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We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our new series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we’ll feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
David Enoch is professor of the philosophy of law at Oxford, and a professor of law and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Enoch explore why liberalism is being defended in the wrong way, why we should be moral objectivists, and how to fight for liberal values.
Note: This episode was recorded on July 14, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: David, you’ve been thinking about a subject that a lot of people have been thinking about for the last years and that I’ve been having lots of conversations about on this podcast, which is liberalism. But you have the suspicion that a lot of people, both in your academic discipline and philosophy and perhaps in the broader public, perhaps politicians, are going around defending liberalism in the wrong way. So perhaps let’s start with that. What are the main ways in which people tend to defend liberalism, and why do you think that those are wrong?
David Enoch: Maybe I’ll start with a metaphor that I really like. And it comes from sports, I mean football or soccer, depending on which side of the ocean you’re on.
Mounk: I’ve become a traitor. I’ve started to say soccer instinctively. I’m ashamed of myself.
Enoch: The thing I’ve enjoyed most about coming to Oxford is the ability to say football again. Suppose that you have two teams and one of them plays to win, while the other one pretends to be the referee. Well, if that’s how things go, then, first, we know who’s going to win, and second, how many football fans do you know root for the referee? So I think that many liberals have been playing as if they are the referee, as if liberalism is not about some strongly held, true, justified, if fallible convictions and then what follows from them politically in a practically wise way, but instead as if what liberalism is all about is somehow dealing with disagreement in a fairly neutral kind of way. I’m not surprised that when this is how the game has been playing out liberals have not been winning.
Mounk: Let me push you on this in two ways. The first is that you could slightly alter that metaphor. And I remember having some of these debates in the early years of the rise of populism, which also has a sport-related metaphor, which is, imagine you’re playing football and your opponent suddenly turns up with baseball bats. What should you do? Should you continue to play football or should you get the baseball bats out yourself?
I think that’s a really tough question because of course you’d be foolish to continue playing football if your opponents turn up with baseball bats. On the other hand, if you both start clobbering with each other with baseball bats, it’s very clear you’re no longer playing football. So if your goal is to play football, that’s not really helpful either. The other way to push on this is just to sort of ask you to clarify what in this context you mean by liberalism. Because liberalism itself is in part about rules. It is about saying, the head of state shouldn’t have all of the power. We need to have a separation of powers. The majority of the population doesn’t get to tell you how to worship and how not to worship, what you can say and what you can’t say. In a way, for liberals, trying to police the rules is part of playing the game.
I do think that there’s a legitimate concern among conservatives that if liberals are saying, hey, these are the rules I really should play by, these are the right values, and by the way, those involved shouldn’t be too religious, shouldn’t have these convictions, then we’re actually breaking what’s supposed to be the spirit of the ideology we’re defending. So what do you mean by liberalism here in this context? And how do we know that what you’re asking us to do isn’t to actually give up on the rules that are central to what a liberal society is?
Enoch: Liberalism, as you will know, means different things in different contexts, in different locations, in different academic disciplines. So I don’t want to argue over the word. I do think that the kind of thing that I’m going to sketch captures a central part of what the liberal tradition has been about. But if you want to use the word differently, I’ll just use another word. The kind of liberalism that I have in mind is first and foremost about a commitment to some underlying values and principles. And those are not going to surprise you. There’s going to be something there about the significance of well-being. There’s going to be something there about equality, though of course different liberals may understand equality in somewhat different ways. There’s going to be something very central about liberty and indeed about the value of autonomy. Though again, there may be differences between different liberals about the precise details. And maybe one or two other things. Maybe something about the hope for rationality in some kind of universalism. And that’s pretty much it. Importantly, this is not yet anything about specific political arrangements or institutions. So it’s not even directly about free speech. It’s in no way directly about democracy. All of these institutional political arrangements are further down the road. In order to get from the basic underlying principles and values to them, we need to do some argumentative work, and that argumentative work is going to be at least partly, and is going to rely at least partly, on empirical claims.
The questions about institutions are always what kind of institutions best manifest and promote the underlying values and principles. Crucially, we liberals do not lose our confidence in the underlying principles and values at the first sight of disagreement. We know what we stand for, these are the things we stand for. And then we ask practical political questions about how best to realize these underlying values and principles in political arrangements and institutions. I do think that across a very wide set of circumstances, what these principles will end up justifying is going to be at least in broad outline the kind of liberal institutions that you have in mind. Something about free speech, something about constraints on political power, something about democracy. But all of these things are further down the road and they require empirical input. So just to give one example that I think is very clear, from a failure of one of my philosophical heroes. This kind of liberalism is very much in the spirit of John Stuart Mill. When John Stuart Mill talks about freedom of expression, without a doubt a central liberal thing for many of us, really relies on quite, quite doubtful empirical claims. He’s of course better than this, but in a slogan it’s about how truth is likely to win in an unconstrained competition.
Mounk: I disagree with your reading about Mill and we shouldn’t make the conversation about that, but I think there’s a kind of naive reading of Mill where he believes in a marketplace of ideas and the truth is going to win out in the marketplace of ideas and that’s why we should defend free speech. And it seems to me that if you read chapter two of On Liberty carefully, the argument is a little bit more settled than that. He thinks, for example, that in many ages and many times the untruth may win out. I think he believed that in Victorian England wrong ideas won out to a very large extent, even though there was significant freedom of speech then. But he thought that the one thing that freedom of speech allows is that at least the speech remains rediscoverable. At least it doesn’t get completely shut out. But anyway, as a side note.
Enoch: Yes, of course, as I said, my version was the slogan version of it. But the point I want to make is independent of a specific reading of me, obviously, and that’s whether freedom of speech can be justified and much more interestingly, how exactly it can be justified, in what ways, how to actually translate it to institutional, legal constraints and so on. That’s not going to be dictated by the underlying liberal principles alone. For that you’re going to have to know a lot about how communication actually works in the real world in a specific time, in a specific place. And this connects to another point that I find is crucially important and that’s also related to the baseball bat example. I draw a rather sharp distinction between the underlying values and principles. As I said, we’re committed to those and don’t lose our confidence just because some people are racists or misogynists or whatever. We don’t go for a kind of relativism—no, we know what we stand for.
