A legitimate role for government?

Is there a legitimate role for the government in shaping the values and attitudes of its citizens?

The answer for most individuals in Western democratic nations is a resounding “No”.

“There is no such thing as a good influence Mr Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

We generally acknowledge the reign of individual self-interest in market matters, and equivocally hail the private conscience in moral matters. We are “moral sovereigns”. We have crowned ourselves. Like Napoleon at Notre Dame, we have wrested this title from temporal and spiritual authority.

In this short essay I will attempt to replace our spontaneous “No” with a qualified “Yes”. I question the viability of a social order that upholds the person as absolute individual, its values as absolutely personal and its freedom as absolute autonomy. First, I question our ability to put these theoretical absolutes into practice. Second, I think in the extent to which they are practiced, they are creating what Anne Manne calls “the shadowland of moral chaos”: increasing suicide rates, depression, drug and alcohol abuse and the breakdown of marriage and families.

Our “No” rests on the philosophical presumptions of the Enlightenment. Since then, society, values and freedom have been considered as “accessories” to the human person, rather than as constitutive elements. As a result, our concept of the human person has been losing weight. We are at a stage where Milan Kundera can talk about “the unbearable lightness of being”.

Thus my focus is not political, juridical or sociological. It is fundamentally about the philosophy of the human person. I believe that by reviving an Aristotelian conception of the human person, its natural rights and the natural law, we will have a basis for answering “Yes” to our original question.

The role of government in shaping the values of citizens depends very much on how one understands the relationship between the individual and society. Socialism claims that the individual can be fulfilled only by dissolving into the projects and aims of the state. In this scenario, the values of the government are those of the individual. Liberal thought has resisted socialism over the past century by reasserting the human person’s individuality and rationality. It draws upon the definition of a person given by Boethius; an individual substance of a rational nature. There will be no end to the need for this insistence. It is the basis for Kant’s categorical imperative. A human person must always be treated as an end in itself, never as a means to an end.

The problem for liberalism has been how to join individuals into an authentic social unit. The theory of the social contract contains some anomalies that I believe are closely associated with our current moral crisis, and may explain our philosophical inability to reconcile the state and the individual.

First, if our rights in society are governed merely by the social contract we happen to be a party to, what is the basis for so-called human rights? For example, if a particular society values the circumcision of women, do other societies have any right to interfere? Human rights, or natural rights, are rights that we have by virtue of our humanity. And as Roger Scruton succinctly points out in Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey, “natural rights lie outside the social contract”.

Second, does the exclusion of government from our values-choices automatically make these choices autonomous? We are influenced by and draw our ideas from a multiplicity of social settings. Among these upbringing, education and the media are probably most significant. These influences can be positive or negative.

Finally, are we really satisfied with a social contract as the basis for our being governed? In the postmodern West we are witnessing what Scruton in The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat continuum, calls a “culture of repudiation”. It is the consequence of an inadequate anthropology. We espouse a quasi-anarchism while almost unconsciously being supported by the structures of government. In our fixation with the idea of a voluntary contract we forget that “obedience is part of life for people who think themselves autonomous”.

Aristotle’s concept of the human person as a “social animal” provides a better basis for understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Social organisation is not a piece of inventory we have voluntarily picked up at some stage in our evolutionary history. Rather it is a dimension of the human person itself; it is constitutive of our being.

Humans have bio-psychological as well as rational reasons for forming societies and for being governed. Writers such as Virginia Held have demonstrated the complete impropriety of a social contract model for understanding the first human society - the family - and in particular the relationship between mother and child. Roger Scruton points out that even on a larger scale, there is a need for a pre-contractual “we” before any semblance of a contract can be formed.

Phenomenologically, our social nature can be studied in the various formal and informal associations that we create. If social contracts involve obligation, would it not be rational to minimise our participation in them? The consequences of a deprived social nature can be examined in the “shadowland of moral chaos”: in the psychological trauma of solitary confinement, in the yearnings for sociability that drive much drug and alcohol abuse and in the depressive effect of an intense but impersonal urban lifestyle.

By understanding the human person as a social animal we remove the wedge between the individual and society. Our bond to others, and hence our bond to government, transcends the agreed-upon terms of an economic transaction. And the assertion of inalienable, common rights hints at the possibility of common goals. We can approach the concept of a natural law.

The operative word in our original question really is “values” and up to now I have not defined this term. The modern usage of this word is best understood by examining its historical development since the Enlightenment. Hume’s dichotomy between what is and what ought drained values of their metaphysical content. It was a great aim of the Enlightenment project, in fact, to explain all “oughts” in terms of “ises”. The project was given added impetus by the logical positivists at the start of the 20th century, who explicitly established an epistemological dichotomy between facts and values.

I think that today values are popularly understood in this positivist tradition. We pay lip service to them, as Hume would have, and there is a general appreciation that certain values are necessary for the cohesion of nation-states. But values are things that we can choose to pick up and carry around. They are optional and intensely personal. We expect that public policy will be “fairly values-neutral”. In the dichotomies proposed between state and church, fact and opinion, empirical reality and belief, objective and subjective, values stand squarely in line with the latter.

