Freedom! What a wonderful word, but try to define it and it may lose its glory.
Freedom is to be allowed to do what you want. Whatever you want! It’s as simple as that.
The more unbounded we are in our actions, the freer we are.
If nothing, absolute nothing, is in your way, you are completely free. If you are able to push everybody aside, if nothing prevents you from hurting others, if you are even permitted to kill, well, then you are absolutely free.
Oh no! Suddenly freedom doesn’t sound so beautiful anymore. But the logic is clear; absolute freedom knows no limits.
So then we should not be given complete freedom, right? A strange good it sure is, because its value doesn’t increase as its amount increases. For other glorious goods, like happiness and love, it’s safe to say that more is better, but freedom is not such a thing. It seems to reach a maximum at some point, and from then on, when more is added, it becomes an evil.
Therefore you must be careful when you cry freedom. You may be given too much.
Is it alright to torture terrorists to extract information? http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/phil/101q.php
Torture is never alright. Torture is always cruel and inhuman and no good law can possibly allow it. It makes it no more acceptable if we perform a linguistic twist and call the tortured human being a terrorist. Nowadays everybody calls their enemy a terrorist, so that designation would not be a restriction. A law which opens up for torture, opens up for sadism, and if all that talk about human values has any meeting, it has to be out of the question.
On a practical level, it is doubtful if information obtained through torture would be really useful, and if it was, it would hardly be worth the loss of integrity that the torturing state would have to suffer.
But still. It is possible to construct all kinds of imagined scenarios and perform far-fetched thought experiments and then maybe nothing can be excluded. Let’s say you could save the life of a million people by torturing a person who had placed an atomic bomb somewhere in a city. If that was really the case, well, then you would have to torture, for if not you would be guilty of causing the loss of a million lives. (Whoever refrains from acting is also guilty.)
The good thing about thought experiments is that they remove all uncertainty and we know for sure what will happen. Here it is a matter of putting the suffering of one person against the death of a million, and the choice is simple. But the law cannot imagine all kinds of odd occurrences. It can only give direction concerning more or less common situations. If you really found yourself in a case where the law was a threat to human life, you would simply have to break the law. Nevertheless the law must be clear: Torture is never alright.
Drugs are banned, but other unhealthy substances are not. That is unjust and illogical, some say, and wish for a world where the laws are perfectly consistent. Alcohol and trans-fat should consequently be outlawed, they suggest, or preferably drugs should be legalized. This kind of argumentation misunderstands the nature of laws and confuses law and morality.
Drugs and alcohol are clearly evils which an ideal society had better be without. That, by the way, also goes for other unpleasant phenomena like traffic jams, unfriendliness and dandruff, and they must also somehow be resisted. But everything cannot be dealt with in the same way. A total ban on all evils would far from eliminate them, but rather create additional evils. On the other hand, a full legalization of everything would immediately result in an unlivable anarchy. Between these two extremes there is no consistently logical strategy. The golden mean includes a pragmatic consideration of the current condition of society.
Alcohol is largely accepted in Western societies, but drugs are not. Whether this attitude is rational or not, it is sufficient reason for keeping the corresponding law as it is and there is no need to get involved in arguments about which is more or less unhealthy. In principle anything unhealthy should be banned, if only the necessary social conditions are already in place.
People should actually be penalized for unhealthy lifestyle. That may sound rather fascist, but given a right understanding of what punishment is or should be it is appropriate. In fact, some unhealthy habits are already sanctioned in liberal societies.
On the face of it, it seems unfair. The penalty for unhealthy conduct is ill health, and one may think that people don’t deserve any additional suffering. That is true, but this is not about what anyone deserves. Governments should stipulate punishment only in order to discourage people from engaging in harmful behavior. The actual penalty that is implemented after the misdeed has occurred is not so interesting. What matters is the preventive effect that the threat of punishment may have.
Now the possible illness that could be the result of certain habits may seem psychologically far off and something we avoid thinking about. Often we are only able to react to threats that are more immediate. If the punishment for a cigarette or a glass of wine is high taxes or banishment from the site, that might make us abstain. Likewise the fear of the roadside police may prevent speeding more effectively that the fear of accidents.
Punishment only makes sense because the free will does not exist.
Our will is bound by whatever circumstances we are in. We did not choose them. Chance leads us from one place to the next and we don’t know clearly what we are doing when we take each step. We are manipulated; lured by rewards or threatened by penalties. Our actions are steered.
The state and the laws also participate in this manipulation, of course they do, for society wants obedient members. It may be a pity that we are not free, but since this is our fate, we might as well give up our freedom to commit crime. Thus the state threatens to punish whoever breaks the law and most of us obey. This is how society works, somehow. Because we are unfortunately not free, we are fortunately not criminals.
