Is the Liberal Order Neutral?

A widespread consensus in liberal democracies is that a liberal political order takes a perfectly neutral stance towards moral and world-view matters. This is also one of the chief arguments for its superiority to other political orders.

The Liberal order, as the argument goes, secures the freedom of expression, belief, and action for all and allows, so to speak, a thousand different flowers to bloom. Other political orders presuppose an objective ultimate good, and therefore clearly posit an objective end of human nature and society. Their laws then seek to preserve these ends, and by definition take a non- neutral stance which ends up oppressing all those who disagree.

The goal of this short text is to investigate the question of whether the claim that liberal orders are neutral is true.

What is a Liberal Order?

The philosophy underlying the Liberal order originated in the Enlightenment with thinkers such as John Locke (17th century, England), who, as a result of the new enlightenment understanding of human nature, believed that the ultimate end and flourishing of human nature was to freely and rationally pursue self interest. Locke’s philosophy prescribed a political order which guaranteed protection of individual rights to property, freedom of thought and religion, and economic activity.

Other enlightenment thinkers took similar, if in part differing opinions:

Jean Jacques Rousseau (18th century, Switzerland) completely redefined the traditional idea of “goodness” by teaching that humans are simply born naturally good and pure, and are only corrupted by societal pressures and influences which push individuals to act unnaturally, emphasizing the importance of individual authenticity. Rousseau saw any societal influence upon individuals, whether from the Church, moral communities, or natural institutions like marriage to force an inauthenticity which oppresses and prevents humans from reaching true flourishing.

John Stuart Mill, a 19th century English philosopher and pioneer of early progressive liberalism, believed that the individuality sought after by the liberal order was always under threat of backwards and ignorant cultural custom of the masses, and that it was the task of the state to suppress the oppressive force of custom for the sake of freeing the individual to improve society.1

Uniting all enlightenment thinkers is a fundamental rejection of the idea of an objective human nature innately disposed towards the final cause of virtue and community. We will see in the course of this text how these concepts tie together.

The combination of Locke’s, Rousseau’s, and Mill’s and other enlightenment philosopher’s thought lead to the idea of a liberating political order which, by virtue of its system of laws and economic structures, does precisely as their philosophy prescribed: namely, guaranteeing individual rights to property, expression, religion, economic activity against all those forces of culture which might infringe upon them.

Liberalism has evolved through a series of waves, as described by American political philosopher Patrick Deneen, and was shaped by later enlightenment thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls to expand the range of freedoms it seeks to guarantee with sexual freedom and freedom of personal authenticity. Yet its fundamental principle is always the same: the assumption that the telos of the political order is to ensure freedom for the individual.

Liberalism’s Neutrality

Liberalism strikes a unique flavor of neutrality. It maintains, at least in theory, freedom of religion, expression, allowing the individual to pursue whatever religious or moral view (or lack thereof) they themselves hold to be true. John Stuart Mill argued profoundly in his book On Liberty, that the act of promoting or forbidding any kind of religious practice represents the assumption of infallibility, or knowing with certainty to be correct in one’s assumption, which no human or political order had any right to assume.2 In contrasting a liberal order to states where religious minorities are persecuted and even put into concentration camps, the preferable option is clear.

Liberalism also nominally seeks to maintain freedom of speech, which ensures the right of the individual to believe and articulate what he finds to be true. Mill made the same argument as above with regard to the censorship of opinions (and he was by no means fully wrong!). To argue that one opinion should not be heard assumes a kind of certainty which we have no right to claim.

Liberalism also seeks to open up the freedom to choose one’s path in life, in other words, preventing the bonds of family origins or even social castes from determining one’s future. The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his writings “Democracy in America” as he visited the early liberal democracy in America that the new political order he observed was fundamentally different from that of his home country France, because it was not family origins which determined one’s destiny, but the content of one’s character.

Traditionally liberal ideology has seen itself as a reaction against societies which severely inhibit human freedom to choose, forcing the chains of family origin, social expectations, and cultural custom upon individuals who would prefer to be free from these and choose their own way. In this sense, it truly is fully oriented around granting individuals a more radically free existence which takes a neutral stance with regard to a person’s origins or religion.

Liberalism’s further waves lead to a widening and shifting of the liberal project, particularly in response to criticism of the effects of early classical liberalism by such thinkers as Karl Marx (19th century, Germany) or deeper analyses of existing modes of unfreedom foisted on individuals by the structure of reality itself.

In the first case, for example, a society influenced by the aims of classical liberalism (focus: freedom of economic activity) often leaves those who have fewer means or natural capabilities more disadvantaged than others. By nature certain groups of people are weaker than others and, in a society increasingly focused on individual freedom, these begin to experience more deprivation of freedom in competition with other groups. For example, men are more physically and socially powerful than women, the sick more vulnerable than the physically healthy, and so on. Particularly in a liberal order, where so much focus is placed on individual freedom, as soon as the more powerful are given this freedom, the less powerful are infringed upon as the powerful enrich their own lives at the expense of others.

