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Merker: The Three Western Moralities
Having sorted out Rousseau and Co., Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise reminds us that modern secular morality is basically a reboot of Christian morality that goes all the way back to the life of Jesus.
And that is important because all good people with a conscience adopt the reigning moral framework, and however aware people are of the standard moral framework within which they live, whether the awareness is innocent or informed or insincere, “moral principles exert causal power in the culture that promotes them.” Christianity, since the beginning, “extols self-abnegation as the epitome of virtue.”
Jesus’ teaching was responding to an existential crisis for the Jewish people, what with the death of Herod and imposition of Roman rule. The air was full of messianic expectations, and that is what Jesus provided in a classic cult. He prophesied that in the new world
the last will be the first, the first will be the last, and righteousness will reign after the unworthy have been cast down and the good exalted.
What should a follower of Christ do?
To qualify for admission his new order of things, one placed one’s trust, belief, faith, in him as the scripturally prophesied Savior, by bearing witness to him, and becoming his follower…
[Y]ou should deny yourself and take up your cross to follow him, distribute your wealth to the poor, become like a child caring not for tomorrow, humble yourself in service to others, love those who hate you do good to those that wish you ill, and turn the other cheek when smitten.
All this was predicated upon the Savior’s “bodily resurrection from death”.
Of course, when Christ failed to reappear, century after century, the extreme cultish beliefs softened. Somewhat.
The way to understand the Enlightenment is to understand that it represented “an unwitting assimilation of a specifically Christian moral stance into the foundation of secular ethics”. Secularists, to this day, believe in a secularized Christian moral universe.
Then came Thomas Aquinas and Summa Theologica and the insertion of Aristotelian “prudential ethics” into European culture. Prudential ethics is “self-regarding” rather than “other-regarding.” But it warns against “violating the self-interest of others”. Self-interest is a good thing as long as it does not violate the self-interest of others.
But Aristotelian prudential ethics remained in the second tier below the other-regarding principles of Christian ethics. It took Thomas Hobbes “to make self-interest the foundation of his moral and political system.” But Hobbes’ ideas ran into a headwind.
So successfully had Christian teaching shaped Western moral sensibilities that any stance that questioned an other-regarding conception of morality appeared to be an assault on morality itself.
For example: the Bishop of Peterborough, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Then came Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits.
There Mandeville argued that… envy, vanity, love of luxury, novelty and fashion… creates… livelihoods for many who might otherwise go unemployed.
And this:
[Mandeville] never tired of uncovering self-interested motives behind ostensibly disinterested pursuits and stances, and delighted in exposing its operation in moral posturing[.]
Frances Hutcheson countered Mandeville with “moral sense theory” in which
the moral worth of actions… is defined by the consequences of those actions… in terms of the extent to which they promote enhanced happiness in others[.]
And on to Bentham and “the greatest good for the greatest number”.
To Merker,
other-regarding ethics are no more fit to guide conduct and decision making for this world than was the original moral message of Jesus at the time when he thought apocalypse was imminent. The difference is that Jesus’ teaching was not intended to promote felicity and flourishing in life on this side of the cataclysm, while the secular heirs to Christian other-regard think it supplies the very key to right action in this life and this world itself.
Then came Adam Smith. His analysis of economic exchange in The Wealth of Nations led to an “ethic of reciprocity” that applied to the acts of buying and selling.
Smith recognized… the wide-ranging ramifications of the fact that… an exchange will take place only when it benefits each of the exchanging parties in accordance with their own conception of their self-interest, and that unless prevented such exchanges will take place and be extended as far as possible by the force of self-interest alone.
Merker suggests that the ethic of exchange is morally superior to the ethic of benevolence.
In the act of exchange the exchanging parties engage each other in a relation of symmetry… They both receive and they both give, they both exchange one value for another, they each bind themselves to a mutual obligation to respect the change of ownership, and by fulfilling it they each realize a bit of their self-interest…
The act of benevolence, on the other hand… is asymmetric throughout. Only one gives, the other only receives, one is the possessor of a resource, the other in need of it, one has the status of benefactor, the other that of supplicant.
And note that the recipient of benevolence takes away the feeling of indebtedness, so that in the best of all possible worlds they would like “to convert it into an exchange.”
All this might have transformed the world, except for the labor theory of value implied in Smith’s work. Smith didn’t directly deal with it; others did, and they knew that the workers were being exploited.
“Laborers, the argument goes, though entering voluntarily upon” an exchange of wages for labor get less in wages “than that labor, embodied in its product, actually is worth when that product is brought to market.”
