The late twentieth century saw two long-term trends in popular thinking about ethics. One was an increase in relativist opinions, with the “generation of the Sixties” spearheading a general libertarianism, an insistence on toleration of diverse moral views (for “Who is to say what is right? – it’s only your opinion.”) The other trend was an increasing insistence on rights – the gross violations of rights in the killing fields of the mid-century prompted immense efforts in defence of the “inalienable” rights of the victims of dictators, of oppressed peoples, of refugees. The obvious incompatibility of those ethical stances, one anti-objectivist, the other objectivist in the extreme, proved no obstacle to their both being held passionately, often by the same people.
The account of the Helsinki rights movement
in Judt’s magisterial history of late twentieth-century Europe, Postwar,
demonstrates the power of rights as a moral and political weapon:
In August 1975 the Helsinki Accords were
unanimously approved and signed [between the major Eastern and Western
countries]. On the face of things, the Soviet Union was the main beneficiary of
the Accords … it was agreed that the “participating states will respect each
other’s sovereign equality … and “refrain from any intervention, direct or
indirect, … in the internal or external affairs … of another participating
State …”
But also included … was a list of rights
not just of states, but of persons and peoples, grouped under Principle VII
(“Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of
thought, conscience, religion or belief”) and VIII (“Equal rights and
self-determination of peoples”) Most of the political leaders who signed off on
these clauses paid them little attention – on both sides of the Iron Curtain it
was generally assumed that they were diplomatic window dressing, a sop to
domestic opinion, and in any case unenforceable …
It did not work out that way … From this
wordy and, it seemed, toothless list of rights and obligations was born the
Helsinki Rights movement. Within a year of getting their long-awaited
international conference agreement, Soviet leaders were faced with a growing
and ultimately uncontrollable flowering of circles, clubs, networks, charters
and individuals, all demanding “merely” that their governments stick to the
letter of that same agreement … Hoist on the petard of their own cynicism,
Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their
own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal.1
There had
been one major institution defending the objectivity of rights all along. It
was the Catholic Church, which has always defended an objectivist “natural law”
view of ethics in general and of rights in particular. On that view, ethics is
not fundamentally about rules, or divine commands, or the greatest happiness of
the greatest number, or habits ingrained by evolution and custom. It is about
the irreducible worth of persons – the irreducible equal worth of persons – and
what follows from that. Because a human being is of immense value, a human death
is a tragedy. That is in contrast to the explosion of a lifeless galaxy, which
is just a firework. So humans have a right to life and (to put the same thing
from the point of view of others) murder is prohibited. Because humans have a
particular nature, their rights and duties are of particular kinds. For
example, because they are intellectual beings, knowledge is central to a full
human life, which is to say they have a right to education. Because they are
spiritual beings, they have a right to the free exercise of their religion.
Because they have the responsibility to think autonomously about what is good
for human life, they have the right not to be persecuted for their political or
religious beliefs. And so on for the many other rights of individuals, which
have come to be widely acknowledged as “human rights”.
In thought
on political and social organisation of society too, the late twentieth century
saw developments that were in many ways a vindication of positions long held by
the Catholic Church. Because humans are social beings with free will, they have
a right to participation in the political and economic decisions that affect
them. Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum laid out a vision of
society between the extremes of state socialism and laissez faire
capitalism. A society should consist of many organisations of different sizes
and purposes cooperating in the context of an acceptance of moral rules.
Families, trade unions, guilds, businesses, clubs and the state should pursue
their own aims, respecting each other’s spheres of action and cooperating to
build a just society. A hundred years later, the Communist experiment in
command economies had collapsed, and the form of “capitalism” successful in the
West was so bound by safety regulations, compensation laws,
truth-in-advertising legislation, powerful industry regulatory bodies and
government inquiries as to be virtually unrecognisable as the laissez faire
version of the nineteenth century. The “regulated capitalism” or “market
socialism”2 of the present day is much closer to Leo
XIII’s plan than to the socialist or capitalist rivals of his time.
