by Iris Murdoch
These heterogeneous and certainly not insoluble problems are usually discussed and solved, against a background of the essential importance of law, by reference to a kind of moral-political common-sense: so far and no further. The liberal state depends upon deep large nebulous good will, something a little, perhaps a good deal, stronger than a minimal understanding of ‘government by consent’. National unity, nationalism, patriotism, as,exhibited for instance in war-time, is an aspect of this consent, and may or may not be a valuable phenomenon. Politicians constantly argue with each other in moral as well as pragmatic terms, and all kinds of moral idealists criticise and attempt to persuade governments. A high moral as well as intellectual level of political debate is to be hoped for, and lip service at least is paid to its importance. Lip service is not to be despised. The triumph of good causes partly depends on people, at some point, becoming ashamed of saying certain things. (For instance of making anti-Semitic remarks or talking about women in certain ways.) The machinery of the decent state is continually serviced by an atmosphere of moral good will and high ideals which is essential to its survival. This thoroughly mixed-up continually changing atmosphere is kept fresh by innumerable lively moralists, not least artists (especially writers) and their clients.
Equally essential are certain axiomatic notions which distinguish political machinery from moral ideas (e.g. crime from sin), and also allow some moral ideas a special (universal) political status (e.g. the idea of human rights). Of course these axioms live and work on a battlefield. I may hold that a bad law is (anywhere) a law. (‘Render unto Caesar’ ... a much disputed remark.) Order is pragmatically (and often morally) better than disorder. In a democracy conscientious law-breaking should be minimal and carefully thought out and explained and controlled, because change can be sought within the law, and too much casualness about law weakens exceedingly important general respect for it. In non-democratic states it may not be easy to distinguish laws from (e.g.) personal decrees of tyrants. In democratic states laws (recognised as such) may (we think) sometimes properly be broken in the name of (axiomatic) rights. Beyond these actions lies an imagined decent, good (not perfect) human society. The aspiration toward democracy is an ideal based on observation of (with all their faults) existing democracies, and is quite unlike Utopian idealism. Problems will also arise about how far into the fabric of society to move the idea of a political situation and a political model. In a Marxist society these situations and this model are (were) omnipresent, and all social machinery related to a single power centre. A liberal democracy contains innumerable groups and power points which are partly or entirely separate from central government. Voluntary groups may depend on a consensus of souls or on strict rules with enforceable penalties, and may sometimes have illegal objectives, but, in relation to them, the borders of state law (law in the strict sense) must always be capable of clarification. The proliferation of other centres of power and social interest is in general good for democracy, indeed essential to it. It is equally important to define the limits of the ‘axiomatic’ area, and to distinguish (very general) ‘natural rights’ from ‘local rights’. A right not to be tortured is unlike a right to be represented. Democratic arrangements are frail and vulnerable, and the situation which allows these problems to be constantly and intelligibly sorted is volatile and subject to continual pressure and change. Here the idea of law, of positive law and of ‘natural law’, and of the distinction between the two, is fundamental. Theorists who argue that legal decisions are really political decisions are tending to weaken the fabric of democratic procedure at a very important point; and doing so in favour of what are likely to be, in effect, random ephemeral local political interests. A not dissimilar weakening of the essential fabric of liberal political thinking occurs when, in relation to punishment, the concept of retributive justice is dropped or discredited in favour of (of course very important) utilitarian ideas of rehabilitation, of making the culprit ‘better’. It should be remembered that retribution, just equivalence, works both ways, towards leniency as well as towards severity. If we lose sight of it, state punishment may become the tool of political factions, of popular indignation or indoctrination, or of quasi-scientific theorising. Punishment is not only, and not fundamentally, a matter of moral redemption. The idea of just retribution (retribution as justice) also helps us to make sense of much-discussed questions of deterrence. It is unjust to hang a man for stealing a sheep, it is also unjust to shoot a randomly chosen person in order to quell a riot and discourage future ones. Decent law involves continued rational and humane attempts to establish, in very various situations, what a just (equivalent) punishment is. Without this bridle, moral improvement may become the ‘re-education’ of the innocent, and deterrence a vindictive retaliation. Just (proper) deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution are the three bases of a ‘political’ theory of punishment, and most fundamental of these is retribution. In the theoretical ‘economy’ of democratic government there is a pragmatic as well as an axiomatic background to such thinking. Arguments about capital punishment involve a more evident appeal to axiom, when people argue (as I would) that the state should never (legally, in cold blood, etc.) take life. (Hobbes allowed the taking of life as a unique case; the individual had no obligation to obey a sovereign who proposed to kill him.) The argument against capital punishment should, in my view, be stated as an axiomatic matter, and independent of considerations of deterrence.
