Two things need to be observed about the conflicting modes of moral reasoning between left and right. The conservative’s innate caution rooted in the anchor of human nature and established experience leads him to evaluate any ideas according to the potential consequences, and especially with regard to the often counter-intuitive unintended or perverse consequences. Many liberals are averse to this mode of thought, guided instead by an often unacknowledged Kantian moral framework that values the purity of intentionality over consequences, or who think that potential adverse consequences can be overcome through the assertion of a morally pure will.... Their moral frameworks or so radically different that they may as well be speaking foreign languages to each other much of the time.
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The second observation flows directly from this. The conservative argument against a liberalism of moral intentions is that it has no logical or practical stopping point—there is no discernable “limiting principle” to liberalism; hence liberals can never say “enough” to its political interventions on behalf of reform and equality.
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While liberals are congenitally discontent with the pace and extent of reform, they always have a general sense of what should come next, best expressed in Samuel Gompers’ famous one-word policy: “More.” More reform, more legislation, more equality. Conservatives, by contrast, do not have a clear or uniform outline of the good society; instead, conservatives have serious divisions among themselves about what the good society should be. It is not simply a matter of opposing “less” to the liberals’ “more.” Conservatives have deep theoretical differences over the relationship of liberty and virtue...
The New Testament Documents
15 years ago