Chris commented thusly to Murali:
Because let’s face it, while the ordering might be slightly different, “liberals” and “conservatives,” for example, have pretty similar basic values: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and all that. What they differ in is how to achieve them.
This is absolutely not to pick on Chris, because he touches on these things in his comment. But it got my mind whirling. It is commonly said that liberals and conservatives want the same things but disagree on how to get there. I believe this is true at least much of the time, but you only need to drill down just a bit further until you get where the real problem. Even when we agree on what we want, there is more to the issue than how to get there.
The first thing that comes to mind is definitions. In my experience, both liberals and conservatives believe that they are on the side of freedom. And neither of them are wrong. The disconnect is how one defines freedom. And, to an extent, to whom one wants to give the freedom when there is a conflict.
To some people, freedom is the ability to go into a bar without hacking out a lung due to the cigarette smoke. To others, it’s the ability to smoke in a bar. That’s a non-partisan example, but there are a number of partisan examples to choose from. One side touts the freedom of reproductive control while the other touts freedom to possess firearms. And against these personal freedoms are touted community freedoms: the freedom of people to protect unborn life or the freedom of people to ban (certain kinds of) firearms (to certain people, in certain places, and so on) for the greater safety. There’s the freedom to do with one’s earnings what one chooses go against the freedom from being financially wiped out due to sickness.
I personally tend to define freedom the way libertarians do – freedom in the individual sense, and negative freedoms more than positive – but over the years I have come to learn that people really do define it differently. Not just rhetorically, but internally.
While I tend to internally think of freedom the way that libertarians do, I also reject freedom as an absolute good in all times and in all things. I see freedom as being an abstract good, and to be given when there is not cost, but there typically is cost and I think you ultimately have to look at it on a case-by-case basis.
Which brings me to the next thing. Chris makes a couple mentions of “ordering” (placing some values over others) and this is a huge complication. I find that most of the time, a lot of conflicts come down to an ordering-of-values as much as different values. A cohesive society is measured against individual liberty and not only with conservatives favoring the former and liberals the latter. Sometimes they switch places (such as whether individual freedom of association should trump desired norms regarding racial differences, disabilities, and so forth).
Now, peeling to the next layer of the onion gets us to why these differences in order exist. And that is a post I will get to another day.
Good stuff. I think it is important to udnerstand how we define words differently and how we order values. Freedom is a great value but to often its treated as a bumper sticker more than a complex idea. Just declaring freedom is usually intended to wipe away costs and benefits,, and who wins and who loses from what is being suggested. Too many people, and you list examples, try to define everything as freedom because that is supposed to make it good. Some liberals will talk about health care as a right or the freedom to not go bankrupt from a chronic health problem. Then some libertarians or conservatives will ask where in the Sainted Constitution those things are. Well leaving aside whatever General Welfare means and that the founders did things that weren’t in the Constitution so they seem just fine that, talking about rights and freedom is just arguing self-righteous definitions instead of whether something is a good idea. I personally don’t really care if HC is a right and while i think there can be good arguments made about it enhancing freedom those don’t’ really have much to do with why i think its a good idea. People say Freedom like we should genuflect when the word is uttered instead of as complex idea.
When it comes to ordering values and to discerning the differences among libertarians, liberals, and conservatives, it might be useful to look at two factors.
The first is default preference. You note that you prefer a libertarian’s definition of freedom provided there is no cost to it (and you acknowledge there usually is a cost of some sort). A libertarian would probably say, “We should start with the preference for negative liberty unless it can be shown to be deficient in some way (unless, in other words, the cost is too great).” I actually suspect but can’t prove that most conservatives and liberals in the US use something like the libertarian notion of freedom as a default value, but it’s possible that they might have other defaults, such as ensuring protections for an understanding of tradition or ensuring protections for the least affluent members of society.