Not only the influence of Marxism, but other forces, connected for instance with a decline of religious belief, have promoted a ‘socialising’ of morality, a tendency for a public political morality to seem like the whole of morals. Groups are taken to be more important than individual persons. Persons must seek ‘being’ by adhering to groups. Of course some kinds of religion, this is very evident in some Christian styles, elevate works above faith. ‘Don’t study your soul, help your neighbour!’ One must no doubt do both and is likely to be tending soul if helping neighbour and vice versa, though this is not always so, and there may be strongly felt choices and tensions. Political idealism and even social earnestness can lead to callousness and cruelty. In the context of politicised morals, a morality of axioms has importance as a presentation of certain independent, separated, values. There is nothing new about this configuration. The term ‘natural law’ names a sort of human and humane standard which accompanies the detail of ordinary (positive) law and provides a critique of the uses of political power. The Greeks thought of the gods (Zeus, the Erinyes) as providers of ‘limits’. Roman law recognised a general experiential common-sense. Medieval Christianity saw natural law as the law of God, the Enlightenment as the law of Reason. The American and French declarations of Rights speak of truths which are ‘self-evident’ and ‘simple and indisputable principles’. And we, although our confidence in Reason has been shaken (for instance by Hitler), also appeal to a special kind of intuitive morality connected with an idea of human nature. We are still using the language of Locke and Tom Paine, concerning ‘natural rights’, ‘toleration’, the ‘rights of man’. Politicians assert ‘human rights’, law courts listen to pleas for ‘natural justice’. The Nuremberg courts (after Hitler’s war) used the authority of ‘natural law’. The Helsinki Agreement of 1975 spoke of ‘human rights’. The definition and role of ‘natural law’ must always remain in dispute, but its influential presence is of continuing importance and value, even when it receives only lip service. It is a special case of an intuitive axiomatic moral understanding. (I shall discuss similar cases shortly.) Its status (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) ‘cuts off the way to an explanation’. It is not deducible from, or a priori excluded by, particular political systems or theories. Natural law, natural rights, may be said to have a ‘special relation’ with utilitarianism, since happiness is the most universally recognisable human value; and through the value of liberty, with liberal theory. But essentially these ideas move around in an atmosphere of their own outside existing legal and political arrang
ements. D’Entrèves says that natural law ‘provides a name for the point of intersection between law and morals’ (Natural Law, last chapter). It also represents a mode of thinking which can become a morality of its own, and in fact now provides for many people a general ethical viewpoint which is separate both from politicised social theory and from traditional personal morals. I mean the mixed area often ‘highly motivated’, which includes the promotion of women’s rights, black rights, animal rights, the rights of the planet (ecology), one could even add liberation theology where the identification of Christ with the poor inspires a passion for justice which is sui generis and not a subsection of either Marxism or dogmatic Christianity. The flag of natural rights or natural law has often been that of revolutionary change. As we have been seeing in the last decade of the twentieth century.
‘If we regard man as a being whose existence is a punishment and an expiation we then view him in a right light. The myth of the Fall ... is the only point in the Old Testament to which I can ascribe metaphysical, although only allegorical, truth; indeed it is this alone which reconciles me to the Old Testament. Our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a false step and a guilty desire. New Testament Christianity, the ethical spirit of which is that of Brahmanism and Buddhism, and is therefore very foreign to the otherwise optimistic spirit of the Old Testament, has also very wisely linked itself on precisely to that truth: indeed without this it would have found no point of contact with Judaism at all. If anyone desires to measure the degree of guilt with which our existence is tainted, then let him look at the suffering which is connected with it.’
(WWI, Supplement to Book IV, ch. xlvi.)
