Joseph Heath’s knack for making this esoterica accessible to us muggles is just amazing. For the length of one essay, you feel like you understand what it’s like to reason like a philosopher. Then you get to the end and realize you’re still the same old ignorant shithead you’d been ten minutes earlier. (OK maybe a tiny bit less ignorant.)
I taught Rawls every semester for over 35 years. I got to the point where I would use an acronym to capture the very basic first principal also found in Catholic Social Teaching: MFOF. "Most F'd Over First!" The preferential option of the poor in less civil terms. There is an evolved biological truth here: There is no such thing as perfect altruism; all altruism is in some way reciprocal altruism. That is why Rawls will endure. I am a social creature; I speak a social language; I know myself in social terms. There is no private language. So there is no fully selfish act that does not occur in the society we need for our own survival and the survival of our kin. Only a fool would not realize at any moment you may be the Most F'd Over.
I do, however, want to suggest that this response to postliberals might not be adequately responsive:
“Congratulations, you have done a great job articulating your preferred conception of the good life! Your next step should be to persuade all of your fellow Christians of the correctness of Catholic doctrine on these points, after which you should get to work on persuading all of the atheists, Muslims, Hindus, etc. Once you have achieved consensus then we can start to build this ideal society. But in the meantime, we are going to need some principles to govern our institutions, since there are many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation among individuals who disagree about such questions. If you feel that you have something to contribute to this conversation, which is what the rest of us have been talking about, please don’t be shy.”
I think somebody like Vermeule would say that this already presupposes the liberal attitude to politics that he opposes. That is, postliberals do not believe the legitimacy of implementing a particular conception of justice depends on the agreement of those bound to reorder their life according to that conception. If the conception of justice they seek to impose is right, they believe that this automatically carries with it a justification for imposing that justice, even if this involves what we liberals would call coercion. In other words, at the very core of many of these postliberals’ beliefs is a rejection of an idea at the very core of liberalism: whereas JS Mill says liberalisms rejects the “logic of persecutors”, postliberals embrace it.
I’m sensitive to the fact that many may think I’m simply strawmanning Vermeule. (I certainly could have used a Russell’s Conjugation for “the logic of oppressors” to avoid making my own views so obvious.) This is Vermeule writing 2020 in The Atlantic magazine in a piece entitled “Beyond Originalism”:
“Common-good constitutionalism is also not legal liberalism or libertarianism. Its main aim is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well. A corollary is that to act outside or against inherent norms of good rule is to act tyrannically, forfeiting the right to rule, but the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to “protect liberty” as an end in itself. Constraints on power are good only derivatively, insofar as they contribute to the common good; the emphasis should not be on liberty as an abstract object of quasi-religious devotion, but on particular human liberties whose protection is a duty of justice or prudence on the part of the ruler.
“Finally, unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
“Common-good constitutionalism draws inspiration from the early modern theory of ragion di stato—“reason of state,” which, despite the connotations that have become attached to its name, is not at all a tradition of unscrupulous machination. (Indeed, it was formulated precisely to combat amoral technocratic visions of rule as the maximization of princely power.) Instead the ragion di stato tradition elaborates a set of principles for the just exercise of authority. Promoting a substantive vision of the good is, always and everywhere, the proper function of rulers. Every act of public-regarding government has been founded on such a vision; any contrary view is an illusion. Liberal and libertarian constitutional decisions that claim to rule out “morality” as a ground for public action are incoherent, even fraudulent, for they rest on merely a particular account of morality, an implausible account.”
"We know what's good for you. We will give it to you, and force you to consume it. You are not allowed to object. Your objection is a signal of your not-goodness."
Who in their right mind wants to give others this kind of power? It's like these philosophers don't believe power corrupts. Perhaps I'm blinkered, but there's nothing remotely persuasive in those ideas. Save us all from people who think they have access to The Truth (or even The Good). The moral realists are simply wrong about what is epistemologically knowable about morality (and probably wrong about there being any non-subjective morality at all).
I do appreciate you for bringing these ideas to the discussion!
