At first sight, it might appear that society has taken a markedly positive moral turn over the past 20-or-so years. The example of the Conservative Party’s embrace of gay marriage alone shows how far we now are from the failure of Conservative prime minister John Major’s ‘back to basics’ campaign to restore traditional moral values in the early 1990s. Cultural and political trendsetters champion any number of apparently progressive moral campaigns: against female genital mutilation, child abuse, poverty, inequality, or any imaginable form of discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or disability. On the face of it, we seem to have the good fortune to be living in a new age of tolerance, born of a society confident and firm in its moral values.

One of contemporary society’s most prominent features is the wide level of support for non-judgementalism; namely, the idea that we do not have the right as individuals to lay down the law as to how others should live their lives. This moral-sounding sentiment reaches right to the top of society. Earlier this year no less an eminence than UK Supreme Court judge Lord Wilson of Culworth declared that marriage was ‘an elastic concept’ (ie, as empty as a rubber band), that the nuclear family had been replaced by a ‘blended’ variety, and that the Christian teaching on the family has been ‘malign’. The one (ironic) judgement that today’s non-judgemental morality is happy to make is to judge the judgemental and castigate strict moral codes as malign and abusive. This residuum of people who still cling to traditional ideas of morality and concepts like duty are routinely denigrated by the right-thinking as intolerant ‘bigots’ or dismissed as reactionary religious rednecks. Society’s apparent moral confidence is betrayed to a degree by its own level of intolerance towards the supposedly morally intolerant and overly judgemental. Would there be a need for today’s moral crusades against child abuse or FGM to be quite so shrill and knee-jerk were they reflective of a society genuinely confident and secure in what is right and what is wrong? A morally confident society might not need to be on such a high-state of moral alert against the dangers supposedly posed to the social fabric by cases such as the black Christian couple in Derby whom Derby Council denied the right to be foster carers because of their belief that homosexuality is a sin.

Not only does much of what passes for morality today have a celebrity-endorsed character to it, it is also marked by tendency to exaggerate and, in some cases, to invent the existence of ‘very bad things indeed’ in order to divert attention from the moral vacuum that actually exists at the heart of society. We have seen it in the case of the moralistic finger pointers who let their intuition outweigh the need for evidence in the failed sexual-assault trials of Dave Lee Travis, William Roache and others. And we can see it again in the imperative to appear in public denouncing immoral behaviour, much as ex-Tory MP Louise Mensch when she announced on social media that Dylan Farrow’s ‘charge of abuse’ against Woody Allen ‘was instantly credible to me’. Rather than seeing society as confident in its moral values, it is truer to see certain sections of it (the state and public figures) as being in search of a moral project. What passes for morality is in fact better characterised as a state of moral indifference. The routine question, ‘Who are you to judge?’, is actually expressive of a profound indifference to you: it represents a contemptuous dismissal of your judgement, of the public exercise of your reason, as something that does not matter. It was in this way that John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, and his wife Sally mounted a defence of their notably elastic marriage after she was photographed kissing another man in a West End nightclub. Sally told the Evening Standard she had ‘nothing to be ashamed of’, that ‘all marriages are different’, that she ‘couldn’t give a damn what people think’, and ‘let people judge me if they want’. John was equally on message in the Independent: ‘All marriages are different from each other and I think that there’s something to be said for people looking after their own business and allowing us to look after ours.’ What John’s each-to-his-own principle reveals is not tolerance, but an absence of moral standards and a plea that we should treat the Bercows’ marriage, and in fact marriage in general, as itself a matter of moral indifference: as something purely pragmatic. So pragmatic, in fact, that even insisting on some level of duty to one’s husband or wife on the basis of a publically declared commitment of mutual love can be considered as just so Victorian and strait-laced.

