Moral Categories in Politics
Categories of Moral Action
A moral system defines how one views the world, how one comprehends hundreds of events, great and small, every day. One of the major ways in which a moral system characterizes worldview is through categorization. Each moral system creates a number of fixed major categories for moral action. Those major categories allow us to classify actions instantly into those that are moral and those that are not, with little or no reflection. Sometimes, we may have trouble fitting an action or event to a category, but mostly we barely notice that we are even classifying. These classifications may sometimes be reflected on consciously and classifications of actions may be changed when we reason consciously. But on the whole, our first unreflective classification stands.
CONSERVATIVE MORAL CATEGORIES
The conservative (Strict Father) and liberal (Nurturant Parent) moral priorities create two different systems for categorizing moral actions. Let us look at them one at a time. Here is the conservative system:
Conservative categories of moral action:
1. Promoting Strict Father morality in general.
2. Promoting self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance.
3. Upholding the Morality of Reward and Punishment
a. Preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people.
b. Promoting punishment as a means of upholding authority.
c. Insuring punishment for lack of self-discipline.
4. Protecting moral people from external evils.
5. Upholding the Moral Order.
I have listed five major categories. There may be more, but these are all used a great deal and will suffice for our purposes. Let us look at each category to see where it comes from in the moral system.
1. Promoting Strict Father morality.
Several metaphors imply a strict good-evil division, in particular, Moral Strength, Moral Boundaries, and Moral Authority. Moral Strength sees evil as a force in the world, reifying it and distinguishing it from good. Moral Boundaries are drawn strictly and clearly between right and wrong. And Moral Authority sets rules to be obeyed, rules that define what is right and distinguish it from what is wrong. The moral system itself, of course, is right—so right that it defines what right is. Defending that system, which defines the very nature of right and wrong, is the primary moral obligation. Actions promoting or protecting the moral system are therefore moral; actions against the moral system are therefore immoral.
2. Promoting self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance.
The primacy of Moral Strength implies that these are primary virtues. Actions promoting these primary virtues are thus moral; actions discouraging them are therefore immoral.
3. Upholding the Morality of Reward and Punishment
The very notions of reward and punishment are based on the metaphor of moral accounting, as discussed in Chapter 4.
Strict Father morality assumes that it is human nature that people operate in terms of rewards and punishments. Rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience are crucial to maintaining moral authority; as such, they lie at the heart of this moral system and are thus moral. Actions that uphold the reward-punishment system are therefore moral. Actions against the reward-punishment system are immoral.
There are three important special cases. They are: 3a. Preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people.
The pursuit of self-interest is a system of reward for being self-disciplined and self-reliant, which are primary moral requirements according to Moral Strength. Interfering with this system of reward for being moral is therefore immoral. Preventing such interference is therefore moral.
3b. Promoting punishment as a means of upholding authority.
In Strict Father morality, legitimate authority must be upheld at all costs or the moral system ceases to function. Punishment for violating authority is the main way in which authority is maintained. It is therefore moral to promote punishment for violations of legitimate authority and immoral to act against it.
3c. Insuring punishment for lack of self-discipline.
Moral Strength makes self-discipline a primary moral requirement and the lack of it immoral. Therefore, actions ensuring punishment for moral weakness are moral; actions going against punishment for moral weakness are immoral.
4. Protecting moral people from external evils.
Since protection from external evils is a fundamental part of Strict Father morality, protective actions are moral and inhibiting them is immoral.
5. Upholding the Moral Order.
Since the Moral Order defines legitimate authority, actions upholding it are moral, and actions going against it are immoral.
These categories of moral action greatly facilitate using the moral system. They provide a simplified, conventional way of putting the moral system into practice.
LIBERAL MORAL ACTION
Liberals, too, have categories of moral action, and not surprisingly, they look very different from conservative categories.
Liberal categories of moral action:
1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness.
2. Helping those who cannot help themselves.
3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves.
4. Promoting fulfillment in life.
5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above.
Again, let us look at where they come from, one by one.
1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness.
The primacy of Morality as Empathy makes empathy a moral priority. Morality as Fairness is a consequence; if you empathize with others, you will want them to be treated fairly. This makes empathetic actions and actions promoting fairness into moral actions. Correspondingly, a lack of empathetic behavior, or actions going against fairness, are immoral.
