Mr. Machan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State College, Bakersfield.
The philosophy of freedom has not always fared so well as has the practice of freedom. For instance, the American economic system, flowering under conditions of comparative freedom, has yielded a virtual miracle of goods and services, whereas the political philosophy of liberty—the system’s moral framework—has fallen out of favor with Americans. And today’s enemies of liberty look at the moral climate and propose that we blame it on America’s economic success. They say that the free enterprise system—essentially the voluntary cooperation of individuals in their economic activities—did not and does not work. They attempt to prove this on the grounds that economic efficiency is not served by freedom of production and exchange; but what they are really complaining about is that the free market has not done what it was never designed to do: it has not made everyone morally perfect.
The problem here is a failure to recognize the difference between political and personal behavior. The former has to do with how people should live together in peace, while the latter concerns one’s conduct of his own life. An effective political system may be approximated without the guarantee that citizens of the system will all be good individuals. It is precisely so as to secure the possibility for the highest degree of moral development on each person’s part that people must be free from each other’s aggression.
It is man’s personal freedom, his capacity for choice, that forms the philosophical base of the political system we call the free society. If men were not free in this basic sense, they could not help doing what they do; and to expect them to refrain from interfering with each other’s lives would be irrational. And so would be the desire for a free society.
A free political society would require some means of protection against those who would trespass upon or attack the lives and properties of peaceful persons. This conviction has been the impetus behind people’s support for some kind of political system, that is, for the institution of government.
What the enemies of freedom have never understood is that there simply is no political means by which to make people good. A free society does, however, stop those who try to lord it over others. If a culture is morally defective, there is nothing that politically free men can do to induce morality except to educate as energetically and effectively as their talents and devotion to virtue permit. It is a mistake to blame free men for not attempting to make others better through political means: a person who respects freedom cannot aspire to become a philosopher king without contradicting himself; it is illogical to preach that no man should rule others and at the same time attempt to bring about this condition of freedom and virtue by force!
When individuals fail to measure up in moral qualities as is true of many in America today, this means they are acting without questioning what is right or wrong. The idea that individuals can aspire to moral virtue has been down-graded; instead, the collective, the group, the society has been given the responsibility of building the good life. Individualism always has been central to the American economic system, but in matters of personal morality the individual was not widely recognized to have great significance and responsibility. Instead, the community, the church, the body politic assumed the role of moral leadership.
Today, when it is obvious to most that morality cannot be politicalized and that something is drastically wrong, people are rejecting even the possibility of being good. Many college and university students express the view that right and wrong cannot be known; we are capable only of mindless action. Not only students and young people but members of the older generation are generally pessimistic about the possibility of building a better life for themselves and a better society.
Overt enemies of the free society often capitalize on this cultural moral vacuum by attributing it to the relative freedom most people enjoyed in the early days of America and other Western societies which were influenced by the English classical liberal tradition (of Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill). By pointing to some of the real and alleged personal failings of people who have been part of the American culture, they would have us believe that there is a necessary connection between political freedom and personal misconduct. There is, of course, a necessary connection between freedom and the possibility of evil, just as there is such a connection between freedom and the possibility of good. But what is important is that both good and evil are matters of personal conduct. No one can make another person good or evil. Harming someone who is good will not make him evil, nor will helping an evil person make him good, in the final analysis. Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are all responses to good and evil, but they are not primary causes.
Those who contend that the free society is bad for people, because people who have been free did not always behave well, are mistaken. It is, in fact, only in a free society that the wrong-headedness, the personal mischievousness of some people, does not necessarily have a harmful effect on all. In socialism, where everyone has a hand in the life of everyone else, the evil that men do must live after them—and beside them, and around them, and on and on. The mismanagement of some collectivist government project burdens us all. Nor is it possible to uncover those who are responsible for the mismanagement. The abandonment of self-responsibility in favor of collective action invariably spreads the lack of responsibility throughout society.
Today, in a climate of fear and moral uncertainty, unscrupulous persons make all sorts of attempts to gain political power over people. Their arguing that the free society and the corresponding free market produce human evil must be challenged. A free society may not produce everything that everyone would like; but free men have the option to pursue their own goals and aims. When there is no freedom, a person cannot even aspire toward satisfying his aims privately. When one’s life is controlled by political masters and things are going badly, there is little personal incentive toward improvement, and understandably so. But in freedom, one man’s efforts suffice to make his own life, at least, more productive or otherwise worth while. And this may encourage others to do likewise.
To try to improve the quality of life in a given society by centralizing it under political leadership is futile. Such efforts simply diffuse responsibility and reduce the likelihood of moral improvement. Needed, instead, is a concentrated effort to restore to people both their rights and their responsibilities. Those who value human life and look for it to be lived well should encourage progress toward a free society.