What Liberalism Is

This post is meant sort of as a response to various writings online that I've seen recently about how liberalism has incorporated many libertarian critiques of it. Obviously, I can't speak for all liberals. I can't, in fact, speak for any liberals except myself. But I can say what I mean when I call myself a liberal, or I call myself a socialist, or whatever. As I've said previously, I think that all political positions are a combination of an underlying essentially moral value and an empirical, pragmatic calculation of what public policy will best fulfill that fundamental goal. For myself, the single moral value that I think is at the root of all of my politics is a very simple one, namely what I call kindness, or the promotion of happiness among sentient beings. As an empirical matter, there are, I think, two main factors that have reduced the happiness of sentient beings, both historically and currently. The first is scarcity of resources, which obviously does things like mandate that all human beings who don't themselves die very young indeed will get quite a lot of experience feeling what it's like when someone close to you dies. The second is the tendency of some sentient beings to inflict harm on other sentient beings.
The practical solutions to these two problems are somewhat different from each other. The solution to the first problem is, roughly speaking, economic growth, which pushes the boundaries of how much scarcity we don't need to tolerate. Lo and behold, we humans who have experienced such economic growth live longer lives, contract fewer diseases, etc. than our forbearers. Does that increase happiness? Well, it certainly reduces suffering, and my inclination is to agree, in a sense, with Abraham Maslow that the less one's physical needs require work to be met the more one will be able to pursue higher, more "spiritual" needs.

The solution to the second problem is a different one. In a word, it requires government, primarily because government is the most effective way anyone's ever come up with to prevent people from going around harming other people. (This is, I think, the fundamental problem with Marx's ideas: he depends on people being nice to one another out of the kindness of their hearts in the communist paradise.) In a state of anarchy, the strong will tend to dominate the weak, and will harm them to gain advantages for themselves. This will happen because it can, and there's nothing to stop it; in the absence of anything resembling "right" itself, might will be the closest thing around to right. Creating a power center which is mightier than anyone else playing the game but that will also only use its might in furtherance of the right, and not according to whim but according to law, is, as Merlin explains to Arthur in The Once and Future King, the best way to keep people from going around hurting one another. So, government. Specifically, as best we can tell, liberal democracy. The point of government being, again, to keep the strong from hurting the weak, or really to keep anyone hurting anyone. As a further bit of empirical reality, acting against the creation of any power centers strong enough to gain undue influence over the government and therefore use the government for their own factional gain, or strong enough simply to overpower the government, is often another necessary component of a government formed for this reason.

These two priorities are not the same thing. One wishes economic growth, that is, the increase in the material standard of living available to all; the other wishes to prevent the strong from depriving the weak from their fair share of life's bounty (which is easier to enforce when talking about material goods). Note that the notion of "fair share" is derived in part from the idea that happiness as a function of material wealth is not linear, but rather tapers off rather like a square-root function or something with an asymptote as you get more and more and more obscenely rich. This means that shifting a thousand people from "dirt poor" to "only kind of poor," at the expense of shifting one person from "really, really, really rich" to "really rich," is an increase in total well-being even in the strictest utilitarian sense. There are Rawlsian reasons to favor egalitarianism as well, but they're more controversial, I think.

But while the priority of growth and the priority of reducing injury are not the same, they can be and often are related. Having a civil society in which someone is not just going to come along and rob you because they can is itself quite economically stimulative. In any event, liberalism, or whatever the hell my political philosophy is, is basically about balancing these two priorities. If somebody, calling themself a liberal, has proposed policies which genuinely weaken economic growth without really doing anything about preventing the strong from hurting the weak, then I think those are bad policies. If the people who tended to criticize those policies called themselves libertarians, and possibly were, in fact, somewhat libertarian, then fine, we could say that liberalism internalized a libertarian critique. Or we could just say that it moved closer to being what liberalism ought to be, which is a philosophy dedicated to promoting the well-being of everyone, as best we can manage.

(For what it's worth, conservativism as I see it is primarily the "ideology" of the powerful who wish to retain their power and their ability to use that power in their own interests even at the expense of the less powerful. In part that's why I think the word conservative is a better description of the ideology it gets attached to than the word progressive is of what I would call liberalism.)