What does it mean to be on the left?

What is there to endorse about equality that is separate from the political structures that bring about its material and cultural existence? I think I follow you all the way to the point where you say:

Personal liberties contribute a great deal to human wellbeing by enabling people to live by their own judgments, and protecting them from the arbitrary power of others, and it is usually an error to countenance undermining personal liberties for the sake of equality;

What would you say about the honor killings during the summer of 2007? What do you say about the institution of sharia law as a semi-autonomous system within British common law? It comes down to a question of how you define your terms. “Personal judgment” seems agreeable to us only so long as it doesn’t consent to abhorrent acts. Self-determination and individual autonomy, two mainstays of a reasonable liberalism, only work in so far as they do not violate the bounds set by society as a whole: the reason France bans the Burqa is not because they have an overriding interest in determining the sartorial tastes of women: it’s because they see in it a radicalism that is fundamentally opposed to the ideas you so succinctly set forth at the beginning of your piece.

If the foundation of liberalism is that everyone should have “equal prospects for a flourishing life,” then it is those who abuse this prospect who give rise to reactionary conservatism.

If you accept the existing framework as a given (private property, a state to enforce the property rights, and everything that follows), then all this sounds like a sensible proposition; and yet 100+ years ago some on the left already rejected the framework itself. It’s been a while, but I believe it’s addressed in Critique of the Gotha Program.

If a social-democratic program is Left, then what do you call those who reject it as… oh, I don’t know – too collaborationist?

his followers consistently failed to make a positive contribution to human happiness

Well, except for those large numbers of them who have been involved in almost every movement for civil freedoms and social progress that has existed during that time. If we ignore them, perhaps.

Two minor addenda to my #2 above:

1. Given the location of publication of your remarks, I take it that “prospects” refers to wealth and income, chances of getting the “top jobs” in society (cf Alan Milburn) rather than to some all-things-considered assessment of well-being.

2. I don’t want to be understood as committed to the view that to be on the left you necessarily have to value equality as such (in ways that might trump individual well-being – as in the LD objection). Rather, since I think we’re discussing at the level of policy rather than deepest normative commitments, I take it that there is an overlapping consensus of leftists who prefer more to less unequal outcomes (as opposed to the focus on prospects alone) for a variety of reasons which might include attaching value to equality as such, but also considerations of solidarity, desire to avoid shame, humilation, arrogance, overweening pride etc., the value of relations of fraternity among citizens, etc etc. (Cf I suppose, Scanlon’s “The diversity of objections to inequality”.)

To generate a thought experiment. Suppose that every member of society, upon turning eighteen, partook in a lottery. If they won this lottery all success and wealth would be theres. If they lost, a poor lot they’d have of it. While these people have equal prospects for a flourishing life I think that there is something fundamentally un-left wing ( though perhaps not right wing either) about this society.

Meritocracy doesn’t seem to work as a formulation either, since a society can be completely meritocratic while still being unfair, i.e if the development of the relevant merits depends on a certain standard of living a vicious intergenerational cycle will be created.

Its equal prospects for a flourishing life, which I then go on to describe in some detail, so no, its not about prospects for income and wealth, top jobs, etc. I think that equal prospects for flourishing requires a fairly radical restructuring of both the economy and jobs themselves (which is why I say in answer to the third question that equality “demands a much more egalitarian society than I can imagine being achieved within a few generations, so anything I say to describe a society regulated by that ideal will sound hopelessly utopian”.)

I agree with what both CB and JQ say. I think that departures from equality of flourishing can be just when they are 1) fairly small and 2) result from actions that people must be allowed to perform and bear the consequences of in order for people to be able to have some authorship of their own lives. In a society with very robustly egalitarian social norms and basic structure this class of actions may be more extensive than in this society. But I realise that many on the left think (and I don’t think that this disqualifies them from being on the left) that more inequality of flourishing is ok than I think, and I wanted to state things in terms that did not restrict the left to those who agree with me in too much detail.

