Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 4 Freedom and the limits of government

If we imagine our Siennese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, transported in a time machine to the present day, and asked for his opinion of the political philosophy contained in this book, I believe he would find much that has been said up to now familiar and broadly acceptable. He would probably think I had given anarchist ideas more space than they deserve, and he would find it extraordinary that anyone should have moral objections to hunting foxes. But on the nature of political authority, on the need for rulers to be responsible to the whole body of citizens, and on what good political judgement requires, we would (I hope) find ourselves in broad agreement. Yet Lorenzetti would find the chapter that now begins much more puzzling. It is about the question whether there is a realm of human freedom that must be kept beyond the reach of politics — whether there are areas of human life in which government must categorically not intervene. This idea, which is a central element in the dominant political ideology of our age, liberalism, had not appeared when Lorenzetti was painting. Of course Lorenzetti’s good government left its people a considerable amount of liberty: they were largely left free to farm, to trade, to hunt, and so on. But this was not a matter of principle, more a matter of the limited capacity of governments to intervene in these areas of daily life.

The idea of limited government took shape over several centuries, and the first impetus came from the religious conflicts that followed the European Reformation of the 16th century. When the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church over the religious life of Christian societies was broken, the initial response was that each political community should have its own established religion, Catholic or Protestant. But the multiplication of Protestant sects gave rise to a demand for religious toleration: within certain limits, each person was entitled to find his own path to God, and the state had no business interfering with this quest. With the further passage of time, the claim for religious freedom expanded to become a wider claim for personal freedom — for each person’s right to choose his own beliefs and his own way of life so long as these choices did not impinge directly on anyone else. In particular the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries bequeathed to all later generations the idea that each person is a unique individual who can find true fulfilment only if she is allowed to choose for herself how she should live, and this requires the greatest possible space to try out new and unconventional ways of living — new occupations, new forms of artistic expression, new ways of conducting personal relationships, and so forth. As John Stuart Mill put it in his classic text On Liberty (whose practical proposals we shall come to later):

Because individual freedom is of such great value, liberals argued, governments must be prohibited from interfering with it, no matter how well they are constituted. Good government is not enough: even the best-constructed and best-intentioned government will be tempted to intrude in areas in which individual liberty ought to be sacrosanct. This is the idea that Lorenzetti would have found so strange, and that I shall explore in the present chapter.

There are two central questions that we need to ask. First, what exactly is the freedom we are talking about? What does it mean to say that someone is free to do this or that, or live in one way or another? Second, what are the limits of individual freedom? What should happen when my freedom comes into conflict with other political goals, including the freedom of everyone else? Is there a principled way to decide this?

Let us begin then with freedom itself, an elusive idea that has filled the pages of many books of political philosophy. As a first shot, let us say that a person’s freedom depends on the number of options open to her, and on her capacity to make a choice between them. Someone who has a choice between ten different jobs has greater freedom than someone who only has two to choose between. Of course the quality of the options matters too: you may think that having two good jobs to choose between gives you more freedom than having ten lousy ones, particularly if the lousy ones are all rather similar (street cleaner, office cleaner, toilet cleaner, etc.). So rather than ‘number of options’ we should perhaps say ‘extent of options’ where this takes into account both how different the options are, and how valuable they are. As to the second clause, ‘capacity to choose’, we need this because someone might be presented with options but for one reason or another not be able to exercise a genuine choice between them. For instance suppose someone offers you the choice of going to see one or other of two plays this evening, but only tells you their titles, neither of which means anything to you at all. You can pick a play at random, but you cannot choose in the sense of deciding which play you would most like to see. Or again suppose that someone is completely under her mother’s thumb and always does what mother suggests. She is offered various jobs, but invariably takes the one that her mother recommends. From one point of view she has the freedom to choose her employment, but from another point of view she hasn’t.

So we can say that freedom has an external and an internal aspect: it depends on whether the world is arranged in such a way that someone has many doors open to him, but it also depends on whether he is able to choose, genuinely, which door to pass through. But now we need to dig a bit deeper to see what it means for a door to be open, and what it means to make a genuine choice.