Thus, there are two sides to contemporary non-judgementalism. One is a form of easy-going moral relativism. If Sally wants to snog in nightclubs rather than mother her three children then who am I to judge? I should be indifferent to her behaviour because marriage itself is a matter of indifference. It is felt that there are certain areas of life where judgement is considered inappropriate or old-fashioned and not up to date with the complexity and messiness and blended poly-diversity of modern life. This side of non-judgementalism, then, is the idea that some things are beneath moral judgement in the sense that they are not worthy of being judged. The other side to moral indifference is that there are certain things that are considered to be beyond judgement in the sense that they are manifestly and self-evidently Evil. Child abuse, rape and genocide fall into this category: moral absolutes that brook no questioning, admit of no extenuating circumstances, and, therefore, require no judgement. The action itself (or the accusation of it) sufficiently condemns the accused without the need for trial. As society has become less and less bound by traditional morality, so the number of moral absolutes has increased in compensation. The Holocaust has mushroomed into multiple holocausts at the same time as more and more child-abuse scandals have been discovered – and in some cases manufactured – to fit a need for moral certainty. Deny or question the force of these contemporary moral absolutes at the risk of your health, wealth and liberty.

Together, these two aspects of non-judgementalism serve to greatly reduce the space available to moral judgement, leaving it a narrower and narrower sphere of operation in between what is considered to be beneath and what is deemed beyond judgement. The first puts moral judgement off limits because it is all too subjective. The second introduces an idea of moral objectivity which also precludes judgement: this is a form of ‘evidence-based’ morality which licenses the operation of moral experts and even moral scientists fearlessly to ‘tell it like it is’, to reveal to lesser mortals certain moral truths of which we would otherwise be ignorant or complicit in their cover-up and denial. The simultaneous operation and interaction of these two dimensions of non-judgementalism in moral thought – the subjective and the objective, the beneath and the beyond – explain the co-existence of the contemporary figures of the moral relativist and the moral entrepreneur. And, contrary to the superficial appearance of a society confident in its moral judgements, the existence of subjective and objective dimensions are part of a reaction against a loss of faith in our moral foundations through reducing much of the need and possibility for us to be moral.

The reasons for this loss of faith are complicated. There is the decline of the authority of traditional religion, and the inability of the square-peg of science to fill the resulting God-shaped hole. There is the profound loss of confidence in the moral fitness of bourgeois society after the horrors of the twentieth century. There has been an accommodation made by conservative thought to the cultural critique of the left, most notably in the form of relativism as well as the idea of the reality of the Other (as opposed to the self or the same). Maybe the one factor that can stand for the others, however, is the loss of faith – not so much in God or in tradition – but in man himself as a moral standard. The twentieth century is often understood to have demonstrated man’s inhumanity more than it did his dignity. And we are maybe more likely to view man under the aspect of his unreason and lack of freedom than we are to expound upon the virtues of man as a rational being, or to seek to afford him more latitude. Whatever the reasons, there is a tendency to see man as faithless, committed to nothing but his self-interest. It is this tendency – this degraded perspective upon humanity – which gives rise to an increasingly irrational rejection of the one thing in which morality can be grounded: the public exercise of individual reason.

Moral conformity An immediate knock-on effect of this shrinking of the intersubjective moral sphere – the erosion and attenuation of any moral sensibility held in common – is the existence of a powerful and self-perpetuating dynamic towards moral flabbiness and moral passivity. That is, flabbiness through lack of moral exercise, and passivity as a result of the exercise of moral judgement on our behalf by self-appointed moral experts. The net effect is a great deal of moral conformity, at least at the level of appearances, although it often conceals a considerable undercurrent of resentment. To take an example from the now heavily moralised sphere of public health – in which what we privately choose to eat, drink or smoke is a matter of intense and prurient interest – the public condemnation of our behaviour by moral MDs coexists with a private, behind-closed-doors cynicism towards whatever ‘the science’ has told us is wrong this week. (As I write sugar and cheese are today’s silent killers.) The outcome is a form of moral schizophrenia and irrationalism in which we outwardly conform to society’s moral codes (more accurately its non-moral codes) by default and through inertia rather than because we have actively chosen to agree with them ourselves. To the degree we conform in this fashion – saying one thing but thinking another, or not thinking at all – we act in ‘bad’ rather than ‘good’ faith. An example is the public lip-service paid to society’s ‘you can’t say that’ speech codes, which forbid the giving of even imagined offence to increasingly large numbers of minority or victimised groups.