Theory,
unfortunately, has not kept pace with these developments, and much argument on
the most abstract plane in economics and politics remains mired in unproductive
wrangling between antique thoughtforms. On the one hand, state “socialism” as a
top-down cure-all for injustices to the powerless is still advocated by those
who have failed to answer criticisms of the overweening state’s tendency to nationalise
the means of oppression, as well as to impose inefficiency and stifle
initiative and enterprise. From the other direction, polemic has been dominated
by a Hayekian theory of capitalism that emphasises freedom at the expense of
all other goods.
Despite its
close correlation with actual historical developments, Catholic “social
doctrine” has not made much impact outside the Church. It has not been widely
studied and understood even within the Church. It has been generally seen, from
a distance, as simultaneously platitudinous and necessarily false. It can seem
platitudinous because it is moderate and balanced in its moral demands on
economics and politics as well as close to the political reality we take for
granted in the West. Like any position not sufficiently paradoxical to stand
out, it risks the fate of Aristotle: “Aristotle’s works are full of platitudes
in much the same way as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is full of quotations.”3 It seems false because Realpolitik and
economic “forces” are presumed by self-styled hard-headed rationalists to be
not subject to human command and hence beyond the reach of ethics.
Friedrich
Hayek, the main theorist behind the moves towards “economic rationalism” and
deregulation in the last thirty years, expresses the suspicions of many in his
arguments on the “mirage of social justice”. Only human actions can be just, he
says, so states of affairs such as societal arrangements cannot be either just
or unjust. For they are merely the unintended outcomes of the “self-organisation”
of society through such means as market forces. The distribution of wealth
resulting from “impersonal” market forces is not the result of the intention of
any person or agency. Thinking it is would be to anthropomorphise “Society”.
Therefore, no one is to blame for that distribution and the concept of justice
cannot apply to it.4
To the
extent that an outcome is not foreseen or intended, to that extent it is indeed
not subject to ethical judgement. But societies do not self-organise like
eddies in turbulent fluids. Hayekians are captives of a certain simplistic
model of self-organisation, the model derived from Adam Smith’s “unseen hand”.
Such models of society have created a great deal of trouble. From Marx’s
fantasy of history as driven by inevitable conflicts of class interests to
Dawkins’ reduction of social interaction to the play of “selfish genes”,
attempts to explain society as the work of amoral agents hidden behind the
scenes have had a ready audience. They play to the same market as books on the
“Secret History of the Court of King So-and-So”5
and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the market that revels in the
exposure of dark forces holding the levers of power and the consequent relief
of moral responsibility from those usually thought to have made the world as it
is, ourselves.
But it is a
matter of the most elementary observation that societies self-organise in a
much more hierarchical and intentional way than fluids or ant colonies. They
are much more like a game of a team sport. A game of football can look confused
from a distance, and also from the point of a camera fixed to the ball. But it
is not. The teams have coherence and are directed according to a conscious plan
– though a plan that has to keep adjusting to unpredictable elements. The game
as played is the outcome of interaction between the planned actions of the team
and the cut and thrust of the ball and opposing play. So it is with economic
and political ventures. The Great Pyramid, the East India Company, D-Day,
Microsoft and for that matter the Catholic Church are great enterprises
directed by minds. They are the outcomes of the ability of human institutions
to achieve coordinated results by referring decisions to small groups who
oversee a complex organisation directed to planned results. After the military,
capitalist enterprises are among the most successful organisations in taking
advantage of such possibilities; indeed, Weber points out that what
distinguishes capitalism from mere buying and selling is its long-term planning
with resources.6 Businesses not only organise complex
supply chains and market strategies individually, but cooperate to form
Business Councils to lobby governments for subsidies and favours and to fund
think-tanks promoting Hayekian ideas. The outcomes of those activities are both
large-scale, intended and partially predictable in their outcomes. Therefore
they are subject to the demands of justice. To the extent that the distribution
of goods is a foreseeable result of those activities – and their point is,
after all, to create and distribute certain goods – the distribution of goods
is itself subject to the demands of justice. The extent of control or
foreseeability of that distribution is not 100 per cent, outside a rigid
command economy, nor should it be. But neither is it 0 per cent or close, as
Hayek pretends. Hayek speaks as if justice would only be applicable to an
all-powerful agent who would direct society and know with certainty the effects
of its actions. But just as in the crime world there is no Mr Big but plenty of
Mr Big Enoughs, so in society there are plenty of agents with considerable
influence on the organisation of society and probable knowledge of the general
tendency of the effects of their actions. Standards of justice are therefore
applicable to their actions.
