Pro-Choice
The long struggle against communism kept libertarians and traditionalist conservatives allied despite their often significant philosophical differences. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, many commentators have speculated on the likelihood of growing strains in the libertarian-conservative relationship. Usually the speculation has centered on splits between libertarians and the religious right over such moral or "social" issues as abortion, gay rights, school prayer, and the drug war. Lately, however, a lot of mainstream conservatives have decided to challenge libertarians on the basic issue of, well, liberty. As Walter Olson pointed out in the July issue of Reason, the Weekly Standard has become a veritable Anti-Libertarian Central, bristling with articles like "Up from Libertarianism" and "The Libertarian Temptation."
The more intellectual conservatives have focused their fire on "the right to choose"-not just, or not even, the right to choose abortion, but the general right to choose one's course in life. William Kristol, editor of the Standard, writes in Commentary, "Conservatism's more fundamental mandate is to take on the sacred cow of liberalism-choice." Adam Wolfson, executive editor of The Public Interest, despairs in a different issue of Commentary that "the 'right to choose' is something which not only upper-middle-class liberals but all Americans take for granted." He worries that people have come to expect that they have a right to choose not just abortion but premarital sex, pornography, and even drugs.
Note that Kristol and Wolfson are criticizing not just particular choices but the right to choose itself. It is, of course, entirely reasonable for public-spirited citizens to urge others to make better choices-to practice temperance or even abstinence with regard to drugs and sex, to avoid divorce, to spend more time with their children, to treat employees with respect, to give more to charity. But the distinction between a free and an unfree society is that such advice remains just that, and the adult individual remains free to accept or reject it without legal sanction.
Conservatives wrap themselves in the mantle of American tradition, but on this key point they have trouble making it fit. The Declaration of Independence not only claims for all people the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but declares that governments derive their powers "from the consent of the governed." Thomas Jefferson and the other signers apparently believed that choice was involved in the very foundation of the American republic. That's what "consent" means: that we have a choice, and we have chosen to delegate some of our rights to a government under the Constitution, though we retain the right "to alter or abolish it" if it becomes destructive of our rights.
Kristol and Wolfson are struggling, not just against the principles on which America was founded, but against the modern world. It is capitalism that has given us moderns so many choices. Capitalism is the economic system of free people; it is what happens when you let people alone. The virtues that capitalism rewards-prudence, discipline, initiative, self-reliance, new ideas-and the affluence it creates tend to push people in the direction of confidence in their own abilities, skepticism about organized authority, and a desire to manage their own affairs in all realms of life. That's why capitalism is not in the long run compatible with political repression or governmental restrictions on freedom.
Freedom is also necessary for the development of strong moral character. Surely Kristol and Wolfson don't want to undermine the bourgeois virtues, but the effect of restricting choice is to eliminate the incentive and the opportunity for people to make good choices and develop good habits. People do not develop prudence, self-reliance, thrift, and temperance when their choices are imposed by force. Welfare-state liberals undermine moral character when they subsidize indulgence in destructive choices. Big-government conservatives undermine character when they deny people the right to shape their own characters through their choices.
Conservatives seem to have a surprising amount of difficulty distinguishing between coercive, government-imposed restrictions on choice and the kinds of voluntary social institutions that, after we consent to participate in them, limit our choices. The distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb told a gathering recently that civil society is not rooted in liberty; it includes such freedom-limiting institutions as marriage, churches, and universities. There's a confusion here about the meaning of freedom. We sometimes use "free" to mean "able to do what I want to do without constraint." The refrain of a 1950s country song by Hank Snow goes, "You've got a house and a wife and a job, Bob, but I'm still free." Yes, a house and a wife and a job limit one's freedom in the sense that one has voluntarily agreed to pay the mortgage every month, to be faithful, and to show up for work every day. The various contracts we enter involve various degrees of commitment: under traditional "employment at will" doctrine, I can quit my job-or be fired-at any time; a mortgage is more difficult to escape; and it is quite reasonable that a marriage, especially when children are involved, is even more difficult to leave. But in accepting such limitations on our freedom of action we do not give up liberty-we exercise it.
