I saw something several days ago that brought back to my mind what George Will, the conservative commentator, had said in a college commencement exercise many years ago. What he said was something like that: “There are people who have values and then there are people who have virtue.” He proceeded to say that one can argue Adolf Hitler had values (he valued the idea of the (supposed but false) superiority of the Arian race) but George Washington had both values and virtue (he fought for the independence of his people).
And so it is about freedom. We praise it as one of the greatest values; but do we use it with virtue? Freedom is like a floodgate. It engenders so many other things. With freedom we can be moral agents, that is, capable to demonstrate our morality by choosing between good and evil. With freedom we can have self-determination by choosing to be what we wish to be. And with freedom we can choose big and important things (whom to love or vote for) or small and pedestrian things (where to shop) that make life a personal experience.
But freedom has its challenges. How we treat our freedom and that of others is one of them. We often spend more energy trying to limit the freedoms of others than ensuring our freedom becomes an instrument of goodness. My two previous posts treated this issue. John Locke and the Enlightenment helped make the idea of individual freedom a fundamental value of the West and as such it made its way into the political declarations of the French and American Revolutions. How ironic, though, that Western civilization, which so much prizes the ideal of freedom, has been responsible for the oppression and coercion of countless people around the globe.
Another challenge is this. Freedom as a value can collide with freedom as a virtue when the right of freedom obtains a fetish power to the extent an individual considers the right to be superior to the responsibilities it entails. This seems to be more of an affliction of western societies than Asian societies which value social harmony and goals, even at the expense of individual freedom. Americans are perhaps the most representative of Westerners in their ardent advocacy of the right of individual freedom. But how well do we use this right?
What triggered these thoughts about freedom was a scene on TV several weeks ago. It was when advocates of gun rights demonstrated in Richmond, Virginia. A reporter asked a few of them what brought them to the rally and their feverish reply was “to protect our right to carry guns.” I juxtaposed that reply to the reality of gun ownership and its consequences in the US. Americans own about 393 million guns or 46% of all the guns owned by civilians in the world. Gun violence and gun-related suicides are major causes of death in this country. Every year dozens of people from students to church-goers and mall-shoppers are gunned down in acts of mass shootings. International statistics draw a clear association between number of guns and gun-related deaths. Yet, gun enthusiasts, with help from NRA, are unrelenting in their defense of unregulated gun ownership no matter how much misery it causes the society. Is this virtuous defense of freedom?
On a different level, Americans are abandoning smaller cars in favor of pick-up trucks and SUVs whether they truly need them or not. Car manufacturers in the US are closing down lines for sedans to concentrate on the higher-margin SUVs. How does that contribute to clean air, to road maintenance, and the climate? If we consume in order to “keep up with the Joneses” instead of our real needs, how virtuous is this use of freedom?
And then, a piece of news that really shocked me. The Watkins College of Arts in Nashville had to merge with another local college, Belmont University. But Belmont happens to be a Christian institution that requires all its faculty and staff to be Christian. So Belmont’s provost announced that the non-Christian faculty of Watkins College could not continue working at Belmont, though, later Watkins’ president said that some faculty would be considered for employment. The artistic expression of the transferring Watkins’ students would also might have to be modified to make it appropriate for Belmont audiences. Again, it is in the name of freedom, here religious freedom, that an institution practices a form of discrimination. First, of all, how Christian is this? And secondly, is it a virtuous application of freedom?
Down the list of abused freedoms, we have the freedoms of corporations. They clamor for freedom to operate without regulations. Fine. We know regulations add to the cost of doing business and that cost is passed on to the whole society. But are corporations virtuous users of business freedom? I used to tell my business students that if they wished to keep regulation and its burden down, they should behave as ethical managers. Those executives that abuse corporate freedoms spoil it for all businesses as society finds it necessary to regulate business behavior. Their non-virtuous use of freedom is a cost to all of us just like the Richmond guys’ enthusiasm for free guns.
And because this is a seminal week in the political history of the US, I have to talk about freedom in the acts of politicians. The Republican senators found themselves in a rare moment of history. Many of them could have acted as free individuals, true to their privately expressed admission of wrong doing on part of the president, and free of the fear of risking their political future. The excuse that Democratic senators might not have behaved any different is like telling a cop that you should not get a speeding ticker because everybody else drove as fast as you. In serving in a court you should take care of both, procedural justice (fairness in the rules of the game) and distributive justice (fairness in the verdict). All but two Republicans decided to sacrifice procedural justice (not calling witnesses) so that they would not face a much harder decision in distributing justice.
Many more examples could be cited. The point is that to claim and defend the right of individual freedom, as we so loudly do in the West, is only half of the solution if it is wasted. And the danger is that there always are out there those who proclaim to know how to make freedoms virtuous but there is no guarantee the way they understand virtue is the same as each one of us does.
Let's Reason 