The Philosophical Origins of the Left and Right, Part IV

In the fourth installment of the series, and maybe the best one in this series so far, Steven Hayward focuses on the part that moral reasoning has to play in both liberalism and conservatism:

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.

This is a crucial point to understand.  For example, when studying the Founders and slavery, most students today come away with the idea that, at best, the Founders were morally suspect when they let the institution of slavery subsist during the American Founding.  It is implictly, or explicitly, taught in most classrooms that we are obviously superior to them in moral understanding because we would have done what they couldn't see or comprehend.  (They were after all just men of their times, right?)

But it's harder than that, much harder in fact.

In the original Constitution there are three concessions to slaveholders, though the Constitution always uses the euphemism persons to describe those persons held against their will in bondage.  As Lincoln said, though the Founders compromised with slavery in the Constitution, they set the country on a course toward its ultimate extinction.  Surely if the Founders would not have compromised, the South would have organized as a separate country, forever out of the control of the U.S.  The Founders saw that Union and the withering away of the institution like slavery, which were at its heart, was against the principle of all men are created equal, were inextricably linked.  They had the practical wisdom, or prudence, to have not only the ends in mind but the most just means to achieving those ends (this is what used to be called statesmanship).  The classic philosophers, among them Aristotle and Plato, taught these lessons, and, luckily for use, the Founders listened.

Hayward goes on:

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.  But while liberals have no stopping point, consequence-minded conservatism has no starting point.  There are few social problems for which the default conservative attitude isn’t to proceed very slowly, often with the tacit assumption that the problem will “solve” itself if just left alone. 

As Hayward shows, this conservative tendency to just let things take care of themselves has, in the past, led conservatives greatly astray in certain areas.  In the 50s and 60s many conservatives,e.g., William F. Buckley (who would later disavow this position), Willmore Kendall, M.E. Bradford, and others railed against civil rights laws because they constricted liberty and let the government grow outside of its constitutional strictures.  This is an important tension within American conservatism and it has not yet gone away.  It reared its head lately with Ron Paul and his lone vote against the resolution celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  I definitely plan on saying more about this at a later date because it is a point worth pondering.