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Communities have a tendency to impose on individual liberties to some extent. If we look, for example, at the Freedom House score for Ukraine in recent years we will see a decline [XXX]. This obviously coincided with the beginning of the Russian invasion and it is assumed that it has something to do with forced conscription of civilians into military service. We might pose that forced conscription is wrong because it violates the basic liberties of otherwise free citizens.
This is a difficult question, one pitting clear individual basic liberties against stark community needs. How should we view this if we take a Rawlsian approach to basic liberties (and privacy) as cornerstones of our political philosophy? Rawls himself thought forced conscription, in general, was a violation of individual basic liberties. He preferred economic incentives to encourage more people to sign up for military duty. But he said there were exceptions to this in cases where it was necessary to uphold the system of basic liberties for everyone. Therefore, for an invader who threatens to impose tyranny over its conquered territory, it may be necessary to have conscription to counter it.
So Ukraine requires its able-bodied male citizens to serve in its defense. The question at hand is whether this violation of liberty is justified by the threat it faces.
Rawls’ own historical experience is informative here. He was a veteran of WWII (something that persuaded him to reject religion, btw), and produced his greatest work, A Theory of Justice, during the Vietnam War. He was against the Vietnam-era draft and was against the war itself, using it as a motivator to analyze the considerable defects of American government. Vietnam was clearly a war of choice and was prosecuted ineptly. The government covered up the military difficulty it was facing (they knew early on it could not be won) and it prolonged the war for many years more than was necessary. Forcing young Americans to fight in it was a clear violation of basic liberties, according to Rawls.
WWII was different. Although we could argue that for the US it was a war of choice, that’s only because we can reasonably imagine that the axis powers would not have invaded the US once they finished with the rest of the world. But this is a tenuous proposition. And, without question, millions of previously free people would have lived under totalitarian conditions had the US not acted, and many would have succumbed to the genocide of those regimes. Even if the US had not been invaded, it would have been a country on a permanent war footing, with the curtailed view of individual liberties that such conditions always produce. Few pacifist thinkers, eg Howard Zinn, along with Rawls, believed that the US should have stayed out of WWII.
The basic principle being advanced here is that sometimes it is necessary to deny someone their basic liberties in order to protect them for many more people. But here there is, like there is for denying privacy, a careful method by which we perform the denial: first, gauge the level of the threat properly. Then ask for volunteers. Increase the incentives for such volunteers. If the army raised is still insufficient, institute a draft. Ensure that the draft is fair by making everyone eligible for it and randomly selecting from among that pool. It is especially important to not allow the privileged to escape from this because doing so has too much of a socially corrosive effect. Conduct the war with an adequate regard for the lives and health of the soldiers. Post-war, ensure that veterans are treated well: medical care should be ensured, education benefits, opportunities to work, etc. Historically, very few WWII veterans saw their forced service as a terrible imposition on their liberty but many Vietnam veterans did. WWII had many of the characteristics listed here of a stepwise and relatively careful process justified by a high-magnitude threat. Vietnam had only some of these characteristics but without the high-magnitude threat. Vietnam was notorious for exempting young people of privilege and for its generally incompetent management.
So now we have two reasons why individual liberties might be subsumed: 1) to protect the entire community from losing its liberties, and 2) to prevent a momentary act of emotion from denying us a more important benefit (the hysteresis argument). The troublesome aspect of both of these is that ultimately they must be imposed. War tends to require far more bodies than people willing to volunteer. Stopping a suicidal teenager means, in the moment, forcing them to stop. And decision-making frameworks have rules in place to stop their members from acting unwisely. This is, unfortunately, the basic crux of the matter. The imposition by someone else on our liberties always feels like a denial of our basic liberties.
But this seems like an immature view of the nature of basic liberties. They are not, like so many other aspects of life, absolute. They exist alongside the rights of others. They exist, frequently, under the condition of “normal” or “reasonable” circumstances. Under normal circumstances we have the right to speak freely. Under circumstances of grave threats to our national security, however, we do not. Under reasonable circumstances (eg terminal illness) we have the right to commit suicide. But if we’re just having a bad day, we do not.
And, perhaps, most importantly they don’t exist just for us. They exist for the benefit of society at large. We emphasize them because we not only hold them dear personally but also because we believe deeply that they are the basis for a better society.
