The Need for a Socialist Morality
Ignoring moral debates has led the Left to implicitly privilege being authentic over being good. This is a conceptual and moral mistake, but it is also a severe political limitation as well.
By Ana María Cisneros
Before I moved to Melbourne, I had heard of safe injection sites, places where addicts can consume drugs without worrying about unsanitary needles or calls to the police. While I knew safe injection sites might mitigate some of the terrible harms of addiction, I was unprepared for what I encountered. Workers at North Richmond Community Health, a few blocks from where I lived, ask visitors to state their drug of choice, then provide clean needles and lead them to a private room to inject, sometimes even helping them find veins. Dazed people stumble out. They roam the streets, safe from overdosing, as they try to steer clear of schoolchildren who are sometimes nearby. It’s only a momentary release. Soon enough, they spend what little money they have on the next hit and repeat the cycle. Many Melbournians, like those from other big cities facing high rates of overdose, think there’s not much else that can be done. Addicts have chosen this life, and it is much better to offer them safe conditions to inject than to let them die in the streets.
There’s a part of the Left that strongly agrees with this judgment and goes further: worrying about people’s personal choices amounts to getting mixed up in a moral debate, and, as leftists, we should focus on politics. In this view, politics is about figuring out what’s the best way of arranging our collective, public lives so that we can all discover and pursue the moral values that make us who we truly are. Since politics concerns the aspects of our lives that affect the lives of others, it is the realm of contestation and disagreement. It is for this reason that we argue against our neighbor if she opposes a wealth tax or advises bosses on how to best union bust. Morality, on the other hand, is understood to be a different matter altogether. We have no business criticizing our neighbor’s Catholicism or trying to get her not to live a life of drug addiction. Discussing morality is at best a fun intellectual exercise, and irrelevant for those of us that want to change the world.
But something has gone awfully wrong with a Left that remains neutral on issues such as whether one should be addicted to drugs. Leftists often fail to realize that their politics depend on their views about morality, and by failing to recognize this truth, they have implicitly adopted a moral picture that is both incoherent and incompatible with leftist ideals.
“Private” Morality
The moral picture at issue here is something like the following: morality pertains to our private lives, not our public, political lives. We should figure out for ourselves, by a process of self-discovery, which values suit us from a sea of different alternatives. These values will guide us, tell us which lifestyles we should adopt, or how we should raise our children. They act as a north star that helps us figure out our life paths. Others don’t have a right to tell me which life path is good for me.
In the case of addiction, some will argue that no one should be forced to turn to substance abuse as a salve for the hardships of poverty, and furthermore, we shouldn’t stigmatize or punish those who do suffer from addiction. That is undoubtedly correct. But some on the putative “Left” go further and claim that we also have no right to demand, for instance, that someone not use heroin if they freely choose to do so. In other words, we are not entitled to tell them they have the wrong priorities, or have chosen the wrong life path. Such a life might indeed not be one we would choose for ourselves, but our fellow citizens should be free to make that determination for themselves. We can only take issue with others’ actions when they impact our public lives—that is, we can only dictate how fellow citizens should live when it comes to “political” questions, not moral ones. I can no more tell them whether they should take drugs than I can tell them whether they should listen to music.
This conception of morality, according to which our moral values belong to a deeply personal, even sacred, sphere, coexists uncomfortably with another. If a family member were using drugs in a self-destructive manner, it’s easy to imagine judging their life choices—that is, judging what he ought to do, or how he ought to live his life. The same thing is often the case with friends or co-workers.
So there are aspects of people’s private lives that we can and often do judge; we don’t just reserve such acts of judgement only for overtly political cases. Perhaps it would be good to rein in our judgments in some cases, but human beings are inherently social animals who need to live in community. We cannot live in community without caring for each other, and wanting those around us to live good lives—good public and private lives. This means exercising judgement about the private lives and personal choices of others: values and actions related to people’s so-called private life can be better or worse, good or bad, just as those in people’s public lives. To exercise such judgments doesn’t entail condemnation. Rather, it means that we judge their choices, as in the case of addicts, as harmful to not just to the community but also to themselves, and we believe there is a better path for them to take.