A century later the marginal theory of value would make the labor theory of value irrelevant, because there is no use value, no labor value: only the actual price of exchange. But not before a century’s worth of intellectuals, from William Thompson and Thomas Hodgkins to Marx, had damned the act of voluntary exchange as inherently exploitative.
Merker notes that for the critics of exchange “the stance that portrays laborers as wronged in principle by wage labor” counts as “a moral act of disinterested benevolence” for “other-regarding” morality, both from the Christian tradition and the new secular tradition. Never mind that it now contradicts the science.
Smith’s pioneering insight… [of] a self-regarding alternative to the other-regarding version of morality… was simply… swamped by… social movements and intellectual fashions that… came to cement rather than to replace, other-regarding ethics in the ethos of modernity.
Except for rebels like Bjorn Merker, you and me.
More to come.
| Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:55:11 GMT |
It's Not that Liberals Deny Science
Remember the halcyon days of yore, when our liberal friends were shocked, shocked that some people were denying the science of climate change, as double-blind tested by the best scientists at UN Climate Change? Because the graph of global temperature from 101 scientifically validated climate models pointed ever upwards — or would if the scientists knew what was good for them.
Of course, some people felt that using the tactics of the Spanish Inquisition and tarring and feathering the yahoos as “science deniers” was a bridge too far. (Not that the Spanish Inquisition ever dealt with heretics using yahoo tar-and-feathers, or even the boiling oil of The Mikado). But what’s a liberal to do when scientists agree that the Earth in is peril?
But then, scientists agree that, with CO2 below 150 ppm, plants start to die.
During the coldest peaks of the last ice age (the Last Glacial Maximum roughly 20,000 years ago), atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped to a low of about 180 parts per million (ppm).
And scientists say that plants are experiencing a Global Greening with today’s CO2 at 420 ppm, resulting in an improvement in crop yields.
So you tell me, dear liberals, what the science says.
But back to Earth. If there is one thing that economists agree on it is that rent controls don’t work. As a test of science denial, we are fortunate to be experiencing the rent-control experiment of a social scientist from Uganda, Zohran Mamdani, who is presently testing his theories on the landlords and renters of New York City.
Guess what! Rents in New York City are up 10% on last year.
The median rent, meanwhile, sits at $5,295, up 6% from last July, though it held flat month over month after climbing 3% in both June and July from May’s previous record of $5,125.
And more:
At the same time, apartments are becoming harder to find. The number of rentals available across the city fell 1.4% from a year ago, while Manhattan saw a 4.4% drop.
Guess what. Developers remove apartments from the market in a city with rent control. But don’t worry. Mamdani has Plans: to “build 200,000 new apartments over the next decade.”
In a parallel social science experiment, economist Javier Milei abolished rent controls in Buenos Aires and rents went down. I was shocked. Do you know why? Because landlords started renting apartments that they had been keeping off the market for years.
Now I ask you, dear liberal friends: who is the biggest science denier? The eevil right-winger who wants to boil the climate with fossil fuels? The BA landlord that keeps his apartment off the market during rent control? Or noble Mamdani, the rent-controller?
Yeah, I know. Back in the day, they called it “scientific socialism.” It was going to save the world from the evils of capitalism, including landlords.
It’s odd isn’t it, that word “landlord.” The people that own apartment buildings aren’t “lords” and the don’t own “land,” if you think of land as rich green acres.
Fact is, dear liberal friends, pretty well every time you propose a new program, you ignore the science. Because practically everything government does is an attempt to dodge the science of the price system.
In fact, practically everything that liberal politics has tried to do since Rousseau has been an attempt to dodge the reality of the price system.
What puzzles me is that the journalists willing to call out politicians for proposing programs that deny the science are as scarce as hen’s teeth.
We know why, of course. It’s like the good old days of the Hollywood moguls: “you’ll never work in this town again.” With journalists, it’s “you’ll never get a leak from a confidential source again.”
In our modern era, of course, the same rule applies to everyone in public life except JK Rowling, including the little kiddies that acted in the Harry Potter movies.
Yeah! What’s the science about transgenders? Legal expert Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once asked us to check with a biologist on that. Thank goodness she believes in The Science.
| Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:15:08 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reynolds’ Laws: 1. Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them. 2. The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government. 3. Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. 4. Longevity of political service does not make a politician more qualified; it only ensures they are more corrupt 5. Proposed legislation will fail if there is not enough opportunity for graft or control.
A fact is a fact until it isn’t.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Liberal Oppression: The Liberal Hegemony
