In 1984 Margaret Thatcher came up with a political masterstroke: give council house tenants the right to buy their own homes at a discount of 33% to 50% off the value depending on length of tenure. Why was this so popular?

Part of the reason goes to the heart of the difference between a rule and a principle – which is another ambiguity which affects our understanding of the absolute/relative debate. Human beings have an inbuilt longing for freedom and justice and maybe an inbuilt dislike of rigid rules. Rightly or wrongly this may be one reason why students instinctively dislike Kant’s categorical rules (meaning absolute, unchanging, applying everywhere in all situations). How do council house sales illustrate the difference?

Council house tenants were bound by rigid rules about what they could do with their houses. No alterations, all hedges could be no higher than 3’ 6”, every front door had to be the same colour. If improvements were made, as soon as the tenant left they were stripped out because the rule was – every house had to be exactly the same. Tenants thus faced a lifetime of paying rents without any power to imprint their own individuality on the place they lived.

Even some left-wing socialists supported Thatcher’s policy. They argued that this represented the biggest redistribution of wealth in the history of the United Kingdom. And so it proved. In an era of house price inflation (the 1980s up to 1989), one million from the poorer sections of society saw wealth gains only the privileged had ever enjoyed before.

The ambiguity in the word ‘absolute’ is therefore partly about confusing rules and principles. We can readily see that Kant’s argument ‘never tell a lie even when a crazy axe murderer arrives at your door and asks if your mate is hiding inside’ is absurd. Note in passing that although this is exactly what Kant argued in his famous essay, most Kantians ever since have rejected the argument for the fairly obvious reason that you can’t universalise the rule ‘always betray your mate to a crazy axe-murderer’. So even if it is true we should never lie, it does not follow that we should break a second universalised absolute about betraying a friend. Rules are all very well, but when two rules conflict, something has to give.

My own belief is that there are absolutes, but they are principles rather than rules. I think this is how it works in Natural Law theory. It is the primary precepts that are absolute (not the secondary precepts as students often suggest), such as the principle to preserve life. These are generalised forms of moral goodness which need to be filtered by our reason to work out how they apply in practice. The application we call ‘secondary precepts’ and it is open to debate how they end up. For example, you can be a Natural Law theorist and argue for abortion (rather than against as the Roman Catholic Church does) on the grounds that preservation of life has to trump reproduction where two come into conflict. You can’t just duck out of the conflict issue – real conflicts are the stuff of delicate moral reasoning. My point is this: the principle is absolute, the application is not and the difficulties lie with the application – which is why morality is such a fascinating subject of study.

So what are these absolute principles? Freedom, truth, justice and the golden rule would be top of my list. I discussed the golden rule in an earlier blog – the fact is that every world philosophy and religion has some variation of this principle (better called a principle than a rule to avoid the confusion indicated above). And council house sales illustrate how freedom and justice resonated with the electorate in a practical policy of empowerment which anyone woud wnat done to them:

“Do to to others as you would have them do to you’.

Image © tokresource.org