On the other hand, there’s the stage of doing politics. I’m fully a pragmatist at that stage. So I think at that stage, what you should do is be practically and politically wise and you should get the best liberal deal, as it were, that is available in the circumstances, which means that there is nothing that is beyond compromise. There is nothing such that you say, if you’re not doing that, you’re not even allowed. No, these are the underlying principles. Now you have to deal with the real world. The real world is complicated in all sorts of ways, both because of natural constraints and because of people and their different limitations and problems. And there I’m going to be fully willing to compromise trying to get the best overall liberal arrangement.
What this means is that when some bad guys come wielding baseball bats, I’m going to first be willing to fight. I think that this actually is something that comes up in your work as well. The kind of over-peacefulness as if we’ve already won and will never have to fight for these things again, that’s never been justified and it’s clearly not justified today. So if need be, yes, you may need to fight and if you have to fight people with baseball bats, you may want to find your own baseball bat, of course. But you’re going to try to do it in a way to the extent possible that is constrained by the principles and values to which you are committed. Those that, in that example, come from football.
Mounk: Great. So I want to get into each of these parts, which is both where we should have moral certainty and when and in what ways we should be willing to compromise given the constraints of a real political world. But before I get there, I guess I still want to understand the premise of where you think people go wrong. I don’t know if you can give an example of a specific politician or a specific thinker or something that helps me get a grasp of this because I feel like I sort of get the point but I haven’t quite put my finger on what you mean. So it seems to me that liberals tend to be relatively confident in their beliefs about what a better political system would be and that perhaps sometimes we can be overly confident in imposing values in the philosophy of perfectionist liberalism in a way where we’re not just saying, these are the right rules to bound our society, these are the right terms of our social cooperation, but actually this is what people should be like in society.
This is the extent to which we can tell, to cite one controversial legal case in the United States, the deeply Christian baker that they need to be willing to individualize a wedding cake for a gay couple. Because if you have prejudices against gay people, you’re a bad person, and we’re not going to stand for that. So where in the culture do you see these liberals who aren’t willing to defend their convictions at that level of principle, at that level of ideas?
Enoch: I have three kinds of liberals in mind that I think are the wrong ones. One comes from philosophy departments, one comes from political science departments, and one is in the air. So let me say just a couple of words on each. So from philosophy departments, the kind of liberalism that is now mostly known by the name political liberalism or public reason liberalism, and that’s associated with the late John Rawls, is often read in this way. Now I should say I’ve had exchanges with Rawls scholars and so on, there’s disagreement about everything and that’s fine of course, that’s how we do our job, that’s okay. But—at least in the way that Rawls is often read and indeed extremely influential, not just in philosophy, in law schools as well—the kind of liberalism that he promotes is one where there’s hardly anything by way of substantive principles and values to which you remain committed even in the face of strong disagreement. So that’s one kind of the hyper-neutralist kind of political liberalism that requires that the state, rather than stand for these principles and values, merely talk about what can be a matter of consensus among all of the reasonable. Something like that.
Mounk: Can you give me a quick example of what kind of rules political liberals say we should be neutral about? Where you’re saying, no, no, no, no, we shouldn’t be neutral about this, this is something where philosophical liberals rightly have a clear stance.
Enoch: Suppose that there is some political disagreement, perhaps having to do with the education of children in some community that is hyper-conservative. Questions of education are extremely hard empirically. But as a matter of principle, I would say, for instance, if that education is an offense against the student’s autonomy because it’s hyper sexually-conservative or for some other reasons along these lines, then that is something that I don’t think the state should be neutral on, just because there is this community that disagrees. As I said, I have this two-stage thing of the principles and then the pragmatic, political action. And the mere fact that you don’t lose sight of the fact that autonomy is important and the fact that the autonomy of the children is compromised is a huge tragedy and a moral problem, an emitter of political concern, still doesn’t entail that we should now send in the troops, because that may create more harm than good, or for any other number of reasons that we can talk about later. But I think it’s crucial that whatever decision we end up making, even if it ends up being extremely compromising, even if it ends up being a kind of neutralist position, it be motivated by an unwavering commitment to the underlying principles, rather than by some weird hope to remain neutral between truth and falsehood.
Mounk: Just to push you a little bit further, tell me what should be at stake in this kind of issue for you. One of the things that makes decisions about the education of children complicated, not just empirically, but philosophically, I think, is that when you’re dealing with adults, liberals have relatively easy answers—adults would be able to make their own decisions. Obviously there are constraints about when those decisions harm others or other circumstances, but basically when it comes to questions of sexual morality, you’re an adult you decide. With children, the way that I tend to think about it is that we are holding their autonomy in trust, which is to say that they’re too young to make certain kinds of decisions. And we want to make sure that they can make their own meaningful decisions later in life. And so it’s the joint job, in the first instance, of a family, but as a kind of backstop of society and the state to make sure that they get the kind of education, the kind of resources they need, in order to lead a self-determined life later on.
But that makes it a complicated and special case. And so sort of where do you think there are questions about sexual morality in education, for example, where these Rawlsian political liberals or perhaps some other people in the culture tend to differ too much, not on pragmatic political grounds, but on principled grounds to the Amish in some famous American court cases, or to ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, or to evangelical Christian communities or whatever it is?
Enoch: In principle, before we’re doing pragmatic politics, we should not be neutral, for instance, between ways of doing sexual education that open up options and then close up options later in life. Or ways of doing sexual education that contribute to personal well-being and that actually create serious suffering later on, and ways of sexual education that are consistent with egalitarian understanding of different people in society compared to ways that are deeply hierarchical in their attitude to sex or in other things as well.
