Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (15 page)

An entitlement culture also fosters the view that other people are responsible for meeting your needs, whereas you yourself are usually the person best placed to meet them. Finally, in a world where entitlements compete, as they inevitably will, we will tend to take a defensive attitude to taking on responsibility, because we will fear what people will demand of us if we do.

All these are reasons for wanting to organise society in such a way that entitlement does not become the habitual concept we reach for when understanding our relationship to the world. However, there are signs that this is exactly what too many do already. Young people increasingly expect to have designer clothes, the latest gadgets and, when they are older, a car. Women’s magazines sell the idea that a woman is entitled to great sex, regular orgasms, love and respect. Men’s magazines also present great sex, great bodies (their own and women’s) and great gadgets as the birthright of any fertile young male.

If this is indeed a pernicious trend, how can we curb it? Not, I think, by denying the internal logic of legal responsibility, but by rejecting the whole framework as an inappropriate basis for social interaction. We should not throw out all legislation that holds people to account, but when it comes to difficult grey areas, we should err on the side of risk. Life is inherently perilous, and if we create a society in which we attempt
to legislate danger out of existence, we create a false sense, not of security, but of entitlement to good fortune.

The overall thrust of my argument about the grievance culture is that it places law above ethics, and this leads to three bad consequences: responsibility being denied in some places and inappropriately ascribed in others; a self-imposed curtailment of freedom through fear of litigation and intolerance of risk; and an impoverished culture of entitlement. The obvious conclusion would therefore be to advocate a rejection of legalistic thinking about social norms and to encourage a return to ethics instead. I think this is right, but it is far from clear how it could be achieved.

What we cannot and should not have is a return to authority-based morality. Politically and socially this will not work, since the world has become far too pluralistic for any authority to hold sway in a sustainable way. In the West this is obvious: even the USA, the most religious of all developed countries, has a tremendous diversity of religious denominations, none of which acknowledges the authority of the others. But even in the ‘Islamic world’, as it is sweepingly called, it is not clear that strong clerical authority has a future. People are simply exposed to too many foreign influences, and when people see choices, they start to choose for themselves.

Iran is a fascinating case in point. I have never been to the country, but you only have to see the films that have come out of it and read stories from people who live there to see that this theocratic country also has a strong secular current in its culture. A small but revealing example is Jafar Panahi’s film
Offside
, which showed the attempts of some girls to get into an all-male stadium to watch the national football team. It sounds like a tale of bitter struggle against an authoritarian regime, but what is striking is how few characters show any deep commitment to the theology which justifies the girls’ exclusion. It’s a feeling you get from many other Iranian films. Whatever the ebbs and flows of theocracy, in the longer run there are reasons to hope that the Middle East too will be unable to base its polity on divine authority.

Setting the Middle East aside, in the West this is already an incontrovertible fact. There is no chance of a reversal because the major religions are and will remain Christian, and the authority of organised Christianity is spent. The worldwide Anglican Communion has revealed itself to be the most thoroughgoing relativist religion of all. It embraces African bishops who think homosexuality is an abomination and south London clerics who openly live with their boyfriends. When it rejected its centuries-long ban on women clergy, it tacitly acknowledged that it was now following a moral agenda set by others (thankfully) and no longer leading it.

The Roman Catholic Church likes to present itself as a rock, compared to this wishy-washy Protestant malleability, but the history of that Church also leaves any claims it has to moral authority in tatters. It may move more slowly, but its views have also varied according to history and fashion, with the liberalising agenda of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 being largely reversed during the papacy of John Paul II. Its history is full of ignominy, including the Borgias, paedophile priests (and a reluctance to deal with them) and the virtual imprisonment and abuse of girls deemed immoral on spurious grounds in Ireland. Whatever good the Church may have done, it has simply done too much that is bad for it to
command any moral authority with any but the most devout of its members.

Evangelical Christianity is even more bankrupt because it claims to take its authority from the Bible. But anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Bible history will realise that this is not a document effectively dictated by God but a very human book, written by various people with different agendas, several decades (and sometimes centuries), after the events they profess to describe. For hundreds of years the books of the New Testament co-existed with many others now deemed heretical, and nothing in the manner of their canonisation suggests that God was in charge of the process. It is a mystery why any intelligent person would think that ‘the Bible says’ is a moral argument for anything. Yet this is what Evangelical Christians standardly do think. The idea that the majority of the population will ever buy this is frankly absurd.

The obvious alternative is that the return to ethics should be secular in nature. The problem is that secular ethics has so far utterly failed to win the hearts and minds of the masses. At best, it leaves people with a set of limpid platitudes such as ‘you should treat people decently’; at worst, it has led to a widespread acceptance of the most vapid and pernicious form of relativism, in which ‘there’s no right or wrong, it’s just whatever you think’.

Moral philosophy has the potential to be a help or a hindrance in this regard, and the way the subject is usually taught, it looks more like a hindrance. Most people who study it are presented with a standard trio of moral frameworks: conse-quentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. On this view, conse-quentialists believe that actions are right or wrong solely in terms of whether they produce good or bad outcomes; deontologists believe that some acts are right or wrong in
themselves, regardless of their consequences; and virtue theorists say that being good is not about following strict rules but about developing the moral character to make ethical choices. To give these caricatures a concrete example, conse-quentialists would say that whether torture is wrong depends on whether, on balance, it leads to more goods than harms; a deontologist would say that torture is wrong in itself; and a virtue theorist would say that torture is not something one can imagine a virtuous person doing, but who knows, there may be exceptions.