When can we say that an option is available for someone to choose? Let us turn this around and ask when an option is not available. The most clear-cut case is one where it has been made physically impossible for the person in question to pursue that option. Someone who has been tied up or thrown in gaol has very little freedom because he is physically prevented from doing nearly all of the things that he might otherwise do. Some political philosophers, including our old friend Hobbes, have argued that it is only physical impediments that restrict people’s freedom. But to most people this seems a very narrow view. We generally think that options become unavailable when sanctions of various kinds are attached to them. Laws, in particular, restrict the freedom of those who are subject to them, because a penalty is applied to law-breakers. There is nothing to prevent me physically from driving above the speed limit or smashing the windows in my neighbour’s house, but if I do these things I am liable to be caught and punished, so I am not free to do them. The same applies to threats issued by private individuals. If someone threatens to beat me up if he catches me talking to his girlfriend again, then (assuming the threat is meant seriously), that option is no longer open to me.

Physical prevention and sanctions are generally accepted as barriers that reduce freedom. Much more controversy arises in cases where people may be deterred from pursuing options because of the cost of doing so, where the cost does not take the form of a punishment or some other sanction. As the question is sometimes put, is a penniless person free to dine at an expensive restaurant — the Ritz, for instance? Do we say ‘No’ because in reality there is no way that person can eat at the Ritz (at least without suffering some fairly dire consequences when it is discovered that he has no money)? Or do we say ‘Yes’ because the only thing preventing him is his lack of resources, not any intention on the part of the Ritz’s owners or anyone else to stop him from eating there? This is more than just a philosophical question, because how we answer it affects the way we think about the relationship between government and freedom. Among the policies pursued by governments are those that transfer resources from one set of hands to another — typically from better off to worse off people. We would like to know whether this increases the freedom of the recipients, or decreases the freedom of the contributors, or neither, or both.

So let’s consider some examples in which people cannot do things that they would otherwise choose to do because of the cost. Should we say that once the cost reaches a certain point people are no longer free? This is too simple: compare someone on a modest income who cannot buy a holiday that costs £10,000 with someone on the same income who needs an operation to relieve a painful (though not disabling) condition that is only available privately for £10,000. Why do we say that the second person is not free to have the operation he needs, whereas in the first case we typically use different language — he is free to have the holiday, but he simply cannot afford it, we might say? Why does the language of freedom come naturally in the second case but not the first? Expensive holidays are luxury items whose distribution can reasonably be left to the economic market, where people make choices over how much they earn and how they spend their income. Whether or not the person we are considering could actually have raised £10,000 by working longer hours, changing jobs, or cutting back on other expenditure — that may be in dispute — we know for certain that nobody was under any obligation to provide him with the holiday. In contrast, the state has an obligation to ensure that everyone has access to adequate health care, whether through a public health service or by regulating the health insurance market so that everyone can buy suitable cover. So if someone is left facing a £10,000 bill for an operation that she needs, responsibility for this lies with the state, which has failed in its obligation. Whether the cost of taking an option is a restriction of freedom depends not just on how big the cost is, but on how the cost arose and whether anyone else can be held responsible for its existence.

_{8. A controversial view of liberty, 1950.}

The commonly held view that the more governments do, the less freedom people have, is therefore mistaken. Governments do sometimes restrict freedom, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not (seat-belt legislation, for example, restricts the freedom of car-users, but most people would agree that it is justified by the lives it saves). But at other times government action can increase freedom, by giving people options that they would not have otherwise because of the cost. We need to look at particular policies, to see whether in opening options up they are closing down other ones that are more important. Unfortunately much political rhetoric about ‘the free society’ never gets down to this level of detail. Political philosophers, who ask exactly what we mean when we say that a person is or is not free to pursue a particular option, can help us make better-informed and more nuanced judgements about the relationship between government and personal freedom. This is a good illustration of my argument in Chapter 1 about the value of thinking philosophically about the political issues of the day.

