At the start of my August 6 column entitled “Why Liberalism Is Not Socialism,” I noted that the distinction between market liberalism and market conservatism, which are contrasting views on the role of government in a free-market economy, presents a different issue from the distinction between moral liberalism and moral conservatism.
I deferred this latter question to a later time, but in view of what some are calling post-liberalism, I want to address it now.
The core of moral liberalism appears in Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all people have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in his subsequent claim that governments are grounded in the consent of the governed. Moral liberalism’s focus is on the individual as a rights-bearing creature, and its highest value is freedom.
On this view, the role of government is to create and maintain conditions that will allow individuals to pursue their own interests and values as they see fit insofar as that is consistent with everyone else having the same right. In the classic phrase, my right to extend my fist ends where your chin begins.
Moral conservatism’s focus is on society rather than the individual, with an emphasis on obligations rather than rights. Its highest value is virtue rather than liberty: the role of government is to create and maintain conditions that will allow individuals to be good.
The difficulty, of course, is that there have always been significant differences among individuals regarding what “good” or “virtue” involves, often leading to conflict and violence. In many ways, moral liberalism arose as a solution to such conflict, in that it advocates accepting our irreducible value pluralism and agreeing to disagree.
To borrow the terms distinguishing market liberalism from market conservatism, the moral liberal says that government should practice laissez-faire (hands off) regarding individuals’ moral choices, whereas the moral conservative argues that government must practice interventionism to ensure that individuals make the right choice.
We can see this distinction quite clearly if we look at the logic of the debate over abortion rights. The pro-choice position holds that because we lack an objectively determinable religious or non-religious way of deciding the moral status of the fetus, what matters is not what choice is made but rather who makes the choice. Against abortion? Don’t have one.
The pro-life position, by contrast, argues that because there is indeed an objectively determinable way of deciding the moral status of the fetus, what matters ultimately is that the right choice be made rather than who makes the choice. As in arithmetic, there is a right answer, and no one has the right to be wrong.
Thus, pro-choice people support not abortion, but abortion rights. Pro-life people oppose abortion rights because they oppose abortion per se.
The question, then, is whether a society is simply an agreement to play by certain rules as we pursue our own individual projects, with government as an umpire, or does society constitute a common project? Is a society merely a collection of “I’s” with no essential connection among them, or is it instead a “we”?
Moral liberalism takes the former position, while moral conservatism takes the latter.
At its most fundamental level, this question is the extent to which a society is a moral order—i.e., an organized endorsement and enforcement of a set of moral norms binding on everyone.
Yet moral conservatism argues that moral liberalism itself constitutes a moral order and thus is not the “neutral” framework it purports to be. We can agree with the claim that any society amounts to a moral order, but some such orders allow for more freedom and some allow for less.
The “thin” version of a moral order is that the moral norms of such a society are grounded in the idea that everyone is free to make her own choices insofar as those choices don’t interfere with others.
That itself is a moral vision, but a “thin” one. Its highest value is freedom, and it recognizes the irreducible fact of moral pluralism. That recognition is fundamental to the liberal tradition.
The “thick” version of a moral order is that the moral norms are those of a common project in which we’re all engaged and to which we subordinate our own individual choices. Recall the sports phrase: “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” At a certain level it rejects the notion of moral pluralism, and thereby the liberal tradition.
In that sense, Christian nationalism is a new, post-liberal form of moral conservatism. It holds that the United States is and ought to be an explicitly Christian nation. It rejects the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state, arguing that (1) society can be defined only as a common project rather than as a collection of rights-bearing individuals, and (2) the common project, along with American citizenship itself, must be understood in explicitly Christian terms.
Not even all Christians accept such views, not to mention non-Christian religions and the “nones.” Do we really want to return to the religious wars of the 16th-18th centuries, but this time inflamed and accelerated by modern technology?
And do contemporary moral conservatives truly want to throw out what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration?
I pray not.