A Critique of Liberalism

Off-Topic and Suggestions
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There are a number of figures ostensibly operating in a similar political space as many of us posting on this platform. One such example is Andrew Doyle. I do largely enjoy his commentary and find him to be engaging. However, I do not agree with his assessment of Liberlism. Chiefly demonstrated in this interview: https://youtu.be/V9LebwsT4TU?feature=shared

This has prompted me to begin to formulate a somewhat accessible critique of Andrew’s position on Liberalism. I would appreciate your feedback:

Liberalism aspires to be a universal ideal, a solution for all societies. Yet, its efficacy is anchored in the Western context, which serves as its substrate.

Core principles—rule of law, equality before the law, individual liberty, and equal rights—derive their meaning and success from this substrate. But what do these principles entail? Rights to what end? The right to mistreat animals—is that defensible if universally applied? What of laws? A law banning property ownership or prohibiting sneezing on Tuesdays—would these be acceptable if enforced equally? And individual liberty—what defines it? Is any form justifiable so long as it is universal? As long as it’s democratic?

Liberalism flourishes in the West because of its substrate: a foundation of Christian values, time-honoured institutions, and personal liberties shaped over centuries. Yet, when exported to other substrates—societies with divergent histories, values, and structures—it often fails. The West’s attempts to impose liberalism, from post-colonial state-building in Africa to interventions in the Middle East, have frequently led to instability or rejection. Why?

Liberalism acts as a doping agent, enhancing the potential of a specific substrate. In our case, that substrate is the West’s unique cultural and historical framework. Without this foundation, liberalism falters, unable to take root. My contention is that we must prioritise safeguarding this substrate first, then we can once again consider the application of liberalism’s doping agent. The doping agent alone, without a compatible substrate, is ineffective.

Language studies reveal how profoundly thought is shaped by available words—a subtle difference with significant impact. Now consider substrates vastly different from ours, where disparities in language, culture, and history compound exponentially. Societies are not equal because they are not identical. Some substrates can be effectively enhanced by liberalism’s doping agent; others resist or destabilise under its influence.

Therefore, liberalism isn’t a value system itself; it’s an augmentation of a value system, an additional layer. It’s a lens, not the light itself, focusing the West’s cultural radiance but powerless without it. The more the substrate degrades, the less predictable and desirable the doping agent’s effect on it is, dimming the light and rendering the lens ineffective. This is what we now witness: as the Western substrate degrades, yet still doped with liberalism, it yields warped, unsettling, and sometimes immoral outcomes—a distorted pattern of light through a liberal lens.

What, then, degraded the Western substrate? Could the doping agent itself—liberalism in its concentrated form, applied over decades—have corroded it? If doping agents can erode their substrate, what other agent has been applied with such potency as liberalism in the West over the past century?

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So, I’m not quite sure that I would call anything that you have written “accessible” :joy:, but what fun is life without the ability to pervail oneself with the floral niceties of language (and when we get into deep philosophy, ‘simple’ becomes a hard thing to achieve).

I’ll try to watch the rest of the video and see if I have critiques from what he says there, but essentially, you are correct, liberalism generally doesn’t make moral claims or have any core principles, but instead is a way through which we try to achieve core aims that come from other places.

I guess the way in which we can think about this is the “but why?” approach. If I make a moral claim or a truth claim, and the question “but why?” makes sense, it is not a fundamental claim, or something we take to be a priori true. The rule of law, equality before the law, individual liberty, and equal rights are not good because they just are (I would argue some of them are not good at all), but they are good because some greater principle leads us to logically conclude that they are. To me, that principle is something akin to the desire for security —if I am to grant some of my sovereignty to the state and support the power of the state, I wish to ensure that said power is not used arbitrarily and capriciously against me.

Of course, we can start asking why I even want to grant power to the state, but this is a very long and very deep rabbit hole. To me, the problem with liberalism isn’t that it exists as a theory, but that it tries to be a first-order principle when it just isn’t. Liberalism is not good because liberalism is good; liberalism can be good because it helps us to attain the goals that we truly want. When this is no longer true, we should unmoor ourselves from liberal philosophy and set sail to lands more suited our true objectives.

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The thing that very much is apparent in this whole discussion is that Andrew seems to talk a lot about applying the rule of law that that immigrants should abide by the rule of law, but doesn’t seem to understand where or how laws come about. Laws can change, and they should change, but his entire arguement, and the way in which he uses the phrase “obey the rule of law” seems to imagine that laws are instead totemic and handed down by God himself.

