Values, Facts, and Conservative Ideology

Welcome friends!

I’ve been noticing a trend recently among conservatives and right wing sorts in which they seem increasingly concerned to deny the traditional philosophical distinction between value and fact, ethics and science, normative and positive, subjective and objective.  Have you noticed any shift in that long standing staple of Western philosophy at least of the more analytical and less “continental” variety?  One expects it from religious conservatives, of course, who have long fancied ethics and morality meaningless unless objective and factual or at least treated as though they were.  However, recently I’ve been hearing similar ideas from random purveyors of bad economics, who seem concerned to establish the ethics they promote in their various economic theories and frameworks are not just their own subjective ethical values but propositions that have been scientifically and mathematically proven to be correct, like the laws of physics seems a common refrain, and hence only subject to dispute by slow witted clods who cannot comprehend the generally rather simplistic science and math involved.  It occurred to me this fundamental bit of philosophical confusion is very likely what’s ultimately behind most conservatives’ increasingly obvious antipathy toward political democracy.  How did I work that out?  I’ll be happy to tell you right now.

Let me first set out my own view on what ethics is really all about, which I think is pretty standard stuff in the context of secular ethical philosophy.  First, ethics and morals and values are inherently subjective, whether we like it or not, whether we talk about them that way or not.  They’re in a different epistemic category from factual statements relating to what we perceive as the external world.  If an alien were to visit Earth he or she or it would need to come to terms with what we perceive as the objective facts of our existence here on Earth.  Let’s go with “it” this time, shall we?  I’m imagining a creature of uncertain gender but with many menacing tentacles and one eye.  Wait, was that on TV?  Doesn’t matter.  Now, this creature might not like the idea of gravity, but there gravity would be nonetheless.  So sad.  The same cannot be said of our human ethics.  If we’re not there to explain them to it, it might never know they even exist.  We could argue ethics with it, hopefully some form of ethics that doesn’t involve the awesome superiority and godlike rights and appearance of the human race or whatever, and maybe it would be persuaded by what we say and maybe not.  But the ethical propositions would not be in the same category as propositions about gravity.  There is nothing in this world that would compel the alien in question to either accept or reject our ethics.  It’s subjective.  It’s a statement about values we hold.  Maybe aliens hold similar values; maybe they don’t.  It’s not a statement about an objective fact one can demonstrate by getting out the old valuescopeometer and taking a few quick readings.

So, if it’s all subjective anyway, what’s the point of ethical philosophy?  You think whatever you want, and I’ll think whatever I want.  Well, for one thing, you may not know really know what you think.  You may think you do.  You may have a vague idea what you think.  But then an awkward situation rolls around and you discover it’s not so clear and you have to sit down and think it through.  So that’s one point of ethical philosophy: challenging and understanding your own ethical beliefs just for your own self-awareness.  What ethical propositions correspond to your fundamental moral sentiments and stand on their own with no further need of analysis?  What ethical propositions are logical developments based on those moral sentiments?  Where may you have made logical or philosophical errors in what you supposed your moral sentiments implied based on divergence of conclusions and your moral sentiments?  

Then, of course, you have the problem of having to deal with other people.  People who may have their own subjective moral sentiments and their own set of ethical beliefs.  How do you intend to deal with them?  Yes, you could always try ignoring them, or if you found yourself at cross purposes, sneaking up behind them and hitting them over their little heads with a rock.  That’s what you might call the traditional approach.  However, you could also sit down, armed with your self-knowledge about your own ethics and your own moral sentiments, and try to work something out with them, understand their ethical arguments, work your way back hopefully to some kernel of commonality, some shared moral sentiment.  I mean, the rock isn’t going anyplace.  It will always be there if you need it.  But it’s nice to give philosophy and reasoned discussion a try.  In that sense, secular ethical philosophy seems rather more robust than religion based ethics, which may be perfectly sensible and persuasive for those holding the same religious views, but which lose their effectiveness rather rapidly when one moves to people in different sects of a shared religion, different religions, or differing views about the value of the whole religious enterprise.  And, of course, with religion, ethics is just part of a much bigger package, so lots of other issues about to complicate and potentially end the discussion of ethics prematurely.

