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March 7, 2005
An article by John Kekes on conservatism. It begins thus:
Conservatism is a political morality. It is political because it aims at political arrangements that make a society good, and it is moral because it holds that a society is good if it enables people living in it to live good lives, that is, lives that are personally satisfying and beneficial for others. Conservatism, like liberalism and socialism, has different versions, partly because conservatives often disagree with each other about the particular political arrangements that ought to be conserved. There is no disagreement among them, however, that the reasons for or against those arrangements are to be found in the history of the society whose arrangements they are. This commits conservatives to denying that the reasons are to be derived from a hypothetical contract, or from an imagined ideal order, or from what is supposed to be beneficial for the whole of humanity. In preference to these and other alternatives, conservatives look to the history of their own society because it exerts a formative influence on their present lives and on how it is reasonable for them to want to live in the future.
How many Australian conservatives who defend traditional puritan bourgeois values think like that? It is not even clear that Australian conservatives are committed to political arrangements that foster good lives, or have a view about what lives are good. They do have a sense of what obligations, virtues, and satisfactions are worth valuing, but it is unclear that they connect this concern with traditional bourgeois values to the values that make lives good.
Making lives good is alien because Australian conservatives link their values, obligations and virtues to a prosperous economy and not to good lives.
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