Under Liberalism, a "Civil" War Avoids a Nasty, Actual One: A Conversation With Philosopher Chandran Kukathas

Despite many unsettled theoretical conundrums, liberalism offers this key benefit compared to its alternatives

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Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to ReImagining Liberty, a show about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic freedom. I'm Aaron Ross Powell.

We talk a lot about liberalism on this show, but to date haven't done an episode on just what liberalism is. It is my pleasure to have Chandran Kukathas join me today to fix that. He is dean of the School of Social Sciences and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University. He's also the author of many books, including the classic The Liberal Archipelago and his most recent Immigration and Freedom. We set out the basic principles of liberalism, explore the nuances and complicated application of them, and dig into critiques that have been raised by non-liberal thinkers.

Let me very briefly mention that ReImagining Liberty is a listener supported show. If you enjoy these discussions and want to get early access to new episodes, you can become a supporter by heading to reimaginingliberty.com. With that, let's get to my conversation with Chandran Kukathas.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

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Aaron Ross Powell: What is liberalism?

Chandran Kukathas: That's not a straightforward question simply because obviously there are many different views about what this is, and there are different kinds of answers. There are historical answers, there are philosophical answers, and I would say there are political answers. Someone who wants to give you an historical answer, for example, would probably try to recount the history of a way of thinking about the world that arises in the West somewhere around the 19th Century.

If you actually look at the term, maybe a little bit earlier, if you look at the sentiment, usually people will refer to the Spanish political movement, sometimes it's called the Liberales, who were essentially anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic, and so they were constitutionalists who wanted to limit state power. If you wanted to look at it philosophically, you might try to find some kinds of principles which more or less say, we live in a world in which people worship different gods, they have different ideas about what is the right way to live.

Liberals are the ones who want to say, "Look, let's try to find some way of compromising so that we live and let live." That's essentially the philosophical core of liberalism. As the word itself suggests, liberty lies at the heart of it, to the extent that live and let live means leaving people free to live in the way that they might choose, while you tolerate the different ways that you find even though you disagree with them or even find them very difficult to accept. There's no toleration unless you're tolerating someone or something that you don't really like.

“Liberals are the ones who want to say, ‘Look, let's try to find some way of compromising so that we live and let live.’" As the word itself suggests, liberty lies at the heart of it, to the extent that live and let live means leaving people free to live in the way that they might choose, while you tolerate the different ways that you find even though you disagree with them or even find them very difficult to accept. There's no toleration unless you're tolerating someone or something that you don't really like.”

There's also ethical dimension to this, because while on the one hand, liberalism philosophically looks like it's a view that says, "What we do is we tolerate different philosophical and ethical views," there's a question about whether this itself embodies an ethical view which comes with its own baggage, its own account of a way of life. I think there's a lot to this because as much as liberals want to say, "Live and let live. Let's tolerate difference. Let's try to get along with one another, accepting different religious commitments, different ethical views," at some point, taking that attitude is going to give you a particular kind of ethical outlook.

If you have this view, you're probably more likely to say, "Well, so that means if you want to tolerate abortion," for example, "or practice abortion, we will tolerate this because you have a different ethical view." At what point do you say, "Well, your difference of ethical view is simply beyond the pale." Someone who's a very, very strong liberal is going to say, "Well, that level of tolerance goes very, very deep," but then how deep?

If you get to the point, which many liberals do nowadays, where you say, "Well, no, that's not okay. We don't think slavery is okay. We don't think racism is okay. We don't think disrespect for people with different views about gender is not okay." Once you do that, you may think of yourself as a liberal, but you're also departing from the basic principle of tolerance on the grounds that certain things are beyond the pale and liberals will have different views about this than, say, conservatives might or socialists might or people from different religious sensibilities might.

Very quickly you're going to get into this morass of different views about liberalism. That's why I say that, it's not a straightforward term. Every account of liberalism is itself either way a philosophical defense of a substantive view, albeit one that is looking for a way of trying to accommodate difference.

