It is by no means uncommon to hear someone reply to criticism of his conduct by saying that there was no law against it. This is a sinister reply, at least implicitly, for it suggests that what the law does not forbid is permitted in all other senses: in other words, that the law provides the sole criteria by which we are to judge our conduct. No doubt there are some legislators who would be delighted by this extension of their responsibilities, but for anyone who cares both for freedom and civilization, the idea of such philosopher kings (who always turn out to be ambitious mediocrities) sends shivers up the spine.
It was Lord Moulton, an English judge, who coined the felicitous phrase “obedience to the unenforceable” more than a century ago. These are the standards of behaviour that the law does not enforce, either by prescription or by proscription, but which the individual feels called upon to obey and enforce in himself. Without such standards, which intellectuals love to deride as inimical to the expression of their beautiful personalities, society becomes a free-for-all in which the most psychopathic dominate and the exercise of freedom by one person becomes a cause of anxiety in others.
The realm of obedience to the unenforceable seems to be in retreat, both among the social and economic elite, and in the general population. Perhaps people have been making similar complaints for decades, if not for centuries, but we seem to be living in an age of mass narcissistic egoism, in which, in the absence of positive law, everyone decides for himself on every occasion how he should behave, consulting only his own immediate interests.
Let us take as an example the wedding gift to Donald Trump Jr. by the Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, a man of dubious reputation, to put it mildly, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. Trump is a private citizen and can therefore legally accept gifts from whomever he chooses; the argument that no one gives such gifts without expecting something in return is no proof that any such demands have been made, let alone complied with. But the whole proceeding is unseemly on the part of the recipient, even if it is nothing worse. But unseemliness has gone the way of obedience to the unenforceable: Fewer and fewer people take any notice of it as a guide to conduct.
Some years ago, pharmaceutical companies used to transport doctors, who were in a position to prescribe the latest expensive drugs and were supposedly “opinion leaders” in the profession, to places that they might like to go. There, in luxury hotels, they were plied not only with good food and drink, but subjected to propaganda, supposedly scientific, in favour of whatever product the pharmaceutical companies were trying to sell.
I agreed only once to go on one of these trips. They were not prohibited at the time, and were regarded, at least by some, almost as a perk of the job. I was soon disgusted. There was one participant whose medical specialty, insofar as he had one, appeared to be attending such conferences around the world, from Florence to Rio, from Stockholm to Bangkok. He marked off the cities he had visited at the companies’ expense rather as a successful fighter pilot would mark off the enemy planes that he had downed. Another boasted of the way that he never spent a penny of his own from the moment he left his house to go on such trips to the moment he returned, including for the limousines that took him to and from the airport.
The principal speaker at the “conference” I attended was widely known as the Universal Prostitute, a professor who would argue passionately in favour of a certain new drug one week, only to argue equally passionately for its direct competitor the next, depending on who was paying him. I must say that he was very convincing, a kind of brilliant pharmaceutical sophist, who eventually lost his medical license for his corrupt (but not illegal) practices, though not before he had made a great deal of money by them.
The last straw for me came when my wife, for whose air ticket I am glad to say that I insisted on paying though the company offered to pay it, ordered breakfast in bed in the luxury hotel in which we had been put up. It was the kind of hotel for which I would never have paid myself, and the breakfast arrived in clouds of starched linen and quantities of silverware the like of which I have not seen since. When we left the hotel, I offered to pay for the breakfast, which seemed to me an unjustifiable extra even in those circumstances of general unjustifiability. A company representative, who was just behind me, said, “No, we will take care of that.”
I resolved at once never to agree again to attend such an event irrespective of the blandishments. At the time, as I have mentioned, such trips were regarded as perfectly legitimate because not actually prohibited, though it seemed to me clear that they were both corrupt and corrupting. If I examine my conscience honestly, I knew this in advance, for it was obvious on the most minimal reflection, but my desire for something for nothing overcame my scruples. Of course, it would have been easy to rationalize continued acceptance of invitations to such events, for example by telling myself that I was not influenced in my prescribing habits by them—just as Donald Trump Jr. can no doubt believe that Umar Kremlev’s gift to him was merely an act of generosity or kindness of heart. But a still, small voice would have told me that I was rationalizing rather than being rational.
Where the rules are the sole determinant of propriety, we do, or tend to do, what we can get away with. Where people do what they can get away with, there is an ever-greater need for rules, and a dialectic is set up between social disorder and bureaucratic control. Freedom simply interpreted as lack of prohibition leads almost inevitably to ever more prohibition. Moral anarchy thus comes to coexist with moral dictatorship.
This is an old lesson. Edmund Burke wrote more than two centuries ago that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites”; if they fail to do so, “Their passions forge their fetters.”
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