Here is a debate we can have about the 2nd Amendment, for example. Gun-rights advocates will point to the 2nd Amendment to justify their right to own a gun. Gun-control advocates will argue that they may indeed have such a right by default but almost certainly it is not because of the 2nd Amendment, which concerns itself with a collective right for the purpose of defending against tyranny. Almost no gun owner in the US is defending the nation against tyranny. They own a gun because they, for personal reasons, simply want one. This is perfectly legitimate, of course, but the Founders were not interested in anyone’s personal reasons for gun ownership any more than their reasons for horse ownership. The 2nd Amendment doesn’t cover the use case that most Americans fall under. Therefore, the gun-control side will argue that no constitutional reason exists for whatever restriction they have in mind. The gun-rights advocates will also point to the 2nd Amendment and argue that the text does not explicitly condition gun ownership on protection against tyranny. Therefore it covers the personal use-case. Either way, the 2nd Amendment is a good example of basic individual rights existing in tension with their collective purpose.
This starts to veer strongly into utilitarianism. At the end of the day, for exigent enough circumstances, we have no choice but to invoke a utilitarian argument. If millions of innocent Americans die every year (let’s say) because of guns then we might have a grounded utilitarian argument for invoking some gun-control measure or another. However if only a handful are dying then we don’t. The real number is around 26,000 suicides and 21,000 murders, with a much smaller number attributable to accidents and law enforcement actions. Assuming gun ownership is a basic liberty enshrined in the Constitution, is this enough to invoke a utilitarian argument against it? Politically, in the US, the answer has been a firm no. But we can see how that might change given higher numbers.
A starker way of looking at this is to say that if the life of one person must be sacrificed to save everyone, it is hard to argue against it on basic liberties principles since the basic liberties of all are at stake. Utilitarianism never goes away and it is a matter of when it should be invoked. The great philosophies tend to have this property. They are clearly applicable under some circumstances and not under others.
Let’s take a look at another personal right and how it might conflict with collective well-being. We have envisioned a moneyless society where “income” distribution is controlled by the community to some reasonable level. However, don’t we have the right to ask other people for money and, in so doing, amass wealth? Our right to ask is certainly protected as free speech and let’s say the person making the donation is freely choosing to do so as well. The transaction may be more involved than that, having some exchange or quid pro quo. But even so, the freedom to transact in this way seems like it falls within our basic liberties.
The problem here isn’t really the request and subsequent donation, in and of itself. The problem is that, done enough times, it results in a skewed income distribution that violates what the community is comfortable with. Communities have the right to set their economic terms: to allocate resources according to whatever scheme they think is best. Someone who derives an inflated income through charitable contributions is not only violating the distribution rule but is probably also not a productive member of society. Again, we have a straightforward conflict between individual and collective rights.
Keep in mind here that we are not preventing people from taking the free food offered at a potluck or saying they can’t give their friends a ride home. In the ordinary course of events, people ask for things and others give them. We don’t expect to stop doing this or pass laws to prevent it. Small acts of charity, that are often reciprocated anyway, pose little problem. It is the acts of charity that skew the economic order that would concern us here. The collective right is imposed mainly when it is of collective significance. In this way we balance the rights of individuals to behave freely (and feel like they are free) with collective rights.
We can also look at the money, or resources, request issue by breaking it into a few different categories. First, why is someone asking for money? Is there a legitimate reason, like need? In a post-scarcity fair economy, this should never be the case. Is the reason for investment? If so, this is governable by community law and the basic ask/donate right would need to conform to investment laws and community perceptions of good investments. Perhaps the person is especially charismatic and people fall under his “spell”, like a cult leader. If the leader is then using the money for self-serving reasons, we would expect the ratings system to catch this and derate the “leader”. Or, depending on the practices of the cult, shutting it down because it violates the basic liberties of its members. But perhaps the spiritual leader is legitimate and simply wants to build a meditation retreat for his members and needs resources to do it. This seems like the kind of resource allocation the community should be able to handle as part of its normal economic affairs. So perhaps the remedy is just to get the folks involved to follow correct procedures instead of doing it “off the books”. In any event, the right to request resources is also constrained by the intent behind the request.
None of this should be surprising to citizens of “free” societies. Our rights constantly exist in a balance with community needs, not to mention the exact same rights of others. Frequently, however, the balance skews too far towards the community (state power) and sometimes it skews too far in favor of the individual. In our current society we have a cumbersome, corrupt, and ineffective process for changing this balance should we desire to do so. Under a ratings system, however, this ability will be explicit and controllable.