One of my pet peeves is how often political issues are framed as moral issues. I also believe this is one of the reasons why politics is so divisive even within the church. One would assume (though this is not always the case) that Christians should share a relatively similar moral base, so when our politics differ, it can be a significant barrier, because we assume this points to some massive gap in morality. However, political issues and moral issues are not the same thing, at least not by definition, and therefore two people with very similar moral fibers can arrive at different political conclusions. It happens, all the time.
Before I go much further, let me be clear that some political issues are, in fact, moral issues. The best examples I can come up with would be those of crime and punishment (capital punishment being the most noteworthy), abortion, and war. These sorts of issues, not surprisingly, fall around the most basis function of government - to protect the lives of it's citizens.
Many other political issues, however, are not, in fact, moral issues, but rather, they are debates about how to best solve moral questions - or better yet - what the role of government is in dealing with these moral issues. So, on these issues, what you generally wind with is two sides grasping for a moral high ground (which doesn't exist if there's not a moral question at stake), and serving to make the issue that much more heated and divisive.
The best example I can use to make the distinction is on issues of social programs and welfare. The moral question at issue is that of our collective responsibility to deal with poverty and help the poor. The political issues all stem from questions regarding what the government's role in helping the poor is. A person with a deep personal concern and a heart for the poor can easily be found on either side of the spectrum on these issues - the difference is not in their concern for the moral problem, but in their view on what the best solution is. That's not, however, how the issue is allowed to be framed. The debate is often allowed to drift to being about IF we're going to care for the poor, not how. Nothing frustrates me more than to hear someone say they are starting to "lean left" on social issues, when upon further review all they are really saying is that they've become more concerned about the plight of the poor and disaffected. Now, none of this is to say that there aren't people who are against welfare and social programs and actually DON'T have any concern for the poor, but your political stance on this issue just isn't enough information define your moral view.
This is why I'm not a fan of terms like "compassionate conservatism" - the qualifier suggests rather strongly that conservatism on its own is somehow devoid of compassion. It just plays into prior negative stereotypes, and further frames debate as a moral one rather than a political one.
You can hold a belief regarding a moral issue without believing it's the government's role to enforce said belief - it's not inconsistent. I think, in general, we'd find political debate much less rancorous if we did a better job of making these kind of distinctions.
9 months ago
1 comment:
Good post. I might quibble a bit with your terminology, but that would be silly since I know what you mean. For what it's worth, by my definition, a moral issue is any issue in which we're asking "what ought we to do?" and, therefore, virtually all political issues are moral issues. However, you're distinguishing between "ends questions," which you call moral issues, about what ends we should be trying to achieve and "means questions," which you call political issues, which are how we should achieve them.
I have often stated, and it seems to me that this is what you're getting at, that most moral disagreements are not actually disagreements about morals, but disagreements about facts. If you're against abortion, you might make the following argument:
1) It's wrong to kill an innocent human being. (Moral premise)
2) A fetus is an innocent human being. (Factual premise)
Therefore,
3) It's wrong to kill a fetus. (Conclusion from 1 & 2)
The people who are for legalized abortion normally straightforwardly deny 2, the factual premise. They do not deny 1, the moral premise, nor do they argue that the conclusion does not follow from 1 and 2.
I believe this is true of almost all moral disagreements. Rarely, when you analyze them, do you find that people are disputing moral premises. They are instead disputing facts.
There is one exception that I have ever thought of in many years of thinking about this issue. "The ends justify the means." This appears to be a moral statement, not a factual one, and many people have argued on both sides of it. E.g. George Washington's family motto was "Exitus acta probat" which roughly translated means "the ends justify the means." And, of course, we have all commonly heard people say "the ends don't justify the means." One's opinion on this statement often defines one's moral approach. If you believe the ends does not justify the means, you are probably a deontological moralist. If you believe that it does, you are probably a consequentialist. This is no help to explaining political divisions since I meet both kinds on both sides of the political divide.
For what it's worth, I am an economic conservative because of my concern for the poor. I believe the welfare state traps people into poverty and that poverty is like anything else, we can have as much of it as we're willing to pay for. But I'm not a fundamentalist on the issue. We can do huge amounts of good by spending money on various global issues like AIDS prevention, malaria prevention, and malnutrition and save a lot of lives cheaply and we absolutely should do this (Bush gets not near enough credit for his Africa initiatives, a continent where he is extremely popular) and there's a lot to be said for doing it through tax dollars. But, as P.J. O'Rourke says, "the Biblical injunction was to clothe the poor, not style them." I have never understood the American left's vaunted concern for the poor, which almost always translates into concern for the poor in America. Why? Because they vote? The poor in Africa and Asia or even South America are far worse off. Shouldn't we be starting with them? But then I assume that they'll agree with me that we can't do everything simultaneously (though it seems many of them don't) and so we have to prioritize.
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