Political Philosophy

by Phil Parvin

  But what, precisely, is state neutrality? There are two versions of the idea: neutrality of effect and neutrality of justification.

  Neutrality of effect

  Imagine that we live in a Rawlsian society which has no public funding for opera. Some people do value opera very much: it is central to their conception of the good. However, they are too few to provide the funding that opera needs to survive. As a result, with no state funding, opera gradually dies out and becomes a lost art form. On the other hand, pop music flourishes.

  One might object to this state of affairs. The point of state neutrality is that everyone should be equally able to pursue their own conception of the good, regardless of whether others disagree with it. The state must recognize the fact of reasonable pluralism, and ensure that people are not unfairly prevented from following their conceptions of the good. But if opera dies out then opera-lovers are no longer able to follow their conception of the good. There is an inequality between the opera-lovers and the pop-lovers: the former cannot pursue their conception of the good, while the latter can. How neutral is this? Surely this is a society which favours pop at the expense of opera. If such a state wanted to be neutral, it ought to provide funding for the opera so that both groups could pursue their conceptions of the good.

  This objection can be expressed as an argument in favour of neutrality of effect. A state without public funding for opera is not neutral in effect between those who value opera and those who value pop. Rawlsian so-called neutrality does not lead to outcomes that are neutral. On the contrary, active support of opera would best promote neutrality of outcome or effect.

  However, there are four main problems with neutrality of effect.

  1 It is impractical. If the state were to try to ensure that all its policies were neutral in effect, it would have to know in detail what the results of its policies would be in every possible circumstance. But the world is far too complicated for this sort of prediction to work. States cannot know exactly what motivates every individual, and so they cannot know precisely what the implications of any particular policy would be. It is simply impossible for a state to ensure neutrality of effect.

  2 It would require the support of conceptions of the good that few people share. By its very nature, a policy of neutrality of effect would have to fund unpopular preferences, so as to counterbalance the popularity of the alternatives. Indeed, the more popular the alternatives are, then the more the state will have to support the unpopular good.

  3 It unfairly subsidizes expensive tastes. Remember, one argument for neutrality of effect was that some valuable ways of life, such as opera, cost more money than their supporters are willing to pay. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that opera could survive without state funding only if tickets cost £500 each. Opera-lovers are not willing to pay £500 to see an opera, and so the state steps in to fill the gap. However, if even opera-lovers do not think that opera is worth paying £500 each for, why should the state, and therefore taxpayers who don’t like opera at all, think that it is worth this level of funding?

  4 It undermines the idea that people should be held responsible for their choices. Given that we have finite resources, people have to accept that not all conceptions of the good will survive, and they must be willing to bear the consequences of their particular choices.

  Neutrality of effect is not, then, the sort of state neutrality that liberals like Rawls advocate.

  Spotlight: Subsidizing the arts

  ✽ In 2007–8 the entire budget for the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport was £6.6 billion – just 1 per cent of total government spending. (Source: the Guardian and Institute of Fiscal Studies)

  ✽ The 19 free-to-enter museums and zoo of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA receive 29 million visits per year. In 2012 the Smithsonian received $810 million from federal government. (Source: www.si.edu)

  Neutrality of justification

  The sort of neutrality that Rawls is in favour of can be called neutrality of justification. The important issue for Rawls is not the outcome of particular policies, but the way in which these policies are justified. The state may not fund opera because it is a valuable way of life, or because it is more valuable than pop music. It is not important that opera ends up on equal terms with pop music. It is just important that the state does not give greater weight to one form of music over another.

  The reason for this is that Rawls argues that the principles of justice must be acceptable to people who hold a wide variety of conceptions of the good. The idea is that there can be an overlapping consensus on the principles of justice, which do not rely on any particular conception of the good. Any state that follows policies that are justified by reference to a particular conception of the good will not adequately accommodate alternatives. It will not respect the fact of reasonable pluralism.

  As this was the subject of the last chapter, we move on to two criticisms of, and alternatives to, Rawlsian state neutrality: perfectionist liberalism and a politics of difference.

  Case study: Catharine MacKinnon on state neutrality

  In her landmark book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (MacKinnon, 1989), Catharine MacKinnon writes:

  The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interests of men as a gender—through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies. The state’s formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design. (MacKinnon 1989: pp. 162–3)

  According to MacKinnon, the idea of neutrality is one way that the state promotes the interests of men. Neutrality in liberalism tends to be associated with negative freedom and non-interference: the state is neutral if it leaves things as they are. But, MacKinnon points out, if society is gendered then not interfering means leaving gender inequality in place.

