Liberty in the Age of Terror

At last, a book that isn't (a) a novel; and (b) an Adam Dalgliesh mystery. Instead, it's A.C. Grayling's clunkily titled Liberty in the Age of Terror, which didn't greatly impress despite the clean, limpid style of the writing.

The book is split into two parts, the first of which examines the history of, and the current problems that confront, political liberalism. The second part contains Grayling's thoughts on a handful of modern political philosophers and thinkers.

The initial whistle-stop tour through the history of political liberalism quickly outlines the defining features that make a set of political values liberal as opposed to, say, libertarian. It then sketches out how identity, equality and justice fit into the picture, and why free speech and tolerance are critical to the liberal state. With these values established, or at least described, the section concludes with an examination of the problems confronting modern liberalism, including threats of terrorism and the loss of freedom and identity, and the problems associated with maintain civil rights and an involvement in democracy.

While all these chapters are well presented, superbly well written and often quite interesting, the material is covered so superficially that it is hard to see why we should take any of it seriously, except that Grayling has told us to do so. Each essay feels very much like a short broadsheet comment pieces — to be fair ACG states in his acknowledgements that many of the pieces have been derived from newspaper articles — intended to provide the reader with something suitablely undemanding for a weekday commute that does not do anything as crass as challenging their political preconceptions.

The second section contains a short series of discussions of the works of various modern political thinkers. These include Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin and Tzvetan Todorov all of whom Grayling praises (albeit with slight reservations); Roger Scruton, who is treated to sympathetic disagreement; and John Gray, Slavoj Žižek and John Ralston Saul, all of whom are accused of intellectual betrayal and dismisssed.

While I largely agree with these decisions — a sure sign of preaching to the choir — I don't think that the second section does justice to any of the thinkers involved, Grayling included. Why bother providing 5–10 pages providing a caricature of a view only to dismiss it out of hand or to assign it a provisional seal of approval? Surely the book as a whole would have been better served by ditching the second section and bulking out the first.

Reith Lectures: Morality in Politics

Following last week's lecture on markets and morals, this week Michael Sandel looked into the role played by morality in politics, via a brief excursion into Aristotle.

The main point of the lecture seemed to be to argue that the state is not founded on a neutral conception of the good based on a thin conception of the self, as Rawls does in A Theory of Justice, but that moral concepts are bound up in the way that we define certain elements of the state. This argument was illustrated with two striking examples, one drawn from the world of golf and one from the world of politics.

Using the example of Casey Martin, who successfully argued that his disability required that he be allowed to use a golf cart during tournaments, Sandel showed how many decisions turn on the Aristotelian distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a thing. Thus, Martin's case was shown to have ultimately turned on the question of whether walking round the course was an essential part of the game of golf or whether it was merely accidental to knocking a ball into a hole.

With the distinction between essential and accidental properties established, the lecure moved on to consider the essential nature of marriage, with particular reference to same-sex marriage, and whether our attitudes towards it embodied particular moral values. Rejecting the argument that same-sex marriage should be allowed on the grounds of fairness, Sandel noted that if this was indeed the justification, there could be no grounds for limiting marriages to two persons, because by doing so we would be treating polygamists unfairly. He also made it clear that there were no grounds for limiting marriage to heterosexual relationships on the grounds that marriage was for the purposes of procreation, noting that the parties to a marriage were not asked whether they intended to produce children and that people who were physically incapable of having children were allowed to marry. Thus, it was possible to rule out the production of children as an essential property of marriage. Instead he cited the Massachusetts court ruling in favour of same-sex marriages, which stated that the the point of marriage was to show public recognition and approval for a relationship. This, Sandel argued, clearly showed that the public conception of the good is not neutral, as Rawls would have us believe, but instead endorses particular virtues as being worthy of state endorsement.

Again, the lecture was interesting, thought provoking and well illustrated — the golfing example was particularly good, even Sandel did appear to corpse halfway through when he explained the professional golfer's concern that their sport was not treated seriously as an athletic achievement! My only real complaint, as before, was that the lecture was too short!