Blunt morality
Morality could do with a revival in our public discourse
What exactly is politics for? It is a Wednesday evening, you’ve broken the back of the week, and some light philosophy is due. Is it for justice? Fairness? An £80,000 salary and as many moat refurbishments as you like?
I jest, of course. We like to think that politics is for the general good, offering sugar, spice and everything nice to as many people as possible. There is at least some consensus around that.
But despite this loose agreement, a conversation I had last weekend reminded me of a largely absent concept in British public discourse: morality.
The Right Dishonourable had been speaking to Daniel Jacobs, a London assembly candidate for the Londependence party. Mostly we talked about whether the capital should secede from the UK, but a few other things came up.
One of these was London mayor Sadiq Khan's proposed commission on legalising cannabis. I put it to Jacobs that some people thought taking drugs was innately immoral. What struck me was not that he disagreed, but that he seemed surprised, even baffled, that anybody could think such a thing.
On an entirely separate podcast, Labour’s failed parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, Paul Williams, was also discussing the “moral purpose” of the party. It’s not so unusual for politicians to gesture in this direction, but they rarely use the m-word. It is almost taboo, ridiculous as that sounds.
By comparison, people are happy to speak of fairness, justice and equality. Ethics also comes up, and many organisations even form committees to discuss such worthy concepts. But while similar to morality, the concepts are not quite the same.
Some years ago I was in a discussion where I said it would be be “immoral” to take a specific course of action. It went down slightly faster than a lead zeppelin, a heavy point in a heavy conversation. To my ear there is a sound of judgement in ‘immoral’ that ‘unethical’, with its scientific ring, doesn’t capture.
To channel the historian Tom Holland, who believes our post-Christian civilisation still carries many of the old faith’s assumptions, I suspect many are uncomfortable with how old-fashioned ‘morality’ sounds. Modern atheist types are happier to talk about harm principles, or to recast moral debates as about health, poverty, or just about anything else.
At the same time, we live in a moralising era. Bigotry, the great evil of the age, is spotted everywhere, and the call-outs are ubiquitous. If wishy-washy progs are nervous about labelling something evil, they’re happy enough to condemn people to professional and social exile for conversational missteps.
Perhaps, in the age of the individual, calling somebody immoral is a tad too judgemental. The post-war era has seen many behaviours that might once have been open to public scorn reserved as matters of personal conscience, even if the Daily Mail is still fighting a rearguard action to defend its right to judge with extreme prejudice.
It would of course be mad to expect eras to be consistent. Describing something as immoral or evil also tends not to be ‘solution-oriented’, as a line manager might say. We certainly gain something be considering moral problems as challenges to be addressed, which often involves suspending judgement.
Yet dry debates on ethical committees miss something. Like calling your other half of 50 years a ‘partner’, it describes the features but misses the soul of the matter. Calling something immoral gets to the point, and might well lay responsibility where it should be. Perhaps that is why people don’t seem to like it.
Apologies for the lack of links. When I next speak to you I promise to have read something worthwhile to share with you.
Jimmy