Talk about values

"Citizen ethics"

2010-02-27T18:25:00.002Z

Congratulations to the “Citizen Ethics” initiative in the Grauniad. Impossible to know where it will lead of course but the discussion is much needed. And for the very small minority of people who have been working away on a book about ethics and integrity it is good to know we are not alone.

Almost all the contributors emphasize the need for a more community oriented, more widely social, humanistic or altruistic set of values, opposing them to individualistic or consumerist values. The great question is how that change can be fostered. Forcing people by more regulations has been tried, indeed is still being tried by the present Government but is obviously stupid anyway. Getting people to read more philosophy is, sadly, not going to have broad appeal! Here's my suggestion, based on the new book.

Let us agree that our values are broken, even the language of ethics doesn’t work any more. (That idea goes back at least to Elizabeth Anscombe in 1958) So what we need is not to explain or analyze ethical argument - the tradition philosophical approach of what “good” and “right” are and how we recognise them - but to reconstruct it in a way that works in our context. That way can recognise that the great religious traditions have been as much about ethical guidance as about supernatural doctrine and learn from them, but the solution must be secular because we no longer live in a world, or even a society, of religious agreement.

Many of the contributors made much of the Aristotelian idea of “flourishing”, which used to be translated as “happiness”. In fact, happiness can be the key and it bridges the gap between self-interest and values - on one condition. Happiness (flourishing) has to be understood as having a major subjective component and that's the bit we forget in our scramble to draw interesting political conclusions. Happiness depends as much on a person’s inner life as on their external circumstances (within limits, this is highly condensed) and given unchanging externals it can be increased by changing the habits which govern the responses of the inner life. This can only be done by a commitment to practice new inner habits, or skills, which are in many respects similar to traditional virtues.

This gives rise to a radically different model of ethics, as I've said before much more like virtue or teleological ethics than ethics based on a legal paradigm. It also gives rise to rational choices which are based on the individual’s own interest in cultivating happiness but recognise that that interest requires concern for others and the community. In this way we can build back up to interpersonal and political choices which are both compassionate and responsible.

The starting point is to encourage people to consider for themselves whether perhaps their happiness is not so much a matter of getting and spending as of their inner lives, which is a secular version of the traditional religious call for values based on spirituality, but there is nothing supernatural about it. By doing this we get back to integrity, which in this context means that the same understanding lies behind the individual’s sense of meaning in their own life, the way in which they interact with other people and the social choices they make. And that is both the beginning of an answer as to how to reconstruct broken values and the way to foster a less selfish society.

Values in political argument

2010-01-23T17:04:00.000Z

We often refer to values in argument even though we very rarely discuss what they are and what they mean. It is taken for granted that, “We all know what we mean” when, for example, an action is justified by reference to justice or freedom. This is a very large assumption when we remember that such concepts have been the stuff of philosophical debate for thousands of years. We hear expressions like “our values”; “Western values”; “the values of decent ordinary people” -- and to ask for details somehow implies that we are not ourselves decent ordinary people. Perhaps there were times in the past when a consensus on values could be assumed because, for example, the same religious beliefs were held across most of society. If that were the case, we might innocently have got into the habit of referring to values which never had to be made explicit. Personally, I doubt that there ever was such a golden age, not least because the links between religious beliefs and values are sufficiently complex that shared religious beliefs might never have generated widespread common values. But in the open and heterogenous society we now have it is extraordinary that anyone can honestly assume that values are so widely shared and understood that they do not need discussion but can simply be referred to by abstract nouns.