Relatedly, though, I deliberately, and perhaps wrongly, use the term “prospects” rather than “opportunity” (and avoid talking about “choices”, too) because it seems to me that “opportunity” tends to be taken to imply that the outcomes described by Chris and Timothy are necessarily just. I don’t think that’s true, in fact, for the reasons John gives (I agree with him that equality of opportunity, properly understood, implies something close to equality of outcome, given the existence of the family, which I think is justifiable on other grounds; and anyway, if outcomes are guaranteed to be equal then, trivially, people have equal opportunities to attain those outcomes). So I use the term “prospects” to avoid that inference; adhering to equal prospects is consistent with thinking that there may be some inequality of outcome, caused by various acceptable mechanisms, but also with thinking that no inequalities are legitimate. Perhaps the rhetorical move doesn’t work.

Harry, it’s possible I’m just not understanding you, and I don’t want to pull the thread off-track if others are more interested in discussing equality, but I’m interested in some of the implications of the last paragraph of your post here. If the Left is interested mostly in proposing changes that others will decide whether and when to enact, and not radical, then it’s almost apolitical (in the sense of not really participating in electoral politics): what does a Left that is not political offer to the ordinary citizen who feels he or she is on the left but finds politics is the best or only way he or she can participate?* Worse, (and I think this is different from what Henri V. said, and also from the old disputes around Marxism) the Left you describe could end up being more comfortable with a right-wing party, and prefer, say New Labour, or Blue Dog Democrats, to those unable to see the right-wing vision even as a status quo that might be preserved.

* Moreso in the US, where this is almost the definition of “independent”? (In fact, in Massachusetts, they created a party, the Independent Voters’ Party, though they are, I think, right-libertarian and anti-tax.)

Gosh, I hope you have misunderstood me, bianca. No, I wasn’t implying that the left isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an organised political force, just that it shouldn’t restrict itself to thinking about what to do when it has power, and shouldn’t think that when it has some power it is a failure if it doesn’t push through a maximalist program. What is possible varies by time and place, and successful political movements are sensitive to what is possible. In the UK, the party that has traditionally been the party to which the left belongs is about to spend 5 (and possibly 10 or more) years out of power, and the left needs to figure out how nevertheless to have some influence.

“Libertarians, conservatives, and classical liberals would all reject the idea that equality of flourishing is a legitimate aim of public policy.”

Many of them would rather argue that if ‘equality of flourishing’ means anything, it would be that individuals have the capacity to ‘flourish’ to different degrees, and that should be respected by government. I.e. that the ‘equality’ lies in the equal opportunity to ‘flourish’ as much as you can, and not to have artificial constraints imposed on your ‘flourishing’.

This may be bullshit, of course, but then so is much of any such discussion of what ‘everyone’ ought to have, in the absence of any acknowledgement that some, indeed many, of the people that we might want in theory to ‘equally flourish’ are arseholes, and that such a quality in them is pretty much bound to fark up whatever great scheme we can imagine.

This is the one great question that any kind of ‘left’ finds it hardest to face: is there any sense in which people, taken in the aggregate, can be good enough to live well together – to allow each other to equally flourish? Conservatives are happy to answer ‘no’, but for them it is just an excuse to justify particular prejudiced varieties of constraint. One suspects that nominally-leftist authoritarians [like many of those making up the current UK govt] don’t really believe it either, which does make you wonder why they’re bothering except for the power-trip. But is answering ‘yes’ anything more than a forlorn hope that at some point in the future we will all get what we want, and a pony?

My quibble would be that your “equal prospects” formulation doesn’t go far enough.

It entails protection from catastrophe, whether that be job loss, medical condition, etc.

harry b: “I wasn’t implying that the left isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an organised political force”

Will Rogers: “I do not belong to an organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

One difference between the Right and the Left is that the Right knows what it is for, the Left knows what it is against. Therefore the Left is less cohesive than the Right.

Sebastian@20: What if not? What comes to mind is the Asimov story, “Examination Day,” I think, where the hero’s friend Trevelyan can’t get a good job because the bureaucracy decided his mind was cut for Bessemers and nobody is hiring them anymore.

Alex @17

The way a government can take action to allow “equality of flourishing” rather than merely respecting it is to remove those arbritary constraints such as unequal access to education, jobs, and so on. So the idea is that if you don’t flourish in your lifetime then that’s because of mistakes made on your part that were justly punished, as opposed to being because the school you went to could never give you the education you needed because it was unnecessarily underfunded or poorly designed. As some people need a lot more to flourish than others this may necessitate an inequality in education/income/resources/etc , and inevitably some people will have their ability to flourish constrained for the sake of others. The artist who “flourishes” by making diamond encrusted skulls may have his ability to flourish constrained if it means that the money for those diamonds can be spent on giving kids a decent education so that they can flourish by becoming lawyers or whatever, and maybe that’s not a nice thing for the poor artist but in a world like this someone’s got to bear a burden. However this problem is hardly fatal for the ideal of equality of flourishing, which is one we must try and strive for.