2. Helping those who cannot help themselves.
The priority given to Morality as Nurturance makes it moral to help someone who cannot help himself, and immoral not to do so if one can.
3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves.
The priority of protection in Nurturant Parent morality makes it moral to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and immoral not to do so when one can.
4. Promoting fulfillment in life.
Moral Happiness and Moral Self-Development make it moral to promote fulfillment in life and immoral to work against it. Fulfillment includes developing your potential in a variety of areas, having meaningful work, being basically happy, and so on.
5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above.
To nurture properly, one must be strong and healthy and must feel nurtured oneself. Therefore acts of taking care of oneself or helping others take care of themselves are moral acts. Since being neglectful of one’s health and strength imposes an unfair burden on others, it is immoral not to take care of oneself or to impede others from doing so.
For the sake of comparison, let us look at both moral category systems together:
Conservative categories of moral action:
1. Promoting Strict Father morality in general.
2. Promoting self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance.
3. Upholding the Morality of Reward and Punishment.
a. Preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people.
b. Promoting punishment as a means of upholding au thority.
c. Ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline.
4. Protecting moral people from external evils.
5. Upholding the Moral Order.
Liberal categories of moral action:
1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness.
2. Helping those who cannot help themselves.
3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves.
4. Promoting fulfillment in life.
5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above.
These categories define the first moral questions one “asks” unconsciously and automatically of any action. If it is in one of the categories, it is moral; if it is in the opposite category, it isn’t moral. Whatever other system of categories one may have—and any conceptual system has a great many—when one is functioning politically, these moral categories are primary. The categories define opposing moral worldviews, worldviews so different that virtually every aspect of public policy looks radically different through these lenses.
Take a simple example: college loans. The federal government has had a program to provide low-interest loans to college students. The students don’t have to start paying off the loans while they are still in college and the loans are interest-free during the college years. The liberal rationale for the program is this: College is expensive and a great many poor-to-middle-class students cannot afford it. This loan program allows a great many students to go to college who otherwise wouldn’t. Going to college allows one to get a better job at a higher salary afterward and to be paid more during one’s entire life. This benefits not only the student but also the government, since the student will be paying more taxes over his lifetime because of his better job.
From the liberal moral perspective, this is a highly moral program. It helps those who cannot help themselves (Category 2). It promotes fulfillment in life in two ways, since education is fulfilling in itself and it permits people to get more fulfilling jobs (Category 4). It strengthens the nation, since it produces a better-educated citizenry and ultimately brings in more tax money (Category 5); and it is empathetic behavior (Category 1) making access to college more fairly distributed (Category 1).
But through conservative spectacles, this is an immoral program. Since students depend on the loans, the program supports dependence on the government rather than self-reliance (Category 2). Since not everyone has access to such loans, the program introduces competitive unfairness, thus interfering with the free market in loans and hence with the fair pursuit of self-interest (Category 3a). Since the program takes money earned by one group and, through taxation, gives it to another group, it is unfair and penalizes the pursuit of self-interest by taking money from someone who has earned it and giving it to someone who hasn’t (Category 3a).
I started with college loans because it is not as heated an issue as abortion or welfare or the death penalty or gun control. Yet it is a nitty-gritty issue, because it affects a lot of people very directly. To a liberal, it is obviously the right thing to do. And to a conservative, it is obviously the wrong thing to do. The metaphors for morality that give rise to these inferences are the following. For the liberals: Moral Empathy, Moral Nurturance, Moral Self-Development, and Moral Self-Nurturance. For the conservatives: Moral Strength, Moral Self-interest, and Moral Accounting (the metaphorical basis of the concepts of Reward and Punishment).
The point of this example is that policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, namely, college loans. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family. The role of morality and the family is inescapable, even if you are only talking about college loans policy.
Model Citizens and Demons
Conservative and liberal categories for moral action create for each moral system a notion of a model citizen—an ideal prototype—a citizen who best exemplifies forms of moral action.
CONSERVATIVE MODEL CITIZENS
In the conservative moral worldview, the model citizens are those who best fit all the conservative categories for moral action. They are those (1) who have conservative values and act to support them; (2) who are self-disciplined and self-reliant; (3) who uphold the morality of reward and punishment; (4) who work to protect moral citizens; and (5) who act in support of the moral order. Those who best fit all these categories are successful, wealthy, law-abiding conservative businessmen who support a strong military and a strict criminal justice system, who are against government regulation, and who are against affirmative action. They are the model citizens. They are the people whom all Americans should emulate and from whom we have nothing to fear. They deserve to be rewarded and respected.