While we appraise people’s life decisions all the time, such appraisals are usually hidden behind the language of privacy. Suppose you believe that abortion is a deeply personal choice. That means that you believe that neither the government nor any private citizen can stop you from getting an abortion or force you to get one. When someone opposes your right to an abortion, they therefore seem deranged or oppressive; they want to invade your private life. But to believe that neither the government nor any private citizen gets a say about whether you have a right to an abortion is just another way of saying you believe that abortion should be allowed. And this is a moral judgment about the private lives of others, about what they can or cannot do, the values they can or cannot have. You believe, in other words, that there is nothing morally wrong with getting an abortion. The person who opposes your right to an abortion is, typically, neither deranged nor evil; they just disagree with you about what should be allowed, what is right and wrong.
Against Consumer Morality
To see something as a personal choice is to see it as something one is allowed to do. That means that we do judge the personal choices and values of others all the time. And we judge what others and the state can or cannot do on the basis of how we judge personal choices and values. Our political positions are therefore never neutral with respect to our moral positions. Morality always involves a judgment about which choices and values are correct or incorrect, and politics concerns the best arrangement for us to act according to those moral judgements.
That we are making political judgments on the basis of moral judgments raises a vexing question: what is the correct account of morality? Those who want to leave morality out of politics often implicitly embrace individualistic morality. According to this view, there is a wide array of permissible values and life paths, including those that embrace the habits of addiction, dishonesty, or laziness. What matters is not the values themselves, but rather that you are the author of your own life, and that you chose those values for yourself. “You” are understood to be a collection of wants and desires, along with properties like gender and race. You are therefore a unique subject, and the values you choose are the right ones if they speak to you and reflect your authentic self. In individualistic morality, what makes a value or life path right or wrong is that you choose it, without coercion, as an authentic expression of your true self.
One of the difficulties of this view is that being authentic requires that you strip away everything you have inherited from others in the process of unveiling your “true self.” What remains is what Michael Sandel calls an unencumbered self, shorn of communal or class identity. There’s little reason to think such a self has anything left with which to make self-discovery or a basis on which to pick some values to live by instead of others. And to the person who faces a life crisis, and does not know what values define her, or which values to choose, individualistic morality has no guidance to offer except to tell her to look further into herself.
The idea of individualistic morality emerged with the rise of capitalism, and now reflects the notion of people as individual consumers. There is no external standard of right and wrong for a consumer; instead, her decisions should be solely dictated by her desires and preferences. However, most people believe there are indeed external standards for what counts as a good life, as Alasdair MacIntyre and many other philosophers have argued. This might be why individualistic morality has a strong class component: it is mostly the middle class and elites who cherish being their unique selves. Their range of freedom as consumers makes it appear as if they are truly autonomous.
But people who lived in pre-capitalist societies, and even many working-class people today, are not autonomous in most aspects of their lives. As a result, their approach to moral thinking does not rely on individualistic morality. Take, for example, the Crow people described by Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope. For them, what mattered was not that they be authentic but rather that they be experts in something valuable for their community, like being a proficient warrior or hunter. Consider also Jean-Claude Michéa’s or Joan C. Williams’s arguments that commitment matters much more for working people than self-expression.
Individualistic morality’s appeal to authenticity forces us to disavow much more than the most obviously objectionable values. It allows for people to be extremely self-interested, and so the best it can say about free riders, for instance, is that we should design incentives to curb people’s selfishness. Contrast this with the empirical data, presented by Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons and further analyzed by Mark Hoipkemier, that, in practice, the best antidote for free riding is for people to be trained to think of a communal we instead of an I. For those who think this way, free riding is not even a conceptual possibility. But individualistic morality forbids us from trying to persuade others to adopt a communal ethos, or structure society in a way that leads to such an ethos, because it only lets us affect each other’s private lives in the most extreme scenarios.
