Really interesting. I have always felt very ambivalent on this point. My understanding is that classical liberalism justifies this position with the claim that its own content is not much other than negative freedom as the goal of living together with others - as long as I leave everyone else free to do as they please, my own views and practices are fine, as are yours. Liberalism only asserts this shamelessness that you describe so well with respect to practices that impinge upon negative freedom. The cultural relativist position that you nod towards is difficult because not all cultures respect the autonomy of the individual nor of other communities to practice their own ways of life, regardless of whether those ways of life interfere with the freedom of others or not. So, I can, as a liberal, adopt the tolerant position that all cultures are equally valid only up to the point at which, say, a culture practices as a rule the oppression of women. Then, to paraphrase Catherine MacKinnon, we have to recognize that all forms of oppression are going to have some sort of cultural ‘excuse’. Where this argument tends to stall is in the fact that liberalism always sneaks in other norms, individualism for example. But it’s difficult to imagine this respect for autonomy without some form of individualism. Here in Toronto, which is a very multicultural city in a fairly multicultural country, the experiment is ongoing. A number of years ago, many people were saying that it had failed. But I don’t find that here on the ground. It’s imperfect, for sure, but we are still holding fast to this idea that cultures can exist side by side, maintain their distinctness and their own sets of values even if these conflict, but also agree to the minimal requirement of ‘Canadianness’ - that everyone respects everyone else’s right to their own ways of life and beliefs (similar to France’s laicite - in theory if not in practice). I guess in my many years of thinking this through and living in different countries, I’ve never come across any better option! And I think that’s usually the justification, rather than any sense of it being intuitively right. It’s just the only viable way (that I can see) for different people and cultures to exist side by side.
Your question about the blind faith that Western powers will always be in charge is a valuable warning!
Thank you for this! I warm to the model you propose, alongside the justification—not intuitive “rightness” but a clearly seen need to get along.
I was going to include a paragraph about the example of ASEAN: one of the most successful organisations for peace and cooperation, located in one of the most religiously, ethnically, culturally, politically, and ideologically diverse regions on Earth. It shows what is possible, I think.
This is small point, but Enoch gets King wrong. He absolutely does not think there are two sides to, for example, issues such as racial segregation. In fact, he spends a lot of time explaining why (for moral reasons) segregationists are morally wrong in their support of Jim Crow, and why the white moderates are morally wrong for not doing anything to overturn it. The idea that he would be some wishy washy relativist strikes me as a very wrong reading of King (and, I say this as someone who has just published the first book length work on his political philosophy). In fact, King does exactly what Enoch would like of so-called shameless liberals: he appeals unabashedly to liberal values - liberty, equality, etc - when he makes arguments against Jim Crow. So, don't worry, you can take a critical view of Enoch's argument without appearing to align yourself with opponents of the civil rights movement!
I think I might have misrepresented Enoch, however. He seemed to want to align himself with King, as a fellow anti-relativist. I think this is a stretch, but I’m not sure he is guilty of the mischaracterisation I led you to believe he’s guilty of. I still don’t think he’s a close reader of King’s political philosophy—indeed, he admits that history is of no interest to him. Your book sounds absolutely fascinating!
Haha David Enoch that old… so and so. If I remember correctly he believes a in a moral realism that discounts moral disagreement as anything to consider. There’s an exchange between him and Gerald Gaus in Ethics on Gaus’s book the Order of Public Reason which illuminates certain tendencies of thought to put it politely.
As for me, your ‘Reply 3’ is the way to go in a qualified sense. The key is to accept nothing is ever settled, there is always contestation. However we all want communal life and so we need to work out norms or principles for a form of “ordered moral warfare”. This may look like some form of liberalism in some ages and societies and in other ages and societies it will look different.
Yes, from the replies here and on social media I've gathered that he's, um, not everyone's favourite. As I say, he might be an extreme case of it, but I find that a lot of analytic moral philosophy has at least an element of discounting moral disagreement as worth considering. Maybe this is a reaction to moral philosophy having for many decades taken moral disagreement seriously, which rubbed more and more against an increasingly polarised, "high-temperature" political environment, until people decided that the only way to make moral philosophy relevant was to make it more weaponisable. But you'd know much better than me.
I agree with your qualified version of Reply 3, I think. I wouldn't want a world of clashing moral dogmas (a dogma-eat-dogma world?), but a set of governing norms for multilateral cooperation would be great. As I've written elsewhere, maybe ASEAN is the useful model here: SE Asian nations surely have moral disagreements that run all the way to the bone, but they seem to be able to follow some shared rules reliably enough to trust each other.
I loved this piece Alex. I increasingly struggle to see how 'liberals' (whether American or 'classical') can be anything but ashamed given their historical complicity in colonial expropriation, exploitation, and genocide. To be a 'shameless' liberal today is a profoundly reactionary position.
