Real liberalism hasn’t been tried
A conversation with Benjamin Boyce.
I had the great pleasure of appearing on Benjamin Boyce’s podcast Calmversations. We discussed the nature of liberalism, censorship and the arts, and William Shakespeare!
Since our chat, I have reflected on Benjamin’s conviction that liberalism cannot provide a moral framework, but I’m not so sure this is true. He is right that it does not provide a set of rules in the manner of religious texts or ideological diktats, but it instead offers us the freedom to think, speak and act however we wish so long as we do not violate the rights of others. Is this not sufficient as a moral benchmark? Can anyone think of an immoral act that would be approved within this kind of liberal system?
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Indeed. Liberalism gives people the protections they need to believe, speak and live according to their own moral framework and this is why we have liberal leftists, liberal conservatives, libertarians, liberal feminists, liberal anti-racists, liberal gay rights activists, liberal Christian, liberal Jews, liberal Muslims etc. And they can all live together while authoritarians of those groups cannot.
Anybody wanting liberalism to give them a shared moral framework will be disappointed. However, given that societies of humans don't do shared moral frameworks and just factionalise and fight like hell when coerced into them, this is not a deficit from my vantage point. Woke just tried to give us a shared moral framework and it went very badly. People always think their own will do better but it never does.
I think it is possible to do immoral or, at least, amoral things without breaking the one rule of liberalism by living in hedonistic, narcissistic or nihilistic ways and not caring about anybody else but not actually hurting them either. I would not approve of this and would say so, but not try to ban it. I could ignore it & not be impacted by it and the individual living like this would reap their own consequences by having an empty or superficial life and no real connections. So, no, I suppose. I cannot think of anything that could be legitimately objected to as immoral aside from some tutting that liberalism denies.
I'm thinking out loud here as one issue I care deeply about is third-party conception ("donor" egg/sperm, gestational surrogacy) which seem to discount the rights of the child, and even when consenting adults agree, the corruption of money taints informed consent. Fact is, most women won't donate their eggs or loan out their womb if not for financial compensation. Many ways the child is wronged by these contractual agreements between semi-consenting adults.