The way you put it--"The only value that liberals seek to impose on society is the minimal value framework of liberalism itself"--strikes me as more extreme than a lot of self-identified liberals will want. I think it basically takes you all the way to minarchist libertarianism. Can a liberal state have subsidized public education? Sin taxes (e.g., taxing cigarrettes higher than other goods, based on a public policy aim of discouraging smoking)? Each of these policies involves the state imposing (in the form of taxation) values on society (education good, smoking bad) that go beyond the minimal value framework of liberalism itself.
I'd like a big enough tent version of liberalism that doesn't say that once you're supporting stuff like the above, you're opposed to liberalism. I admit that makes it much harder to come up with a crisp definition of liberalism. But liberalism so-understood is less vulnerable to post-liberals arguing (persuasively!) that complete state value neutrality is impossible and/or undesirable, and then using that (true!) claim to (speciously!) support highly sectarian views about the proper role of the state.
I'd prefer something like the following. The state can be non-neutral on questions of value that go beyond the minimal liberal framework. But the more divisive the issue--the more strongly people care about it, and the more people in the minority--the more of a social cost there is to the state taking sides on the issue. So we should like norms/institutions that push us towards neutral, compromise positions on questions of value, even while acknowledging that on lots of questions, no perfectly neutral, compromise position exists.
I like an analogy to judicial minimalism. The judicial minimalist thinks judges should default to making their decisions narrowly--decide the case in front of them, but don't issue sweeping rulings that go well beyond the issues before the court. But this is obviously a balancing question--judges need to write opinions, and those opinions are more than just "this side wins." And because opinions have some reasoning, they're going to have to be generalizable--they'll have to apply to hypothetical cases beyond the actual case in front of the court--to at least *some* degree. The judicial minimalist tries not to go too far. But they also recognize that there's no minimum distance such that they can have a simple principle "go this far and no further."
I think this is a helpful supplement to what I'm saying here. One dimension of my thinking about this (which I didn't include in the post; maybe this is my next post on the subject?) is that liberalism, like all things, can come in degrees. We can think of this as akin to Unger's discussion of the semantics of words like 'flat' (which I know you're familiar with). There's an absolute standard of liberalism, and then a huge range of things that are more or less illiberal. There's an absolutist position on liberalism, like Unger's position on 'flat' and 'knowledge,' which says that you have to be completely value-neutral or else you're not REALLY liberal. I think a contextualist account makes more sense. While there might be an absolute standard, 'liberal' really signifies something like 'close enough to that absolute standard for all practical purposes.' So just like a flat runway can have cracks and divots in it, a political liberal can support sin taxes. And that's a good thing. For any political ideology X, "Never go full X" is a good mantra. That doesn't mean that no sensible person is an adherent of any political ideology. It just means that, even if liberalism (or whatever) has a greater share of truth or prudence than other political ideologies, moderation is still wise.
Another good one! I appreciate that you make a case for liberalism in institutions, too.
I consider myself a liberal (though of the kind who is happy to let the political pendulum swing, rather than to try to nail down a “perfect” liberal politics), and I admit that I struggle with how to discuss liberalism with regard to institutions. It's one of the places where liberalism undermines its own champions: Proponents of liberalism need to accept, and even defend, the rights of non-liberal people and institutions to be less liberal, while trying to nudge them in a more liberal direction – even if the liberal sympathizes with instincts of the less liberal party.
So, if Instacart decided to stop sales of ingredients that can be used to make kebab pizza, I would agree with the sentiment, and defend Instacart's right to not contribute to any more kebab pizzas in this world, but I would also have to disagree with the actual ban and try to dissuade them from doing it. Even if they technically and legally are free to act on their institutional objections to kebab pizza, and they can make a solid moral argument for why no one should ever eat kebab pizza, and even if I share their disgust, they should nevertheless allow people to partake in kebab pizza making and eating, because the liberal principle weighs heavier than good taste. Eat and let eat.
On every level, from axe murderer to institution, there's an asymmetry to liberalism that I wish were better explored and understood among us ordinary people, in that it promises near-absolute rights, but only suggests (doesn’t quite demand) the corresponding responsibilities. Popper's Paradox is the meme version of it, but is a pretty poor articulation with no real exploration. And it’s rarely as “simple” as in the case of literal nazis and axe murderers, but more often about perspectives in academia and systems in privately owned institutions.
Yeah, I think this is an important point. Two further thoughts in response to yours. First, it's a mistake to think of liberalism as entirely value-neutral. Liberalism is itself a value system akin to pacifism, and that's important to understanding the underlying logic of liberalism.
