Progressive moral reasoning today - what is left?
One must appreciate the frustration of Naomi Wolf recently, who finds herself increasingly having to share the writing of conservatives who are still standing up for basic civil liberties in COVID-world, while her own progressive comrades-in-arms have gone almost entirely silent on the subject.
As illustration we might append a tweet from the president of the European Commission this morning.
The top reply to her tweet, as I type this, was as it should be.
I can hear the rebuttals though - “well we aren’t actually forcing these medical interventions upon anyone, they’re only required if you might want to… travel between countries.” For the moment. Ahem. And can I just add that nobody, nobody, believes this is about COVID control, not mainly (note that it isn’t even called “COVID pass”). Cases and deaths are plummeting rapidly. Vaccination is rapidly covering the only segment of the population we actually need worry about. No, obviously this is about creating a new bureaucracy, which will only grow in size, that will limit access to basic functions like travel and commerce on the basis of health status. Advocates know that even if they never say it, and opponents know that. And certain corporations that stand to make oodles of new money forever are no doubt lobbying for it with all their might.
But whither “not without consent” then? Well the truth is that many progressives have decided that requiring consent before subjecting someone to a medical intervention is a bad idea, with the possible exception of an individual who is willing to lock himself in his home and never interact with anyone else again ever. That hypothetical individual who doesn’t actually exist can do whatever he wants. For everyone else, you live by our rules. We pretty well blew past the medical consent barrier with mask mandates and, in our hurry, almost nobody uttered a peep about it. “I don’t consent” or “I don’t consent for my child” will get you exactly nowhere in arguing with progressive authorities about masking. And “adequate information” about possible downsides of masking (and especially the masking of children) were never provided by authorities and never will be.
What is left of progressive moral reasoning today (which is also the moral reasoning of our culture at large)? If you’d asked me a year ago I might have pointed to a few remaining principles. The most important principle left would probably have been the principle of consent - but it’s worth noting that, as employed by progressives, it wasn’t always what you might call “protecting consent”, in the sense of “I can’t subject you to this medical intervention without your consent”, although sometimes it was. But often it was what you might call a sort of “liberating consent”, something like “if both people in the relationship consent to do BLAH, then nobody else is permitted to prevent them from doing BLAH”.
Two other principles I might have pointed to would have been one, the idea that better physical health is a good thing. And so progressives have long been willing to engage in anti-smoking campaigns that are infused with moral language. They weren’t consistent about this, since you’ll also got in a lot of trouble for “fat-shaming” for example, and we see still a lot of messaging that all body shapes and sizes are equally good, even though being obese is one of the worst things you can do for your health. And then two, environmental concerns are also a popular moral concern of progressivism.
What has happened lately is that the health concern has been magnificently elevated and, any time it has come into conflict with the “consent” concern, it has ridden right over it without any difficulty whatsoever. Why? Well, I think one reason (and Jeff Deist actually talked about this in his excellent interview with the Babylon Bee recently) (free version of interview) is that it is more fulfilling to be for something than just against somethings. Consent as it was often employed by progressives was an argument for people who were in the weaker position in society, an argument against the powerful - “you all say we can’t do this, but both adults consent, so you have no right to stop them”. So it was an argument against prohibitions if you will, and those are always weaker, I think. This vision of reworking society in a way that makes it so much safer and healthier (such is the promise anyway), really a sort of eschatological utopian vision for some people I think, is an argument for, people have this glorious vision in mind… and so it’ll ride right over a weaker idea like “consent” when the two conflict. (And now if you wanted to be dark about it, you might argue that people in the past who were willing to ignore ideas of medical consent did so because of their own utopian visions too.)
Great essay. Progressives, being Godless, have no "moral" reasoning. If they are using moral language, they must have a hidden motivation. I think you are onto the idea that things like the principle of consent, tolerance, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are all Trojan Horses that have been very effective at infiltrating the institutions that the progressives hate. Now that they have the upper hand, they quickly turn the tables. Rather than moral reasoning, it is power reasoning.