Liberty
Arguments about liberty (or freedom of choice [or better yet, luberty]) are some of the most common you’ll encounter in debating. Everything from debates about legalising or banning practices to debates about foreign aid can touch on freedom of choice questions. The view of freedom of choice I’m going to cover here is pretty close to the view John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty (link below). This is the view that is most often advanced by debaters and as such it’s a good one to be familiar with. As always though, there are plenty of theories out there on this stuff and plenty of alternate views to check out! I’m first going to plot out the typical argument in favour of freedom of choice (or at least, a typical argument in favour of it). Then I’ll raise a few ideas about where freedom of choice might be limitable on this view. The arguments here advanced are for the purposes of demonstration and do not reflect my own views, or the views of the Debating Society.
A Typical Argument for Liberty
Premise 1: maximal individual flourishing is a basic moral good.
Flourishing can be a tricky notion to define. Generally a person that is flourishing is leading a “good life”. What a good life consists in, however, is a matter of ferocious debate amongst academics. Does a good life, for instance, require us to have a rational, well-defined idea of what we want our life to be like, or does it merely mean being happy as much of the time as possible? Might it instead be satisfying our preferences, whether or not they make us happy, or might it instead be that a good life consists in living in a community in whose collective projects we share? Either way, you’re (fortunately) unlikely to have to enter this particular philosophical quagmire. In the majority of debates, it’s probably enough to just say that individuals leading a “good life” is an end in itself. What that good life is, for this argument anyway, is best defined by the individual, not by the state.
Premise 2: a good life requires that the choices that are made concerning an individual’s life resemble as closely as possible what that individual would choose for themselves.
A good life requires that the individual be able to make choices that match their preferences as closely as possible. If they are unable to do so, it’s likely that they’ll be dissatisfied with the way their life is going and, probably, cannot plausibly be said to be leading a “good life”.
Premise 3: the individual is the entity with the greatest stake in their own welfare. They are also the person best placed to decide what is best for themselves.
That is, the individual is the person most likely to be affected by the consequences of their choices and is therefore the entity most likely to make the best choice from the perspective of their own wellbeing. They’re the entity that stands to lose the most if they choose badly and stands to gain the most if they choose well.
Moreover, because the individual has the best appreciation of what they want (i.e. the only person who can know with accuracy the preferences of an individual is that individual themselves) they’re also the person best placed to make those decisions.
4.Conclusion: because flourishing is an important moral good, and because achieving that flourishing requires that the choices made concerning an individual’s life be as close as possible the choices that person themselves would make, and because the person whose choices are most likely to reflect the will of that individual are the individual’s themselves (because they are likely to have the greatest stake in the consequences of those choices), we ought to have a strong presumption in favour of freedom of choice.
What Is Liberty?
Freedom of choice, like almost all individual rights, can be understood both positively (as a right to freedom of choice) and negatively (as a right to be free from interference in one’s choices).
The negative aspect of freedom of choice is fairly straightforward. A person has negative freedom of choice if they are free from direct, coercive constraints on their behaviour (banning things is a good example here – passing a law to ban the consumption of meat pies on Wednesdays is a good example of a law that would restrict negative freedom of choice). We might also extend this by saying that it’s also important that a person feels as though they are free from such restraints. A common argument in favour of acknowledging a right to privacy, for instance, is that if a person feels as though they are permanently under surveillance (even if they are not in fact), they’re unlikely choose as freely. This is because they’re likely to feel as though their choices will be judged by others, may be made public or even render them subject to sanction. The inevitable result is self-cenorship (where a person chooses to act less freely and less publicly than they might otherwise have for fear of being subject to arbitrary acts of offense or harm). That functionally undermines their capacity to choose and thus the degree to which that person is living a flourishing life.
The positive aspect of freedom of choice is more complex. Saying that someone has a right to choose obviously implies a right to do certain things certain contexts. I have a right to have Scotch whisky on my cornflakes in the morning, even if others might think it a strange choice. However, it is also important to consider the quality of the choices in question. If a person, for instance, is not aware of all possible choices (or if certain choices were not open to him because of a prohibition), he may not choose what is best for himself. The option he might have chosen might have been one of the ones he wasn’t aware of (or one of the options that was prohibited).
To offer a more concrete example, a person that grows up on a very strict religious commune, and has received all their guidance and education from and with those within the community, is unlikely to be aware of all the possible options open to them in life because the social conditions in which they’ve grown up have conditioned them both to accept particular things unquestioningly and have restricted the knowledge that they have of the outside world. What is the quality of that individual’s positive right to freedom of choice? Though there’s no physical restraint on him (i.e. he could probably walk out the gates of the commune tomorrow and never return), he faces enourmous psychological limitations. For instance, a person who has never been made aware of the existence of other forms of religious belief hasn’t really made a choice to believe; rather, they lack the capacity to question because they’ve been manipulated into not doing so. The right to choose freely doesn’t meaningfully exist or is at least severly impaired in this instance.