Of course, in the assault on choice, welfare-state liberals and big-government conservatives find themselves coming together. The leftist writer Robert Kuttner deplores Americans' "excess amount of choice" in his latest anti-market jeremiad, Everything for Sale. No doubt Kuttner is surprised to find himself on the same side of such a basic issue as Kristol and Wolfson, but that may be a harbinger of the politics of the future.
Cato Policy Report, July/August 1997
Pro-Life
Back in 1997 I wrote an editorial, titled "Pro-Choice," about conservatives and liberals who want to deny people choice in all sorts of areas. So I thought it was time I wrote a "pro-life" editorial. This time I want to focus on one of the most important choices: the choice of life over death. (And once again, I'm not writing about abortion.) Not much controversy here, right? Everyone prefers life to death. Everyone wants to live as long as possible. You'd think so. But no, it turns out that lots of people are not so sure that life is a good thing.
The most obvious are Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists. Islamic martyrs "love death as you love life," bin Laden tells an interviewer. "The Americans are fighting so they can live and enjoy the material things in this life," a Taliban spokesman says, "but we are fighting so we can die in the cause of Allah." In a video for his followers, bin Laden intones, "The love of this world is wrong."
And there he reaches the crux of the issue. He is wrong. This world is well worth loving. It is right and good for human beings to try to make the most of life on this earth. The Americans are indeed "fighting so they can live and enjoy the material things of this life." Not just material things, of course-we fight for such values as love, sex, family, friendship, community, integrity, and courage. But at the root of all these is the love of life in all its wonder and happiness.
One of the biggest complaints modern Americans have about life is how stressed they feel, how they are pulled in so many directions. Why are we stressed? Not because we have to work longer hours than we used to. Whatever the statisticians may tell us about the hours we work, we know that our grandparents and their grandparents worked harder than we do to achieve a much lower standard of living. How many hours a week would I have to work at their jobs, and in their economy, to afford a small house without air conditioning, radio, television, or a refrigerator? No, the problem today is that capitalism has given us so many options; but who would want to give up all that abundance?
Or all the interestingness? Whatever your interests, the modern world is filled with enough to keep you busy for a lifetime. Every day there's more news about science, politics, international affairs, sports, entertainment, and so on-not to mention new books, new movies, new music, new religions, even new family and friends. I for one don't want to die because I want to find out what happens next-in everything from sports to politics to TV soaps to the newest scientific discoveries.
Sadly, the Islamic terrorists are not the only people who see life as a limited blessing. The debates over genetic engineering have brought out our native-born anti-lifers in droves. One of the most-quoted bioethicists of our time, Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center, says: "The worst possible way to resolve [the question of life extension] is to leave it up to individual choice. There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death."
Callahan is a liberal, in the modern welfarist sense. Conservatives such as philosopher Leon Kass, named to head President Bush's Council on Bioethics, and scholar Francis Fukuyama, a member of the council, sound remarkably similar. In a debate at the Cato Institute, Fukuyama said, "The whole effort to defeat death, it seems to me, is a kind of striving that speaks of a kind of serious lack of a certain kind of moral perspective." A certain kind, perhaps.
Kass writes, "The finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual." In a speech in Jerusalem two years ago, he complained that Jewish scholars "nearly always come down strongly in favor of medical progress and on the side of life-more life, stronger life, new life." He objects to their making "victory over mortality" the goal of medical science. This Jewish attitude has also been noticed in the Middle East, where Hamas leader Ismail Haniya says that Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die."
And then there are the environmental extremists, who think there's just too much human life on earth. Jacques Cousteau told the UNESCO Courier in 1991, "In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day." Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes, "We humans have become a disease, the humanpox." Celebrated young novelist William T. Vollman says, "I would say there are too many people in the world and maybe something like AIDS or something like war may be a good thing on that level."
