LIBERAL MORAL ACTIONLiberals, too, have categories of moral action, and not surprisingly, they look very different from conservative categories. Liberal categories of moral action: 1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness. 2. Helping those who cannot help themselves. 3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves. 4. Promoting fulfillment in life. 5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above. Again, let us look at where they come from, one by one. 1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness. The primacy of Morality as Empathy makes empathy a moral priority. Morality as Fairness is a consequence; if you empathize with others, you will want them to be treated fairly. This makes empathetic actions and actions promoting fairness into moral actions. Correspondingly, a lack of empathetic behavior, or actions going against fairness, are immoral. 2. Helping those who cannot help themselves. The priority given to Morality as Nurturance makes it moral to help someone who cannot help himself, and immoral not to do so if one can. 3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves. The priority of protection in Nurturant Parent morality makes it moral to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and immoral not to do so when one can. 4. Promoting fulfillment in life. Moral Happiness and Moral Self-Development make it moral to promote fulfillment in life and immoral to work against it. Fulfillment includes developing your potential in a variety of areas, having meaningful work, being basically happy, and so on. 5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above. To nurture properly, one must be strong and healthy and must feel nurtured oneself. Therefore acts of taking care of oneself or helping others take care of themselves are moral acts. Since being neglectful of one's health and strength imposes an unfair burden on others, it is immoral not to take care of oneself or to impede others from doing so. For the sake of comparison, let us look at both moral category systems together: Conservative categories of moral action: 1. Promoting Strict Father morality in general. 2. Promoting self-discipline, responsibility, and self-reliance. 3. Upholding the Morality of Reward and Punishment. a. Preventing interference with the pursuit of self-interest by self-disciplined, self-reliant people. b. Promoting punishment as a means of upholding authority. с Ensuring punishment for lack of self-discipline. 4. Protecting moral people from external evils. 5. Upholding the Moral Order.
Liberal categories of moral action: 1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness. 2. Helping those who cannot help themselves. 3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves. 4. Promoting fulfillment in life. 5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself in order to do the above. These categories define the first moral questions one "asks" unconsciously and automatically of any action. If it is in one of the categories, it is moral; if it is in the opposite category, it isn't moral. Whatever other system of categories one may have – and any conceptual system has a great many – when one is functioning politically, these moral categories are primary. The categories define opposing moral worldviews, worldviews so different that virtually every aspect of public policy looks radically different through these lenses. Take a simple example: college loans. The federal government has had a program to provide low-interest loans to college students. The students don't have to start paying off the loans while they are still in college and the loans are interest-free during the college years. The liberal rationale for the program is this: College is expensive and a great many poor-to-middle-class students cannot afford it. This loan program allows a great many students to go to college who otherwise wouldn't. Going to college allows one to get a better job at a higher salary afterward and to be paid more during one's entire life. This benefits not only the student but also the government, since the student will be paying more taxes over his lifetime because of his better job. From the liberal moral perspective, this is a highly moral program. It helps those who cannot help themselves (Category 2). It promotes fulfillment in life in two ways, since education is fulfilling in itself and it permits people to get more fulfilling jobs (Category 4). It strengthens the nation, since it produces a better-educated citizenry and ultimately brings in more tax money (Category 5); and it is empathetic behavior (Category 1) making access to college more fairly distributed (Category 1). But through conservative spectacles, this is an immoral program. Since students depend on the loans, the program supports dependence on the government rather than self-reliance (Category 2). Since not everyone has access to such loans, the program introduces competitive unfairness, thus interfering with the free market in loans and hence with the fair pursuit of self-interest (Category 3a). Since the program takes money earned by one group and, through taxation, gives it to another group, it is unfair and penalizes the pursuit of self-interest by taking money from someone who has earned it and giving it to someone who hasn't (Category 3a). I started with college loans because it is not as heated an issue as abortion or welfare or the death penalty or gun control. Yet it is a nitty-gritty issue, because it affects a lot of people very directly. To a liberal, it is obviously the right thing to do. And to a conservative, it is obviously the wrong thing to do. The metaphors for morality that give rise to these inferences are the following. For the liberals: Moral Empathy, Moral Nurturance, Moral Self-Development, and Moral Self-Nurturance. For the conservatives: Moral Strength, Moral Self-interest, and Moral Accounting (the metaphorical basis of the concepts of Reward and Punishment). The point of this example is that policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, namely, college loans. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family. The role of morality and the family is inescapable, even if you are only talking about college loans policy.
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