The extent to which we have a right to freedom of choice is always to a certain extent determined of environmental factors. Social conditions can influence our psychological states (oppressive social conditions are likely to limit what we take to be possible), and can restrict our choices more conventionally (in certain societies, it is oppressively difficult to be openly transgender, either because it’s illegal, or because there’s a strong social norm in place that disapproves of it). Just as importantly, the family environment we’re raised in, our genetic disposition, the groups of friends that we have etc… can all influence the extent to which we can exercise our freedom of choice. Given this, many liberals therefore support a broad array of freedom-maximising social programmes that seek to give the individual the capacity to make free choices. Some examples;
Public education. Choice requires knowledge, school gives knowledge.
Public health. Choice requires the physical capacity to choose. The only proper guarantor of that physical capacity is if there is a reliable public health system to which people can turn if they’re suffering from ill health. They can get better and get back to leading their (hopefully good) lives. The thought that you might become irreversibly ill will restrict the choices you’ll make (e.g. you’d never do a job that was in any way dangerous if you thought that you’d have no chance of recovering from any injury you might sustain) – hence public health.
Policing. If we all thought we might be subject to arbitrary violence at any point, we’d again not make particular choices; police protect our freedom to choose.
Two final things to note here. Firstly, you don’t need to step through the positive/negative stuff in debates; it’s just a useful way of analysing the right in the abstract. Rather, do the analysis as to the importance of freedom of choice, then show why a particular social policy will either expand or restrict freedom of choice in a positive or negative respect. Secondly, these arguments are essential for debaters and have plenty of currency. The way to make them more persuasive though is not to just defend the right of individuals to make choices generally and use that argument to support of the policy at stake in the debate, but also to defend the value of that policy relative to the specific individuals at stake in the debate. For instance, in the topic that we should legalise voluntary active euthanasia, it would make sense to run this freedom of choice argument to justify the right to be euthanised on the grounds that a person is entitled to develop and pursue their own conception of the good life. It would also make a lot of sense to defend the positive value of a right to euthanasia to the good life of an individual (the importance of self-determination, the subjective value that people place upon dignity, the importance of giving autonomy to the elderly etc…). In this way you show that the principles of liberty not only ground a right to euthanasia, but also render that right a particularly desirable one.
When Can We Limit Freedom of Choice?
There are obvious cases where we legitimately limit freedom of choice. We put people in prison, force people to not to harm others, restrict access to child pornography etc… However, intuition is rarely ever enough in debates. What’s obviously needed is some principled analysis concerning the limits upon the choices we can make.
The bread and butter restriction upon freedom of choice is always where your conduct harms others, the basic intuition being that it’s obviously unjust for your actions to arbitrarily undermine other people’s legitimate interests. But what is harm? This is another philosophical problem that you’ll either find fascinating or infuriating depending on your perspective. Given that, I’ll offer just one (I think quite plausible) definition. A person causes harm if their conduct leaves others worse off than they would otherwise have been. There are at least three ways that you might do this;
Direct Harm (physical harm or a specific act that causes psychological harm to another) – where your conduct directly impinges upon someone else’s quality of life. For instance, striking someone in the face will restrict their freedom to choose options that don’t involve seeking medical attention in a very short space of time. Strike them hard enough and they might suffer permanent damage, enough to change their prospects in life. Either way, you’ve damaged their quality of life and your behaviour can justly be curtailed. In the same way, indoctrinating someone into believing something restricts their freedom of choice is what might be called direct psychological harm.
Indirect harm – where your conduct does not directly harm another, but creates social conditions harmful to another. Here’s a typical feminist argument against pornography that relies upon the idea of indirect harm. The production of pornography need not harm anyone. Its consumption is also unlikely to hurt anyone. However, the social conditions created by a society that widely consumes pornography are likely to leave at least some women worse off than they might otherwise have been. This is because the social attitudes promoted by pornography, and a society that widely consumes it, lends legitimacy to the view that women are sex objects that ought to be subservient to men. The making of pornography thus indirectly causes harm.
This is a far more controversial category and is obviously more difficult to prove. For instance x is a man, employed by a women’s rights NGO who performs well in their job. In the evenings, they occasionally watch pornography. Can it really be said that I should be punished for the social conditions pornography creates?
Or, y a racist, often leans out his car windows and shouts offensive slurs at members of a particular minority. However, that minority also has consistently received extremely unfavourable news coverage, has been the subject of talkback radio ire. Individuals from that minority are also socially disadvantaged. Ought we punish y for that social disadvantage? If we were to do so, it seems as though we’d have to punish a whole lot of people – everyone involved in the news coverage (who might just have been reporting facts), everyone who called in to talkback radio, presumably everyone who just agrees with the negative social perception of that minority because that in itself feeds the unfavourable status quo. It seems as though we might be lead to punishing too many people on this view.
Indirect harm arguments can work very well. However, it is essential that you prove very closely the links between the conduct and the social conditions, and in turn the link between the social conditions and harm
Failing in one’s obligations to society. You might not want to pay tax. Sorry; everyone else’s good life is in some way contingent upon everyone agreeing to pay taxes to support a central government. You’re therefore obligated to bear your part of the tax burden because if you don’t, you’ll lower the amount of money that government has to spend on the collective good. In doing so, you leave everyone worse off than they would otherwise have been. On that basis, therefore, we’re happy to force you to pay tax.
