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Chapter Two liberalism and ethics He who renders to each his own through fear of the gallows is constrained in his action by another’s command and threat of punishment, and cannot be called a just man. But he who renders to each his own through awareness of the true principle of law and its necessity, is acting steadfastly and at his own will, not another’s, and so he is rightly termed a just man. —benedict de spinoza, tractatus theologico-politicus There is an ambivalence in liberalism with respect to ethics. On the one hand, the traditional role of ethics as exhortation to appropriate conduct seems anathema to liberalism. Leo Strauss has noticed, for example, that ‘‘the soul of modern development, one may say, is a peculiar realism, consisting in the notion that moral principles and the appeal to moral principles —preaching, sermonizing—are ineffectual. And therefore that one has to seek a substitute for moral principles which would be more efficacious than ineffectual preaching.’’1 The point Strauss makes here is a feature of the broader effort by early modern political thinkers to treat ‘‘men as they are’’ rather than ‘‘as they ought to be.’’2 To have a social system that ‘‘works’’ means that we must discover the basic forces that operate in sociThis chapter is taken with slight, but important, modifications from ‘‘Liberalism Defended: The Challenge of Post-Modernity,’’ in Classical Liberalism and Civil Society, vol. 7 of the John Locke Series in Classical Liberal Political Economy, The Shaftesbury Papers, ed. Charles K. Rowley (Fairfax, Va.: The Locke Institute, 1997), 9-5 – 9-22. 1. Leo Strauss, ‘‘Progress or Return,’’ in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 242. 2. Spinoza, for example, is explicit about this: ‘‘[Philosophers] conceive men, not as they are, but as they would like them to be. The result is that they have generally written satire instead of ethics, and have never conceived a political system which can be applied in practice; but have produced either obvious fantasies, or schemes that could only have been put into effect in Utopia , or the poets’ golden age, where, of course, there was no need of them at all’’ (Tractatus Politicus, chap. I, 1). liberalism and ethics 19 ety and utilize them to effectuate the outcomes we desire. The distance, therefore, between the prescriptive and the descriptive—that is, between the norms that should be followed and what actually describes our dispositions —must not be too great, if we are to have workable principles. Schemes that run contrary to basic inclinations or rudimentary social forces will be doomed from the outset. Ethical prescriptions, especially demanding ones, are therefore of dubious social utility. Indeed, as the history of liberalism unfolds, increasing attention is devoted not to ethics but to what we would today describe as ‘‘social science ,’’ culminating perhaps in the science of economics.3 From this science (and others) it seems evident that ethical exhortations are rather weak tools in comparison to such forces as monetary incentives when it comes to encouraging behavior on either an individual or social level. It is perhaps no accident, then, that many of the fathers of liberalism were also the fathers of economics. But the moral side was not completely ignored by early liberals. Freedom of thought and speech, along with toleration, were central features of the doctrines of early liberals. Moreover, peace, social order, material wellbeing , and the benefits that flow from any realization of these values (e.g., the alleviation of poverty, ignorance, and disease) were certainly also a part of the value structure of the roots of liberalism. In addition, the language of liberalism was, and still is, framed in terms of rights—hardly a concept devoid of moral connotations. It could be argued, consequently, that as interested as liberals were in social science, they were equally as adamant about the moral justification and propriety of the liberal order. Nevertheless, in liberal theory the descriptive and prescriptive (social science and normative ethics) seem to have a peculiar relation to one another. It has never been clear which one is to dominate, yet neither seems quite able to survive on its own and still express the nature of liberalism. The descriptive needs the prescriptive to support the notion that the conclusions of social science should have a bearing on public policy. To show that free markets...

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