Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (7 page)

Here one can see clearly some of the ways that fairness and equality are contested. For example, where progressives tend to support equality of distribution and need-based fairness, conservatives prefer equality of opportunity and contractual fairness.

We have been tracing the logic of freedom by looking at where one person imposes on the freedom of another: harm, coercion, the taking of property, the taking of rights, and injustice. Correspondingly, security, justice, the rule of law, fairness, and equality contribute to the idea of freedom.

In all the cases of imposition on freedom, it is a person who interferes with another’s freedom. And in all cases, there is a possibility of
not
imposing, of not interfering with someone else achieving his or her goals. When corporations are metaphorically thought of as persons, then the courts can see corporations as interfering with the freedoms of their customers, their employees, or the public.

If these two conditions hold in all cases of the imposition on freedom, what happens in cases where one or the other does
not
hold? In those cases there can be no imposition on freedom.
That is, the issue of freedom, or of the imposition on it, cannot arise. In short, these two conditions define the limits of the application of the idea of freedom.

If a storm were to cut your telephone lines, it would be odd to think of that as an abridgment of your freedom. But if the FBI were to cut your telephone lines, it would definitely be an abridgment of your freedom.

Suppose the Texas Rangers baseball team is playing the Oakland As in the playoffs. If the Rangers win fair and square, it would not be considered an abridgment of Oakland’s freedom. But if the president ordered the As to be arrested and held as suspected terrorists just until they forfeited the playoff games to Texas, that would be an abridgment of their freedom.

Why?

In all cases of interference with freedom, someone’s purposes are thwarted. The converse is not true. Purposes can be thwarted without it being an issue of freedom. Under what circumstances is this true?

The most interesting cases I have found are those of natural causes and competition. What makes these cases interesting is that the concepts of nature and competition are both contested, and the issue of whether or not freedom has been abridged depends on how they are contested.

The laws of the natural world constrain us. I am not free to float up off the ground or to dematerialize here and materialize in
Paris. Yet this does not count as an interference with my freedom. What defies physical possibility is not seen as an abridgment of freedom. There is no disagreement here.

What is physically impossible for all human beings doesn’t count. Our physical nature is taken for granted. Freedom is about possibility, and how other people interfere with it. Where there is no possibility, there can be no interference.

Nature can impose harm, exert overpowering force, take your property, and make it impossible to do what normal human beings do. And nature is certainly not just! But an earthquake is not seen as an abridgment of freedom, though a terrorist attack is. The difference is whether the imposition has a human or natural cause.

Human nature, as we have seen, matters in a different way for freedom. When nature is internal to a human being, the human being has no possibility but to act according to his or her nature. Being born left-handed is not seen as an abridgment of your freedom. Nor is being born short.

What we take to be human nature is central to the American idea of freedom. In general, we are free to engage in behavior that is understood as natural and normal. Within the uncontested range, freedom extends to engaging in trade (but not selling secrets), expressing your ideas (but not identifying an undercover CIA agent), associating with people of one’s choice (except in the case of conspiracy). These are called inalienable rights—freedom of speech, assembly, association, and so on.

But what counts as “natural and normal” is often contested. Conservatives, for example, talk constantly about the “homosexual lifestyle”—a frame that takes homosexuality out of the arena of nature and into the arena of human choice. Progressives, correspondingly, argue that homosexuality is a matter of nature, not “lifestyle,” and is therefore a matter of inalienable rights. Marriage for homosexuals is seen as a freedom issue.

Consider cases of scarce resources, where there is not enough for everyone. These are situations defined by the fact that not everyone can achieve his or her goals. When one person gets a scarce resource, another person may be automatically precluded from getting it. There is no possibility for everyone to freely get the scarce resource.

Such cases often explicitly or implicitly fall under the category of competition. Freedom to compete is a form of freedom.

But what happens when you are in a competition? Is winning a competition interfering with the freedom of the losers? The answer is no. The category of a competition removes the issue of interfering with the freedom of the others in the competition. When Tiger Woods wins a golf tournament, he is not abridging the freedom of the other players. One company is not seen as interfering with the freedom of another if it makes a better product that the public buys and thereby puts the other company out of business.

However, it is common for there to be rules and laws governing competition. If the rules or laws are violated, the result may be injustice, and injustice does impose on freedom. Thus, in the competition for jobs, unjust hiring practices can be abridgments of freedom.

There are also mores governing competitions. When Wal-Mart enters a small community, it often puts small local shops out of business, paying lower wages and offering no medical benefits, often forcing the community to pay for emergency medical care. Progressives tend to see this not as fair competition but as an unethical “raid” on a community—and an imposition on its freedom.

The contestation here is a question of what is to count as competition and how the rules that govern the competition are defined. Take the question of college admissions and affirmative
action. In the case of Proposition 209 in California some years ago, conservatives framed college admissions in terms of a competition for admission. In the American tradition of fairness in competition, the criteria should be clear and objective—say, grades and SAT scores—and race, gender, and ethnicity should be irrelevant.