Mounk: But this is also at the level of abstraction. You are saying that, in principle, we shouldn’t have teachers go in the classroom and say gay people are bad. Because that I agree with, but it’s not clear to me how many philosophical liberals don’t agree with that. Where does the rubber hit the road? What are the statements where you think liberals are willing to say, oh, I’m kind of neutral about that, and I shouldn’t be neutral about that? Because I have in the back of my mind that other people are going to say, well, one of the things that’s happening in education in the United States is people going into elementary schools, into middle schools, saying there’s no such thing as a gender binary. All of gender is a spectrum. And if you decide as a very young child that you actually are another gender from what you are, we’re going to applaud you for that and talk about your bravery, and perhaps it might mislead children into making wrong decisions about their bodily future at a very young age. So there’s going to be people who have worries on the other side, but I don’t think they are completely easily dismissed either.
Enoch: That’s a good example. One of the things that is crucial here is that truth matters. So if in particular a life of sexual experimentation or sexual freedom—or merely not feeling guilty for doing what sexually comes naturally to you—is, other things being equal, a better life, then we should not be neutral between the kind of education that encourages this and the kind of education that does not. I suspect it’s more there in right-wing caricatures of left progressivism, but I’m assuming there are some cases like this that are actually real and so on. That doesn’t mean we have to endorse that either, but precisely we don’t have to be neutral between truth and falsehood. So let’s see. Is there something genuine there that answers the real concerns about well-being or about equality or about hierarchy or about autonomy, including sexual autonomy, or is it something else?
If it’s genuinely of value, then we need to take that into account. For instance all of the constraints on the use of state power, and worries about abuse of power and other things as well. That’s where I say, I’m in principle willing to compromise on all of this, but there’s a huge difference between saying, look, this is the kind of education that is intrinsically much better because it promotes well-being and sexual autonomy rather than oppressing them, now is there anything we can do about it? Quite possibly the answer is yes—probably not sending in the troops, that’s a very pricey option, but there are going to be others. And if there is nothing we can do about it, then we shouldn’t do anything about it, but we should still recognize the tragedy. Rather than think about it as, we should respect the practices of this community, no, no, the practices of this community are oppressive and they make people suffer. So that’s the initial point. That doesn’t mean we should do things that will make people suffer even more, but it does mean that the starting point has nothing to do with this kind of hyper-neutralism associated with Rawls.
Mounk: That principle, I think, is one that we can take more generally that’s really useful. I think it’s very tempting to say, if X is right, we’ve got to do whatever we can to pursue it, and if we think on pragmatic grounds that we shouldn’t pursue it, then the way to deal with cognitive dissonance often becomes to stop claiming that X is right. Whereas in many situations in politics and in life, X is right, but you can’t fully realize that. You should make a pragmatic assessment about the extent to which you can, but you should live with the discomfort that you have in some ways given up on pursuing what is right, because under the circumstances, that is how best to preserve that value.
In a very different context, I feel like I had a very similar position in some of the debates about impeaching Donald Trump, in which I both felt that he deserved to be impeached, for example, for his actions on January 6th, 2021, but I had the political calculation that it was very unlikely that we would gain the majorities to impeach him. I thought that it would be much more politically damaging to try and impeach him and fail to do so than to not try to do so. I think very few people on either side understood my position. I think the people who were in favor of impeachment said, but if it’s right, then we have to do it, while I said, no, if it’s right, what we need to do is to reduce his power in the world, and if going ahead with an impeachment that is perhaps philosophically justified or legally justified is actually going to increase his power, then that’s a really bad idea. On the other hand, people who were against impeachment because they might have liked Donald Trump thought, well, Yascha must secretly think that he shouldn’t be impeached. So no, I thought he should be impeached. But my pragmatic judgment was it wasn’t going to happen. And that meant that the best way to pursue the broader goal of not giving him further power over the American Republic was to not try to pursue a course of action which was likely to fail. So I agree with you.
Enoch: I would imagine that the tension you mentioned is really basic, it’s like Politics 101. I would imagine that any good, wise, conscientious politician deals with that tension every day.
Mounk: And then they’re pushed by their allies and their donors and by social media into doing what sometimes they know is not very wise.
Enoch: I never said it was an easy job to do.
Mounk: Speaking of Politics 101 and the people who sometimes fail it, I think you said the first bucket of people get this wrong are philosophers and the second are political scientists. What do political scientists get wrong?
Enoch: So there’s this thing called political realism, which is gaining ground and is considered rather popular among political theorists in political science departments. I don’t think it’s gained any grounds in philosophy departments, which is in itself interesting. Now it’s hard to state what the view is and I don’t know that I understand it well enough, and I’m not sure that I plan to change that considerably, but that view often introduces itself as a kind of contrast with what they call political moralism. And they think that politics is not about morality at all, that moral normativity or moral values or moral principles should not play a guiding role in how we do politics and I think that that’s both confused intellectually and problematic politically. Now somehow they think that they still maintain a normative edge that allows them to criticize what’s going on politically despite this starting point. They sometimes talk about a sui generis political kind of normativity. I can say these words, it doesn’t mean that I know exactly what it means. And some political realists also think of themselves as liberals.
But I want to make it very clear that that’s not the kind of liberalism I talk about. The kind of liberalism I care about and that everyone should care about very much starts from moral commitments. It doesn’t go too quickly from moral commitments to political action precisely because of the tension we’ve just discussed. So it’s quite possible that you’re committed to these things but that doesn’t mean you have to immediately follow through politically in the most simple straightforward kind of way. And perhaps this is all some political realist meaning in which case I’m happy to have them on board. But yes, politics, the normative parts of political philosophy are an important particular instance of sophisticated, practically implemented moral philosophy. So that’s for political realists.
Mounk: I have a friend who’s an actress and I remember many years ago her recording an ad that was somehow supposed to have a mid-Atlantic accent and there was a British director and an American director on the project and the American director kept saying, you just sound British. And the British director kept saying, you just sound American. And she ended up despairing—and political theorists are a little bit like that. And I say this as somebody who has a PhD in political theory, but political scientists definitely consider us sort of weird pseudo philosophers, and the philosophers consider us weird pseudo political scientists. So I think the political scientists in the audience are going to object to you describing this as a political science view, but that’s fine. We’ll leave them to object.