The second is how one measures the cost of freedom. Libertarians (or some of them) might say that “market failure” would be a reason to restrict liberty, or that engrained racism enforced by militia groups (i.e., the KKK) would be a reason for the state to intervene to ensure equal access to the pursuit of happiness (and freedom from the fear of violence). A liberal might say that the cost of freedom is too great if it means people go into abject poverty, and therefore some restrictions on freedom–such as taxing people to create a safety net–would be called for. A conservative might say that the freedom to use recreational drugs might actually enslave the users to an addictive vice, and strict drug enforcement is for the potential drug users’ own good.
I hope this makes sense. Also, I do not intend to make a caricature of any of the positions (libertarian, conservative, liberal); I’m just trying to give some examples for illustration.
This is a tremendous insight; I hope you keep drilling down this well because this promises to yield a lot of intellectual profit.
The only problem is that I have to get a lot of permits and such, otherwise the environmentalists will pitch a fit at any more drilling for profits.
You’re exactly right on both points, Will. Looking forward to that next post.
Good post. I find the debate on negative vs. positive liberties a very interesting one.
I think “freedom from want” deserves to be taken into account as much as negative liberties, because it’s a major factor in how people experience their lives. If you took one well-off person in a prosperous, repressive dictatorship, and another very poor person in a democratic, but destitute country, and asked them if they would like to change places, I have a shrewd idea of which one might accept and which one would definitely refuse.
In the developed world, where death from want is fairly rare, a focus on negative liberty may well be the best approach. In the developing world, it’s another matter. How important is freedom of the press if you don’t have a TV and don’t know how to read? (And what is freedom of the press? If a few large companies with similar ideological view own all the major media, and the government doesn’t interfere with them at all, is there a free press?) What’s the value of the freedom to starve to death, or to to die of easily treatable diseases?
Maybe I’m defining freedom poorly by putting it in those terms. Maybe the real question comes down to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – the government should allow liberty, but it also has the obligation to give its people the best shot at life that it can. And there will be tradeoffs between those two areas.
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You have a good point here. My only counter would be that getting people an education or food in their mouths becomes much, much harder when there is no accountability without a political system. Such accountability is much harder without freedom of speech (including freedom of the press). It may be impossible, as it would be relying on a benign dictatorship of sorts.
My main issue with “positive liberties” is the difficulty of definitions. The problem with health care as a right, to me, involves how we define “health care” and “right.” How much health care? Because health care is a variable thing. Does a person who needs a new liver have a right to it? Can a hospital turn away someone who is actively hostile? Do they have a right to any doctor, or the doctor of their choice? Any treatment, or the treatment of their choice? What about the wide variance in EOL care? What about narcotic treatments? I say all of this despite my complete support of EMTALA and no abstract opposition to a single-payer (the devil being in the details).
These problems exist with negative rights, too. Are threats protected by freedom of speech? Is racism protected by freedom of assembly? And so on. But we’re looking at a much shorter field and we’re specifically talking about what the government cannot do rather than what it must provide for. When every kid has a right to an education (which they should), the conversation shifts to the right of a good education (which is desirable, but difficult to pin down).
Another example, and maybe I should turn this into a post, is the freedom of want for food. I would be supportive of a network of soup kitchens that took all comers. If a candidate for public office said “Hey, we can cut taxes by x% by getting rid of the soup kitchens!” I would oppose them on that. But the conversation turns from soup kitchens and canned food to “food with dignity” (I half-wrote, but deleted an anecdote — this does happen). This isn’t a reason to oppose soup kitchens and canned beans or whatnot, but it is reason to question the making of the right of receipt of food. Define food.
You have a good point here. My only counter would be that getting people an education or food in their mouths becomes much, much harder when there is no accountability without a political system. Such accountability is much harder without freedom of speech (including freedom of the press). It may be impossible, as it would be relying on a benign dictatorship of sorts.
For many years Cuba had the best health and education levels in Latin America and the Caribbean; it’s still at or very near the top. To me this suggests that a less than democratic political system still has accountability mechanism; that likely is even more true when the legitimacy of its ideology is based on the ability of the state to provide some minimal standard of living for its people.
Yeah, I hadn’t thought that comment through when I made it. I may not like the odds as much when you don’t have speech and democratic accountability, but it’s far from impossible. Good point.
I wanted to thank everyone for their kind words and contributions.