Liberty and The Public Good: Endorsing Suicide and Slavery as Part of a Free Society.

Everyone is talking about liberty lately and how our liberties have been curtained over the past century by a growing big government which has intruded too far into the private lives of citizens. We need “simple rules for our complex world”. A society that embraces liberty should minimize government and maximize free markets, since “economic freedom is part of freedom.”

Liberty itself is important for maximizing the public good, because freedom empowers individuals to deviate from the norms, and thereby envision new ideas, invent new technologies and thereby advance society in a way that benefits all. Advance for all is conditional on individual liberty. If we try to eliminate deviation, we kill innovation that leads to advance. Liberty itself is justified, not by natural rights, which are “nonsense built on stilts” but by the best way to organize society to maximize the public good. It is the public good that justifies liberty, because a society organized by liberty is one that benefits the most people. Since central planning and human analysis cannot successfully fathom how to achieve the social good, the best way to achieve the social good is to leave things in the hands of individuals, who following their own interests, produce outcomes that are beneficial to all. [i]

I completely agree with this utilitarian perspective on liberty but believe its full implications have not been fully understood by those who endorse this view of liberty. As a consequence, we have not yet taken this utilitarian view of liberty to its logical conclusions. If we are really to adopt liberty, then we must be strict in adhering to the logic of liberty. If we do so, we have some changes to make to fully implement a society that fully embraces liberty. Today we miss the mark by relying on liberties that derive from the older natural rights justification of liberty. I wish, therefore, to make a modest proposal that takes the utilitarian view of liberty to its logical and necessary conclusion.

My modest proposal is this: that if we really embrace a utilitarian view of liberty, we should change our laws to permit suicide and slavery. Specifically, we should immediately acknowledge that a society that is truly free in this sense allows people to take their own lives, sell themselves into slavery, and therefore allows others to purchase and traffic in slaves, under certain conditions. This sounds on the surface contradictory. How can a free society endorse slavery? But we shall see that if liberty is really founded on utility, then slavery and suicide should be embraced. Moreover, I have a specific proposal about which group of people would make the best class of slaves, a point to which I return later, after first justifying slavery as an institution in a free society.

The fuller essay is published on my site: http://www.freedomandcapitalism.com/

[i] These views in various forms can be found in John Stuart Mill, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein’s writings.