There are many ways to divide people according to their political beliefs-communist and anti-communist, liberal and conservative, libertarian and statist, reactionary and modernist, and so on. But the issue of whether you celebrate life on this earth and want to extend it or think that "the conquest of death" lacks any value seems a good place to draw a line. With enemies of life in abundance, maybe we need what Hayek called a party of life, a "party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution," a party that appreciates and encourages the enjoyment of life on this earth. And since choice is an essential part of human life, the pro-life party must be pro-choice as well. The Declaration of Independence, which not only declares that governments derive their powers "from the consent of the governed" but also claims for all people the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, can serve as the party manifesto.
Cato Policy Report, July/August 2002
Rights, Responsibilities, and Community
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. United States Declaration of Independence
A journalist asked me recently what I thought of a communitarian proposal to "suspend for a while the minting of new rights." How many ways, I thought, does that get it wrong? Communitarians seem to see rights as little boxes; when you have too many, the room gets full. In my view, we have only one right-or an infinite number. The one fundamental human right is the right to live your life as you choose, as long as you do not infringe on the equal rights of others. But that one right has infinite implications. As James Wilson, a signer of the Constitution, said in response to a proposal that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution, "Enumerate all the rights of man! I am sure, sirs, that no gentleman in the late Convention would have attempted such a thing." After all, a person has a right to wear a hat, or not; to marry, or not; to grow beans, or apples, or to open a haberdashery. Indeed, though that right is not recognized in current federal law, a person has a right to buy an orange from a willing seller even though the orange is only 2 3/8 inches in diameter.
It is impossible to enumerate a priori all the rights we have; we usually go to the trouble of identifying them only when someone proposes to limit one or another. Treating rights as tangible claims that must be limited in number gets the whole concept wrong.
Rights and Responsibilities
It is certainly true that every right carries with it a correlative responsibility. My right to speak freely implies your responsibility not to interfere with my exercise of that right. Your right to private property implies my responsibility not to steal it, or to force you to use it in the way I demand. In short, the protection of my rights entails my responsibility to respect the rights of others. So why do I feel uncomfortable when I hear communitarians talk about "rights and responsibilities"? The problem is that there are three senses of the term "responsibility" that are frequently confused.
First, there are the responsibilities noted above, the obligations that correlate with other people's rights. Second, there are the responsibilities that some would insist we assume in order to exercise our rights. This sense, frequently found in communitarian writings, echoes the ancien régime approach, the notion of rights as privileges that we retain only so long as we use them responsibly. That idea degrades the American tradition of individualism. It implies that we have our rights only as long as someone-the government, in practice-approves of the way we use them. In fact, as the Declaration of Independence tells us, humans have rights before they enter into governments, which are created for the very purpose of protecting those rights.
People rarely try to take away our rights when they think we are using them responsibly. No one tries to censor popular, mainstream speech; rather, it is obscene or radical speech that is frequently threatened. We must defend even the irresponsible use of rights because they are rights and not privileges. To paraphrase the moving words of Martin Niemoller in a modern American context: "They came first for the pornographers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a pornographer. Then they came for the drug dealers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a drug dealer. Then they came for the insider traders, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an insider trader. Then they came for the Branch Davidians, and I didn't speak up because I was a mainstream Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." Governments will never begin by taking away the rights of average citizens and taxpayers. But by establishing legal precedents in attacks on the rights of despised groups, governments lay the groundwork for the narrowing of everyone's rights.
Third, there are the moral responsibilities that we have outside the realm of rights. The Communitarian Platform claims that "the language of rights is morally incomplete." Of course, that is true; rights pertain only to a certain domain of morality, a narrow domain in fact, not to all of morality. Rights establish certain minimal standards for how we must treat each other: We must not kill, rape, rob, or otherwise initiate force against each other. That leaves a great many options to be dealt with by other theories of morality. But that fact does not mean that the idea of rights is invalid or incomplete in the domain where it applies; it just means that most of the decisions we make every day involve choices that are only broadly circumscribed by the obligation to respect each other's rights.
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Excerpted from The POLITICS of FREEDOM by David Boaz Copyright © 2008 by Cato Institute. Excerpted by permission.
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