Government can do less directly about the internal aspect of freedom, a person’s capacity to make genuine choices among the options open to her. This is sometimes called ‘positive liberty’ as distinct from the ‘negative liberty’ of having options that are not blocked by external factors. These two kinds of liberty have been contrasted with each other, as they were by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a famous lecture called ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Berlin wanted to highlight the dangers in ‘positive liberty’ which he believed could be used in such a way as to justify authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, like Stalin’s Soviet Union, which gave their subjects very little ‘negative liberty’. But I believe it is more fruitful to see them as complementary, and I gave examples earlier to suggest why we should be concerned about genuine choice as well as about the availability of options. But how are we to know when a choice is genuine? This is more difficult to decide.

It may help once again to approach this question from the opposite angle, by asking when choices are obviously not genuine. A fairly clear-cut example is provided by people who are in the grip of a compulsion or an addiction — for instance kleptomaniacs who simply cannot help shoplifting when the opportunity arises, or drug addicts who will go to any lengths to get the next fix. People in this position act on their strongest desire at the moment of decision, but when they stand back and reflect, they know that these are not the desires they want to have. If they could push a button to get rid of the compulsion or addiction, they would. Their decision to grab the shirt or inject the heroin is not a genuine choice because it is motivated by an urge that the individual involved would rather not have.

A different example occurs when a person’s choices are determined by an outside force, like the girl who always does what her mother tells her. Although the person concerned appears content with her decisions — there is no inner struggle as there often is in the case of the compulsive or the addict — we feel that the decisions are not really hers. Genuine choice requires a certain kind of independence; a free person must ask herself ‘what do I really want or really believe’ and be able to reject second-hand answers. People lose their freedom, in this sense, when the social pressure on them to conform to prevailing conventions or prevailing beliefs becomes so intense that they are unable to resist. Religion and political ideology can both have this effect.

How can we promote this inner freedom, the capacity to make genuine choices? One way is to expose people to a wide range of alternatives, so that they are less likely to take it for granted that any one set of beliefs, or any one way of life, must be the right one (conversely religious sects and political regimes that want to control their members’ choices go to great lengths to ensure that they do not get to see or experience anything that deviates from their approved way of living). So a government that wanted to promote freedom to choose could do so by encouraging social diversity — by exposing people to new ways of living, new forms of culture, and so on. One practical manifestation of such a policy would be an education system that encouraged children to think critically about the beliefs and values they have inherited from their parents or imbibed from their social network, and at the same time exposed them to other faiths and other cultural values by drawing children from different communities together in common schools. But unlike external freedom, internal freedom cannot be guaranteed. Some people are independent-minded by nature; others are born conformists. All that politics can do is to provide more favourable conditions for those who want to choose their own path in life to do so.

So far I have tried to explain what freedom is and why it is valued so highly in contemporary societies. Now I want to begin to explore its limits. That individual freedom must be limited in various ways should be self-evident: the freedom of each person must be restricted to allow everyone to enjoy (external) freedom to the same extent, but beyond that there are many legitimate social goals whose pursuit involves placing limits on what individuals may do. To protect the natural environment, for instance, we have to prevent people dumping litter, poisoning the air with exhaust gases, turning wildlife habitats into housing estates, and so forth. We balance freedom against other values, and sometimes freedom has to give way. But how far should this balancing go? Is there a sphere of personal freedom that we are never justified in infringing, no matter how good the consequences of restricting freedom might appear to be?

John Stuart Mill, whose essay On Liberty I have already cited, believed that there was indeed such a sphere within which liberty should be inviolable. He argued that when a person’s actions were ‘self-regarding’, meaning that they caused no harm to the interests of anyone except possibly the person himself, they should never be interfered with. Mill thought that this principle would justify freedom of thought and expression, and the personal freedom to live in the way one wanted — how to dress, what to eat and drink, what cultural activities to pursue, what sexual relationships to have, what religion to follow, and so on. (These ideas are familiar to us now, but when Mill wrote, in the mid-Victorian period, they were regarded as radical, indeed even as shocking.) But is it possible to draw the line that Mill wanted to draw? Are there really any actions that are certain to cause no harm other than to the person who performs them?

_{9. Isaiah Berlin, the most widely read philosopher of liberty in the 20th century.}

Mill acknowledged that people might well be offended by behaviour that he would classify as self-regarding — by outrageous dress, unusual sexual practices, militant atheism, and so on. But he argued that being offended by something is not the same as being harmed by it. Harm is a matter of being attacked or threatened, having your property destroyed, or your economic position worsened, and in Mill’s eyes this was something that could be established objectively. Offence, by contrast, depends on the personal beliefs and attitudes of the person offended — you may be offended by homosexuality, or rap music, but that is because according to your personal scale of values these activities are wrong or unacceptable; my reaction may be quite different. Mill thought it was perfectly in order for those who found other people’s behaviour offensive to avoid the offenders, or indeed to try to persuade them to change their ways, but what they were not permitted to do was to prevent, by law or other means, the behaviour in question.

But we can ask whether offence and harm can be so easily separated. Suppose that a woman works in an office or factory where most employees are male, and who insist on displaying large posters of naked women that she finds offensive. As a result, she dislikes being at work and may even decide to leave. In an obvious sense, she is being harmed by the apparently self-regarding behaviour of the male employees. Another example is provided by so-called ‘hate speech’ — vicious remarks directed in public at members of ethnic or religious minorities, which may drive them away from schools, colleges, or workplaces, or at least make them feel very uncomfortable about being there. Again it seems that behaviour that is immediately simply offensive may indirectly cause harm, so we have a choice: either we can expand our idea of harm to include these cases, in which case the sphere of self-regarding actions will shrink, or we stick to the original idea that only behaviour that is directly harmful can be interfered with, and say that people should be left free to express themselves even when other people find the form of expression deeply offensive.

Three things are particularly worth noting about the examples we have just considered. First, it is not just a matter of personal idiosyncrasy that the behaviour is found offensive. Whatever we think ourselves about nude posters, we should be able to understand why many women find them offensive. It is very different from, say, objecting to someone pinning a David Beckham poster over their desk because you support a rival football team. Second, the offence is not avoidable except by a large change in the victim’s behaviour, for instance giving up the job or leaving the college. This contrasts with the case where I am offended by the posters on the walls of my neighbour’s living room — which I can avoid by keeping out of his house — or by the opinions expressed in a racist newspaper, which I need not buy. Third, the offensive behaviour itself has little or no positive value to set against the distress that it causes: it is not an essential part of anyone’s idea of the good life that they must be able to gaze at naked women while they work or that they should shout abuse at blacks or Muslims. (I don’t deny that a few people may want, quite badly, to do these things; the question is, what is lost if they are prevented?) Although freedom of expression is important, not all expression should count for the same. It is very important that people should be able to worship freely, engage in political debate, express themselves artistically, and so on; very unimportant that they should be able to display posters at work or shout crude racist slogans.

So instead of Mill’s simple principle — that self-regarding behaviour may never be interfered with — we may find that we need to make more complex judgements, weighing the value of different kinds of behaviour against the costs they may impose on others, and the ease with which those costs could be avoided.

I turn now to a different problem for Mill’s principle: forms of behaviour that have no immediate effect on anyone but the person herself may still have long-term consequences for other people because they make that person less able to contribute to society, or create costs that others have to pay. For instance, someone who becomes an alcoholic may be unable to hold a steady job; someone who smokes heavily, even if only in their own home, increases their chance of getting cancer or heart disease, and therefore of needing medical treatment at public expense. The question, therefore, is whether we should count these activities as purely self-regarding, and entitled to protection in the name of individual freedom.

Mill considered the example of alcoholism and argued that drinking ceased to be purely self-regarding in two cases: when the person involved had taken on a job or a commitment that could not be performed properly under the influence of alcohol, and when the person was liable to engage in acts of violence while drunk. But if the effect of drinking was simply to render the person less able to make a social contribution than he otherwise might, society had no right to prevent it. Children could be taught about their social responsibilities and warned about the dangers of alcohol and so forth. But for adults, preserving freedom was of paramount importance even if society as a whole suffered as a result.

One reason why we may hesitate to follow Mill here is that the state has taken on a far wider range of responsibilities to its citizens since the time that he wrote, and so it has to cover the costs incurred by much more apparently self-regarding activity. When Mill wrote On Liberty there was no public health service, no national system of education or of income support for the poor, no public housing, and so on. To a very large extent, those who damaged their health or made themselves unfit for work had to bear the costs themselves, or had to apply to local charities, who were entitled to impose conditions on those they supported. The question is whether Mill’s principle still makes sense against the background of a welfare state, funded by taxation, that is committed to providing everyone with a minimum level of income, education, health care, and housing. In this context, should people have enforceable social responsibilities both to contribute and to avoid becoming unnecessarily dependent on welfare services?

This is one of the most controversial issues in politics today, and one reason that we may find ourselves eventually agreeing with Mill is that there seems no obvious stopping place once we abandon his principle of liberty. For instance, should the state require people to eat a healthy diet? Should it force them to take regular exercise? Should it prevent them from engaging in dangerous sports? Any of these measures would significantly cut the cost of public health care, but we may none the less think that they involve an intolerable degree of intrusion in private life. In which case, we may conclude that the state can legitimately require participants to insure themselves when they go mountaineering or engage in extreme sports; and that it has an important role to play in educating people, including adults, about the risks that they run when they smoke, drink, eat fatty foods, spend most of their leisure hours sprawled in front of television, and so on, but it should none the less not prevent them doing these things. As Mill put it, ‘the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom’.

Mill’s defence of liberty against the state involved demarcating a sphere of private activity within which people should have complete freedom to do as they liked. We have examined some problems with this approach, and we will encounter some more in Chapter 6 when we look at feminist arguments against the idea of a protected private sphere. So now I want to explore a different way of restricting what the state may do in the name of individual freedom. This is the idea that every person has a set of human rights that governments must never infringe.

_{10. John Stuart Mill, utilitarian, feminist, and defender of liberty.}

The idea of human rights has grown steadily in influence since the United Nations endorsed, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which set out a long list of rights that all the signatory states undertook to respect in the case of their own citizens. But the concept itself can be traced back much further, to the idea of natural rights that played a central role in the earlier stages of liberal political philosophy. John Locke, for instance, claimed that all men at least (whether his exclusion of women was deliberate is controversial) had natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and when governments were established by social contract, they undertook to protect these rights as a condition of their having political authority. The Universal Declaration’s list of rights is much more extensive, and besides rights that directly protect liberty — such as rights to freedom of movement, freedom of worship, and freedom to marry — it includes others whose effect is to provide people with access to material benefits, such as the right to work, the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to education. Nevertheless, in the light of our analysis of freedom earlier in the chapter, these rights too can be seen as ways of protecting individuals’ freedom, by ensuring that options are available to them that might otherwise be closed off by lack of material resources.

The human rights perspective does not involve asking whether certain human activities are potentially harmful to others. Instead it looks at the person herself and asks whether we can identify certain conditions without which no one can lead a decent human life. It tries to be neutral over the question what the best kind of life is for human beings — it does not say whether it is more valuable to be a religious believer, a political activist, an artist, a farmer, or a housewife — but it claims that all of these ways of living require conditions that human rights protect. Some of these conditions are plainly uncontroversial: no one can live a decent life without the freedom to think, communicate, and move about, without having adequate food and shelter, without having the chance to form personal and professional relationships with other people, and so forth. But other items that appear on standard lists of human rights, including the original UN Declaration, are more problematic. They may be rights that we would like to see implemented in the societies we belong to, especially if we are liberals, but we might wonder whether they are really essential to human life in all its forms.

Let us consider a couple of examples: first, the right to freedom of ‘thought, conscience and religion’, which the UN Declaration interprets broadly to include the freedom to change one’s religion and the freedom to practise any religion in public or in private. Since religious belief and practice are pervasive features of human existence, we may agree that everyone should have the opportunity to worship, to read religious texts, and so forth. But should they be able to choose which religion to practise without restriction? Should they be able to proselytize (to try to convert people who adhere to a different religion)? Must the state treat all religions equally or is it permitted to privilege one as the national religion? In liberal societies the right we are considering is often interpreted strongly, as requiring a positive answer to all these questions. Yet elsewhere a much more limited right is recognized, and it would be hard to prove that human life in those societies is therefore less than decent.

Second, the UN Declaration includes a strong right of political participation. Everyone, it says, has a right to take part in the government of his country, and it goes on to say that this entails regular elections, universal and equal suffrage, and the secret ballot or its equivalent. Once again this is a right that liberals will applaud, and as we saw in the last chapter there are good reasons for wanting those who wield power to be democratically accountable to the people as a whole. But if we are talking about human rights, the question we must ask is whether such a right is really an essential component of a decent human life. For millennia human societies have existed in the absence of such democratic rights, and although by our standards all of them were imperfect, it would be hard to claim that they uniformly failed to provide tolerable conditions of life for their members.

In other words, we need to divide human rights, as they are conventionally understood, into two categories. There is a fairly short list of rights that we can say with some confidence are essential for human beings to possess, no matter how in particular they choose to live their lives. Deprived of these rights, their lives will be cramped, stunted, less than fully human. There is also a longer list of rights that we believe every citizen is entitled to enjoy, and that lay down parameters for a well-governed society. However, there may be different versions of this longer list, depending on who is compiling it. The version favoured by liberal societies may be different from the one preferred by societies with different cultural backgrounds, for example Islamic societies, or East Asian societies with Confucian or Buddhist traditions. So we might conclude that those rights that appear only on one of the longer lists and not on the shorter list should not strictly speaking be called human rights. When the French revolutionaries framed their statement of principle in 1789 they called it The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Taking our cue from them, we might call the rights that belong on the longer list rights of citizenship, meaning by that that these rights ought to be recognized as basic protections for the individual within our political community — while in other communities a different set of rights, overlapping with but not identical with ours, should prevail.

I began this chapter by pointing out that the idea of an area of individual freedom into which government must in no circumstances intrude has become deeply ingrained in liberal societies. What we have discovered is that this idea is actually quite problematic. Once we began to investigate what freedom really means, we saw that in many cases it cannot be enjoyed without positive action on the part of government, providing the resources that keep options open, and the conditions under which people can make free and informed choices. We also found that there was no simple way of defining a sphere of ‘self-regarding’ activity which was of no concern to anyone beyond the individual inside it. And finally we have found that using human rights as a way of setting absolute standards for governments to observe can only work if the list of human rights is kept short and basic. The longer list of citizenship rights will legitimately vary from society to society, and that means that it is a proper subject for political debate. Rights that at one time seemed essential may later prove to be socially harmful (the Founding Fathers of America wanted to ensure that a citizen militia could always be raised to defend the country, and so the Second Amendment to the Constitution gives every American citizen the right to bear arms — a right that now prevents legislators from introducing any effective measures to control the spread of handguns).

Freedom, then, is a very important political value, but not of such importance that it should set absolute limits to the exercise of political authority. In a democracy, especially, questions about the use of resources to promote freedom, about freedom and social responsibility, and about the rights that all citizens should enjoy, will be openly debated, and in answering them people will appeal to many different principles — to equality, to fairness, to the common good, to respect for nature, to the protection of culture, and so forth. As these debates proceed, certain freedoms will be picked out and enshrined as basic rights, perhaps in a written constitution. But this is never the final word: as societies change, as new needs and new problems arise, so too will the shape of freedom itself. Who could have imagined, even 20 years ago, that internet access, electronic surveillance, or gene ownership would very soon assume centre stage in debates about individual liberty? Who can predict which new issues will have taken their place in 20 years’ time?