These in part marxist critiques influenced the next waves of liberalism. Liberalism, which orients the fundamental telos of society around freedom, then took on the additional concern to free people even from such natural violations of freedom through legislation and positive protections of, for example, female freedom to use birth control or have abortions, or married people to divorce with remarkable ease.

Thus, liberalism by its very telos strives towards a kind of neutrality and refusal to impose or allow to be imposed different forms of man-made and natural infringement of freedom in society.

Liberalism is not Neutral

The astute reader may already have begun to notice, however, where a societal orientation towards freedom in the way which Liberalism implements it begins also to lead to a very non-neutral stance towards many aspects of human life.

The first and most basic reason why is that we live in a world of limits. To attempt to attain one good has implications in the real world. If I want to become healthier, lose weight, and develop muscles, then I have to sacrifice something, namely, time, comfort, and the ability to eat whatever I want. To strive to build community in a village or a city requires a number of people to sacrifice their free time for a group. To make investments in national infrastructure requires not spending that money somewhere else like retirement or healthcare.

To sustain any one good always requires that some other good is sacrificed for it.3 The question is then, what concrete good is sacrificed by liberalism in order to attain its radical conception of freedom?

We’ve already seen how some of the emerging marxist critiques of the first wave of liberalism (classical liberalism) were that it sacrificed too precious a good for the sake of personal freedom. Namely, that to sustain economic freedom for everyone ultimately had a concrete effect: it benefited skilled and wealthy people while destabilising the lives of untold others, pushing many into poverty while making the already wealthy far more wealthy. Already here we see an early recognition that freedom can come at a cost.

The fundamental aim of liberalism, namely, to free the individual of outer coercion, itself requires the sacrifice or complete transformation of those aspects of society which by their nature represent potential outer coercion of the individual. Let's go through a few of these to practically illustrate what I mean.

Classical liberalism, with its emphasis on freedom of economic activity, opposes itself to all that which opposes economic activity. We've already discussed the Marxist critique that allowing full freedom to business owners can lead to merciless treatment of employees. But this pattern extends itself throughout the entire spectrum of human life: cultural traditions, or religious practices, beloved cultural fixtures such as old, historical landmarks, natural reserves, and anything which exists simply for its own sake rather than for the purpose of promoting economic development stands under threat.

These things necessarily stem the free flow of economic activity, for example, by preventing the building of a new shopping center or gas station or by preventing the adoption of various technologies. This becomes framed in a negative light in the liberal order. Even local cultural circles of economic activity, such as small local stores, lose their economic and cultural protections and are inevitably rolled over by the power of the cheapness and convenience of external imports in the name of expanding economic activity and freedom. Were one to suggest putting a limit on this kind of economic undercutting of the local community, they might be accused of thwarting economic freedom.

Yet since the liberal order is focused on economic and personal freedom (including of those who would like to sell cheap products in heretofore unexplored markets such as in local cultures), it wields often merely soft power to slowly erode these structures. In other words, it refuses to place, or removes legal protections respecting such fixtures of society as local markets, walkable streets, or even human employment in the face of AI development, and slowly allows the forces of economic pressure to push them out of the realm of viability. A common victim here is also the local and cultural connections of small-town life, which represent a moral fabric of mutual recognition and love. These are reframed as backwards and closed-minded by the liberal order, preferring the anonymous, cultureless, and commercially-centered bigger cities which enable profit generation, economic activity, individual freedom, and lack of natural obligations.

As liberalism further explores its implications, it insists upon the freedom of the individual to choose whichever life he or she wishes, bucking all traditional restraints of John Stuart Mill’s deplored “custom”. Thus traditional structures or biases such as the expectations surrounding marriage, caring for ailing parents, social service, or even free-will fire department service come to be framed in a negative light, as such obligations or commitments thwart the freedom of the individual to fully shape their life the way they spontaneously wish. The German FDP, for example, a confessing liberal party, rejects as a matter of principle any social fixtures which represent an infringement of radical individual freedom, like a military draft or a social year for students.

This naturally has implications for religious institutions as well. For any religious institution or individual which insists upon a moral value or commitment which might infringe upon the radical freedom or feeling of authenticity of the individual will be culturally and even (in advanced liberal orders) legally punished.

The Church, for example, no longer feel able or willing to teach the traditional Christian idea that sexuality only belongs within marriage - for this idea represents a restriction on individual freedom as a condition to receive the desired end, namely salvation or good standing with God. Instead it relativises and downplay its history and adapts to the new liberal sociology. Even the very idea of a God who stands beyond and in judgement over the individual is subtly downplayed and rejected in favor of a “God who sees you.”

The liberal order, again, does not usually explicitly punish these moral structures, but reframes them and removes legal protections for them. This becomes conjoined to a slowly introduced valorization of radical freedom in public messaging. Public cultural messaging which encourages radical individual pursuit of pleasure naturally gains an ever stronger voice in a liberal order which punishes those who critique it, setting the further conditions for the slow decline of moral structures which bind society together.

In the social area as liberalism progresses forwards, even reality itself becomes an obstacle for individual authenticity, representing itself in the significant push towards “trans rights”, the development of politically correct language and the corresponding opposition to “hate speech”, which even becomes anchored in legal structures and punishes institutions and individuals who publicly say things which can be perceived as such. This is not an accident, but only the logical endpoint of the liberal project.

