Squaring the Circle

In his New York Times column today David Brooks muses on the differing world views, particularly different views of morality, that are contending in modern American society. Here’s a telling passage:

Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody who’s not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics — as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.

Even worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions — the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits — and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots.

One of my college professors lo! those many years ago, one of the most eminent in the university at the time, once said that he never paid much attention to an undergraduate paper until the first “however”. Here’s Mr. Brooks’s first however:

However, there are weaknesses. The moral freedom ethos puts tremendous emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of choice. Can a society thrive if there is no shared moral order? The tremendous emphasis on self-fulfillment means that all relationships are voluntary. Marriage is transformed from a permanent covenant to an institution in which two people support each other on their respective journeys to self-fulfillment. What happens when people are free to leave their commitments based on some momentary vision of their own needs?

If people find their moral beliefs by turning inward, the philosopher Charles Taylor warned, they may lose contact with what he called the “horizons of significance,” the standards of truth, beauty and moral excellence that are handed down by tradition, history or God.

This is a crucial passage:

A lot of people will revert to what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “emotivism”: What is morally right is what feels right to me. Emotivism has a tendency to devolve into a bland mediocrity and self-indulgence. If we’re all creating our own moral criteria based on feelings, we’re probably going to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve.

Self-created identities are also fragile. We need to have our identities constantly affirmed by others if we are to feel secure. People who live within this moral ecology are going to be hypersensitive to sleights that they perceive as oppression. Politics devolves into identity wars, as different identities seek recognition over the others.

Does Mr. Brooks not see the inherent conflict between

It is wrong to try to impose your morality or your religious faith on others.

and

We need to have our identities constantly affirmed by others if we are to feel secure.

While it is possible for the highly permissive rubric of the Wiccan Rede, “An’ it harm none, do what ye will” to function in a liberal society, compelling others to affirm your convictions or choices is authoritarian.

Here’s his “however” in his outline of the conservative moral tradition:

The weaknesses of this tradition are pretty obvious, too. It can lead to rigid moral codes that people with power use to justify systems of oppression. This ethos leads to a lot of othering — people not in our moral order are inferior and can be conquered and oppressed.

To my eye it appears that he understands what moves progressives better than he does what moves conservatives.

What pains me in discussions of this sort is that Mr. Brooks writes as though considering the moral universe were virgin territory while in actuality it has been considered, discussed, and written about voluminously for millennia. Moral systems are essentially of two sorts: deontological and consequentialist. Deontology refers to the ethical theory that the morality of an action is based on whether that action itself is right or wrong. Consequentialists believe that the consequences of an action determine whether it is right or wrong. Utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) is consequentialist.

What do you notice about that? The “moral freedom” rubric that Mr. Brooks clearly likes does not appear to be either deontological or consequentialist. I think it is quietly consequentialist but makes some extremely strong, unstated, unproven, and possibly unprovable assumptions, i.e. that “moral freedom” will make more people happier. Quite to the contrary I think it will make some people happy and most people very miserable, indeed.

To relate the title of this post to the subject of Mr. Brooks’s column, how do we square the circle? How can people who demand “moral freedom” and those who believe in deontology live peacefully in a society together? I think the only path to that is through the Enlightenment values of tolerance of contrary views and commitment to a limited government of defined powers but that flies directly in the face of emotivism.