MORALITY AND THE AIMS OF POLITICS
I’m an unrepentant political moralist: I think politics is and ought to be shaped by what we, collectively, think is right, good, and just.
There are political moralists on the left and on the right. It has been interesting in recent years in the United States to see the protection of the vulnerable emerge as a stated goal of both leftists advocating for child care subsidies and paid family leave and conservatives opposed to abortion rights.
A certain liberal aversion to such moralism has been sustained for many decades by moderates in both major parties in the US. This consensus has steadily eroded, no doubt partly thanks to political polarization but also perhaps because the view that politics shouldn’t involve moral aims is hard to sustain. Allowing markets to rule our lives is itself a moral choice, after all. For instance, large increases in productivity in the past half-century have been accompanied by stagnant wages for workers. This widening economic inequality is the product of a set of policy decisions taken together with the predictably rapacious behavior of private companies; it is not a natural equilibrium.
Besides, the fact that the US government spends an enormous sum of money - half the entire federal budget - on social insurance and health care programs, which remain popular across the political spectrum, is hard to ignore.
Let us be clear: the majority of this spending is devoted to keeping children, the disabled, and the elderly from suffering. These programs are popular with good reason. People rightly think that bad luck should not push people into misery and that we owe something to the vulnerable.
Still, as the debate over abortion rights shows, all sides can be committed to the protection of the vulnerable but disagree about who the vulnerable are. Political moralism, therefore, does not dictate what we should do. Rather, it directs us to give due regard to political arguments founded in moral judgment and sentiment, which have too often been rejected as appropriate grounds.
I have made the case here for political moralism, all too briefly, because I want to indicate the gap between political moralism and a position with which it is sometimes conflated. I will call this second position political supremacism. On such a view, every aspect of our lives falls under the purview of politics (and, more specifically, political authority or state control) because the function of politics is to make us act as we should. (An example of such political supremacism is the view of the state defended by some integralists, which I have written about elsewhere.)
A good example of the difference between these positions is provided by the topic of truth-telling. The state does take an interest in certain social dimensions of truth. That is why we have laws against false advertising, libel, slander, and perjury. (The ongoing defamation lawsuits against the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars show the merits of such laws.)
We do not, however, have categorical laws against lying. Making up an emergency in order to skip a friend’s birthday party, inflating your accomplishments to win over a romantic interest, and plagiarizing a term paper are morally reprehensible, but they aren’t against the law. Even if it would be better if, in any given case, a lie were not told, it would not be a legitimate aim of political life to make people comply with this principle. (If you think lying can be morally permissible, then you can substitute the idea of a law against morally impermissible forms of lying.)
Thomas Aquinas, who had a capacious sense of the functions of positive law - the kind of law that human communities make for themselves - saw this clearly when he wrote “human law is meant to lead people to virtue gradually not suddenly, and for that reason, it does not immediately impose on the multitude of imperfect people what already belongs to the virtuous, namely, to abstain from every evil” (1).
Thomas held this to be so even though he understands human law to stem from the natural law, which in turn participates in the eternal law of God. Natural law is reflected in the precepts of conscience, and these precepts do abhor every kind of badness. But a good system of positive laws will not take the extirpation of vice to be its aim; that is instead a task that falls to each one of us, albeit with the help of our guides and educators. (Law itself can be counted among these educators, of course, but wise counselors who know us personally matter more.)
By contrast to political supremacism, political moralism sees injustice, especially social and economic injustice, as its main target. But even here trade-offs must always be made. It might be more just if everyone had the same opportunities for success in life, for instance. But pursuing this goal relentlessly could easily undermine important social institutions, such as the family.
Education offers a good example of this type of tradeoff. A vibrant system of public education is an important leveler of unjust forms of inequality. Likewise, the state should promote parents’ involvement in the education of their children and parents should have enough economic comfort to be involved in this way. But parents also vary in their capacities and their interests with regard to their children’s education in ways that the state cannot – and should not – regulate.