This tendency is present in everyday life but it is in political argument that it is most apparent. It is perfectly understandable that politicians are not (in the main) philosophers and their job is certainly not to analyse the meaning of words. Nevertheless, we do look to political leaders to articulate visions of what kind of society we will become and what kind of people we are, at least in our social aspects. So, is it asking too much that politicians should be able to spell out not merely practical policies, but the values which lie behind them, which is to say the vision of society that they represent? Increasingly however what we find is that politicians simply use value words like puppets in an old-fashioned Punch and Judy show. They hold up “Justice” and we cheer: they hold up “Privilege” and we boo. Perhaps we get the politicians we deserve, but with one or two honorable exceptions (I think of Robert Kennedy and Obama) we do not seem to get politicians who will articulate visions or values.

Perhaps though this complaint is to do with the medium and not the message. Perhaps it is simply the summarising and condensing of political messages into soundbites which gives the impression that no thought is given to values. Nevertheless, it remains true that people’s opinions, loyalties and allegiances are swayed on the basis of value words the meaning of which is never fully discussed. That in itself is a distortion of the democratic process.

But in recent years a worse habit has crept into political currency. Politicians use references to values not as a way of justifying their actions or of advancing discussion, but as a way of putting their actions beyond the need for justification and preventing discussion. The classic example is the defence of the invasion of Iraq. It seems to be enough for a politician to say, “I did what I thought was right”, to put the matter beyond further discussion.

Just think about this for a moment. What was done in this particular instance was, it is now agreed, done on false assumptions. There have been some significant benefits as a consequence for the people of Iraq, but there have also been very considerable hardships and difficulties, not least the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. A cruel dictator was overthrown, but the world is littered with cruel dictators and there is no general assumption that getting rid of them justifies external military intervention whenever the mood takes a country powerful enough to do it. This invasion was, on the very best and most generous interpretation, a huge mistake of a kind which should and usually would destroy a politician’s reputation and credibility.

But the defence is simply to say, “I did what I thought was right”. By appealing to values the discussion is apparently ended, the fox has gone to ground. It is considered inadmissible to question a person’s values, perhaps because it may seem to be an attack on their religious beliefs or perhaps because it may seem a personal attack, a person’s values being so intimately part of who they are. Not the least extraordinary aspect of this is the implicit assumption that our leaders act only in their own names and therefore need consider only their own values, not ours, in their decisions on our behalf. But public actions must surely be justified by reference to public values, to values that are open to public scrutiny, not simply by reference to anyone’s inscrutable conscience. “I did what I thought was right” is nowhere near good enough, unless it is the preamble to a full explanation of what made it seem so right.

We see the same pattern more and more as a justification of everyday political decisions. Leaders no longer say, “I think this is right because …” and go on to give a fuller explanation of the justification for their decision. They simply say, “I am doing this because it is right.” As soon as an ethical value is invoked further discussion or explanation is considered unnecessary. Values are being invoked not as part of an argument or an explanation but as a way of preventing them.

This tendency can only be harmful and it displays an astonishing arrogance on the part of those who use it. Of course values are an important part of the reasoning which supports any important political decision. But those values need to be explained and the more important the decision the more the values need to be explored. To use a value word like a trump card to end discussion shows a debasement of political language. It strongly reinforces the need to find ways of talking about values so that values can take their proper place in political discussion. “It is right” is not a proper justification of any action, it is at best an indication that an argument based on values may be about to follow. We need to talk about values to prevent this kind of political manipulation and take political discussion back to an honest level where both facts and values are open to challenge and discussion.

2009-12-04T15:41:00.000Z

Is equality the answer?

Statistics on wealth and income distribution suggest that in the last decade our society has become less equal. Some members of the UK Government reportedly favour a drive towards equality as their USP for next year’s election. An interviewer for any job other than Government might ask why a decade heading in the opposite direction is a qualification for championing equality now, but that is not in fact the key question. The key question is whether equality should matter at all, even to the left.

It is easy to think that equality is what progressive politics has always been about. This is partly true, but when equality has been high on the progressive agenda the consequences have usually been disastrous. The cry for equality has been associated with the worst excesses of violent revolutions and the Terrors which usually follow them. It is of course true that inequality can be harmful to society, but usually only when other conditions are present, for example when people are so badly off they feel they no longer have a stake in society. Inequality is often a symptom of social problems rather than the disease and prescribing equality is a mistake which has often killed the patient, as in the aftermath of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions.

