What Social Conservatives Get Right about Liberalism
by Benjamin Studebaker
Many social liberals often speak of a desire to “get the state out of the bedroom”. We often hear them say “I’m not pro-abortion, I’m pro-choice”. They are often perplexed that social conservatives do not seem to want freedom of choice in these matters. Social liberals conceive of themselves as politically neutral, taking no side in the question of whether or not any given individual should get an abortion or have a gay marriage. This neutrality is entirely lost on social conservatives, for whom the liberal position is necessarily affirming abortion and homosexuality as good things. While I agree with social liberals on many substantive issues (I support gay marriage and abortion rights), it’s important to note that in one respect social conservatives are completely correct–the liberal position is not and cannot be a neutral position. Here’s why.
Let’s consider an issue like gay marriage. For social liberals, there appear to be three possible views about gay marriage, each of which is an entirely independent view:
- Gay marriage is morally prohibited (the conservative view).
- Gay marriage is morally required (a ridiculous view).
- Gay marriage is morally permissible (the liberal view).
For liberals, the view that gay marriage is permissible is the neutral move, the move that gets the state out of the bedroom. Many liberals believe that conservatives keep straw manning them, acting as if they were really proposing the ridiculous view that everyone should be gay, and a small minority of conservatives actually do this, claiming that there is some kind of nefarious “gay agenda” at work.
But when most social conservatives consider the issue of gay marriage, they don’t see two or three discrete independent views. Instead, they see a continuum, and it looks something like this:
There are 5 places one can be on the continuum, but these are not distinct independent views. Instead, they are relative positions on a sliding scale. Let’s say a little about each one.
Morally and Legally Prohibited
Something is morally prohibited if it is unambiguously bad. It is legally prohibited if a legal prohibition will be effective in deterring people from doing the unambiguously bad thing. In our society, murder is morally and legally prohibited. In most cases, murder is unambiguously bad and the law against murder helps to prevent people from murdering each other. The law attempts to make exceptions in the rare cases in which murder is not unambiguously wrong (e.g. war, justifiable homicide, etc.)
Morally Bad, Legally Permissible
Something is morally bad but legally permissible for one or both of two reasons:
- Logistical Nightmare–a law against the behavior would be difficult or impossible to enforce (e.g. blowing cigarette smoke at one’s children)
- Situational Complexity–while the behavior is bad in this case, there are too many similar situations in which the behavior is good to ban it outright (e.g. pegging someone with a ball–throw it too hard and it’s potentially harmful, but throw it at the right speed and it’s benign).
Morally and Legally Permissible
Something is morally bad but legally permissible for one of two reasons:
- Situational Complexity–whether or not the behavior is good or bad depends on too many external factors to make any kind of hard, fast law (e.g. owning a wood chipper–whether or not it is good for me to have a wood chipper depends entirely on how I am going to use it, and this is hard to predict in advance).
- Matter of Taste–the issue at hand is fundamentally not a moral issue, but is merely subject to personal taste (e.g. whether I should paint my room red or blue).
Morally Good, Legally Permissible
Something is morally good but legally permissible when making it required would be too demanding. It’s good to give money to charity or to help little old ladies cross the street, but if everyone had to give all of their money to charity and help every little old lady cross the street for fear of punishment by the state, that would be an unreasonable demand. Moral philosophers actually have a term for good things that are permissible but not required–they call them “supererogatory“.
Morally and Legally Required
Something is morally and legally required when it is unambiguously good and failing to do it is unambiguously bad. When something is morally and legally required, we are said to have a duty to do it. Our duties might include ensuring our children do not starve, paying our taxes, etc.
In the case of gay marriage, it’s certainly possible for the state to prohibit it if it wants to do so–marriage, after all, is a legal contract that only has political meaning insofar as the state chooses to accept it. Banning gay marriage is not a logistical nightmare–nearly all states have explicitly or implicitly banned it for centuries. So if gay marriage were bad in all or nearly all situations, it would follow that it would be considered morally and legally prohibited. Consequently, to permit gay marriage necessarily implies that one does not think gay marriage is bad in all or nearly all situations.