Going beyond those obscure political debates, you might say that this is a larger kind of temptation in politics that perhaps comes not just out of the idea that there are certain kinds of moralizing in politics that both constrain how we’re going to act and ultimately are just going to lead to disaster. What is the kind of political realist view that you worry about where you are saying, hang on a second now you’re just giving up on principles and politics in a way that sounds pseudo profound, but actually it’s going to lead you down the wrong way? And how is that different from a kind of political pragmatism that I think you do advocate, once the rubber hits the road and you’re trying to figure out how you can best further moral values?
Enoch: I think that some of the things that people find attractive about this kind of political realism are things like the following. In our normal kind of private life it’s very often wrong to lie. But you may think that sometimes for politicians it’s okay to lie, and maybe more often than in our private lives. I think that that’s true. I think that politicians too shouldn’t lie without sufficient justification. But in politics the stakes are very high, and it’s going to be more often than in our normal lives justifiable to lie. And some people think, okay, so you’re already not a moralist in the sense that you don’t think that the same morality applies in politics as it does to our private lives. I don’t think it shows that I have any problem with applying morality in politics. It just shows that what follows from morality is hypersensitive to circumstances—for instance, how high the stakes are. So if that’s all you mean by a kind of divorce between politics and morality, I’m fine with that. Where I do have a problem is where—and again I don’t want to generalize and I’ve read only parts of this literature—some political realists will want to insist that nothing in politics is morally criticizable, that somehow if you try to criticize political practices or political actions in moral terms, you are already committing a category mistake. It’s as if you are playing soccer and declaring something a ball or a strike to return to our previous example.
That I think is unfounded intellectually, but also extremely unattractive politically, because we do think that the main problem with many political practices is at the end of the day a moral problem. And we do want to give a good account of how it is problematic, perhaps a good account of what better institutions, arrangements, political actions we can hope for. And we’re going to be using all of everything that is at our moral disposal in doing all of that. So I think that to the extent that political realists want to sort of deprive us of those resources that weakens the good guys in the political sphere.
Mounk: Great, very helpful. What is it in the general kind of vibe you were saying that liberals also sometimes get wrong, they also lose the courage or the convictions that they should hold onto?
Enoch: I want to give an example that somehow stuck in my mind, although it’s from 20 something years ago. It was during the first rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I was a PhD student at the time. I remember there were starting to be petitions online specifically about the way that the Taliban treated women. Unbelievably, perhaps, we’re almost at the same point again now. And then there were these petitions and there started to be from the left these counter responses to these petitions and they said something like, but this is Western imperialism. It’s a different kind of culture. Don’t judge. It’s not for us to say. And that I found was terrible. It was terrible because I don’t think that these arguments work intellectually, philosophically, regardless of politics.
But it was also clearly politically weakening. It was a way of preventing the good guys from mastering the political will to do something about a horrible thing that was going on and, of course, it’s extremely asymmetrical. The bad guys don’t care about this stuff. So this really confused perhaps relativism, perhaps skepticism, perhaps nihilism, perhaps the weirdest kind of pluralism is as if quality of lives are equally good or something like that never weakens the bad guys, but it always weakens the good guys. And I think that it can be shown, actually quite easily, that intellectually this does not hold water, and also that it is politically damaging. It’s again this kind of unwillingness to distinguish between truth and falsehood. I think it’s really important to expose the indefensibility intellectually but also by how harmful it can be.
Mounk: That is really interesting and it connects to one of the strands of work that you’re most known for in philosophy within meta ethics. And some of those discussions are going to get too abstract for this podcast pretty quickly. But I would like to double click on this topic. It seems to me always that there’s some kind of weird misunderstanding of your own position within that kind of line where people are saying, it would be wrong for me to judge the Taliban on their way of life. But that presumes that there’s some kind of standpoint by which you are going to be objectively wrong in doing that, which is kind of a strangely self-undermining position. Perhaps I can help to explain what I mean by that with an analogy. In some debates about free will and, we’ve had some of those debates on the podcast here, there’s this idea that if free will doesn’t exist, then it’s really wrong to punish people for crimes. And therefore, the philosophical debate over free will sort of determines whether or not we have prisons and stuff like that. And I think that’s like a million steps in between that philosophical premise and that empirical conclusion that people kind of skip over.
But what’s interesting to me about this is that what drives a lot of the anxiety about this for people seems to be, if I’m complicit in locking these people up who can’t actually be guilty because they don’t have free will, then I’m guilty of some terrible misstep. But if you really believe that there’s no free will and that those moral categories are misplaced, then you shouldn’t worry about your own guilt or innocence in being complicit in this set of social affairs. So again, you’re pretending, you’re not applying this moral standard to others, while in a weird way still holding yourself to those same moral standards, which of course means that even for you saying that it’s colonialist to think that women should have basic rights in Afghanistan, you in a strangely colonial way are saying, these moral standards apply to me, but those kind of primitive people over there would be wrong to apply those moral standards to them, which is quite ironic. So tell us, you’re much more philosophically sophisticated about this than I am, why is that kind of moral relativism that is implicit in this plaint of, who are we to judge a community for forcing its women to wear a burqa, for forcing its women to marry the person who’s chosen by their parents, et cetera, et cetera? What is philosophically wrong about that position?
Enoch: The point that you mentioned is of course crucial. When I teach this kind of stuff, I like to present an argument that says something like, there are no objectively true judgments about what’s right and wrong, therefore it’s wrong to condemn these practices in another society. And I show how not only isn’t this argument sound, the premise does not actually establish the conclusion, but the premise actually establishes the negation of the conclusion. If there are no objectives, then that judgment in itself cannot be true. And that is the worst possible flaw an argument can have. But that doesn’t yet show that the view is false, it shows that at least one way of arguing for it failed. But there are other things too. So one common set of fallacies in the neighborhood here has to do with the role of disagreement. So it’s a really important question to ask how, if at all, disagreement about moral judgments or about values, how does it shape our meta-ethical commitments, our commitments about the objectivity of morality and so on. And there’s this kind of perhaps an initial suspicion that if there’s disagreement, there’s no objective truth. Or perhaps if there’s disagreement of some specific kind that satisfies some further conditions, then there can be no objective truth.