Aaron: As you were saying that, it seems like there's a parallel to the way that people talk about free speech and liberal speech norms as well, which is, on the one hand you can say, "Look, we have a liberal society," or, "We have liberal speech norms because we are tolerating all of this diversity and difference. If you want to live your life in a certain way, no one's stopping you unless that certain way involves stealing from people or punching them in the nose all the time," or something like that. "Within limits, we're not going to stop you."

In the same way that we can say, "Look, no one is actively preventing you from speaking." A lot of people who seem to be uncomfortable with liberalism say that's not really the whole story, right? In free speech, I might technically have the right to speak, but if I have been excluded from all of the various platforms or my audience has been taken away, then I have free speech in name only because my speech is not reaching anyone. I don't have a community to talk to.

There seems to be a similar objection to liberalism in the sense that it's one thing to say we're going to tolerate your lifestyle. If the society around you doesn't have like a sufficient critical mass of people who want to share your lifestyle, then you can't—if you're the only member of your religious faith in the particular town and everyone else tolerates religious faith but isn't supportive of it, has no desire in following it, then it makes it awfully hard for you to practice. Does liberalism, is their a sneaking in an exclusion of diversity by way of basically saying, "We're going to leave you alone but the society is not in any way going to necessarily support the kind of life that you want to lead?”

Chandran: I think that is the case, especially, if you think about the case as you've described where you really are a very isolated minority because even if everybody around you is as open-minded as possible and as respectful as possible, you're going to feel isolated. I think there is no political or moral, ethical, social outlook that's going to be more hospitable, if hospitable at all, to you if you're in that circumstance. If you're the only Christian in a vast sea of Hindus or Muslims or Jews, you're going to feel very isolated even if they're as nice as possible because everything around you is going to be different. The most you can really hope for is that they will just leave you alone. The chances are there will be someone around there who will say about you, "Well, that guy's a Christian," or whatever it is that you happen to be. There's no way that you will not feel it.

I don't think that would be a particularly useful case to examine. I think it would be more useful to think about cases where, okay, you do have a substantial enough minority surrounded by people who are different that you can, in fact, live your life without feeling completely surrounded, but nonetheless, you're in a minority. The norms of the wider society are not as much in your favor as they are within your particular community. Then what opportunity do you have to have a voice, to practice your faith, to not practice any faith? That's where I think the issue becomes more relevant.

I think in that circumstance, the attitude of the liberal will be, again, live and let live. It's not to say that the person in the minority will find it easy to the extent that someone in a minority group wants more to the extent—let's say, for example, that if you're in a Muslim community that's in a society that is predominantly Christian, all of the regalia in ceremonies, all of the symbolism that surrounds you is predominantly Christian. It's because of hundreds of years of Christian society growing up there. You may want more than that, but it'll be hard for you to turn around and say to everybody else, "You've got to somehow dismantle all of this."

I don't think you could say that any more than if you were a Christian in a Muslim society. You could say, "Look, you've got to change the architecture, change the days of the week, change the holidays, because I feel uncomfortable." I think that's simply a part of social reality. We are always in a minority with respect to certain things. Minorities have to find ways of respecting the norms that are there around them.

I think the liberal attitude would be for both parties to actually try to have some respect for the others. Truth be told, it's a very difficult thing to do. It's difficult to do when you're in a minority because you're in a minority. It's difficult to do when you're in a majority because being in the majority feels like the natural state of things. Why should you compromise in some way? Why should you be tolerant? You have that power, either informally or formally.

Aaron: We've been talking about liberalism as—the word you use is an attitude. This attitude of live and let live, of respecting diversity and neutrality to the extent that we can, how does that relate to liberalism as a governing philosophy, as laws, as sets of institutions? I guess one way to ask this is, imagine we had the enlightened despot ruling society who has absolute authority but sets the laws such that they reinforce liberal norms.