Where choices are made that exclusively concern the individual, things get more difficult. There are of course plenty of moral theories that are happy to just throw out the argument I outlined above and just make choices for people. Communitarianism and Marxism are two theories worth a look if you’re interested (follow this link to a blog post that deals with communitarianism). I won’t consider them here, however. I’ll instead consider one of the premises in the basic argument. We earlier argued that the individual had the greatest stake in their own welfare and was therefore the person best placed to make choices concerning their own life with a view to maximising their long-term prospects of leading a flourishing life. The final part of the argument is the most important – individual flourishing is the basic good. Freedom of choice is only worthwhile because we assume it’s the best way to achieve that good. If we can establish that there are some circumstances where intervention, either by the state or some other actor, would better lead to individual flourishing, we’re obligated on the basis of the original argument itself to restrict freedom.
So another good, generic test for the restriction of freedom of choice is: “does the person in question have the capacity to judge what would be in their best interests”? If the answer to that is no, and some other body is better placed to make that judgement, you’ve a prima facie case for coercion. Here are some examples. All of these examples are controversial and do not necessarily reflect what I personally believe.
They only reflect arguments that it is possible to defend in a debating context.
People with severe mental dysfunction. Certain severe psychological disorders mean that individuals literally lack the capacity to evaluate the consequences of their choices. They therefore lack the capacity to do the calculus required to determine whether something is or is not in the interests of their welfare. As such, a degree of coercion is permissible, provided that that coercion is more likely to lead to that individual’s flourishing than the choices that individual might make themselves.
For an example, consider the ANU Spring 2011 debate about forcing the severely mentally ill to be institutionalised. In that debate, to run this argument, you needed to;
Establish the usual basis for freedom of choice (above).
Explain the principled justification for limiting freedom of choice (above) where there’s no harm to anyone else.
Establish why the severely mentally disabled lack the capacity to choose what would be in their best interests.
Establish why the state can do a better job than anyone else at making those choices. Bear in mind that this didn’t just require differentiating from the individual themselves, but also from other care they might be receiving; e.g. care from family members.
Children generally lack the degree of rationality required to make decisions in their own best interests. Therefore we defer to parents and when they fail at the task, we defer to the state.
People with temporary mental deficiencies. It’s (arguably) a good thing when the police lock up severely intoxicated people and let them go in the morning. Even if they’ve done no harm to anyone else, giving them somewhere safe to go stops them hurting themselves in a way that they might have if they were left to their own devices.
Countervailing analysis though can be found in the work of (the eternally useful) Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin argues that the efficacy of state paternalism is limited by the “endorsement constraint”. The idea here is that where the state forces individuals to engage in particular “valuable activities”, it is unlikely to be successful. A person who voluntarily attends the opera is likely to find their life enriched by it; it’s activity that brings them happiness, the themes of the opera might prompt personal reflection upon their own life, it might be a valuable form of social commentary etc… However, that individual is only able to access what is valuable in opera because they have chosen to attend. They are able to take value from the opera, because they themselves take it to be valuable; hence their attendence. A person who is coerced to attend the opera, though they will experience the same performance, is unlikely to take value from it, precisely because they are not attending voluntarily, and so are unlikely to recognise the opera as a source of value for them. They’re unlikely to be receptive to the value that they might otherwise have taken from the opera. The state presumably was coercing that person to attend in order that they might adopt some of the values from it. They will not do so, however, because they will not suppose it to be a valuable activity, and so will not be receptive to any value within it.
Finally, here’s some really useful analysis concerning conflicts in preferences. I’ve simplified and modified the argument, but the more complex basis of it is based on: Robert E. Goodin, ‘Permissible Paternalism: Saving Smokers From Themselves’ in LaFollete (ed), Ethics in Practice, an Anthology (2nd Edition, Blackwell 2002) 307. The theory suggests that we have long-term preferences and short-term preferences. Ideally, we use our long-term preferences to organise our short-term preferences. For instance, our long-term preference might be to become a lawyer. Our short-term preference is therefore to attend university and become a lawyer. We could also say that leading a flourishing life consists in maximising as many of our long-term preferences as possible. Ideally, our short-term preferences are a means to our long term ones. Therefore, where there’s a conflict between our short-term and our long-term preferences, we’re undermining our own flourishing and the state is entitled to intervene.
Example: we ban duels to the death. We’ve all got a long-term preference to live long and healthy lives. Our short-term preference might be to satisfy a demand for satisfaction, but as we’re likely to die we can say that it is reasonably likely to conflict with long-term preferences. Therefore, the practice should be banned.
Notice again how this justification turns on the fact that freedom of choice is only good if it actually leads to the outcome of people leading flourishing lives. If it doesn’t, it seems as though curtailing that freedom of choice is a reasonable thing to do, provided that curtailing it is likely to yield a better chance of maximal flourishing than the choice itself.
Thanks guys!
Lachlan
References
JS Mill, On Liberty, available at: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645o/