On this view, the state cannot take a neutral position or avoid having a substantive view. Even if the state chooses to take no action to encourage or discourage gay marriage, the implication is that the state thinks that gay marriage is either a matter of taste or situationally complex. If you’re a religious conservative, this means that the state takes a view of gay marriage that directly contradicts your religious belief that gay marriage is unambiguously bad. For religious conservatives, this amounts to a legal rejection of the moral views of their religion–they see it as persecution, as a declaration by their state that their faith is wrong.
Social conservatives have this much right–the liberal claim to neutrality is a front for a policy that in reality promotes a substantive view that is, in effect, an official repudiation of the religious view that gay marriage and abortion are unambiguously bad. The problem is that once we recognize that the liberal position is not neutral but is instead a substantive challenge to the conservative moral worldview, the state is left with nowhere to go if it wants to stake out a position that can be seen by both liberals and conservatives as mutually inclusive. In sum, the state is not in the bedroom because it wants to be there, it’s in the bedroom because the door is locked and it cannot get out. If the government could find a policy that would not contradict the views of either group–that would truly be neutral–it would be immensely politically advantageous for any given political party or politician to embrace that view. No one does so because such a view cannot exist. The state has to choose–does it think that gay marriage, abortion, and other such things are unambiguously bad, unambiguously good, or permissible because of logistical nightmares, situational complexity, matters of taste, or demandingness issues?
I support gay marriage not because I think that this answer allows the state to avoid answering the question of whether or not gay marriage is good, but because I think sexuality is a matter of taste (except in scenarios where there is some kind of severe under-population problem). I support abortion rights because I think it is unambiguously bad to bring unwanted children into the world, and unless the state becomes capable of rearing orphans adequately, parents are the most capable of determining whether or not a child will be wanted. These are substantive views that directly challenge those of social conservatives. They are not neutral answers.
A conventional liberal might say “well, I believe in abortion rights because I believe it’s a woman’s right to choose,” or “I believe in abortion rights because we have bodily sovereignty,” but these are non-answers. It’s a tautology to say that you believe in abortion rights because you believe that women have them, and to appeal to bodily sovereignty just begs the question–why do you believe that people have or should have bodily sovereignty? “Because it’s good,” is no answer–what is good about it? Inevitably, one is forced to appeal to some outcome–abortion rights and gay marriage rights must confer discrete benefits on those who would avail themselves of these rights. The belief that these benefits do or can outweigh the various objections and concerns raised by social conservatives is a substantive belief that repudiates the conservative view. There is nothing neutral about it. The effort to get the state to have the liberal position on gay marriage and abortion is every bit as much an effort to capture the state for moral purposes as is the effort to get the state to have the conservative position. To argue otherwise is gross hypocrisy.
So let’s drop the act. Everyone is trying to impose a moral view on society of some kind or other, and whatever the state does it inevitably embraces some ideological and/or religious views at the expense of others. There is no non-coercive option–the only question is who will do the coercing, who will be coerced, and to what end. Power and morality are games that no person can refuse to play.
So, now you *don’t* believe in neutral positions???
Conscious inaction necessarily implies that inaction is the normatively appropriate response. That’s substantive and therefore not neutral.
Then how do you feel about this argument:
“One of the most important functions of the state government is that it aspires to be ideologically neutral. In theory (though not in practice), Marxists could win elections in Indiana and make Marxist laws just as easily as could conservative Christians, liberal humanists, fascists, or any other group. What separates the United States from countries like the Soviet Union is that the USSR was formally institutionally committed to communism. In order to participate in Soviet politics, one had to be a communist, and the civil service and the various state institutions were expected to endorse and defend the communist ideology. The civil service and the state institutions in liberal democracies are committed to political neutrality except in cases in which their own mandates are at stake.”
Whoa, this is an entirely different claim.
I absolutely believe that the state structure should not be intrinsically committed by design to a particular ideology. We should not have a 1-party state, or a system in which one must pass an ideological test for office.
