Morality and public policy
A few days ago, on a weekend morning run through Brooklyn, I listened to a podcast conversation between Tyler Cowen and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Their conversation reached far and wide across both their sets of interests in Ghana, pan-Africanism, the development and persistence of a middle class, judging the Booker prize, cultural cosmopolitanism, the retrenchment of Nationalism worldwide, and so on.
Appiah is, arguably, one of the world’s most famous philosophers and cultural theorists. I’m most familiar with his work on cosmopolitanism but he has written about “political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history.” The most interesting fact about him, to me, is that he’s the son of royalty in his native Ghana.
At the end of their conversation, they briefly broach an interesting topic. Cowen asked Appiah:
COWEN: What do you think is the next undervalued moral revolution on its way, say within the next decade?
APPIAH: I should have a standard answer to that, but I don’t. I think that we’re seeing . . . There’s a long tradition in Muslim moral thought of making each of us, at least each Muslim, responsible for the moral lives of other Muslims in a certain way. It refers to a passage in the Koran about commanding right and forbidding wrong.
This society was, when I came here 30-something years ago, very much a society in which people thought that you left other people to do their own moral thing. Now there’s an interesting change going on, that people feel inclined to intervene in the moral lives even of strangers and to say what they think about it. Maybe not to coerce them, of course, into doing anything in particular, but at least to express a view.
If that takes hold, it will be a huge revolution in the moral life of our society.
I found this line of thinking provocative. Like Appiah, I have always understood America to be a society in which everyone is responsible for his or her own moral life. And, further, intervening in someone else’s morality seems anti-American to me. This thought has been circling around in my head for a few days and I wanted to explore it from a few sides. And see if I can tie it together with a perennial topic of interest politics and public policy.
To me, this seems like one of the central differences between the two major political camps in contemporary society. In an over-simplified sense, people on the right argue that right and wrong is either individually derived or derived through culture and religion and there’s no room for the state in this arena. On the left, right and wrong are socially constructed and derived, and therefore, it is well within reason for people to shape and judge each others’ morality. And therefore, public policy can be derived from moral principles that help us shape a more just society (for some definition of just).
George Lakoff, a cognitive psychologist, has famously modeled conservative and liberal differences on a metaphorical stage using fathers and mothers as a way to describe how each ideology conceives of right and wrong and how the world does or should work.
His framework, which I find useful time and again, is summarized as:
“The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).”
In addition to this Lakoff framework, I think there are other implications for the role of morality in public policy and public life.
The future of morality
To consider our future understanding of morality, we should probably start with a consideration of our past understanding of morality. The Handbook of Moral Development categorizes and outlines the extant (as of 2006, at least) academic literature, primarily from psychology, on the topic. It describes academic understanding of structuralism, conscience, social justice, social interaction, empathy, aggression and a number of other topics that are related to morality. I haven’t spent time reading into all these areas but I think they generally describe moral development as both an individual and social project.
On an individual level, morality and emotions seem to be highly related. Emotions like shame, guilt, empathy and sympathy all play a role. The extent to which one can compel someone else to feel these emotions, I’m not sure it’s always a successful gambit.
For example, one of the more recent developments in climate change is a focus on the huge detrimental effects of air travel. As I write this, 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic ocean to attend a conference in NYC. She’s doing this as part of a pledge to Stay On The Ground, or not participate in commercial air travel. Why? Because it is one of the most polluting things an individual can do. Activists like her have asked air-travelers to take a similar pledge and cut out or cut down on air travel in their lives. Although Jay has argued in the past that many of us, especially those of us worried about climate change, are mostly climate change hypocrites, and the reality that the majority of climate change abatement won’t happen via individual change, I can’t help but think, as a writer at Vox put it, that “shame is not a great feeling, and it’s hard to convince people they need more of it.” (Also this is a minor point, and not the focus of her activism, but I can’t help but wonder if the overall impact of Thunberg’s solar yacht trip with a number of other crew members, who all have to fly back to Europe, is ultimately the least polluting option).