  Consider freedom of speech and pornography. In the USA, constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech have been taken to rule out any regulation of pornography. MacKinnon argues that pornography actually limits women’s freedom of speech by representing women as passive beings who enjoy being raped and abused, meaning that women outside of pornography are often not believed when they say they have been raped. Freedom of speech might be better secured for women as well as for men, then, by regulating pornography. But state neutrality assumes that there is freedom of speech already, and that the state’s job is not to interfere with it.

  In general, state neutrality defends the status quo, with dire consequences for women:

  Rape law assumes that consent to sex is as real for women as it is for men. Privacy law assumes that women in private have the same privacy men do. Obscenity law assumes that women have the access to speech men have. Equality law assumes that women are already socially equal to men. Only to the extent women have already achieved social equality does the mainstream law of equality support their inequality claims. (MacKinnon 1989: p. 169)

  As long as legislators and judges are primarily male, implementing constitutions and laws passed by men in situations of profound inequality, neutrality simply perpetuates that inequality.

  Raz and liberal perfectionism

  Comprehensive liberalism is an alternative to political liberal arguments for neutrality. It claims that liberalism should be grounded on valuable principles like autonomy. One influential variant of this approach is liberal perfectionism: the idea that ‘it is the goal of all political action to enable individuals to pursue valid conceptions of the good and to discourage evil or empty ones’ (Raz 1986: p. 133). Liberal perfectionism of this kind is most commonly associated with Joseph Raz. It also has much in common with the earlier comprehensive liberalism of John Stuart Mill.

  ‘[T]he autonomy principle is a perfectionist principle. Autonomous life is only valuable if it is spent in the pursuit of acceptable and valuable projects and relationships. The autonomy principle permits
and even requires governments to create morally valuable opportunities, and to eliminate repugnant ones… A government which subsidizes certain activities, rewards their pursuit, and advertises their availability encourages those activities without using coercion.’

  Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 417.

  The liberal perfectionist claim that states should promote particular conceptions of the good is a straightforward rejection of state neutrality. What makes someone like Raz a liberal perfectionist (rather than, say, a communitarian) is that he does not argue that valid ways of life must be based on shared communal values. Instead, he argues that a valuable way of life is one that is based on autonomy. If a person is to lead a valuable life, it will be an autonomous one. In Rawlsian terminology, she will actively engage in framing, revising and pursuing her conception of the good. She will not passively follow her community and unthinkingly adopt a shared way of life. She will be the active author of her own life.

  So, if the liberal perfectionist state is supposed to encourage valuable ways of life, then it follows for Raz that it will encourage autonomous ways of life. In this way, a perfectionist state retains its liberal character. It does not coerce people into following one way of life, but gives them the resources and encouragement to choose a way of life for themselves. Raz, then, is a comprehensive liberal in that he disagrees with the Rawlsian assertion that the state should be neutral between conceptions of the good that foster autonomy and those that deny it.

  In practice, this means that Raz is willing to advocate paternalistic and interventionist state policies to a much greater extent than Rawls is, because he does not believe that the state should protect autonomy-denying ways of life. So, for example, certain sorts of cultural practices will not be allowed (see the chapter on multiculturalism for further discussion). He is more paternalistic because he is willing to involve the state in making value judgements about the value of different ways of life, and thus advocates that the state should fund and support some ways of life more than others.

  The paternalistic nature of Raz’s argument is more significant than it may initially appear. This is because he has a different, and more demanding, understanding of autonomy than many liberals, including Rawls. For Raz, autonomy is not just about choosing a way of life, it is about choosing a valuable way of life. If a person autonomously chooses a worthless life, her life is not valuable. The fact that she has chosen it is not enough. That is why governments should make value judgements about different ways of life – they need to ensure that there are many valuable options available, and possibly to rule out worthless or repugnant ways of life.

  Choice is therefore a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the living of a valuable life: people’s choices could be misguided. The problem, of course, is: who gets to decide what is a valuable life if not individuals themselves? Raz argues that the state is best placed to make these decisions, based upon a reasoned evaluation of different conceptions of the good life, and the reasons people have for following them.

  This is controversial but not unconvincing. It does seem that there are some ways of life that we know, pretty surely, are worthless. A life of addiction to heroin, for example, is not very worthwhile, and it is fairly uncontroversial that the state should at least discourage, if not actively forbid, such a life. Why should we allow people to make the mistake of becoming addicted to heroin, given all that we know about its extremely harmful effects? Surely it would be a dereliction of duty, not to mention a waste of human experience, not to act on the knowledge we have about the worthlessness of such a life? The problem, of course, is that once we depart from these extreme sorts of cases, the issues are much less clear-cut. We could probably agree that heroin addiction is worthless, but we are much less likely to agree about the relative merits of opera and pop, and the funding (if any) each should receive.