Is that liberalism versus, say, a democratic, a fully democratic society where all the power is invested in the people? As is the case in many "liberal democracies" there's a lot of illiberalism in the system as well. Does liberalism tie us to a particular set of institutions or a particular way of driving and enforcing laws?

Chandran: I think this is actually really a very tricky, almost I would say, a subtle question because I think what it speaks to is the liberal attitude to power. On the one hand, I think liberals are very, very wary of power. Most of liberal political thinking, I think, is aimed at figuring out how to restrain or constrain power. Lots of different ways of doing it. Some of it is constitutionally to find ways of limiting what presidents, legislatures, judiciaries can do, sometimes by dividing power among these, but also sometimes trying to divide and limit power socially by restricting the things that people can do to amass power.

The other problem that can also arise is that you can, in a system that is very, very much one in which power is constrained constitutionally, separated, divided, and so on, but nonetheless ultimately is captured. For example, through the workings of a democratic system, you could, as many liberals have recognized, have a democracy that is highly illiberal because through a fluke or cunning, people come into power as collectives with the intention of placing restrictions on people's freedom or restricting people's freedom unequally. That's perfectly possible.

You could have governments that are democratically elected that place enormous restraints on the freedoms that people might otherwise have enjoyed, freedoms of speech, freedoms of exchange, not only various economic freedoms but also political freedoms. Equally, it's quite possible that you have a dictator, say at the extreme, who has attitudes that are very liberal.

This is not a perfect analysis or analogy, but let's say you had a Marcus Aurelius, whose interest is in governing well, or an Ashoka, the emperor of India. Now, these people were not by any means liberals, but on the other hand, they had a certain attitude to government, to rule, that could rule. You could also have someone coming to power by democratic means who wishes to rule in a completely illiberal way.

I don't think for liberals, there's an easy answer to this particular conundrum. How do you preserve liberal values to the extent that these embody an attitude of tolerance and a spiritual live and let live willingness to ensure freedom of others to live their own lives, speak their own minds, worship as they wish, when liberal institutions and mechanisms can bring into prominence people, governments, legislatures, judiciaries that don't share that attitude?

Aaron: How, in an ideal sense, does a liberal society figure out where the limits of live and let live are? We can stipulate that there are easy cases, like if your living involves murder, we're not going to let live in that case. It seems like a lot of the backsliding you see in liberalism, a lot of the times when people who have claimed liberal values suddenly are expressing illiberal urges are specifically on that.

I was a liberal until liberalism called for accepting transgender identities, and that's a bridge too far for me. I was a liberal until my particular religion became a minority, and then that's a bridge too far for me. It seems like murder is an easy case. Saying I just really don't like redheaded people and that's a bridge too far is an easy case in the other direction, but things get awfully fuzzy in the middle.

Chandran: They do get fuzzy very quickly. Even with the question of murder, it's not all that clear-cut. Just conceptually, murder means wrongful killing. To say that everyone accepts that murder is wrong is essentially a tautology. Of course, everyone agrees that murder is wrong. That's what murder is. Where it gets difficult is figuring out what counts as murder. Is voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide murder? Some people would say yes, others would say no. Is abortion murder? Some would say yes, others would say no. Is killing in war murder? Is execution for punishment murder?

Here people just differ enormously. No one differs on the question of whether murder is wrong, but there's an enormous range of views on what counts as wrongful killing. I think this is where saying something like, "Well, I have a liberal attitude," is not going to get you very far, because it's not in itself going to settle the question. Now, one response to this might be to say, "Okay, what we need to do is find the correct answer ethically."

The problem is here, by hypothesis, there is ethical difference. It's not that the people who are differing ethically, some of them thoughtful, and others not, it's actually there are thoughtful people on all sides of this question. What you have to figure out is, where do you go from there? I don't think that this question is settlable ethically, in the sense that there's any hope of a demonstrative solution to this. Of course, everybody will have, holding their own respective views, people who are among the finest minds, who hold the same view, who will be able to offer excellent arguments in favor of that view, whether we're talking about abortion, or euthanasia, or killing in war, and so on, but none of them are going to persuade the other.