The established undercurrent of a liberal society ultimately shapes to match the fundamental aims of the liberal order, both through the soft power of public messaging and through legal pressure aimed at protecting “freedom”. The institutions of society begin to transform, cleansing themselves of any ideas, structures, or practices that represent an objective telos which demands obedience or sacrifice from the individual in order to be fulfilled. These are then slowly shifted towards a subjective telos oriented towards the psychological well-being of the individual without making any demands of the self.

Furthermore, by its very nature, the liberal order also exerts an enormous influence on the spectrum of the thinkable among those subject to its influence. For any ideas that suggest or promote a lifestyle that restricts the complete freedom of the individual are slowly subjected to a subtle taboo. The fact that fasting from eating before a church service or devoting a lot of personal time to a community - or even the idea that there might be a God who created us for moral excellence - is difficult for the average Westerner to imagine today has not come out of nowhere, but precisely from the idealisation of unrestricted personal freedom.

This leads to a creeping shift in the spectrum of ideas that individuals are willing or even able to grapple with, which is deeply questionable from a philosophical point of view and in any case hardly intellectually neutral.

To come back to the question posed in the beginning of this section: what is the cost of the radical freedom proposed by the liberal order? The price to be paid is moral, cultural, metaphysical, familial, and communal. For none of these corresponding goods can thrive without tolerating and even encouraging the restriction of radical individual freedom for the sake of something greater.

The liberal attempt to discern what makes for a just human society fundamentally de-natures humans and attempts to consider the world from the perspective of a disembodied ego, abstracting away all questions about our nature and metaphysical belief, or of our physical and mental embodiment in the world, resulting in a complete blending out and even banning of questions of the religious or moral- subjugating these fundamentally to the human ego as a means to an end.

Thus, to answer the ultimate question of the article, it must be insisted that while liberalism nominally aims at neutrality, it can never reach it. If neutrality consists in truly not taking a stance, either positively or negatively towards matters of metaphysics and worldview, the liberal order manifestly fails just as much as other political orders which take an explicit stance. In fact, the liberal order ends up, by its nature, becoming positively anti-metaphysical and anti-cultural, and ultimately re-shapes society around a correspondingly anti-metaphysical and anti-cultural posture towards all claims of religion, family, moral and cultural practice.

While pursuing all of these moral goods are theoretically possible, they are not placed on an even playing field. In a liberal order, profit, consumption, and sexual freedom are attainable, but the virtues of the moral life as prescribed by the ancient Greeks and the Abrahamic religions are placed under systemic skepticism and even legal disadvantage and punishment when made public in any way, leading to the inevitable development of a moral and spiritual relativism which haunts the society like a thick fog, punishing those who dare to see through it.

The liberal order offers every individual, in theory, perfect freedom to pursue happiness, but by its very nature removes their very ability to attain it, on cultural, social, political, moral, and religious levels.

Liberalism does not have a Monopoly on Freedom

The next thought most people will have is certainly “if Liberalism is not neutral, then surely it is better than what came before”. This may well be true. Yet one persistent issue with the dialectic presented by advocates of the liberal narrative is a false disjunction about the political possibilities open to us. As the argument goes, either we keep our liberal order or we go back to utter tyranny, with persecution of those with different opinions, of non-believers, reinforcing a patriarchal society and returning to every vagary and vice the premodern world had to offer.

The good news is that this is far from true. The post-enlightenment political dialectic has revealed much wisdom about the state and society which are unquestionably worth keeping. Yet the assumption which we have every reason to jettison happens to be that which is most fundamental to liberalism itself: namely, its anthropology, or assumptions about human nature.

Here the rich yet oft-neglected philosophy of the premodern tradition from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is a treasure of political wisdom worth looking back to. Humans are not blank slates as John Locke argued, but we have a specific and objective nature which is oriented towards physical health, work, moral virtue, and community. Moral rules arise not out of abstract considerations of rights, but about a condition of what makes for the good life for humans, and therefore what makes for a good society.

According to the classical political tradition, certain values which the liberal order has come to valorize to the exclusion of all others still have a high ranking as belonging to the good life. For example: freedom of speech, meritocracy, the dignity of every individual, and even individualism. Yet the classical tradition also recognises that human nature requires more than merely abstract external freedom to thrive, thus affirming the importance of moral community, virtue, and the pursuit of the common good.

In short: no political order is neutral, because every political order, whether upfront and explicitly, or silently and implicitly, operates on a conception of human nature and the common good, as well as a valuation of what degree to which these will be implemented by political policy and messaging. Liberalism represents a different kind of order, but not one which escapes the inevitable need to take a stance on what life is about.

In conclusion I offer an analogy which illustrates the general case I've been making: Imagine someone sees another person drowning. But because they don't want to be dogmatic, they don't want to take a position on whether they really should be helped or not -- that would be presumptious. So they not only refuse to help the drowning individual, but prevent anyone else from helping them, to ensure that they stay neutral. Well - in a sense, indeed, this person has stayed neutral. But in another, truer, sense, they absolutely have not.