Now, if you hold this view of subjective ethics, a funny thing happens.  No one person can ever really lay claim to being the ultimate arbiter of ethics.  Everyone has their point of view.  Some people may have thought through some issues a little more carefully than others; but when it comes to the inputs and conclusions they find consistent with their moral sentiments, no one is in any better situation than anyone else really.  When it comes to society making collective ethical decisions, it’s just a bunch of people talking to one another.  And how do you make order from a bunch of people talking to one another and having different views and so on?  Political democracy, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, that sort of thing.  You talk it out, and then you have some mechanism where you vote and decide what you’re going to do, maybe with some mechanism for protecting the minority with maybe some harder to revise rules that are still nonetheless subject to democratic processes and potential revision.  There is a close link between secular philosophy, the idea that ethics are ultimately subjective, and the philosophical basis of political democracy.

Of course, one can get to democracy by other routes, including a religious one, which is kind of interesting itself.  What normally happens when one comes to believe ethics are objective is one will be drawn to some sort of authoritarian political regime that will make other people behave ethically.  If we’re talking about religious ethics then we’re talking about an authoritarian theocracy of the sort one finds in various places around the world today.  Doesn’t always happen that way.  Some religious traditions historically associated with political democracy stress the subjective choice involved in accepting their ostensibly objective ethics.  In those traditions, whatever it is doesn’t really count as ethical if one is only doing it because one thinks if one doesn’t the religious police or local holy man or woman will hit you on the head with a rock.  People with this perspective are basically fine with society at large deciding to reject what they see as the one true ethics, indeed they often expect as much and consider such a result essential to their own self-identity and particular worthiness, but they never doubt for a moment the objective veracity of their own ethics.  There are yet other possible routes by which those who support the idea of objective ethics may support political democracy.  For example, they may simply fear authoritarian rule because of the very sensible concern the wrong sort might end up dictating ethics.  But that seems a rather unstable situation.  If ever they felt there was a way they could ensure the correct result they would prefer to do away with political democracy.  It’s very much a second best solution. However, in general, one has a much trickier and less direct route to supporting political democracy if one thinks ethics and morality are objective rather than subjective because in the latter case political democracy is really the only sensible game in town.

It’s a roughly similar situation in the realm of economics and economic theory.  What usually happens when one thinks one has found the one true, objectively correct ethics as far as economic arrangements go is one wants to set things up in the ostensibly ethical way and then prevent other people interfering through such dastardly mechanisms as, for example, the monopoly on legal power of an activist and democratic government.  One becomes a sort of technocratic and secular priest of the one true ethics, akin in many ways to power mad religious extremists.  Think I’m being funny?  Have you had the temerity to challenge the ethical views or values relating to economic issues of an academic economist recently?  How about one of these hot headed and forever foaming at the mouth economists of the boulevard?  Think religious extremists are not always entirely rational and sometimes a little overly emotional?  You should get out more.  There’s a lot of it about.  And, of course, if one feels one’s role on this earth is to make and defend an economic system that reflects the one true ethics, the question of how one goes about it may become a secondary consideration.  Maybe one talks honestly about one’s values, but the risk is always there someone might disagree or get confused and end up doing the wrong thing.  One will be tempted to believe the ends may justify the means and just go with whatever works on a strictly rhetorical basis, even if, wink wink, you and I know it’s not really honest or technically true or entirely correct.  Basically, one comes to believe things like maybe the common misinterpretations of neoclassical welfare economics in which it appears to take up distributional issues isn’t really so bad after all, as long as it leads people to the ostensibly ethically correct result.