The ultimate solution, or answer, is going to be a political answer. It's not going to be an ethical one. Now, this means that when these issues are settled politically, those who have very strong ethical convictions on the subject are many of them going to be distressed, angry, upset about the outcome, because they think there is one correct answer. I think, on the whole, the liberal attitude is going to be, this has to be resolved politically, it cannot be resolved ethically.

By hypothesis, there are different ethical views, and there are only a few options. When there is an ethical difference in this regard, you go your separate ways, which means maybe you move apart physically, or you come into conflict to enforce one view over the other, in which case the side that will win will just be the one that's more powerful. Now, that's probably the reality a lot of the time, but that's hardly an ethically convincing solution. It just means that the stronger party wins. It doesn't mean that the stronger party is right.

I think very few people think that might is right, even though they might agree that might will eventually rule. Then the other option is to find some compromise, which invariably—or not invariably, but often will involve some fudge because you cannot settle the issue. To that extent, liberalism is often a philosophy that's looking for fudges. Not very inspiring, I know, but it has its own rationale to it. It accepts that some of these questions cannot be settled.

“Lliberalism is often a philosophy that's looking for fudges. Not very inspiring, I know, but it has its own rationale to it. It accepts that some of these questions cannot be settled.”

Now, again, the sociological reality is that liberals are not themselves somehow, neutral, standing above the fray, and, people have no dog in the fight. They are human beings, they will have prejudices and so on. Much as they try to put these aside, they will get caught up in the debate. I think the attitude or the sensibility of a liberal is one that looks for compromise, but in reality, their own views will creep into the process.

Ultimately, the compromise that's reached will be more a political compromise than a philosophical one. I would like to think that the liberals are the ones who will accept the compromise. The illiberal ones are the ones who are more convinced of the rightness of their own view and want to fight on.

Aaron: I'm thinking about this in the context of differing moral theories, because it sounds like what you're effectively saying is there isn't a standard external to the liberal society by which we can settle these problems. It's not like there's a divine command theory of liberalism that we can point to, so we have to go internal, and does that mean then that liberalism is, at least the way you've articulated it, is ultimately what we might call a virtue ethic.

What I mean by that is that it can't be simply a decision-making procedure the way that utilitarianism or a deontological theory is a decision-making procedure that we just apply rules and we get the right answer, because the right answer is awfully fuzzy, there's disagreement. The procedures can lead us astray, as we already talked about. Democracy can lead to profoundly illiberal outcomes. Instead what we need is a sufficiently liberally virtuous people such that their motivations, preferences, tastes, attitudes, and so on will motivate them to more liberal answers even when things are fuzzy.

Chandran: I'm not quite sure what you mean by more liberal answers, whether you mean more liberal in the sense of more tolerant of fudges or more liberal in the sense of more substantively liberal, let's say, according to some particular society's ethical standards. For example, do you mean like, say, by more liberal a society like the United States or Australia or—although I recognize that even in these places, there's quite a wide variety of attitudes from conservative to very, very radical.

Aaron: I guess is what I mean is if we're looking at, say, the fudges that are made or we're the impartial spectator observing the society from the outside, you and I could look at two different democratic societies and have a sense of one of them leans more liberal in its attitudes, in its system of laws than another. That if the fudges had gone in a different direction, it would have pushed it in a less liberal direction. That it seems to be that the governing institutions are instantiating less tolerance than more and so on. These are all coming from people deciding politically these hard questions. It's a gut thing—this looks more or this looks less liberal. Again, there's no bright-line test for that, but I think, in general, a lot of us can make that assessment. What I'm wondering is, how much of that depends upon a society having the right decision procedures in place for settling differences versus the society having sufficiently liberal values internal to the people themselves?

You could have a society that has liberal governing institutions, but if a sufficient quantity, say, of non-liberal people come in or a sufficient quantity of the people's attitudes shift away from tolerance, those mechanisms are going to turn towards liberalism.

