The tyranny of the harm principle

So I and possibly half a dozen other people voted against the ban on airbrushing, which was not surprising given the one-sided nature of the debate, and the near-universal, it seems, misunderstanding of JS Mill's harm principle. With hindsight I should have tried to speak myself.

The harm principle is a prohibition on banning things that don't cause any harm to others. It is not a sufficient justification for banning anything. Some bans are worse than the harms they would prevent. And many bans are wrong because they are ineffective at preventing the harms they are intended to prevent.

The problem is that it can be difficult to be seen to agree completely that a cultural meme like body fascism is a big problem causing considerable harm to many people, while at the same time rejecting a particular social engineering solution to it. Speaker after speaker spoke of the harm done by unrealistic expectations of plastic beauty, as if this were the point of dispute.

Sure, there are those - the libertarians - who would interpret harm in the narrowest possible way - the initiation of force - in order to delegitimise almost every law. At the other extreme communists might argue that competition causes harm - which it does to those who lose - and reject economic liberalism. Both may claim, wrongly, to be good Millians.

The error both are making is in looking for a rules-based formula for when something ought to be banned or not, and then arguing over the interpretation of the rules. And if you misunderstand the harm principle as saying what must be banned, rather than what must not be banned, it is understandable that you might want to adopt a narrow concept of harm, to minimise the assault on liberty.

I suggest that the harm principle should be seen in the context of Mill's utilitarianism. Specifically, that goods or ills have to be weighed up against each other. Some precious liberty against some moderate harm? It's a judgement call, and the answer is often a boring compromise: 70mph; no parking between 9am and 6pm; hotels must have fire alarms...

And the most useful liberties - such as the freedom to compete in business - are thus justified in spite of the legions of bankrupted suicidal failures.

So the communist has a broad concept of harm and prohibits a great deal. The libertarian has a narrow concept of harm and prohibits little. I agree with the broad concept of harm, but I would still prohibit only a little, understanding that the harm principle does not demand a prohibition.

So back to the airbrush ban. I suggest that the correct and healthy attitude to have towards advertising, celebrity culture and so on is a skeptical one. What you are seeing is not real. The danger is that an airbrush ban might make you think it is real, compounding the negative impact of the image. I don't see a prohibition intended to increase the confidence you might have in the fidelity of body fascistic images in the media as worth any loss of liberty.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to the men's policy paper. I continually find my self-esteem undermined by the portrayal in the media of men who are richer and more powerful than I am. I worry about all the boys facing these impossible comparisons. Something must be done.

Emote with me!!!

I've been meaning to say this for a while - since attending the Social Liberal Forum meeting at the last Lib Dem conference. But it ties in nicely with Charlotte's revelation about the nature of the "progressive" and conservative debate, and how each side thinks they are doing what is right.

Speaker after speaker at the social liberal forum said how deeply they cared about the plight of underprivileged people, so much that the mood of the event could be described as a collective subvocal chant of emote with us! Having been a churchgoer (charismatic) in the past, and therefore having done that sort of thing in another context, I am deeply suspicious of it. It doesn't work for me. Yet these are important emotions to have. Empathy for the poor is better than contempt. It is still only a pale caricature of what the left - the Labour movement - was meant to be about, which was working people asserting themselves, not, as it is now, working people being patronised by the middle classes. I would attribute much of the BNP success to the way that where Labour seem to say "We care about you", the BNP say "We care about us."

But back to the Forum. A speaker goes "We care. We care. We care. 50p tax rate!" to a cheer. I can see how that policy absolutely feels right to people, but I am still left wanting the analysis that it would do any good. "It's a symbol" we are told, as if that were a good thing.

But of course it is not just the left that emotes like this. Only when Conservatives do it, it is something way nastier. Europe: boo. Foreigners: boo. Single parents: boo. I remember the Conservative election broadcasts in the 80s pushing the fear button over nuclear disarmament. Fear leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side. Conservative emoting is all dark side of the force stuff.

Charlotte points out that Conservatives believe they are doing the right thing, and I would agree for the most part. But lets not slip into relativism here - just because people disagree over what the right thing is, it doesn't mean there is nothing to be said about it. Charlotte is right that politics would be better if it were more rational, but rationality alone doesn't give us values. Libertarians of the Ayn Rand school like to portray themselves as driven purely by reason, but this is based on sophistry, and Rand had no answer to David Hume's is-ought gap.