He then also talks about the badness of authoritarianism and seems to suggest that breaking authoritarian laws might be just and good, but thta would mean people breaking the rule of law, something we just defined as sacred.

As it stands, I would say that there are times when people can break the law. Magna Carta would have never happened without people chosing to break the law. Likewise, France and the USA only exist today in their current guises because of people breaking the law, and we have yet to refuse to ackowlege the legitimacy of either. This is just what I was saying in my previous post though, and what you were getting at in your’s. Liberalism is not fundemental but additive to other philosophies.

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This is a very important observation, and seems to get to the crux of the issue. If I may, I can attempt to steel man Andrew’s argument; I would imagine he would say that the law being authoritarian in nature would make it a ‘bad’ law, and by definition anti-Liberal, therefore fair game.

However, this (in my mind) requires Liberalism to make moral claims, which it does not. And it would seem Liberal laws can be authoritarian, for example, I would imagine there would be little argument against the claim that the welfare state is a Liberal project, however I would argue it has an authoritarian dimension as it creates a right claim for some, but an obligation for others, with no ability to abstain, and is now so embedded in our institutions that it is almost impossible to democratically dismantle, and therefore has the effect of binding over parliament. This is so entrenched that even the utterance of this argument would likely get scoffs of disbelief among a large proportion of our society. The same too with almost any critique of the Liberal pillars of our society.

Essentially, I believe Liberalism is so entrenched in our state that it is broadly defacto authoritarian in its effect.

To that end - I notice that Andrew seems to believe Liberlism is the opposite of Authoritarianism, which, to my mind, is simply not true. One could easily imagine an authoritarian Liberal society, some might argue we need not imagine.

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An excellent point, I have little to add to this other than highlighting it.

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The hosts do actually make him address this in the interview around 19:20, but they don’t push it too much because they use paedophilia, and I should imagine that steelmanning that is rather icky (albeit I wish they had explored that idea because it would’ve forced him to take a position).

In particular, Andrew asserted that a law is authoritarian, and thus bad because “it is imposed against the will of the people who it affects.” That is to say, he seems to think that consent is determinative, and if you consent to an act being done against you, then it is liberal. He also talks about “taking away the rights of someone else to gratify yourself.” For me, as someone who doesn’t believe in natural rights, this seems like an argument for the status quo of rights, or that once a right or a privilege is granted, it can never be taken back. Firstly, I disagree with this, and secondly, he is being illiberal by wanting to strip rights away from people that DEI has granted them. Unless I misunderstand his framework, he wants to remove the black man’s right to get a job over the white man, against the will of the person whose rights he is taking away. I should imagine that Andrew would say that he is restoring the status quo ante bellum, but that isn’t clear.

I think that it depends on how one defines liberalism. As noted above and in the other posts, Andrew seems to define it as “the things I like are liberal, and thus good, and the things I don’t like are authoritarian, and thus bad.” He doesn’t have a consistent ideology, and if he does, the Triggernometry crew did a bad job at teasing it out of him. There are times it felt like he was arguing for a completely atomised, anarchistic society, but when offered the chance to steelman that position, he backed down and said that it would be a bad thing. Personally, I’ve had debates with anarchists before, and I find that they are much harder to debate because they have a consistent moral and philosophical framework; Andrew just doesn’t.

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Thank you for your responses. This is somewhat of a tangent, but I am very interested in your statement that you do not believe in natural rights. Would you be willing to expand on this? Is this a repudiation of deontological ethics?

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I don’t think so, at least not as I understand deontology. My repudiation of natural rights is as follows:

  1. A right is a guarantee of access to some thing which has been granted to you by someone who has the power to grant such access.
  2. A right means nothing unless it is enforced and protected by the guarantee. If you have a right to half the bread in the world, but do not have the power to enforce said right, the right does not exist.
  3. You cannot force an entity more powerful than you to grant or enforce rights which it must give you.
  4. Thus, all “rights” exist at the pleasure of the state and can be removed at the state’s pleasure.

Personally, my ethics are probably somewhat deontological, I believe that it is almost always wrong to lie, for example, but whilst I see that as a moral imperative for how I treat others, I don’t believe I have a moral claim or a natural right to stop it from happening to me. I think that deontological principles work in high-trust societies, where you can reasonably expect others to grant you moral consideration as much as you grant it to them, however, it doesn’t work when someone breaks these maxims. For example, I do believe in capital punishment, even though most deontological frameworks would argue that the taking of a life is always morally wrong.

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Very interesting, I believe actually we probably have similar ethics, in application.