That is a good point! I love Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru quartet for showing how damaging and confusing the moral self-assurance of colonising powers was for the colonised.
In the modern context, you have the Western liberal powers picking and choosing which multilateral agreements to ratify (or the USA attaching strict conditions to aid funding): still behaving like the moral authority.
Very interesting, I would love to read a transcript of the talk. Did Rawsl' discussion of political vs comprehensive liberalism come up?
I live and teach in India, having studied in the US, and in some ways professionally engaged in thinking about the Western liberal canon. So the question of whether it translates across cultures, and of the extent to which it is a 'Western' imposition is very much a live one for me, as well as others who might describe themselves as liberals in a country like India, especially today. I don't think shamelessness would really work!
Very interesting! The Dipesh Chakrabarty article I cited engages a bit with this question of how much liberalism is a ‘Western’ imposition. I’m very interested to learn your perspective after studying in the USA.
I must read the Dipesh article! I guess I lean towards a more universalist picture here, I tend to think that a focus on which philosophical traditions are truly “Indian” vs '“Westerm” is in some ways a red herring. Have written about this a little, but it's a minority view, at least in India! Looking forward to reading your book, though…it's out this summer?
Thanks for this. I think it’s good to think right and do right, and to argue and work for what’s right, but I’m deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of an attempt to claim moral high ground. Beyond the worries you raise about value certitude, it just seems broadly unhelpful.
When I cross the borders between the evangelical Mennonite world of my upbringing and the secular academic/higher-ed labor organizing world I work in, I marvel at how kind folks in both groups are to make room for me in their conversations, given that my willing identification with the other group marks me as a Sus Guy with Bad Ideas and Worse Friends. I’m not a relativist: I’ll argue for my positions, but I think the arguments are calmer, and I think I’m more persuasive when I start from a mental posture of acknowledging the moral generosity of my interlocutors.
(To be clear, this is just about me being a Christian on the one hand, and a political and theological liberal on the other. I’m not suggesting that oppressed groups start by acknowledging the moral generosity of people who dehumanize and/or oppress them.)
Really interesting. I have always felt very ambivalent on this point. My understanding is that classical liberalism justifies this position with the claim that its own content is not much other than negative freedom as the goal of living together with others - as long as I leave everyone else free to do as they please, my own views and practices are fine, as are yours. Liberalism only asserts this shamelessness that you describe so well with respect to practices that impinge upon negative freedom. The cultural relativist position that you nod towards is difficult because not all cultures respect the autonomy of the individual nor of other communities to practice their own ways of life, regardless of whether those ways of life interfere with the freedom of others or not. So, I can, as a liberal, adopt the tolerant position that all cultures are equally valid only up to the point at which, say, a culture practices as a rule the oppression of women. Then, to paraphrase Catherine MacKinnon, we have to recognize that all forms of oppression are going to have some sort of cultural ‘excuse’. Where this argument tends to stall is in the fact that liberalism always sneaks in other norms, individualism for example. But it’s difficult to imagine this respect for autonomy without some form of individualism. Here in Toronto, which is a very multicultural city in a fairly multicultural country, the experiment is ongoing. A number of years ago, many people were saying that it had failed. But I don’t find that here on the ground. It’s imperfect, for sure, but we are still holding fast to this idea that cultures can exist side by side, maintain their distinctness and their own sets of values even if these conflict, but also agree to the minimal requirement of ‘Canadianness’ - that everyone respects everyone else’s right to their own ways of life and beliefs (similar to France’s laicite - in theory if not in practice). I guess in my many years of thinking this through and living in different countries, I’ve never come across any better option! And I think that’s usually the justification, rather than any sense of it being intuitively right. It’s just the only viable way (that I can see) for different people and cultures to exist side by side.
Your question about the blind faith that Western powers will always be in charge is a valuable warning!
Thanks for this thoughtful piece, in any case.
Thank you for this! I warm to the model you propose, alongside the justification—not intuitive “rightness” but a clearly seen need to get along.
I was going to include a paragraph about the example of ASEAN: one of the most successful organisations for peace and cooperation, located in one of the most religiously, ethnically, culturally, politically, and ideologically diverse regions on Earth. It shows what is possible, I think.
This is small point, but Enoch gets King wrong. He absolutely does not think there are two sides to, for example, issues such as racial segregation. In fact, he spends a lot of time explaining why (for moral reasons) segregationists are morally wrong in their support of Jim Crow, and why the white moderates are morally wrong for not doing anything to overturn it. The idea that he would be some wishy washy relativist strikes me as a very wrong reading of King (and, I say this as someone who has just published the first book length work on his political philosophy). In fact, King does exactly what Enoch would like of so-called shameless liberals: he appeals unabashedly to liberal values - liberty, equality, etc - when he makes arguments against Jim Crow. So, don't worry, you can take a critical view of Enoch's argument without appearing to align yourself with opponents of the civil rights movement!
