Libertarianism and Moralism

With Will Wilkinson safely on the other side of the Earth, I am free to agree with him about something:

It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. Liberals who worry about religious home schooling are not wrong to worry. I defend home schooling not because parents have a moral right to indoctrinate their children. Indeed, parents have a moral obligation not to. They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds. Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children’s psychological freedom. They deserve condemnation and ostracism, not interference from the state. I defend their political right to potentially behave immorally — to harm their children’s capacity for the full exercise of their rightful freedom — in part because I appreciate how accommodating pluralism reduces social conflict. But, perhaps more importantly, because I think that full-fledged competitive diversity in education will help erode superstitious thick identities, that it will help fosters a sense of contingency in inherited identities that make it easier to slough them off, or at least easier to wear lightly. But, even then, the scope of liberal pluralism has its limits, and it is neither right nor desirable to avoid the conflict inherent in debating and enforcing those limits.

I tend to like thick identities, but mostly insofar as I think there’s more agreement between Nietzsche’s concept of becoming who you are and MacIntyre’s than either would care to admit. Will’s idea of wearing your thick (i.e. unelective) identity lightly is a really humane and apt vision. And it underscores, at least to my mind, how the defense of political libertarianism is a moral position itself, one at odds in key ways with certain strains of cultural libertarianism. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds of the controversy, other than to point out that Will’s position is admirably liberated from the obsession with suffering that guides overly simplistic liberal moralizing. Stultifying upbringings often wind up producing kids and young adults who have registered harm to something more visceral than their capabilities for human flourishing. Contrariwise, however, even some strictly traditional upbringings can carefully limit what some neo-Aristotelians would vehemently champion as capabilities necessary to human flourishing without producing suffering children. Recognizing this should make libertarians and conservatives alike unafraid of state permissiveness and moral rigor. Cultural libertarians and religious fundamentalists are equally capable of being stultifying moralists themselves; to prevent one moral clique or another from seizing the machinery of state to bust up whatever family structures they despise seems to me a pretty prudent way to go.

NOTE: there are complications here, of course, especially with regard to Heather’s three mommies or whatever. If you know me very well you know I am in no great hurry to usher in a golden age of psychosexual freedom for all love combinations. As a constitutional matter, I’m entirely persuaded that the citizens of individual states reserve the right to exercise basic controls over the legal definition and recognition of marriage. We have the luxury in the US of being able to vote with our feet in practice as well as in theory. Still, I worry from time to time that many social conservatives really do think they’ve lost the moral battle and that only by institutionalizing current mores in the highest possible law will there be any hope. Morals, yes, but probably not much hope. Governments can from time to time ‘legislate morality’, but usually this only works in an environment of near-total moral consensus. Where that consensus is lacking, proponents of one position or the other have got to own up to the obligation to persuade their fellow citizens in public but outside of politics. Tough times in a culture where both right and left are complicit in making national political issues out of every conceivable moral question.