Hayek,
indeed, admits that hierarchical self-organisation of society is possible. In
fact, he spends much of his time warning how easy it is, constantly arguing
that any restrictions on market forces will slip quickly into a totalitarianism
that stifles freedom and enterprise. There is such a danger. But it is a danger
only because of the innate tendencies of human societies to cede control up the
line in order to get things done, a tendency that realises itself in many more
partial ways than by dictatorship. When Hayek announces that the answer is “no”
to both the questions:
1. “Whether
within an economic order based on the market the concept of ‘social justice’
has any meaning or content whatever;
2. “Whether
it is possible to preserve a market order while imposing upon it … some pattern
of remuneration based on the assessment of the performance or the needs of
different individuals or groups by an authority possessing the power to enforce
it,”7
the logical
tension between the two “nos” is severe. It is like telling King Canute both
that ordering the sea to go back is impossible and that doing so will
dangerously distort the free flow of the tides.
The essential solution to the problem of how
to impose social justice without falling into the evils of totalitarianism and
a command economy is the one initiated by late medieval law and developed by
Catholic social justice theory. Hayek himself praises the late medieval
scholastics for their insight that “comparative prices arrived at without
fraud, monopoly and violence was all that justice required.”8 True, but how does a freely “self-organising” society
suppress fraud, monopoly and violence? Those constant temptations for the
powerful will be major components of any spontaneous order, since an order is
spontaneous precisely when those who have power exercise it without restraints.
Fraud, monopoly and violence (and pollution9,
industrial accidents and the like) can only be suppressed – and thus prices be
determined by economic reasons, that is as a result of free choices – by a
strong legal system (of both criminal and commercial law), which can call on
state sanctions to protect the rights of individuals. Indeed, the very
existence of markets that violate rights can only be prevented by legal action
– there are “market forces”, in the sense of people prepared to pay, that would
create free markets in slaves, child pornography, judicial decisions,
liquidation of rivals, kidneys and babies if those sales were not illegal.
Market forces do not have a meaning outside the system created by these legal
restrictions: those restrictions on what may be bought and sold determine
whether there can even be prices of such “products” as slaves, while
regulations on work safety and pollution demand that businesses internalise
their costs and hence include them in prices, instead of distributing them to
hapless others. On the other hand, the legal system can create markets for
ethical reasons, for example when copyright and patent law requires payment to
the creators of intellectual property. Or the legal system can act to restrict
the consequences of some free market decisions, in the way that bankruptcy law
contains the downside risk of bad investment decisions by outlawing debt
slavery. The law of contract, which declared contracts void in case of fraud or
duress, was an early success in incorporating ethical requirements into the
control of business.10 Market “forces” have a very different
meaning in a system not shaped by such an understanding and enforcement of
fairness in contracts.
Only the
state, acting in support of a legal system that is flexible about extending the
protections of law, can accomplish those tasks. As John Paul II wrote in his
encyclical on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, “The State has
the task of determining the juridical framework within which economic affairs
are to be conducted, and thus of safeguarding the prerequisites of a free
economy, which presumes a certain equality between the parties, such that one
party would not be so powerful as practically to reduce the other to
subservience,” and “Economic activity, especially the activity of a market
economy, cannot be conducted in an institutional, juridical or political
vacuum. On the contrary, it presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom
and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public
services. Hence the principal task of the State is to guarantee this security.”11
Later
developments in the same direction have been the strengthening in the twentieth
century of compensation law to protect workers and consumers against unsafe
work practices and products,12 and more recently the strong regulation of
matters of business ethics such as conflict of interest and insider trading.
