We shall discuss how in a liberal society the state has become responsible for undertaking people’s obligations to each other, because the civil society has become too weak Yet, in the process the state has transformed itself into a coercive authority. As modern liberal democrats, we need to learn how to be responsible for others rather than relying on the market or the state to absolve our moral responsibility. This means participating in the civil society.

When people consider their debts and legacies to past and future generations, when they want to acknowledge their ties to others around them, when they try to develop rules for sharing the things they have in common, they tend to reach for laws and bureaucratic regulations – we don’t rely on the market to establish the rules that guide their interdependence.

Reliance on government to organise rules of obligation to others is the starting point for various effort at developing a political approach to moral regulation. Instead of suggesting that one can fulfil one’s obligations to others by first satisfying one’s obligations to oneself, the political approach stresses the need for some authoritative instrument capable of providing the direction and steering for the needs of all.

Liberal principles now have a near monopoly among political theorists of modernity. Western liberal democracies are characterised by respect for the idea that individuals themselves have the freedom to determine what they ought to do. Nonetheless this has one serious problem: if everyone is free to act as it chooses, what exists to insure that people will recognise their obligations to one another? Historically, a liberal theory of politics was linked to a conservative theory of society. By simply assuming that liberal citizens were tied together morally by tradition, culture, religion, family and loyalty, classical liberal theory was able to emphasise the benefits to be gained by the free exercise of political rights, since strong civil society could always be counted on to cement the moral obligations that politics neglected.

In contemporary liberalism, by contrast, the assumption that strong obligations (arising from the civil society) make possible weak political ties (i.e. weak state obligations and regulations) is harder to maintain. As the moral world associated with civil society comes to be taken less and less for granted (in other words, greater moral and social fragmentation and corrosion of moral responsibility due to greater marketisation of society), traditional liberalism fails to explain and understand the nature of moral obligations. The question – who is responsible for others when people are expected primarily to be responsible for themselves, as in the liberal world? – becomes urgent. The answer that emerges is that the government will assume the task of protecting the moral order that makes society possible.

Reliance on government to strengthen a sense of moral obligation is a substantial improvement over reliance on the market. Particularly when it concerns meeting obligations to distant others, the welfare state has increased a general recognition of the interdependence of lives and fates that characterise social life in modern society. Yet the welfare state works best when it builds on and strengthens already-existing social ties. When government is relied on to establish rules of moral obligations, will it weaken the very social ties that make government possible in the first place? How one answers this question will determine one’s position with respect to the political approach to moral regulation. If one concludes that government is capable of serving as a substitute for the moral ties in civil society once associated with family and locality, the welfare state must be judged a great success. But if the assumption by government of moral responsibility is seen as subtracting from a sense of personal responsibility for the state of others once associated with the intimate realm of society, the problems of the political approach to moral obligation begin to seem to more serious.

The problem of welfare states is whether their strength of recognising and organising the living conditions of people who are strangers comes at the cost of weakening social and moral ties in civil society, especially families and communities. For example, in the case of caring for elderly parents or relatives, the state can undertake the role of the carer so relaxing families and communities’ responsibility to such an undertaking. If it is true that people are more likely to learn a sense of obligation to others through the social practices they develop in the intimate sphere of society, and in that way also learn of their personal responsibility to distant others, the welfare state can bring about an unanticipated problem: when government assumes moral responsibility for others, people are less likely to do so themselves. Indeed, families and communities, instead of contributing to the articulation of moral understandings that soften political regulation, are themselves increasingly organised to political rules (e.g. class-based welfare rights).

In the modern state, members of groups do not act out of sentiment, loyalty, passion or belongingness (as they did in early liberal world where groups would ‘socialise’ individuals into their obligations to one another). Instead, members join groups only to obtain the rewards that groups can offer, and since the benefits groups provide are collective goods, they will obtain these benefits whether they participate in the affairs of the group or not. Thus, since every member receives the same benefit, members may fail to participate hoping that others will participate in the affairs of the groups – this is referred to the paradox of the ‘free rider’. How, under such conditions, is participation to be organised? The free-rider option is so tempting to rationally calculating individuals, people will not advance their collective objectives, unless there is coercion to force then to do so. In effect, obligations to others cannot be satisfied, when each actor has no moral ties to others, without some form of coercion.