I think I might have misrepresented Enoch, however. He seemed to want to align himself with King, as a fellow anti-relativist. I think this is a stretch, but I’m not sure he is guilty of the mischaracterisation I led you to believe he’s guilty of. I still don’t think he’s a close reader of King’s political philosophy—indeed, he admits that history is of no interest to him. Your book sounds absolutely fascinating!
Haha David Enoch that old… so and so. If I remember correctly he believes a in a moral realism that discounts moral disagreement as anything to consider. There’s an exchange between him and Gerald Gaus in Ethics on Gaus’s book the Order of Public Reason which illuminates certain tendencies of thought to put it politely.
As for me, your ‘Reply 3’ is the way to go in a qualified sense. The key is to accept nothing is ever settled, there is always contestation. However we all want communal life and so we need to work out norms or principles for a form of “ordered moral warfare”. This may look like some form of liberalism in some ages and societies and in other ages and societies it will look different.
Yes, from the replies here and on social media I've gathered that he's, um, not everyone's favourite. As I say, he might be an extreme case of it, but I find that a lot of analytic moral philosophy has at least an element of discounting moral disagreement as worth considering. Maybe this is a reaction to moral philosophy having for many decades taken moral disagreement seriously, which rubbed more and more against an increasingly polarised, "high-temperature" political environment, until people decided that the only way to make moral philosophy relevant was to make it more weaponisable. But you'd know much better than me.
I agree with your qualified version of Reply 3, I think. I wouldn't want a world of clashing moral dogmas (a dogma-eat-dogma world?), but a set of governing norms for multilateral cooperation would be great. As I've written elsewhere, maybe ASEAN is the useful model here: SE Asian nations surely have moral disagreements that run all the way to the bone, but they seem to be able to follow some shared rules reliably enough to trust each other.
I loved this piece Alex. I increasingly struggle to see how 'liberals' (whether American or 'classical') can be anything but ashamed given their historical complicity in colonial expropriation, exploitation, and genocide. To be a 'shameless' liberal today is a profoundly reactionary position.
That is a good point! I love Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru quartet for showing how damaging and confusing the moral self-assurance of colonising powers was for the colonised.
In the modern context, you have the Western liberal powers picking and choosing which multilateral agreements to ratify (or the USA attaching strict conditions to aid funding): still behaving like the moral authority.
I'll have to read the Buru quartet – thanks for the recommendation!
Very interesting, I would love to read a transcript of the talk. Did Rawsl' discussion of political vs comprehensive liberalism come up?
I live and teach in India, having studied in the US, and in some ways professionally engaged in thinking about the Western liberal canon. So the question of whether it translates across cultures, and of the extent to which it is a 'Western' imposition is very much a live one for me, as well as others who might describe themselves as liberals in a country like India, especially today. I don't think shamelessness would really work!
Very interesting! The Dipesh Chakrabarty article I cited engages a bit with this question of how much liberalism is a ‘Western’ imposition. I’m very interested to learn your perspective after studying in the USA.
I must read the Dipesh article! I guess I lean towards a more universalist picture here, I tend to think that a focus on which philosophical traditions are truly “Indian” vs '“Westerm” is in some ways a red herring. Have written about this a little, but it's a minority view, at least in India! Looking forward to reading your book, though…it's out this summer?
Yes, 19 June—thank you! And I’d love to see anything you write about this.
And finally, a piece called ‘Reading Rawls in India's: https://web.iitd.ac.in/~burra/research/burra22reading-rawls-in-india.pdf
And here's a longer piece on the question 'What is 'Indian' about Indian Philosophy?' Unfortunately formatting is a bit screwed up in the published version: https://web.iitd.ac.in/~burra/research/burra23indian-political-thought.pdf
Great, will pre order it! Here's a short piece on the general theme in connection with teaching the Western canon in India: https://www.miamisocialsciences.org/home/wlieiebx357qf0ag75vemn5dnjg8h4
Thanks for this. I think it’s good to think right and do right, and to argue and work for what’s right, but I’m deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of an attempt to claim moral high ground. Beyond the worries you raise about value certitude, it just seems broadly unhelpful.
When I cross the borders between the evangelical Mennonite world of my upbringing and the secular academic/higher-ed labor organizing world I work in, I marvel at how kind folks in both groups are to make room for me in their conversations, given that my willing identification with the other group marks me as a Sus Guy with Bad Ideas and Worse Friends. I’m not a relativist: I’ll argue for my positions, but I think the arguments are calmer, and I think I’m more persuasive when I start from a mental posture of acknowledging the moral generosity of my interlocutors.
(To be clear, this is just about me being a Christian on the one hand, and a political and theological liberal on the other. I’m not suggesting that oppressed groups start by acknowledging the moral generosity of people who dehumanize and/or oppress them.)
Thank you for sharing your experience on this; I really appreciate it.
I’ve also come to my views by having lived to some extent between cultures.