The Illusion of Moral Neutrality
When politicians claim that you can't "legislate morality", they're lying to us. Politicians and their enablers impose their vision of morality on us all the time. Moral neutrality is a sham that only serves the hide the oppressive nature of the state.
Pierre Lemieux - July 14, 2008
In a much discussed speech, David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, argued that “moral neutrality” has lead to a “broken society” where we even fear “to say what needs to be said” about right and wrong, good and bad. Professor Douglas Farrow of McGill University commented that Canadians could soon face their own David Cameron moment. “There”, he said, “the trigger apparently is yet another mindless stabbing. In Toronto, we’ve had similar things: mindless shootings” (National Post, July 9, 2008).
So, we are living under a morally neutral state? Try telling this to individuals who are denormalized because they smoke tobacco or are jailed because they consume drugs or provide them to consumers, who have their children seized by the state because they don’t teach them state-approved morals, who pay taxes to support government programs based on egalitarian ethics or other state activities they disprove of, who are brainwashed by the subsidized environmental religion, or who are prohibited by law (in theory or in practice) from defending themselves against gun- or knife-wielding thugs. All these people and others have moral values imposed on them by the state, that is, by force. Nothing morally neutral about that.
Sure, some other people have their sensitivities protected, even against offensive speech — and even in England, the motherland of free speech. But these privileged people are those whose consent and support are needed by the state apparatchiks.
In public policy, there is no such thing as moral neutrality. Any government intervention incorporates either explicit or implicit moral judgments, and the only sense that can be made of “moral neutrality” is that the underlying values are not made explicit. The state has not been and cannot be morally neutral, at least when it intervenes in all aspects of our lives. The state’s moral values transpire in whom it favours and whom it harms.
Can we say that Canadians themselves are morally neutral? The first problem is that they don’t have only one view of ethics. Second, the “morally neutral” individuals accept fashionable ideas, values and behaviour, just like “human rights” commissions do. These “tolerant” people call the cops when others behave non-violently in ways they don’t like. Again, nothing morally neutral about it.
This is not to deny that some useful moral constraints have disappeared, which may partly explain why senseless crime or youth crime is on the rise. But, for most people, moral constraints have not vanished, their nature has simply changed: submission to the state or, for false dissenters, to the ideal state has replaced respect for the individual.
Mr. Cameron’s efforts to grapple with important issues such as personal responsibility is commendable. But the ethics the British politician is proposing is at best wishy-washy and at worst as relativistic as what he thinks he is attacking. He cannot mention “personal responsibility” without immediately adding “social responsibility”. He is even unable to avoid the Hare-Krishna of “social justice”, an expression which Friedrich Hayek, the classical liberal economist and Nobel prizewinner, has shown to be either empty or totalitarian.
David Cameron speaks like any ordinary collectivist politician when he says, “We as a society”. Society is not a super-individual who has preferences and makes choices in its big collective head. Society is only a collection of individuals, even if we admit that their cooperation depends on shared basic values. Under the social “we”, it is the state that makes decisions, at best in the name of the majority, at worst under the direction of a minority or a small group of politicians and bureaucrats.
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