I was recently thinking a bit more about how conservatives attempt to use the concept of personal liberty in contexts like political libertarianism (in the case of economic conservatives) and arguing for the right to express one’s religion in any situation one sees fit (in the case of social conservatives). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: in my opinion these people just don’t really know what they’re talking about, or maybe they know what they’re talking about but are being purposefully misleading. The words are there but they just don’t fit in very well together. Let me explain.
Now as I’ve already said in many previous posts, the concept of personal liberty is very, very important for the liberal and humanist viewpoint as I understand it. However, there is a realm in which it makes sense to talk about personal liberty and there is a realm in which it does not and distinguishing those two realms is where I think conservatives typically fall down. The realm in which it makes sense to focus on personal liberty is when your actions don’t have a significant impact on other people. The realm in which it doesn’t make sense is when your actions do. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the idea of personal liberty suddenly becomes philosophically suspect in the latter case, it’s just that you’re dealing with two people and the concept of personal liberty applies equally to both, so if they don’t see eye to eye, if one person is doing something that significantly affects the other person, then the idea of personal liberty just isn’t going to do much to resolve that situation.
So libertarians, I think, get it partially correct when they (ostensibly) reject government involvement in situations in which one’s behavior does not have a significant impact on other people. Nothing wrong with that; seems like a perfectly legitimate application of personal liberty to me. I say “ostensibly” because as I’ve suggested before I think political expediency often leads libertarians to jump in bed with social conservative elements in the Republican Party who are only too happy to get the government involved in exactly those types of situations if it furthers their religious objectives. However, nobody’s perfect, so I can understand libertarians sometimes not living up to their stated ideals. No, the bigger problem I have with libertarians is that they then go on to attempt to apply the idea of personal liberty in contexts in which it seems to me we are plainly talking about people having a significant impact on other people, such as distributional issues, for example. I’m sorry, but if you have two people and they both think they have some type of moral or ethical claim to some resource or whatever and you decide whose claim should take precedence, then you cannot be deciding who is getting what on the basis of personal liberty. That’s logically impossible. You’re deciding on the basis that you think one person’s claim in more justified than the other person’s claim, which is a rather different issue philosophically speaking. So in the context of an economic system, if you think government should not redistribute resources or whatever, then that’s fine: you support the distribution that results from current market arrangements. However, you’re not talking about personal liberty; you’re talking about whatever values you’re applying to your assessment of our current market arrangements. And it’s not a matter of government being involved or not involved. It’s involved right now in the form of defending property rights. Indeed, government power expressed in our justice system is what lies behind and enforces our current market arrangements. One either likes the job the government is doing and wants to leave it at that, or one doesn’t like it for some reason and wants to change something. So again, you’re not talking about people becoming free of government in some abstract sense; you’re talking about government doing one thing rather than another, supporting the interests of one group of people rather than another group, expressing one type of social and moral philosophy as opposed to some other, etc. As I may have mentioned before, as a liberal I don’t really see eye to eye with conservatives’ assessment of the ethical standing of the results of our current market arrangements but that’s not even what I’m talking about here. We need to go back to the step even before that. I’m just trying to clarify what we’re talking about, and what we’re talking about is manifestly not personal liberty.
Then we have the social conservatives. Now the funny thing about social conservatives to me as far as personal liberty goes is that they are very concerned about their right to express their religious beliefs in any and every context they see fit, but they seem entirely blind to the right of people to go about their business without having to continually deal with other people’s religious beliefs. Maybe a facetious example would help to illustrate what I’m talking about. Suppose my religion requires me to hit anyone who fails to pray properly on the head with a rock. Now, what does the concept of personal liberty suggest we do? Does it suggest I should be allowed to hit other people on the head with a rock? The answer of course is it doesn’t say anything. The issue is not about personal liberty. You’re talking about two people, the hitter and the hitee, and they both have a claim to personal liberty. Now take it down a notch and suppose you’re a kid in a science class about evolution. Suppose your religious beliefs preclude you from accepting the theory of evolution. You want to explain your views to the class but the teacher and the rest of the class are focused on learning about the theory of evolution. So what does personal liberty suggest we do in this case? Again, it doesn’t really say anything. You have two people with conflicting goals: one person wants to discuss his or her religious objections to the idea of evolution, and the other person is trying to lean about the scientific theory of evolution. It’s not a matter of supporting or not supporting personal liberty. OK, having gotten the red herring of personal liberty out of the way, we can then proceed to discuss how to resolve the issue. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to say we’ll talk about some things in some contexts and other things in other contexts. So I’m fine with the idea that a school limits discussions in a science class to scientific issues in the same way a church limits Sunday sermon discussions to whatever the pastor or priest or whoever has to say. I think if we have some kind of rule in which anyone can hijack any discussion in any context to whatever purpose they like then we’re mostly going to end up with a lot of frustrated, angry, and ultimately ignorant people. But again, my point right now is not to resolve these kinds of conflicts, it’s just to clarify what we’re talking about and again we’re clearly not talking about personal liberty.
So just to summarize. As a liberal and humanist I strongly support applying the concept of personal liberty wherever it makes sense, and to the extent people of other political persuasions agree then that’s great, we’re on the same page on that one. But I cannot support pretending to apply it to situations where it logically cannot apply. All you’re doing in that context is engaging in what I think might fairly be called political posturing, in particular, substituting an attractive concept you think people might rally behind, even though it’s completely irrelevant, for the more difficult concepts you would need to really address the issue at hand, in the process making it more difficult to recognize and discuss the real issues that divide us. So having libertarianism as one’s stated social philosophy doesn’t do much for me except to show me one either doesn’t know what the real issues are or one knows what the real issues are but would prefer not to discuss them. The sooner we get the false image of libertarianism as a complete and coherent social philosophy out of our heads the sooner we can get back to discussing the fundamental issues that we really need to discuss.