Second, one of the main liberal values is a kind of non-aggression. Violence is out an censorship is as well. Persuasion is the only permissible kind of "intellectual force" (so to speak) within the liberal value system. This might seem to leave liberalism weak, since it deliberately eschews other "intellectual forces" that might seem more effective. But those other forces are less powerful than they might seem, and liberalism is attractive because it takes a principled stand against imposing costs on its adherents that other value systems embrace.
Yes, "it's a mistake to think of liberalism as entirely value-neutral" is roughly my answer to Popper's Paradox, which I mentioned in passing above. Once you understand the values and rules of liberalism, the paradox dissolves, and the argument falls apart. Liberalism has always kept the right to sanction those who wish to restrict others' liberties, but does it with as little force, censorship, or other cost to people's liberties as possible - minimizing the trade-offs. Typically sanctioning the behavior, not the idea.
I think that is a strength in society, but I can also see how institutions may have to be more pragmatic.
A media platform being perfectly liberal will quickly be overrun with some combination of porn, cryptoscams, spammy marketing tactics and/or political extremism that is likely to turn the mainstream off. No one wants to hang out at Zoo Station, even if you (or exactly because you) want to keep it open for everyone.
The exact failure mode seems hard to nail down, but looks like some combination of technology, anonymity, greed unchecked by good business regulations, mis-/disinformation, and algorithms optimized for the wrong things.
I think some of these things can be fixed, but it takes a bit more effort and investment than simply banning people (bad algorithms can be rewritten, porn can be put where it's only discoverable to people who go looking).
But other issues (scammers amplified with bots and AI, networks that are ticking time bombs for coordinated violence, illiberal forces that train their algorithms to most efficiently sow confusion and discord at scale) may pose harder problems, and so I still wonder – though don't yet know what I think – whether we need to more clearly articulate requirements for participation in a liberal community in the 21st century, or come up with a new formulation of liberalism particularly for digital spaces.
As you said, it's subjective but I don't think I would necessarily put this ahead of the "maybe I'm wrong" justification for liberalism.
There are obviously areas where I'm not particularly concerned that I'm wrong (notably Nazis), and so I'm not super bothered by people espousing those views being excluded from the conversation, but I think there is a real camel's nose/slippery slope problem with doing so.
Once you are banning Nazis, you've shown you are in the "bad people" banning business, and you open yourself up to criticism that failure to ban other positions is a tacit endorsement of those positions. Basically, if you ban Nazis, people want to know why you aren't also banning vaccine denialists (certainly a dangerous and discreditd group) and if you ban them, you start getting people calling on you to ban anyone who wants to lift mask mandates or reopen schools and pretty soon you've started banning positions that you really should be considering as possibly showing you are wrong.
I see this with the complaints over Nazis on Substack, where you can be pretty sure that the problem they care about isn't actually that Richard Spencer has a Subsrack, but that Jesse Singal, Barri Weiss or even Matt Yglasias do.
These are obviously not mutually exclusive reasons for supporting liberalism, but I think it's worth thinking of them as twin pillars rather than one being more important than the other.
Sure. They are complementary arguments, not contradictory arguments. My point with the Nazi illustration is that the "you might be wrong" argument has important limits - you can't use it in the Nazi case - while the "peace treaty" argument doesn't. (Or maybe it does, but they're just different limits.)
Speaking of Nazis why not check out two books on the topic:
1. The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau
2. Operation Paperclip
After the war in Europe many prominent Nazis gained or were appointed to positions of influential political and economic power in Germany and throughout Europe. Many/several well known hugely big industries that participated in the Nazi death machine and the use of slave labor too were quickly rehabilitated to respectable acceptance in the scheme of scheme of things - to big to fail!
Speaking of death machines every state in the US relies on the presence of companies that manufacture and/or supply all kinds of things for the now world dominant US death machine.
And of course the presence in many states of various kinds of camps/bases etc by the various sectors of the same death machine rely on the presence of such bases for their prosperity.
Meanwhile the modern dreadfully sane everyman of the whats-in-it-for-me consumerist "culture" is a highly propagandized individual, participating in illusions (including "religious" illusions) and, effectively, self-destructing.
At present, a "culture" of total war, a "culture" of death, is ruling the world, while the people are engrossed in self and other destructive consumerism.