Individualistic morality ought to be anathema to the Left. The working class has time and again organized through shared values as an “us,” whether that be a union, a neighborhood, or a class. It is what’s implied in Bernie Sanders’s slogan Not me, us.
At best, individualistic morality will grant us only temporary permission to promote a communal ethos and collective struggle, so that we can then return, after liberation, to the very individualism that is alien to most people. For this political program to be feasible, advocates of individualistic morality must think, against the evidence, that everyone wants such a morality or, in a more materialist vein, that individualistic morality will emerge when, through redistribution, everyone has enough resources to order their lives as they see fit. But there’s no reason to expect that material abundance will automatically produce individualistic morality.
Goodness Over Authenticity
Yet this is precisely what we have been doing. Consider a mother who wants her sister’s children to be raised religious, even though her sister is not. Many on the left would see this as an imposition. We typically don’t realize that part of what is moving her is a desire to see children be raised to be good human beings, who help each other out and stand up to injustice. That desire, even if not articulated in these terms, is often connected to an instinctive recognition of the goods of thinking in terms of a communal we, not of an I. Instead, many would tell her that how to raise your children is a deeply personal choice, letting the ideal of authenticity speak through us. Meanwhile, the Right uncritically agrees with her desire to see children raised religious and uses her support to fuel policies that may undermine other values she endorses, such as honesty and commitment.
What we should instead be doing with our religious mother is affirming the idea that children ought to be raised to be good. We should agree with her that part of what it is to love and care for those around us is to want them to flourish and live good lives. And we should go further, for example, by saying that the best way of forming such citizens is by investing in public schools and offering state-funded job programs. We should convince her that we share the ideal of a world in which lying and free riding are morally objectionable. Many on the Left, however, would stop well short of affirming the idea that children should be raised with the virtue of honesty due to their commitment to individualistic morality, which says that it is not up to society (or the state) to tell people how to raise their children.
For all these conceptual and practical reasons, we must reject individualistic morality and the idea that moral values ought ultimately to be left to individual choice. That means the Left must dirty its hands by offering an alternative moral picture. This is necessary not just so that we arrive at the correct political positions, but also so that we build a political program that is relatable to those with the instincts to correctly reject capitalism’s ideal of authenticity.
Thankfully, the Left has no need to reinvent the wheel. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre offers a compelling starting point for rejecting the infinite permissibility of values:
[There is] a set of goods whose contribution to a good life, whatever one’s culture or social order, it would be difficult to deny. They are at least eightfold, beginning with good health and a standard of living—food, clothing, shelter—that frees one from destitution. Add to these good family relationships, sufficient education to make good use of opportunities to develop one’s powers, work that is productive and rewarding, and good friends. Add further time beyond one’s work for activities good in themselves, athletic, aesthetic, intellectual, and the ability of a rational agent to order one’s life and to identify and learn from one’s mistakes.
Some might worry that such a political vision stifles originality and opens the door to the kind of state coercion witnessed in totalitarian regimes. This should worry anyone who pursues an alternative moral picture, for individualistic morality is appealing precisely because it tries to avoid uniformity and undue coercion. That said, whether these challenges can be met should be a matter of collective debate. Consider, in the meantime, that the goods outlined above allow for much diversity. There are many kinds of artistic and athletic activity and many forms of work. There are, in other words, many forms a good life can take. But that does not mean that a life becomes good only because the person chose it for themselves.
Whatever the precise nature of a different, socialist morality, we must, for the sake of our politics, adopt an alternative to individualistic morality. Ignoring moral debates has led us, instead, to implicitly endorse an account that privileges being authentic over being good. The Left must do better, or risk drifting further into irrelevance.
Ana María Cisneros is a PhD student in Philosophy and a former socialist organizer.