For several decades progressive thinking has been organised around the idea of social justice, often taking the work of John Rawls as its intellectual justification. But social justice is no more than equality disguised by hiding its ugliest consequences. Rawls saw social justice as fairness, where some inequality is allowed but has to be justified by the benefits it provides to the disadvantaged. In fact he put forward a sophisticated version of the childhood practice of ensuring that a cake is evenly divided by making the cutter choose their piece last. Rawls’ theory, as its critics have often pointed out, begs the question why equality is the only fair distribution anyway. As a snapshot of society at a particular moment a state of perfect equality might look fair, but only because all the dynamic elements, including the history which led up to that moment and the evolution which will then take place, have been taken out of the picture. It is dynamism which makes equality absurd, the whole business of what to do once everyone has been made equal and then some work harder, smarter or luckier than others. Must we constantly rebalance to maintain equality? If you accept this answer, you have either to explain why society will not grind to a halt because nothing is worth any effort, or else allow so much power to the State to effect constant redistribution that society will succumb to tyranny.

This last idea, that equality is incompatible with any degree of freedom, became associated in the eighties with the right-wing theorist Friedrich von Hayek. It was taken by Lady Thatcher’s circle as an argument against a socially active State, but that was a mistake which has discredited the underlying idea. It is only an argument against a State which attempts to impose the false goal of equality. The idea that the pursuit of equality leads to tyranny goes back at least two hundred years earlier to David Hume, the finest mind of the Scottish Enlightenment (writing, all the more impressively, before the excesses of the French Revolution). Equality cannot be maintained without the constant and intrusive exercise of power and is therefore incompatible with freedom. That is not a right wing theory, it is a fact supported by a great deal of evidence. It would be dishonest of the left to pretend otherwise just to mislead the disadvantaged into lending their support.

Political thinking is easily polarized by word pairs. It often happens that the negative form of a word has the real power and misleads us into going too far in the opposite direction. Equality is not a good thing just because inequality can be very bad. Injustice, by way of comparison, is the powerful concept of the justice/injustice pair. As Amartya Sen has recently argued, important though it is to remove injustice we should not conclude that perfect justice is a feasible aim, any more than we should conclude that history can have an end. As an aside, inequality itself is often caused by past injustice, but even then it does not automatically follow that it will be just to deal with inequality by trying to recreate what we think might have happened without the wrongs of the past. How many new injustices would we create by so doing?

So we might ask, heretically, why is inequality wrong? If I have sufficient, for example, does it even matter that you have more? To insist that it does verges on the unworthy but easily sold politics of envy. If I do not have sufficient the case is very different - but what surely needs to be addressed is how my lack can be put right. Insufficiency is what should concern us, not inequality. We cannot begin to find solutions until we see this clearly. Injustice might sometimes be at the root of the problem, but not every inequality, not even every insufficiency, is someone else’s fault. Redistribution might contribute to a solution, as everyone but the most rabid right wing apologist will accept. But redistribution which does not cure the insufficiency may be pointless and excessive redistribution may do damage of its own. Whenever equality becomes a political goal in its own right ideology has taken over from common sense. Insufficiency is the real enemy but the questions which need answering before action are empirical, not ideological.

We should be deeply concerned about genuine insufficiency, not only in our own society but around the world. As an expanding world population meets the effects of climate change that concern will become the key challenge of the future. But mistaking that challenge for a problem about equality helps no one and confuses issues which already wallow in interest politics and ideology. European politics has been arranged for a long time along a left/right, equality/freedom axis. A shift to an axis which has insufficiency at one extreme may already be under way, but it is much needed. Such a shift might help us to accept not only that insufficiency should be the focus of concern but that excess is at the other extreme. If that is so, the equilibrium position may be to learn how to be content with sufficient. That will be enough of a challenge.