Here I think that this by and large fails, but that the way forward here is to do piecemeal analysis of specific arguments. So what kind of disagreement do you think is relevant? In what way? Let’s see. But anyway, if you go for the full scale, wherever there’s disagreement, there’s no objective truth, then we can easily come up with counter examples from morality as elsewhere. But also we can again present a kind of self-undermining, self-defeating point. Because that statement itself, the one that if there’s disagreement, there’s no objective truth—that statement itself is controversial. So it would undermine its own truth and so on.
Mounk: Help my listeners think through this. Because I do think that there is a caricatured version of this moral relativism that immediately gets my hackles up. I mean, the idea, it’s just how this community chooses to live. The most philosophically liberal way to formulate my objection to this is to say, I believe that people should have a right to live in dignity and freedom and self-determination. That means that they can make a lot of choices about how to live. If an adult chooses to make a very extreme religious choice, whether that is to become a certain kind of very self-abnegating nun who is not going to speak to anybody outside of a convent for the rest of her life or to wear a burqa or whatever, we might need to tolerate that choice, even if we are a little bit concerned about how much it really serves the wellbeing of that person. But if the community imposes that choice on that individual, then there’s a very straightforward objection that we did not choose that. And we believe that human beings should be able to choose how they live on some basic dimensions.
But at the same time, there is a more understandable concern that historically we’ve often gone around and said, no, we know what’s better for the people of India, and so we’re just going to rule all of them and tell them how to live. We may not understand the details of this community, but we’re going to go in and say, we have all of the wisdom and we’re going to tell you how to have a lovely thriving society. And that has gone pretty wrong. So how do we think about not being morally relative in those ways, recognizing that there are some deeper truths that may be universal, but also paying attention to the ways in which that really might be perverted into a kind of colonialist attitude, into the idea that on our culture and moral enlightenment, the world shall become better when historically that has often led us deeply astray?
Enoch: I certainly share the worry and I’m not a bigger fan of the history here than you or any other decent person is. But I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” answer to this. What we have to do is to try really hard to avoid this, to listen to other people, although they may be mistaken as well. We need to be epistemically modest. This is something that I think is crucial. That is, we have to realize that there are many things we don’t know. Perhaps you just don’t know where you’re coming from, what exactly it’s like to wear a burqa. And you may want to try and find out, which will have to involve also listening to people who do, but also doing that with a kind of willingness to find out that some of them may be mistaken about this as well. So this kind of epistemic modesty is crucial for me. Notice, by the way, that epistemic modesty is crucially different from relativism. So for the relativist or nihilist, there is no objective truth.
If you’re going to be epistemically modest, you have to presuppose that there is an objective truth. That’s precisely why you have to be modest, because it’s not easy to actually find out what that objective truth is. You have to be instrumentally wise. Think about the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime. If somebody wanted to criticize that by talking about Saddam’s rights and privileges, then I have zero interest in having that conversation with them. But on the other hand, someone said, of course Saddam does not merit any kind of protection. But, have you given any thought to what things are going to be like once that regime is toppled? Have you worked sufficiently well on suitable, workable, feasible alternatives and so on? I don’t know how much lives have improved in Iraq. I’m assuming that some have and some have not.
I think that the two main constraints are being extremely epistemically modest and being instrumentally wise. But I can’t put three Newtonian laws about how to be epistemically modest and instrumentally wise across all circumstances. We just have to try hard on this, to learn from the dangers that we know that have been realized in history but all the while not to lose sight of the most important universal moral truths there. I don’t think that many people really don’t believe in the objectivity of morality. Many people don’t believe that they believe in the objectivity of morality. And I think it’s one of my tasks to try and rid people of this terrible confusion, at least when it comes to politics, where, once again, it systematically weakens the good guys.
Mounk: There’s the old joke by Tom Lehrer which goes something like, some people don’t love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that. It’s a very good line and I think there’s something similar here, where we really don’t know what’s true in politics and we should just let people live as they do, and if some community in another part of the world is terribly oppressing its women that’s their right, and anybody who disagrees is a terrible human being. As you’re saying, that is the most simplistic form of this view but that is the form of view that I encounter even with very smart undergrads, even in the public debate.
Enoch: When you’re doing meta-ethics, these are more abstract parts of this kind of discussion that you alluded to earlier. There are, of course, more sophisticated versions of relativism or views that try to answer to the same underlying philosophical concerns. And some of those are quite sophisticated. They certainly avoid the worst problems and they have to be discussed in a way. We discuss them in philosophy. Namely, no slogans, don’t accuse them of weakening the good guys, and address their arguments. That kind of relativism, skepticism, nihilism—something unclear along these lines that is actually in the air—is the kind of view that no serious metaethicist defends and for good reason. So that also means that even though I have a specific hyperrealist, objectivist view in meta ethics, I don’t need to rely on all of the details, the absolute details of that view and my arguments for it, in order to reject the kind of, as I said, bad liberalism that’s in the air. For that what you need to do is to reject some of the most simple-minded versions of this kind of relativism that are nonetheless extremely influential, at least as part of some kind of public discourse.
Mounk: Let’s look back to the red thread of the argument. So what you’ve shown so far is that there are certain ways that people are reluctant to insist on the values and perhaps on objective truths in the political system. And I think something like this example of a Taliban is very clear and striking in this regard. And that is a mistake, that liberals should actually, at least in the first step, be willing without too much hemming and hawing to insist on their values. What is the form that this liberalism takes? What is the content of that liberalism that we should believe to be objectively true in this kind of?