This reminds me a bit of a David Lewis essay I really like, Mill and Milquetoast:
https://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Mill_and_Milquetoast.pdf
The way you put it--"The only value that liberals seek to impose on society is the minimal value framework of liberalism itself"--strikes me as more extreme than a lot of self-identified liberals will want. I think it basically takes you all the way to minarchist libertarianism. Can a liberal state have subsidized public education? Sin taxes (e.g., taxing cigarrettes higher than other goods, based on a public policy aim of discouraging smoking)? Each of these policies involves the state imposing (in the form of taxation) values on society (education good, smoking bad) that go beyond the minimal value framework of liberalism itself.
I'd like a big enough tent version of liberalism that doesn't say that once you're supporting stuff like the above, you're opposed to liberalism. I admit that makes it much harder to come up with a crisp definition of liberalism. But liberalism so-understood is less vulnerable to post-liberals arguing (persuasively!) that complete state value neutrality is impossible and/or undesirable, and then using that (true!) claim to (speciously!) support highly sectarian views about the proper role of the state.
I'd prefer something like the following. The state can be non-neutral on questions of value that go beyond the minimal liberal framework. But the more divisive the issue--the more strongly people care about it, and the more people in the minority--the more of a social cost there is to the state taking sides on the issue. So we should like norms/institutions that push us towards neutral, compromise positions on questions of value, even while acknowledging that on lots of questions, no perfectly neutral, compromise position exists.
I like an analogy to judicial minimalism. The judicial minimalist thinks judges should default to making their decisions narrowly--decide the case in front of them, but don't issue sweeping rulings that go well beyond the issues before the court. But this is obviously a balancing question--judges need to write opinions, and those opinions are more than just "this side wins." And because opinions have some reasoning, they're going to have to be generalizable--they'll have to apply to hypothetical cases beyond the actual case in front of the court--to at least *some* degree. The judicial minimalist tries not to go too far. But they also recognize that there's no minimum distance such that they can have a simple principle "go this far and no further."
I think this is a helpful supplement to what I'm saying here. One dimension of my thinking about this (which I didn't include in the post; maybe this is my next post on the subject?) is that liberalism, like all things, can come in degrees. We can think of this as akin to Unger's discussion of the semantics of words like 'flat' (which I know you're familiar with). There's an absolute standard of liberalism, and then a huge range of things that are more or less illiberal. There's an absolutist position on liberalism, like Unger's position on 'flat' and 'knowledge,' which says that you have to be completely value-neutral or else you're not REALLY liberal. I think a contextualist account makes more sense. While there might be an absolute standard, 'liberal' really signifies something like 'close enough to that absolute standard for all practical purposes.' So just like a flat runway can have cracks and divots in it, a political liberal can support sin taxes. And that's a good thing. For any political ideology X, "Never go full X" is a good mantra. That doesn't mean that no sensible person is an adherent of any political ideology. It just means that, even if liberalism (or whatever) has a greater share of truth or prudence than other political ideologies, moderation is still wise.
Another good one! I appreciate that you make a case for liberalism in institutions, too.
I consider myself a liberal (though of the kind who is happy to let the political pendulum swing, rather than to try to nail down a “perfect” liberal politics), and I admit that I struggle with how to discuss liberalism with regard to institutions. It's one of the places where liberalism undermines its own champions: Proponents of liberalism need to accept, and even defend, the rights of non-liberal people and institutions to be less liberal, while trying to nudge them in a more liberal direction – even if the liberal sympathizes with instincts of the less liberal party.
So, if Instacart decided to stop sales of ingredients that can be used to make kebab pizza, I would agree with the sentiment, and defend Instacart's right to not contribute to any more kebab pizzas in this world, but I would also have to disagree with the actual ban and try to dissuade them from doing it. Even if they technically and legally are free to act on their institutional objections to kebab pizza, and they can make a solid moral argument for why no one should ever eat kebab pizza, and even if I share their disgust, they should nevertheless allow people to partake in kebab pizza making and eating, because the liberal principle weighs heavier than good taste. Eat and let eat.
On every level, from axe murderer to institution, there's an asymmetry to liberalism that I wish were better explored and understood among us ordinary people, in that it promises near-absolute rights, but only suggests (doesn’t quite demand) the corresponding responsibilities. Popper's Paradox is the meme version of it, but is a pretty poor articulation with no real exploration. And it’s rarely as “simple” as in the case of literal nazis and axe murderers, but more often about perspectives in academia and systems in privately owned institutions.
Yeah, I think this is an important point. Two further thoughts in response to yours. First, it's a mistake to think of liberalism as entirely value-neutral. Liberalism is itself a value system akin to pacifism, and that's important to understanding the underlying logic of liberalism.
