Liberalism

Hi, I'm Geoff Pynn. I teach philosophy at Elgin Community College, and in this video I'm going to talk about liberalism. What justifies the state's authority? This is a difficult question. On the one hand, without the state, society as we know it couldn't exist. We'd be forced to fend for ourselves, focusing all our energy on gathering and protecting what we needed to survive from the scarce natural resources available to us. To gain the benefits of society, we need to accept some kind of state authority. The trouble is that none of us seems to have a choice in the matter. We're forced to accept the state's authority -- not only because most of us can't leave, but more importantly, because the state has the power to coerce us to accept it. If we don't want to obey, the state can use the threat of violence to make us change our minds. If we resist and disobey, the state has the power to use actual violence to compel our obedience. But doesn't this make the state the moral equivalent of a benevolent gangster, handing us benefits with one hand while threatening us with the other? The root of the problem is the idea that individuals have a moral right to be free. When someone gets you to agree to something by threatening you with violence if you refuse, you aren't really making a free choice. The ideal of individual freedom, also known as liberty, is one of the building blocks of modern Western ethics and political philosophy. How can liberty be reconciled with the idea that the state's authority over us is legitimate? Well, for one thing, liberty has its limits -- we don't have a moral right to *absolute* freedom. You aren't free to poison someone's food just because you don't like them. You aren't free to steal your neighbor's crops just because you forgot to plant your own. In general, our liberty doesn't include the freedom to cause harm to others. The philosophy known as liberalism treats this limitation on our liberty as the basis for state authority. If the state's laws are all aimed at preventing us from causing harm to others, then they ought to be fully compatible with our individual right to be free. It doesn't infringe upon a person's liberty to prohibit them from doing something their liberty doesn't entitle them to do. The English philosopher John Stuart Mill defended just such a requirement in his book, On Liberty: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." The Harm Principle, as Mill's idea has come to be known, has been extremely influential. It suggests the ideal of a liberal state, whose soul function is to protect and promote the liberty of its citizens, preventing them from harming one another, while infringing on their freedom as little as possible. Notice that the Harm Principle does not allow coercion just to prevent you from harming yourself. "He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise." Forcing someone to do something for their own good is known as paternalism. Mill thought paternalism was unjustified. It requires that rulers be able to identify what's in someone's own interests better than they can themselves. This might be justified in the case of children or some people who are incompetent to care for themselves, but when it comes to most of us, Mill thought, no one's in a better position to know what's good for you than you are. The Harm Principle says what conditional law must meet to be legitimate: It has to prevent someone from harming others. But some laws intended to prevent harm may still be illegitimate. That's because a law preventing one sort of harm might lead to other harms. Consider, for example, government censorship. Censorship might be defended on the grounds of harm prevention, allowing falsehoods and immoral opinions to freely circulate could cause all sorts of harm. And yet, one of the hallmarks of liberalism is opposition to censorship and the defense of free expression. How does that work? Well, Mill thought that censorship would lead to more harm than freedom of speech. He gives two reasons. The first is that, while falsehoods may cause harm, sensors can make mistakes too. If the government censors something on the grounds that it's false, but, in fact, it's true, then it's causing the very harm it's supposedly trying to prevent. Still, you might think, well-informed, methodical and honest sensors are likely to prevent the spread of falsehoods much more frequently than they'll prevent the spread of truths. This isn't a very strong argument against government censorship. The deeper reason Mill gave concerns the value of liberty itself. Mil thought that, for most people, liberty was an essential ingredient of a worthwhile life. We only truly flourish when we make and pursue rational choices about what to do with our lives. Making and pursuing free choices requires learning through experience and deliberating, evaluating and revising our goals and values in light of what we learn. Without the freedom to make mistakes, we can't do any of these things. So Mill's second reason is that freedom of speech is necessary for us to find true happiness. If we are denied the freedom to be wrong, we can't engage in the rational deliberation required for us to find the right way to live our best lives. Instead, our beliefs would be held for reasons we couldn't fully understand, and our lives mapped out for us us in ways we hadn't really chosen for ourselves. Censorship would make the rational deliberation that liberty requires impossible, and leave us to wither on the vine. Mill defended the freedom of association, religion and occupation on similar grounds. He promoted the idea that we should be exposed to "different experiments in living" -- a variety of ways of structuring our lives and relationships -- in order to discover and pursue for ourselves the best way to live. The liberal ideal is certainly appealing, but many difficult questions remain. What's the line between actions that are genuinely harmful and those that are merely offensive -- unpleasant, undesirable or unwelcome? How great a risk of harm must an action present before it can be legitimately prohibited? After all, just about anything we do could cause harm. Can the state prohibit people from allowing harm; for example by requiring them to assist others at risk? Can the Harm Principle justify taxing people for national defense, public health, or other modern governmental functions? Most importantly, for our purposes: how is liberalism connected with democracy? In the modern world, the two concepts have come to be tightly linked, so much so that many nations identify themselves as liberal democracies. But what's the relationship between the two ideas? On the face of it you might think that liberty and democracy are incompatible -- the majority could vote to restrict liberty, in violation of the Harm Principle. Mill himself was keenly aware of this risk. He worried that in a democracy, minority groups could be subjected to the tyranny of the majority. And yet, Mill defended a version of democracy as the ideal form of government. In order to exercise our liberty we must deliberate and make choices about how to govern our own lives. And, Mill thought, no thought no form of government could allow us to do this better than democracy could. What do you think?