Enoch: I’m not sure I fully understand what you refer to by the word “form” here. You could ask what follows for politics. Either the most general kind of politics, like basic constitutional arrangements, what follows for those. Or you could ask something much more specific, like, well, if you’re right, how should we think of campaign financing? Or how should we think about some constraints on state power and so on? My answer to these are going to be somewhat disappointing because really, from that kind of liberalism alone, nothing yet follows because everything else is up for at least to an extent up for empirical grabs. Does a fairly robust principle of free speech follow? I suspect that at least across many circumstances, yes, but not across all. I certainly cook up kind of philosophically favorite weird hypothetical examples where nothing like that would fall, but perhaps more importantly how much regulation by whom of what kind will strongly depend on empirical considerations. For instance, something that you’ve addressed in your work, you may think that the presence of social media or the presence of the internet or the presence of some specific features of social media means that we should think about speech in a somewhat different way than we used to, or maybe just shows that we’ve always been mistaken, or maybe it doesn’t show that we’ve been mistaken, but it shows that from the same underlying principle, the set of regulations on speech that may be justified now are different. I’m not even sure whether they are more or less than we were used to. They may just be different, like along some other dimension. And similarly for pretty much everything else.
Mill has gotten a lot of heat for thinking that some nations and peoples are not yet mature and ready for government by representatives and that’s presented as racist and may very well have been. But I sometimes think that perhaps Mill’s mistake was that he thought that some of us are sufficiently mature for that. That is also an empirical hypothesis. It would be deeply depressing if we thought that the more negative results follow, but that’s still a possibility. The specific constitutional arrangements, I suspect, would be roughly in line with what we’ve become accustomed to think of as liberalism. But whether this is so, and much more importantly, the precise details of how this is so, are going to be dictated by those principles together with a clear-eyed view of the empirical fact and a willingness to compromise on everything as long as it gets you more from that set of underlying principles and values.
Mounk: How does this agree with or contrast with the following view? Sometimes in grad school when I read too many abstract philosophical papers about the value of democracy, for example, I started to think that that whole line of inquiry is somewhat barking up the wrong tree, but we’re trying to find these very, very abstract justifications for a set of very concrete institutions whose justification is actually rather different. Why is it that we believe in the separation of powers? Why is it that we believe in certain basic constitutional rights for people? Why is it that we believe in the kind of strange practice of voting every four or so years for one of three or four choices in some countries, effectively two choices, having those people deliberate about stuff and they make some kind of decision and then it’s somehow supposed to be the case that I’m the author of those decisions because I made like a random choice between two options every four years? And I think a lot of the answer to that is extremely empirical. Most societies in the history of the world have been pretty damn bad, very brutal to any dissenters, not capable of making much economic and material progress, and we stumbled upon a set of institutions that seem to be doing a lot better on those things.
This is not a purely utilitarian view. It’s not just that they’re maximizing the money in your bank account or maximizing the amount of pleasure you feel. It’s that they actually happen to serve some things that we care about. They happen to be the set of institutional arrangements that allow people to lead thriving lives. That’s a fundamental justification for why we should have a separation of powers of the judiciary, the legislative and the executive, which is a kind of strange arrangement, feels natural to us, but does not feel natural to some of the people coming up with that. You go back to John Locke, he has different divisions of separation of powers because it really hadn’t been set in stone yet. But it’s not that there’s some abstract philosophical reason why we should have a separation of powers in general, or the particular separation of powers between these three branches of government. It’s that from historical experience, we know that that is much more likely than any alternatives we have so far concocted to actually give people a meaningful self-determining life in conditions of relative affluence. And that’s what we care about.
Enoch: So I think that that is my view at the end of the day about democracy. But I do want to introduce at least one kind of nuance there. So I’m gonna go abstract on you here.
Mounk: You have my permission.
Enoch: Imagine a regime, a political order, that is actually doing pretty well, perhaps as well as your best kind of democracy on whatever scales you want, but in which there is a benevolent dictator who calls the shots. I sometimes give the example of Singapore as a perhaps close example along these lines. Now you may suppose that people just live much better lives there. Well in that case, maybe you’d be willing to compromise on your precious little democratic stuff. I’m okay with that. Western democracies have a problematic record when it comes to human rights, but are by and large better than others. Let’s suppose that in this hypothetical example of mine, human rights are actually respected a little bit more than in your favorite example of Western democracy, liberal democracy. Suppose we then talk about well-being, about prospering in other ways, about equality, along many of these lines. Singapore at least used to be a very good example, but maybe not, or the real world is complicated.
Mounk: I think one famous political philosopher kept citing an idealized version of Sweden and he called it Swedeland, to distinguish it from the empirically existing Sweden. So perhaps we can call this not Singapore but Singeland.
Enoch: Exactly. So anyway, I feel that something is missing in Singeland. Maybe it’s something with the hope of self-rule, and maybe we should just recognize that that hope has just no chance in hell in anything like a modern state, so we should give up on it. Okay but something is missing, and it’s worth thinking about what exactly it is, or maybe there’s a kind of violation of equality that’s really important. Why should that guy have so much power and the rest of us should have none or hardly any? Maybe at the end of the day we should think that it’s not important this kind of equality or that it is important hypothetically but it can’t be attained in any real-life state or maybe it is somewhat important, but it’s much less important than some of the other things that can be achieved. Obviously, many people have actually immigrated from Western democracies to Singapore. So maybe that shows that at least for many people all the benefits were more important. But as long as you agree with me that something is missing, normatively speaking—something is missing there that’s not missing in your best example of a liberal democracy. We can talk about what exactly is missing there and whether it’s worth the relevant price? There’s this quote, I’m going to get it partly wrong now, that I like from Judith Shklar, where she says about the relationship between liberalism and democracy, she says something like that they are eternally, monogamously married, but it’s a marriage of convenience. Of ultimate importance are liberal fundamental values and principles. Democracy is further down the road and very much vulnerable to empirical stuff of what follows from these principles to the specific circumstances. But I suspect that in most cases, at least in the world roughly as we know it now, this is roughly speaking going to be the kind of system of government that liberal fundamentals call for.