2009-11-06T16:19:00.000Z

Respect

I have come across a number of discussions recently about the idea of “respecting other people’s beliefs” which set me thinking about the strands of meaning that are tangled up in that much used phrase.

“Anyone should be allowed to believe whatever they want to believe free of any legal sanctions.” This should apply to beliefs about any and all subjects and to people who believe contradictions, absurdities or odious things about other people. We could call this political freedom of belief and I can’t really think why any civilized person would oppose it.
“Anyone should be allowed to express any belief free of any legal sanctions.” (Political freedom of speech.) This is a key political freedom, possibly the most basic of all. In practice almost everyone accepts that there are some things which should not be said because, for example, people might be misled and incited to violence by some utterances. But any restriction on this freedom carries dangers and I think we have probably become too ready to accept restrictions on freedom of speech.
“No one should use abusive or demeaning personal rhetoric in discussing another person’s views, whether with that person or more widely.” This seems to me one of the core meanings of “respecting other people’s beliefs” and it is the essence of civilized discussion. Sadly, it is often forgotten or deliberately flouted now in the attempt to stir up publicity - much of the debate on both sides of the “God Delusion/New Atheist” argument falls into this category, for example. But respect in this sense is respect for the person not for the view: it doesn't cover denying the truth of a person's views or simply saying they are wrong, let alone producing arguments or evidence against their view, or demanding the arguments or evidence in favour. It might be likened to abstention from verbal violence in discussion, rather like abstention from violence in playing a physical game, which is not at all the same as abstention from the game or in this case from discussion.
“Everyone should bear in mind that they could be wrong, however convinced they are that they are right, and conduct discussion accordingly.” This is a rule many people express and very few follow. It is particularly unpopular in today’s age of soundbite politicians and celebrity-driven careers, when people feel it is essential to be seen to be right. But the salutary insight that we could be wrong is about keeping our minds open to evidence. It doesn’t follow that we always are wrong, or that all views are equally true, or should be treated as such. If we come across a strange point of view which differs from what we are used to we should not dismiss it just for unfamiliarity, because it might offer a different way of looking at the world which is better than our current belief. The new view needs first to be understood in sufficient detail, demanding a certain respect for it which will be broadly proportional to how cogent the view itself is - a suspension of criticism until we have properly understood what is proposed. But then, the new view needs to prove itself, show its evidence, the reasoning behind it, it’s predictive power and so on. The world views of different cultures for example often have practical consequences which are superior in some respects to ours so we can often learn something from them even if in the end we do not accept them. They can help us to look critically at our existing view and perhaps improve it. This can happen without such beliefs being true or being embraced in every detail - that might be the right conclusion, but it needs more work!
“No one should disagree with or challenge another’s beliefs.” Many people think or behave as if this were what respect amounts to but it can't be quite as simple as that. As a general maxim it would amount to having, or at least expressing, no beliefs at all. Do we have to agree with everyone, including two sides with mutually incompatible positions? There is a time and place for disagreement and a time and place for keeping silent, of course: no one would suggest it’s right to go into the middle of a religious service and loudly start to dispute the relevant faith, for example. If this aspect of good manners is all that is intended, fair enough. But if we disagree with someone it is surely often a mark of respect for that person and for their views (rather than the reverse) to engage in a discussion of why they think that and why they reject the reasons which lead us to have a different view. It depends on our motives. If for example we just want to prove someone wrong for our own entertainment or aggrandizement, or worse humiliate them, then challenging their beliefs is certainly not respectful, it might even amount to bullying. If we are genuinely curious about their beliefs or about why they hold them it is a very different matter and the questioning is itself respectful. The difficult cases are those where our motive for discussion is to change the other person's mind about their views. But whenever we do so to be helpful there can be no disrespect even if the person finds our concern unwelcome.
“If someone does not want to discuss or justify their views they should not have to.” Again, this might simply be an aspect of good manners. To press someone on an abstract point which has no immediate consequences when they are uncomfortable with the situation is rude. But if for example the belief in question has practical consequences, particularly consequences for others apart from the believer, it is surely necessary to challenge the view. If John does not want to discuss his political opinions in the pub it might be good manners to talk about football (again), but if he says it is safe to let his young children play on the railway that is surely a belief that any friend would question.
“There are certain categories of belief, including supernatural beliefs, which should not be challenged.” This is a half truth and possibly a dangerous one. Since supernatural belief does not depend on evidence in any straightforward way we have no agreed way of deciding supernatural questions. Some, including many theologians, would say it follows that so-called supernatural facts are not really facts at all but something else - metaphors, myths, doomed attempts to express an inexpressible truth, meaningless babble, whatever. It does seem to follow that there must come a point at which further discussion of supernatural matters is pointless (I don’t include the exegesis of agreed texts) and people have to accept disagreement. But before that point is reached there is surely a great deal that can be done by way of clarification of positions, demands for consistency, separation of empirical from supernatural points and so on. So, if someone wants to say that they have an inexpressible faith based (say) on personal spiritual insights there is nothing more to be said, but if they produce a string of propositions about the world based on their supernatural beliefs, they are surely subject to the same demands of rational discussion as if they were talking about geography. And someone who claims that they and only they know certain truths because they have supernatural insight denied to everyone else should be sent straight to Jeremy Paxman for questioning.
“All supernatural beliefs are equally valid”. This might possibly be true if the beliefs in question were “purely” supernatural, although it might mean that all are equally meaningless so it might not offer much comfort to holders of exotic beliefs. But since many such beliefs are an amalgam of supernatural and empirical it will usually not be true, quite apart from the demand for internal consistency.
“It is (morally) wrong to question or cast doubt on anyone’s supernatural or religious beliefs.” It might be rude, it might be unwise, it might be vicious if intended to incite or justify violence against against them, it might be cruel if for example someone’s beliefs are their only comfort in some present grief. It could be wrong for any such specific reason. But can it be wrong in general? How can it be, for no one, even the most fervent believer, can think that it is wrong to doubt any belief of any religion? Some religions of course believe that it is morally wrong to doubt their doctrines, which is the essence of blasphemy. But to insist that everyone subscribe to that view is to insist that everyone subscribe to that particular religion. This is where rationality and discussion end. If a religion believes that it is wrong to question or doubt it there is no possibility of discussion, but there is no possibility of persuasion either. Such a religion is either closed or aspires to grow by force.