  But Raz points out that perfectionist action does not have to be as extreme as prohibition. There may be some cases, such as heroin addiction, where the activity is sufficiently worthless to justify prohibition. However, there are other cases where state discouragement, perhaps in the form of taxation, seems more warranted. Actually existing liberal states do this sort of thing all the time. The policy of congestion charging is a good example. Driving into central London is not so worthless or morally repugnant as to justify a ban, but it is sufficiently undesirable to merit the use of a tax, to discourage people from doing it. Similarly, in the UK we have perfectionist taxes on tobacco, petrol and alcohol. We also employ perfectionist measures to discourage people in other ways. For example, we discourage gambling by setting a minimum age for participation. We discourage smoking by setting extensive limits on tobacco advertising. And, of course, similar measures apply to the encouragement of ways of life that we see as valuable. Public transport is subsidized, many art galleries and museums are free to enter, there are many free public libraries and subsidized leisure and fitness facilities.

  Spotlight: Perfectionism vs. state neutrality

  A discussion of perfectionism vs. state neutrality occurs between fictional Minister Jim Hacker (JH) and civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby (HA) in the comedy series Yes Minister:

  JH: There’s no difference between subsidizing football and subsidizing art – except that a lot more people are interested in football.

  HA: Our cultural heritage has to be preserved!

  JH: For whom? For people like you, you mean. For the educated middle classes. Why should the rest of the country subsidize the pleasures of the middle-class few? Theatre, opera, ballet. Subsidizing art in this country is nothing more than a middle-class rip-off!

  (Yes Minister Series 3, Episode 7: ‘The Middle-class Rip-off’ (1982).

  In other words, actual states do engage in all sorts of perfectionist policies. Most of them are not strongly opposed, and many of them are not even controversial. Few argue that tobacco should be untaxed and unregulated, or that public libraries should be run on free-market principles, with the consumer paying to use them. These facts seem to undermine the objection that perfectionist principles involve controversial and coercive imposition of state power over and above the will of the people. We often can agree about whether a way of life is more or less valuable and, when we can do so, Raz would insist that we ought to. For Raz, then, the role of the liberal state is clear: to provide for individuals, through direct or indirect means, a range of valuable options from which to use.

  Young’s critique of liberal neutrality

  Iris Marion Young offers a critique of both neutrality and perfectionism (and hence, of political and comprehensive liberalism) from the point of view of a critique of domination and oppression. For Young, the ideal of neutrality that we find in the work of Rawls and other political liberals fails to take account of the differences between people, and forces people to reason in ways which ignore their felt emotions and experiences. In her phrase, it ‘reduces difference to unity’: neutrality refuses to recognize that people have deeply different lives, experiences and social roles. People have different races, genders, religions, cultures, sexualities, careers, classes, conceptions of the good. These differences, Young argues, should not be glossed over. They should not be placed behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ in order that they be excluded from our deliberations about justice, or excluded from the process of public reasoning about political principles and institutions. We should not try to pretend that there can be one, neutral standpoint that can reduce all these differences to unity, that can make all these people the same. There is no such moral standpoint. Instead, the correct way for us to approach questions of justice and public policy is through a process of deliberation between actually existing, situated people, people who are substantively different from one another and whose differences are recognized.

  Because Young rejects the idea that there can be any truly neutral standpoint, it follows that the supposedly neutral state will actually end up representing one particul
ar standpoint. This standpoint, Young argues, will be the standpoint of the majority group in society. In other words, the result of a policy of supposed neutrality is the perceptions of the dominant group are presented as universal and objective, and that subordinate groups are silenced and portrayed as inferior. Moreover, because the dominant standpoint is presented as a neutral standpoint, it cannot be challenged. Any attempted challenge can be refuted as a particularistic, selfish claim for special deviation from neutrality, rather than as a serious, principled alternative to the dominant viewpoint.

  ‘A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. A genuinely liberal society does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them.’

  David Cameron, ‘Speech to the Munich Security Conference’, 2011

  Of course, if this argument holds, it applies even more strongly to Raz’s perfectionism. Raz does not even claim to provide a neutral standpoint. Indeed, he argues that the whole purpose of government action is to discriminate between ways of life, and to promote some above others. Young would argue that this cannot be done without dominating and oppressing minority groups. She denies that there is any objective and universal standard of value. Instead, society is characterized by a number of diverse groups, each of which have their own, different, but valid perspective on life. Neither neutrality nor perfectionism can overrule these differences unless by suppressing diversity and undermining equality.