But that doesn’t mean that the state can ever be politically neutral with respect to policy. Our structure allows the state to be captured by liberals, conservatives, or something else altogether, depending on which the relevant voting population takes to be more persuasive. When their policies are seen to fail, we can change our minds and pick different people who will push the state in different ideological directions.
In sum, the state structure itself should be neutral with respect to ideology/policy, but the policy commitments themselves cannot be neutral and necessarily take on the ideological coloring of whoever is in government.
Perhaps you could answer a question that puzzles me. The US does not have a state religion as such and theoretically there is a separation between church and state in the first amendment. Yet “In God we Trust” has been on US coins since the civil war and paper currency since 1957, when it became the official motto of the US. Do you feel social conservatives who oppose gay marriage and abortion rights on religious grounds do so because they feel the government is a Christian institution and therefore cannot, on this basis, liberalize existing laws? As an outsider looking in, this is certainly how it appears to me. In fact, a lot of the commentary I have seen recently on social media from my American relatives suggests that one cannot be American unless one is also a Christian and certainly not a muslim. My husband tells me not to tell any of my American in-laws that we are athiests. I do anyway.
I’ll give it my best shot–there is a substantive debate in the United States over what the freedom of religion guaranteed in the 1st amendment entails/should entail. There are two relevant clauses–the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. The free exercise clause is relatively straight forward, it prevents the state from making any particular religion illegal. So you can definitely be an American and be a Muslim, at least legally. In practice, around 78% of Americans self-identify as Christian, but 16% are unaffiliated, 1.7% are Jewish, 0.7% are Buddhist, 0.6% are Muslim, and 0.4% are Hindu. All told, there are about 69 million non-Christians in the US. For comparison, the UK has a total population of 64 million.
The establishment clause is more complicated, here’s what it says:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”
Conservatives often read this to mean that the state will not interfere with the workings of the churches. It follows from that reading that churches would be tax exempt, for instance.
Liberals read this to mean that the state will observe separation of church and state–that it will not establish a state religion or show formal preference for the religious beliefs of some citizens over others, that it will avoid being openly religiously partisan insofar as it is able.
In practice, the courts usually read this the liberal way, though there is a large number of conservative Americans who resent this and continue to hold that the United States is “a Christian nation”..
As far “In God We Trust” goes, to this point the courts have argued one of two things:
1. The term “God” is non-denominational and does not constitute establishment in and of itself.
2. It’s ceremonial deism–it has no substantive religious meaning because it’s frequently repeated and is therefore not establishment.
I don’t find either of these arguments satisfactory myself–I think the slogan violates the establishment clause and unnecessarily alienates atheist citizens. The Supreme Court last considered usages of this kind in 2004, when it chose not to eliminate the phrase “under God” from the pledge of allegiance. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (who retired 2 years later in 2006) argued the following:
“I believe that government can, in a discrete category of cases, acknowledge or refer to the divine without offending the Constitution. This category of “ceremonial deism” most clearly encompasses such things as the national motto (“In God We Trust”), religious references in traditional patriotic songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner”, and the words with which the Marshal of this Court opens each of its sessions (“God save the United States and this honorable Court”). These references are not minor trespasses upon the Establishment Clause to which I turn a blind eye. Instead, their history, character, and context prevent them from being constitutional violations at all.”
I personally am not persuaded, but I leave it here for you to judge. The Supreme Court’s views do change over time, but for now this is the way they’re looking at it.
Thank you for the explanation and I guessed it would be a matter of interpretation. I agree with your conclusions. The religious freedoms implied and stated in the constitution would have been important in a time where conflict between different Christian groups was apparent. I suppose they never really considered atheism or “free thinking” as an option when the Constitution was created. My knowledge of American history is not as good as it should be as I never studied it at university.
I really liked the bit near the end about the tautological nature of arguments for certain rights. It doesn’t take Jeremy Bentham to see that there’s something awry with the liberal notion of individual human (or natural) rights – conventional liberals start from the assumption that individual human rights exist and that to accept their legitimacy is to exercise moral neutrality towards all individuals in society (as your article neatly shows).