If I may, I’d like to contrast my understanding with yours and potentially provide some clarity, from my perspective on the points you have made.

  1. A natural right, as broadly described by Aristotle and Plato is an inalienable moral right implicit in the condition of being human, by virtue of the capaity to reason. It is not granted, it is not removed. It is the natural order of things, applying at all times, in all places across the multiverse.

  2. In my interpretation of my somewhat limited reading of ethics - a natural right isn’t contingent on being ‘enforced’, I think what you might be alluding to here is the difference between a ‘claim right’ and a ‘liberty right’. A claim right being a right that essentially places an obligation on others, and a liberty right which requires no action whatsoever. For Example, a ‘claim right’ is the right to access the NHS; A ‘liberty right’ would be the right to privacy. Obviously the claim right is contingent on a litany of obligations on others, where the right to privacy is contingent on nothing, other than being left unsurveilled, (a negation of action).

  3. I agree, you cannot force an entity greater than you to grant or enforce rights. Yet, that does not mean the natural rights do not exist, it just means they may be being broken. In my view, no natural right requires ‘action’ from any other person or entity.

  4. Natural rights exist outside of the state, some would say they are devine, some would say they eminate from nature. Plato and Aristotle would say they are a fundamental aspect of a human’s ability to reason. It matters not if the rights are respected, those rights exist regardless. The religious among us would say there is a punishment for breaking natural law (rights), which is hell.

I do believe, like myself, your ethics are probably mostly Deontological, if not Rule-Utilitarian, I am somewhat straddling the two myself, more Rule-Utilitairan in edge cases, but starkly Deontological with fundamental ethical claims, i.e the right to life, the right to own property, the right to privacy. Note - they are all ‘liberty rights’,

I do not believe (although I could be proven wrong) that there are any natural rights that are ‘claim rights’; And I am extremely skeptical of claim rights, as I believe almost all ‘claim rights’ infringe on natural law, in the instances of taxation (for example), infringes on the natural right of the right to own property - save in the presence of a social contract (which is another rabbit hole).

This is my view, I hope it might be informative in the context of your own ethics.

On the point of why I asked - the reason I was most interested in your rejection of natural rights is because of your recent policy on banning abortion. I thought it very interesting that you landed on the clarity of that position, without subscribing to natural rights. Thank you for taking the time to articulate your position.

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As you are a mathematician (and at risk of stating something you already know) you might find Descartes work on ethics interesting, as they are generally considered to have been a direct influence of Kant, who is known as a prominent figure in Deontology - which to my mind is an expression of natural law (rights).

From my very limited academic experience of discrete mathematics, it seemed to me (at the time) that Descartes ethics were a natural extension of his mathematical work, where I found myself frequently asking questions of my maths professors where I got the response “thats a philosophical question”. That blur between mathematics and philosophy really fascinates me.

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I guess I would say to that “what use is a right if it is not enforced?”, and “How do we devine rights which are ‘natural’ without a higher being to grant them?” To me, natural rights only make sense if handed down by god, or a god, otherwise they have no philosophical or moral basis. They seem like free-floating rhetorical tools to be used and discarded at pleasure.

With regard to abortion, it took me a great while to reach that position, I used to be far more liberal, but ultimately, the social harm and personal harm it causes convinced me. The social harm of it being used as a contraceptive, encouraging women (and men) to behaive more promiscuously, the general promotion and encouragement towards hedonism, and the general devaluation of life that the killing of babies causes; and the personal harm to women caused by them devaluing their bodies, the emotional toll of them killing their own children, and the effect it has later on when they decide they want babies but their fertility is gone.

But I don’t think that, as a rule, one should never take the life of another. Rather, that it should only be done out of love and compassion. For example, I oppose institutionalised euthanasia, I think that the bill passing through Parliament is wrong and will lead to horiffic outcomes, but I believe in euthanasia itself. If your beloved grandmother is struggling to breathe and is in emmence pain and you have the option to end it quickly; or if your platoonmate has had his leg blown off and won’t make it back to base due to the loos of blood, putting him out of his suffering can be the right thing to do. However, in both cases, I want it to be illegal, I want the person taking the life of the other to know that they might be punished for it, but feel so morally compelled by the pain and suffering in front of them that they feel no option but to help, and for them to gladly accept punishment should it arise. I guess that this is quite Kantian in tone, albeit I’ve never read Descartes, so maybe you are correct and my moral philosophy is closer to his.

