KENAN MALIK Where do values come from? It's
a particularly important question to ask at a time when old moral codes no
longer seem to command support, and there is great uncertainty as to what
should replace them.
FRANCESCA KLUG There is considerable lamenting
of a lack of a common ethos or common set of principles.
KENAN MALIK Francesca Klug, senior research
fellow at the Human Rights centre at the London School of Economics.
FRANCESCA KLUG There is a view that is expressed
by people across the political spectrum, religious people, non-religious people,
that anything goes, that we live in a 'me' society; that, for people of a
more traditional bent, that some of the old deferential values have now waned,
that the old symbols like the monarchy and the church are no longer relevant;
that for people of a more progressive hue perhaps there is a view that the
'me' society, where commercialism rules OK, has taken over and a sense of
a collective common good is perhaps less apparent than it was in previous
years.
KENAN MALIK In the past, people accepted both
their identity and their values with little questioning. Over the past half
century, however, both the sense of national identity and the values that
underpinned that identity have corroded like an old lead pipe. And, as philosopher
Simon Blackburn points out, so too have the institutions that once embodied
the values.
SIMON BLACKBURN In the Britain that I grew up
in the middle of the last century, you could assume, rather naively perhaps
that medicine could be left to doctors, the state of the armed forces could
be left to the generals and the state of the law professions could be left
to the lawyers, the state of the Civil Service could be left to the Civil
Service. I think there's been a loss of that naivety.
KENAN MALIK There can be no going back to that
unquestioning age, and I doubt if anyone would really want to. And yet more
has been lost than simply naivety. Ours is an age of corrosive skepticism,
of 'trust no-one' cynicism. It is also an age in which such cynicism has led
to a yearning for absolute certainties. And this, as Simon Blackburn points
out, makes for a perilous mixture.
SIMON BLACKBURN I think it does create a rather
dangerous vacuum in which any old charlatan can walk with a pre-packed set
of answers so I'm quite nervous about that. The increased sense of cynicism,
of lack of trust that's there's no-one you can trust, you can't trust the
police, the press, the judiciary, the Royal Family, whoever it might be and
certainly not Mr Byers and the government, I think that's a dangerous time
that we enter because without trust eventually, there's no civil life. One
wants to somehow find a middle road between naïve over-confidence and
corrosive skepticism whereby you can never take anybody's word for anything.
KENAN MALIK We'll leave aside for the moment
the question of whether the purveyors of moral certainty really are charlatans.
But Blackburn is surely right that the loss of faith and the demand for certainty
are opposite sides of the same coin. The corrosive effect of cynicism has
undermined not simply civil, but political, life too. There is nowadays a
widespread disillusionment with politics as an agency of change. A disillusionment
that has both driven people to think of political questions in moral terms
- morality seems so pristine compared to the dirtiness of politics - and also
made them more uncertain about the basis of our moral life, since no source
of authority seems untouched by the corrosive spirit of our times.
The question, therefore, is whether there really are any sources of authority
left in which we can root our moral certainties. And, perhaps more importantly,
does it matter if there aren't?
The traditional source of authority for moral values is God. Here's Denis
Alexander who's both a practicing scientist - he is a molecular immunologist
at Cambridge - and a practising Christian - he edits the journal Science
and Christian Belief.
DENIS ALEXANDER The ultimate moral values which
I believe come from God, through his revelation, through the Bible, through
the people of Israel, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth and so this is the big metaphysical picture if you like, this is
where I think the ultimate values as a Christian derive from, starting from
the Ten Commandments and from God's revelation through his people over the
centuries but of course supremely as a Christian through the teachings of
Jesus himself.
SIMON BLACKBURN I fear the word of God just
gets in the way of ethics. Believing that the answers to everything are there
in a particular text, which has no interpretation, no revisions, no updates,
needs no scientific investigation, just there and given - I think it's an
uneducated view in the strict sense that when we look at the history of human
progress, when we look science, when we look at what we know about the world,
it never proceeds by simply according final absolute authority to a particular
text at a particular time.
KENAN MALIK Simon Blackburn. Moral values, he
seems to be saying, derives from human reason, not divine wisdom. Faith is
an obstacle to the application of reason to values, and hence can lead to
deeply immoral sentiment. Not surprisingly, Denis Alexander disagrees.
