The Need for a Socialist Morality
Ignoring moral debates has led the Left to implicitly privilege being authentic over being good. This is a conceptual and moral mistake, but it is also a severe political limitation as well.
Before I moved to Melbourne, I had heard of safe injection sites, places where addicts can consume drugs without worrying about unsanitary needles or calls to the police. While I knew safe injection sites might mitigate some of the terrible harms of addiction, I was unprepared for what I encountered. Workers at North Richmond Community Health, a few blocks from where I lived, ask visitors to state their drug of choice, then provide clean needles and lead them to a private room to inject, sometimes even helping them find veins. Dazed people stumble out. They roam the streets, safe from overdosing, as they try to steer clear of schoolchildren who are sometimes nearby. It’s only a momentary release. Soon enough, they spend what little money they have on the next hit and repeat the cycle. Many Melbournians, like those from other big cities facing high rates of overdose, think there’s not much else that can be done. Addicts have chosen this life, and it is much better to offer them safe conditions to inject than to let them die in the streets.
There’s a part of the Left that strongly agrees with this judgment and goes further: worrying about people’s personal choices amounts to getting mixed up in a moral debate, and, as leftists, we should focus on politics. In this view, politics is about figuring out what’s the best way of arranging our collective, public lives so that we can all discover and pursue the moral values that make us who we truly are. Since politics concerns the aspects of our lives that affect the lives of others, it is the realm of contestation and disagreement. It is for this reason that we argue against our neighbor if she opposes a wealth tax or advises bosses on how to best union bust. Morality, on the other hand, is understood to be a different matter altogether. We have no business criticizing our neighbor’s Catholicism or trying to get her not to live a life of drug addiction. Discussing morality is at best a fun intellectual exercise, and irrelevant for those of us that want to change the world.
But something has gone awfully wrong with a Left that remains neutral on issues such as whether one should be addicted to drugs. Leftists often fail to realize that their politics depend on their views about morality, and by failing to recognize this truth, they have implicitly adopted a moral picture that is both incoherent and incompatible with leftist ideals.