A welcome article. One quibble. Those "interested in the details" will be misled by footnote 1. It says Rawls's "veil of ignorance" argument fails because behind the veil choosers would look for principles of highest average utility rather those guaranteeing the best worst outcome ("maximin"). This encapsulates how Rawls differed from John Harsanyi, but it obscures the fact that Rawls gave reasons why choosers behind the veil would use maximin rather than average utility. The footnote doesn't record this. Maybe Rawls's reasons aren't compelling, but Harsanyi's view doesn't simply win by default.
I appreciate this essay, in particular because it sets up my reading of Political Liberalism.
However, I want to push back on one of it's initial claims:
> According to popular perception, universities have become cesspools of radical left-wing indoctrination, dominated by cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and post-modernism. As someone who has been working on the inside through the past three decades of intellectual fads and enthusiasms, I am sorry to report that, not only is this false, it is the opposite of true.
The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't provide explanations for the illiberal drift that people are seeing that appears to emanate from the elites coming out of academic institutions.
Before she made a career out on the right wing cultural grievance circuit, Riley Gaines made a competing claim with transgender activists. She argued that not only she was forced to compete against a beneficiary of male puberty in swim competitions, she and the other female swimmers were forced to be exposed to male genitals in the locker room. If Rawls was so dominant in academia, why did it seem like none of y'all considered "what if the veil were lifted and I discovered I was a competitive female athlete? Or a physically attractive woman who wanted to use a gym membership to keep fit, but didn't want perverts pretending to be transgendered gawking at me in the locker room?" Because she had a point *on principle,* no matter how much we may personally find the right's own stances on such issues distasteful.
A useful framework here is Timur Kuran's notion of preference falsification. Rawls' original position would actually be quite useful at disarming a lot of the morally charged cultural war issues, and yet liberal academics seem unmotivated to engage with the exercise when speaking up publicly has a price. The hurdle you need to clear is not just to claim, "we academics love Rawls," you need to use his framework to meaningfully engage in contentious (and therefore costly) subjects. This would *prove* that the liberal tradition is alive and well in academia in a manner that actually might silence skeptics.
So long as academia seems unable to actually make serious use of it's dominant moral and political philosophical frameworks, especially when there's reputational risk, I think y'all need to own the perception that liberalism has severely weakened over the last few decades. Remember: if *you all* as a cohort won't stand up and apply liberal principles to whatever potentially unpopular position they might lead to, can you expect the same of the voting public? And if *we* don't vote according to liberal principles, how can liberalism actually survive within our sovereign borders?
But, by no means is this critique a dismissal. On the whole, I'm grateful for the knowledge.
Regarding the prevalence or lack of progressive radicals in academia, the author is saying it’s not them, it’s the HS and primary school teachers doing the indoctrinating.
Sure. But HS and primary school teachers were educated in universities where, for instance, the Sokal affair (which has been replicated many times) suggests that the degree of institutional capture of illiberal left wing ideology exceeds what the author suggested.
I agree. Fac Eds are notorious centres of progressive indoctrination, but they are a small part of the overall ecosystem. Also the progressively inclined are more apt to follow a career in education. Perhaps this is a case of a loud minority having outsized visability and influence.
Indeed, Timur Kuran's work on preference falsification explains this well. A minority pressure group managed to impose a high social cost of contradicting their radical beliefs. Those costs soared high enough that very few chose to pay that cost.
When I think of Modern Liberalism I see the image of Kneeling Nancy. The European woman who was third in line-of-succession to the most powerful executive office in the world, praying in the rotunda of "our democracy" with an African kente cloth, over the death of a petty African criminal who was strung out on fentanyl and resisting arrest.
I then think of the European arresting officer, now rotting in prison for doing his duty, convicted in a kangaroo court, followed by months of violent rioting and lockdowns for the rest of us because of a virus manufactured in a government-supported lab for what reason.I have no idea.
Ugh! That is not what Liberalism classical or modern is about. That is uniquely, White Americans who are not Conservative. They do it not because they believe in Equity but because they know the Right will be triggered by it. Malcolm X spoke of this phenomenon & so did George Orwell ( he was speaking about the Cosmopolitan Socialist & their disdain for the Provincials, who are different from the working class).