The existence of such speech codes is itself attributable to our failure to be moral insofar as once we stop judging for ourselves, we cease to imbue what we say and do with moral content. The subsequent moral formalism inevitably invites the moral policing of appearances as if they were real. Loss of faith in the possibility of moral universals – believing what is right for you is also right for everyone else – therefore leads to a hollowed-out moral nominalism in which words quite literally matter. One clear contemporary example on which spiked has reported is the policing of racist, sexist or sectarian speech at football games, even to the extent of condemning the positive self-identification of Tottenham fans as a ‘Yid Army’ as evidence of anti-Semitism. This ludicrous situation is the inevitable result of a logic which sees our moral thinking as determined by our speech and actions rather than the other way round. The non-exercise and the denial of moral autonomy results in the automatic handing down of moral sentencing as if we were moral automata rather than free and rational individuals. The greater importance given to the impact of words is in direct relation to a decreased belief in the resilience and capacity of the human subject. From this starting premise comes an increased willingness to see the individual more as a thing or an object than as a person or a subject. This retreat from reason and the idea of freedom leads us to consider other individuals as a problem to be managed, as objects to be nudged (in one popular theory) into shape, as forms of behaviour to be analysed and modified. It also leads to a diminished faith in the ability of individuals to exercise free will against, for example, the blandishments of advertising or the power of alcohol or nicotine. And it finds expression in the idea that individuals are subject to forces outside their control, apparent in the credence given to popular neuroscientific theories of consciousness or ‘early years’ determinism.

The pernicious logic of the reduced terrain on which we are allowed to exercise our moral judgement merely compounds – through our moral flabbiness – the extent to which we are looked upon as ‘thing-like’ which, in turn, justifies yet more intervention and nudging on our behalf. Moral conformity, and the demand for moral conformity, is therefore something in which we are ourselves complicit insofar as we choose not to exercise individual judgement and reason. Although we do always remain conscious of our freedom as at least a niggle, the fearful voice of what Kant called our internal judge follows us like a shadow despite our attempts to escape it. The roots of this perverse logic in bad faith and self-disgust are particularly marked in the postwar degeneration of left-wing movements and their gradual embrace of the politics of identity. Thus feminist and anti-racist movements began explaining the persistence of sexism and racism in society simply as a result of the existence of racist or sexist attitudes, caused by the existence of racist or sexist language. The solution? Change the language and change reality. The operation of this magical and fantastically self-serving logic can be seen in the explosion of the concept of gender. In just 60 years, it has gone from denoting grammatical categories to Facebook recently allowing its users to choose from 57 different genders instead of just boring old male or female. Non-exhaustive and non-hierarchical options now include: agender, cisgender, gender variant, genderqueer, intersex, neither, non-binary, pangender and trans. It is only a matter of time before the inevitable call for ‘one person, one gender’.

Individual experience is indeed often messy and denies easy categorisation. No one can live in a pigeon-hole. Yet the deconstruction, if not the exploding, of the concept of the individual as predicated upon a shared rational agency makes moral judgement impossible. The exponential multiplication of imagined differences between individuals reduces the real differences between people to a matter of indifference. The desire to remove all limits from the individual renders him un-limited and uncontrolled. All that is left is a view of human nature as a polymorphous bag of protean desire, and a view of most (other) people as incapable of managing those desires and, therefore, as being in need of help to lead their own lives. To put it another way, society comes to be seen as the solution to the problem posed by the individual, rather than as something itself constituted by individuals. What comes to be considered most dangerous are those individuals who persist in the ‘illusion’ that they have the freedom to act in the world as they themselves see fit, as individuals who can self-limit and do not need external help. The persistence of subjectivity, of moral autonomy, represents a potential rupture in the social fabric. Its repression is therefore licensed in the interests of society. This is the essence of contemporary moral thought. What has emerged from the wreckage of traditional, ‘bourgeois’ morality is not – despite appearances to the contrary – liberation from stultifying moral orthodoxy and routine like some butterfly from a wheel. Rather, the waning of the force and authority of traditional morality was itself a precondition for the emergence of non-judgementalism. That is to say, the seeming strength of today’s non-moral code is an illusion caused by the weakness of any alternative. Traditional morality has no more bite than the teeth of the Cheshire Cat. What is left is at best a morality of repudiation, verging on moral nihilism, espoused by moral nothings in a discourse in which nothing means very much at all. This is a moral mirror world in which it appears as if the virtuous ones are those who have liberated themselves from the moral strictures of society, but in which the real truth is that society is deeply troubled by the idea of genuinely individual judgement, of being moral. What passes for virtue today is really the pretence that one has escaped at last from oneself.