With resources
dwindling, the moral questions behind public spending and taxation have been
thrown into sharp relief. It
must always be remembered that the post war consensus known of Butskellism,
which has been a feature of most of Britain’s history over the last fifty or
sixty years, was formed in an environment of relative prosperity. As we move through a period of
austerity the moral differences between left and right become more evident.
In the last couple of weeks,
for example, we have heard the Public Accounts Committee talk about the morality
of companies avoiding tax and, just last week, Chancellor George Osborne told Councils
that putting up Council Tax is morally unacceptable. The inference that all politicians who advocate the opposite
position are therefore immoral represents a raising of the stakes in political
rhetoric. Will the next General
Election campaign be about politicians trying to out-moralise each other?
This is an awkward one
for public servants, who are supposed to be politically neutral. Would George Osborne have me question
my own morality before I advise politicians to put up taxes, or am I entitled
to set the moral issues aside and think solely about the cash?
With all that in mind
perhaps public servants should be thinking more about the moral side to public
provision and how we pay for it.
To help us, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his team believe they
have discovered the foundations of human morality. Inherited from man’s
earliest ancestors who lived for generation after generation in extended family
groups, these are the
psychological traits that supported this way of life and are still the basis on
which human cultures are built.
The six foundations, wickedly
paraphrased for the sake of this blog, are; care for others; a sense of fairness, a desire for liberty,
group loyalty, respect for authority and a sense or purity or sanctity.
Without going into too
much detail (there is a great deal of good stuff on the internet for those who
are interested), genes that
support these traits have survived in the gene pool because they help human
beings work together and optimise survival rates. Groups that didn’t look after each other, that turned in on
themselves too easily and that weren’t competitive enough with their neighbours
dies out. Hence the moral
foundations exist, Haidt believes, in every human population anywhere in the
world.
Of course the moral
foundations are only genetic tendencies, and like all other such tendencies,
they are shaped and moulded by culture, religion, upbringing, experience and,
last but not least, freedom of choice for the individual.
This is important
because, fairly evidently, there are moral dilemmas implicit in the moral
foundations. Group loyalty and care for others, for example, works best when
the people we are called upon to care for are inside the group. A strong commitment to group
loyalty also explains why we have a tendency to be antagonistic towards people
different from ourselves, to a point that often descends into violence. But going to war sooner or later kicks up the dilemma of when
to stop trying to kill the other side and when to show mercy and compassion to
the wounded and displaced. Culture
and religion attempt to solve these dilemmas and not surprisingly they are
solved in different ways in different populations.
One of Haidt’s
fascinating pieces of work around the moral foundations studied how people with
different political views take different practical attitudes to the six moral
foundations. ‘Conservatives’ tend to have more respect for
authority, greater group loyalty and a greater sense of what is pure than
‘liberals’, for whom care for
others and fairness tend to trump everything else.
But the implication of
this is that the stuff of politics is not in the moral foundations of the human
species, which are universal, but the way cultures and individuals interpret
them.
It seems that pretty
much everything the public sector spends money on, and hence for which we pay
our taxes, appears to have a basis in one or more of the moral foundations. Economists may justify public
expenditure in terms of such matters
as market failure and the need for public goods, but these are not the kind of
things people think about when they pay their taxes. It is likely that the broad consensus we have over
what things we are prepared to give up some of our earnings to pay for is based
on some fundamental agreement amongst ourselves over what is morally right.
I am not yet sure what
the implications for moral foundations theory might be for the public sector,
but I am pretty sure that if the theory turns out to be true they are there to
be found. There has already been a
piece of work designed to help charities use moral foundations to improve
giving.
I will continue to
permit myself a wry smile from the sidelines when I hear politicians talk about
morality., but if this debate leads us all to give more consideration to moral
questions then it won’t be a bad thing.
Merry Christmas to all
my readers!
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