I've written before about the 2 or 5 foundations of morality in evolutionary psychology. These 5 instinctive traits do exist in us, and we can apply reason to ask the question: what are the consequences if we reinforce this instinct or suppress that one in the language that we use - the metaphors we choose - the buttons that we push - to explore and advance our political ideas.

So liberalism as I see it involves a recognition that promoting the wrong foundations - the deference to authority for example, or the ingroup (class/race/etc) - has bad consequences, and promoting the right foundations - reciprocity, no harm, etc, has good consequences. This relies on an assessment of the consequences of freedom or tyranny, class war or class peace, etc. Is this or that a consequence that I want? How do I feel about it? It is an emotional question.

How not to destroy socialism

Charlotte Gore has kindly offered to destroy socialism for us, explaining that it is wrong for the state to force us to do things that it think are good for us. Who could disagree with that? The question becomes a little muddier when it is not force but taxation, and not what is good for us, but what is good for other people.

When libertarians equate taxation with force, it seems to be because they have a good presumption against the initiation of force, and want to use it again. And they are not their brothers' keepers.

The comments have thrown up something that I tend to take for granted when evaluating or justifying policies.

I asked Charlotte this: Do you object to socialism because it is justified in terms of the greater good? Or do you object to the idea of the greater good, because it is used to justify socialism?

and she replied

I think the point is that you can use 'The Greater Good' as a moral justification to commit almost any act. Socialism - both terrible ends and terrible means - is justified in the same way. 

So yes, I am against both the act and the moral justification that 'permits' the act. I am not against things just because they're justified by 'the Greater Good' - I just see it as a warning flag.

Now that you're asking, I think debating with people about whether or not Socialism would serve the Greater Good would, in effect, be to accept the premise of their argument - that the Greater Good can be a legitimate moral justification.

There's something in this I agree with. It is probably true that appeals to the greater good usually merit a reaction of horror.

And yet, I think a liberal society is a good one, in a way that a socialist or conservative society is not. Am I committing the same crime? So I responded along these lines:

I would agree that the "greater good" is a dangerously nebulous concept. So let's forget about the "greater". You are arguing, aren't you, that a smaller state is better than a bigger state? Some people will argue the opposite.

I say "X is good" and you disagree, do you say 

"No, X is bad"

or

"No, 'X is good' is not a legitimate moral justification."

Adding that I find it hard enough to work out sometimes what is good and what is bad, never mind what makes a "legitimate" moral justification.

The trouble for arch libertarians, as I see it is that they are saying that it is wrong to use certain kinds of argument as moral justifications for political action. This is itself a moral claim very much of the kind that it itself condemns.

It seems to me that libertarianism, like Marxism, is full of the kind of implicit moral claims that are also condemned. Respect property. Don't initiate force. Anything the government does is evil. If these are not moral claims, then what are they?

So what alternative do I offer?

It seems to me there are two phases to the evaluation of a policy. 1, a prediction of the policy's effects, and 2, evaluation of those effects according to our values, that is whether it has good consequences.

This does seem inescapably to rely on a notion of the good. Frankly, no other standard makes any sense to me, than that a policy should have good consequences. What else might I possibly want to care about? Good intentions? Purleeeze. The road to hell, etc. 

So it is a struggle to understand Charlotte's perspective that certain kinds of argument are dangerous and therfore cannot be used. Of course it is true they are dangerous. Prediction is never perfect (and so policy should be risk-averse) and some people have pretty warped values, and so some very bad policies could seem good after a process of prediction and evaluation.

But what is the alternative? To say that we don't care about the consequences? Yet even libertarians don't fail to claim that the libertarian society will be freer, happier, richer, and better in all sorts of ways. Do they say this just because they think it matters to us, when it really doesn't matter to them?

No. There are bad policies because there are bad predictions and bad evaluations, not because we shouldn't be trying to do either. And it is interesting how a confusion of prediction and evaluation is behind so many bad policies. Socialists are bad at prediction because of Marx. They liked his evaluation - although he couched it, like libertarians do, in apparently amoral rational terms - and so didn't subject his philosophy to the rigour that has blown it away. Greens are trying to reinvent economics - because they don't like the predictions it gives about their well-intentioned policies - by trying to add "moral" values to it, rendering it a hopeless tool of prediction.