Chandran: Yes. No, I understand what you're getting at. No, I think the outlook of the people is extremely important. If the attitudes of the people are, let's say, inclined to, what in the 18th Century would have been called enthusiasm, nowadays we would call fanaticism, then you're not going to get the kind of societies that liberals would like with all the institutions that you try to set up.

Here what I mean is no matter what kinds of legal structures or political rules you set up. I'm not going to say institutions, because in a way institutions are just really what's in our head. An institution is not what's on paper or what's written down. An institution exists only when there is a way of thinking, and that way of thinking depends on the outlook of the populace. This is what makes institutions fragile, because the way people think is also, in part, dependent on the kinds of rules that are there, the extent to which the rules are enforced or transformed or in other case disparaged by people who are influential.

Lots of well-known European thinkers reflected upon this. If you want to go to a not-very-liberal thinker in Thomas Hobbes, he recognized that it's one thing to have the laws that he recommended, but he also said the people have to be educated to embrace these, otherwise it's not going to work. Montesquieu says that, of course, the laws should conform to the spirit of the people, but if the laws exist and prevail for a while, the laws themselves will shape what people think, and it is an ongoing two-way process.

A liberal society could be undermined by a transformation of people's consciousness, which is brought about by any one of a number of factors, including the laws that are made, the political institutions that are undermined. If people cease to have confidence in the integrity of their institutions, this could change their attitudes, make them more vulnerable to those who want to tell them that things should be done differently, for example.

Aaron: Doesn't that just seem then to reinforce the illiberal critique that liberalism pretends to neutrality in the sense that it says we value diversity and live and let live and everyone can pursue their own conception of the good so long as it's not—however we want to define it and rope it off, harmful to others pursuing their conception of the good. Everything you just said sounds like, but we also need to indoctrinate you into our particular conception of a set of virtues necessary for this thing.

Chandran: Yes. There is something to that. I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that liberalism promises neutrality. I think it can't. Maybe the most it can say is that it strives towards neutrality in the sense of having an open and capacious outlook, willing to listen to all points of views, especially those that are in the minority, those that are rejected by others, those that are struggling to find their way in the world. It cannot promise neutrality because any set of institutions, any set of rules by the very nature of rules and institutions will issue in an outcome. It will mean that a decision will be taken.

It cannot be neutral in any stronger sense than that. Some things will be prohibited. Some things will be permitted. There's no way of avoiding this. It can't be neutral in that way. On the other hand, I think what it does strive for is openness to disagreement, openness to challenge, openness to revision so that all of this is constantly re-evaluated. What it doesn't or shouldn't try to do is to settle things once and for all.

Now that said, I think there are liberals who think that these questions can be settled and should be settled in a particular way and that liberalism in a way will bring us the right answers because I think even within liberalism there are different ethical theories, different accounts of the foundations of liberal thinking. Among those, for example, who think that toleration is very important, there is a view that the limits of toleration are given by justice. The question we've got to figure out is what is just?

Now there are other liberals who say, well, the problem is that what is just or what is justice is itself contested in which case to say that this is going to settle the limits of toleration is itself problematic because it's begging the question of what exactly is right, what is just, where those limits are. The reason that we have toleration is that those limits are difficult if not impossible to settle.

Maybe another way of looking at it is to say, okay, even if you think that there is a right answer out there to a host of very important ethical questions, if you think that, do you think that these questions can be settled quickly and easily? If you think, no, they can't be settled quickly and easily because they clearly haven't been, they're going to take some time, they'll need procedures and so on, then what do we do in the meantime? While we're trying to settle these questions, what do we do?

I think one very good answer to this question is, well, we have, broadly speaking, liberal norms. Are they completely neutral? No, of course not. They recognize that we're still trying to figure out what that correct answer is. Given that the answers, not only are the answers questioned, in dispute, debated, but the procedures themselves for setting these questions are highly debated. You have to be open not only to the solutions but also to the methods. These are all up for grabs. It's for this reason I think that liberals are sometimes caricatured as people who won't take their own side in a debate because they can see the other side.