Do I believe in the Intrinsic rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and the role of a robust civic administrarive state to provide us with social and economic support to protect those natural rights; for rule of law to reign in rent seeking and oligopoly and the excess of capitalism that seeks to erode those natural rights; and for targeted policy and legislation to address the racial caste system and historical indigeneous segregationist policies and to expand rights of LQBTQAI so they are not denied their natural rights; to address illegal immigration by providing a legal path so we don't create a two tier citizenry that erodes all our rights? Yes. What I don't approve of is white cultural progressives and their adjacents othering minorities and disenfranchised groups and using us as props to beat their conservative and far right brethrens by constantly virtue signalling. This is our country. This is our democracy.
So, racists, and maybe capitalists, whatever they are (I guess straight white people, even progressives), do not have the same rights as you disenfranchised people? They are supposed to provide disenfranchised groups with "social and economic support" but you (I assume you belong to a disenfranchised group) have no such obligations to them?
"Of course, the revolution in liberal philosophy that he carried out brought its own difficulties. For example, unlike classical liberalism, modern liberalism is much more ambiguous in its understanding of both constitutional law and individual rights. Nor does it offer any easy answers to traditional questions about the role of electoral democracy in a liberal society. It cannot easily be extended to deal with questions of international law and global justice. Its application to minority rights, race relations, and family organization is contested."
Those are not weaknesses; they are features. It's only a weakness if you expected liberalism to tell you what's right. That's not what it does. It tells you how to coordinate with others in a fair way that doesn't depend on agreement on all or most values. Liberalism is doing its job there, it's not committing.
Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually - just CLICK into EthicalGovtNow.org. Dems may win the midterms, but our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities, while supporting all liberal Democrats now. One more time: please CLICK to visit and delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org or, what we are experiencing now our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.
Joseph Heath’s knack for making this esoterica accessible to us muggles is just amazing. For the length of one essay, you feel like you understand what it’s like to reason like a philosopher. Then you get to the end and realize you’re still the same old ignorant shithead you’d been ten minutes earlier. (OK maybe a tiny bit less ignorant.)
Still, it’s a great ride.
I taught Rawls every semester for over 35 years. I got to the point where I would use an acronym to capture the very basic first principal also found in Catholic Social Teaching: MFOF. "Most F'd Over First!" The preferential option of the poor in less civil terms. There is an evolved biological truth here: There is no such thing as perfect altruism; all altruism is in some way reciprocal altruism. That is why Rawls will endure. I am a social creature; I speak a social language; I know myself in social terms. There is no private language. So there is no fully selfish act that does not occur in the society we need for our own survival and the survival of our kin. Only a fool would not realize at any moment you may be the Most F'd Over.
This is a truly excellent essay!
I do, however, want to suggest that this response to postliberals might not be adequately responsive:
“Congratulations, you have done a great job articulating your preferred conception of the good life! Your next step should be to persuade all of your fellow Christians of the correctness of Catholic doctrine on these points, after which you should get to work on persuading all of the atheists, Muslims, Hindus, etc. Once you have achieved consensus then we can start to build this ideal society. But in the meantime, we are going to need some principles to govern our institutions, since there are many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation among individuals who disagree about such questions. If you feel that you have something to contribute to this conversation, which is what the rest of us have been talking about, please don’t be shy.”
I think somebody like Vermeule would say that this already presupposes the liberal attitude to politics that he opposes. That is, postliberals do not believe the legitimacy of implementing a particular conception of justice depends on the agreement of those bound to reorder their life according to that conception. If the conception of justice they seek to impose is right, they believe that this automatically carries with it a justification for imposing that justice, even if this involves what we liberals would call coercion. In other words, at the very core of many of these postliberals’ beliefs is a rejection of an idea at the very core of liberalism: whereas JS Mill says liberalisms rejects the “logic of persecutors”, postliberals embrace it.