For products where the market cannot easily be informed because the quality of
the offering takes a long time to become clear, such as life insurance, bank
risk and some forms of education and medication, there is pressure for enforced
inspection and publication of information; the pressure comes both from the
public and from reputable firms concerned not to be undercut by “cowboys”, and
those industries are heavily regulated.13
Again, market forces are created in the context of these legal and semi-legal
restrictions. Regulated capitalism is successful because of the regulation, not
despite it. The regulated and generally stable capitalism of the last few
decades has delivered prosperity more reliably than the unrestrained capitalism
of the Depression. And it is no accident that the world’s most vibrant free
enterprise society, the United States, is also the most litigious.
There are
special difficulties with the regulation of the market in labour, where setting
a minimum wage or imposing other industrial relations requirements on
employment risks disadvantaging the unemployed. But interventions such as
enforcing equal pay for equal work, non-discriminatory hiring practices and
occupational health and safety standards have proved to be successful in the
workplace without apparently retarding growth.
Mainstream
economists, far from both Hayekian and socialist extremes, agree up to a point
with these considerations, although they prefer to express themselves in ways
that underplay the role of justice. They allow that the State may “support” the
market in the “public good” situation (such as defence or health); the
“externality” situation (as in taxing a polluter for the “quality of life”
burden it imposes on others); the “merit good” situation (where it is accepted
that goods such as education or social security should be provided even to
those not prepared or unable to pay). The State may also “oversee” the market
with watchdog bodies to enforce free competition and to correct information
asymmetries by such means as publishing the results of restaurant kitchen
inspections. Finally, the State may act macroeconomically by influencing
interest rates to change the balances between growth, inflation and unemployment.14 The State is also the only entity likely to
coordinate interests over time intervals greater than those applicable to
market mechanisms, for example in taking into account the rights of future
generations in policy on environmental degradation and global warming. That is
a very wide sphere of potential activity by the State, even taking into account
warnings that the intervention should be as little as possible consistent with
accomplishing the tasks. The economists normally prefer to justify these interventions
in terms of “wants” such as the desire for defence, but the ethical language of
“merit goods” and the like suggests that they really mean desires that are
morally defensible.
None of those developments are totalitarian. They do
not command prices or allocate goods. They simply restrict what can be done by
businesses and others, in the interests of justice, before they can get to the
point of setting prices by a market mechanism. Those developments have largely
been accepted in practice, and the legal and compliance systems have enforced
them (in Western countries) with a high degree of effectiveness. The cases of,
for example, pollution in China and bribery in Russia remind us that this
outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion.
If markets are structured ethically, Catholic social
theory welcomes them.15 Markets, when working well, are efficient
at allocating effort and ensuring needs are met. They are not in themselves
“materialistic” or based on any assumptions that humans are merely economic
beings. They have the ability to fulfil demand, and what humans demand is up to
them. If some people demand luxury consumables, there is a market in them; if
others are prepared to pay for opera or charity services, that creates a market
in those. If there is to be moral evaluation, it should bear on the choices
people make, not on the existence of the markets to satisfy them. And it is
markets that give people the opportunity to make their own choices on what is
good for them and their dependants. It is especially in accordance with human
dignity to be able to make that choice, using one’s own information and
responsible judgement.16 Markets are also especially successful at
encouraging innovation, which, in addition to better fulfilling needs,
contributes to a richer human life for those who use their intelligence and
hard work to imagine and implement a new process or product. Social justice is
not only for the oppressed. Someone with a good idea also deserves justice, via
a market that offers escape from the dead hand of red tape and vested interest
by providing an opportunity for the idea to reach the public.