There's some truth of it in this. Maybe it's also a virtue, but at critical moments, you also need to make a decision. This is why I think when these decisions are made, ultimately they're made politically, which means that the answers are settled by power. Those who have the capacity to enforce an outcome will do so. I think liberals, like everybody else, just has to accept that. That's just the nature of reality. I think liberals will step up still if they're thinking rightly and say, "Well, okay, so that's settled." That was settled because the more powerful got their way, as they always do. Hooray for us. We were in the powerful side, but that's not what makes us right.

Aaron: I'm reminded of the professor I had in my first year of law school who upon discovering that I had a background in philosophy and pointed out that it's great to discuss matters of justice and try to define it, but your client doesn't want to wait for you to settle the matter and you just have to convince the judge and move on. As someone who has spent your career articulating and defending liberalism, what do you see as the most either challenging or interesting critiques of liberalism?

Chandran: I think the most important challenge to liberalism at the philosophical level is the one that says that—and you've raised this question already, is that the promise or the aspiration to neutrality is unachievable. I think the challenge is right. It's just that I don't think that the alternative is going to resolve anything because it gets us back to the starting point where there are different claims about what is right.

There's a very famous critique, which is I think essentially a critique of liberalism by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, first advanced I think in comprehensive form in his book of 1981, After Virtue, which he begins in a very dramatic form when he says, "Okay, imagine that there's been a catastrophe globally and all the libraries have been destroyed and what we're left with is only fragments of books of scientific knowledge or historical knowledge and we try to piece things together again but all we've got are these fragments. It would be very difficult. How do you understand a scientific theorem or an equation unless you know the full context?" He says, "The moral life we live is a bit like that."

His analysis as a result of the work of mostly philosophers in the European tradition in the 17th and 18th Centuries, he means Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, the attack on a reason-founded ethics was so comprehensive that we now live in a world, a post-Enlightenment world, in which all we've got are these fragments of moral knowledge. There is a natural tradition that's trying to recover this but we can't in the real world because our knowledge has been so fragmented by the attack.

It's a very powerful critique, but maybe the most powerful critique of liberalism there is, in this case really coming from a Catholic tradition. Leave aside the fact that I just don't think it touches anything that's relevant in other ethical traditions because they haven't been subject to this particular history, whether you're talking about the Islamic or the Hindu or the Chinese or the Japanese. Leave that aside.

Even if you took this view as presenting an important critique of liberal thinking, where do we go from here? Do we really say, "Okay, what we need to do is go back to Aristotle and St. Augustine and Aquinas and reconstruct everything from there to get the right answer."? I think you might come up with a clear philosophical answer. I think you'll struggle to find even broad agreement among all of those within that tradition but you're really still going to struggle against those who don't buy that particular story.

Now at that point, what do you do? You've still got this ethical diversity. Where do you go if you're going to say, "Well, we'll enforce the correct view?” MacIntyre himself ends his book by reflecting on the history of St. Benedict who, in a world in which no one accepted his particular interpretations of Christian teaching, left for life in isolated communities, waiting until such time as the whole tradition might be recovered. That's not a particularly helpful diagnosis of the problem if you're looking for an answer of how we live together in the modern world.

Again, leaving aside the fact that we also live in a world in which there are Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and utilitarians and ethical intuitionists, virtue ethicists of different kinds, we still have to find a way of coexisting. MacIntyre actually says that what we have in modern politics is a kind of civil war by other means. In a way, that's right. If you're going to have a civil war, then I think it's better for that war to be civil. That's what I think liberalism is advancing or advising. Let's find a civil way to engage, given that the alternative is warfare.

Aaron: Thank you for listening to ReImagining Liberty. If you like the show and want to support it, head to reimaginingliberty.com to learn more. You'll get early access to all my essays as well as be able to join the Reimagining Liberty Discord community and book club. That's reimaginingliberty.com or look for the link in the show notes. Talk to you soon.

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