Freedom is a good thing, and everyone save a few old people in Russia and a few of the world’s dictators would agree with me about that. Since I’m pretty sure that none of those people read the Orthodox Heretic, I’m not going to talk about the benefits that come from freedom. Instead, I’ll ask a related question: “What kind of good thing is freedom?”
In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes a state where people are completely free in the ‘state of nature.’ By nature then, we have the right to do whatever it is that we want to do. Unlimited freedom – is that not a good thing? Hobbes correctly points out that it is not. He says that when everyone is free to do whatever they want, like stealing and killing, life would be ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ His point was that for the sake of happiness, we should be willing to give up some of our natural freedom and enter into a social contract. This contract of laws, of course, places severe restrictions on our liberty; however, given the boost in happiness that we get from living in a society governed by laws, we should be willing to make the exchange. Hobbes’ ideas, via Locke especially, had a deep impact on the Founders.
This simple analysis reminds us what is true about freedom, namely, that it is not an absolute good. If it were an absolute good, it would be good independently of the circumstances or the consequences. But our Founders, like any founders of any society, reject the idea that freedom is good-in-itself. Importantly, when freedom will make us less happy, as is true in the case of the state of nature, we should limit freedom for the sake of happiness.
I’m afraid that our friends the libertarians gloss over this fact and instead think of freedom as an absolute good. I don’t mean to say that they are anarchists who want to overthrow laws and the government entirely, but rather that they have forgotten the principle that freedom must be limited when it severely conflicts with our pursuit of happiness.
Next week I will show how our Founders put this principle into practice not just by instituting laws against killing and stealing, but about bankruptcy.