Of course, these are very crude summaries, but someone studying moral philosophy probably ends their course with the take-home message that moral theory is pretty much like this. The question then becomes, which view is right? There is absolutely no consensus on this, and I think it would take a brave philosopher to say there ever will be. So just as the plurality of moral authorities leaves all of them emaciated, so the plurality of secular moral frameworks leaves no one of them able to command widespread assent. Hence there is nothing to facilitate the kind of return to ethics that can fill the vacuum left by the decline of traditional morality more convincingly than legalism.

However, there is another way of looking at moral philosophy which has more potential. Although there is no consensus as to which moral theory is the right one, there is a tacit acceptance of a common procedure for thinking through moral theories. This can be summed up as the view that moral discourse is a democratic, rational activity. It works by assessing the different reasons given for or against a particular course of action in a way that defers to no authority. This is the way in which ethics committees work: they do not require everyone involved to subscribe to the same fundamental theory of
ethics. Rather, they demand that people effectively set these aside and offer only such reasons as can be assessed and judged by the common standards of rationality. It is democratic, not in the sense that it necessarily follows majority opinion, but in the sense that contributions to the debate are assessed on the merits of the arguments, not on the status of the person offering them.

Where univocality is required, a consensus has to be reached which leaves many parties unsatisfied. For example, society has to decide on the legal status of abortion. People’s fundamental commitments on this are just incompatible: Catholics regard it as murder, whereas many others defend a mother’s right to choose. However, a nation has either to ban or to allow it: there has to be one law which applies to everyone. A Catholic on an ethics committee or commission will therefore probably find themselves on the losing side of the debate. Nevertheless, just as long as everyone can see the general value of democratic, rational debate for resolving such matters in a pluralistic society, this has to be swallowed.

The fact of pluralism means that, whenever univocality is not essential, plurality should be allowed as much as possible. Shops can open on Sundays if they wish, and those who think it impious to go to them can stay at home. Your religion can ban blasphemy, but civil society will not. You may think living together outside marriage is wrong, but the law will not condemn those who choose to do so. This is not the kind of lazy relativism that says morality is just whatever you think it is; it is simply a recognition of two facts about morality. The first is a contingent one: as a matter of fact, reasonable people do not agree on fundamental moral values. In the absence of consensus it is more reasonable to allow as much diversity of opinion as is compatible with a cohesive, workable polis. The
second is a more fundamental one: moral values are plural, and there is more than one way of living a good life. This is more contentious, but I think it is reasonable to hypothesise that we will never find one way of living, one way of ordering society, which is best for everyone. Some genuine goods push out other equally legitimate ones. A more mobile society is also a less cohesive one, but can we ever say, once and for all, that mobility trumps cohesion or vice versa? The alternative is to allow different societies, or parts of them, to embody these different goods. For instance, cities celebrate the value of diversity and mobility, while smaller towns may embody the values of stability and cohesion.

Such a pluralist society can nevertheless have a strong ethical culture, just as long as it is widely recognised that decisions about what is right and wrong, whether collective or individual, are based on the rational giving and assessing of reasons. It does not matter that we disagree over what the most fundamental moral values are, as long as we agree that there is a meaningful procedure for talking about and resolving questions of ethics.

How might such an ethical society be nurtured? Education plays a role. There has been enthusiastic talk of ‘philosophy for children’ programmes in recent years, much of it confused because it misunderstands what this usually involves. I think the description is misleading: children are not being taught philosophy but are being taught how to talk about issues and values together, respecting different opinions and coming to collective decisions. In contrast, philosophy is, more often than not, a gladiatorial contest in which the aim is to emerge as the last one standing in a vicious war of words and logic.

Even if ‘philosophy for children’ is a misnomer, it does have a part to play in facilitating the return to ethics I favour.
It should be tried, because the alternative is too grim. What are the lessons about ethics that most of us left school having learned? First, that rules are set by grown-ups and you follow them because you have to – but without teachers anything is permitted. Second, that different religions have different moral outlooks and (if you’re lucky) so do different philosophers – so you just choose the one you fancy, or choose none, since clearly none is right. Third, there’s no real truth about ethics because you’ve learned that everyone has different views, but you’re also told to respect them all – young people thus enter adult life with no sense that ethics is meaningful or rigorous. Fourth, there is no sense of any connection between ‘morality’ and what it means for one’s own life to go well – morality is too often seen as a set of checks on individual behaviour, all about what thou shalt not do. As such, it is seen as a constraint, something perhaps to get around and not something that is needed to help us make decisions to make our own lives flourish.

Compare what might happen if rational discourse about ethics were not just taught but embodied in the ways school work. Children who leave school having had this kind of education will have learned that moral claims require the giving of reasons, and that even though consensus is not always possible, agreement sometimes has to be reached for practical purposes. On other occasions each can freely pursue his or her own conception of the good life. More importantly, ethics would seem relevant. The reason-giving nature of ethical discourse constantly forces us to say why it is good for us and for others that we do certain actions rather than others. Morality ceases to be primarily about holding us back and instead becomes a precondition of going forward in positive ways.

A generation of citizens who have had this educational
experience might just be equipped to reject the current legalism which is keeping warm the seat of ethics vacated by the old moral authorities. I can’t pretend that I’m completely confident that this will work. We often expect too much of education, when it is the wider culture that really has to change. But at the same time, in practice, much of the culture of ethics I advocate is already in place. Not just in ethics committees but also in public forums such as debates and the serious media we expect people to give reasons for the values they profess and to have these interrogated. What is needed is not therefore a radical change but a shift of power, so that this, rather than legalism, becomes the dominant paradigm within which people think about their responsibilities and the morality of their actions.