We’re currently witnessing a serious degradation and degeneration of support for political democracy here in the USA with multiple branches of the conservative movement involved: bad religion, bad economics, and bad ethics.  The trends will likely continue unless we begin to get serious and teach our young at least the rudiments of real philosophy, so they can at least understand the difference between value and fact, normative and positive, ethics and science, subjective and objective.  If we don’t, then we shouldn’t be surprised at all if one day they can’t really see the point of political democracy, free speech, free thought, and all the other democratic values we’ve traditionally held in this country and throughout the modern developed world.  If that day arrives, we will have been the architects of our own demise.

Liberalism and “Neoliberalism,” and Conservatism

Welcome friends!

Have you noticed a curious trend online in which economic arguments long associated with traditional American economic conservatism are described instead as “neoliberal,” for example in phrases like the “neoliberal doctrine of free markets” and so on?  While it’s true what distinguishes so-called “neoliberals” from normal, traditional, American-style “liberals” is the former’s adoption of conservative economic reasoning, and in that sense I suppose it’s technically correct to call conservative economic ideas “neoliberal,” there’s something suspiciously odd about it to me, especially when not used as part of a hyphenated formulation like “conservative / neoliberal economic reasoning.”  To me it always sounds like the tail wagging the dog, or what I imagine that must sound like anyway.  Neoliberalism here in the USA as far as I can remember has always referred to liberals who adopted conservative economic language during the so-called Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s when conservatism and in particular economic conservatism was rampant in this country.  So, as I’m sure you can appreciate, it sounds rather jarring to the ears of anyone like me who was alive at that time to now misplace the derivative connection to what was in the past always considered mainstream conservatism and call free market ideology a neoliberal idea, as though it was something they had worked out amongst themselves and, who knows, perhaps later told conservatives about?  It raises one’s suspicions that some sort of rhetorical funny business involving words is going on, along the lines of conservatives’ attempt to redefine and broaden the meaning of “socialism” as we’ve always understood it in this country to now include the mundane fixing of market problems and addressing distributional issues that have long been considered part of the neoclassical economic orthodoxy.  However, when I raised my concerns to a fellow online the other day he pointed out the term “neoliberal” has a long of tradition in Europe going back to the 1930s of referring to the economic policies we traditionally associate with conservatism in the USA.  What the heck?  Really?  Why have I never heard about this before now?  Why is everything always so damned complicated and confusing?  Because some people like it that way?  Oh.  Yeah, probably.  Anyway, it sent me to Wikipedia to learn more about this newly strange beast called neoliberalism.

Part of what the authors had to say about neoliberalism in the Wikipedia article seemed to make sense to me.  “Neoliberalism constituted a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus that had lasted from 1945 to 1980.”  That sounds about right.  That timeframe would make the start of neoliberalism contemporaneous with the conservative revolution here in the USA.  That’s what I always understood to be the case.  Some traditional liberals, the sort who supported Keynesian and New Deal policies to confront the conservative free-market policies that arguably led to the Great Depression and initially prevented any effective response to that economic calamity, gave up their by then traditional liberal economic ideas to adopt conservative economic ideas relating to worshipping the free market as a panacea and in so doing became so-called “neoliberals.”  They were neoliberals rather than plain old conservatives at that point I suppose because they retained their interest in other non-economic parts of the traditional liberal agenda in this country, presumably things like the separation of church and state, racial equality, etc.

However, after this promising start the article promptly began to go perceptibly pear shaped.  The authors noted English-speakers have actually been using the term neoliberalism since the start of the twentieth century but with different meanings and, to make matter worse, with definitions that have changed over time.  Of course.  As the name of an “economic philosophy,” it was apparently used by European “liberals” in the 1930s (and, yes, I have no idea who we’re talking about now, maybe anyone who wasn’t a fascist?) as they attempted to revive the central economic ideas of so-called “classical liberalism,” which is an even older term for what we here in the USA have long called conservatism in the realm of economics, that is, people who view so-called “free markets” as panaceas.  So, in Europe in the 1930s, neoliberal apparently didn’t mean “new” American-style liberals who had adopted conservative economic principles in the 1980s, it basically meant proponents of a “new” or resurgent form of classical liberalism or conservatism as we call it here in the US.