I’m sensitive to the fact that many may think I’m simply strawmanning Vermeule. (I certainly could have used a Russell’s Conjugation for “the logic of oppressors” to avoid making my own views so obvious.) This is Vermeule writing 2020 in The Atlantic magazine in a piece entitled “Beyond Originalism”:
“Common-good constitutionalism is also not legal liberalism or libertarianism. Its main aim is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well. A corollary is that to act outside or against inherent norms of good rule is to act tyrannically, forfeiting the right to rule, but the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to “protect liberty” as an end in itself. Constraints on power are good only derivatively, insofar as they contribute to the common good; the emphasis should not be on liberty as an abstract object of quasi-religious devotion, but on particular human liberties whose protection is a duty of justice or prudence on the part of the ruler.
“Finally, unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
“Common-good constitutionalism draws inspiration from the early modern theory of ragion di stato—“reason of state,” which, despite the connotations that have become attached to its name, is not at all a tradition of unscrupulous machination. (Indeed, it was formulated precisely to combat amoral technocratic visions of rule as the maximization of princely power.) Instead the ragion di stato tradition elaborates a set of principles for the just exercise of authority. Promoting a substantive vision of the good is, always and everywhere, the proper function of rulers. Every act of public-regarding government has been founded on such a vision; any contrary view is an illusion. Liberal and libertarian constitutional decisions that claim to rule out “morality” as a ground for public action are incoherent, even fraudulent, for they rest on merely a particular account of morality, an implausible account.”
"We know what's good for you. We will give it to you, and force you to consume it. You are not allowed to object. Your objection is a signal of your not-goodness."
Who in their right mind wants to give others this kind of power? It's like these philosophers don't believe power corrupts. Perhaps I'm blinkered, but there's nothing remotely persuasive in those ideas. Save us all from people who think they have access to The Truth (or even The Good). The moral realists are simply wrong about what is epistemologically knowable about morality (and probably wrong about there being any non-subjective morality at all).
I do appreciate you for bringing these ideas to the discussion!
A welcome article. One quibble. Those "interested in the details" will be misled by footnote 1. It says Rawls's "veil of ignorance" argument fails because behind the veil choosers would look for principles of highest average utility rather those guaranteeing the best worst outcome ("maximin"). This encapsulates how Rawls differed from John Harsanyi, but it obscures the fact that Rawls gave reasons why choosers behind the veil would use maximin rather than average utility. The footnote doesn't record this. Maybe Rawls's reasons aren't compelling, but Harsanyi's view doesn't simply win by default.
I appreciate this essay, in particular because it sets up my reading of Political Liberalism.
However, I want to push back on one of it's initial claims:
> According to popular perception, universities have become cesspools of radical left-wing indoctrination, dominated by cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and post-modernism. As someone who has been working on the inside through the past three decades of intellectual fads and enthusiasms, I am sorry to report that, not only is this false, it is the opposite of true.
The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't provide explanations for the illiberal drift that people are seeing that appears to emanate from the elites coming out of academic institutions.
Before she made a career out on the right wing cultural grievance circuit, Riley Gaines made a competing claim with transgender activists. She argued that not only she was forced to compete against a beneficiary of male puberty in swim competitions, she and the other female swimmers were forced to be exposed to male genitals in the locker room. If Rawls was so dominant in academia, why did it seem like none of y'all considered "what if the veil were lifted and I discovered I was a competitive female athlete? Or a physically attractive woman who wanted to use a gym membership to keep fit, but didn't want perverts pretending to be transgendered gawking at me in the locker room?" Because she had a point *on principle,* no matter how much we may personally find the right's own stances on such issues distasteful.
A useful framework here is Timur Kuran's notion of preference falsification. Rawls' original position would actually be quite useful at disarming a lot of the morally charged cultural war issues, and yet liberal academics seem unmotivated to engage with the exercise when speaking up publicly has a price. The hurdle you need to clear is not just to claim, "we academics love Rawls," you need to use his framework to meaningfully engage in contentious (and therefore costly) subjects. This would *prove* that the liberal tradition is alive and well in academia in a manner that actually might silence skeptics.