I believe that everyone should have equal prospects for a flourishing life; one in which they are able to find fulfillment and contribute to the wellbeing of others, in which they can attain self-knowledge and can act on that, and in which their interdependence with others is tempered by social conditions which prevent those others from tyrannizing them with the arbitrary use of power.

It’s so difficult to separate fact from value in statements like this — the two are fused together in way that’s not always obvious.

It seems to me that the reason many people on the right would reject this view is because they believe that ‘finding fulfillment’ and ‘contributing to the wellbeing of others’ are often deeply incompatible.

The view on the left seems to be that when people achieve self-knowledge, they will discover deep-seated desires and capabilities that — when developed — help others to develop and reach fulfillment too.

But many conservatives believe that people have some desires and capabilities that are profoundly antisocial. As a result, it is civilization’s role to suppress these desires and capabilities and perhaps even prevent people from becoming fully aware of them.

Many people on the left seem to believe that things like sadism can never be a true expression of who a person really is — that they are a symptom of a diseased social environment. But this is something many conservatives deny.

Economically minded classical liberals seem to have a different view again. Many of them seem to think that ‘flourishing’ means consuming and that leftists want to achieve equality by reducing the overall level of human flourishing.

I’m not sure how to have the argument given that the key terms mean different things to different people.

“What makes the left the left is that whereas each dimension of unjustified inequality (class, gender, race, sexuality) triggers action from some interested parties, the left is concerned with all dimensions.”

My one disagreement with this sentence is that some who are on the left are fundamentally opposed to people going without what they need in order to flourish, where this concern encompasses all dimensions of human needs. They will acknowledge that inequality is often a cause, and an effect, of unmet needs. But what bothers them is that needs are not met rather than that those who are deprived are worse off than others. (I have in mind views along the lines of Frankfurt, Raz, and Wiggins.)

So perhaps it would be better to replace ‘inequality’ with another term – maybe ‘deprivation’ – that encompasses both a concern about inequality and a concern about unmet needs.

That reservation aside, I think the above sentence is insightful and useful. Among other things, it makes clear why support for labor unions or for civil rights is not necessarily left-wing. Someone who supports unions because they’re good for white working class people like him, but who is also anti-immigration because these people are ‘taking away our jobs’, is not even left wing insofar as his support for unions is concerned. The same goes for someone who supports civil rights because these measures benefit people of his race even when they privilege the more fortunate members of his race over more disadvantaged whites. These people are, in one significant respect, no different from those on the right who rail against inheritance tax and call for the lowering of the top rate of taxation because these measures benefit people like them.

Of course, people will usually take themselves to have principled rather than self-interested reasons for the above patterns of support. But the selectivity and self-serving nature of their concern suggests that these principles aren’t more than rationalizations.

We need to search for a pattern of concern that is along the lines Harry articulates in the above sentence.

Someone who supports unions because they’re good for white working class people like him, but who is also anti-immigration because these people are ‘taking away our jobs’, is not even left wing insofar as his support for unions is concerned.

Hmm.

“The boss has taken our jobs”: left-wing.
“Immigrants have taken our jobs”: right-wing.
“The boss has taken our jobs and given them to immigrants”: right-wing? Always?

@28:

None of that, however, addresses the basic problem for the left, which continues to be that, when given the choice, the population at large consistently rejects solutions which are, in the pure hearts of leftists, the best thing for everyone.

If we tone that down a bit and substitute “better” for “best” I think we can show that it’s not entirely true. For example, polling issue-by-issue (rather than on party ID or candidates) in the US consistently shows that the center of gravity of public opinion- to take a currently newsworthy example, on health care- is well to the left of the center of gravity of the political system, which is in fact rigged to block implementation of the real preferences of the majority.

