Damon,
Excellent question, and I agree that the answer does depend on what we mean by “liberalism.” That is too long a post for me to undertake right now. It would mean a dissection of a swath of history that starts with John Locke and continues to the present
day. But by liberalism, I mean something like the philosophy that privileges the individual and his—okay, historically speaking, usually his—rights over social institutions and the power of social institutions, these institutions being the things to which
societies usually turn for morals, norms, rules, laws, shared traditions, etc. Liberalism has many modern variants, in the same way that conservatism, socialism, authoritarianism, etc., do, from the classical liberalism that in the modern era is called libertarianism
and that rests on a notion of an abstract individual with certain basic rights that are culturally invariant to the multiculturalism that embraces the rights of each and every identity group within a society—perhaps we might call this something like identitarianism,
although I fear that my coinage may actually refer to some established position in political philosophy that I have never heard of. This multicultural view would involve an individual’s right to have his, her, or their cultural background, not just the Lockean-Jeffersonian
rights of life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, recognized as part of his, her, or their individuality. But since all forms of liberalism privilege the individual’s perspective over a perspective involving shared norms, moral relativism is always
a danger and therefore the first thing that political and philosophical conservatives attack when attempting to debate liberals. They have point, a point similarly made, interestingly enough also by socialists, that the abstract individual is a fiction, that
humans always live within shared social contexts and traditions. Meanwhile, liberals usually attack the moral certitude, if not absolutism, of conservatives, this particular attack on moral absolutism being the whole point of liberalism in all of its varieties.
But it is absolutely possible for there to be a kind of liberal intolerance, a certain smugness about the rightness of one’s tolerance, that many conservatives, for good reason, find enraging and that can be as much a form of moral absolutism as any form
of absolutism promulgated by any religious authority. I hear told that I have even fallen prey to this kind of intolerance myself a time or two, even though, I will repeat, I am actually quite suspicious of unalloyed individualism and of moral relativism
as intellectual and ethical positions, in large part because I do not believe that there are abstract individuals, independent of shared social context and also because I think moral relativism to be incoherent. Nevertheless, in stereotypical liberal intolerance,
anyone who disagrees with liberal tolerance is intolerantly suppressed. The stereotype here is the liberal so concerned with the rights of every oppressed or marginalized group that he, she, or they forgets that religious conservatives, social conservatives,
political conservatives, etc. have rights too. Good luck on figuring how to assert what one perceives as the rightness of one’s moral and political views, a rightness that I am sure everyone feels regarding his, her, or their political and moral opinions,
while respecting others with differing views, views that one finds not only wrong but even pernicious or reprehensible.
On a different thread, Harris Friedman also raises the question of moral relativism, and if I have understood him correctly, something I am not sure I have done, he points out that certainty is much easier to come by in the physical sciences than it is
in the social sciences, which are infiltrated with all kinds of value concerns, and therefore, even more so, in the matter of morals and ethics, which by definition are entirely about values. I agree. That is why moral relativism, despite its incoherence,
has a point. Once we have decided that there really is no objective way to know, for example, which set of (usually but not necessarily) religious or political beliefs is correct, and once we have decided that we do not want to kill each other because we
cannot arrive at agreement here, then the main workable solution are philosophical liberalism, with its attendant moral relativism, and some form of procedural democracy that also protects individual rights. Thus, for the last 200+ years, as an evolving project,
for what was morally acceptable back then is not necessarily what is morally acceptable today, we govern by majority rule, but when it comes to individual beliefs and life practices, we try, often unsuccessfully, to allow a thousand flowers to bloom. But
almost everyone I have ever met believes, in his, her, or their heart of hearts, that his, her, or their moral, religious, political, etc. beliefs are correct. I would like to find an ethical position that is neither relativist, since it leads to incoherence,
nor absolutist, since leads to tyranny. If anyone has any solutions here, don’t be shy; please step up and share them.
Some of these issues are discussed, with brilliance, by Charles Taylor in
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, a book I strongly recommend, but I am afraid that, much though I agree with his Hegelian-intersubjectivist analysis, he does not have the answer either.
John S. Auerbach, PhD
On Jan 24, 2019, at 7:58 PM, Damon LaBarbera <00000051867784e1-dmarc-request@LISTSERV.ICORS.ORG> wrote:
~Psychology Practice in FloridaSome excellent writing lately, jeesh….
One observation....
Dr. Auerbach notes that liberalism has an Achilles heel, which is moral relativism. But does liberalism in 2019, given the strident time we live in, have the same underlying moral relativity as in prior decades? Does moral relativism drop as people become more upset. Is a shift towards moral certitude happening culturally? And if moral relativity becomes a bygone component of liberalism--does that alter the fundamental quality of liberal thought?
Damon L
