Contrasting Morality & Ethics
How We Trapped Ourselves in Rights Ideology
A great deal of commentary on political or international affairs appears to be sentimental assertion. An opinion on the facts that are thought to be available seems to be constructed around unthinking ideas of what is right or what is good, as extensions of the inner personality of the observer. Most of it is of the habitual ‘eating people is wrong’ type unless you are a cannibal in which case it is of the ‘eating people is necessary’ type. We all do it - cannibals and moderns alike. It is impossible not to do it because we are pattern-making animals in cultures of habit and inheritance where the patterns we accept are central both to our own survival and to the identities that we dare not abandon. Without that social or individual identity, we fear that we will simply dissolve - whether into the mass of people around us or, even more grimly, into a rootless nothingness in the eyes of others or ourselves. Our opinions (which we like to delude ourselves are true and ‘objective’) prove to be mere extensions of personalities that are as instinctual as they may be reasonable. Even the ethical commitment to the true or objective proves, on closer examination, to be the attempt by personality to assert that there is truth and objectivity without any attempt to question what that might possibly mean and whether even truth and objectivity as ideals stand up to being true and objective in themselves. This confusion is what it is to be a human in a world of humans.
I have no immediate answer to this problem of what is truly good or just. Each person has a notion based on what they are and a will (or not) to question the validity of whatever they cling to in order to assert identity and meaning. If we were to attempt to come to a view on this fundamental problem of philosophy and indeed life we might concentrate on three issues in particular amongst many: a) an investigation of the character of an agent such as ourselves (that is, as a step towards what is a ‘good’ person but this may be a question that is more psychological and relational to others than philosophical), b) the problem of the consequences of any action (which may turn out to be an issue of epistemology - that is, what we can know about the future and how much responsibility we can take for our ignorance of things when things go wrong)1 and c) the abstract notion of duty (which is quite definitely a social construct related to our actions towards others and expectations of others).
Morals on the Sand of Belief and Habit
The notion of duty or obligation is as dubious as the existential reality of rights except to the degree that it is a representation not of the ethical (which is at the heart of individual decision-making in relation to the world) but of the even less reliable moral (that is the social construct that enables us to live in the world). An obvious question is whether ethical (that is personal or professional) decision-making (a ‘false friend’ when it is cover for individual or professional survival as identity or in other respects) is necessarily concomitant with morality when a socialised morality itself may threaten identity - a particular problem for extreme cases of self-driven saints and demons who actually believe in what they claim to believe. The former become martyrs, the latter end up on the gallows.
There is a clear distinction to be made here between an unthinking acceptance of a socially imposed moral duty out of necessity or convenience and any internally generated ethical commitment to performing a duty within a social or cultural context because it aligns with one’s own value system. This may or may not include a rational commitment to social cohesion where morality is essentially the construct that holds a culture or civilisation together. The multiplicity of tensions between choices and constructs here could have us spinning off into the modern equivalent of exploring the numbers of angels that might dance on a pin-head - is there any value at all about thinking critically in itself and what is it? does social cohesion simply require a valuation of conformity with the law and with the forces of order (as some conservatives would aver)? is social moral duty created in reality by consent or habit and by whom (which leads us into the world of liberal ethical and political philosophers justifying things without recourse to God or essences)? do I consent to abide by morality from knowledge or have I invented the knowledge of it so that I can abide by it? did social morality create me or did I participate in fact and not in belief to its formation? and so forth.
I am not entirely convinced that an interest in consequences or conformity with duty are only matters of morality (that is, are solely socially constructed) so you will find me philosophically sceptical about all essentialist claims regarding both rights and duties but still committed to there being a de facto humanist and realist approach to such matters that embrace their own ultimate absurdity regardless of their existence. Morality in particular comes into being by being chosen or inherited so the pressure is always on the ethical individual to have a response to it. On the other hand, both an interest in consequences of conforming and a countervailing tendency to conform to norms can come as much from within a person as unconsidered or considered ‘ethical’ positions as by habit or as a result of external force. Moral philosophy that ignores the psychology of choice is essentially trying to rationalise the constructions (or create new constructions) out of existing social or power relations which can then be transformed into absurd essentialist abstractions (such as rights). It is the abstractions that are absurd not the social forms and it is the intellectual who is absurd and not the citizen (or subject of the Crown).