##31,32 re Mike Otsuka @29 – Isn’t the point something like: a proper (egalitarian) left-winger doesn’t allow national borders – and nationalistic/parochial partisanship – to trump egalitarian considerations? Let the immigrants come, but let them join the union. If they don’t join the union, oppose scab labour, not immigrants per se.

A related – arguable – issue being that the right (UK: Conservative), before the advent of free-market rationalisations, was fairly openly partisan in terms of both nation and class, and the industrial left-wing initially somewhat ambiguous between being an opposing partisan group (focus primarily on class) and a genuinely universalistic, which is to say at least minimally egalitarian, movement (focus primarily on nationality).

bianca steele @34 – voting on the basis of self-interest might not count as selfish behaviour (or as you call it ‘acting from naturalistic [sic] or self-interested motives’) if it’s seen as part of an attempt at finding a social optimum. The normative doctrine of the invisible hand supposedly works like this – and not only excuses but also demands self-interested capitalistic behaviour – on the basis of glaringly inadequate empirical justification, I should add.

Salient, right to be romantic? Chance to hold public office? Safety from assault? I don’t think any of these are so controversial that they require to take sides. Unless, of course, the Left now is what used to be called Center and the new Right is what used to be the troglodytes.

Isn’t the point something like: a proper (egalitarian) left-winger doesn’t allow national borders – and nationalistic/parochial partisanship – to trump egalitarian considerations?

No, I think the point is that you can be a left-winger without being a proper left-winger – or rather, that the Left is about the act of taking sides with respect to certain fundamental inequalities & injustices, and in practice that act is very seldom ideologically pure. Few acts are.

Yes, I do, in fact, think well-of-course-everyone-agrees that homosexuals have a right to have a partner without it threatening their job security.

Well, uh, folks don’t agree on this, any more than folks agree that homosexuals should have a right to raise children in their home.

I think the controversy here is merely about the level of zealotry

I don’t understand what you mean by “zealotry” — whose zealotry? Is it “zealous” for state institutions to step in and defend the rights of individuals when they are violated?

So then, maybe for you the main difference between Left and Right has something to do with the rules being more absolute and universal vs. more flexible and local?

I don’t know what you mean by this. It sounds like: folks on the Left want nobody anywhere to ever get lynched/tortured, on absolute universal principle, whereas folks on the Right don’t mind torture if the person’s skin is kinda brown and they seem kinda foreign and suspicious-like.

…Now, I don’t think that characterization is fair to “folks on the Right,” but I do think it is fair to “folks on the Left.”

Hey, you caricature them, they caricature you, everybody happy.

(shrug) I was trying to work out what you meant by “flexible and local,” not advance any serious claim of my own. I don’t think it applies generally — for example, folks who advocate that abortion should be considered murder are not particularly “flexible and local” in their thinking.

if there is an overwhelming popular demand in the community to prevent a homosexual teacher from working in that community, then one option for this teacher might be to move to another community.

I agree and disagree. It is true that one option for the teacher might be to move. In exactly the same sense, it’s also true that one option for the teacher would be to commit suicide. Quit being a bother to the community, etc.

But this is not a very useful definition of “option” from my perspective (and of course, we should note that jobs are scarce; one can’t just pick up and move in mid-semester and find employment as a teacher, one has rent obligations for the year that one can’t get out of, etc).

In a sense, all was resolved: the teacher in question quit.

So far as I understand, the last straw was students writing F-G in large letters in some kind of permanent ink (paint?) on the carpet of the teacher’s room and just getting a “warning” for it — and nobody was assigned to clean up the carpet, so it was still there the next day. This might not have been a last straw if it wasn’t for the daily crowd of five or six students who would hang out outside this teacher’s classroom door before first period and yell things such as, “f-ggy b–ch” (my first familiarity with the ongoing hostility derived from walking by and hearing them and admonishing them for their language). The principal was nonplussed when informed of their behavior, and said, “You could try ignoring them.”

Anyway, he quit, and is probably happier elsewhere. So in a sense your definition of “option” is indeed correct. I don’t know if there were any legal issues to be resolved, if there was a lawsuit, etc — having been accused of being homosexual myself just because I visited with this teacher a couple times in the hall, I learned to keep my head down and not ask or converse about it. (I also left the school that year, disgusted and disheartened, to begin my new career.)