Imagine if we were really free and nothing could make us act against our own will. Then punishment would have lost its purpose. The state could have threatened the most draconian measures, but the free person would have continued his independent and lonely way, committed crimes according to whim and ignored society. Luckily we are not free.
Law is not morality, but the law should be moral.
The law is there to organize society and promote order, and therefore it ultimately has the same aim as morality; a condition where mutual aid is encouraged and injury avoided.
But the law is social and morality is personal and contradictions will occur. The written laws cannot regulate personal lifestyle, for that would make legislation unnecessarily complicated, create too many criminals and lead to disorder and arbitrariness; that is the opposite of what was intended. If the law intervenes too much in morality, it will compromise morality.
All legislation must search for what is pragmatically possible exactly to promote morality. The modern liberal is wrong to think that the individual way of life is irrelevant to lawmaking. It is highly relevant because individual well-being is the ultimate measure of a successful society, and any conduct that is hurtful for the individual will also hurt society.
There is a complicated balancing act between unalterable goals and pragmatic necessity. Moral rigidity and fanaticism in legislation may lead to unintended immoral conduct elsewhere in the social labyrinth. (e.g. a ban on alcohol may lead to an increase in violent crime) However, the original moral intention may still be right.
Thou shalt break the law. The law is human, and to be human is to err. That also goes for the rulers of your society and there is little reason to believe that those man-made rules that you are told to obey are always good. You are responsible for your own action and therefore only your own conscience can decide if a law is good and worth obeying. Whoever follows a bad law is morally convicted and a hundred percent law-abiding citizen may commit a lot of evil.
This is perhaps easily understood if we imagine ourselves as citizens in a horrible Nazi state. If the law commands you to kill Jews, you would hopefully refuse to obey. But the laws are not perfect even in your comparatively gentle society and only your skeptical attention can reveal them.
It is dangerous to have a blind confidence in the law, and this thoughtless respect for rules is exactly what makes apparently normal people accomplices to the atrocities of totalitarian states. But your state also commits injustice, and every time you obey without thinking, you may be guilty.
Yes, why? What gives a fallible human being the right to punish another, and what right does the state have to condemn its citizens? Who can really say that another human being deserves to suffer?
Someone has done something wrong, broken a law, injured another, and therefore justice presumably demands that must be injured himself. An eye costs an eye and a tooth is the price of a tooth, but no one gets back what is lost when violence is returned. If the thief pays back what he has stolen, the damage is repaired and the world is again in balance, but if the murderer is murdered and the robber goes to jail, then damage is added to damage and the world is even more miserable.
Still we punish. We think we do it for justice, but in the human court there is no justice. No, we punish simply because that’s the way of our society and we know no other way. It is a pragmatic necessity, but no justice. The potential criminal must know that punishment will come if he breaks the law, and hopefully he will then abstain from crime. Punishment is there to deter people from breaking the law and that is all there is to it. We have to punish, but we should do it reluctantly.
People have a superstitious belief in the court of justice. Whoever is brought to court is only suspected and then the omniscient tribunal will somehow be able to unravel the truth.
He is suspected of war crimes, it is said. No, he isn’t. He is accused. The court will then decide if it agrees with the accusation. It’s not a matter of suspicion, because a suspicion may be proved.
How do you prove a war crime? Do you count the number of civilians killed and describe the horror of war. If that’s all, many American presidents would have been automatically convicted. No, the real question is whether or not the war was just, and who can objectively answer that question?
Suspected of war crimes? Suspected of having waged an unjust war? It is superstition to believe that a court can prove what can never be proved.
A person should be allowed to decide for himself; that sounds like a good principle. A nation should also have the right of self-determination; that sounds like a logical continuation. But a nation is not a person, and the analogy is very doubtful.
A person is a natural unity, but a nation, what is that? It is often rather arbitrary who are to be called a nation.
Is there a British nation or a Scottish nation? In a sense those two nations are mutually exclusive. If the British are allowed to decide for themselves the Scots are not, and Scottish self-determination would reduce the British one.
Let’s say Britain is a free nation and the British people accordingly a free people. That would also include those who inhabits the northern part of the kingdom, so let’s assume that they also felt free. But one day it occurred to someone that Northern Britain, Scotland that is, was a separate nation. They suddenly perceived that this nation was dominated by someone outside of it and therefore the Scots could no longer be considered free. That means that they had lost their freedom even though no real change had taken place.
Could that be possible? Isn’t freedom something more substantial than that? It may seem that it isn’t. Freedom is often defined away or granted to unsuspecting people who couldn’t care less.
A Bear - Poles Apart 