Travis Quigley (University of Arizona), “Conservatism and Justified Attachment”
Forthcoming, European Journal of Philosophy
What is conservatism? The most natural association is with the aversion to change. But conservatives, whether in the political domain or their personal lives, are often more concerned with going back than with preserving the present. G.A. Cohen begins his essay on the topic with the epigraph “It’s not like it was.” That’s a judgment about the worth of what used to be, not the importance what currently is. And to go backward is, of course, to change. But it sure sounds like something a conservative would say. The basic goal of my recent paper is to analyze conservatism in a way that reconciles these conflicting aspects. I’ll briefly give that argument here, but I have two further goals that I only briefly mention in the paper — two further criteria that an account of conservatism should meet. It should bear some connection to political conservatism, even if it isn’t a direct one. And it should help explain excessive conservatism. Understanding conservatism in a way that makes sense doesn’t mean endorsing conservative goals all things considered — but, then again, it’s intellectually lazy to quickly conclude that conservatism doesn’t make sense just because we might not endorse its goals.
But really: what is conservatism? I argue that the basic conservative disposition is attachment to the familiar objects that make up one’s life. (One can be attached to anything: people, institutions, habits, even dreams or ideals.) The characteristic mark of conservatism is to value something more than it objectively warrants, not because of an overestimation of its value but simply because it is yours. I have no qualms about the value — not just monetary value — of my dented and gas-glugging 2004 Buick LeSabre. But I’ll be sad when (if…) it ever stops running. That particular car has special value to me that I wouldn’t expect anyone else to care about: I would pay more for a repair than in some sense I strictly should.
This is what Cohen (2012) called personal value. He distinguished it from two other grounds for conservatism. The first, which received most of his attention and most of the subsequent discussion, is particular value. The key distinction is that particular value is due to some property of an object itself, rather than residing in the connection between a person and an object. The second, which he discussed only rather elliptically, is the importance of accepting the given. The idea of the given will be easier to discuss a little later.
I’ll leave most of the details aside, but my view is that personal value is the fundamental thing. This contrasts with two alternative views of particular value: Cohen held that existing objects of positive value should be preserved, while Jacob Nebel (2021) holds that some valuable objects warrant intrinsic consideration of how well things go for the object. Both of these views run into issues with the impulse to restore what was rather than preserve what is: as Nebel himself presses, the value of what exists implies nothing about restoration. But (so I argue) considerations of the welfare (so to speak — and I find this notion somewhat mysterious) of valuable objects will not explain restoration either. Conservatism is a matter of treating something as more valuable than it’s objectively worth: the test for restoration therefore concerns a tradeoff between something that currently exists and something that could be restored that is worth somewhat less. But this tradeoff would be “good for” the restored thing only at the expense of being “bad for” the currently existing thing. So the question of intrinsic concern for valuables seems to be a tie at best.
Looking instead to personal value explains preservation and restoration in a continuous way. I’m attached to my LeSabre right now. But that attachment, being at heart a psychological feature, wouldn’t just disappear if (heaven forbid) the engine quit tomorrow. Even if the car were incinerated, I would want it back — if a genie said I could push a button to magically restore my old car or else be given a different, slightly better car, I would opt for restoration. Attachments fade only slowly. This is, I think, the natural shape of conservatism: there is a natural impulse to preserve our current attachments and to restore severed attachments, but, much like grief, this impulse becomes pathological if it lasts forever.
The question of pathology brings us to the normative heart of the matter. Part of our task in saying what conservatism is should involve an account of when and to what degree conservatism is justified. For it seems perfectly clear that conservatism is often excessive in practice. Now, analysis and normative evaluation are obviously different things. But different analyses fit different justificatory pictures. For an attachment account of conservatism, the natural question concerns why conservative attachments are valuable in the first place. Conservatism is a bias that favors certain objects more than they’re objectively worth; we might conclude that the best thing would be to gird ourselves against any natural propensity to conservatism. But this seems wrong. A life without attachment is importantly impoverished. Recall that Cohen invokes the importance of accepting the given. He mentions, at the very beginning of his essay, the motif of “abandonment of striving, of seeking a better state, and instead going with the flow, as do the lilies of the field, which are at peace with the world, and therefore with themselves” (Cohen 2012: 2). I propose that the value of contentment is not a different brand of conservatism, but instead justifies the propensity to form attachments. Attachment to familiar things is a dam against the (equally natural) currents of striving and seeking. A good life is a balance between aspiration and acceptance. Some degree of conservative attachment helps constitute this balance, while excessive conservatism calcifies into a fear of change per se.
This is not a recipe for judging in any particular case when conservatism has gone awry. But — I think unlike competitor accounts — it is an account not just of what conservatism is, but what makes it good and why it requires such delicate calibration. The approach combines various ingredients from Cohen: his emphasis on existing things is explained because attachment to existing things is the basic case of conservatism; the psychological aspects of personal value explain the shape of restoration; and accepting the given provides the normative foundation. This is not how he saw things, but I hope it’s an appealing reconstruction.
Finally, I promised some commentary on the political connotations of conservatism. The (small) literature on value conservatism has followed Cohen in largely ignoring the political. This is sensible insofar as the political term conservative, just like the political term liberal, has all sorts of contingent associations that have little to do with philosophical accounting. But people don’t only become attached to specific things. They become attached to their lives as a whole, and the social worlds in which those lives fit. The impulse to preserve and restore social worlds is not some unrelated phenomenon: it’s the very paradigm of conservatism. And there is a straightforward explanation for why political conservatism is considerably more dangerous: if I treat my LeSabre as excessively valuable, I might do the best thing for myself or I might overshoot and pass up some important benefits of a new car. But treating the social world as excessively valuable sacrifices what is most valuable for the entire polity, many of whom probably don’t share my particular attachments. That doesn’t mean that attachment conservatism has no place in politics, but it does mean that excessive attachments, and the failure to see them as basically personal rather than general values, is liable to have some pernicious political effects.
Please feel free to reach out at travis.c.quigley@gmail.com. Here’s the paper (and a preview copy). Here’s my website. And I’d love to chat in the comments here, too.