But are these real dichotomies? Does objectivity mean divesting ourselves of values? Max Scheler, who built his whole moral philosophy on the foundation of values, thought not:

“To conceive the world as value-free is a task which men set themselves on account of a value: the vital value of mastery and power over things.”

Postmodern philosophers have further questioned the distinction between fact and value, sometimes to a radical degree. Can we really talk about “facts” independent of their value-context and the personalities that produced them?

What I believe all this points to is another key aspect of the human person forgotten by the Enlightenment. Martin Heidegger claimed that “we are creatures of the unreal”. Unlike animals, we are not defined by our biological need to feed and reproduce. The things that we are most concerned with are those “ought” statements. We are moral beings. We seek a normative dimension to our actions and our lives. Values are an important part of who we are, and any pretensions to “values-neutrality” should be seen merely as the expression of another value.

Then what is the origin of our “oughts”? One possible answer is given by the concept of natural law. This proposes that there are certain “values” that human beings hold by virtue of their being human. I believe that the study of the morality of different cultures, rather than negating this idea by its variability, rather enhances it by its consistency. Everywhere we see some evidence of certain values; that it is wrong to violate or take innocent human life, to steal another’s property or to lie.

In the light of this, a role begins to emerge for governments in shaping the values of citizens. In the first place, we cannot continue to pretend that there is such a thing as values-free government. It would be a mistake, for instance, to view the abortion debate that is so topical now as a conflict between the “fact” of a woman’s right to choose, and the “religious value” of the dignity of human life. Rather, both sides present certain facts, and both rest these on particular values. We need the ethical tools to evaluate these values.

On another level, there is the need to recognise those values that arise simply from our human condition. These must be separated from other values over which there are grounds for discussion and debate. The government can realise its role in treading that line between upholding the natural law and allowing for a legitimate plurality of values.

Critics of this view may fear from it a “return to the Dark Ages” or simply the first steps down a slippery slope to tyranny. However, I think we should reflect on our own society and consider that, in many ways, this is in part what we already allow. We forbid murder, rape, robbery, stealing and so on, and rarely consider why. They are based on more than positive law or common sense. The challenge for governments in the 21st century is to identify those aspects of natural law we have ceded to plurality. We will probably find that they are at the epicentre of our “moral chaos”.

What we are trying to grapple with here is essentially a question of the meaning of human freedom. In the West, “freedom is the value by which all other values are measured”. No word is more important to the Enlightenment, no word is more important to postmodernism and no word, in both contexts, is as poorly understood. Lord Acton in Essays on Freedom and Power rightly pointed out that freedom, or liberty “is an idea of which there are two hundred definitions”.

We protect our freedom like a possession. Our greatest fear is that it will be interfered with by others. We make a contract to ensure the safety of our freedom and that of others. But this is a rather limited view of freedom. It is a negative freedom; a freedom from inhibitions, including duties, obligations and others. I prefer to see it as something that we share with all persons for all time. I do not have freedom, I am free.

At the same time we are inherently limited beings. We have physical, psychological and intellectual limitations. We have social and moral limitations, also. Beyond the rhetoric, this fact is often recognised. In the context of the individual and society, attempts have been made to rationalise these limitations to freedom. The most famous is John Stuart Mill’s principle of “harm”; we are socially and morally free, so long as we do not harm others. Government has a role in dealing with a person’s crimes, but not with his or her vices.

Such a morality is remarkably pervasive in our society. But the dichotomy identified is again problematic. The Millsian concept of “harm” does not allow for psychological harm, which is something that a litigious society such as ours must increasingly come to terms with. It doesn’t account for the harm occasioned by neglected responsibilities. Does a drunken father cause harm to his family simply by being unable to support them? Nor does it allow for moral harm. Scruton rightly asks, “in particular, am I harmed by those things which disturb and upset me, and which perhaps tempt me away from the path of righteousness?” Couldn’t the very expression of “freedom” be at times the occasion for moral harm for those whose value systems differ from ours? Is it a satisfactory solution simply to ask these persons to abandon their “scruples”?

In a globalised, multicultural West it is possible that this negative, individualistic freedom will become a new form of slavery. Perhaps this is already happening with the demands for political correctness made, for example, by the EU. It is here that the concept of natural law again begs discussion. An authentic freedom must be a perennial freedom, and we cannot guarantee freedom to future generations unless it is anchored to some evergreen moral philosophy. Human freedom in matters of law and government must be viewed with reference to the natural law. Freedom by itself is self-defeating; we could do well to ask with Nietzsche, “Freedom? Ah, but for what?” We could also take a warning from Scruton: “If all that Western civilisation offers is freedom, then it is a civilisation bent on its own destruction.”

There is a famous cartoon from the French Revolution depicting a peasant bent over under the weight of the privileged estates. In a sense, it could represent the human person in the West in the 21 century: stooped, malnourished and burdened with the triple weight of our society, values and freedom. Didn’t Satre say, “We are condemned to freedom”?

I believe we are in a position, taking on board postmodern criticisms of the Enlightenment project, to recognise the weightiness of the human person. Our freedom, values and society are not excess baggage. We are not lightweights who need be afraid of being pushed around by governments. We need not necessarily be antagonistic to government at all. Given the presence of a natural law inscribed in our being, both government and individuals may “shape” each other’s values with a view to the same end.