The Crisis of Our Time
Social and power relations are also operative within the life stories of individuals as much as they operate within societies, whether contributing to the unfolding of lives and societies with changing conditions or trying to fix lives and societies into some model of the good. Efforts to create an abstract ethics or morality are interesting as performative agents for social cohesion and identity or, alternatively, to drive change but they are not necessarily ‘true’. They remain manufactured and contingent so that the ‘good’ involved in tearing the hearts out of captives in Aztec society or the ephebophilia of the ancient Hellenes can find no easy challenge abstractly once Nietzsche’s God has died. That lost God proves to be as manufactured and contingent except as ‘belief’ and yet it was ‘belief’ that also held together the Aztecs and Hellenes and if you challenge the Aztecs and Hellenes on false belief, then you lay open our society to the same charges once you start thinking about the basis for our beliefs.
Issues of information adequacy and of ends (in relation to consequences) are equally important. The mythos of AI is partly yet another attempt to solve the problem set by Nietzsche but with a new God. The idea here is that if we can understand all possible consequences and there will be no inadequacy in information and analysis, thanks to machines, we can have a ‘rational ethic’ and so a rational morality. Of course, this transhumanist ideal still does not deal with ‘ends’ unless the machine dictates those ‘ends’. The machine (or many machines) is only ever offering us its (or their) ends (or the ends of sneaky programmers) as each human being offers theirs. It may even be that, if the machines do come to offer us their ends, the machine will have become a sentimentalist like us, merely cloaking its ends in the bluff of pure analytical reason.
All this gives liberal society - now beginning to crumble under its own internal contradictions of which the type case this week is the mess that the BBC has got itself into - a serious problem.2 It is as serious as when the indigenous people of Mexico found that the gods gave no protection against gunpowder or louche Hellenic aristocrats found that imperial power patronised a very different view of sexuality to theirs. This problem is that the invention of rights and duties is now simply to be seen as part of the mechanics of a society that is self-evidently no longer working. Rights theory is collapsing into, at best, an inadequately experimental form of social science or perhaps a language game.
The Failing Reality of Rights and Duties
Rights and duties, presented as abstract truths in the context of the power struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and increasingly accepted as ‘True’ as part of our civilisational structure, can now only be presented as viable ‘beliefs’. Exactly where is a right when it is not in the head of a person as a belief however that belief originates? Recognised as beliefs and not ‘existents’ in the world, they start to lose their hegemonic power, one that effectively ordered us to accept the reality of rights on trust, as matters not to be questioned, as matters to be accepted because the price of questioning them was too socially high. Rights reflected power relations so when these power relations start to collapse so does belief in the framework that power uses to justify itself. This is the problem of the ‘death of God’ appearing amongs tthose who killed God.
Ceasing to accept the ideology of rights may seem to present a significant cost to current civilisational norms but we may have to face that this particular civilisation (like that of medieval Catholic Europe) is no longer philosophically viable. It has become absurd. And it is not the fault of Nietzsche - the writing was always on the wall. He was warning us of our fate if we did not deal with the nonsense of false belief. Beliefs certainly need to be mouthed to hold society together but the mouthing has to be credible. Once God was no longer credible, one great culture started to die. This is to be the fate of Rights ideology to an equal degree.
Although the high point of Western liberalism might be regarded as the settlement of 1945 with rights flowing outwards from New York with gay abandon, no one asked exactly what was the basis of a right other than the brute enforcing power of a new imperium in Washington. The ideology of rights started to rot when that imperium failed to deliver what it claimed to deliver. Brute reality, the naked business of imperial survival, delivered us unending lessons in hypocrisy and manipulation of which the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and recent support for Israel in Gaza are just way points in a long road to now - this is exactly the same process that unravelled the Catholic hegemony in Europe with its way points of Luther, Galileo and the Thirty Years War until Nietzsche popped up and announced that God was dead.
The Unravelling - Rights Metastasize
The current moral collapse of liberal institutional structures is unravelling more than trust as an ideal, it is actually unravelling what we are supposed to trust as realities, institutional structures as well as the ideological framework beneath those structures. All that is required now is for someone to admit that Rights are dead, not as an intent to destroy them but simply as a recognition of a truth - that they were never there in the first place. Just as Heidegger pointed out that ‘only a God can save us’3, that same someone is going to have to point out that we need a new metaphysic to replace the failed metaphysic of Rights, something that is more true to what it is to be a human in society. Something that actually works.
