Why is it that the right so often treats questions of public policy as matters of private morality? Even though as citizens of democratic nations we govern on the basis of the equal rights of all, conservatives often appear to be motivated by overwhelming moral impulses when it comes to the treatment of those less powerful and numerous than themselves. Whether it's poverty, sexuality or gender, these moral instincts override their willingness to participate in group decisions using shared liberal language.
That old canard: the immoral poor
The lie that poverty is a result of moral failing is pervasive. Margaret Thatcher once said that poverty was a ‘personality defect’; in the US, former Presidential candidate and now cabinet Secretary Ben Carson has described poverty as a mindset. The Victorian notion of deserving and undeserving poor is so universal today that even supposed progressives who critique Thatcherism, and whatever it is Ben Carson believes, embrace paternalism as a matter of both political philosophy (see: Dworkin) and public policy.
My book, “Politics for the New Dark Age”, and this blog, have discussed how paternalistic (read: authoritarian) approaches to poverty and welfare often systematically strip decision agency from the subjects of government policy. Examples include, but are not limited to: limited-duration unemployment benefits; conditional-welfare programs (that require recipients to seek work or training or be subject to forced labour); to “cashless” welfare delivery; and the latest “straight-from-the-Onion” headline requiring government authorisation before getting a pet. Even social democrats love their own ‘nudge’ policies, and in foreign policy will argue the necessity of imposing conditionality on foreign aid.
The reason this belief set is shared by both right and left because it’s not a progressive-conservative issue (do we trust that social decisions make us better off?) but an authoritarian-libertarian one (do we trust others to make decisions to make themselves better off?). Although conservatives are on average more authoritarian than progressives, there’s plenty of would-be authoritarians on the left. Centre-left parties may believe in cooperative solutions to alleviate poverty, but do so from a position of presumed superiority over those they seek to help. I support the view of the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who argues that "The proper aim of egalitarian justice is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others."
She goes on to criticise what she terms the 'luck egalitarianism' of the centre-left:
"First, it excludes some citizens from enjoying the social conditions of freedom on the spurious ground that it’s their fault for losing them. It escapes this problem only at the cost of paternalism. Second, equality of fortune makes the basis for citizens’ claims on one another the fact that some are inferior to others in the worth of their lives, talents, and personal qualities. Thus, its principles express contemptuous pity for those the state stamps as sadly inferior and uphold envy as a basis for distributing goods from the lucky to the unfortunate. . . . Third, equality of fortune, in attempting to ensure that people take responsibility for their choices, makes demeaning and intrusive judgments of people’s capacities to exercise responsibility and effectively dictates to them the appropriate uses of their freedom."
It’s the structure, stupid
A moral understanding of difference is merely one answer to the question of why there is difference in the first place. Broadly speaking, moral culpability is a feature of agent-based explanations of difference; structure-based explanations do not feature direct responsibility in the same way. This can be shown with reference to two popular explanations of poverty, which come in both group- and individual-centred variants: the biological (‘race’ or genes) and the ‘motivational’ (culture or the individual).
To rebut these briefly: the social construct of race is junk science, and while individual genes do affect lifetime outcomes, they are arbitrarily distributed amongst the population at birth and carry no ethical culpability. With regard to motivational explanations, and as I wrote in my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, while cultural technology may contribute to individual success, culture-level explanations are often little better than de-racialised chauvinism until we recognise that cultures are products of structures and not the way around. Differences in individual 'ambition' is the more common “liberal” explanation of poverty, which of course is disprovable by tracking systemic inter-generational and geographic patterns of deprivation.
Both biological and motivational stories about poverty implicitly construct hierarchies – the hierarchy is caused by difference. Structural explanations point to the existence of unequal social and economic hierarchies as the cause of poverty – difference is constructed by hierarchy. As Rutger Bremen said in a TED talk in June, the root cause of poverty is a lack of money and people lack money because how social and economic systems distribute available resources. A structualist (and this includes Marxists) sees the target of social reform as society itself. The socialist 'New Man' is a result of structural change, not a precondition for it.
Resentful elites
For those that have stuck it out this far, I am now going to state the central contention of this piece: authoritarian personalities do not treat the poor and other minorities differentially because of their prior moral belief [systems]. Rather, they have and express moral beliefs in order to justify the existence of hierarchical difference. Moral emotions are an effect of biological status/hierarchy preferences, not a cause; moral systems of belief serve to legitimise and authorise hierarchical instincts and authoritarian societies. In an example of gene-culture co-evolution, belief systems work with and activate emotional responses, which in turn are legitimised and socially licensed by social norms, practices and institutions.
Those at the top of social hierarchies (be they economic, sexual or gendered) are more likely to believe thanks to rational calculus, elite socialisation or developmental history that those hierarchies are necessary. Social policies that would assist the least well off, even if articulated in the soft discourse of classical liberalism (“everyone should have the right to marry whomever they please”) or social democracy (“inequality of opportunity is unfair and unjust”), upset that hierarchy. Any possibility of social advancement for those perceived to sit at the lower reaches of the social heap (whether due to feminism, LGBT+ pride, or economic welfare) challenges the natural order and provokes an emotional response, be it anger, hostility or fear. And from their cultural toolkit, elites call up or manufacture moral belief systems that legitimise and justify their anger and the steps they take to act upon it.
If there is one lesson I want readers to take away from “Politics for the New Dark Age”, it's this: be sceptical of anyone, politician or otherwise, that wants to engage a comparative analysis of the worth of individual lives, or of different social groups. They are, by definition, potential autocrats and they cannot be convinced by liberal reasoning alone that they are wrong.