DENIS ALEXANDER I'm fully aware of the argument
that if you believe when God says something you do it no matter what then
you end up doing all kinds of horrible things which most people would find
abhorrent. The Christian world view is a package of theology and ideas about
the world which also resonate with what we believe actually works in society,
so there is a pragmatic aspect to it, which in that sense gives us the common
ground with all kinds of people to actually live together in a pluralistic
society. So I think it's obviously a nonsense to say that because God says
torture is all right it's ok to believe that. As a matter of fact, he hasn't
said that, the revelation we have of God in the Christian view is of an ethics
which actually cares for people, which is against torture, which is against
depriving people of their rights.
KENAN MALIK But that's not how people have read
the Bible in different ages. The line from Exodus, 'Thou shall not
suffer a witch to live' was used for 300 years to burn tens of thousands of
witches on both sides of the Atlantic. I'd imagine no Christian, would agree
with any of that today. So we are able to stand back form a particular text
to decide what is good and what is bad in that text. But if we are able to
do this, where do our standards come from? How can we pass judgement on the
word of God if all our standards come from God himself?
DENIS ALEXANDER The primary authority comes
from Jesus himself who told us to love our neighbour as ourselves and it's
absolutely true that we could take many examples from history where people
have taken passages of the Bible out of context as they have taken many other
passages out of other books as well. The teaching of Jesus is central to what
Christians believe about how they should act in the world and what we see
in the teaching of Jesus is the primacy of human value, the fact that we do
treat other people as being made in the image of God, as enormously valuable
and to be treated with respect.
KENAN MALIK I believe in equality. I assume
you do, many Christians do, many Muslims do, many Jews do. And moreover most
Christians and Jews and Muslims say they believe in equality because it is
sanctioned by the Bible or the Koran or the Torah. But why can't we just throw
away the text and say that we have used our faculty of reason to say the equality
is good and leave God out of the picture entirely?
DENIS ALEXANDER When the metaphysical underpinnings
of a certain world view are thrown away, it's a bit like a booster rocket,
which sets the whole rocket off up towards outer space but eventually it slows
down and runs out of steam. When you have the booster rocket in this sense
- let's say the teaching of Jesus and what he taught and practised and the
influence that he had on the world - when that is thrown away, then eventually
the morality goes with it. I think it's very difficult to maintain the kind
of system of belief you suggested without some underpinning, without some
rationalisation, something that is rooted in something bigger then our own
biology and descriptions of our own beings. And I think that's what we're
seeing in our own society, that when you throw the God basis out of the window
then eventually the Christian morality goes as well.
KENAN MALIK Despite Denis Alexander's steadfast
defence of the importance of theology, it's difficult to get away from the
thought that religion simply drapes our own values with stories of divine
origin as a way of asserting the authority of those values. To use his own
metaphor, whether or not religion acts as a booster rocket, humans themselves
must launch it, and decide in which direction it goes. That's why different
people in different places, and different ages, read the same sacred text
in different ways.
It seems difficult, then, simply to root our values in God. What about the
other traditional source of values - nature?
SIMON BLACKBURN People looked at nature and
inferred that unbridled competition and aggression were the admirable ways
for human being to behave. I think that was a fallacious inference, a false
inference. It came out of reading morals into nature and I think that's a
very dangerous thing to do. It's not dead yet in things like some of the extremes
of sociobiology but I think we have go to be very careful in that. The human
animal without culture might turn pretty nasty and if you think that's what
nature requires and you start advocating it, then you're turning the clock
back against culture and civilisation.
KENAN MALIK Simon Blackburn. But perhaps he's
being unfair. In the nineteenth century, certainly, social Darwinists argued
that morality was rooted in nature's struggle for existence, and that might
was right - a justification for racism, colonialism, even genocide. Today,
though, social Darwinists (or sociobiologists as they are now called) are
a very different breed and tend to find in nature the source, less of aggression
and exploitation, than of cooperation and empathy. But this raises the same
kind of problem that religion faces: if nature is a text that can be read
as supporting both nastiness and niceness, why not simply throw away the text,
and agree that niceness is better than nastiness?
There is another problem too. Many sociobiologists today accept that no moral
lessons can be drawn from nature. But they also suggest that human beings
are simply physical beings like any another. We live in a fully determined
universe, they argue, and such determinism calls into questions what are often
considered special human traits, such as free will. Here's Colin Blakemore,
professor of physiology at Oxford University.