Mounk: I have two thoughts on this. The first is that I do think self-determination matters as a political value. I think democracies are vulnerable there, because most people empirically don’t feel that they’re engaged in a lot of self-determination.
Enoch: Wait, is the problem that they don’t feel that or that they don’t have self-determination?
Mounk: Well, that’s going to be the second point. It’s not a view that I hold myself, but for example, the majority of the population in most democracies in Western Europe in particular, and in many other continents as well, have for a very long time wanted to have less migration and certainly less illegal migration. The political class has for various reasons—in part because it’s really hard to actually enforce borders well—ignored their preferences. I think a lot of people have some objective reason to believe they’re not actually listening to what we want on some very important and core things. So that makes democracies a little bit vulnerable on their claim of being able to serve that value of self-determination very well. But the second point I want to make is that somebody who wants to give that empirical argument for democracy a run for the money would say, look, yes, of course, Singapore is in fact a very impressive society. It has some genuine problems with it, but it is a very, very impressive place with a very impressive class of civil servants and who are quite public spirited. But this is a huge outlier. By and large, there’s still very strong empirical arguments for embracing democratic institutions because the average democratic institution is going to be better able to serve those values. If you were able to export the model of Singapore to lots of places around the world that are on the lower end of the performance of democracies, that would be good. If we can turn Nigeria into a state that is as affluent, as thriving as Singapore, but give up on some of democratic freedoms there. That is not a trivial moral choice at all. Perhaps I’d have to think about it. Perhaps I’d be in favor of turning it into Singapore. But that’s not what’s going to happen if the actual existing political elites in Nigeria get all of the powers that the political elites in Singapore have. That’s just not a realistic vision of what would happen.
I want to go back to some of those questions of political pragmatism. So we have our set of values that are believed to be empirically grounded and morally correct. And we should be more self-confident in those. We should say these are the institutions that tend to produce the most human thriving. We are able to condemn the kind of oppression of women that happens in a country ruled by the Taliban or similar groups. And now we face a situation in which we have real empirical obstacles, in which some group within our country really disagrees with us profoundly, in which we fear that pushing too aggressively for gay rights, let’s say, in some society that is deeply homophobic may in fact have backfired. There’s some arguments that claim—it’s hard for me to assess the empirics of this—that Western funding for NGOs in some African nations is actually what indirectly led the introduction of the death penalty and other things for gay people there because there’s a kind of backlash against those attempts to fight for rights that I certainly very much personally believe in. How do we bring to bear pragmatic considerations on those circumstances without running the danger of giving up too easily on just saying, we’re never actually going to fight for those values because we can always cite some pragmatic reason not to?
Enoch: It’s extremely important to recognize both dangers. One danger is precisely the one you mentioned, this kind of lack of resolve and also lack of effectiveness, But the other danger is to be unwise in ways that are counterproductive. It’s interesting that you mention backlash because that’s the kind of example I always give. I am deeply afraid—I have been, long before it was popular—I’ve been deeply afraid of backlashes. What the risk of backlashes means is that sometimes a politically wise liberal leader will have to give up on what are genuine improvements. So it’s not just because something’s not going to be feasible. Suppose something is feasible but suppose it raises the risk of a backlash, then maybe you shouldn’t pursue it even if you can win. This is really painful because it means giving up on important wins, and this is not a win for my party or for me personally, it’s a win in terms of the liberal fundamentals. So yes, you need to somehow get the balance right. You have to be very well empirically informed about the relevant populations and whether backlash is coming and in what ways and how dangerous it is.
But once again, the kind of balancing act that a wise politician will have to go for, or leader, not necessarily politician, will have to go for, will strongly depend on the circumstances. And I’m kind of a particularist about this. I don’t think there’s a universal principle you can cite here. There’s an attitude that I go for. The attitude is being shamelessly uncompromising about the fundamentals and being shamelessly pragmatic and willing to compromise on specific things. What you should do is try to make the decision that is best in those circumstances. And sometimes you may be justifiably risk-averse in some ways and sometimes less so. There may also be—importantly for politics, less for the philosophical sector—important divisions of labor. So within, say, a feminist movement, there may be room for those who forge ahead without paying enough attention to risks of backlash. And then there may be room for some pragmatist leaders who actually do take that into account, giving up on important feminist wins from time to time, because you foresee the kind of male chauvinist backlash that will get the bad guys back in power.
Mounk: That’s an interesting point about the kind of separation of labor. A lot of the problems we run into are when people don’t have a sensible conception of their own role or misrepresent what the role is. To take one random example, there’s a big debate about NPR in the United States, which is a bit of a misnomer because it actually only has a very small percentage of its funding from the federal government. I have my misgivings about NPR in certain ways. There are also things that I like very much about NPR. I think the fundamental problem with NPR is not that it’s a progressive radio station, it's that it’s a progressive radio station that pretends to be a politically neutral radio station. What NPR should do is to cut the federal funding and say, we are a progressive radio station. There’s nothing wrong with The Nation as a magazine, since it’s a privately owned magazine that openly says we are progressive publication. That’s a good addition to the public ecosystem. I disagree with The Nation plenty of times. There’s nothing wrong with the existence of The Nation. In fact, it’s a good thing that The Nation exists. In the same way, I think NPR can have a great role to play in American life if it didn’t claim, I believe falsely, to be this politically neutral public institution in a way that misrepresents what its role actually is.
Here’s one worry I have about your position. I don’t know if that’s a pragmatic political worry or whether it is also a philosophical worry, but I think since we’re sort on the pragmatic end of the discussion, it should matter to you either way, which is that one way of making compromises with groups in your society is to say, dear Amish, you have a very different conception of life than we do. We live in a country where we respect that people can have fundamentally different conceptions of the world. This means that we’re going to go very far in trying to accommodate you. We may not be able to accommodate you in everything. Perhaps you can take your children out of education. I believe around the age of 13 or 14 is what the Supreme Court ultimately decided. But you’re not able to do it at eight. Then we would intervene to go to school, so there’s going to be some form of compromise here. But part of this is that we don’t have a deep view about the ultimate moral truth of religion. Part of this is that we recognize that we have our own beliefs. You may be right about your beliefs and what is a godly life and what is a worthwhile life. And that seems to me like an attitude of mutual respect in certain ways. It sounds to me like the kind of framework that you suggest would be somewhat tougher or meaner in how you address that group.
