From Fair Go To Fair Game

(Reciprocity Rules, OK? 2¾)

No doubt it’s pure coincidence that on the day after the Child Support Legislation Amendment (Reform Of The Child Support Scheme-New Formula And Other Measures) Bill 2006 gets its second reading in Federal Parliament, the subject of the daddy state has come up in the ‘sphere, through this post by Don Arthur at Club Troppo. Anyone who might be inclined to suggest that there’s something a bit zeitgeisty going on would be drawing a long bow indeed. Synchronicity my eye.

Among the web-pages linked in Don’s post, is this little beaut, a Bert Kelly lecture by Peter Saunders of the CIS, under his “Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies” hat. In it, he questions when, if ever, governments should intervene to enforce social norms. Starting with Durkheim’s diagnosis of the illnesses of modern society, Saunders shows how the conservative moral agenda in so much social policy discussion is strongly Durkheimian, touches base on the principles of classical liberalism then outlines a serious social problem arising from various (misguided) policies with ostensibly liberal objectives:

• As social behaviour and attitudes begin to change, democratic governments come under pressure to amend laws and administrative practices to make them consistent with the newly emerging lifestyles;
• Because a society’s laws and formal rules are its most visible and symbolically significant statement of its collective morality, legal and administrative changes shift the public perception of what is ‘acceptable’ or even ‘normal’ behaviour. By shifting the laws in response to social changes, governments therefore underpin and reinforce the existing direction of change;
• This in turn opens up a new agenda for change and fresh demands begin to build up to which governments, sooner or later, feel obliged to respond.

Hence we chase our tails. By reflecting social change, governments help create and reinforce it.

The result of this cycle is a process of normative slippage, where as governments loosen social controls of deviant behaviour, this is taken by all and sundry as a community endorsement of deviant behaviour and those anti-social individuals who take perverse delight in flouting social norms go even further in devising new deviances, cranking up the demand for liberalisation another notch or two. This is a very bad thing and governments can and should do something about it.

The classical liberal objection to social control of individual behaviour is that individual liberty is paramount; it should only be infringed (under a Rule of Law) on certain strict criteria:

• The first criterion, so elegantly outlined and defended in Mill’s On Liberty, is that individual freedom may be restricted if it leads to harm to others.

• The second, also elaborated by Mill, is that liberty extends only to responsible human agents. Not only does this mean that people like children and the mentally ill may be coerced against their will if this is deemed to be in their own interests; it also means that government has a crucial role to play in ensuring that all citizens are sufficiently well educated that they are able to make enlightened and responsible choices about how to behave. Mill abhorred the prospect of a universal and compulsory state education, but he insisted that the state should impose on all parents the obligation to have their children educated to a certain agreed standard.

• The third criterion is not found in Mill, for it has to do with the common good, and Mill was too busy knocking down utilitarian justifications for government intervention to allow for such a condition. It is, rather, found in Adam Smith, and it holds, simply, that governments may intervene in civil society to make provision for such ‘public goods’ as benefit all citizens but which none, if left alone, will provide.

None of these principles is unproblematic (the harm criterion, for example, could justify almost unlimited government intervention, for almost everything that we do in life impacts on others with some negative consequences; similarly, allowing governments to make provision for ‘public goods’ opens up the possibility for widespread intervention, depending on how broadly or narrowly such goods are defined).

I find it curious that while Saunders explicitly identifies potential objections to the first criterion (derived from Mill’s On Liberty) and the third (derived from Adam Smith) but not the second – that liberty only extends to responsible human agents, leaving parents free to compel children (who are not fit judges of their own interests) to take their teaspoon of cod-liver oil after brekky, because it’s good for them, and some person or persons unspecified to compel the mentally ill (also not fit judges of their own interests) to do things which are deemed to be in their best interests. The question to be answered here, of course, is “who gets to decide what is best for children, the mentally ill and other irresponsibles?” The people through their governments, presumably, which raises as much potential for abuse as the other two criteria for restricting personal liberty.

The end of Saunders’ lecture, is a call for classical liberals to side with conservatives to prevent the process of normative slippage from going any further, and perhaps turn it back. That is, everyone should be free to conform, a position which is entirely in keeping with classical liberal principles:

… we saw earlier that classical liberalism identifies three conditions under which it is legitimate for government to override the free choices of individuals. Arguably, all three apply in the kinds of policies we have been discussing.

• Government should intervene when others are being harmed: This criterion applies particularly strongly in the case of family policy. We now know that, on average, children are better off if their parents stay together, and we also know that married parents stay together more successfully than those who cohabit. This evidence would seem to justify governments introducing policies which deliberately favour married parenting (where there are no children, however, there is no warrant for government trying to influence people’s lifestyle choices).

• Government has a duty to ensure that people are properly informed and educated. In family policy, evidence on public opinion suggests that many people are ignorant of the evidence regarding the impact of different patterns of family arrangements on child wellbeing. There would seem to be a case, therefore, for government promoting a public information campaign so that parents can make more fully enlightened decisions about their relationship with each other. In welfare policy, we have seen that claimants often respond positively after they are obliged to take steps towards self-reliance, and this may justify changing the welfare system even in the face of current public opinion.

