The Relationship between Liberalism and Conservatism

Parasitic, Competitive or Symbiotic?

Ann Bousfield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429764653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1999, this volume is a radical text which contributes to the current debate over the future of liberal theory as it offers an explicit critique of some of the leading players in that debate - namely William Galston, Jeffrey Reiman and Richard Rorty. It also offers an implicit critique of the general de-ontological liberal position.

1 Introduction

Much current debate within liberalism has arisen from the division of liberal allegiance between 'deontological' liberalism (represented by Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin and Hayek) and 'communitarian' liberalism (represented by Sandel, Taylor and Rorty). In particular, controversy has raged over different interpretations and theoretical justifications of the characteristically liberal claim to neutrality between competing conceptions of the good. This book, in contrast, will argue that liberalism is not in fact neutral between different conceptions of the good. On the contrary, liberal 'neutrality' actually depends on a conception of the good that is based on a specifically liberal understanding of what human beings are, and hence of what their flourishing consists in. This book will examine the possibility that the political problems facing liberalism are no more than the symptom of liberalism's failure to establish that its conception of the good is indeed neutral, arguing that the bid to establish liberalism's neutrality between competing conceptions of the good ultimately undermines any effort to establish a workable normative foundation for liberalism.

Developments in the thought of John Rawls, the leading liberal philosopher of the late 20^th century, indicate the seriousness of these problems. In response to critiques, such as those of Walzer and Sandel,¹ Rawls has shifted his position, most notably in Political Liberalism,² to one where the neutrality claim is specifically limited to rational procedures and the claim of liberalism to universal applicability on the basis of its supposed value-neutrality is dropped. In one sense dropping universalism means that the liberal claim to neutrality does not need to be comprehensive, a point Rawls in effect concedes in Political Liberalism:

[P]olitical liberalism assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime. Political liberalism also supposes that a reasonable comprehensive doctrine does not reject the essentials of a democratic regime. Of course, a society may also contain unreasonable and irrational, and even mad, comprehensive doctrines. In their case the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society.³

Rawls here is granting that within a liberal polity, ethical agreement about the foundations of a liberal society is improbable, and radical disagreement possible. But instead of invoking liberal neutrality towards the politics of illiberal minorities, he suggests such illiberal minorities should be contained in order to prevent them undermining liberal values. This cannot be a neutral position. In effect Rawls, in Political Liberalism, recommends the type of prescriptions advocated by Richard Bellamy, who seeks to develop a form of liberalism stripped of ethical pretensions.⁴ However the problem of liberal non-neutrality extends far more widely than Rawls and Bellamy: it is endemic throughout the history of liberalism, as this book will show. Moreover, liberalism is not only not neutral about forms of the good life, the point conceded by Rawls in Political Liberalism·, in the end it resorts to conservative justifications of the liberal order. For example, again in Political Liberalism, Rawls recognises the limits placed on political philosophy by historical conditions and by political practice:

I also hold that the most appropriate design of a constitution is not a question to be settled by considerations of political philosophy alone, but depends on understanding the scope and limits of political and social institutions and how they can be made to work effectively. These things depend on history and how institutions are arranged.⁵

Far from calling on liberalism's usual preference of reason over tradition, Rawls here seems to suggest that cautious pragmatism is a better guide to constitutional design than bold applications of theory - a typically conservative position.

The argument of this book may be outlined as follows. Liberalism takes itself to be neutral regarding conceptions of the good. Thus, liberals claim (most famously in the case of Rawls) that the 'right is prior to the good'.⁶ Moreover, because of the neutrality with regard to the good implied by the right being prior to the good, liberalism typically maintains that it is both genuinely autonomy-respecting as to ethics, and universally applicable as to politics. But these claims are not valid; liberalism's own purported neutrality is itself (part of) a specific historically-conditioned conception of the good. For the individual human being at the heart of liberalism is indeed a liberal individual, that is, a specifically liberal conception of individuality; similarly, the autonomy of these individuals that liberalism claims to respect is liberal autonomy. But these conceptions, which form the essential content of liberal theory, incorporate substantive values, which can be shown to be a product of specific historical circumstances. This has profound implications for liberal theory, producing tensions within it, some of which have been recognised to some extent by some liberals. But none - not even Rorty who has explicitly disavowed foundational Enlightenment liberalism⁷ - have fully developed the implications of liberalism's inconsistencies. The most important of these implications is that liberalism, to the extent that it can be justified at all, can be justified, only on conservative grounds. For the result of liberalism's ambivalence about neutrality is that in the end, all liberals can do by way of justification is assert the primacy of liberal values, not on the basis of a coherent rational foundation, but on the basis that liberals have found much to enjoy and value in them, that they are their own values, that because of this they are the foundation a way of life that liberals are determined to protect, and that, finally, experience shows them to be the least repressive form of political arrangements so far discovered. Such a justification suggests that liberalism has closer historical and conceptual links with conservatism than has traditionally been supposed. A justification of liberal values which properly acknowledged this would, first, take seriously the culturally specific nature of liberalism and recognise the limitations for meta-theory that that imposes; and second, recognise that cultural and historical specificity compels liberals to distinguish certain values ahead of others, in other words compels them to relinquish any claim to neutrality between competing conceptions of the good.

