At the recent Civitas conference I got embroiled in arguments when I made the statement that the term “morality” has no meaning if we are utterly alone: it only takes on a meaning when there is at least one more person present, because then our behaviour may effect someone else, for better or worse, and reciprocally - our conduct will be judged by others rather than only by ourselves.

This really threw the cat amongst the pigeons, and a couple of doctrinaire libertarians immediately took the floor to reject my position. “How can you say such a thing? Individual morality is the basis of society!” Now I have lots of libertarian (pro-freedom-of- the-individual) instincts myself, I replied, and it all sounds good at first. But if we reflect more deeply it becomes clear that the word “morality” makes no sense in the context of true solitude. For when our actions concern only ourselves they are neither moral nor immoral – they are just preferences, choices, tastes or passions that we indulge or reject. By now I was feeling the heat, because this example threatens the popular current Western notion of morality according to which we like to think we act as our own morality-judges (you know: “you do you’re thing, and I’ll do my thing.” Or, “It’s true for you, but it’s not true for me,” and so on.)

However, until very recently people have always understood that we are social beings who live together inside a kind of public moral bubble that covers the entire community. Each of us freely participates in the creation of the moral standards inside the bubble through our beliefs, daily actions, and opinions concerning the ultimate issues in life. So much has this been so for most of human history that even in the early days of modern democracy there was not much doubt that a majority vote would also be the public moral vote. Then, the people as a whole was considered a kind of jury. But it was not long before those two things – majorities, and a fragmenting morality - began to wander off in different directions. Communities were weakening. Those who began by proudly defending the individual against the raw power of the state, soon also began to defend against the moral opinions of society at large; that is, against whatever moral opinion was inside the bubble. “Don’t tell me how to behave,” was the new rallying call. It wasn’t long before people wanted outside the bubble altogether. They each wanted a bubble of their own. Of course, all that simply strengthened the state while weakening the bonds of society, which has always been the best protector of the individual against the state.

At any rate, this new idea soon found its prophet in John Stuart Mill, and by the latter half of the 19^th Century the rather peculiar idea had arisen (dignified by Mill’s little 1859 booklet On Liberty) that to be free and happy each of us should indeed conceive of ourselves as living in a bubble according to our personal wishes. Our bubbles need never collide unless we do something to harm someone else or they harm us. What constitutes harm in such a world is a much larger question, and in the latter part of his booklet - which few even today ever read - Mill himself specified so many qualifications and limits as to what is individually good or bad behaviour that he pretty much undid all his earlier defenses of the individual bubble idea. At any rate, despite these weaknesses, and for some reason that is now unclear but that may be understood by future historians, moral theory in the Western world more or less wholly embraced Mill’s simple individual-bubble idea (likely because it is so simple) and it is the contradictions in what I believe to be this incoherent theory that interest me. Perhaps an example illustrates these best.

Let us suppose you find yourself utterly alone on the moon, and you have sufficient to survive, but are clearly solo for the rest of your life. My claim is that try as you might, you cannot do anything “moral” or “immoral” because there is now no one except yourself to evaluate your actions. For example, you may decide to use a drug which was illegal back on earth, or to shout some forbidden “hate speech” as loud as possible over the barren moonscape. But aside from some kind of residual shame or guilt brought with you from earth there is no one else with respect to whom these actions can be said to be moral or immoral. My wife objected that she would feel like a regular moral being alone on the moon because she would be accountable to God. That was pretty good. So I thought about that and answered that for Christians like her, God is a personal God (everywhere felt, nowhere seen) and so she cannot really say she is ever alone.

A fellow who all but verbally accosted me the next morning called me “a collectivist” for my views. We all have “a personal moral code,” he spluttered (this was a variation of the individual bubble theory) and so we can behave morally or immorally with respect to that code all by ourselves (his code was serving as his “other”). You are speaking like a collectivist, he insisted, because you want to impose a group morality on me! I responded that he was dead wrong on two counts. First, because true collectivists have a monopoly on force, so anything they do is the farthest thing from morality - he had chosen the wrong word. Secondly, my example of the public moral bubble, as I said above, is a matter of free participation by all adults, and not coercion at all, so it cannot be collectivist, though it is clearly a very public influence. We will all naturally feel a strong moral pressure when we understand the shalls and shall-nots inside the bubble, but we freely abide by or reject them and pay the price or reap the reward accordingly.

But alone on the moon (without a code-companion, or God watching) morality is a non-issue because there is no one to help or harm except yourself, and you are the only judge of that. In addition (it is likely an historical recognition of this truth) the most famous universal caveat on human behaviour is that no one can be a judge in his own case. That is why I say that morality is not possible on the moon because you alone would be making – and remaking, or breaking - the rules of a code you made up to suit only yourself; there would be only a play-judge, because no one can act as a legislator and a judge of himself at the same time (that we can do so is  one of Mill’s false assumptions). Such an attempt can only produce a dialogue of the deaf between two conflicting aspects (one a ruler, the other the ruled) of the same personality – you! Indeed, without the possibility of impartial judgement of our behaviour (by real others acting according to some shared and publicly-accepted standard of conduct that no single individual has invented), morality can have nor force or effect, and therefore no real meaning other than the vanity of self-satisfaction (today I will try my best to do what I said yesterday I would do). A good parallel for this reality is human language. We all speak according to rules that none of us individually has invented or can alter by ourselves. Our language, like our morality is a shared public substance without which we cannot "speak" (either language or morals) at all. In effect, Mill’s individual moral bubble theory was a way of placing each of us on a private moon, with a private language, but in terms of a shared sense of the good and the bad it has been a disaster for the West because it produces a rudderless social ship: all the passengers wander about as they feel on the deck, with no common course in mind.

One of Mill’s most stringent critics, James Stephens, at the time complained that the personal bubble idea would eventually destroy every system of morals, for it conceived of human beings like a pack of hounds all chained together but all straining to go in different directions. To be fair, it was only during the period of what I call his “liberty outburst” that Mill thought all this was just fine. Most of his life he insisted that the self must be subordinate to the common good and subject to a “restraining influence.” There are, he declared, “fundamental principles” that men hold sacred and that are “above discussion,” and without which there is a natural tendency to anarchy. Stephens agreed of course, and in a memorable turn of phrase remarked that even a Parliamentary government is just such a system of mild public restraint whereby in order to live well together, "we agree in advance to count heads instead of breaking them." But alas, because we no longer agree on basic terms such as right and wrong public conduct, we fight a lot, and when as they must our miserable little bubbles collide and we can no longer settle things between ourselves, we are driven by frustration to sue each other and to run to judges, Charters, Tribunals, and the like to arbitrate our conflicts.