But, to step back from social morality for a moment, consequences and questions of rights and obligations have also become part of the territory of the individual-ethical (that is the psychology of personal choice and ‘being’). Rights have expanded to include almost any demand by any person in the face of others. Since each person is equal in their claim to express themselves through demands then it is easy to see how Western liberalism has collapsed into an anarchic war of competing rights - women demand the right to a bathroom that men who think they are women now lay claim to. People with white skins think that people with darker skins have reversed privilege through the language of rights to such an extent that they think they can now claim counter-rights. These are all areas of inquiry that concern an individual’s informed (consequential) choices and values and their relation to ends.
Rights and obligations have even less meaningful existence in the struggle between persons than they do in societies as a whole except to the degree that an individual (in effect) creates their identity out of the abstractions underpinning society. We are getting perilously close here to Sartre’s observations on role-playing waiters. We are becoming things defined by parts of ourselves. Worse than human objects, partial aspects of the human are binding these aspects into social things that deny the human as totality. Ethics in this scenario may become only terms in a language game that act as cover for struggle between interests or persons - tools or weapons in that struggle. The ‘trans-gender’ or other rights-orientated person ceases to be a person in order to become a thing defined by an attribute or belief. ‘I know my rights’ used to be the healthy obstreperous demand of the worker demanding to be treated according to regulations and laws. Now, ‘rights’ are things into which persons are subsumed as if personality is subject to absorption into something alien in a tale told by Lovecraft or Ligotti. This is the madness of the university that denies the self and the human for abstractions that curl into one another until there is nothing left but words in a void.
The Occult Nature of the Philosophical Lie
Once a person speaks of rights, they are almost certainly conniving in the telling of a philosophical lie in order to hide an occult values-driven intent to change some relation of power. This occult approach to power is undertaken instead of breaking free from an abstraction to demand, in a revolutionary way, a change in that relation of power out of interest and from strength. The transgender or autistic or whatever type of person has ‘rights’ to hand as tool or weapon but, in using this philosophical falsehood, they become enslaved by its implications. Instead of being a person to be respected who just happens to contain this attribute, whatever it may be, that makes them happily outside the ‘norm’ because the ‘non-norm’ is respected, the ‘non-norm’ has to be positioned socially so that it supercedes any ‘norm’ which is no longer to be respected.
This is important because we have moved from a world of excessively tight social boundaries (created by resource-poor societies held together by clerical or bureaucratic texts) to the collapse of all boundaries. Social morality once lived entirely by the ‘norm’ but it is now dying by the ‘norm’ because the social morality of rights has constructed a society of coalitional abnormals that collapses social cohesion into a form of rainbow mush. It has turned human beings not into free and equal persons (the original intent of eighteenth century rights ideology) which might include nearly all possibly human variation that does not harm another but into things to be defined by the claimed right - gender, sexual orientation, ‘race’ or whatever. In short, just as God was ultimately killed by the misjudgements of the Church so Rights have been killed by Rights Activists. We may come to feel the loss in both cases and yet know that there is no going back.
Perhaps only the individual who can question their own ethical habits from the position of being a human who is a whole progressing through time and society can sweep away all talk of rights or captive sacrifice or making a man of a boy through sexual patronage or the necessity of cannibalism and so assert something else - a consciousness of the actuality of the will to power for oneself or by someone else and the responsibility of being aware of that will and its consequences. The issue shifts from rights to values and from persons as things or bits of things in abstract thing-like groups to persons as persons in a struggle for equal regard and care. Understanding the contingency of social morality, we may see the possibility of making an ironic commitment to what is ethical in that morality (assuming the will of a person is not psychopathic which presents a very special problem here)4. Duties might then make a claim of obligation because such commitments can be freely chosen from a position of knowledge.
Duty - Last Refuge of the Centrist Scoundrel
Duty has otherwise become the last refuge of the desperate centrist scoundrel. Having abandoned personality to the identity politics of ‘rights’, once a person starts to speak of a duty (which has become now no more than authority making claims in order to control the anarchy of rights) they are either admitting to the need for a complete abandonment of their own will to the social (as the soldier does in battle) or they have chosen with deliberation a care or concern for others which they did not need the ideology of rights and duties to deliver. Once detached from their origin in care and concern for others and for oneself in the light of particular power relations, the language game takes over. Rights and duties rapidly become tools and weapons for unthinking struggle, increasingly detached from ethical considerations, used to create new ‘moralities’ that may be neither true nor useful to any but a few who make use of them for reasons of social or cultural control. The contemporary liberal activist, in this context, becomes as oppressive as any petty eighteenth century aristocrat who at least respected their subject as a whole thing to be oppressed rather than as a social construction based merely on an attribute.
