution of homosexuals or ‘apostates’ or ‘blasphemers’ or other outgroups merely for being outgroups. I definitely have substantive moral commitments that trump commitments to tolerance or libertarianism. They even trump, for instance, my commitment to democracy, especially democracy understood as simple majoritarianism; I don’t care how big a majority wants to oppress women or atheists or queers or Jews: I want a strong bill of rights to trump that majority will.
So to return to Norm’s original point – “Call this framework ‘pluralist liberalism’. Is it not itself premissed, then, upon principles for which universal validity is claimed by its adherents?” – I would say yes, it is, and furthermore that it applies only up to a point – which is perhaps another thing that some liberals disguise from themselves. In fact there are perhaps three of those (I’m starting to write a Spanish Inquistion sketch here). Substantive moral commitments, the fact that pluralism is believed in only up to a point, and the related fact that democracy is believed in up to a point. They’re all related. The vocabulary (the hurrah vocabulary) of tolerance, pluralism, multiculturalism, diversity, and democracy, are very often flung around as if they were all quite unqualified, unlimited in their application, when the truth of course is that none of them are. Hardly anyone actually believes in tolerance of everything, pluralism in all matters, democracy no matter what the majority decides – yet people often talk as if they do believe exactly that. It’s worth reminding each other of the point up to which.
Hurrah!
I agree absolutely with you and the Norm (I think)
Better go now before I disagree over something
Best wishes
Yeah, I agree with this too, and never really saw much of a paradox in the first place. “A substantial moral committment” to the “neutral political framework” of liberalism is only a paradox if you choose to see it as one.
There is an unparodoxical way of stating things, which is: “liberalism maintains that life is better when, as much as possible, people are free to pursue their own goals and values.” A couple of things should be noticable about this statement. First, liberalism itself is not neutral about what constitutes the best political framework – it advocates one particular framework over others in order to maximize the welfare and happiness of citizens. Second, liberals can unparadoxically restrict the attempts of certain individuals to restrict the freedom of others, since what they want is to maximize freedom, not simply grant it to everyone in all situations. Liberalism would obviously be self-defeating if its advocacy of freedom resulted in the denial of freedom. Thus, the parodox is only apparent, not real.
Now, there is a real paradox involved in the attitude of some misguided liberals, who mistakenly accept the idea that liberalism must be neutral between any and all views of the proper political framework. A liberal who believes that the views of an extremist of the Christian right or a leader of the Taliban are just as valid as her own has no reason to oppose those views, and so has no reason to defend freedom against those who wish to restrict it. You can’t really defend a view that you think is no better than any other. But again, the position of the misguided liberal results from a mistaken idea of what liberalism entails. Once we realize that liberalism never was a neutral choice among political frameworks, we can see that the views of this misguided liberal are, well, misguided.
Incidentally, there’s a good discussion of this issue in Michal Lynch’s “True to Life,” subtitled (coincidentally enough) “Why Truth Matters.” He makes the additional point that liberalism is a good philosophy because it is most likely true, and that its truth provides much of the rationale needed to defend it. Lynch’s book is really excellent – I certainly recommend it to anyone interested in the kinds of discussions here at B & W.
Phil
I think that the apparent paradox is resolved by realizing that the liberal framework focuses upon a method of discovering truth, rather than any particular truth itself. The method is rational argument, research, and empathy. Any subject is open to debate, any claim open to scrutiny and challenge. Dogmas do not stand on any rational basis, and therefore must inevitably resort to the use of force. In the absence of a sound method for resolving disputes, the only valid argument is a fist. It’s the use of violence and coercion that we are trying to avoid, but what do we do with an ideology which is itself a call for violence, someone who has abandoned rational discussion altogether?
The answer is that you allow people to say what they want, and in the language they want, and respond to them in kind. If they choose the language of force, you respond in that language. The point is to make the use of violence as costly and unnattractive as possible. But it’s important not to draw first blood; preemptive force is too easily justified by fear mongers.
[I don’t care how big a majority wants to oppress women or atheists or queers or Jews: I want a strong bill of rights to trump that majority will.]
but presumably oppressing the paedophiles is something that we’re all prepared to countenance, and it’s rather hard to say why they don’t qualify the same treatment as the atheists and queers unless you’re prepared to appeal to a) absolute morality or b) the majority will.
By “oppressing the paedophiles” you mean not lowering the age of consent to zero? So you say “oppressing the paedophiles” as one might say “oppressing the murderers” if murder remained illegal?
Besides, I didn’t say I was never prepared to appeal to majority will, or to think democracy is (within certain limits) a good thing. This is where up to a point comes in.