But even if there is no conservative opposition to challenge such a view, supposed neutrality can only be upheld by the belief that these rights are natural. Natural rights would allow neutrality by transferring the moral decision from the individual to whatever divine entity espoused the natural right. Of course, rights are not ‘natural’; they are human constructs intended to uphold a particular moral stance. The First Amendment, for example, reflects a moral preference for religious freedom over religious authoritarianism. So, to bring it back to current issues, even in a society in which 100% of people agree with gay marriage (one can dream!), it would still not be neutral to support the legal right of gay people to marry.
Thanks Calum! Yeah, if I claim that the rights I affirm are human constructs, you can then ask me why I believe human beings should construct them in that way, and I have to answer you with a substantive appeal to outcomes. That entails taking a stand and renders neutrality impossible. But if I claim that the rights I affirm are natural, and you ask me why I affirm these rights as natural but not some other set of rights, all I can really do is make an appeal to a divine entity.
This is particularly problematic for liberals who affirm natural rights, because liberals presumably want to conceive of their rights as religiously neutral. But if you need to have particular religious beliefs to believe in the natural rights that are being affirmed, neutrality is impossible. Bentham was definitely right to see the liberal tradition as incompatible with natural rights theory and as a comprehensive moral doctrine in its own right.
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Good post, but there are a lot of confusion in terms here:
You can’t be supporting “gay” marriage, because “gayness” of persons is intangible to legal bodies giving marriage license.
It’s GENDER-NEUTRAL marriage you are supporting.
Conflating the issue with sexual liberty is just an attempt to link the issue to the legal paternalism of a group that’s supposed to be defined by sexual desires. Sex is less and less associated with marriage today, and declaring it a matter of taste implies very rose-tinted ideas about human sexuality.
And supporting the entitlement of parents to decide the “unwantedness” of their children unexamined is just an appeal to solipsism.
Libertarian much?
I use the term “gay marriage” because this is the term with which most are familiar.
I consider myself to be much more statist than the average person, so I am surprised you would call me a libertarian. I certainly believe that the state is entitled to regulate sex and the family as much as it believes to be morally good and just, I just happen to think that many of the regulations it presently enforces are neither of these things.
To be more precise, I think that sexual orientation is a matter of taste, but only insofar as no one is being harmed. This means the sex must be consensual and must not create problems for the state (either through insufficient creation of offspring or creation of unwanted offspring). I approve of the state’s effort to prevent people from engaging in non-consensual sex (i.e. rape). However, I do not see a compelling reason for the state to oppose homosexual sex–I do not see anyone being harmed by this activity unless we presuppose that there is an underpopulation problem.
In our society, there are four kinds of children:
1. Those children born to parents who want them.
2. Those children born to parents who do not want them.
3. Those children given up by parents who do not want them and adopted by parents who do want them.
4. Those children give up by parents who do not want them who are permanent wards of the state.
On average, children from groups #1 and #3 do much, much better in life than do children from groups #2 and #4. If we could guarantee that all children who were not wanted by their parents would end up in group #3, there might be a case for the state to insist that healthy mothers give birth and give up their children for adoption (it would probably have to financially compensate them). Similarly, if the state became much better than it currently is at caring for wards of the state such that there was no substantive difference between #4 and #1 or #3, it could restrict abortion on that basis (again, with compensation). However, today most children who are unwanted are either raised by the parents who did not want them (and who then go on to do a subpar job) or they are raised by the state inadequately. It is wrong to bring children into the world when we are unable or unwilling to provide them with a healthy environment in which to grow, so abortion of such children is good and just. Because a child’s parents cannot guarantee that their child would be adopted by good parents (#3), the child’s parents must assume that if they do not want their child they will either raise the child inadequately themselves (#2) or allow the child to become a ward of the state (#4). This makes the parents the most effective determiners of whether or not the child needs to be aborted–they are in the best position to say whether the child will fall into category #1 or not.
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