The Farce of Fairness: It is Time for Mass Civil Disobedience

[marmar]

from CounterPunch:




It is Time for Mass Civil Disobedience
The Farce of Fairness

By TED HONDERICH


What is fair in a society?

John Stuart Mill, proud of his logic, gave liberalism's 1859 answer, maybe the answer of Britain's Liberal Democrats today. He gave it in his principle of state intervention in his essay On Liberty. The principle was that the state is to intervene in the lives of citizens not to help them, but only to prevent them from causing harm to one another. Then Mill didn't say what harm is, say whether bankers can do it. Nor did he say in his essay Utilitarianism, where vagueness about unhappiness and happiness went with an obscure paean to individualism. The vagueness and obscurity helped conceal the fact evident in clearer utilitarianisms, such as Jeremy Bentham's, that they justify having a slave class in a society if that does in fact produce the greatest total of happiness or satisfaction for the society.

John Rawls of Harvard gave us liberalism's 1972 answer to the question of what is fair in a society. What is fair is what is in accordance with the social contract we would make if we didn't know where we would were going to turn out to be personally in a society to come -- and if we believed what are deceptively called general facts, say about the benefits of what is called liberty in a society. We, with those all-American beliefs, so innocent and so manufactured, would choose a society where a kind of liberty trumps any equality. That liberty makes of little worth the recommendation of a vaunted principle of equality to the effect that inequalities are all right so long as they can be pretended to be in the interest of the badly off. All of which stuff is oblivious of the truth that fundamental liberty is one thing with equality, oblivious of the illustrative fact that if you and I are in conflict, and unequal in that I have a gun, your liberty reduces to zero.

Liberalism, you can therefore kindly think, as I myself maybe still do, is indeterminate and irresolute. It is at best decent moral impulses, a little conscience, at odds with self-concern, the latter being visibly to the fore in a pinch, say the forming of a coalition government, and less visibly before then. Maybe that is too tolerant a view of liberalism, too kind. It looks that way in England just now.

What is the tradition of conservatism's answer to the question of what is fair in a society? Its answers abound. Resisting change, being for so-called reforms, being against mere theory, respecting human nature, being for self-serving freedoms, less democratic government, the organic society, being against equality -- and for the pretence of indubitable economics, wholly spurious necessities. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.counterpunch.org/honderich11012010.html

[Igel]

1. Mills argument has other assumptions.

With a very limited government comes reduced means for intervening in private affairs; the harm that can be mended tends to be smaller, between individuals. If you want a government that can intervene easily between classes of people and define "harm" in broader terms of social justice and the like then you need bigger government.

However, a limited government can by its very nature hand out fewer perks that produce outsized corporations. A larger government has bigger perks. The pre-1860 federal government was besieged by lobbyists that wanted small contracts, that wanted picayune laws changed for their benefit. The idea of having AT&T lobby for a regulation that would affect 25 other companies across the US and position it different internationally would be unthinkable with that sized government. AT&T can see that it can leverage its money quite nicely by shifting government-bestowed advantages in its direction, and when the advantages are large it makes sense to throw more money at government.

A classically liberal government is likely to be a restricted government. Rights are all negative.

Mills has to make assumptions about knowledge and reasonableness on the part of consumers and citizens, about how the economy works. Given incomplete knowledge and diminished rationality on the part of consumers, the classical liberal economy doesn't work; given larger accumulations of capital, such an economy also fails to work.

I rather enjoyed reading Fish's recent NYT op-ed piece on liberalism and religion. (Not the one in today's NYT, which was basically trying to explain his terms and what he was trying to say for people who didn't understand what he clearly and obviously meant by "liberalism".)