What defines a liberal?

As a tribute to Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist who was killed in Homs today, her newspaper has made her final report freely available rather than keeping it behind the firewall. I think this is a fitting gesture.

When Whitney Houston was found dead her record company Sony immediately raised the price of her recordings. Though I have no strong opinion in the matter and this move was quickly reversed, it strikes me that this was rather a crass thing to do.

So there you are: two moral judgements about a private company's pricing decision. There is nothing very odd about them, is there?

But read on...

I joined in because the first contributor assumed that those who disagree with Sony's decision must be calling for government to regulate the music industry. Not so: they may just be voicing their disapproval of that decision. I was far more concerned about the importance of good ethical reasoning than I was about Whitney Houston.

That debate soon began to generate more heat than light, so I did not persevere with it. But it is notable that another contributors made the same assumption: that if you voice disapproval of something then you must want the state to take action. And a third took the related view that if something is not banned by the state then it must be fine morally.

I find this view mistaken and rather worrying. What defines a liberal society is precisely that there is a large and vital sphere of life beyond the confines of state action. In Moscow 50 years ago the state and civil society were one and all moral questions were settled by the state. That is how they live in Tehran today, but it is not how we want to live in Britain.

As I said in one of my contributions to that thread, I feel that the prevalence of such views even in a Liberal Party does something to support the views I expressed in my (slightly pretentiously named) Eight sceptical theses on moral rights - particularly no. 3:

The more rights we ascribe to people, the more we tend to make the government mighty. If there is, say, a right to work, who can have the duty to give employment but the state? This process tends to make the individual citizen a spectator in important moral questions. I think what we are seeing here are the effects of that spectator status. Today's young liberals have grown up in a world where all moral questions have been settled and codified in legally bindings codes. If any disputes arise over them, they are settled by judges, not citizens or their elected representatives. All that remains is to ridicule those who are so stupid or so wicked as to disagree.