The other aspect of Leo XIII’s vision that has proved
successful in practice is the doctrine of the interplay of special-purpose
societies. This too has medieval roots. The development of the notion of
corporation allowed monasteries, universities, business companies and the like
to be “legal personalities”, owning and disposing of assets to pursue their
special purposes. That allowed the development of an internal space relatively
free from outside interference that allowed long-term innovative pursuits such
as the universities’ development of science and companies’ overseas trading
ventures.17 The idea was expanded to politics with the
separation of church and state and later the doctrine of separation of powers
in Westminster constitutional democracies, in which legislative, executive and
judicial arms of government have defined spheres of operation and agreed modes
of interaction. As with the moulding of business relations by contract and
compensation law, we can become so familiar with this organisation of society
that we fail to perceive its uniqueness, but a comparison with a different way
of doing things is instructive. Islamic societies do not admit a separation of
church and state and do not have legally independent corporations, while the
extreme example of monistic societal structure was Mao’s China:
The essence of totalitarianism is contained
in the great helmsman’s injunction to “put politics in command”. This is not
just Communist-Chinese baby-talk. What it means is this: that you are to take
over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which
distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker
for repeating “the general line”. Destroy the specific institutional fabric of
– a University, a trade union, a sporting body, a church – and give them all
the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the
essence of resistance to totalitarianism must consist in trying to maintain the
specific institutional integrity of different institutions.18
Business companies are, indeed, among the
special-purpose societies that can contribute to both general well-being and
the human development of their members. In a properly-functioning marketplace,
trust is essential to business,19 while the
necessity in business for long-term disciplined planning encourages certain
virtues, such as prudence.20
Catholic
theory does however take a positive view of the possibility of large-scale
state action in support of the “common good”, the collective goods like defence
and the planning of health services that can only be realised in an organised
society by centralised action. As Leo XIII put it, “it lies in the power of a
ruler to benefit every class in the State, and amongst the rest to promote to
the utmost the interests of the poor; and this in virtue of his office, and
without being open to suspicion of undue interference – since it is the province
of the commonwealth to serve the common good.”21
That is not to imply that the state should perform all the work. Privatised
services or public-private partnerships may be the most efficient ways of
providing, for example, telecommunications infrastructure or mass vaccination,
but in that case attention moves to the service contracts and regulatory
regimes under which the private contractors operate. The State must craft those
carefully to ensure the providers secure their fee only by acting for the
public good, and also that there is fair provision of essential services to
those unable to pay full price.
More
controversially, Catholic social theory approves of a limited degree of State
action in support of redistribution of wealth. It does not aim at any
particular distribution of wealth, for example an equal one, or advocate a
“soak the rich” policy.22 It does however rule out certain
distributions of wealth as unjust, notably those in which the disadvantaged
lack opportunities to work for their survival. For example, people disabled
from birth are unlikely to make their way forward in a free marketplace, so
justice requires that some of society’s wealth should be redistributed to them.
For the same reason, Catholic theory recommends some intervention in the labour
market to ensure a minimum wage sufficient for a “condition of frugal comfort”
for a worker and dependants (to use the phrase of Justice Higgins in the 1907 Harvester
case, influenced by Rerum Novarum23).
Economists rightly point to the problem that a minimum wage may disadvantage
the unemployed by making it harder for them to gain employment, but it is
impossible to believe that a healthy modern economy cannot easily provide the
resources (through government action such as subsidies for apprenticeships, as
well as wages directly from employers) to find useful work for all the
able-bodied at a level of frugal comfort.
With the
right to survival secured for all its members, the State can move to the
protection of the other rights whose fulfilment is necessary for a complete
human life, such as the rights to education, to participation in political
decisions and to free expression.
It is
clear then that the demand for social justice is neither meaningless nor
platitudinous nor unrealistic. Immense efforts have been needed to implement
the demands of justice and create a political, social and economic environment
comparatively free from violence, intimidation, corruption, extremes of
poverty, debt slavery, unsafe work practices, dangerous products, false
advertising, insider trading, nepotism and all the other practices that
accompany the naked and unrestrained abuse of power.
It is
Catholic social justice theory that reveals how the order that protects us is
founded on the worth of persons and consequent respect for their rights.
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