Originally published August, 1997.
A 2000 word essay analyzing the claim that those who seek freedom are no different than others trying to establish a particular morality via the force of government. Such a claim, however, is wrong. Liberty merely establishes the conditions required for any viable ethical code to operate. It does not favor any particular morality over another.
Available for purchase here.
Many people sympathetic to the idea of a free society balk when advocates of liberty state that any non-coercive action should and would be permitted (for adults) in a properly constituted society. Such skeptics believe that a natural function of government is to ensure that citizens live virtuous and moral lives. If it is permissible to jail criminals when they rob, steal, or otherwise harm us, then why should the government not punish other behaviors that are also immoral? Whether the issue is using drugs, purchasing pornography, discriminating against minorities, or any other action that a majority judges to be wrong, the government has an obligation to make people behave properly just as it does when punishing thieves and murderers.
The classical liberal may answer that no one has the right to impose on others his ethical views on issues such as gambling, sexual practices, or objectionable reading material. The skeptic may then counter that requiring citizens to live according to a legal code recognizing full liberty is no different in principle than what the skeptic desires, i.e., to “impose a morality”—his—on those who disagree.
Such a reaction is understandable given the zero-sum view of life promoted by many who believe you should do-it-to-them-before-they-do-it-to-you. Understandable or not, however, such an idea is wrong. At best, this approach reveals an erroneous perception of the proper roles of government and ethics. At worst, it is an attempt to establish conditions antithetical to freedom and to the very morality such people profess to support.
These false premises hold that, first, the requirements of morality are met when people merely perform the right behaviors and, second, that the State is charged with maintaining that morality. The conclusions reached by those who accept an activist State are therefore unsurprising. They push the notion that government should operate as a substitute parent to protect its citizens from themselves. In such a vision, it does not matter whether potential harm arises from ignorance, accident, or unethical impulses.
Yet the crisis in liberty we face today does not flow from any excess of moral behavior the State has induced by keeping its eagle eye trained intrusively upon the minutia of our daily existences. The Vandals pounding at the walls of freedom and morality threaten us so imminently precisely because the self-styled moral watchdogs have destroyed the very ramparts they claim to defend.
There exist many important societal stressors. “Gun” violence, random murders, white collar crimes, and other frightening disruptions plague our individual lives. Yet endangering our liberties on a more abstract and, hence, less immediately visible level, are the concerted attacks by the political, intellectual, and cultural leaders of our nation on the fundamental nature of morality. Their actions and words constitute a denial not only of the concept of an absolute, objective morality that is applicable to everyone, but of the conditions necessary for the establishment of any type of morality. If such people were to acknowledge any principle, it would be the “principle” that there are no principles.
The self-refuting nature of such beliefs does not, of course, bother the advocates of moral and political relativism. A contradiction can occur, after all, only if certain absolutes do, in fact, exist. Since absolutes are, however, anathema to their worldview, they are unconcerned by what they do not think exists.
When they proclaim that “guns kill” or that “drugs kill” or alcohol or poverty or any other such thing or condition “kills” or “makes” people act in certain ways, they remove individual people entirely from the realm of morality.
A valid ethics (or morality) requires the ability to make choices in the face of alternatives and to act upon those choices. Making choices requires the possession of free will (in the form of a volitional, conceptual consciousness). And such free will and resultant choices and actions are possible only to specific, distinct individuals.
When such requirements are not met, morality does not exist. In situations where no alternatives are present, morality does not apply. Where free will does not occur, any consideration of moral issues is moot. When people are coercively prevented from acting as they desire, they cannot be judged according to any moral standard. If people are considered merely as “groups” or “communities” or “society” rather than as individuals, the idea of morality becomes meaningless.
So it is that statist, “pragmatic” politicians and intellectuals pursue and encourage a zigzagging course implicitly designed to bolster and maintain the conditions necessary for a situational “morality.” This mercurial guideline permits them to take any action, commit any outrage against freedom, spout any lie if it furthers their goal of achieving greater power for the government and themselves and increased collectivization of the country. After all, they are merely guiding us “for our own good.”
Yet like any skill, moral judgment requires that one have the opportunity to practice it, to make mistakes, to learn and grow in ability. If denied cognitive exercise, a person’s sense of morality will atrophy like an unused muscle. Every law, every directive, every regulation that impedes an individual in this area wreaks the same kind of havoc that would result were we to forbid our children to walk lest they fall and hurt themselves. The evidence of this type of tragedy is evident in any of the former collectivist countries where for generations people acted only as they were permitted. Such moral confusion and fear is far too prevalent here, as well.
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