As people take to heart, and as a matter of principle, the rights of the individual, so they can object to any intervention whatsoever. There are two reasons for this – one is a rights-orientation and the other is the claim that to make an intervention to protect certain individuals is a patronising failure to respect their agency.
In that latter case, which I find easier to address, consider women who are sexually harassed in the workplace or children bullied at school. Some might say, women are strong enough to say no and children grow by virtue of dealing with struggles. To protect them limits freedom and fails to grant them agency and the opportunity to develop self-respect. They also argue that interventions prevent people from shouldering necessary responsibilities. Well, what about rights of property? No one complains that their agency is limited by the patronising attitude of the police in seeking to prevent burglaries. No one says, my agency isn't adequately respected and these damn property laws are preventing me from developing my self-esteem by fighting off robbers!
Women, instead, should have their freedom to work without harassment and children to go to school without paralysing fear. Those are freedoms that do need to be protected. Women and children should not be responsible for having to police the damaging and offensive behaviour of selfish, aggressive and destructive others.
Actually, I have changed my mind on this as I used to feel that women should ‘man up’. If they want to be equal and treated as equal, they should not have special protection. However, now I see that they do not face equal harms, and thus it balances the scales to seek to prevent such harms.
In the former, I hear libertarians complaining that the lockdown in the UK was an authoritarian act and that the people weren't asked their opinion, thus the government was undemocratic. Oh right. So, just how long would you have allowed for a public vote to be organised in an emergency situation? They say, it was too severe. Right - so, for your precious liberty, we should have death rates per 10,000 not just among the highest in Europe but, perhaps, twice as high? So that you can feel freer? That individual freedom matters more than the social good in all situations at all times? Mill might have hoped that all citizens would take the decision to stay home as an act of social responsibility, because they had reasoned well, but sadly, we don't seem to have absorbed his ideas on responsibility as well as we have taken on board his ideas on individualism. He specifically did not advocate selfishness.
There is a particular tension here between two aspects of political thought - yet both claim to be supported by the doctrine of impartiality where each counts for one and none for more than one, so all should be considered equally. However, in utilitarianism this becomes the need to maximise happiness (or welfare or preferences) for the greatest number while minimising suffering. So, once the rich man has enough for his needs, he should be morally obligated to support those who do not have enough to meet their needs. In contrast, a rights-based approach sees that each person's rights are (impartially) sacrosanct. Thus, a rich person would feel they have a right to their earnings rather than having to give them away (as taxation) to support the poor, just as the poor person is not obligated to pay more tax.
In neither case is context, relationship or community part of the picture.
Going back to the sceptic's claim that people should be allowed to make up their own minds rather than be dictated to by the government (rights-based thinking), how many citizens would and could and would have the opportunity to read all the evidence? Further, the utilitarian would ask if they could be trusted to weigh it up in a way that did not privilege their needs over those of others in different circumstances? Actually, I've just learned that apparently Mill did think that educated people (experts) should have multiple votes - there might be pragmatic value in that, if the educated folks were as well-intentioned and socially motivated as Mill, but that suggestion sure isn't a goer now. It clearly goes against rights-based thinking and rather optimistically assumes that education would guarantee a prosocial outlook.
Let's consider this question in greater detail: experts were hauled out by the governments of our nations to justify lockdown or maskwearing or whatever. Sometimes, the scientific advice was indeed contradictory or later was considered to have been wrong wrong. Herd immunity, for example, might work with certain flu viruses, and was seen initially as a possible response to Covid-19, but once the virus was better understood, herd immunity no longer seemed a viable option. Now, some make the claim that for this reason all scientific pronouncements should be greeted with due scepticism. Especially when one view is used by a government to persuade some behaviours rather than others. The government may not be privileging equally both sides of an argument, it may have an ulterior motive for favouring certain scientific evidence - and thus the individual has a right to question, investigate and make her own decisions.
We can see how this could seem sensible and Millian. He did after all want people to think for themselves. He did want minority views to be heard. Kant likewise wanted individuals to use their reason – but recall that he did say that citizens should obey the laws and then seek to express their dissatisfaction.
Still, let’s give the sceptics their time. They want to assess the information for themselves. Firstly, as I mentioned, in a complex world with so much information to be found, supporting many different approaches, how is the individual to determine which voices have the strongest empirical backing?
