The Tribune

FREEDOM is often narrowly defined, especially notions of personal freedom and autonomy. Communitarian cultures and nations enjoy a more expansive appreciation and articulation of freedom.

These cultures understand that all freedoms exist within a broader moral universe and collective context, that the exercise of freedom affects family, friends and neighbours, as well as fellow-citizens we will never meet.

Individuals sometimes refer to “my freedom”, often failing to appreciate a society mostly dominated by such thinking is doomed to collective and moral failure if we do not correspondingly and deeply appreciate our responsibilities and obligations to others, including acquaintances and moral strangers.

Relatedly, many young people often speak of “my truth”, as if they are uniquely the possessors of a certain truth. It would be more accurate to speak of “my opinions, feelings or thoughts”, which may not be true, accurate or factual.

If an individual spoke of “my science, my mathematics, my meteorology”, this would be deemed comical.

Humans are social animals, requiring community and a sense of the collective in order to survive and to flourish through the division of labour and the orderly working of societies.

State failure often results from the inability of legitimate authorities to enforce laws and norms which promote necessary cooperation.

One of the unique purposes of government is to mediate between competing interests in the promotion of the greater good. Left to ourselves, selfishness, not altruism, is a part of our human condition and sinfulness.

The failure of the state to regulate competing interests and “freedoms” may result in dangerous monopolies, collapsing infrastructure, chaotic transportation networks, poor health and safety standards, the abuse of minorities, inequities in health care and education and the existential threat of climate change.

Left on our own to mediate roads and traffic networks absent traffic signs, signals, police and customs, there would be even more road rage, death and anarchy.

RULES

Try to drive in some global cities and one immediately recognizes the need for rules and regulations, which are in our personal and collective interests.

The tobacco giants famously used the notion of personal freedom as they were advertising to induce customers, including younger people, to purchase products filled with carcinogens and nicotine.

In the United States, menthol was often targeted to black Americans. Thankfully, on April 29 of this year the US Food and Drug Administration finally announced a rule banning menthol cigarettes.

Of note, the Centres for Disease Control note that though African Americans typically start smoking cigarettes at an older age and typically smoke fewer, “they are more likely to die from smoking-related diseases than whites.”

Many of those who opposed the ban on cigarette smoking in public places argued they had the freedom to smoke. They did. But not when they were putting the health of others at risk. Freedom without limits is a danger to individuals and societies.

Just as maximizing profits can harm societies and destroy the environment, maximizing personal freedoms can lead to disorder and dysfunction when the needs of all are truncated in the interests of the few.

The American form of capitalism is different than more balanced forms found in much of Europe and parts of Asia.

In the United States, corporate and private greed often outstrip the common good, resulting in vast and dangerous inequity in the richest country in human history.

Though COVID-19 is promiscuous in whom it attacks, the pandemic has been unequal in terms of those who have died and in exposing health-care and economic inequality.

Time reported:

“Perhaps no facet of inequality has grown more dramatically than wealth. The 15 richest Americans have become over $400 billion richer since the markets bottomed out in March 2020.

“Meanwhile, a yearlong bull market—triggered by the CARES Act’s passage at the market trough and supported since then by a series of government rescues – has added roughly $4.8 trillion of wealth to the richest one percent of American households.

“More comprehensive measures, which include real estate and privately held companies, report that the richest one percent of Americans gained over $7 trillion of wealth from the end of March to the end of December 2020.”

HYPOCRITES

Many Americans claim to dislike so-called big government except when they are getting social benefits or benefitting from largesse in terms of contracts, grants, massive tax breaks, subsidies and favours.

The degree of corporate welfare and subsidies in America is staggering, hypocritical and well-documented.

Yet, many of the corporate beneficiaries often decry social welfare benefits and so-called cheats, especially when the beneficiaries are minorities and the poor. Some humorists have ribbed that many in corporate boardrooms like socialist-style benefits for themselves but near unbridled capitalism for the poor. The former want the government to give them bootstraps or subsidies to manufacture the boots, often overseas with poorly-paid workers, which they then advertise and sell to the global poor, often making outrageous profits.

Just as American capitalism is built on a more ruggedly individualistic and less communitarian ethos, so too the often skinny and often anaemic concept of freedom in America.

America’s rabid gun culture is suffused with all manner of founding mythologies and history, including a belief that guns are a natural extension of certain freedoms requiring few limits.

This has resulted in an endemically violent society married to a Christian nationalism that often makes guns seem like a weapon ordained by God against certain infidels or the government, foreigners, blacks and others who seek to supposedly despoil white privilege.

Most of the developed world have more restrictions on guns and many fewer deaths and mass shootings.

These societies appreciate that gun ownership must be viewed and regulated in the context of public health and safety and the protection of fellow-citizens.

In America this moral code is flipped, with the individual, especially in the arena of guns, taking precedence over the common good. This mindset has resulted in a blood-soaked culture of death and violence.

The Bahamas remains in many ways a more communitarian society than America. But over the last several decades our communitarianism is atrophying because we are affected and in some ways infected by American notions of personal freedom.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a sense of freedom built on self-absorption, a lessening of the importance of shared responsibility, and personal responsibility tied to a broader sense of the common good. There is also a greater selfishness often connected to materialist greed.

COMMON WELFARE

During the pandemic, many have enjoyed a national sense of the common good in terms of receiving food for more than a year, along with unemployment assistance, business loans, assistance and grants, rental assistance and other forms of the common welfare a good and decent society renders to those in need.

Yet, when asked to abide by health measures and/or to take a vaccine to help protect others and to promote herd immunity, many have balked, turned inward and argued vociferously about personal choice, as some argued when smoking bans were being instituted.

Had the state argued that those in need during the pandemic were on their own, many would have decried this as a moral failure. But when invited to a certain moral reciprocity toward others, many cried foul.

It is a form of self-absorption and moral immaturity to rely on the common good when in need but fail to proactively help the common good by receiving a vaccine that is overwhelmingly safe and that will help to reduce ill-health and death, while enabling the greater reopening of the economy.

When an individual goes to a restaurant to eat, one expects health and safety standards such as clean bathrooms, proper dining and cooking facilities and an eatery generally free of rodents or vermin.

The state and the business owner has an obligation to ensure the health of customers is not adversely affected by restaurant workers. Customers would not want to be served by an employee suffering from a bad cold, flu, tuberculosis or some other easily transmittable disease.

Likewise, the state and restaurateurs should protect others from the transmission of COVID-19. While employees should not be forced to take a COVID-19 vaccine, vaccinated and unvaccinated customers should not have their health endangered by those who refuse to be vaccinated. The latter similarly deserve to have their rights and freedom protected.

It is a reasonable and sensible practice to allow the vaccinated to enjoy indoor dining along with other vaccinated customers and employees. This will also apply to entertainment venues, travel, potentially religious and other public gatherings.

Likewise, as societies reopen, those who refuse to be vaccinated cannot reasonably or intelligently argue they are being discriminated against while putting others at risk because of their personal choice. The unvaccinated do not have a right or the freedom to endanger others. They have a responsibility to ensure that their choices do not adversely affect others.

Their freedoms are no more sacrosanct than other citizens who choose to protect themselves, their loved ones and others in the general population.

The unvaccinated also have no right to endanger other unvaccinated individuals. Freedom is not the personal preserve of those who ignore science, medical advice and reasonable precautions necessary to protect the greater good and themselves and their family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

Freedom is a moral responsibility that bears in mind and respects the needs, the health and safety and the human dignity of others.