To which extent is private morality (moral rules not enforced by government) necessary in a free society? This is one of the many interesting questions raised by James Buchanan in his 2005 book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.
A tyrannical government faces a very different question: How much, and what sort of, morality will sustain or threaten its rule? This question is illustrated by the new purification campaign launched by the Chinese government (Ryan McMorrow, “China Launches Internet ‘Purification’ Campaign for Lunar New Year,” Financial Times, January 26, 2022):
The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, has instructed officials to sweep away “illegal content and information” and target celebrity fan groups, online abuse, money worship, child influencers and the homepages of media sites. …
The edict is the latest step in Beijing’s clampdown on the entertainment industry as authorities purge content deemed immoral, unpatriotic and non-mainstream from online culture.
The concept of private morality is fuzzy under a totalitarian government, which naturally wants to control all morality and shrink the private domain in that area too:
President Xi Jinping has unleashed a broader effort to reshape Chinese social mores and culture, diminishing materialism and western influence in favour of a more nationalistic and homegrown approach.
The most controlled societies typically show an austere and prudish ethics. The poverty that usually goes hand and hand with tyranny is an explanation. Yet, it is not clear that an austere morality is the only sort compatible with tyranny. The panem et circences (“bread and circuses”) offered by Roman emperors may be helpful to other tyrants. In the (literary) literature, we meet both the austere life of Orwell’s 1984 (although gin provides a security valve) and the medicated dolce vita of Huxley’s Brave New World. Our own soft tyrannies, as Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw for democratic regimes, are more of the brave-new-word kind. Can the state lead to Nirvana? What we can say is that the more totalitarian is the political regime, the more everything, including morality, must be oriented towards achieving Leviathan’s goals:
Censors have also escalated their culling of content deemed to be misaligned with the Communist party’s priorities.
It is a safe conjecture that publicly imposed morality undermines private morality, including habits of honesty, fair dealing, and trust. Generalized cheating and stealing were endemic under the Soviet empire. Those lucky enough to own a car, it was reported, had to remove their windshield wipers at night lest they were stolen (see Nina and Jean Kéhayan, Rue du Prolétaire Rouge (“Red Proletarian Street” [Paris: Seuil, 1978]). The tyrant can’t have both obedient and honest subjects. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued a related point: totalitarianism, including unlimited majoritarian democracy, signals “the end of truth.” Without the conviction that there is such a thing as truth, there can be no morality except for the idea that the ends of the political rulers justify the means.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Feb 5 2022 at 11:47am
Some economic regulation would be optimal even in a society of less than omniscient angels, but more if agents do not eschew causing knowable harms to others out of self interest. All angels would mean no “nigh watchman” state, but there would still be a “collective goods” and “pigou taxing” state. The more angelic the society, the smaller the state could be.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 6 2022 at 10:02pm
Thomas: Consider that angels would presumably produce “collective good” (singular or plural, and whatever that means), which goes on to show how angels are foreign to our world (especially in the singular case). Non-angels will always be tempted to exploit their non-angelic fellow citizens through the state: that is the problem.
Jon Murphy
Feb 7 2022 at 6:18am
Humans are neither angels nor demons. They are humans. We are capable of great evil and great good. Humans may ” cause knowable [and known] harms to others out of self-interest.” But they may also internalize those very same harms also in self-interest, or in social interest.
Despite many of our economic models, humans are not solidary and isolated creatures. Humans exist within a larger society and network of interconnected relationships.
Ordinarily, the isolated model of humanity is very powerful in terms of economic insights. But, as Coase pointed out in his famous 1960 article The Problem of Social Costs, those models are highly misleading when it comes to externality.
This social nature of humanity inevitably causes humans to take into account various harms done to others, either directly (eg, I listen to music with headphones so as to not disturb my neighbor) or indirectly (eg virtues like justice, respect, etc or institutional arrangements like law).
David Seltzer
Feb 7 2022 at 10:55am
Jon, we are as you state, quintessentially human. It seems one can understand this in the context of amiable morality and mundane morality.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 7 2022 at 3:59pm
Jon: I suggest two caveats. First, it is far from being clear what “social interest” means. Second, as you know, the problem with externalities is to determine what they are; so just using the term is fraught with danger as your reader is likely to have an expansive notion of them.
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