COLIN BLAKEMORE We are part of physical world.
I mean, we're made up of the bits of machinery that everything else is made
up - the molecules and the atoms and the forces and all of that sort of stuff.
So, we're part of the physical world. And you have to say, either all of that
stuff including us, the stars, the planets, people and plants and everything
on the earth are determined by a set of physical rules, causal rules, or there
are exceptions to that. And if there are exceptions to it, if we're an exception
in the sense that our actions are not absolutely determined by a causal sequence
of events - as you say, going back to the Big Bang - then, my goodness, that
is an enormously fundamental catastrophic challenge to our logic, to the way
that we think about the world, to science.
KENAN MALIK But if free will is an illusion
what can moral values possibly mean?
COLIN BLAKEMEORE Ha, I wouldn't advocate that
just because I think that all of our actions are determined we should just
throw caution to the wind and become totally anarchic and abandon the courts
- of course not. I mean, society has to work. It designs for itself - again,
all of this is, in a sense, determined - but designs for itself a complex
process, a set of rules, people know what those rules are, they learn about
them when they're kids, they know that there are policemen on the streets,
they make decisions causally determined with the knowledge of the law in their
heads. So if they disobey it, then something has to be done to constrain society
and make it work. So you have to detach, I think, the crude notion of responsibility
that there's an evil person sitting in there who has to be punished. Well,
I don't think, you know, there is a person sitting inside us - there are brains
sitting inside us and physical machinery sitting inside us - not persons.
But unless you did something to stop actions which disturb and perturb the
society that you live in, then a society would no longer work.
KENAN MALIK So what you're really saying is
that moral responsibility has no real meaning but it's simply something we've
invented because otherwise we can not make society work?
COLIN BLAKEMORE That's close to what I'm saying,
yes.
KENAN MALIK What Colin Blakemore seems to end
up with is a concept of morality robbed of any moral content. The problem
lies not so much with his determinism as with his insistence that such determinism
must render free will, and hence moral choice, illusory. The logic of this
argument seems to be that any moral values will do - so long as they allow
the machinery of society to function.
Such relativism is also at the heart of a very different kind of philosophy
that has gained ground over the past century - the belief that values are
not rooted in the natural or the supernatural worlds, but are self-created
by human cultures. In which case it seems to follow that there could be no
universal values, for every culture would establish its own distinctive moral
rules.
This denial of universal norms strikes most people as profoundly wrong. After
all, should only the lucky ones who happen to be born into the right societies
possess freedom from arbitrary arrest or torture? One attempt to reject such
relativism, without invoking the aid of either God or nature, has been through
the idea of human rights. Here's Francesca Klug.
FRANCESCA KLUG We're all human beings and that's the
essential nature of what human rights thinking is all about. It's in a sense
extremely simple - the idea of the essential dignity of every human being
and therefore the essential equality between them.
KENAN MALIK Human rights a set of basic rights and
protections - such as the right to liberty and the protection from slavery
and torture - that are supposed to apply equally to all human beings. As the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it, 'Everyone is
entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without
distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political
or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.'
For advocates, human rights constitute a 'higher law' that constrains the
actions of government and individuals. But it is precisely such constraints
that worry critics such as David Chandler, a lecturer in international relations
at Leeds Metropolitan University.
DAVID CHANDLER I see human rights really as
a very confident and relentless critique of the political sphere, a sphere
that's posited on the idea that human beings are capable, are rational and
self-governing, and a human rights approach really says, 'Well that's wrong.
You know that's like Enlightenment optimism. The reality is that humanity
is pretty barbaric, that people aren't really interested in politics and a
general good, and that the way forward is really to protect people against
themselves.' I think that's the essence of it. It's really saying that human
rights or this ethical judgment of the importance of certain values should
be privileged and protected from ordinary people really. It should be privileged
above the sphere of democracy, it should even be privileged above the idea
of equality under the law.
KENAN MALIK Human rights, in other words, like
all ethical constraints, are profoundly anti-democratic. But isn't David Chandler
putting democracy above justice? Is it not better to have a just society than
a perfectly democratic one?