[This is where up to a point comes in]
but which point? “Up to a point” is not really an argument here, is it? It means “up to the point at which I give up on my earlier argument and appeal to either an absolute moral value or to the views of the majority”. Which means that you are not actually in any better position when it comes to arguing with someone who goes up to a different point than someone who had admitted they were a cultural relativist from the outset rather than denying it.
No it doesn’t. The “up to a point” has to be defended and defensible, it has to be justifiable, it can’t be just a because God says so. It also has to be debatable and questionable. I’m not a cultural relativist because I’m not willing to defer to “up to a point”s that simply rely on “because God said so” or the equivalent, or “because it’s the custom” or the equivalent.
defended against who, justifiable and defensible on what grounds? NAMBLA are certainly prepared to have an argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys, and the reason that they can’t is going to have to depend on some absolute statement of (im)morality.
Against the people who argue, justifiable and defensible on rational secular grounds of some kind.
“NAMBLA are certainly prepared to have an argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys”
Of course they are, I know that, that’s what I was saying. But 1) are they prepared to have an argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 3 year old boys? and 2) the reason that they can’t is going to have to depend on the same kind of argument NAMBLA uses. Why would it have to depend on “some absolute statement of (im)morality” rather than, say, arguments about consequences or harm?
To put it another way, if it turns out that NAMBLA is right that sex with 12 (or 3) year old boys is entirely and reliably and always harmless, then they ought to win the argument. Obviously I think it would be very hard to show that, but that doesn’t amount to an absolute statement of (im)morality, nor a taboo nor a Yuk. I don’t see why you assume it does.
well, even assuming that you’re not trying to smuggle in a whole load of assumptions by gerrymandering the word “rational”, you’ve now given so much ground to cultural relativism that it is quite hard to see why you wrote a book about it being so bad. Clearly, the amount of harm and good done by different ages of consent is going to depend on cultural factors.
?
What ground have I given to cultural relativism? Are you taking (or pretending to take) cultural relativism to be the same thing as rational argument?
And you completely neglected to answer anything I said. Unless you’re taking an irrelevant assertion to be the same thing as a real answer.
“Clearly, the amount of harm and good done by different ages of consent is going to depend on cultural factors.”
What types of cultural factors, specifically? I’d be very interested to know which ones make it perfectly fine to have sex with a 3-year old child.
The fact that some, even most people in a different culture may have different moral assumptions than ours does not in itself imply how well those assumptions stack up against ours. That’s why rational argument is needed, and that’s why we can’t simply chalk up differences to cultural relativism and call it a day.
Phil
Pardon me, but there is a very simple and rational reason why paedophilia ought not to be allowed, which is that sexual activity inherently carries with it significant risks, akin to the risks carried by, say, smoking, drinking alcohol, or driving, and people who have not reached an adult level of responsibility should be protected from the consequences of such acts, as part of the assemblage of duties making up a civilised society. Which sort of takes us back neatly to the whole ‘up to a point thing’, where the point here is the line between consenting adults and protected minors.
I thought it would be pretty obvious that someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society where it was normal to do so would suffer less harm than someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society in which this was a strange and unusual thing to do.
“I thought it would be pretty obvious that someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society where it was normal to do so would suffer less harm than someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society in which this was a strange and unusual thing to do.”
Did you? Interesting. It seems to me one can pretty easily make a case that a girl (not a boy) getting married at 14 in a society where it was normal to do so might well suffer more harm rather than less. If she has a baby at 14 that could easily harm her physically; in a society where marriage at 14 is strange and unusual (and, indeed, illegal) there might be intervention to protect her from that outcome. So it depends what you mean by “harm,” for one thing. If you mean the opprobrium of doing a nonconformist thing, it would be obvious, you’re right; but what about, for instance, the harm of having a crappy subordinated helpless life without actually conceptualizing it in those terms because of lack of awareness of any alternative? In other words habituation does to a considerable extent dampen active misery, but one could see that as a harm in itself. People who are poor and uneducated and illiterate and subordinated have much nastier, harder, narrower, worse lives than people who are prosperous and educated and autonomous, however habituated the first group may be. In other other words your point looks to me way too much like the easy way flourishing fortunate people just write off miserable people elsewhere by saying it’s not so bad for them, they’re used to it.
Come to think of it, that idea is similar to (and no doubt influenced by) Sen on adaptive preference. Yes, people adapt their preferences to fit their surrounding cultures, but that should not automatically be viewed as the opposite of harm. It could also be viewed as the essence of harm.
“I thought it would be pretty obvious that someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society where it was normal to do so would suffer less harm than someone getting married at the age of 14 in a society in which this was a strange and unusual thing to do.”
It’s not obvious to me. A 14-yr old girl in a society where such marriages are “normal” may feel coercion to marry, which hardly seems less harmful.