There are probably many other strands: let me know your favourites.

2009-10-12T14:37:00.000+01:00

Political values and private values

Politics is usually about interests, about which group is to get what they want. Politicians constantly appeal to values in their rhetoric (generalities like our values, traditional values, family values, working class values, national values, even “the values of ordinary working people”: or particular values like fairness, equality, social justice, freedom etc.) but it is rare that values actually play a part in political decision making. Usually politics is a more cynical business. Unfortunately that means that our public world, our society, is also cynical and largely value-free. Many politicians like to pretend that values are the difference between their side and their opponents (“We have sound values, they are opportunists”) but nearly always such rhetoric is an attempt to make the majority feel good about pursuing their own interests, for example by rolling out or rolling back the power of the State. Perhaps we should not be surprised when politicians (deniably) sponsor torture, indiscriminate bombing or other acts which in private life would see them shamed and locked up, because values have all but been driven from the public arena.

The lack of values in real politics is nothing new. It was well known in principle and ancient in practice long before Machiavelli dared to put it in writing in pre-Reformation Florence. What was shocking about Machiavelli was that he suggested cynical opportunism in politics in a time and place when Christian values were held up as a model for both private and public morality. There was at least a pretence that the same values were shared and applied at every level and that departures from these values were aberrations and exceptions. Machiavelli, writing to curry favour with princely tyrants, let the cat out of the bag: politics was about power and interests, not values at all.

