Situational ethics have harmful effects

It is curious how often sunny ways leave people feeling burned. I am not being sarcastic. I’m convinced Justin Trudeau is a genuinely pleasant and well-meaning person. His political philosophy sincerely emphasizes inclusion, social justice and general benevolence. His colleagues mostly mean it too. Yet the result of their governance is a surprising degree of frustration, anger and bitterness that is not accidental.

It is also not deliberate. I am a firm believer in never attributing to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity. What I mean is that deep flaws in their philosophy, summed up by Robert Kennedy as, “Don’t tell me the rules, tell me the problem,” necessarily produce bad unfair government in pursuit of the opposite.

I do not deny that Liberal policies are divisive to their political advantage too often to be pure coincidence. They frequently combine high-mindedness with low cunning in ways that, for instance, privileges the large voting blocs of Central Canada at the expense of westerners who mostly weren’t going to support them anyway. And doubtless their backrooms contain individuals whose pride in operational ruthlessness long ago eclipsed whatever devotion to delivering a better world originally inspired it. But the main problem is their overall philosophy of compassion.

It seems paradoxical since compassion is a good thing. But in watching various progressives’ agenda unravel to general surliness I am haunted by an observation from Harvey Mansfield more than a quarter-century ago, “that it may be possible to impose perfect justice, but that people may not be in a mood to live together when you are finished.” (This line, from a writer in Reason magazine in 1991, may be paraphrasing not quoting.)

How can it be? Well, truly perfect justice is not to be achieved on this Earth in any case. But a particular vision of justice that dispenses with supposedly rigid and heartless rules in favour of “situational ethics” necessarily has profoundly harmful effects that become worse over time. A philosophy of on-the-spot compassion, rushing from crisis to crisis, means and must mean ad hoc, even arbitrary action in an ever-wider circle. The arbitrariness is a feature not a bug. And it leaves people feeling cheated. Rightly.

To take the federal Liberals as an example, from electoral reform to tax changes to deficits, their unshakable belief that they can always improvise an ideal solution deprives ever-larger numbers of people of the protection of fixed rules, from how pipelines are approved to politicians keeping their word. And because they must be unconstrained by rules, including the rule that you will do what you said, they create not just individual unfairness but pervasive, demoralizing, systemically unfair uncertainty.

It’s not just the federal Liberals. It’s the Ontario provincial Liberals and before them the NDP. It’s Democrats in the United States, Labour in Britain and left-wing parties generally.

To repeat, the problem here is not the deep malevolence of the far left with its class war, race war, gender war and so on, often with an evil dose of anti-Semitism. From Lenin to Militant Tendency, there are left-wing radicals who wrap hatred of actual people in a tattered mantle of love for mankind. And such nihilistic radicalism is a major problem in its own right, to put it mildly. But Justin Trudeau, Kathleen Wynne, Barack Obama, Bob Rae, Pierre Trudeau, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and any number of such people are not in that category.

Some, including Johnson, Trudeau Sr. and Robert Kennedy, were obnoxious in person. F.D.R. famously never forgot or forgave a perceived slight. And while others seem genuinely pleasant, including Obama, they are all dangerously arrogant. How could they not be, to believe themselves so wise and kind, so spectacularly and conspicuously above the general run of their fellows, that to bind them with procedural rules would be a disservice to mankind?

We have constitutional and political limits on government to restrain the arrogantly benevolent as well as the actively evil. And the problem here is arrogant benevolence that clouds their vision and poisons their thoughts.

People who believe love is all you need necessarily think policy failure is caused by lack of compassion. And since they themselves are plainly overflowing with the stuff they cannot be to blame, it must be the fault of cleverly malevolent political and intellectual adversaries. Thus does high-mindedness turn nasty, quickly and inexorably, facing the inherent frustrations of governing. Including Bill Morneau’s mean-spirited attacks on “the rich,” as if he or Trudeau had ever felt the pinch of want.

Compassion is good. But both compassion and justice require that government should create standing rules for citizens to live by, and politicians too. To dispense with the rule of law, even in the name of justice, is inherently unjust. So it reliably leaves political scorched earth behind.

IT’S NOT JUST THE FEDERAL LIBERALS.