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Interesting, I think then you might describe your position on ethics as ‘Rule Utilitarian’ (the morla weight of an action is based on it’s outcome, with some hard rules in place), as I, from my perspective (and I think literature on the topics backs this up, but I might be wrong); Deontology is contingent on something like natural law.

Not to put a too finer point on it, but liberty rights do not require enforcement, its the negation of an act. The right exists, regardless if it is enforced or not. This is a very fundamental ethical point, which strikes at the core of natural law. Things exist in nature, even if we do not perceive them, we take no action on them.

Kant would likely say, the natural rights are divined through the human ability to reason, and have agency. Essentially the fact that you exist, you think, therefore you have these rights inherently in your being. To back that up, many would argue we naturally understand these rights, multiple value systems around the world arrived at loosely the same ethnical principles, with no contact with one another. They might also argue that some of the same ethical principles can be observed in animals, where there are social patterns that resemble justice (in some primates, for example). This is an attempt at using reason, rather than a higher order being. Obviously, this is far more simple if you do believe in a God, as clearly then natural rights are granted by a divine entity.

My personal belief is that we know these things to be true. They are self evident. I am not a religious person, but I believe something like divinity is fractionated across humanity, and it is that divinity (I have no better word) that gives us moral worth, as well as moral agency. I also believe the enlightenment thinkers are correct, you can reach it through reason alone - it’s just requires a tremendous amount of nuanced thought and meditation. For me that fractionation of divinity is what gives democracy its legitimacy, why a trial by peers (plural) is just, and even why we have this concept of a quorum - it naturally emerges from human societies that are oriented in a direction in accordance with god/nature/reason.

The only moral code I am aware of which would state that is it is always wrong to end life, in all circumstances, is Janeism. Other than that, I too believe that it is moral and just to end life, for reasons understood since the dawn of human civilisation - when under mortal danger from another, in self defence, and in a just war (an extension of self defence). There could also be a self defence moral argument for capital punishment. Of course, natural rights can be removed justly, the right to privacy - when suspected of a crime, the removal of liberty - when guilty of a crime.

Ultimately, this is where ethics and belief meet. For me, I do not know if God exists, but I hope he does, and based on the evidence, I can’t go too far wrong acting like he does exist. I believe natural laws exist, and if God exists, they come from him. If he does not exist, then to me natural laws still exist, from my experience of the world and of other humans, and I hold this belief comfortably knowing that I am in good company, with some of the greatest thinkers that ever lived.

That isn’t to say this is an argument from authority - I could be totally wrong, I could be miss reading these intellects. But it’s what I believe.

The net result for me is that quite a few moral conundrums for others (mostly leftists) are simple to answer - abortion is morally wrong, the right to life is a natural right - however, there are circumstances where it might be argued that it is just, and that is up to us to decide where that line is. It might be just to end someones life out of compassion, I can imagine a scenario where that might be the case. But we better be sure, really, really sure - because to me, if you get it wrong, it’s a (I have no better term) mortal sin; Is there a punishment for this mortal sin in the after life? I have no idea - but I feel compelled to be a good person, and I want to be remembered as a good person, having a positive effect on the world. Maybe that alone is heaven, and the inverse - hell?

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I am not sure if you are too harsh on Liberalism. Liberalism has served western civilisation well for the best part of two centuries. John Stuart Mills would not recognise what we see today as Liberalism. Modern liberalism has been co-opted by groups who are not liberal in their objectives.

I agree with you that the “substrate” is the key to why it worked in the past and why it is failing now. Civilisation thrives, when there is a high trust cooperative population that largely shares the similar philosophical and cultural backgrounds. Inside such a society, natural rights can be demanded and shared. Consent is mutual both for the powerful and the meek. One of the key underpins of a successful liberal society is the judicious use of reason and critical thinking applied to the problems of the day. It is not an emotionally charged approach, nor it is hemmed in by too much dogma. It should be pragmatic. The aim is the pursuit of happiness and freedom for the widest cross section of society.

One of the many current day problems our Liberal system now has is we no longer have a high trust homogenous civilisation. Over decades the consensus on our underpinning culture and history has been slowly and deliberately undermined at an ever increasingly rapid rate. Personal safety is in doubt. Corner shops and supermarkets are fortifying their public spaces. Hostile foreigners prey on our children and women in our streets, which should be bastions for our civilisation.