But is this really what we want? Perhaps bad behaviour is to be expected of tyrants but why should we condone such a lack of public values when we have democratic forms of government? Why do we not expect the upholding of values to be at the heart of politics? In private life of course we often put our own interests and desires above our values, even if we sometimes feel a little ashamed of so doing. But when it comes to public life, to creating the kind of society and indeed the kind of world we want to live in, why do we allow an even lower standard to apply?

One of the problems with public or political values is that we no longer have a clear shared base of private values. Our values are drawn from so many different sources that, although we have bits and pieces in common, there is no shared heart we all understand and can appeal to. A related problem is that we do not even know how to discuss and debate ethical questions. Groups within society may hold strong views about certain questions of value, but they cannot persuade the rest unless, for example, the rest share their religious beliefs or their ideology. Groups can’t really talk to each other (as opposed to shouting at each other) because they are making different assumptions and even using different concepts, different language. However, if there is no commonly accepted way of discussing ethical questions because discussion stops at the boundaries of belief or culture, then in practice society has no values. There is thus a real danger that a free, pluralist society becomes an amoral society, a society without values.

We all recognise that democratic arrangements do not settle ethical questions. No one says, on being outvoted, “Ah, now I see that I was wrong about this issue!” We come to political compromises or we just accept that a vote has gone against us but we can’t find the answers to ethical questions this way. If people share values (meaning they already agree at some level of principles) it’s easy, but if they don’t it just doesn't work. That of course is why it is so difficult to impose democracy on communities fundamentally divided about values. Genuine democracy, something that goes beyond mere head counting and doesn’t leave the minority feeling alienated and aggrieved every time, assumes that questions about values can be discussed. But discussion about values rarely happens now in any society: the best we get even from those who care about values is to label those who disagree as bad or evil or sinful.

The difficulty of taking collective ethical decisions is not, let us be clear, a criticism of democracy. Whatever the form of government, what is done in the public sphere rests on individual choices. In the many forms of modern tyranny (whether it be one-party rule, military dictatorship or theocracy) decisions depend on the particular interests, prejudices and perhaps principles of the tyrant(s). In democracy, people are likely to choose as their rulers those who promise to promote their interests or those whose values seem to approximate theirs. If values are to play a significant role it must happen at the level of the individual. We may suspect that politicians in general will only respect certain values if they believe that the people respect them and thus that to betray those values will end their power. Be that as it may, if there are to be such things as political or social values they have to rest on private values. If we are not clear about our values then no system of government will see them realised. If our personal values are incoherent or arbitrary what is the basis even of our personal decisions, the decisions we make every day and which shape the kind of lives we lead and the kind of people we are? There isn’t one. So how can our collective decisions be any better?

We pay lip service to the idea of values and ethical standards both in our private lives and in politics. We believe that values both shape our individual lives and hold society together. And yet we no longer have a coherent idea about what values are and where they come from. There is a void where our values should be. Or if you prefer a different metaphor, the house of values is built on sand. Quicksand.

2009-09-23T10:47:00.000+01:00

A principle of sufficiency

(Extracted from notes for new book)

From Rousseau to Rawls people who think seriously about what politics ought to be doing have focused on equality. It has been a talisman or icon of progressive politics. Over time the idea has perhaps changed from flat-out equality (always a hard sell, even Marx shied away from it) into something more like “fairness” or “social justice” but the underlying idea is still the same, that differences have to be justified or there is something wrong about them. This leads us into straight into one of the (many) paradoxes of our economic system, particularly as it applies in the UK. We praise and applaud the free market and its operation but are suspicious or just plain envious of anyone who succeeds to a level we might think of as excess. It’s OK to strive to be rich, but not actually to be rich.

