Morality in the 21st Century: Responsibility

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 1: Responsibility

"‘We've been fed a diet of happiness and rights for two or three generations. It's thin gruel. Lots of times in your life, you're not happy. And if you think the purpose of your life is to be happy, then during those times that you're not happy, you're bereft. And that's not helpful, because life is very difficult. And people go through very long periods of time, where they're trying to bear up under a very heavy load. It's much better to let people know that it's meaning that sustains people and not happiness. And that meaning is to be found in large part as a consequence of adoption of responsibility. And that's the missing half to any discussion of rights. Meaning is the right counter to happiness and responsibility is the right counter to rights’

‘So tell me, here you are having looked at the psychological drive that allows people to allow totalitarianism and hence, clamp down and suppress human creativity and freedom. But how come this is speaking to young people today when we live in perhaps the freest, most individualistic age that we've had in the West in all of history?’

‘Well, there's two issues. One is the problem of totalitarianism. The other is the problem of nihilism. And nihilism is predicated on the observation that while that there are time frames, let's say that you can apply to your being that seem to reduce it to, to meaninglessness, what difference is it going to make in a million years what I do? And there's an underground desirability about nihilism to which is a more pernicious one which is, well, my life is meaningless and that's terrible. But it also means I have no responsibility. And so that's the secret attraction of nihilism.

And I think that many, many young people are trapped by their own rationality into either a totalitarian viewpoint, which is often encouraged by the universities not least, or a nihilistic viewpoint. And those aren't the only two viewpoints. Like the viewpoint that the human being has a nobility of spirit and is an radventure on the high seas of the unknown, and that is required to bear a tremendous amount of responsibility. That's a very credible story. And it's so interesting to tell that story to young people, because what psychologists have done for so long for so many decades is to say, well, you're okay the way you are, your self esteem should be high, you can accept yourself the way you are.

And I think that's complete nonsense. And I think it's also terribly pernicious for young people, for someone who's just in the formative stages of adulthood to say, oh, you're okay the way you are. But they're not having a great time of it. They're not oriented properly in their lives. And what they want to hear is, no, no, you have more problems than you can possibly imagine. There's a lot of you that needs to be straightened out. But your potential is is almost incalculable. Potential for being a force that's good for yourself and for your family and for your community. But it's going to take work, you're going to have to get your act together, you're gonna have to tell the truth. It's like, it's a much more positive idea.’...

'The collectivist issue is, well you're your group, not, you're not an individual. The Marxist overlay is: and history is a battle for power between groups and there's an oppressor group and a victim group and the victim group is victimized and therefore has all the moral advantage, so to speak. And that society is best construed as an endless battle. Which is just a replay of the old Marxist idea of, of the working class, say against the capitalists. Look, when the Russians had the revolution 100 years ago, they had no real idea, although there were thinkers who had warned, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky about the dangers of this collectivist utopian idea. But they really didn't know.

But now it's 100 years later, and we know. And although we know that the left can go too far, we've done a very bad job of identifying exactly when. The right goes too far when they start making claims of racial superiority. Clearly. The left goes too far too, but we don't know when. And my sense is, well, it has something to do with their insistence that the collective vision be superordinate and then to move beyond that to reconstruct society so that the measure of fairness becomes the equality between those groups, which I think is a catastrophic. It's a catastrophic worldview and it produces catastrophic strategy... we haven't come to terms with the straightforward fact that just approaching the problem from the perspective of your canonical identity is your group, immediately breeds all sorts of monsters. So I think we can’t even construe the problem that way without running into major problems.'

‘Could it be in fact that what's happening now is that morality is sort of evolving into politics. So we're out sourcing individual moral responsibility to group identities and whoever is in charge of adjusting those.’...

‘One thing that Jordan Peterson is very worried about is the way we are identifying now primarily, with our group, whether that's defined ethnically or politically or in terms of sexual orientation. And he gets really concerned about this, because that doesn't really allow us to develop as individuals. Do you feel under that kind of pressure to identify with groups or do you feel you're able to speak just as you?’...