We hone our tools for prediction with scientific skepticism, free debate and a respect for evidence over tradition. This is liberal of course, but what really defines the liberal are the values. That you know what is best for you, better than I do, and therefore I should respect your freedom. That I have no way of knowing whether my hopes and dreams are better or more important than yours are, and in this sense we are equal. That despite and because of our differences we have to get along. Liberty, equality and community. Not really fundamental values, but abstractions reflecting as best as possible the diverse inarticulable fundamental values in each of our heads.

Whew.

Ok, a final thought and a slight digression if you have not had enough already. I very much liked oranjepan's comment:

If we stop thinking of liberalism as an ideology and start thinking of it as a tendency which incorporates differing ideologies in different contexts then all the problems and inconsistencies dissolve away into compatibility.

All ideologies are great if you are rich and can control the circumstances in which you apply them, but if you're not rich it's a different matter. If you're not rich ideology becomes a way to explain the world which provides excuses for your lack of material success and prevents you from taking the opportunities to rise out of your situation.

Its much better not to dispute the truth or applicability of any ideology but to dispute the universality of its truths and define the limits of its application.

It provoked the retort

I think what you've said there sums up modern politics - especially our party. A pragmatic, managerial approach to politics

The response is that skepticism with regard to ideologies is pragmatic and therefore unprincipled. (Unprincipled? Is that like lacking an appreciation for the greater good? What a thing to suggest!)

Pragmatism is considering what works - it is calculating the actual effects of a policy. So it is consistent with - indeed essential to - a sound values-based judgement of those effects and therefore of the policy.

But I read in oranjepan's comment skepticism more than pragmatism. Don't get carried away with your ideologies. That is the sort of thing that leads to atrocities.

The moral difference between liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.

There's a good talk by Jonathan Haidt examining the differences in moral thinking between liberals and conservatives. This is American usage of course, but particularly focussing on social rather than economic issues, so it is not too inaccurate.

Haidt identifies what he calls the 5 foundations of morality by which he means 5 traits in evolutionary psychology (touched on here), connected with questions of moral behaviour. These are:

1. Harm/Care. We are disposed to bond with others and care for them, and have strong feelings about those who cause harm.

2. Fairness/reciprocity. This is associated with the golden rule ("Do unto others as you would be done by.") Also, I dare say, there is a fairness/reciprocity basis to both support for a social safety net, and for free trade. Both are reciprocal, but are often associated with opposing ideologies.

3. Ingroup/loyalty. We have a powerful instinct for forming tribes, mostly to oppose other tribes. More on this shortly.

4. Authority/respect. The anarchists' lament. Stop taking orders, they might say. Just listen to me and stop taking orders!

5. Purity/sanctity. Not just sex, but also attitudes to food for example.

So while we have the brain wiring to be guided by all of these consideration, there are differences of opinion as to which are moral. According to the video, conservatives tend to recognise all 5 as moral, and liberals just the first 2. In contrast to ingroup/loyalty we celebrate diversity; in contrast to deference to authority, we question it; in contrast to purity, we celebrate the freedom to be impure. 

Haidt makes some sweet bipartisan point about the conservatives having a point, using all the tools in the toolbox to maintain order (yuk! stability, perhaps, please?) and that libs and cons therefore exist in some wonderful symbiotic dynamic harmony like yin and yang. But I will move swiftly on from there by looking more closely at the 5 foundations and British politics.

Harm/Care

Disagreements here a generally over what constitutes harm, and the extent of our duty to care for our neighbour. Mill, in On Liberty, argues, for example, that there are duties of care - to throw a line to somebody drowning for example. I see little disagreement on this except from libertarians. Am I right?

But while I disagree with libertarians who say that the state should not seek to do good, I agree that it should not try to (and can't) make us good. Socialists on the other hand don't seem to see a problem with that. (Do other liberals agree with me?) Conservatives can be found in both camps, I guess.

Greens generally apply harm/care thinking to the natural world, which, it can be argued, means a failure to apply it properly to human beings.

Fairness/reciprocity

Socialists believe that the poor deserve more, conservatives that the rich deserve more. Greens believe that everybody deserves less. I, frankly, don't know who deserves what, but I bet it isn't a function of class identity. Fairness in the sense of equal rights is still opposed by many Conservatives, but otherwise is largely agreed.

Both free trade/freedom of contract, and the social safety net and public services can be seen in terms of reciprocity. Socialists and greens are against half, and conservatives and libertarians against the other half; liberals support both halves.

Ingroup/loyalty

I agree that liberals are not greatly moved by this (except obviously as political partisans, like everybody else). Socialists and conservatives represent ingroups based on social class.