Second, one of the main liberal values is a kind of non-aggression. Violence is out an censorship is as well. Persuasion is the only permissible kind of "intellectual force" (so to speak) within the liberal value system. This might seem to leave liberalism weak, since it deliberately eschews other "intellectual forces" that might seem more effective. But those other forces are less powerful than they might seem, and liberalism is attractive because it takes a principled stand against imposing costs on its adherents that other value systems embrace.
Someone pointed out to me by email that Scott Alexander made a similar argument at SlateStarCodex about a decade ago. Check it out if you're into this line of thought: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
Yes, "it's a mistake to think of liberalism as entirely value-neutral" is roughly my answer to Popper's Paradox, which I mentioned in passing above. Once you understand the values and rules of liberalism, the paradox dissolves, and the argument falls apart. Liberalism has always kept the right to sanction those who wish to restrict others' liberties, but does it with as little force, censorship, or other cost to people's liberties as possible - minimizing the trade-offs. Typically sanctioning the behavior, not the idea.
I think that is a strength in society, but I can also see how institutions may have to be more pragmatic.
A media platform being perfectly liberal will quickly be overrun with some combination of porn, cryptoscams, spammy marketing tactics and/or political extremism that is likely to turn the mainstream off. No one wants to hang out at Zoo Station, even if you (or exactly because you) want to keep it open for everyone.
The exact failure mode seems hard to nail down, but looks like some combination of technology, anonymity, greed unchecked by good business regulations, mis-/disinformation, and algorithms optimized for the wrong things.
I think some of these things can be fixed, but it takes a bit more effort and investment than simply banning people (bad algorithms can be rewritten, porn can be put where it's only discoverable to people who go looking).
But other issues (scammers amplified with bots and AI, networks that are ticking time bombs for coordinated violence, illiberal forces that train their algorithms to most efficiently sow confusion and discord at scale) may pose harder problems, and so I still wonder – though don't yet know what I think – whether we need to more clearly articulate requirements for participation in a liberal community in the 21st century, or come up with a new formulation of liberalism particularly for digital spaces.
PS: Thanks for linking to the post by Scott.
As you said, it's subjective but I don't think I would necessarily put this ahead of the "maybe I'm wrong" justification for liberalism.
There are obviously areas where I'm not particularly concerned that I'm wrong (notably Nazis), and so I'm not super bothered by people espousing those views being excluded from the conversation, but I think there is a real camel's nose/slippery slope problem with doing so.
Once you are banning Nazis, you've shown you are in the "bad people" banning business, and you open yourself up to criticism that failure to ban other positions is a tacit endorsement of those positions. Basically, if you ban Nazis, people want to know why you aren't also banning vaccine denialists (certainly a dangerous and discreditd group) and if you ban them, you start getting people calling on you to ban anyone who wants to lift mask mandates or reopen schools and pretty soon you've started banning positions that you really should be considering as possibly showing you are wrong.
I see this with the complaints over Nazis on Substack, where you can be pretty sure that the problem they care about isn't actually that Richard Spencer has a Subsrack, but that Jesse Singal, Barri Weiss or even Matt Yglasias do.
These are obviously not mutually exclusive reasons for supporting liberalism, but I think it's worth thinking of them as twin pillars rather than one being more important than the other.
Sure. They are complementary arguments, not contradictory arguments. My point with the Nazi illustration is that the "you might be wrong" argument has important limits - you can't use it in the Nazi case - while the "peace treaty" argument doesn't. (Or maybe it does, but they're just different limits.)
Speaking of Nazis why not check out two books on the topic:
1. The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau
2. Operation Paperclip
After the war in Europe many prominent Nazis gained or were appointed to positions of influential political and economic power in Germany and throughout Europe. Many/several well known hugely big industries that participated in the Nazi death machine and the use of slave labor too were quickly rehabilitated to respectable acceptance in the scheme of scheme of things - to big to fail!
Speaking of death machines every state in the US relies on the presence of companies that manufacture and/or supply all kinds of things for the now world dominant US death machine.
And of course the presence in many states of various kinds of camps/bases etc by the various sectors of the same death machine rely on the presence of such bases for their prosperity.
Meanwhile the modern dreadfully sane everyman of the whats-in-it-for-me consumerist "culture" is a highly propagandized individual, participating in illusions (including "religious" illusions) and, effectively, self-destructing.
At present, a "culture" of total war, a "culture" of death, is ruling the world, while the people are engrossed in self and other destructive consumerism.