Classical liberalism, which before was a minimalist theory of the state (in terms of a weak state that relied on the civil society to establish and satisfy moral obligations), has become instead a minimalist theory of society. Government could be weak, according to classical liberal theory only because civil society was strong. In contemporary versions of liberal theory, the opposite has occurred: society has become so weak (in part because of the corrosive effects of the market, political rent-seeking and the state’s displacing effect of moral practices) that government, by necessity, has become strong(er). In this contemporary world, all motivations are individualistic; people no longer create a social space organised by moral rules, emphasising trust and solidarity.

The disappearance of civil society from the liberal theory of politics creates an awkward problem. If individual actors are not tied together by sentiments, culture, reciprocity and such like, the only agency capable of providing moral guidelines would appear to be coercive authority. Yet many liberals retain a bias against state intervention.

Though contemporary liberalism emphasises the option between individual freedom and state authority, this is a false choice. Civil society, not the individual, is a better alternative to government in modern society.

The citizens of capitalist liberal democracies understand the freedom they possess, and appreciate its value. But they are confused when it comes to recognising the social obligations that make their freedom possible in the first place. They are unclear about the moral codes by which they ought to live. Neither the liberal market nor the democratic state is comfortable with explicit discussion of the obligations. Both emphasise rights rather than obligations. Both value procedures over purpose.

Despite their discomfort in discussing moral obligation, modern liberal democrats have a greater need for obligations than before. The sheer complexity of modern forms of social organisation creates an ever-widening circle of newer obligations beyond those of family and locality – obligations to perfect strangers, those in urban and rural places in all societies, and those living in the future. To be modern is to face the consequences of decisions made by complete strangers while making decisions that will affect the lives of people one will never know.

Because they are free but at the same time unsure what it means to be obligated, modern liberal democrats need one another more but trust one another less. At a time when they have difficulty appreciating the past, they are called on to respect the needs of future generations. When they seem not to know how to preserve small families, they must strengthen large societies. As local communities disintegrate, a world community becomes more necessary than ever. Modern people need to care about the fates of strangers, yet do not even know how to treat their loved ones. Moral rules seem to evaporate the more they are needed. The paradox of modernity is that the more people depend on one another owing to an ever-widening circle of obligations, the fewer are the agreed upon guidelines for organising moral rules that can account for those obligations.

Liberal democrats face an unhappy situation because they tend to rely on either individualistic moral codes associated with the market, or collective moral codes associated with the state, yet neither set of codes can successfully address all the issues that confront society. Under the individualistic moral codes, the market structures agents to organise their obligations to others by having a conversation (through the price signal) with an authority they cannot see (i.e. the invisible hand of social order). Under the collective moral codes, agents rely on the state to organise their obligations for them, but they lose a good deal of control over deciding how – they can see the authority (unlike the market) though they cannot converse.

Numerous moral questions arise. For example, should younger couples oppose increases in social security benefits that help older people? should government take responsibility for unemployment even if the risk might be permanent dependence on the state? Is the best solution to the drug crisis to legalise drugs? Neither the market nor the state provide an adequate answer to these moral questions. Neither approach recognises that people are capable of participating in the making of their own moral rules. A third approach finds its roots in a historic concern with civil society, and enriches the individual’s decision making process.

The themes of civil society include autonomy and responsibility. We learn how to act towards others because civil society brings us into contact with people in such a way that we are forced to recognise our dependence on them. We ourselves have to take responsibilities for our own moral obligations, and we do so through the gift called society that we make for ourselves. What makes us modern is that we are capable of acting as our own moral agents. If modernity means a withering away of such institutions as the family and the local community that once taught the moral rules of interdependence, modern people must simply work harder to find such rules for themselves.

Modernity’s paradox cannot be resolved either by welcoming markets and states enthusiastically or rejecting them completely. The question facing modern liberal democrats is whether they can live in societies organised by states and markets yet also recognise that reliance on states and markets does not absolve them of responsibility for their obligations to others.