Now, I’ll grant you that there may be variances in age of sexual maturity from one society to the next, and differences in quality of life that also cause emotional maturity to vary. So it’s an open question whether it’s always equally harmful for someone to marry a 14-yr old girl. But notice that the mere “acceptance” of the practice is not what we need to assess the morality of the practice. We assess the moral questions by rationally weighing all of the factors involved.
Phil
[but what about, for instance, the harm of having a crappy subordinated helpless life without actually conceptualizing it in those terms because of lack of awareness of any alternative?]
this is the doctrine of “false consciousness”, and to be honest neither feminists nor Marxists have had such good luck with it in the last century as to make it worthwhile carrying into this one.
Isiaiah Berlin wrote the definitive book on this one in “Two Concepts of Liberty”. If you are prepared to call someone else’s life bad for reasons other than them thinking it’s bad, then what defence do you have against someone else who wants to say the same thing about you? Apparently, the defence of saying that your way is “rational”, which is to say, not much.
“then what defence do you have against someone else who wants to say the same thing about you?”
But I don’t want such a defence. If someone has something rationally grounded (yes, rationally grounded) to say about that I want to hear it. If someone has (non-loony) ideas about how our lives could be better, bring them on. Whyever not?
Adaptive preferences aren’t identical to false consciousness.
You seem to think this is about coercion, but it isn’t, it’s about widening choices, it’s about making choices available.
[yes, rationally grounded]
the attempt to smuggle your evaluative premises into your definition of “rationality” has been tried several times as a way round the is/ought distinction and it doesn’t work. Very few people use invalid logical schemata in their moral arguments; they just start from different moral premises or believe things about the purpose of human life or the existence of God which you don’t.
[Adaptive preferences aren’t identical to false consciousness.]
Yes they are. If you disagree with someone about the quality of their life, you are saying that their _conscious_ experience of how their life feels to them is _false_. Berlin goes through this one from soup to nuts, and nobody’s been able to resurrect the doctrine since (Joseph Raz had the nearest go). If X changed their preferences to be more like Y’s then they would like the things that Y likes, but also vice versa and there is no interpersonal absolute standard by which we could say that one of them was better off thinking like the other.
No kidding. But it is still open to anyone to point out to anyone that her preferences may be adapted to her environment. A Punjabi woman whose husband wallops her if she doesn’t work hard enough in the field can say it to me, and I can say it to her. It is of course true in both cases. It’s worth thinking about in both cases; in all cases.
“Yes they are. If you disagree with someone about the quality of their life, you are saying that their _conscious_ experience of how their life feels to them is _false_. Berlin goes through this one from soup to nuts..”
But this is only a good criticism if it were never possible to be mistaken about one’s own preferences or experience of their life. Yet most of us have convinced ourselves we were happy with a job, relationship, etc when we weren’t, or compromised our own happiness by choosing actions and goals that turned out to be incompatible. And many of us might also have experienced that speaking with someone about our goals and feelings could clarify these contradictions, especially if the talk involved a rational evaluation of our values and goals. It is indeed possible for someone to criticize the life choices and experience of someone else, and to learn something about our own preferences through the rational criticism of others.
The choice of Berlin as an example here is a little ironic. It is true that Berlin was a pluralist, and lobbied his entire life against the idea that there is one overarching, one-size-fits all solution for the problems of humanity. He rightly showed the connection between this pursuit of absolute solutions and totalitarian regimes and megalomaniacs who oppress others. But why would Berlin have devoted so much time and effort to this cause if he did not hold the belief that such totalitarianism and absolutism was an inherently bad thing? If he simply thought that totalitarianism and liberalism were “preferences,” he would have had no reason to oppose the former and support the latter. So, unless I’m mistaken, your view requires us to believe that Berlin spent an entire lifetime campaigning for liberalism without a) having any rational justification for doing so; and/or b) without believing himself to have any rational justification for doing so.
Phil
[But this is only a good criticism if it were never possible to be mistaken about one’s own preferences or experience of their life]
No, it’s still a good criticism if people are regularly mistaken about their own preferences, just so long as nobody else is systematically in a position to be better informed about their preferences than they are.
[But why would Berlin have devoted so much time and effort to this cause if he did not hold the belief that such totalitarianism and absolutism was an inherently bad thing?]
This is a very interesting point and it’s the subject of John Gray’s book on Berlin. Basically, the answer (or at least, Gray’s answer which I agree with) is that he did so because there was an inconsistency at the heart of his philosophical system and value pluralism, which he thought could neither be reconciled nor got rid of (the universe is not obviously under any obligation to give us a consistent moral system).
good God some benefactor of mankind has put a Wikipedia entry on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agonistic_liberalism