Unfortunately, our conversations about topics such as these have become straitened as the language of rights has come to dominate them. It can be helpful to point out that parents have certain rights with regard to their children as a way of expressing disapproval of state interference in every aspect of child-rearing. But it is a simple fact that the state also has an obligation to children, to foster their flourishing and to avert certain kinds of harm from them. Parental rights cannot, therefore, be absolute. Yet rights talk by itself tends to suggest some kind of inviolability, and it tends not to offer any guidance on how to balance the interests of different people in situations of conflict.
It would be better for us to think in terms of the goods that matter to us and that we need as human beings. Family life deserves protection from interference because a healthy family life relies on and promotes the good of intimacy. If children are subject to harm or serious deprivation, we need not think of this as a conflict between a child’s right to be cared for and the parental right to authority. Rather, the very intimacy on which familial love relies has itself broken down in such cases, which in turn entitles intervention that seeks either to restore it or to find other ways of securing the goods of family life for the children affected. Judgments about when such a restoration is possible are difficult to make. But framing the matter this way better orients us to deal with difficult cases than a clash-of-rights account.
We can find the same pattern when it comes to truth-telling, my earlier example. There are kinds of harm that arise simply from a lie, such as the reputational harm of libel or slander. But there is also a set of goods secured by enabling people to pursue the truth on their own, which in turn explains a host of phenomena (again, usually talked about in terms of rights) ranging from the freedom to pursue scientific inquiry to the toleration of religious differences, to which I return below.
Any political moralism that is worth defending must account for the complex relationships between goods at the level of society and goods that matter in individual lives. Again, to choose an example of some relevance to the present moment, it is important for our democratic institutions that we have a free press. But it is also important to have our politics aimed at the truth and to keep people from falling victim to conspiracy theories and mass hysteria.
It will inevitably be a challenge for a political system to balance these goals. But the prudential judgment of policymakers and ordinary citizens ought to be directed toward this very complexity. Political moralism does not entail that we should wish for more effective control over people’s lives and choices, whether such control is direct or indirect, e.g., in the form of market incentives or the ‘nudges’ advocated by a more paternalistic sort of liberal; but it does counsel that we should not retreat to an anodyne conception of living and letting live, where people are left to their own devices (and, all too often, to forms of deprivation invisible to others).
Christians and other people whose religious beliefs require or at least promote certain moral positions face a particular challenge in this respect. The intertwined phenomena of Christian nationalism and the strange alliance between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump has led many to think that we should get Christianity out of public and political life in the United States, given the harms to which it has given rise. One way to secure that conclusion is to adopt the framework of the liberal-libertarian tradition in politics that emphasizes individual rights.
Christians, however, cannot consistently commit themselves to such a position. Again, in the face of a great deal of bigotry and other forms of intolerance that are practiced in the name of Christ, I want to emphasize that we should see religious toleration as itself a good, one grounded in the pursuit of truth that belongs characteristically to human beings who are made in the image of Truth itself.
But I also want to warn against the temptation to give up on the essentially moral aim of politics because some people make poor use of it. If Christianity makes certain ethical demands, not just on its practitioners’ behavior but on their beliefs about what a decent society is and what we should collectively pursue, then there will necessarily be a politics shaped by the gospel.
The question for us, then, is what a gospel politics looks like. Here is what I believe:
It would have a serious concern for the harms of economic inequality not only on the poor who are allowed to suffer but also on the rich who are imperiled by their very wealth.
Families, both biological and chosen, would be seen not as an object of preference that individuals are free to make but as a necessity for life that is worthy of collective support.
Love of nation would be seen as dependent for its health on love of neighbor and always to be subordinated to the love of God.
Gospel politics is a form of political moralism, but, like any Christian ethics worth the name, it ought to be chastening to us, sinners very much in need of grace. It ought also give us courage to live out our values boldly, making use of what God has given us, “a spirit of power and love and discipline”.
Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae, q. 96, a. 2 ad 2