DAVID CHANDLER I think the problem with justice
is that once you talk about justice without ideas of democracy and accountability,
that you're really moving towards a world of vigilantism in a way, that today
people are very critical of a politically beleaguered framework in the international
sphere, that the UN Security Council formally has to give the go-ahead for
military intervention, that international law is formally based on the consent
and treaty-making between different governments, and argue that surely justice
isn't served by that but my argument really is that once you undermine that
sphere of political and legal equality, that justice is really determined
and decided by the powers that are strong enough to be able to do the intervening,
so if you look for instance at say the war over Kosovo, although everyone
would agree that it wasn't justified legal, in pure legal terms, people would
argue that it's legitimate because it's an ethical intervention based on protecting
the rights of others but once you move, once you see the justice outside the
bounds of legality, it's a question of who decides. Who decides whether a
war is just? Or unjust? And once you remove the, even the sort of fairly thin
level of international institutions that exist at the moment, at the end of
the day it's really only the interviewing powers that decide what justice
is and I think that sets up quite a few problems.
KENAN MALIK Not many people, perhaps, will be
persuaded by this answer, but even some proponents of human rights, such as
Francesca Klug, agree that there's a problem here.
FRANCESCA KLUG There is an ongoing and historic
debate within the human rights world about its tension with democracy. If
you think about it logically, rights conflict with each other and you cannot
escape from the fact that you're going to have to have a referee to determine
where the balance should lie in any particular circumstance and you can argue
about whether that should be judges or whether that should be parliament;
but in the real world it can never be an absolute idea except perhaps at the
most extreme levels such as the requirement not to torture people, the sanctity
of the right to life, but even that can have limits in certain circumstances
such as self-defence. So in reality I think that the human rights community
have done themselves no favours by presenting this as a kind of truth, as
a kind of uncontested idea. It can never be an absolute idea and in that sense
it can never be a universal idea.
KENAN MALIK But if there's nothing absolute
or universal about human rights, as Francesca Klug suggests, and if they are
to be contested through the democratic process, in what way are they distinctive
from any other kind of political claim? And how is it possible not to fall
once more into the swamp of relativism? Here's Francesca Klug again.
FRANCESCA KLUG Human rights is essentially a
set of ethical values but its strength relies on people being persuaded politically
in my view rather than simply legally to support them. I think the essential
point about human rights thinking is that it's universally applicable but
it is not a missionary religion. It is not saying that this idea is the truth
and that everybody who doesn't accept the truth is somehow outside this group.
Quite the contrary. It's saying this is an idea which we, the drafters of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the judges who are interpreting
a convention hold by and put forward. It is a contested idea that at its essence
is the concept that the rights or the claims that it is upholding as the right
claims are applicable to every human being in the entire universe. But it
is not something which is, which is dogmatically applied. It must be an idea
that is constantly open to contestation, or it is nothing.
KENAN MALIK The philosopher Martha Nussbaum
goes even further in linking politics and ethics.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM Political values are one part
of one's moral values. John Rawls used a nice image. He said they're a module
which you can link to your moral values in which way you think best. They
have to be one part of that and it's important that they are consistent with
whatever else you believe or else you're going to be in a lot of tension and
contradiction, but on the other hand, they're only a part. There are lots
of things such as the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, the destiny of
the soul after death, that politics shouldn't take a stand on, because that
would be demeaning and disrespectful of people who have different religious
views about that. Our ethical lives cover more aspects than our political
lives. Our political lives are one part of our ethical lives.
KENAN MALIK For David Chandler, though, the
attempt to link ethical and political values is a bit like regarding Manchester
United as both Premiership champions and relegation contenders.
DAVID CHANDLER Essentially they're opposite
sides of the spectrum. The more that ethics and morality become central to
politics, the more you find that political discussion, political decision-making
is restricted to a sphere of elites whether it's moving issues towards the
judiciary which the Human Rights Act does, or towards ethics committees and
people that have a moral standing in society. Once an issue becomes a human
rights issue, what you're really saying is that we should be safeguarding
these questions from the dangers of the ballot box, from the dangers of a
democratic process.
