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Sexual Morality, Homosexuality and the Liberal Consensus
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18957 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
4,867 Words |
| Author
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Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton is professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck
College, University of London. His books include Art and
Imagination, Sexual Desire, and Untimely Tracts. |
The liberal view of the state requires government by consent. The most plausible version of this requirement formulates the test of legitimacy in these terms: The legitimate state is the one that each individual citizen would consent to, in those circumstances where consent derives solely from the principles of rational choice. In our time the most famous exponent of that idea has been John Rawls, but it can be recognized, in one form or another, as fundamental to Enlightenment thinking. The state ought therefore to be neutral regarding all those matters over which rational people might reasonably disagree.
By a wholly natural movement of thought, the liberal tends to conclude that morality and its enforcement are no business of the state. To make the state into the guardian of morality is to give privileges to a particular morality, and therefore to those individuals who subscribe to it. But other individuals, whose values differ from those endorsed by the high command, may be equally reasonable in affirming them and be equally entitled to live as their conscience dictates. They could never rationally consent to an order that forbids this right, and therefore no such order can be countenanced. The only conceivable liberal order is one that remains morally neutral, standing above and beyond those particular 'conceptions of the good' that motivate the various ways of life that are subsumed by it.
Built into that argument is the assumption that rational beings may reasonably differ concerning the requirements of morality. Kant denied this assumption, on the grounds that moral principles emerge directly and necessarily from the autonomous exercise of practical reason, and that every rational being will, in those circumstances where his reason is unclouded, spontaneously affirm a common moral code. Moral neutrality seems to follow from the liberal view of the state, only on the assumption that the ordinary principles of rational choice--principles that every individual can be expected to endorse--do not fully determine the content of morality. That is the assumption made by Rawls and by many other liberal thinkers. And it is an assumption that is easily made, given the manifest fact that ordinary people, even though rational, must invariably be prompted by something other than reason--a religion, for example--if they are to have a clear idea of right and wrong.
A problem then arises for the liberal worldview. The ancillary forces that turn us to the moral life are not as a rule tolerant of rivals. They are not "experimental" attitudes; on the contrary, they derive their power from an authority that countenances no
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