Socialists have struggled politically from the numerical decline of the unionised working class. Labour, therefore has had to expand its ingroup suffering much pain in the process. 

This has left the working class feeling justifiably aggrieved that nobody represents them, creating opportunities for the BNP. The BNP being of course the epitome of the evil of ingroup/outgroup thinking.

Having your ingroup taken away, or being betrayed by it, can be an utterly crushing experience. Politics would perhaps be much healthier if there were an old-fashioned working-class socialist party. As long as it never won any power. We may have the best policies for millions of poor people, but we don't represent their interests against those of the middle classes.

Authority/respect

Clearly this issue separates liberals and libertarians from conservatives and fascists. Socialists appear in both camps and in the middle ground. 

I think Greens have a complex relationship with this one. I know many would post them firmly in the authoritarian camp, but they also have a strong anarchist influence. In any case this is not so much about whether strong authority is necessary, or even helpful, in saving the planet - a question we will all have to face; but whether an attitude of deference to authority is a good thing, on which point I think they are largely with liberals.

Purity/sanctity

This is not so clear as in the US with its big religious right, although the same trend is apparent.

However I think the biggest on purity/sanctity are the Greens. Organics, GM, alt meds, being close to nature. Support for such "natural" things, often out of proportion to the benefits (if any), seems to be a purity thing. 

In Haidt's surveys everybody recognised Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity as moral instincts, but conservatives did tend to rate them lower than liberals. Understandable: these different factors must be weighed against each other. And yet libertarians also seek to diminish the scope of considerations of harm/care and fairness, reducing them to "no initiation of force" and free trade. I think this explains why they are seen as right wing, with some justice, even though they don't agree with conservatives on foundations 3 to 5.

So this just illustrates yet again the error of lumping any of these ideologies with any other. A five dimensional compass would not sort these babies out. It is no good lumping greens with fascists or communists, or lumping libertarians with conservatives, as if this could end the debate. Both must be opposed for what they actually say, unless, of course, on occasion, they are right.

Anti-anti-anti-anti-american

There is a little fuss brewing over at Lefty Conspiracy about the America in the World blog. Frankly the sound of repeated comfort-zone positions is pretty deafening, with neither side addressing the arguments of the other much.

So the conspiring lefties complain with some justification about being lumped in with the Taleban, when all they are doing is criticising a government. America in the World complains also with some justification that the USA is misunderstood, that it is good for the world, in a world where so many forces and powers are pretty heinous and do not attract the same condemnation.

Of course everybody knows that the USA, even when under the Democrats is a terribly conservative country, and this does seem to be a large part of what is behind why AitW's Conservative founder thinks it is so great, and the lefties think it is so awful. This seems to me to be a very narrow perspective. Compared to most of the rest of the world, there is little difference between the values of the USA, EU, and the rest of the democratic world. When, for example, one country is left holding out against action on global warming, that country will be Russia.

But actually what is so great about the USA is not its conservatism but its liberalism, if only they knew what the word meant. The USA is still a beacon of freedom and democracy. It's prosperity benefits the rest of the world through trade. Its contributions to science are enormous. And even its military and intelligence services have played some positive roles alongside their various crimes.

It is too easy to forget all this in the face of a few disagreements over policy. Among political people, political disagreements tend to loom large. So it is a shame that this vital cause of opposing anti-Americanism has been conducted in such a partisan way. It is foolish to big up the USA, as AitW does, with snide remarks about the EU. The USA and EU are on the same side, and will have to stand together in the future.

It is utterly bonkers, as AitW does, to offend those who most need to be reached by this message - those with the greatest political disagreements with American people and governments - by lumping them with racists.

Yet the anti-anti-anti-Americans on Liberal Conspiracy should not get a free ride. It is too easy to focus on the comfortable and justifiable: our right to disagree with a government. Beneath the cheap attack on the left and liberals, that few Conservatives could resist, AitW is largely correct about the USA and its other detractors. And we should say so.

Towards Liberal Environmentalism

Some weeks ago I wrote this post in response to an article by John Dixon asking whether environmental challenges demand a massive illiberal state intervention in people's lives.