Democracy is posited on the idea of there being no absolute values. If there
were absolute values, why would you need to have a collective decision-making
process, that those absolute values would be interpreted for us or laid down
by the elite or whoever is regulating society, and I think that the ideas
of democracy and the political sphere of equality and decision-making really
sort of say that there are universals but those universals really come in
the process of how that decision is decided, whereas a human rights approach
is really saying that we've already decided what you know the end process
is.
KENAN MALIK This is an argument that gets to
the core of the problem with which we've been wrestling: how might it be possible
to establish a common set of values? Today, both politicians and the public
tend to reach for ethical answers to political questions, in order to root
beliefs in some kind of certainty. But, David Chandler suggests, such quick-mix
ethical concrete can provide no real foundation to our lives. When we transform
political discussions about right and wrong into ethical debates about good
and bad, he argues, we expunge reason from politics, and vacate our own responsibility
for shaping the values that govern our lives.
The trouble with all this, though, is that we seem to have got no further
than we were at the start. We appear to have rejected all the sources of value
- God, nature, even human rights judges - seemingly without finding anything
to replace them. Are we condemned, then, to live in a nihilistic world?
Possibly not. For throughout these discussions two themes have emerged again
and again as crucial: reason and democracy. Even those who look to God or
nature for their values accept that ultimately it is through reason that we
have to decide which values are good and which bad. It is when we throw away
reason, and dogmatically defend values as absolute, that the problems arise.
The question of democracy is more contentious. Democracy doesn't always produce
the right results - after all, Hitler was elected on a popular mandate, as
critics of democracy are fond of pointing out. In any case how can we trust
democracy when barely fifty per cent of the electorate be bothered to vote
in many Western nations?
These are both important criticisms, which cannot be done justice in this
programme. But in many ways they also miss the essence of why democracy is
important. Democracy is not about end results - it's about the means by which
to achieve them. Democracy does not tell us what values are good, or how we
may come upon them. But it does provide a method of debating such questions.
And it provides a means of implementing change. This is why, in many cases,
democracy will lead to unpalatable results. It is also why in the long run
values that emerge through a democratic process are likely to be both more
humane and more robust than those imposed from without. Democracy allows us
to get away from the idea of values as eternally fixed, and yet to see them
as potentially universal. And if the political process seems moribund today,
that surely is an argument to think of how to re-invigorate it, not bypass
it by providing ethical answers to political questions?
The only thing of which we can be certain is that we have to do it all ourselves.
Not nature, not God, not even God wearing the robes of a human rights judge,
can do it for us. Part of what makes us human, Simon Blackburn suggests, is
that we have the capacity to stand on our own two feet.
SIMON BLACKBURN I fear that the tendency to
go fundamentalist is a tendency that can't put up with the fragile way in
which we stand on our own feet. Not standing on your own two feet but simply
submitting yourself to authority is a kind of act of self-deception. It's
pretending now that you've found the answers, whereas you've not, you've just
given up looking, you've given up thinking about them, the questions, you've
just resigned your will to that of the writer of the Holy text and I share
that belief. I think there is something deeply unsatisfying about giving up
the attitudes associate with enquiry and with testing the structure and seeing
whether this bit hangs together with that bit and so on but then I'm a philosopher
so that's my business. I'm not going to go round cracking up ignorance and
derivatives confidences.
KENAN MALIK What this requires, of course, is
a certain faith in human nature - something at which many people blanch today.
David Chandler suggests that underlying the idea of human rights is a vision
of Fallen Man needing to be redeemed.
DAVID CHANDLER Not everyone can agree on what
human rights are, where they come from, how they can be implemented but human
rights advocates say, 'Well we can all agree on what a human wrong is, we
can all agree that torture is wrong, or that genocide is wrong'. But the whole
problem I think of regulating society on the basis that we're all liable to
commit human rights abuses and human wrongs has a very negative view of humanity
and the form of regulation that that sets up that says well we can't really
trust people to vote in a government that won't commit abuses, we can't trust
people not to attack their neighbours or abuse people around them or their
children, that view of humanity and the idea of rights that that sets up isn't
rights of, of active rational subjects.
KENAN MALIK It's a pessimism that can only make
more difficult the task of creating a shared set of values, for it can only
strengthen the 'trust no one' cynicism that haunts our age. I'm not saying
that humans are inherently good or that a little bit of reason will solve
all our dilemmas. I'm just suggesting that rather than sub-contracting our
morality, we should put a little bit more trust in ourselves.