These model citizens fit an elaborate mythology. They have succeeded through hard work, have earned whatever they have through their own self-discipline, and deserve to keep what they have earned. Through their success and wealth they create jobs, which they “give” to other citizens. Simply by investing their money to maximize their earnings, they become philanthropists who “give” jobs to others and thereby “create wealth” for others. Part of the myth is that these model citizens have been given nothing by the government and have made it on their own. The American Dream is that any honest, self-disciplined, hard-working person can do the same. These model citizens are seen by conservatives as the Ideal Americans in the American Dream.
CONSERVATIVE DEMONS
Correspondingly, conservatives have a demonology. Conservative moral categories produce a categorization of citizens-from-hell: anti-ideal prototypes. These nightmare citizens are those who, by their very nature, violate one or more of the conservative moral categories; and the more categories they violate, the more demonic they are.
CATEGORY 1 DEMONS: Those who are against conservative values (e.g., Strict Father morality). Feminists, gays, and other “deviants” are at the top of the list, since they condemn the very nature of the Strict Father family. Others are the advocates of multiculturalism, who reject the primacy of the Strict Father; postmodern humanists, who deny the existence of any absolute values; egalitarians, who are against moral authority, the moral order, and any other kind of hierarchy.
CATEGORY 2 DEMONS: Those whose lack of self-discipline has led to a lack of self-reliance. Unwed mothers on welfare are high on the list, since their lack of sexual self-control has led to their dependence on the state. Others are unemployed drug users, whose drug habit has led to their being unable to support themselves; able-bodied people on welfare—they can work and they aren’t working, so (in this land of opportunity) they are assumed to be lazy and dependent on others.
CATEGORY 3 DEMONS: Protecters of the “public good.” Included here are environmentalists, consumer advocates, advocates of affirmative action, and advocates of government-supported universal health care who want the government to interfere with the pursuit of self-interest and thus constrain the business activities of the conservatives’ model citizens.
CATEGORY 4 DEMONS: Those who oppose the ways that the military and criminal justice systems have operated. They include antiwar protesters, advocates of prisoners’ rights, opponents of police brutality, and so on. Gun control advocates are high on this list, since they would take guns away from those who need them to protect themselves and their families both from criminals and from possible government tyranny. Abortion doctors may be the worst, since they directly kill the most innocent people of all, the unborn.
CATEGORY 5 DEMONS: Advocates of equal rights for women, gays, nonwhites, and ethnic Americans. They work to upset the moral order.
The demon-of-all-demons for conservatives is, not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton! She’s an uppity woman (Category 5, opposing the moral order), a former antiwar activist who is pro-choice (Category 4), a protector of the “public good” (Category 3), someone who gained her influence not on her own but through her husband (Category 2), and a supporter of multiculturalism (Category 1). It would be hard for the conservatives to invent a better demon-of-all-demons.
These categories are extremely stable and they resist efforts at change. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich found this out shortly after the 1994 elections, when he sought to recategorize the best model citizens of all—large successful corporations and the people who run them. Reich attempted to use the conservative demonization of welfare recipients against the conservative conception of model citizens. He attacked big corporations and the ultrarich for being recipients of “corporate welfare.” Reich pointed out that large corporations owned by the ultrarich receive from the government huge amounts of money that they do not earn: money from inordinately cheap grazing rights, mineral and timber rights, infrastructure development that supports their businesses, agricultural price supports, and hundreds of other kinds of enormous government largesse that come out of the taxpayer’s pocketbook—an amount far exceeding the cost of social programs. If the government eliminated corporate welfare, Reich argued, then it could easily afford social programs to help the poor.
Reich’s attempt to turn the conservatives’ model citizens into conservative demons was doomed to failure, and it fell flat immediately. The reason is clear. The status of successful corporations and the ultrarich as model citizens has become conventionalized—fixed in the conservative mind. They are icons, standard examples to conservatives of what model citizens are. Moreover, they do not fit the stereotype of welfare recipients. They are seen as self-disciplined, energetic, competent, and resourceful rather than self-indulgent, lazy, unskilled, and hapless.
