Freedom, or Liberty, most people will agree, is a fine thing. In general. Once we come to specifics, however, it becomes obvious that freedom means different things to different people. Most people, I think, realize that individual freedom must be limited to some degree in the interests of the broader society.
Defining those limits has always been a problem. The Covid pandemic has pushed that problem to the forefront of public discourse. It is always in the news.
The major weapons in the fight against this Protean disease raise issues of civil liberties: mask wearing, social distancing, quarantines, vaccinations. All of them require changes in human behavior or inconveniences that most people would rather avoid.
These measures can be effective only if most people embrace them. If a large minority or a majority refuse to do so, they provide fuel for the virus. Unfortunately, refusal has been all too common during the current pandemic.
Opponents of anti-Covid measures denounce them as violations of their civil liberties. It is our right, they argue, to decide for ourselves what measures to comply with. Society has no power to make us accept them without our consent.
A 19th century text that remains highly relevant to this issue is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). On Liberty is especially significant in the present situation, because literate libertarians often cite it as a classic statement of their viewpoint.
Mill's aim in that work was to define the extent of liberty, and he defined it quite broadly. "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." Individuals have a right to do or say anything, even if it harms them.
But libertarians often fail to mention that Mill added a significant limitation to individual freedom. He argued that society has the right to limit or restrain individual liberty to prevent harm to others.
The Harm Principle, as it is known, is open to interpretation in specific cases, but it provides a rough guide to human liberty and its limits. In effect, one person's liberty ends where another's begins.
In the case of Covid, or any dangerous contagious disease, people who refuse measures designed to slow or halt its spread are not only harming themselves, but others. They are violating the freedom of others to be protected against infection.
Nearly 100 years before Mill, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant provided a complimentary principle to Mill's that also fits our pandemic predicament. As part of what he called the "categorical imperative" Kant argued we should always act with a moral purpose. We should "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
To put it another way, we should consider what the effects of our action would be if everybody acted in the same way. Say we are tempted to steal. We should ask ourselves, "what if everybody did that?" Kant argues that would make stealing a universal law. (Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785)
Following Kant, we might apply the categorical imperative to Covid. Those who refuse anti-pandemic measures are not only acting as individuals. They are in effect saying, this is OK for everybody.
The good news is that, whether they realize it or not, most people are following the principles of Mill and Kant. We need more to do so.
[Image: Immanuel Kant]
Except the pandemic measures were based on pseudo science and falsehoods and the evidence shows that not only are lockdowns innefective but they create more more harm than the pandemic itself. It seems to me that the author is therefore himself illiterate when it comes to the harm principle. He also appears historically illiterate when it comes to the harm caused by tyrannical governments. I can therefore only assume he is a marxist, that most lethal of human ideologies.
ReplyDeleteCome back when you have some facts, and identify yourself.
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