It Has become fashionable amongt the so-called “Common Good Conservatives” to treat virtue and liberty as a zero-sum game where too much liberty destroys virtue and that if virtue (but according to who) must be paramount for a dispensation of “liberty” to be allowed. This false dilemma fallacy, complete with a “strawman of liberty”, so as to speak, is part and parcel of the misleading and fundamentally dishonest begging of the “common good” question:
“The ‘common good’ quarrel on the Right hinges on a single question: does government exist chiefly to secure liberty, or to serve the common good? Put differently: are political communities meant to erect as few guardrails as possible so diverse peoples can actualize their choices? Or is the point of societies to embody a particular conception of the good life? And should, or how could, the government deploy its power to ensure those ends? Perhaps the ‘general Welfare,’ as the expressed purpose of government named in our Constitution, deserves more of our attention — even if we ask legitimate questions about the scope of its reach in achieving it.”
Yup, the very phrasing of the question is ripe with presumptions and intended to beg the question to leas to the preferred outcome. The first rule of such debates is to not concede the loaded question, and it’s as loaded as a fully chambered revolver used to play this little game of Russian Roulette.
Rather than play that game, let us posit a more honest question: Does government serve as a restrained and limited tool to maintain laws that rise above the rulers that are conducive towards both liberty and virtue; or is government simply the means by which some collective society with a collective will, as divined by an enlightened few, determine the “good life” that people have been ordered into living?
Indeed it is quintessentially American, and our long heritage before our founding tracing back to the tossing off of the “Norman Yoke” with the recognition of a separation of society and state, for our government to be limited in power and scope, tasked with maintaining the minimal amount of powers and laws that are conducive towards people ordering themselves via the blessing of liberty into what has become the greatest country on Earth. The question of the scope of that limited government, and the particulars thereof, is a very different thing from that scope being unlimited.
Societies are not constructed and morality can not be imposed, as the myriad socialist societies that have destroyed Europoe, and beyond, have aptly demonstrated. Nor is the “General Welfare” a grant beyond the Leftism even the Supreme Court foolishly allowed in South Dakota v. Dole (1987) and United States v. Butler (1936).
“Put more sharply, it is a contest between a thin or absent conception of the common good and a thick one. And to dial down even more: what is the common good and how is it achieved? Definitionally, the common good represents the full ensemble of conditions that allow all of the constitutive elements of society to flourish. But, the rejoinder says, what does ‘flourish’ mean in a contest of 340 million variations of the term?”
Yet another give away that this person disdains our American heritage and embraces a more European one of government (as conflated with the people) ordering society to a certain desired form.
“On one side stands what I’ll call ‘drag queen conservatism’ — the view that a genuinely free society will inevitably produce things many of its citizens find repugnant, and that tolerating them is the price of liberty. On this account, the state’s job is to maintain the playing field, not referee it (even though, inevitably, it does referee it because at various points, governing authorities do restrict our behaviors). Neutrality is the highest political good; government lets its citizens order their lives however they want, and any political movement that seeks to advance a substantive vision of virtue eventually migrates into authoritarianism.”
A virtuous society that embodies the elements of a true common good is indeed strong enough to tolerate things that government might find repugnant, and that tolerating that is indeed the price of liberty, for without that liberty the government becomes a tool to impose any ordering it likes, be it “good” or otherwise. The entire point of limited government is to prevent the people who control government from yoking the people; allowing both good and bad prevents an all-or-nothing government framework where the at best the good will be flawed and at worst the bad will be imposed. The Founding Fathers understood that wisdom.
This is why, as Daniel Hannan noted, “you tolerate objectionable behavior up to the point of incitement; you tolerate eccentricity up to the point of madness; your tolerate offensiveness up to the point of harassment; toleration means you tolerate—it means you tolerate what you find utterly appalling.” This is not to say that public morality can’t be maintained and shaped, but it must be maintained and shaped by free individuals—not by the government or some collective as administered by some Nomenklatura of Common Goodness—and done so with minimal compulsion.
Neutrality, properly understood, means a government constrained by tradition and the past, though not enslaved thereto, with equal and neutral application of the law and equal and neutral protection of freedom and liberty within those limited bounds, be those bounds wide or narrow.
“On the other side stands the opposite conviction, what I will call ‘social cohesion conservatism’ — the view that government can, at some level, administer a thicker vision of human flourishing from the top down; that government exists to make possible the conditions in which the good can be achieved equally by all.”
The government, nor some nebulous collective can “adminsiter” a “top down” flourishing. This worldview is one where free individuals can not create the conditions for the “common good”, but that a handful can somehow impose it on everyone else. This is elitist and Unamerican.
And then we get two fantasies that he even admits are fantasies while dabling in one to dismiss the other
“But we must resist two fantasies at once: that the state can perfect us, and that the state can stay neutral. That’s an uncomfortable, perhaps irresolvable, tension. The common good is not optional. It is not even avoidable. The only real question is whether conservatives will summon the nerve to name their own.”
Why yes, the state can’t perfect us, but neither can it imperfectly make us more moral or otherwise more prone to some nebulous “common good”. If without “order” people will morally dilapidate, then how can “the people”—or more accurately, a select few in leadership—the broad and effectively unfettered power of government make them (or again, the leadership) any less prone to moral dilapitude by removing themselves from imposed order and granting them the authority to impose it on others?
Socialists, who are more honest about being socialists, often say that if you believe in the police, military, public roads, parks, traffic lights, &c, then you are a socialist, and therefor the only question is how this socialism ought to be implemented and in what form. This person is no different. He even cribs the same arguments saying that property rights, unborn children, the gender binary, traffic lights, family, education, restricting pollution, opposing murder, and even people being honest with other people is the “common good” (this is the Bailey) and that therefor liberty opposing the “common good” as people like him would have imposed is wrong (this is the Motte).
Ah yes, the irony and misconception are quite clear from that cute little Motte n’ Baily fallacy. Unless you want the government to “order” society and your life, then you are some strawman “libertarian” who loves murder, transgenderism,and pollution while hating family, children, and honesty.
“If you believe freedom should be ordered toward what is true and good, you believe in the common good. Liberty is not merely the absence of restraint but the social and moral space in which persons and communities may flourish.”
Freedom that has been “ordered” isn’t freedom, regardless of whether you subjectively believe it to be “true and good”. Liberty is indeed the absence of restraint, and a limited government that within its restricted and proper scope, be that scope narrow or wide, in maintaining those minimal guardrails that are conducive towards virtue (though not imposing) and dissuasive against the opposite (though not prohibitive, per se) is the best way to protect liberty while maximizing the propensity towards virtue by free individuals who freely hold both the conditions that lead liberty and virtue in common.
“Be clear which side of the ‘ordered liberty’ ledger you are on: Are you more prone to the need for ‘order’ or more concerned about preserving ‘liberty’? “
And again we circle back to that false-dilemma fallacy. Those who would sacrifice liberty for a bit of “order” will end up with a dearth of both and a surfeit of neither.