• Government should make provision for public goods. This takes us back to Durkheim and the idea of social cohesion as a public good. If this is accepted, then it follows that government should not remain neutral in the face of developments that undermine social solidarity and erode social capital. It is arguably not in any of our long term interests that the number of heroin addicts keeps increasing, or that prostitution becomes increasingly common, or that long-term emotional commitments become increasingly rare, or that more and more people become marginal to the labour force. That being the case, the argument for governments to seek to reverse these trends by tightening rules in future rather than loosening them seems compelling – but this is the argument which classical liberals are likely to find the least easy to accept.

[original emphasis]

What Saunders drops in that first bullet point – where he emphasises the harm that family policy does to the average child, is his argument that welfare recipients do harm to others:

In the case of welfare dependency, the victims are the taxpayers who continue to behave in such a manner that they can support themselves, but who are increasingly called upon to support others who have chosen (or otherwise ended up in) non-viable lifestyles.

That second bullet point is interesting too. You’ll note that the second of Saunders’ three conditions under which personal liberty could be restricted was:

… that liberty extends only to responsible human agents.

This has been re-spun as:

Government has a duty to ensure that people are properly informed and educated.

[original emphasis dropped]

I suppose it might have been considered a somewhat offensive line of argument, even in front of a sympathetic audience, if Saunders had said, apropos family policy, that couples who divorce are clearly not responsible human agents or, apropos welfare policy, that welfare recipients aren’t either.

While Saunders liberal principles can accommodate normative family law and anormative welfare system, he doesn’t go so far as to argue that everyone should be compelled to subscribe to a conservative work ethic:

In Australia, as in the USA, one of the key writers driving the welfare reform debate has been Lawrence Mead. Listening to Mead in his recent talks to the AIFS conference in Sydney and in a public lecture at Macquarie University, he justified his arguments for welfare reform (what he readily refers to as his ‘new paternalism’ agenda), not on the classical liberal grounds of reducing public expenditure and the role of government, but rather on the argument that government should enforce citizenship obligations for the common good, and that work is one such obligation of citizenship.

It was interesting in this respect that the question which Mead seemed to have most difficulty answering was one where he was asked why, if the welfare-dependent poor were expected to work, the ‘idle rich’ shouldn’t be expected to work also. From a classical liberal position, the question makes no sense – the only issue is that you should not unnecessarily rely on the state to provide you with a living, and the idle rich do not do this. But from Mead’s conservative moral position, the question is unanswerable, and in the end he did come close to accepting that a collective obligation of citizenship, such as the obligation to work, must logically apply to all citizens.

[emphasis added]
What Saunders’ says may be true from the classical liberal position, where society is fair as long as we all know the rules and abide by them – much as players in a game of Monopoly usually agree to abide by the rules as set out by Parker Bros, give or take the odd spot of peculation by the Banker – but we might question whether it’s fair according to Talbot Parsons’ universal norm of reciprocity, recently invoked by Saunders’ to justify the Mutual Obligation requirements imposed on society’s shirkers. The poor ones that is, not the rich ones.

The moral justification for enjoying an idle retirement is that one is living off pelf salted away through many years of hard graft. Money earned as wages perhaps or, if you got all entrepreneurial during your work life and it paid off in profits, as your just reward for identifying a profit-making opportunity and taking a risk on it. But self-funding retirees and ex-entrepreneurs, as we well know, don’t account for all of the idle rich. Second and third generation idlers, it might be argued, live off the wealth the state foregoes in inheritance taxes – a separate justification for an idle life bludging off your parents’ estate needs to be provided. But that’s a rather obvious and predictable line of argument, really – one more in line with a vulgar, hard-line application of the universal norm of reciprocity, rather than a nuanced, selective judicious one.

Saunders’ final justification for coercive intervention by the daddy state to reinforce family values is that it provides for a social good, in the form of social cohesion. As Saunders’ admits, it’s the one least congenial to classical liberals – including, I think, Saunders who has been quite derisive in past writings on policies advocated on the grounds that they foster social cohesion based on the essentially egalitarian Australian notion of the fair go. Classical liberals should, and I believe would, findequally obnoxious the notion that, in the interests of social cohesion, some people are fair game for state-imposed re-education in family values and the work ethic.

Postscript: as further evidence that I’m not exactly in touch with the zeitgeist a lot of the time – including the few hours I spent yesterday dissecting Saunders’ Bert Kelly lecture - other bloggers have pointed out to me, tactfully, that the Bert Kelly lecture I’ve “dissected” (Jason at Catallaxy) dates back to the year 2000. Leaving me with the feeling you get from popping off a quick .357 magnum round at a large flounder lying at the bottom of a very small firkin, only to discover that the fish died of natural causes long ago.