These words of Schopenhauer may prompt various reactions. The ‘Buddhism of the New Testament’ is interesting and ambiguous, to be amended perhaps by Christians in the light of Romans 8. 22, ‘The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.’ The spectacle of the terrible suffering of others may prompt not only sympathy but also a sense of guilt which may be overwhelming. (This was felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust.) So it may be felt that not only ‘personal spirituality’, but also moral philosophy and traditional theology are out of place in a world tormented by poverty, misery and cruelty: that old-fashioned theoretical generalisations, or calm reflections upon inwardness, are too abstract and dreamy and indeed selfish to be true for a post-Hitler post-Stalin over-populated nuclear planet. Such an attitude may make benevolent social fanatics, or could lead to terrorism, where a particular cause, idolised as just, produces a callous indifference to other values. But one does not have to choose between activism and inwardness or feel that one is bound to swallow the other. A morality of axioms needs the intuitive control of a more widely reflective and general morality. In a good society these ways of thinking, while always in tension, know their roles and places, and when they have rights against each other. This procedure belongs with political liberalism. The acceptance of parliamentary democratic government itself involves a deliberate limitation of our morally inspired activity, as when we keep our objections to government policy within the law, or carefully define and delimit occasions of conscientious law-breaking. Decisions about the use of illegality and violence in politics live close to an axiomatic background, but should also depend upon personal moral conscience and common-sense. Law-breaking in a bad unfree state is more excusable than law-breaking in a good free state, where laws and situations can be changed by legal unviolent means. Yet in any state there may be strong grounds for preferring respect for law (even bad law) to alternatives. (See Hobbes.) A habit of law-breaking is a dangerous tendency and conscientious protesting may seem to licence irresponsible, even criminal, activities. (We must be deemed potential knaves.) These are familiar problems. It is not the fundamental duty of the state to make us good. It is the fundamental task of each person to make himself good. Hobbes also suggests that moral philosophers ought to realise that ̒̒̓virtues’ are ̒̓good ̓because they are ‘the means of peaceable, sociable and comfortable living’. (Leviathan, Part I, ch. 15.) It is, one might say, the duty of the state to make ‘decent arrangements’. Politics concerns large crude decisions affecting large numbers of heterogeneous people. Politics is about other people with individual interests. Think how crude and clumsy all government is and has to be. Of course in modern democracies the liberal (political) individual and the moral individual constantly overlap, as when we argue about pornography, pacificism, abortion, medicine and hundreds of topics which are in the newspapers every day. The discussion and clarification of such topics are often proper tasks of the democratic liberal state, in the context of decisions about what is and what is not ‘the state’s business’ or ‘the government’s duty’. We recognise and attach importance to sometimes unclear distinctions between public political standards and private personal morals, between sin and crime, between the claims of happiness and goodness, and equality and freedom. We in Britain have many rules to prevent people killing themselves and others in cars, but no rules to prevent them killing themselves and others on mountains; whereas in Russia there are much stricter rules about who is allowed to go up mountains. Reflection upon this could lead us back to the bases of political theory. Modern states, if they are rich enough, may tend toward becoming ‘nannies’ to their citizens, and we argue about how far this tendency should go. The Welfare State is a good thing, but can it go too far? When does a nanny become a tyrant? We activate the value of freedom against the value of happiness, and for this to be possible the master axioms must be separate. The right to be free is not internally connected with the right to be happy. The explanation that is ‘̒cut off’ would be one that attempts to connect where connection is not appropriate, for instance by redefining freedom and happiness in relation to a single social ideal. Faced with political theorising (if told for instance that in obedience to the General Will we are, with Rousseau, ‘forced to be free’), we appeal to ideas of freedom or happiness as sui generis. This lack of connection, characteristic of liberal political thinking, should be contrasted with the way in which private morality discovers the interconnection of the virtues. The lack of internal relations acts as a defence of the citizen as Hobbesian individual. That we, politically, ‘are’ such individuals is axiomatic.
Citizens of liberal democratic states can argue about whether to be more free and less comfortable or more happy and less rich or more equal and less free and so on and so on, and a great many different kinds of considerations bear on these arguments which are made possible by a certain fundamental refusal of system. It is characteristic of totalitarian states to refuse access to such choices and to prohibit such discussion, intimating to the citizenry that (for instance) the system which makes them orderly is also making them happy and good. A denial of human variety and the rights which the fact of variety carries, the is-and-ought-to-be aspect of human life, lies behind totalitarian reasoning, which has also relied upon a claim to be scientific and therefore efficient. How false such a claim could be has been demonstrated by the fate of the Soviet Union. The manifest lies involved in the imposition of such a view can produce cynicism and despair, or else simply perpetuate some demoralising simplicity or lack of education in the society. When I was in China I asked a question about ‘̒homosexuality’, a word with which our otherwise excellent interpreter was unfamiliar. When I explained its meaning in other terms, I was told that there was no such thing in China. So if homosexuals do not exist they clearly cannot have rights. The famous Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and other pronouncements in this style illustrate a conceptual impoverishment or concept-starvation, a thinking-by-slogans. Orwell’s book 1984 exhibits such impoverishment as deliberately fostered by cynical rulers. Of course ordinary idealistic persons can, in various circumstances, readily embrace all kinds of simplified nonsense; and a few crude ideas can inspire unselfish citizens to render genuine service to their society. But in politics a great many people can be led by a few simple notions to bring about
a lot of irreversible change. Consider the simplicity of the slogans which prompted or ̒justified’ the Red Guards who helped to destroy Chinese society in the ‘Cultural Revolution’. In any state there are always plenty of motives for destructive activity, but concept-starvation makes it easier for a few leaders to turn their citizens into a centrally directed herd. How true it is that nevertheless the human spirit cannot be quenched is proved by the events of 1989 in eastern Europe which, when I wrote the above, lay in the future.