Libertarianism and the Principle of Liberty in the Judeo-Christian social frame

first part – God is Libertarian

Choice – Yes, God is Libertarian and yes, people have free-will and freedom of choice. Now some people will disagree and as long as we keep civilized, and no one jumps to anyone’s throat we can start the debate. I am not going to teach anyone philosophy or logic, I will just try my best to make a point and why not, open a perspective.

People surrounded themselves from the early ages of civilization with the word ‘fate’ to give a name to those circumstances they were not able to control. That was the actual birthday of the primordial religion and it was the space where the early societies could manifest their spiritual connection with themselves and the world. It appears that it was humanity’s fate to get this word embedded into its consciousness over centuries and millennia as even to the day so many people believe more or less in a form of fate. This brings up into discussion predestination, choice and free-will. For so long people fought for this very precious idea and never seemed to have achieved it. I am talking of course about the idea of freedom but for now I will focus on ‘choice’.

Do we as human beings have the freedom of choice? At first glance this question might not appear to be as tricky as it actually is. Maybe you already have the answer. Let us think from another perspective: do you really have a choice if you are not the choice-maker? More specific, are people really choosing if they are not able to make the options they choose from? Let us say you go to a restaurant for a meal and for dessert you want to eat some fruits, but strawberries are the only fruit you like, and I put on the table an apple and a pear as a choice. If this is the case, we are just choice-takers and not really choice-makers. If this is true, is each human being’s fate pulling the strings of their lives? Are we predestined to live the lives we live right now?

This argument might seem stretched but if we put this into perspective, into a long chain of a few thousand small choice-taking events things change dramatically. If you do not think the same, please feel free to do the following thought-exercise: recall how many choices did you take and how many choices did you take in the past three months. I would say that real freedom of choice implies or should imply the ability of creating the options and choose from them. Now this can be a dangerous terrain as having too many options is the worst of all, especially if the options are quite similar with one another in quality and potential. That is enough about choice for now, we will return to it later on. I will try to keep things as simple as possible just so we will not get lost in the details and lose the trail of thoughts. Therefore, I will not go too deep into these concepts for now but please feel free to check them out if you want to.

Freedom – The concept of ‘freedom’ refers mainly to the ability of the individual to act or change without constraint. Over the centuries, people heavily struggled to attain freedom, or to become free as they were enslaved by ‘one thing or another’. Looking into perspective, mankind’s journey towards freedom seems to be redundant as it appears that we always find something we must be free from. Is it our obsessive and addictive traits that get us enslaved? Is it our constant need for safety or the feeling of being safe? Is it because we are comfort creatures? Is there any real freedom as long as the human psyche is vulnerable to addiction?

Free will – The ‘free-will’ concept refers to the ability of the individual to choose between different possible courses of action without constraint. Now this concept is so vast that I cannot even comprehend all its aspects because of the exponential growth of possibilities, but I do not want to explain it in a reductionist way either. Therefore, I will leave the explanation aside and focus on a particularly important aspect of ‘free-will’: its manipulation. Because all these abstract concepts happen on a psychological level, they can be subject to exploitation using different methods such as subliminal messaging, persuasion techniques under the neuro-linguistic programming umbrella. If so, are we as human beings having any real ‘free-will’?

The Principle of Liberty – “What you do with your own life and why is entirely up to you. All people should be allowed to follow their own pursuits which logically necessitates that they cannot use that ability to take it away from other people since it applies to all people. That is why people should have freedom of speech or freedom of religion, which is essentially freedom of morality. People are allowed to say things that you do not agree with, believe in gods that you do not think exists, hold values that you don’t. Just because you think something is wrong, does not mean you get to force that on someone else. Your opinion, no matter how correct it might be, does not take precedence over human rights. There is no reason why you, or me, or anyone else should have any say on what someone else does with their own life.” See Michael Moreno .

The Harm Principle – “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to other.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. In other words, the only scenario where liberty can be taken away from an individual against his will, is to prevent harm to others. To get a clear picture of this principle we should define what harm is in the first place. “People make a fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the difference between not helping someone with harming them. The lack of a positive is not a negative, the lack of +1 is not -1 it is just 0 and choosing not to help someone is not harming them, it is neutral. If I do not give money or food to a homeless person that is not the same with me taking money or food from them, I am simply choosing not to help them, I am not harming them and I am not violating their liberty. If my parents are paying my bills and all the sudden, they stop, they have not harmed me, they just stopped helping me.”

Sursă foto: Freedom of Choice (rebeccahintze.com)