Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.