So long as academia seems unable to actually make serious use of it's dominant moral and political philosophical frameworks, especially when there's reputational risk, I think y'all need to own the perception that liberalism has severely weakened over the last few decades. Remember: if *you all* as a cohort won't stand up and apply liberal principles to whatever potentially unpopular position they might lead to, can you expect the same of the voting public? And if *we* don't vote according to liberal principles, how can liberalism actually survive within our sovereign borders?
But, by no means is this critique a dismissal. On the whole, I'm grateful for the knowledge.
Regarding the prevalence or lack of progressive radicals in academia, the author is saying it’s not them, it’s the HS and primary school teachers doing the indoctrinating.
Sure. But HS and primary school teachers were educated in universities where, for instance, the Sokal affair (which has been replicated many times) suggests that the degree of institutional capture of illiberal left wing ideology exceeds what the author suggested.
I agree. Fac Eds are notorious centres of progressive indoctrination, but they are a small part of the overall ecosystem. Also the progressively inclined are more apt to follow a career in education. Perhaps this is a case of a loud minority having outsized visability and influence.
Indeed, Timur Kuran's work on preference falsification explains this well. A minority pressure group managed to impose a high social cost of contradicting their radical beliefs. Those costs soared high enough that very few chose to pay that cost.
When I think of Modern Liberalism I see the image of Kneeling Nancy. The European woman who was third in line-of-succession to the most powerful executive office in the world, praying in the rotunda of "our democracy" with an African kente cloth, over the death of a petty African criminal who was strung out on fentanyl and resisting arrest.
I then think of the European arresting officer, now rotting in prison for doing his duty, convicted in a kangaroo court, followed by months of violent rioting and lockdowns for the rest of us because of a virus manufactured in a government-supported lab for what reason.I have no idea.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
Lol. I had to look that up. Thanks.
Same
Ugh! That is not what Liberalism classical or modern is about. That is uniquely, White Americans who are not Conservative. They do it not because they believe in Equity but because they know the Right will be triggered by it. Malcolm X spoke of this phenomenon & so did George Orwell ( he was speaking about the Cosmopolitan Socialist & their disdain for the Provincials, who are different from the working class).
Thank you for your comment. Do you believe in human rights?
Do I believe in the Intrinsic rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and the role of a robust civic administrarive state to provide us with social and economic support to protect those natural rights; for rule of law to reign in rent seeking and oligopoly and the excess of capitalism that seeks to erode those natural rights; and for targeted policy and legislation to address the racial caste system and historical indigeneous segregationist policies and to expand rights of LQBTQAI so they are not denied their natural rights; to address illegal immigration by providing a legal path so we don't create a two tier citizenry that erodes all our rights? Yes. What I don't approve of is white cultural progressives and their adjacents othering minorities and disenfranchised groups and using us as props to beat their conservative and far right brethrens by constantly virtue signalling. This is our country. This is our democracy.
So, racists, and maybe capitalists, whatever they are (I guess straight white people, even progressives), do not have the same rights as you disenfranchised people? They are supposed to provide disenfranchised groups with "social and economic support" but you (I assume you belong to a disenfranchised group) have no such obligations to them?
Have a great day!
"Of course, the revolution in liberal philosophy that he carried out brought its own difficulties. For example, unlike classical liberalism, modern liberalism is much more ambiguous in its understanding of both constitutional law and individual rights. Nor does it offer any easy answers to traditional questions about the role of electoral democracy in a liberal society. It cannot easily be extended to deal with questions of international law and global justice. Its application to minority rights, race relations, and family organization is contested."
Those are not weaknesses; they are features. It's only a weakness if you expected liberalism to tell you what's right. That's not what it does. It tells you how to coordinate with others in a fair way that doesn't depend on agreement on all or most values. Liberalism is doing its job there, it's not committing.
Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually - just CLICK into EthicalGovtNow.org. Dems may win the midterms, but our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities, while supporting all liberal Democrats now. One more time: please CLICK to visit and delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org or, what we are experiencing now our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.