Shucks, that’s a long comment and getting off-topic. I’ll leave further details alone and return to my point: taking advantage of one’s available options is finding a private solution to what’s really a public problem.

That was in response to 45

Oops, that was off-topic again. My apologies — I need to stop bringing up examples as side notes that aren’t directly relevant to the thread topic.

Get a bus thicket and head north.

I think about that a lot, but then (and watch me turn this back ’round around to the thread topic), perhaps it’s better that I’m here and doing what little I can to advocate for adjustments in social norms, to pull the society nearby me Left a little. Which brings me to:

This is the one great question that any kind of ‘left’ finds it hardest to face: is there any sense in which people, taken in the aggregate, can be good enough to live well together – to allow each other to equally flourish?

I’ll be honest: as a Leftist, I’m not terribly interested in equal flourishing. I’m interested in ensuring that every human being has the opportunity to live a life in which:

* Suffering is not imposed upon them due to characteristics beyond their control.

* A physically comfortable though meager survival is possible without work or contribution to society. This includes reasonable accommodations: shelter, food, access to health care. By comfortable I specifically intend “the conditions of survival do not themselves directly impose suffering on the individual.”

* Individuals who wish to work, contribute, and socially cooperate have the opportunity to do so in exchange for money. By “opportunity” I specifically intend the concrete opportunity to do work for which their body, brain, and value system is reasonably well-suited.

* Education and career-matching services are readily available for any individual who wishes to prepare themselves for a life of work and contribution, or improve their ability to work and contribute.

* With work, contribution, and social cooperation, it is possible to accumulate property beyond what is strictly necessary for physically comfortable survival.

Salient, one way to prevent the suffering you’re talking about (caused by cultural incompatibility) is to provide everyone with a bus ticket (which is, in essence, an economic solution). I’m not sure if this is a right- or left-wing outlook, but there’s something to say for ‘live and let live’, local autonomy.

Advocating for adjustments in social norms is fine, but the world will never become culturally homogeneous. For example: rural environments inevitably produce a culture different from that in cities. You might be fighting windmills, I’m afraid.

Tim, you can’t be serious. If you have any reason to think the extra-political nature of psychology or, say, sociology of religion might be in doubt, by all means bring it to the table. Though, of course, I’m glad to know you think about the importance of the well-being of others from time to time.

Adding to the first part of my comment #29 above:

I mentioned that, on Harry’s criterion of “What makes the left the left”, Frankfurt, Raz, and Wiggins fail to qualify as on the left. One might react to this with a shrug and say “Well, I guess I never really thought of people like them as on the left”.

So I’ll add that Karl Marx also fails, by Harry’s criterion, to count as on the left, at least on Allen Woods’s reading of Marx’s ethical commitments as extending to ‘non-moral’ goods that are tied to human needs and flourishing, but as failing to extend to such ‘moral’ values as justice and equality.

Now Wood’s reading of Marx is a controversial piece of Marx scholarship. But I don’t think anyone would want to deny that, on Wood’s reading, Marx still clearly qualifies as ‘on the left’.

It doesn’t seem to me that “live and let live” adequately describes the community’s actions toward the teacher in comments 40 and 47, nor the same community’s likely actions toward young women in need of abortions (let alone the abortionists).

No, I was talking about the attitude of the central authority towards these backward communities. If the community is overwhelmingly against homosexual teachers and abortions, then should we force them to accept homosexual teachers and abortions, or should we provide easy opportunities (economic opportunities) for homosexual teachers and women in need of abortion to relocate? The Amish communities, for example.

I believe the latter solution is much preferable and I’m curious if this is compatible with ‘being on the Left’.

Or, to put it another way, being on the left requires a practical commitment to the collective struggle to overturn the oppressive social conditions under which most of us live. Many on the left are of the opinion that this can only come about by the oppressed themselves becoming conscious of their oppression and acting collectively to end it. At any rate, since the struggle is by its nature a collective one the question of exactly what kind of world we are struggling for must be decided on collectively.

Whatever the merits of ‘Equality of What?’/recipes-for-the-cookshops-of-the-future philosophising may be, it can’t possibly provide a litmus test for who is or isn’t on the left. It’s possible that you could be the only person in the world who has the correct answer to ‘Equality of What?’ By contrast, if you think you are the only person in the world who is on the left, then you are not on the left.