Reich’s attempt to call attention to the enormous unearned largesse bestowed by the government on big corporations failed because he did not really understand the conservative worldview and the cognitive structure underlying American politics. The conservative heroes and demons are what they are for the deepest of reasons, because conservatism rests on a widespread, deeply entrenched family-based moral system. You don’t change that with a single speech.
LIBERAL MODEL CITIZENS
Liberals have a very different notion of a model citizen, again generated by liberal moral categories. The ideal liberal citizen is socially responsible, and fits as many of the liberal moral categories as possible. The model liberal citizen (1) is empathetic; (2) helps the disadvantaged; (3) protects those who need protection; (4) promotes and exemplifies fulfillment in life; and (5) takes care of himself so he can do all this. Model liberal citizens are those who live a socially responsible life: they include socially responsible professionals; environmental, consumer, and minority rights advocates; union organizers among impoverished and badly treated workers; doctors and social workers who devote their lives to helping the poor and the elderly; peace advocates, educators, artists, and those in the healing professions. Interestingly, there does not seem to be any identifiable type in American life that is a model citizen in all of these ways. There have certainly been individuals who have been models in one or another of these ways, e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy, and, for many, Hillary Clinton.
LIBERAL DEMONS
There is, of course, as rich a liberal demonology as there is a conservative one. Those who violate categories 1 to 5 are the monsters of society.
CATEGORY 1 DEMONS: The mean-spirited, selfish, and unfair—those who have no empathy and show no sense of social responsibility. Wealthy companies and businessmen who only care about profit are at the top of the list, because of their power and political influence.
CATEGORY 2 DEMONS: Those who would ignore, harm, or exploit the disadvantaged. Union-busting companies are a classic example, as are large agricultural firms that exploit farm workers, say, by exposing them to poisonous pesticides and paying them poorly.
CATEGORY 3 DEMONS: Those whose activities hurt people or the environment. They include violent criminals and out-of-control police, polluters, those who make unsafe products or engage in consumer fraud, developers with no sense of ecology, and large companies that make extensive profits from government subsidies (e.g., mining, grazing, water, and lumber subsidies) by contributing to the coffers of politicians.
CATEGORY 4 DEMONS: Those who are against public support of education, art, and scholarship.
CATEGORY 5 DEMONS: Those who are against the expansion of health care for the general public.
If there is a demon-of-all-demons for liberals, it is Newt Gingrich.
It should come as no surprise that conservative model citizens are often liberal demons, and conversely. Now that we know what conservatives and liberals consider basic moral categories, model citizens, and citizens-from-hell, other general political and social attitudes fall into place.
Incidentally, the theory given here explains many things: why we have the categories of moral actions that we have, why we have the model citizens we have, and why we have the demons we have. The categories for moral actions arise from the metaphors in the moral system. The model citizens and demons arise from the categories of moral actions.
Categories of Policies
The college loan program is illustrative of the great gulf between conservative and liberal moral categories. But it is, in itself, not a very interesting example, since it is not general enough. College loans are not a great issue of our time, the way, say, affirmative action, environmentalism, and abortion are. A more enlightening way to look at the way moral categorization affects public policy is to consider how whole classes of policies fit into the moral categories of liberals and conservatives.
In the next chapter, we will begin to use conservative and liberal moral categories, model citizenry, and demonology to answer the questions we started with about the great issues. Why do stands on the great issues cluster as they do, with opponents of gun control also opposed to social programs, progressive taxation, gay rights, multiculturalism, and abortion, and so on, while proponents of gun control have the opposite views on these issues. What is the logic behind this clustering? And what is the logic that each side uses against the other?
VARIATIONS
As you read through the next several chapters, recall that their purpose is to account for those who (1) have a coherent politics, that is, those who are strictly liberal or strictly conservative, and (2) those liberals and conservatives who share the central model. But many readers either do not have a coherent politics or are not central cases of liberals or conservatives. As a result, many readers will feel, rightfully, that one position or other that I am discussing does not apply to them. The reason, I believe, is that such readers are not prototypical, and I am describing central prototypes. Many readers thus will either fall under one of the variants of the central model, or have some mix of both liberal and conservative political attitudes. The parameters of variation on the central models will be described in Chapter 17, and those variations should account for a great many more readers’ views.
The study of variations is a very important part of this project, since the analysis of the central cases predicts that certain ranges of variations should occur. Systematic variations based on fixed parameters of variation are not counterexamples to such a theory; rather they are confirmatory instances.