The scope of differences which need either justification or eradication to avoid being offences against equality has widened through time. Such widening is inevitable when the claim of inequality becomes, as it has become, sufficient to establish a political right to remedial action. “It’s not fair!” has become the battle cry of special interest politics of all shades and from all sides. Of course there are many things which genuinely are not fair but the boundaries are always difficult to draw if equality is the model of fairness we use. Where do we stop? It’s a question which is difficult to answer in terms both of quality and quantity. What kinds of difference call for collective action and social change? And what degree of inequality, if any, is tolerable?

There is so much inequality in the world and so much suffering caused by it that this emphasis on equality is more than understandable. If we just focus on material inequality we cannot turn away from the searing poverty which affects so many millions in the world. Most people would agree that such suffering is an affront to civilization although we seem unable to devise practical means of eradicating it. A call for equality, or even “more equality”, may nevertheless be a mistake and point us in the wrong direction. Suffering associated with inequality does not necessarily need equality for its eradication. In fact, this is increasingly accepted in political practice and even in political rhetoric. In domestic matters politicians on all sides tend to talk about their vision of a fairer society where once they might have talked of a fair society. It’s a quiet but sensible shift for many reasons. Aiming for incremental improvement is more realistic, in terms both of achievability and of managing expectations, than aiming for perfection. In any case, the point has repeatedly and bloodily been made by history that enforcing absolute equality requires some form of tyranny because complete equality is simply not an equilibrium state and will not maintain itself.

But if we abandon the idea of equality what principle can we stand on which can both explain our sense of outrage at gross poverty and provide an argument to move others? We can go back to first principles about happiness and the inner life. The desire to live happily can be taken as a common human aspiration, beyond differences of time and culture. Of course there are vast cultural differences in what a person may perceive as the happy life in different times and places but understanding the importance of the subjective, of the inner life, is a fundamental step away from total dependence on external conditions. Happiness can be based on taking personal responsibility for the development of one’s own inner life. From this basis we can build back up into external ethical and indeed political principles which can be applied (not as a matter of perfect deduction but) because they encapsulate sensible practice towards reinforcing positive aspects of the inner life.

One consequence of this approach is that external, material well-being takes a much more subsidiary place. Provided basic material needs are satisfied (and accepting that what counts as a basic need may be subject to some cultural variation) happiness is within everyone’s reach because it depends on their own inner life. From this point of view the idea that material equality is a necessary condition of fairness or justice seems very strange.

Instead we might suggest a principle of sufficiency. On the level of material resources what is needed for anyone’s practice, and what anyone who is serious about developing their own inner life would like to see available to all as a matter of sympathy and compassion, is not equality but sufficiency. It would be a huge improvement if everyone had sufficient to meet their basic needs, from which point the possibility of living a happy life would be as open to them as to the richest in the world. We are of course left with all the practical issues of how to achieve this but the idea frees us from a particularly vicious dilemma. If equality is our model it can seem that for any person and indeed any nation to be richer than another is somehow wrong, but then it can seem that more planet-damaging growth is the only answer. Sufficiency is a more practical target.

But sufficiency is a subtle knife which cuts both ways, because the richest might also accept that there is a point at which enough really is enough, even though there might be disagreement over where that point was located. Indeed, the charitable trusts which have long been created by those who have won the race to maximise capital are an example of this principle in action, perhaps best exemplified today by the Gates’ trust. If compassion is an important practice then there are without doubt obligations on the rich to help the poor, on the national as on the personal level. But those obligations end at sufficiency, not equality.

There is much more to this argument than can be set out [in a blog]. But try it out, not as a doctrine but as a way of looking at the world. It accommodates that sense of outrage we feel at gross inequality, without courting the whole raft of new injustices which enforced equality would produce. It accommodates, if you like, the view that everyone has an equal right to develop their own happiness but that consumption is not the point of our existence. It is one of those simple shifts in point of view which makes everything look different.