Knowledge And Decisions

When freedom is conceived of as a relationship among people, trade-offs of freedom for material goods, scientific progress or military power, for example, become quite explicit, instead of being subsumed under a general expansion of “freedom” as sweepingly redefined. The growth of the decision making powers of government may facilitate various specific forms of material progress — even if at the expense of material progress in general — while reducing freedom. That trade-off needs to be made explicit. It is instead muddied over by those who define freedom as options (freedom to)¹¹ — and who have many options to promise in exchange for our freedom. The options approach asks, “What freedom does a starving man have?” The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition — perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things. No matter what ranking may be given to such disagreeable things as indebtedness and constipation, a laxative will not get you out of debt and a pay raise will not insure “regularity.” Conversely on a list of desirable things, gold may rank much higher than peanut butter, but you cannot spread gold on a sandwich and eat it for nourishment. The false issue of ranking things cannot be allowed to confuse questions of distinguishing things.

The mere fact that something may outrank freedom does not make that something become freedom. Moreover, in social trade-offs as in economic trade-offs, all rankings or preferences are incremental at a given point and changeable at other points. Nothing desirable at all is categorically less desirable than something else. Food may be incrementally preferable to any amount of freedom to a starving man, but that does not mean that dessert after a banquet is incrementally preferable to the freedom to go home at the end of the evening. The great social desiderata are so frequently discussed in categorical language that it is easy to forget their incremental nature — and to talk nonsense with seeming profundity as a result. Both Adam Smith and John Rawls made justice the primary virtue of a society,¹² but their meanings were not only different but nearly opposite, because one was speaking incrementally and the other was speaking categorically. To Smith some amount of justice was a prerequisite for any of the other features of society to exist,¹³ but he was far from believing that all increments of justice invariably outranked increments of other things, and in fact he regarded such a belief as counterproductive and doctrinaire.¹⁴ To Rawls, justice is categorically paramount in the sense of not being incrementally inferior to any other consideration, so that one consideration of justice may be sacrificed only to another consideration of justice, but not to any other desired goal.¹⁵ According to Rawls, a policy that benefitted all of the human race except one person should not be adopted, no matter how much they were benefitted, nor even if the one person were completely unharmed, because that would be an “unjust” distribution of the benefits of the policy. Perhaps not many people are likely to agree with Rawls’ conclusion, but many use the same arbitrarily categorical approach to social analysis which led logically to such conclusions.

When two things have to be traded off against one another, it is necessary to understand clearly (1) that they are in fact two different things, and to consider (2) explicitly on what terms we are prepared to incrementally trade the one for the other. Nothing is gained by claiming — or insinuating — that both are the same thing, or that one is just more of that thing than the other. At least nothing is gained from the standpoint of rational decision making. In political reality, much is gained by those who wish to take the decision making power of others into their own hands. Much verbal sleight of hand is practiced with such statements as “security is merely an aspect of freedom.”¹⁶ Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

NONGOVERNMENTAL “POWER”

Not only is freedom confused with other things, so too is its opposite, force. The widespread recognition of the need to use force to counter other force is used to justify expanding governmental force to counter things that are not force at all, but are called force metaphorically for the sake of justifying coercive action against them. Attacks on economic “power” are a common form of justification for expanded government force.