I argued that this was not the case because the solutions to the problems we face exist, but we are failing to face up to a moderate increase in costs. I am a little unsatisfied with that answer, because there are two more critical arguments that can be made against John's original "the environment demands socialism" case:

1. Safeguarding the environment is not in fact a single objective that can be pursued 'at all costs' with a war communism kind of mentality. For one, it is many objectives; global warming is not the only problem we face, and the factors contributing to it are diverse. For two, the challenge might be better stated as sustaining ourselves without damaging the environment. Sustaining ourselves is as diverse a goal as it ever was, whatever constraints are applied or not. It is impossible to do well by central planning.

Whether war communism is the best way to fight a war is also worth asking, but as Hayek let it past, so will I for now.

2. What does this suggestion mean:

"It’s going to require radical structural changes in the way our economy and society function. People won’t do this on their own. Government must force the change, whether structurally or by actively moderating our behaviour."?

It's short on specifics, as usual. I was probably too charitable in thinking it referred principally to blunt and illiberal but reasonably effective measures such as rationing. But it could be worse. What if all the things we were told we ought to do - switching things off, modes of transport, consumer choices, and so on - what if the "correct" choice in each case became compulsory? Is this what we are talking about here? That would be active moderation of behaviour and it would be tyranny. And it wouldn't do much good. Why?

• There's a rule that says "don't leave the TV on standby". There isn't a rule saying don't watch TV. My current TV uses 200W when on and 2W on standby. I can (and would) obey the rule by turning the TV on when I sit down, rather than 5 minutes later when the programme starts. (Using one sixtieth of a unit of electricity instead of one six thousandth of a unit. Big deal.)
  
• There's a rule that says "recycle". There isn't a rule that says "don't use stuff at all". Recycling usually has some benefits compared to other means of disposal, but never has any compared to not using stuff in the first place.
• ...etc. All this advice, don't fly, don't do this or that, probably does good overall, but there will be some unintended consequences. Make the advice compulsory and you will have unintended consequences in spades.

I hope to expand on both of these points in due course. Tristan has reawakened me from my blogging slumber with this post. Work has been heavy lately but I haven't forgotten you.

Tristan correctly identifies that much environmental advocacy seems to presume a collectivist philosophy. It is important to be careful here. I have no doubt that some 'collective' action will be necessary - some government spending is justified. But only in pursuit of a situation in which we are still free to pursue our own goals - to sustain ourselves according to our own desires and values. We won't get there by having the state micromanage us, or by turning well-meaning back-of-an-envelope environmental advice into hard law.

The Trap: What happened to our dreams of freedom?

Having missed the first two of these programmes, I was pleased to catch the third. I hope that my profoundest observations on it weren't lost during Desperate Housewives which was on immediately after.

The thesis was, in short, that there was something missing from Isiah Berlin's negative liberty concept, which has led to failures in imposing negative liberty in Russia, Iraq and elsewhere. Cicero provides a good defence of Berlin and negative liberty.

I think you could take Curtis' arguments and arrive at the rather different conclusion that negative liberty just can't be imposed. He makes the point that when it came to the Iraq war, we were so steeped in the culture of self-interest, that we didn't trust Blair and Bush. This is what perhaps led them to fabricate the evidence of a threat from Iraq.

And here's the problem. Freedom suffers if we can't rely on legislators and politicians to be honest brokers, rather than self-interested rational men. And of course we can't rely on anybody not to be self-interested, but we can, if we have elections and a true democratic culture, create the right incentives for politicians and vote out those that fall short.

An attempt to impose negative liberty cannot introduce this kind of check on power. Without democracy, politics becomes corrupt and self-serving whether done in the name of negative liberty, of socialism, of God, or of any other cause you care to mention.

Curtis argues that negative liberty relies on people being self-interested, and that positive liberty seeks to do better than that. But this is wrong. Negative liberty allows people freedom to choose their own values - so long as that doesn't interfere with the freedom of others - and so people are perfectly free to be altruistic without undermining the system. It is positive liberty that makes some reliance on people behaving appropriately and can go wrong when they don't.

The lesson I take from The Trap is not that negative, or positive liberty is prone to fail, but that the imposition of values is prone to fail. The imposition of values is of course against the principles of negative liberty, whether negative liberty is one of the values being imposed or not. Revolutions make things worse. The way to enhance freedom, of either kind, is not to tear down the system, but to reform it incrementally and democratically.

Curtis' description of Pol Pot's murder of the entire Cambodian middle class reminded me of this quote:

As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.
- Derek Wall, principal speaker of the Green Party

I discuss an alternative approach to environmental problems, offering more freedom, negative and I daresay positive as well, here.