This is a highly complex and detailed book. There's a lot to take in. Perhaps too much. In a sense the book is several books compounded. And by this I do not primarily refer to its length, but rather that there are several topics that might have beneficially have been treated separately, which taken together in this way present a whole that is hard to digest. It is rather like having several courses of a meal all at the same time; it's clearly all food (in this case food-for-thought); but one might not want everything at once. However, this is mitigated by Gaus’ skill as a writer. He has a clear, conversational, easygoing, mostly jargon-free style, that makes the book untrying to read – although of course one still has to work hard at following the complex arguments. One cannot but feel that it would have helped him to get the nub of the argument over if it could have been presented in a more concise form.
The book is a defence of classical liberalism. In this sense it is in the tradition of Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick. However, the book claims to differ from these approaches in not resting the justification for the set of moral rules that should be in place in a liberal society on one core idea – this attempt always ultimately fails, claims Gaus. Gaus’ approach is that of the fox not the hedgehog; it is a piecing together of foxian insights and arguments and not based on one big hedgehogian idea. In this he draws upon arguments which may ground social moral rules from instrumental reasoning, rule-based reasoning, moral emotions, empirical psychology and social facts. With this heterogeneous collection one gets some idea of how complex and multifaceted Gaus’ approach is. Gaus favours a piecemeal approach, building his argument upon a wide pyramid-like base, rather that having it upside down precariously balanced on a single point, with concessions shifted this way and that in a futile attempt to stop it toppling over.
The heart (but not Archimedean point) of Gaus's position seems to be as follows.
Morality and the factual conditions for social life cannot be separated. In turn, personal values cannot be separated from social rules. The justification for the structures of social morality is that it is fundamental to and promotes large-scale human cooperation and social life. A justifiable moral system is one that allows us to live together well.
The other main point of discussion in Gaus’ book is that of moral authority. On this basis no-one has a monopoly of knowledge of the moral rules (someone who claimed as much would be irrational), and all must be regarded as equal, although not therefore equally right, in their interpretations. This leads to the ‘restricted view’. It has two strands, positive and negative. The positive strand is that moral personhood consists of a willingness to do what morality demands even though it may not conform to one's wishes. The negative strand is that we refrain from claiming moral authority over others and demand that they endorse what they do not have reason to. In making moral demands on others we are making their actions our business, and putting them in a position where they cannot say that it is none of our business. There are areas of what Gaus, rather wonderfully calls, ‘blameless liberty’, actions that are no-one else's business; and it should be the default position that this is so unless it may be justified otherwise.
Then the question arises as to what is the justification procedure for settling matters of moral dispute. Gaus rejects as inadequate the instrumentalist view that we act according to social rules because of our own self-interest. His position, rather, is based on the facts, namely, which moral rules operate to form a society that allows us to live together in cooperative and mutually beneficial social relations.
This mixture of the factual and the normative has a feeling of applying a Wittgenstein view of language to social morality. There is no point beyond or outside what human beings have in fact discovered through an evolutionary process of trial and error to determine what is really the most effective way of fulfilling the aim of allowing us to live together in a mutually beneficial set of social relations. The social relations that are morally justified are just the social relations that for a complex set of reasons, bring this about. In this, Gaus’ position would seem to be pragmatic. Just as language gets its meaning from what people actually do with the language, so morality gets its justification from what actually works to create a society that is mutually beneficial. There can be no stripping of all this away and starting again in an attempt to build things up from unassailable axiomatic principles. There is a worry here of course that the factual and normative are being unwarrantedly conflated. Gaus rejects processes such as democratic decision-making as a way of settling what the social moral rules should be. This is because democratic process are at least as disputable as the moral rules themselves. It is not clear however why if the rules themselves are reasonably arrived at through a social evolutionary process, a process of determining the rules may not also be arrived at in the same way. In any event, a set of minimal social rules may eventually be agreed upon by all. There lingers here a worry that such rules will always inevitably fall between two stools: too specific and there will be dissent; too vague and the social rules will be vacuous truisms agreeable to all, but not concrete enough to determine anything (except perhaps with the adjunct of other, but in that case disputable, rules).
While stating clearly that there is much of value in this book, there are some worries. I will mention just two.
The first concerns the vision so often found in books of political philosophy, and particularly those of a classical liberal bent (although I am deeply sympathetic to the aspirations of classical liberalism), of a set of basically rational, hale and hearty, adult individuals, able and willing to respond reasonably to moral argument and come to their own conclusions by a similar process. This it seems to me to seriously underestimate the sheer power of non-rational process to determine people's beliefs and actions, processes which have little or nothing to do with rational deliberation. (There is a section on morality and emotion that I turned to hopefully, but it was on quite another matter, that of Strawsonian ‘reactive attitudes’.) Such influences are more to do with facts about psychology and social life than any process of sound reasoning. This will lead to disputes not between positions that are held on the basis of rational deliberation, but between positions that are stubbornly held through causes other than rational deliberation: habit, longevity, emotion, social pressures, laziness, fear of authority, and the like. This puts the idea of a rational consensus in doubt. Having said that, it is surprising the extent to which people, in what get called liberal democracies, do seem to get along and agree to abide by rules that do not necessarily accord with their desires.
The second concern is an over-complication of what a liberal society is. Six hundred pages. Can it really be that complicated to get to the heart of liberal democracy? There is a good case to be made for simply this: that the aspiration in a liberal democracy is to apply the minimal number of rules of social morality compatible with the society holding together and people not harming each other, leaving free all other areas to be decided as matters of private morality. The rationale behind this is that we are just not sure enough of the good-life to impose it on others. So it is something we prescribe to the minimum. Perhaps this is indeed what Gaus is getting it. In which case I believe the book is very much on the right track.
This is a major work of political philosophy, and should be read, as it no doubt will be, by anyone serious working in the field.