At least if you’re being honest in your reasoning when you’re addressing those groups, you would say something like, we think you’re objectively wrong. You are wrong about what education is required in order to give children a thriving life. You are wrong in how you think about the world. Now, we know that for all kinds of pragmatic political reasons, it might be a bad idea to send in the troops and crush you. Therefore we’re going to come to this deal with you. But make no mistake, we don’t really respect you. You can see how that actually may itself be much less conducive from pragmatic grounds to a good political settlement where we’re able to live in peace with each other as citizens of the same country.
Enoch: Okay, so I want to make three points. One on pluralism, one on epistemic modesty, and one on respect. So first, earlier I mentioned a kind of radical pluralism where all forms of life are just as good as any other one. And I expressed some criticism then alongside the criticism of relativism, nihilism, and so on. But there are more restricted versions of pluralism that I think make perfect sense. So I don’t think that there’s a single way of life that is best. I think that there are perhaps many ways of life that are equally or roughly equally good. Perhaps there are some ways of life that are not the best, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have at least some very good parts. In fact, perhaps some values that are manifested in those ways of life that cannot be manifested in ways of life that are overall better. So I can recognize that. I think that once we are clear on the availability for the liberal of a restricted version of liberalism, it takes at least some of your worry away. I don’t want to say it takes all of it. So that’s the first point.
The second is let me remind you about epistemic modesty. One, as I said, it’s not that every case of disagreement should make you think that you can no longer object to racism or something. But you should be very open to the possibility that there are some values that you miss. Joseph Raz talks somewhere about competitive pluralism. That’s the kind of pluralism that your way of life may be very good, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t miss on some important values that can only be realized in a very different way of life. So we should be open to that, but it’s possible that there’s a kind of community that’s available to an Amish or some other conservative community that’s no longer available to me. That may be of value, which doesn’t begin to justify sexual oppression or gender discrimination, but that is of value and that is important. So I think that once we are clear on the epistemic modesty, on the willingness to learn and to find out that perhaps you’ve been mistaken, I think that also serves to deal at least to an extent with your worry. But I also want to mention a doubt about the notion of respect.
How does one respect someone one disagrees with? The kind of view that you express, I think the kind of view that Rawls is often taken to express, is that the way you show respect to someone you disagree with is by disengaging, by retreating to neutral grounds. And I do think that’s sometimes a way of showing respect. But I also want to note that often it’s a way of showing contempt. Or often the way in which you really engage someone, sorry, the way in which you treat someone with respect when you disagree with them is by engaging them. Think of interpersonal relations. If someone puts forward the view that I really object to, I just say, whatever, let’s continue the conversation on something else. That’s not a way of showing respect. That’s a way of saying roughly, you’re not worth it for me to correct your mistake.
Now, I think Rawls is often associated with the first way of showing respect. Raz—criticizing Rawls—insists on the latter kind of respect. In this case, I’m a compromising kind of guy. So I think that respect comes to different things in different contexts. And that sometimes the way you show respect is precisely by retreating to neutral grounds. But sometimes the way to show respect is engaging. And I think it’s really complicated. So just saying something like, you have your ways, I have my ways, let’s go on. I don’t think that we can just in a simple kind of straightforward way say that’s how you show respect and everything else falls short. I think that that’s a way of showing respect some of the time. But some of the time that falls short and the way to show respect is very different.
Let me also mention that on top of all of this there’s also the fact that when there are oppressive practices that are part of a community, you can talk about respecting the community or the members of the community who are very much committed to those values, but there are also always victims to be protected. And that’s not something the liberal can ignore, at least on the principle level. Whether we should send in the troops is, as we’ve now said several times, a whole other matter.
Mounk: I know that you’re a philosopher and not a campaign strategist or advisor, but spell out for us a little bit what the implications of this really rigid conversation are for how we should do politics, whether that is some politicians and political candidates and so on who I know listen to this podcast or whether that’s us as private citizens arguing for a position. If you’re in a political system where you want to defend these basic principles of liberalism against politicians who disdain them, who are trying to attack them and so on, does all of this have implications for the kind of language you should use for the way in which you talk to your fellow citizens? What concretely does this mean in the heat of political battle?
Enoch: I think it does, but you were right to point out that I’m not a political strategist and a lot depends here on the kind of stuff that political strategists are at least supposed to be experts on. So I think that if a leader or an aspiring leader speaks honestly, they should say things like, here’s what I’m committed to. I am committed to a very strong kind of gender equality of the kind that is often compromised by some hyper conservative communities and so I’m committed to doing whatever is feasible in terms of other important values including by the way the autonomy of members of that community to protect girls and women from the gender from the attitudes to gender in that community. However, I should also note that politics is hard. We’re going to need to find the power, the political will, the resources to do these things and to do other things. We’re going to have to balance this with other considerations. We’re going to have to build political alliances, including with some people who don’t agree with us on everything. But even if I can’t deliver on this, even if at some point it becomes politically unwise to see these things, it doesn’t make me lose, I still keep my eye on the liberal ball, namely these liberal fundamentals. And similarly for race, and similarly I would say for socio-economic topics, although of course what exactly follows from the liberal fundamentals to these economic considerations is extremely complicated and I’m not an expert on that either. So I think that this kind of attitude for political leaders may actually be useful politically. But I may be wrong about this. This is really a question for political strategists. Even if that’s so, I think it could be useful thinking in those ways, could be useful for political leaders, say, within some circles, even if that’s not the best message to splash on billboards.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss the war in Gaza, and where the limits of deterrence are, and the importance of external pressure on Israel. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
