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| Morality (Photo credit: joel duggan) |
I got involved briefly this week in a discussion on Liberal Conspiracy on the subject of forcing ISPs to block porn sites. The move has been mooted by the British government this month as part of its "pro family" agenda. (Incidentally, have you ever met a politician who described themselves as anti-family?)
The blog post at Liberal Conspiracy was implicitly against the idea of blocking such sites, but focused more specifically on the fact that it was those pesky Christians again who had been conducting research into the feasibility of such a move. The article's title - The Religious Fanatics Behind the Tory Plan to Block Porn - gives a slight hint of where the author was likely to go on the subject.
In the course of the discussion (299 comments and counting) "pagar" made the following assertion:
"Morality is a matter for the individual, not the collective."
I replied to pagar:
"Really?
Opposition to murder, rape and human trafficking are just three of the behaviours that require a collective morality."
To which pagar answered:
"No.
These things are legitimately matters for a collective legal system not because they are “immoral”, but because they involve coercion, the imposition of one’s will by compulsion."
Pagar's comment, in my opinion, goes to the heart of the liberal dilemma. On the one hand, s/he wishes to reject the idea of a universal or community-wide morality, replacing it with a radically individualised idea of personal rights. On the other hand, pagar appeals to an implicit universal moral ethic (namely, that it is wrong to use coercion on another) as the reason why law should be enforced against murders and traffickers.
Pagar and others who argue this way may or may not have thought long and hard about "why" they assume that not coercing people is wrong in itself, and therefore the basis for law.(Let's lay to one side for now the fact that all state-sanctioned law involves coercion. Try not paying your tax next year for proof of this reality.)
It may be argued that it is "obvious" that imposing one's will by coercion is "a bad thing". I would strongly agree, but unlike the secular liberal, I am not satisfied with such a subjective answer alone. In the Middle Ages, it was "obvious" that people were born unequal and should be treated differently under the law. In the 18th century it was "obvious" (even to such apparently enlightened figures as Thomas Jefferson) that the "negro" was "innately inferior" to the white man.
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| Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1805. New-York Historical Society. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
By stating what one regards as "obvious" as the basis for an absolute moral code, imposed by the force of the state, a whole number of miserable and oppressive policies can be and have been imposed.
So, I agree with pagar that coercion of one individual on another is wrong (with the proviso that all law involves coercion). Where I differ from him/her is the denial that such an assumption is an example of a collective morality. Simply put, people's view that it is wrong to kill and rape rests upon a moral assumption which the community must subscribe to in order for the view to find expression in tangible legal rights.
It seems that when humans come together to form societies, they cannot help but establish communal codes of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. To deny this seems to me to fly in the face of the evidence of history.
Those who deny the need or reality of a communal morality end up, it seems to me, creating one anyway. The commitment to individual rights rests upon a community-wide acceptance that such rights do in fact exist. In effect, communal morality at its best upholds and underpins these rights and freedoms. Denying communal morality seems to me a philosophical and political dead end.
Which, if I'm right, begs the question, "What is the communal morality and where does it come from?"
But that's for another day.
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