Yes, I do take social morality to be highly contingent and dependent on social circumstances and relations. There is no God and there is no moral essence outside the decision of society to create one for its own sake. Yet there is an aspect to it that relates to what it is to be a human being, biologically as much as socially. Ethics arises from within both individual and society and it reflects psychological and cultural history but also neuroses and desires. The British Crown, for example, is regrettably a form of necessary absurdity with its own archaeology because of the organic development of the admittedly rather ramshackle British community. Radicals would do well to understand this. Both ethics and morality are contingent on a given person or society (creating the grim space for the psychopath and the Nazi State) but it is not so contingent in its working out once you know what person or society you are and how a person or society must live amongst other persons and societies.
Once you know not only what you are but your relations to others, your ethics become a necessity for you, a form of ethical realism, and admittedly it may have no or little connection with morality as widely accepted by others if morality does not have the same level of realism. The absurdity of the Nazi State was that it was not ‘wicked’ (an emotional reaction) but that it was ‘stupid’, undertaking actions that would ultimately destroy it, including repression and extermination. So it is with the sociopath. Sovietism proved, in the end, to be stupid. The current British Government is unutterably stupid albeit in not so malign a way as the first two or the Aztecs. Radical realism tells us that morality includes the law that contains and judges sociopaths and the capacity to fight back against threats to social cohesion. Some form of social morality would thus always appear to be necessary for social cohesion but such morality is far from necessarily true or just. Necessity is only truth as necessity.
Flexibility and Fluidity Where Values Replace Rights
On the other hand, if a person is true to themselves and they know themselves to be what they are then the ethics of the person become necessarily and not contingently true although they may only be true as a process rather than an event - that is, as the person (and this applies to a society) changes in time and in the world. The ethic of a person may certainly shift on new experiences and data. Even ‘eating people is wrong’ can be questionable under very extreme conditions of survival. And, yes, we have to take account of the wrong ‘un - the psychopath or predatory paedophile - and that is why social morality is necessary: personal ethic is insufficient to master and control a society or civilisation.
A baseline of social order is required that has nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with the right functioning of cohesion and stability … and this requires that people ‘believe’ in its fairness (justice), protection, competence and efficacy. At this point in history, in the United Kingdom and in many Western liberal countries, contemporary liberalism has failed in all of these requirements. It has failed because it got trapped into taking eighteenth century abstractions as reality and then allowed them to be expanded into something on the very edge of anarchy but this is not an argument against moral flexibility or fluidity.
A personal ethic (much more so than social morality) may be absolute at one point in time yet be relative in relation to itself at another point in time just as morality changes with changing social and power relations. This fluidity, uncomfortable for many people, places great emphasis on the constant investigation and re-investigation of the validity of a moral statement or position in the world but also on the validity of one’s own ethic in relation to one’s own personal development and relations with the world including others in that world. This means that a personal ethical statement or position or a personal judgment of a moral condition must relate to a particular state of being in the world and so may reasonably be amended as the self, social and power relations change. An abstract policy that is external to a society (like the ECHR or international law) can create inflexibilities that fail to allow a society to deal with new conditions and create its own evolutionary adaptations.
Values Contesting Convention
This does not mean relativism as such or a lack of commitment to a strong position in good faith at one point in time even though it may be reversed at another. The strength of the British Constitution used to be the supremacy of Parliament which has now become a hedged-in paper tiger staffed by make-weights. It constructed one major and cowardly constraint for itself for a long while in accession to the European Union but has so many others that its weakness in dealing with successive national crises is now manifest. Far from a loose relativism where abstractions are the means of trying to hold back the tide of actual thought, sound policy means a concentration on uncovering the core ethical values related to oneself for oneself and understanding the relative importance of each competing value in its relation to another when they conflict so that an action or statement is always as consonant as possible with the reality of the situation that either self or society finds itself in.
The shift is (again) from rules to values and then to let values allow us to assess the applicability of rules to actual situations in which we find ourselves. New rules can then appear without benefit of clergy or abstractions. If ethics then appear to shift, then it is because the self or society that is changing (and, yes, there is a ‘self’ despite the inanities of post-modernism: all we are saying is that this self is fluid and should be recognised as such). Centred on core and considered ‘values’ (perhaps as basic as the sanctity of human life, no foreign foot in a country unless invited or not sexually predating on the vulnerable as a matter of ‘honour’ and ‘care’), the ethic then becomes more soundly based than one centred on abstractions or theory.