‘I, yeah, I absolutely believe that that's what people are feeling. You know, if you look on Twitter, look at someone roughly our age’s bio, it’ll list all the different subgroups of society that they're in, you know, they'll have feminist, bisexual, you know, whatever. I do feel that people are just sort of saying, well, because I'm this, these are my beliefs because I fit in with this group, as opposed to saying, well, maybe a lot of people in this certain group do think that but maybe I should have a look at the other options and see what I specifically feel about this issue’...

‘People can be worried that say they see themselves as a feminist, that what they say is going to be portrayed through the whole group... it's kind of quite scary for them to actually just have their own opinion and say, yeah, I'm a feminist, but I also believe this, or I'm a Labour and I agree with this.’

‘Let me just say something for a moment wearing my religious hat. Cos of course, in very religious ages, people believe that God heard and saw everything you did. But the big difference was he forgives. And today, it seems that we're in quite an unforgiving sort of world. And do you feel that it is an unforgiving world where you can be very easily shamed for something that you didn't really intend to do any harm at all?’...

‘That's part of the polarization is that people are put into groups... there's a kind of ideological lockstep that everyone has to think the same thing and do the same thing. And if you don't have a thought, or an idea or an opinion, or just to kind of oh what's that, that might be interesting, that's not in the box that I've been put in, but I want to kind of go a bit further, that's completely shut down. Because you're betraying the group. And I think that's also what makes people more unforgiving is because these kind of groups become antagonistic towards each other is that we're in this group, and they're in that group and we don't like them, especially if it's someone who says something with which you disagree. People, because of these group identities are encouraged by each other to be really, really harsh and polarization increases, people become less forgiving of each other.’...

'The distinction I would make is between a community and a collective, I think a collective is what happens when the individual is ignored. It doesn't matter what you are, it's the color of your skin, it's the sexuality, it's whatever it is, whatever they want to call it, that's the group that's you're in, we don't care you are, and and that, for me, that lack of individual respect, I mean, is the philosophy behind Marxism. It's led to the death of 100 million people in the last century. And the community is something different. The community is a organic relationship between people. That we are naturally social beings, that we respect the individual. So a community that forgets the respect the individual becomes a collective and that's when it's dangerous. So the civil rights movements, they’re communities and they’re brilliant.'...

‘Even Adam Smith, I mean, alongside the Wealth of Nations, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiment. Even Adam Smith realized that markets wouldn't deliver necessarily moral outcomes. I was very disturbed to read a note that a leading investment bank put out to its biotech clients, in which it asked the question, is curing people a sustainable business model? And in its answer it essentially made a very rational case that actually it wasn't necessarily because of course, if everyone's cured, there's no one to buy any drugs. You know, if you're a pharmaceutical company and you cure everyone of a particular disease, well, then you won't have a market for your products.’...

'The idea that this is unacceptable for people in China to be paid $2 a day for that work. Well, it's better than being paid $1 a day, or it's better than not having a job at all.'...

‘We need to overcome a fear that in parallel societies, if we bring moral argument to bear in public life, including substantive arguments about the good life and virtue, we are opening, the possibility of disagreement, and worse, possibly, of coercion. Of the majority imposing its values on the minority and therefore, so goes, the impulse, better to ask citizens to leave their moral and spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public square. This is an understandable impulse. But I think it's mistaken.

Partly because we can't resolve the hard questions, whether abortion or what a fair tax rate should be. We can't resolve those questions without engaging in morally robust debate. More than this, the attempt to pretend to a neutrality that can never be achieved in public discourse, leaves some voices out and devalues their contribution, and people sense this. And it generates resentment toward the way politics is being conducted. And I think we're seeing that frustration at that condition and even rising anger in the populist backlash against established politics these days’


Presumably the people like libertarians who insist that the private sector is always superior to the public sector must fall back on blaming private companies' unwillingness to cure patients on government intervention