One of the culprits [there are many, this is just one] however is not liberals per se, it’s a much older problem… it’s the rise of zealotry. Zealotry is a plague that has afflicted us in the past and will ebb and fall. People creep into zealotry because they need to feel they are morally elevated above others. What makes them dangerous is that they tend to believe that the ends justify the means. Marxists, accelerationists and grifters have chipped away at the substrate and co-opted institutions and culture focal points to harness and exploit the zealotry tendency of gullible people to sow the destruction of liberalism from within.
Many would agree that 1996 Britain had the balance about right. We had no idea that progress from that point on was towards decline. It was Liberalism that apexed in 1996. Its zealotry that needs to crushed now in order to reclaim it.

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I wouldn’t… I would say that things started going wrong around 1911, but certainly Thatcher, who put economics above social policy and did a lot to destroy the social fabric of Britain, was wrong. I also worry that liberalism means (because it does) the destruction of social bonds and the freeing of the individual from the responsibilities he has to the collective.

Now, moral principles needn’t be laws, and laws needn’t be moral, but if we create a system where people do not feel like they owe a duty and moral consideration to those around them, then that is not a system worth living in.

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I agree Thatcher’s policies in the long term were destructive. They remained in place for far too long and resulted in UK industry and infrastructure being carpet bagged by foreign investors and this is very clearly evident now. In 1979 they were probably the right move. The problem is that these policies were left in place far past their expiry date and became extremely destructive. Some policies have a medium term shelf life and the sheer openness of the UK to inward investment and direct competition from abroad is one of those policies. Some policies should be given time limits when they expire and need to be revised or renewed. You could blame Blair and Cameron for leaving those policies in place for too long, even more so than Thatcher.

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I agree. My criticism is of Liberalism being considered a value system in-of-itself, my point is, that it is not.

I would further contend that I believe it is the excesses of Liberalism itself, absent of the limiting factors of a strong Western substrate, which has caused the West to further degrade. There has been no error checking for some time now, and it has damaged the substrate. So whilst I agree Liberalism has served us well in the past, I also blame it for serving us badly in the present.

From Doyle’s argument in the interview, I believe he would say “more, not less” and “that’s not real liberalism”. Which to me sounds like a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, there are plenty of people calling themselves liberals doing harm, in the name of Liberalism. My argument is that they are liberals, that have gone too far.

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These are the people I consider to be zealot “progressives.” Wouldn’t you agree that progressives are not classical liberals? Like so many elements of our culture, Liberalism has been co-opted by revolutionary zealots who are aiming to destroy us as a culture from the foundations. We need to be careful not to carry out a scorched earth defence with our own cultural “institutions.” Western Liberalism needs to be reclaimed, not abandoned.

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I agree they are zealots, liberal zealots, that have progressed liberalism beyond its original intent, but nonetheless, I believe they are using liberal principles to do it. I also believe they would say they are using liberal principles to do it, and would call themselves liberals. All it takes is a few steps to go from equality before the law, to equality before the state, to equality before the institutions, to equality before the corporations, then equality everywhere, then equity. These are liberal principles taken to the extreme.

Yes I would agree they are not classical liberals. Because classical liberalism is what we now call liberalism prior to liberalism being taken to excess. If the zealots, as you describe, weren’t liberal, then why would we need to preface “liberal” with a modifier, so as to distinguish it?

Essentially, I believe the Western substrate is so degraded that we couldn’t even apply “classical liberalism” as a doping agent any more. We have to rebuild, I believe with populism, and then once rebuilt, again earn the ability to successfully apply Liberalism once more. Hopefully this time, with error checking / limiting principles. This will require new philosophies, which is why (I believe) this sort of discussion is important for the future; and we can’t even begin until we admit that Liberalism can go too far.

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The “degradation of the substrate,” I fear, is the very reason we cannot repeal our way out of this mess. By all means we need to purge the civil service, judiciary and the quangocracy. The problem is the British system prior to the Blairite changes was underpinned by a very carefully cultivated elite that took generations after generation to build. That substrate is no longer there to protect the UK via tradition and the old unwritten constitution. We sadly, as much as I would like to, cannot go back in time. We have to move forward and play the hand we have been dealt. I cringe as I say this, but we need to establish a written constitution that enshrines the traditional British cultures and heals that substrate. It will take time.

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Well articulated, I agree. I think repeals will be required, a significant amount. But I do not think that alone will suffice. You may be right about a British constitution, but I too somewhat recoil from that, as it seems alien to our system of government. That said, I also agree we cannot go backwards, so we may need to consider things that do not obviously accord with our history, within reason of course.

I don’t know what the precise solution is, however whatever it is, it will likely be a combination of things. But what I do know is the answer isn’t “more liberalism”, as Doyle seems to allude to.