Socially, moral development has a lot to do with culture, family, society and institutions like the church or mosque. Religion, arguably, has been among the greatest social shapers of morality in human history. But religion changes and expands into so many parts of society that it is hardly a useful way to conceive how right and wrong work in the world. It’s like saying, in order to understand the climate we must study the air.
All of this, I suppose, is to say that moral development is a complex topic. It has been the subject of inquiry for a long time. We understand it in some ways and are completely blind to how it works in other ways.
Morality and public policy
That brings me to the role of morality in public policy. Appiah’s example of strangers chiming in and expressing an opinion about the rightness or wrongness of others’ actions seems anodyne. But what if we generalize that principle to the level of laws or public policy? Is that a development that we want to see in society? I would imagine the conservative answer to this mostly rhetorical question would be no. And that the liberal answer may be yes.
Last week the New York Times Magazine published its 1619 Project. It contains essays, photography, and poetry about the enduring legacy of slavery in America. Reactions to this work has ranged from ecstatic, to skeptical, to polemical.
One of the reaction pieces that caught my eye was commentary in the Washington Examiner that claims that “slavery doomed the possibility of achieving limited government in the United States.” The author describes the repeated ways in which the Federal government had to intervene on behalf of African Americans before, during and after the Civil War, especially in the South, to ensure their rightful and fair treatment.
On one level, to this day, any arguments about states’ rights are inevitably tainted by their association with arguments made in support of Southerners who perpetuated slavery and then an elaborate system of racial oppression. Those who argue in favor of leaving more decisions up to the states are forced to grapple with the reality that for a majority of U.S. history, when states were left to their own devices, they denied liberty to millions of Americans — and changing things required federal intervention.
But on another level, expansions of federal power that were necessary to fight slavery and racial oppression created precedents that were then used to exert federal power in other areas: education, economic regulations, social welfare, and so on. The landmark Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. United States case that upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded the scope of the Commerce Clause, which has broad implications for federal regulatory authority.
The evils of slavery and the Jim Crow era, and their legacy, need to be studied and acknowledged in their own right. But if we’re going to have a broader discussion about the continued implications of slavery in 2019, then conservatives should recognize how its legacy has made the case for limited government significantly harder to make.
The Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc v. United States case the author references, in my understanding, basically ensured that the civil rights of black Americans were protected. That the freedom of a motel owner to say, “I don’t want black people in my motel,” was not worth the price of black Americans being denied their basic civil rights. The Supreme Court decided to make a decision about right and wrong and use the law to enforce it.
To me, this is an illustrative example of why moral arbitration through public policy is a fact of life. If we believe the constitution grants all citizens a certain set of rights. And that the unequal distribution of those rights is morally wrong. Then it is our duty to stand up, protect and argue for laws or norms that change that.
Should the state play this role? Or should this role only be played by institutions like the family or church? If we disallow the state from doing this and say instead, for example, that the market or schools or something should do it instead, how is that different from or any better than laws or the government? I’m not arguing that every right and wrong in society should be adjudicated by the state. I know history is littered with examples of states going too far using the framework of right and wrong but I’m not convinced they outweigh the beneficial ways in which states have also played this role.
I suppose the complications come in when more and more of moral life is ceded to and shaped by public institutions, whether that’s the government, media, the university or corporations that employ us. But it seems to me that that train has long ago left the station. We live our lives in these public places. And it follows that we would have strong opinions about how these places take shape. I think moral life has always been shaped by these institutions and we’re now in an era of reshaping that is opening the door to people traditionally left out of that role.
And so we find ourselves in the current atmosphere where political debates hinge on right and wrong. Is it right for insurance to be tied to the employer? Is it right to hold migrant families in detention indefinitely? Is it right for political representation to be apportioned the way it is around the country?
The framing and discussion around these questions matters a lot. Especially when the stakes are as high as right and wrong. But Appiah’s idea, that we are going to become more and more responsible for each other’s moral lives, and that it will cause a major shift in how society works, seems plausible to me.