There can still be a preparedness to think in defiance of the ‘given’ and to challenge conformity when necessary. Social and power relations contain no over-arching self-aware judicial mind making choices unlike the ethical person so the actions of the ethical person become key to the good society. The ethical person may not be a moral person at all but they should be a thinking person whereas the formally moral person is not thinking very much and so may not be an ethical person. For example, the moral person may collude without thinking in the conscription of young men without their consent on the paranoid fantasies of military officials and neo-nationalist ideology - the ethical person is unlikely to do so without a considerably greater weighing up of matters.
Concluding Remarks on Rebellion
Of course, this means a preparedness to possess an ethic that is as likely to contest common morality (and by implication some aspects of social cohesion) as to align with it. ‘Rebellion’ becomes an ever-present option. Of course, some ‘heroic’ existential defiance of socially cohesive morality for its own sake is likely to be based on a ‘false self’ if the defiance is just an attitude or emotional stance that is not at root a position that is internally critiqued as to its validity. An adolescent defiance of the social without thought about why social morality is required in the first place - because of our unstable human condition - may be defined by its negativity rather than be derived from consideration of the self’s actual relation to the various norms that make up a society or culture.
Each person has to negotiate his or her way between the Scylla of unthinking acceptance of behavioral, social, cultural or political norms that may wreck the self as something true to itself and the Charybdis of inventing a self that has not been considered with adequate care by itself, so creating a ‘false ethic’. That a rebellion may become ultimate - even armed against the State’s monopoly of force - may be inconvenient for the liberal democratic system but it is a necessary corrective as the system spins increasingly out of control.
This dynamic of constructing a personal ethic (which may or may not be socially or culturally dysfunctional) is a natural product of working to ‘know oneself’. It might thus be said that ethics derive from thinking about one’s internal psychology and social condition and from the use of philosophy to help think about oneself phenomenologically as much as it is a matter of making values fit together rationally. Indeed, rationality may not be the best guide in all cases. It may clear away the ground in order to clarify a contest between values but there may still be a struggle over competing ‘goods’ and there may be issues over judgments on consequences that may, in turn, be based on inadequate information.
In such cases, the ‘choice’ that has to be made cannot be just moral or ideological unless one is minded to choose the moral or ideological in order to avoid or evade a choice that is personal. Of course such an evasion may be a legitimate conscious and thought-through choice just as one may choose to act against ones own core values and perhaps do so without guilt, shame or regret, but evasions and choices ‘against oneself’ (unethical choices) must be seen for what they are - necessities - rather than as ethical decisions. In short, let us not delude ourselves as to our goodness and just try to be as good as we are able.
This includes the problem of chain of responsibility. A violent action against a person (for example) may originate in a personality flaw created in early childhood by cruel treatment which may be the result of mental illness in a parent caused by poverty or from a chain of mistreatment that resulted from a family being thrown off land by rapacious landlords who were under pressure from bankers on loan payments who needed to recoup monies or go bankrupt because of fiscal action by states who, in turn, needed to do this because they were threatened with invasion by opponents who needed resources denied to them and so on ad infinitum … until evolution itself, the laws of physics or ‘God’ becomes the ultimate cause. Justice involves the ‘drawing of lines’ to attribute responsibilities and politics is in part the struggle about where to draw the line in order to maintain an interest.
If we analyse the BBC case, we find that the civilisational error lies not in the manipulative lie in which it got caught out or the counter-productive legal regime in which an alleged mistake can result in a claim of $1bn in a foreign jurisdiction but in two factors that few seem to be facing as a challenge not just to the institution but to the entire intellectual superstructure of late liberal culture.
The first is that the apparently one-off single lie (the editing of clips) is, in fact, part of a much more general form of implicit corruption or stupidity - which is to claim high standards in the presentation of ‘facts’ and not take responsibility for the selection of facts or the interpretation of facts within a particular ideological model.
A sub-set of this problem is the confusions that take place between balance and truth where the social perception of balance means a sometimes dodgy approach to truth (as in the nonsense of having four sub-elite spokespeople speak a balance of platitudes on ‘Question Time’) while the attempt at truth within a pre-set ideological framework which is imbalanced towards one side of a clearly divided national culture means that the ‘truth’ is only partial because it is imbalanced.