This is an extremely contentious argument, of course, and not least if we examine the history of liberalism. After all, that liberalism depends on a conservative axiology is contrary to what most liberals believe liberalism to be. Liberalism originated from ideas that emerged in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It was predicated on the belief that, by the use of reason, people could be emancipated from the shackles of religious and political superstition. Liberalism as it originated was the antithesis of tradition and superstition. All established institutions and procedures were to be considered in the light of reason, to discover whether they promoted the human good or human liberty. Within liberalism, as it came to be formulated, there could be no presumption in favour of an institution because it had existed for centuries; the only defence of such institutions was that they could be justified by reason. It was, at least in intention, profoundly anti-conservative. But that intention could not be realised.

Since liberalism's emergence as a self-conscious philosophy it has been founded on a particular view of how people are, from which claims about the social and political obligations of individuals are derived. In this liberalism's philosophical strategy is no different from that of any other political philosophy, or indeed from certain religious creeds. Where liberalism differed radically from what had gone before was in its claim that as a view of man, and as a political doctrine, it claimed to be both universal, in the sense that it applied to all men at all times, and more importantly was grounded not in faith or prejudice, but was developed by reason from claims about the real nature of man and society. The basis of the liberal view of man (sic) is that he has rights by virtue of his essential human nature. I shall argue that the rights that liberals claim individuals should have are not prior to the political practices of liberal societies; rather they are products of those practices. In effect, liberal individuals themselves and the rights that they claim are not universal to all times and places as liberals argue, but are abstracted from their context in existing liberal societies.

Kenneth Minogue percipiently describes the liberal view:

[T]he liberal conception of man has all the beauties of a child's mecccano set; from the basic device of man as a desiring creature, any kind of human being, from a Leonardo da Vinci to a Lizzie Borden, can be constructed ... For a desire being a vague and ambiguous conception, permits of endless modifications. The movement from the desired to the desirable launches an ethics of improvement in terms of which any moral term can be reinterpreted ... But if one strips off from this abstract figure [the liberal 'individual'] each of the components ... what then remains? Only the creature who was born free and yet everywhere is in chains, a faceless and characterless abstraction, a set of dangling desires with nothing to dangle from... Such an abstract figure could not possibly choose between different objects of desire.⁸

What Minogue is pointing to here is the central weakness of the liberal conception. It is all too easy to see in Minogue's 'abstract figure' of a 'set of dangling desires with nothing to dangle from', the disembodied, unencumbered selves in Rawls's original position⁹ whose good can be understood only in terms of getting as much of what they want as is possible and fair. This attenuated conception of human nature cannot independently support the substantive ethics and axiology which in fact underlie liberalism's claims to neutrality. It is a flaw that goes to the heart of liberalism and it cannot be remedied within a liberal paradigm.

Let me reiterate that familiar paradigm. Liberty is something whose value we can acknowledge whatever our views on how it should be exercised, just as we can recognise the value of money irrespective of what we want to purchase. Take for example two people who disagree fundamentally and in every particular about how life is to be spent, an ascetic and a hedonist. Each has his or her own conception of the good life, in the light of which he or she regards the other as at best profoundly mistaken. Each will thus regard the necessity of living a life in the preferred manner of the other as an evil. Consequently, they will regard their freedom to pursue their own conception of the good as of supreme value. This argument works whatever an individual's conception of the good is, provided the individuals in question are rational and believe that the satisfaction of their own wants constitutes a moral imperative of itself. 'My good', whatever it may be and provided it does not harm others, requires me to accept 'your good' whatever it may be, provided it does not harm others. Everyone, no matter what else they disagree on, provided they are rational, can agree on this - which is why John Rawls, for example, regards liberty as a primary good.¹⁰ So, because liberals believe that liberty is a necessary condition for all individuals to pursue what they see is good, they claim that it is - and what is more that it ought to be - neutral between competing conceptions of the good. Neutrality is of fundamental importance to liberalism because it is only by political arrangements being neutral between competing conceptions of the good that the state protects the liberty of individuals. Once the state begins to favour one version of the good ahead of another it becomes coercive of individuals who do not adhere to that version of the good; and so, to that extent, it deprives them of their liberty. As Jeffrey Reiman succinctly puts it:

... liberalism contends that living one's own life according to one's own rational judgements is a condition of living a good life; that promotion of the ability to so live is a moral ideal that all societies should foster and the right of individuals to so live (as far as this is compatible with all individuals being able to do so) is a right that all human beings have a duty to respect.¹¹

As is commonly argued, neutrality between the competing conceptions of the good of individuals presents liberalism with two related problems, however. First, if liberalism is to be wholly neutral between competing conceptions of the good it can offer no moral reason for preferring liberal values ahead of any other. The second problem for liberalism is related to the first. If man is fundamentally a desiring animal then either liberalism must be completely neutral between any wants that individuals have, as long as they do not harm others, or (and this is where the neutrality of liberalism breaks down) it must offer a hierarchy of wants, some of which are perceived by liberals as being more valuable or acceptable than others. Only liberalisms with explicit developmental dimensions, like those of Mill, Hobhouse or Green, consciously offer a ranking of wants: for example, Mill's notion of the higher and lower pleasures. Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mill, Neutrality and Inconsistency
• 3 Hayek's Libertarian Neutrality
• 4 Challenges to Neutrality I: Liberalism with a Moral Foundation
• 5 Challenges to Neutrality II: Ethical Liberalism and Contemporary Debates
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography