Classical liberalism #6: How far does individual freedom reach? | Daniel Jacobson | Big Think

The term liberals changed its meaning over the course of the 20th century, and it's confusing in a lot of ways. Nowadays, people use it often, especially in the United States, as a synonym for left-wing or progressive. But liberalism was a movement in political philosophy in the history of ideas that was more coherent than that and that has some aspects of left-wing and some aspects of right-wing politics. So it's not really useful to try to locate it on some political spectrum.

The best way to think of liberalism, I think, is as individualist rather than statist. The classical liberals, and I'll just use "liberal" from now on to mean classical liberal, valued individual rights, personal responsibility, and democracy. They favored democracy because democracy was the rule of the people by the people, rather than the rule by someone else. However, they saw it as having some inherent dangers.

Rule of law: the same rule should apply to everyone in society. But liberals thought that laws should be constrained; there were limits to what legal authority could do to the individual and how that could compel the individual. Liberals see freedom primarily in terms of what's sometimes called negative freedom—freedom from being compelled either by the state or by other people, by society, as opposed to the freedom to do various things.

What kind of political coercion would be a violation of individual freedom? Well, for Mill, the sphere of Liberty—this doctrine of the rights of individuality, he calls it—extends to self-sovereignty, my sovereignty over my own mind and body, to the liberty of us to associate consensually, and to liberties of conscience, including freedom of speech. Those are inviolable liberties. This is a radical doctrine, even for liberals, because it means that all forms of compulsion designed to protect people from themselves, to keep people from harming themselves, or to force people to do things that are good for them, are illegitimate.

Now, it should be said, we're talking about sound-minded adults here, not children and people with mental illness. But even there, it would rule out many forms of legislation as fundamentally illegitimate. It would rule out laws that prohibit the use of recreational or experimental drugs, for instance. It would rule out seatbelt laws. Mill thinks that all of that—that sort of legislative paternalism—is fundamentally illegitimate, not because he thinks there aren't bad choices, but because he believes that it's up to individuals to choose whether they're going to do the things that are genuinely best for them.

So let's try taking that seriously. What would happen if we allowed, say, recreational drug use of all kinds? Not just legalizing marijuana, but legalizing opiates, say. Well, it's hard to justify the legalization of all drugs, but one thing that we can see is the costs and ineffectiveness of prohibition. Prohibition hasn't stopped an epidemic of opiate use; it has great financial costs, and it also has costs in terms of human lives.

Well, it's not clear to me that Mill was right that we have this absolute sovereignty over our bodies. I do think that it's clear that there are great costs for trying to prohibit what people do to themselves. It can be argued that we should be further towards Mill than we actually are, that we should allow people more freedom to decide how they're going to treat their own mind and body than we actually do.

There are trade-offs between different forms of good, and most liberals aren't quite as radical as Mill. They're not quite as radical, not just because there are some drugs that they think it's okay to prohibit, that they believe the costs of prohibition aren't as great as the costs of legalization would be. But also because mandatory vaccinations, for instance, are coercively imposed on people who doubt their efficacy or think that they are dangerous. Nevertheless, most liberals think that mandatory vaccination is worthwhile despite the sacrifice in individual freedom that it implies.