But we’re not done yet.  The article also noted that at some point in the 1930s there was a time in which European “neoliberalism” apparently didn’t simply imply a return to “classical liberalism” (conservatism in American terminology) but was meant to contrast with the latter by accepting a role for the state to “intervene” in markets when necessary, which of course here in the USA is a hallmark of what we call “liberalism” rather than “neoliberalism.”  The 1930s in Europe sounds a very interesting time, doesn’t it?  I hope I never see anything like it during my lifetime.  Oh, it’s happening again?  Right now?  Damn.  Oh well, let’s just carry on, shall we?

Anyway, to continue our narrative relating to what Wikipedia had to say about the topic, the term neoliberalism apparently entered or maybe re-entered common use internationally in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet’s economic reforms in Chile and quickly took on negative connotations.  At that time it was apparently used as a pejorative term people critical of free market ideology applied to those less critical of that ideology.  In that context, it became associated with people like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James M. Buchanan, all considered notable “conservative” writers here in the USA.  But, then again, I guess the article didn’t say these conservatives ever referred to themselves as neoliberals, only that their critics referred to them as such.

So that cleared it up, right?  Clear as mud?  Who the heck cares, anyway?  Why am I even talking about it right now?  It’s only a word, right?  Well, I think maybe it matters a little bit here in the USA for a couple of reasons.  First, given our recent history, it raises the suspicion conservatives are starting to play funny words games in an effort to smear traditional liberalism, which in the USA has always been about using democratic government in a pragmatic and progressive and I suppose generally leftist or socialist way, by associating it with neoliberalism and hoping people won’t notice the difference.  Second, and along the same lines, it seems to make the entire economic debate of the past few centuries a debate between two schools of “liberals,” with conservatism apparently not involved at all, waiting in the wings to emerge as the new kid on the block recently arrived to save the day with bold new economic thinking rather than representing the hoary old traditional “free market” economic thinking dating back to at least the nineteenth century in opposition to which American-style liberalism was formed.

However, it may well be that in our new Age of Ignorance that ship has sailed.  The good ship Funny Terms.  My impression now is that many people who would formerly have proudly proclaimed themselves liberals now seem not entirely sure what the word really means and hence prefer alternative labels such as progressives, democratic leftists, democratic socialists, social democrats, etc.  You know, it’s fine with me if you want to call yourself that, it’s the same thing, we can still be friends, but I can’t help thinking what sort of confusion it’s going to generate down the line if ever those young people crack a history book and read about the long conflict between liberal and conservative economic ideas here in the USA.  

At the same time, “conservatism” as far as economic principles, seems to have become unmoored from what we’ve always considered conservative economic thought in this country.  Where previously economic conservatives would have agitated for the free movement of labor, they now argue for limiting immigration.  Where previously they would have agitated for the free movement of goods, they now argue for tariffs and trade wars.  Where previously they would have agitated for the free movement of capital and the principles of competitive advantage, they now tout nationalistic economic warfare.  Where previously they would have advocated reduced government spending, they now support running up the national debt like there’s no tomorrow.  Where previously they would have demanded government impartiality, they now support government doling out economic favors and treats to the president’s favorites and loyal minions.  Actually, now I think about it, I suppose that may be a rather more benign reason the economic debate in this country seems increasingly to be defined as an internal conflict between two sets of liberals.  Because conservatives no longer seem to have any coherent economic philosophy at all, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for young people to remember back to the time they did.

Oh well.  I guess words are always changing.  Let’s face it.  I’m old.  Well, older anyway.  My moniker refers to myself as a “liberal” humanist and that’s the way I’ll always think of myself.  That’s the world in which I was born.  But if you’re young and want to say it some other way that’s fine with me.  I can be a progressive humanist or a democratic leftist humanist or a democratic socialist humanist or a social democrat humanist if you like, just don’t call me a neoliberal or conservative humanist.  Good enough?