Moral Enforcers

Social justice warriors are like a mob of out-of-control Dirty Harrys, using the law to impose their standards on people with whom they disagree. By Nick Cater.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but when we were asked if the law should be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry, were we told that ticking “yes” would give Rugby Australia to power to deprive a person who voted “no” of their livelihood?

There was nothing that I could see in the national plebiscite that explained that if the “yes” case got up, “no” voters would have to keep their traps shut forever and a day about a conviction embedded deep in their conscience.

This is not democracy as we know it, although the principle would be familiar to those who have followed the career of  Robert Mugabe, who seized the gift bestowed on him by a popular vote in 1980 to declare himself head of the state of Zimbabwe, head of government, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, thus granting himself unilateral power to dissolve parliament, declare martial law, and run for an unlimited number of terms. 

The move against Israel Folau, backed by a broad coalition of virtue harvesters, is a classic case of noble cause corruption, otherwise known as Dirty Harry syndrome, where normal rules of civic conduct are suspended in the quest for a supposed greater good.

The main lesson about democracy we should draw from the Folau case is that securing 50 per cent plus one of the popular vote does not entitle you to lock up your opponents, physically or metaphorically.

Representative democracy, when it works as it should, seeks compromise between competing convictions, and guards against the temptation for the winner to take all.

The matters that are settled by an election fall into a limited category of things we properly regard as the everyday business of the state. Taxation, industrial relations and energy policy are examples of matters on which the winners gained a clear mandate in the 2019 federal election.​

Weightier matters, like the definition of a good person, the limits of free speech and the ideal of the nation, remain contested. And rightly so, since a decision to impose moral order by absolute decree, whether fashioned by conservative or progressive thinkers, would provoke greater conflict and weaken the social fabric.

Yet this is exactly what progressive culture warriors are attempting to do by every means at their disposable. Since the political constraints placed on an elected government prevent them venturing too far along this track, progressives increasingly resort to the law to regulate areas of life that once matters of personal judgment. 

They look to the law to address contentious moral issues on the principle that there ought to be only one collective judgment. They are fearful of allowing people to be guided by their conscience in case they arrive at judgments with which they don’t agree.

This argument is at the heart of Jonathan Sumption’s Reith Lectures, available on podcast from the BBC. For those of us wrestling to understand how a nation governed by the fair go could arrive at a point where expressing a deeply held religious conviction can result in something verging on persecution, the four hours it takes to listen to Sumption’s exposition of the law’s expanding empire is time well invested.

He compares the current censorious move to the influence the evangelical movement had on Victorian sensitivities in the 19th century. It was an atmosphere that inspired John Stuart Mill to write On Liberty, and explains why that book speaks so clearly to the issues involved in the Folau case. 

While Sumption principally addresses the situation in Britain, complicated by influence of the European Court of Human Rights, his analysis resonates here. “Social media encourage a resort to easy answers and generate a powerful herd instinct which suppresses, not just dissent but even doubt and nuance,” he says. “Public and even private solecisms can destroy a person’s career. Advertisers pressurise editors not to publish controversial pieces and editors can be sacked for persisting. Student organisations can prevent unorthodox speakers from being heard. These things have made the pressure to conform far more intense than it ever was in Mill’s day.”

It is the same mentality which looks to law to regulate areas of life that were once matters of personal judgment, says Sumption. “We are a lot less ready than we were to respect the autonomy of individual choices. We tend to regard social and moral values as belonging to the community as a whole, as matters for collective and not personal decision.”

Our courts of late have been less than willing to resist this trend, and indeed have been inclined to embrace it. Royal Commissions, once considered a useful method of inquiry into complicated or systemic civic challenges, are too often regarded as a platform to judge not just breaches of the law, but supposed breaches of morality. 

In whatever form the Folau case presents itself for their scrutiny, the courts now have a chance to redeem themselves.