The second is the sudden upsurge of public defenders of the BBC who do not declare their personal interest in the survival of the BBC and whose vehement protestations paradoxically prove the case of at least imbalance. Their protests confirm bias (and so lack of balance) and ignore the fact that the editing in question was a deliberate untruth. In trying to ignore it or ‘explain’ it in the context of political attacks, these ‘defenders’ ironically demonstrate the high probability of the editing being derived from some sort of bias.
In short, the ‘mistake’ (clearly part of a pattern of such mistakes demonstrating adherence to some sort of ideological framework) becomes ‘proven’ by the conduct of its most vociferous ‘explainers’. The hole the corporation dug for itself by saying one thing and being another gets ever deeper. There is a human inability here to anticipate criticism and correct possible bad future outcomes in advance combined with a terrified defensive posture that refuses to admit that, while the obvious mistake might be corrected and regretted, there is still no attempt to explore the prior framework of decision-making and organisation that allowed the mistake to take place.
The BBC behaves like the trade Editor who refuses to let an external professional assess his readership figures in case it be discovered that he has few. Its consultations are defensive efforts to lodge itself within existing power relations and not critique its own meaning in a society that is more than those highly contingent power relations. And the BBC is not alone in this - almost every liberal institution now positions itself for survival within a slowly dying system rather than re-think itself in relation to its duty to a changing society.
Heidegger of course must not be misinterpreted here. He was not calling for the return of God. He had already left the building. He simply accepted Nietzsche’s insight as fact and was noting (which Nietzsche might equally have noted) that humanity by its very being in the world almost certainly requires an alternative metaphysic in which meaning could be lodged. Some humans (me included) have no need for a metaphysic beyond ‘being in the world’ but most humans do, a point that does not need explaining here.
The ‘death of God’ has still passed most humans by given that most humans still choose or are habituated or are biologically hard-wired to ‘believe’ in something that actually exists outside mere ‘being in the world’. The ‘death of God’ simply means that most of these beliefs are philosophically untenable but this will never stop the search for something that gives wider meaning to a pattern-seeking species. Heidegger simply recognises this but seeks a replacemen that is viable philosophically, an endeavour he failed in at the social level (infamously dabbling in national socialism) but perhaps not at the individual level for some people.
The ‘death of rights’ is similar. It does not mean that people will suddenly stop talking of rights or claiming rights but only that the talk and claims will be as anarchic as modern ‘spirituality’ has become. The search is on for a replacement that can restore order and which I suspect will reverse the polarities of the ‘death of God’ in the post-Nietzschean world. That is, that, just as the search for a new metaphysic ends up with an individual response but cannot reconstruct a viable social metaphysic outside the cold clinical vision of scientific materialism (not in the Marxist sense) so the new ‘politics’ will construct a socially viable philosophy that has little element of personal belief attached to it. If rights continue to be talked of and claimed as ‘true’, they will be seen as simply rhetorical tools in the struggle for social power which is, in fact, what they have become.
We must refuse to ignore the problem of the person whose individual nature directs themselves to harming others. One of the paradoxes of contemporary radical liberalism is that it has recently been busy trying to impose oppressive boundaries because it let loose the darkness it is now trying to contain.
In the 1970s, an admittedly young woman activist supported the ‘civil rights’ of those who advocated child sex because her abstract ideal of liberty had ignored the actual effects of such sex on children and the exploitative power relations involved. This person changed their view sufficiently to become a vocal feminist and leading member of the British political establishment but the inability of the British liberal elite in general to deal decisively with the organised abuse of vulnerable adolescents in care homes over many decades is closely linked to the fact that an ideology of rights became sets of abstractions about culture instead of a concern for vulnerable individuals.
Abstraction creates confused thinking about policy. Marxism-Leninism eventually crumbled on the inability of abstraction to deal with the behaviours of the really existing human. Values focus the mind on life actually lived. A return to boundaries includes a return to the scientific analysis of harms to persons and the construction of systems of governance to control those who harm. And that the harms must be harms that exploit power over others or that harm bodies and property and are not harms to the beliefs and ideals that are holding up defensive and untenable ideologies. Freedom to ‘be’ has been lost in the struggle to square competing rights, creating an incipient liberal totalitarianism that is so distracted by the effort of making us all conform to its abstractions that it has failed to protect its population from actual material risks.