I’m not going to give an extensive response to my title question, for that would take me too far afield into political philosophy, and that is something that I have not kept up over the years. However, I do want to make a brief comment on Giles Fraser’s response to the criticism of his “This German circumcision ban is an affront to Jewish and Muslim identity” article. In a short article entitled “No, I am not a liberal – I believe that community comes before the individual” he undertakes to respond to a tweet which said “Giles Fraser’s opinions are fucked up, moronic & unfit for planet Earth”. Well, I’m not prepared to go to such lengths, but I do think he has misunderstood the foundations of liberalism, and simply does not understand why liberals value personal autonomy.
Fraser thinks that the personal autonomy that liberals value is valued at the expense of community. Here’s how he puts it:
All of which presents an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I’m not a conservative either. I’m a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods. But I don’t buy this. What we need is a much more robust commitment to the common good, to the priority of community. It is intellectual laziness and a form of cheating to think we can always have both.
So, given the choice, he chooses community. The unfortunate thing is that he confuses community with commitment to the common good, as though the common good (which is what Fraser seems to mean by ‘community’) were something that could be achieved by prescinding from autonomy. However, there is simply no reason for believing that that is true. Personal autonomy is not something that can be simply divorced from conceptions of the common good, as James (sorry!) John Stuart Mill recognised so clearly. One’s autonomy must be consistent with the greatest liberty for all, and so the community is always, from this point of view, a restriction on the scope of autonomy.
The liberal commitment to personal autonomy, as I understand it, is not pure libertarianism, which, as I probably inadequately understand that point of view, seems to me to suggest that the freedom to act is not limited by (at least many of) its deleterious effects on others, and even on oneself. According to libertarianism it is possible, as the Oxford Companion to Philosophy puts it, that “libertarian rights may work against our individual interests” (qv. libertarianism, political), since, according to libertarianism, autonomy (and the right of individual choice) precedes, or is antecendent to, community. Liberalism, however, for which I would take John Rawls’ conception of the original position of choice — where no one knows what position in society he will occupy, thus making it more likely that he will choose a maximin strategy for distributing both goods and freedoms — as in some sense definitive, includes community as an essential aspect of the exercise of autonomy.
Thus, if we think of children as participants in community — as I think we must — then we must take what is reasonably held to be their (would be) choices in mind when deciding how the community, which includes them, will act towards children. And from this point of view, where both community and individual autonomy are valued — as they are in liberalism — it seems that the children’s interests would not be best served by the kinds of things done to assure cultic identity. Indeed, given the difficulty of undoing commitments made on behalf of children in respect of their subsequent cultic identity, not only is community not best served in this way, but such narrowly cultic commitments has enormous implications for the wider community in which religious cultic identity can be seen to play an often destructive part. So, if Fraser is really committed to community, he must at least accommodate the kinds of personal autonomy with respect to subsets of community (such as religions and other ideological associations) that he denies in favour of continuing to favour ancient, and often barbaric practices by which membership in those subsets of community is acquired or symbolised. It seems unreasonable for him always to favour community over autonomy, since this in itself would be destructive of community, because, in plural societies, forcing membership in subcultural communities inevitably, in the long run, not only fractures lives, but also the wider community in which moral, as opposed to merely cultic, commitments should predominate.
I can’t think that any sane and thoughful person does not understand that there needs to be a balance between individual freedom and the way in which that freedom effects other people. The gay marriage issue highlights the muddled thinking that some people seem to indulge in. If gay couples want to get married, allowing them to do so has no detrimental effects on anyone else, none whatsoever. Yet we have people who are totally opposed to gay marriage, for no better reason than that their religion tells them that they are against it. Those in favour of circumcising infants have no better reason than religion to support their case.
I would agree, generally with the sentiment and conclusions of the article (essay?) (wait for it) but for the fact that, as in so many of these discussions, terms have not adequately been defined. The term liberalism is one such word and the one I want to focus on here, I think it matters.
“Liberalism first became a powerful force in the Age of Enlightenment, rejecting several foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as nobility, established religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism)
It doesn’t really matter in which epoch the concept emerged because it’s very emergence is presupposed on the existence of reasonably developed tools for the dissemination of the idea and the authority to implement the ideals. This authority in itself presupposes order and usually the control of physical, ‘real’, property. Hence we find [above] that ‘liberalism’ is defined in terms of “…a fundamental right to life, liberty and property.”
Property is, by definition, exclusive. To speak of liberalism is to speak of exclusion where non-players in the ‘property’ markets are in effect excluded. It would seem that this incorporated exclusion defies the very sense of community being offered as legitimate authority to confront the barbarity of genital mutilation.
As an aside, I also really wanted to let you know how much I enjoy your contributions.
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I must admit, it’s really difficult to grasp liberalism, unless you are already free in your own mind from the enslavement of others. It’s like trying to explain to a theist that there is no God, it’s a form of mental enslavement to a metaphor. The Matrix metaphor is a good one, where people are trapped in a reality created by a race of machines, you have to be free from the Matrix to understand why people are enslaved.
I don’t get how anything could be an affront to an eight day old childs identity. An eight day old child doesn’t have an identity. There is only the assumed ownership by a so called culture.
Doesn’t his argument fail even on his own terms?
Fraser says: “We have to choose. So, do we think the state ought to have a substantial vision of shared values, perfectly at ease with the language of right and wrong, and at times not at all uncomfortable about imposing that vision through taxation and legislation?”
And in the instant case, it seems that the “shared value” of the state that one shouldn’t mutilate children is precisely what is here being “imposed”.
Sorry, Colin, your comment, for some odd reason, got caught up in the span filter. But, here it is, at last.
Community is largely a construct invented by demagogues and self-appointed “leaders” who claim to represent some in group defined by religion, race, language, mode of dress.
In some cases an outside observer would be hard pressed to distinguish the “community” from the larger population in which it resides, case in point, I’m sure that if I was transported to Belfast in Ireland I would not be able at first glance to differentiate a catholic from a protestant based on speech, dress or physical characteristics. Ditto for Shia and Sunni Muslims.
I see some parallels to the “group selection” controversy in evolutionary biology, much like adaptation happens at the individual level so it is with “community”, it is an externally imposed categorization of individuals, sometimes without the knowledge or consent of members.
One only need look at various Muslim enclaves in the west, the majority of Muslims left their country of origin for very good reasons and are interested only in providing a safe environment for their families, something lacking in the theocratic regimes that they fled.
It is rabble rousing individuals with a personal agenda who stand to profit from the sectarian strife that is the usual by product of identifying an out group that can be blamed for the real and perceived problems that beset the members of their “community”. Quite often the real problems that these people face are generated and exacerbated by the “leaders” themselves.
And irresponsible and lazy media are their natural allay.
Insert the word “abortion” for the word “circumcision” and see if the argument still holds water.
Or “contraception”.
Or a hundred other concepts where “community” might equate to “bigoted narrow-mindedness.”
Fucked up, indeed.
Argumentum ab populum.
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