But the university did not consider admissions exclusively in terms of a competition over grades and standardized test scores. It saw the real competition outside the university—in the job market and in impoverished communities’ need for skilled professionals. The university saw admissions as part of a complex moral mission: not just to educate the best and the brightest, those with the highest GPAs and test scores, but also to provide social, cultural, and educational capital to minority students who were talented but who historically lacked access to this capital. The university’s goal was to give minorities a fair chance in the job market and to train professionals—doctors, teachers, lawyers, and engineers—who wanted to work in underserved communities. These are freedom issues, not in admissions but in the world outside the university, and the university saw itself as promoting freedom, as providing access, in the world at large. The university also saw its educational mission as providing a culturally diverse student body, which would promote tolerance (freedom from discrimination) and help to educate students about California’s diverse cultural heritage (freedom of access to knowledge).

The university failed in communicating its moral and educational mission to the public, while conservative opponents succeeded in framing admissions purely as a competition to be conducted fairly according to a narrow body of criteria, where unfair competition (based on race and ethnicity) compromised freedom.

Another example of contestation over what counts as competition is the issue of whether “intelligent design” is to be taught as science. Advocates of intelligent design have based
their public relations campaign on the two very different meanings of the word “theory.” In everyday speech, there is a frame concerning truth. A “theory” is not an established truth and contrasts with a “fact.” “Just a theory” in this frame suggests that there is no good reason to believe it.

But science is about more than mere belief or conjecture. Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth. Science is fundamentally about freedom, freedom of inquiry into the truth without the bias of initial faith or belief. Within science as an institution, a “scientific theory” is in fact a material explanation of a huge range of data based on experiment and evidence. Within science, it is normal for theories to compete. The basis of competition is clear: amount of evidence, convergence of independent evidence from many areas, coverage of data, crucial experiments, degree and depth of explanation. The judges of the competition are distinguished scientists who have spent their careers studying the scientific evidence.

In the science of biology, evolution wins the competition, governed by the rules of the scientific method, hands down. There are no other legitimate competitors. Freedom here is freedom of objective inquiry, on the basis of evidence and explanation. Other theories are free to enter the competition, but if they do not follow the rules of the competition, they will be eliminated—fairly and justly.

Intelligent design advocates, who are often fundamentalist Christians, argue that living creatures are too well and intricately “designed” to have evolved without a designer—namely, God. Advocates of intelligent design refuse to accept the rules governing the competition. They frame science merely as belief. Their “theory” is as good as anybody else’s. In matters of belief, there should be no prejudice. Freedom here is freedom of expression, freedom to express your beliefs and have them accessible to the public.

The bottom line: The concept of competition is part of the logic of freedom. Competitions are governed by rules. If you are free to enter the competition, there is no abridgment of freedom. If you lose or are eliminated on the basis of the rules, there is no abridgment of freedom.

Intelligent design was free to enter the competition for a scientific theory of how human beings got here. It does not follow the rules defined by the scientific method and has been eliminated. There is no abridgment of freedom.

Scientists have not been very good at communicating this to the public. Nor have they been effective at explaining the threat to freedom posed by the advocates of intelligent design. It is a threat to the freedom of inquiry into the truth and to the moral imperative of science: to seek the truth without initial bias.

A single consistent logic of contested concepts is not possible. But a logic relating simple uncontested core concepts is possible.
Coercion interferes with freedom
is part of the logic of simple freedom. It uses the simple uncontested version of coercion—the use of force against someone’s will. We will call coercion in such a statement an “attendant concept” since it is part of the characterization of simple freedom. Other attendant concepts include harm, rights, justice, fairness, nature, and competition. These attendant concepts act like blanks to be filled in by worldviews, and when not filled in, they are vague.

Simple political freedom is about how simple freedom is affected by taking society into account, having a government, and recognizing social institutions. The logic of simple political freedom has additional attendant concepts—still more blanks to be filled in, as we shall see.

Simple political freedom begins with the question of how a government can best serve the freedom of its citizens. It further recognizes not just individuals but also institutions: governmental institutions, business institutions, educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations (advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations), religious institutions, political parties, informal groups.

Given the massive political differences in our nation, it is remarkable that there is an uncontested version of political freedom. Political freedom begins with the idea of self-government: Tyrants and dictators can be avoided if we choose those who govern us and make sure that none of them has overriding power. The attendant concepts to simple political freedom are self-government and its democratic institutions—within the national government: Congress, the administration, and an independent judiciary, with a balance of powers and similar structures at lower levels; within civil society: free elections and political parties, a civilian-controlled military, a free market, free press/media, and free religious institutions.

At this level of oversimplification, all of this is uncontested. The details are, however, thoroughly contested: what counts as a balance of power, what is an independent judiciary, when are elections free, what is civilian control of the military, what is meant by a free market. The contestation has been very public: The president has declared a “war on terror” with no end and has taken on war powers indefinitely. He has claimed the authority to spy on American citizens without court orders and to overrule certain laws passed by Congress. Does this upset the balance of power? Is a judiciary independent if a majority of judges are chosen to fit a single political ideology? Is the freedom of a “free market” enhanced or abridged by government regulation, progressive taxation, class action lawsuits, unions, and businesssupplied health insurance? Is the air force civilian controlled
when the air force academy is controlled by fundamentalist Christians and when the high-ranking military officers are largely conservatives? Is the press free when there is massive media consolidation, when there is little competition among major media outlets, and when control of major media organizations is in the hands of radical conservatives? Is there freedom of religion when fundamentalist evangelicals have gained the power to rewrite the laws of the land and impose their religious beliefs on the nation?