The Liberty Principle: Political Right and Wrong

I began this mini-series of blogessays on morality and terrorism with the neuron bomb of planting the idea of absolute morality based on belief in a God who provides a supernatural transcendent source for determining right and wrong. We can do better than this. In addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action, and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive, and that is the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty.

Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness. The liberty principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. The liberty principle is grounded in history and anchored in modern enlightenment values.

In pre-historic bands and tribes, liberty was limited to the actions and interactions of individuals within their families, extended families, and tiny communities. Liberty as a political concept was nonexistent, because there was no politics. Society, such as it was, was mostly a loose confederation of individuals representing their families and extended families to the community at large. The primary purpose of these communities was to resolve conflicts within the band or tribe, to secure food and natural resources, and to protect against other bands and tribes. As bands and tribes coalesced into chiefdoms and states, and populations grew from hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands, political organizations were needed because the informal methods of conflict resolution that worked so well in smaller populations broke down among the much larger populations, and the small skirmishes between bands and tribes grew into much larger and costlier wars between chiefdoms and states.

As chiefdoms and states require revenue to support a bureaucratic infrastructure, and bureaucracies are not designed to be revenue-generating organizations, the individual members of the chiefdom or state must relinquish some percentage of their productive labor. Today this is done through taxes, duties, levies, tolls, excises, and various other financial assessments. Where there is no money, or a limited supply of cash flow, the barter system may be employed, such as in feudalism, where peasants gave over a portion of their agricultural products to the land-owning lord, and/or a fraction of their time to military service in defense of the castle, manor, or realm. Here, and elsewhere, some freedom and autonomy is exchanged for security and resources, and this may lead to an increase in overall liberty and the general good of the chiefdom or state.

It is at this point—roughly three to five thousand years ago when bands and tribes evolved into chiefdoms and states—that the concept of civil and political liberty was born. Here we can turn to the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid from Chapter 7 in The Science of Good and Evil (see below), to see where and how that transition was made. It is at the bio-cultural transitional boundary between the community and the society, where social status and recognition lead to social justice and security, and where the drive of reciprocal altruism gives rise to indirect and blind altruism, that liberty emerges—the principle that when individual members of the community exchange freedom and autonomy for resources and security, in the long run their overall liberty increases. For example, exchanging a portion of my earnings for food that someone else produces, allows me the freedom to pursue non-food producing activities. Ideally, the exchange of some freedom and autonomy for resources and security leads to other forms of freedom and autonomy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

For many millennia the concept of liberty for all members of the state lie dormant, suppressed by the selfish and competitive drives of the political and religious leaders who held the reigns of power. Even the occasional enlightened societies that set up quasi-representative bodies to protect the interests of the citizens at large, restricted liberty to a narrow class of land-owning or power-wielding white males. Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies that encourage intolerance, and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the Enlightenment has been to grant greater liberty, for more people, everywhere. Although there are setbacks still, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all humans continues.