“Can we agree,” Robert Abela asked, “that passport sales have been fundamentally good for us? In the pandemic, the passport scheme enabled struggling people to be subsidised. All the scheme needs is fixing.”
I’ve paraphrased, of course but that’s the prime minister’s take: not just on passport sales but also on political morality.
Morality? Yes, for Abela also condemned the Passport Papers revelations as another “targeted attack” on Malta “that has to stop”. If that’s not moral condemnation, what is?
It’s easy to retort in several ways. Were the Luxembourg Leaks (2014) an attack on Luxembourg, the Swiss Leaks (2015) an attack on Switzerland, the Panama Papers (2016) on Panama?
No, they revealed corruption and many states around the world are grateful. What makes the Passport Papers different? That they only target Malta? We’ve also had revelations about Cyprus. Do we really know that revelations on other jurisdictions won’t follow, even in one or more years down the road? Would the Luxembourg Leaks have been “bad” if they had not been followed up by the Panama Papers?
Other criticisms have been made of Abela’s defence of the scheme. The opposition has challenged the claim that passport sales have funded pandemic-related subsidies: the figures don’t add up.
Other critics argue the scheme cannot be fixed even if you remove the lax standards and inbuilt attractions for crooks. The scheme sells what should never be put up for sale. Citizenship is not a consumer item; it’s an organic moral bond. Selling passports should be as taboo as selling kidneys.
Other critics say that even if passports can be treated as goods, here we’re selling goods that are only partly ours. The Maltese passport is bought because it’s an EU passport too. Selling such a passport is like cheating family members of a piece of land held in common.
All these counter-arguments are based on two ideas. One is that some behaviour can be prohibited on principle. The other is that, in judging what is good for us, we mustn’t take a narrow view of ourselves. We are not just consumers or welfare recipients. There are some things that money cannot buy: honour, dignity and a fulfilling life.
Such ideas were once dominant under administrations of both major political parties. They no longer are. They have been replaced by a utilitarian morality.
Like all moralities, this one has a moral community, the nation. It has moral values, including justice and equality, but they are measured by looking at the general happiness of the nation, calculated in terms of the pleasures and pains of “the people”.
It’s no coincidence that our politicians routinely speak of the ‘hurts’ and ‘whines’ of ‘the people’ (il-weġgħat tan-nies, il-karba tal-poplu). Politicians promise to heal such hurts with more welfare measures or steps to maximise the satisfaction of consumer desires.
Dignity – the guarantees of law for the fundamental rights that enable us to flourish as persons – takes second place, as you might expect in a public discourse that speaks of “the whines of the people” without pausing to consider how it patronises the public.
Selling passports should be as taboo as selling kidneys- Ranier Fsadni
To privilege dignity is to say that any moral code has to have some values that are non-negotiable since without them we degrade ourselves. But the dominant political utilitarianism says there are no taboos. There are only consequences that need calculating.
Only those consequences that touch the nation are worth calculating. Do we really need to calculate the possible negative consequences of minimising the risk of rape and torture? Yes, if rape and torture are risks run by foreigners, asylum seekers. We should weigh them against the general happiness of the nation.
“I too feel the hurt of the people,” Abela said last year, referring to popular resentment of irregular migration.
Let no one say he hasn’t done his best to assuage that hurt. Yes, foreign lives are lost at sea but can we agree that the balance of national hurt was reduced because we have leaders brave enough to take “difficult decisions”?
The final twist of this moral code of consequentialism is who decides what’s morally relevant and what’s not: the dominant leader of the day.
“Don’t talk to me about morality,” Joseph Muscat is reported to have said, when someone raised the matter in connection with the then planned IVF law. He then proceeded to moralise himself, drawing on his own personal experience to declare that not approving it would be immoral.
“I never understood the logic of this divorce law,” Abela said, dismissing the logic of his own foreign minister, who had lobbied for a divorce law based on prudence. For it’s not logic as such that counts; it’s the leader’s logic.
The old moral consensus, especially under Nationalist administrations, often confused the moral teachings of the Church with the moral duty of the State. The new utilitarianism has put aside Church morality but replaced it with the political leader as arbiter.
Nor is this a leader who decides on the basis of an ethics of conviction. The leader decides on the basis of the calculation of utility.
Politicians will always struggle to find the right balance between the ethics of personal conviction and the politics of state responsibility. In the past, adult contentment – the exercise of choice in private life – had to take a back seat to considerations of public welfare and the common good.
In seeking to correct that imbalance, we have created a new one. Welfare and contentment are measured only in terms of the satisfaction of consumerist desires. Our discourse cannot handle goods that transcend the market, like the environment or citizenship.
It can handle welfare and limited versions of contentment. But its utilitarianism cannot handle the fundamental values that guarantee dignity.
Welfare and contentment, without dignity: a life fit for well-housed, well-fed slaves.