Secondly, and connectedly, most interventions carry with them detrimental effects as well as benefits. It takes a broad vision to weigh up such pros and cons, as well as a given time perspective - so, while lockdown seems to have strong short term benefits (especially to those with financial support or the ability to work from home), the long term costs also have to be factored in. An individual might be able to make those balances for her own life, but how can she access enough data to factor in the society? One wonders if even a government can adequately do that - but putatively it should be considering the needs and futures of all (which may or may not be the case).
Thirdly, having democratically elected a government, presumably the electorate would be inclined to accept that decisions made by authorities are not for the betterment of this or that individual but for society at large. For this reason, a given limitation may be imposed in order to prioritise an issue that had not previously been dealt with in the optimum fashion. It may become clear that it is better to restrict the liberty of some - to drive when drunk, say - for the good of the majority.
My fourth objection to this case for individual liberty is that it is often incredibly blinkered. Consider levies on sugary drinks. Libertarians get angry about such interventions as it's a sign of paternalism, the nanny state, a restriction on liberty to choose what one does with one's own physical health. But let's think rationally about this.
If libertarians are using Mill as an authority for free choice, recall that he has a profound justification for taxing intoxicating drinks. There are costs that come from selling alcohol, in an increase of uncivil behaviour which must be policed and thus there is a case for consumers bearing some of that cost. And as governments must raise revenue anyway, it is better that they tax what is not required but is rather a matter of preference and pleasure. If we look at sugary drinks, there is a cost to the nation in increased rates of obesity and diabetes for example. And sugary drinks are far from necessities of life.
In a social context, some limitations have not just good reason, but ethical weight. Over time, they will also tend to alter perspectives on what is or is not 'moral' in a given society. Whereas drink driving was maybe seen as morally neutral in the past, now it is widely seen as ethically wrong. To defecate in a public place was once seen as normal - there are great stories about what Versailles was like before it was deemed wrong to use hallways and staircases as latrines - but now would be considered extremely offensive. Whereas ivory was once seen as the height of luxury, now many would condemn buying it as immoral not just illegal.
Besides, how free are we anyway? Advertising acts as a powerful incentive to buy such products and the desire for sugar, once we have a taste for it, is an unconscious drive that, if we consider Harry Frankfurt's definition of free will, can leave us not free (‘I want not to want sugar but I want it anyway’). Thus, increasing pricing may act as a shove toward freedom - in that it may empower us to resist the persuasions of advertising and the urge for sweetness. We may be more free by having liberty restricted.
This is an important concept. Consider what CBT aims to do - or indeed psychoanalysis: to overcome the restrictions that our own psychological habits have imposed upon us. What education seeks to do: to resist the restrictions our upbringing and absorbed belief systems may have imposed upon us.
We have this feeling that to be free is to get what we want. That it's about the external constraints. But some external constraints - on buying ivory, for example, or drink driving - are acceptable to us now, because we have assimilated the values inherent in their application. Initially, they would have been designated by some to be appalling restrictions on liberty. Of course, there are plenty of external constraints - when it comes to labour laws, participation in the democratic process, choice of where to live and so on - which would truly represent offensive injustices. On the other hand, many of them, like the laws against drink driving, are valid and laudable. But, in either case, we tend to ignore the role that internal constraints place upon us. We are constrained by our internalised values or personality not to, say, remove all our clothes in a hot restaurant or kick dogs. We can build up our prosocial or generally beneficial internal constraints; indeed we all do, naturally, through education and socialisation. There are, though, some internalised limitations which restrict our freedom in negative ways. If we have a phobia, we might see it as something we need to deal with to be free, but often we enable these limitations by regarding them as aspects of personality or as 'free' choices. We say, 'Oh, I'm a chocoholic!' and don't care that we are not free when there's a chocolate bar in the vicinity. We say, 'I'm shy' and don't attempt to meet people.
Indeed, Spinoza*, who also advocated freedom, asserts that some of the greatest dangers to freedom are internal. A person who has not investigated the causes for her desires will follow appetite (instinct) and is thus in chains. He says that in a free state, even though common agreement dictates limitations, a person is more free than when on her own but just blindly following desire. So we have to ask, are all these people who shout for the freedom to do what they want actually free in a meaningful way at all?
Freedom is more complicated than we like to think. It has to incorporate a wider context than the individual; a wider structure than unreasoned wants and fears and a greater awareness of what the concept of freedom actually entails.
NOTES
*I have just read Roger Scruton's brief introduction to Spinoza's Ethics, which was very helpful in clarifying (to an extent) a very dense work.
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