Individual Liberty Research Articles

Market competition, efficiency and economic liberty

This paper investigates efficiency and freedom as joint foundations of market economies. Whereas ideal perfect competition accommodates Mill’s principle of individual liberty in the economic arena, in real world, imperfectly competitive, markets economic freedom and efficiency appear often as conflicting values. Building on J. S. Mill’s utilitarian defense of free trade in On Liberty Chapter V, this paper puts forward a consequentialist defense of economic freedom under imperfect competition. Defense rests on the instrumental value of equal freedom, enjoyed by every market agent, as a source of general welfare in a world of dispersed information among unique human beings. The paper has a clear impact on contemporary antitrust debate, supporting neo-Brandesians’ rehabilitation of Structuralism in antitrust also on well founded, economic, i.e. efficiency, reasons.

Struggle for Existence in Toni Morison’s Song of Solomon

The purpose of this study is to examine the philosophical perspective that Toni Morrison employed when creating the primary characters in Song of Solomon. This article examines the philosophical foundations of the novel at hand by Toni Morrison. It is precisely this aspect that pertains to man's very existence and being. Existentialism is a philosophical and literary school of thought. It focuses on individual liberty and responsibility as two fundamental aspects of man's existence. Existentialism is present both in literature and philosophy. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the Song of Solomon text. In this novel, Morrison places Milkman and Pilate in situations from which they can proceed in a variety of ways. The existential aspect of the book will be analyzed by focusing on the struggles that both of the main characters confront when attempting to make decisions about the course of their lives and overcoming obstacles. Morrison's method will be evaluated based on her ability to weave the preexisting social and cultural situations of the main characters into the fabric of numerous societies. Milkman's unwillingness to be controlled by conventional codes and his desire to adapt to the needs of his new being, both of which are emphasized in the study, are illuminated by the research. The research will concentrate on the two characters' distinct conceptions of which they are, as well as the perspective from which each character views the surrounding community, its morals and values, and the societal expectations placed on its members.

The Tragedy of Freedom: A Hypothesis of Existentialism in Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild"

This paper examines the tragedy of freedom in "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer through an existentialist viewpoint. In the protagonist's pursuit of personal liberation, the study examines the concepts of autonomy, accountability, and the search for meaning through an understanding of existentialism. A qualitative case study method analyses the novel and investigates existentialist concepts. A summary of the literature work, close reading, theme analysis, and literary interpretation are all provided within the framework. This study aims to enhance our comprehension of the tragedy of freedom and its implications for human existence by casting light on the intricate interplay between individual liberty and societal norms. By exploring the existentialist perspective, the research contributes to the larger discourse on freedom, responsibility, and the pursuit of meaning in literature and human experience.

'The Real Question of Freedom': The State, the Church and the Individual, c.1860–1920

This essay explores the relationship between the individual, the state and the church. In particular, it considers he ways that a particularly influential group of early twentieth-century state-critics – the English pluralist – grappled with the tension between state authority and individual liberty through a careful engagement with the thought of John Henry Newman. But while English pluralists like J. N. Figgis and Harold Laski admired Newman's critiques of ultramontanism, they could not accept some of Newman's premises, particularly those regarding the conscience, which underlay his rejection of ultramontanism. English pluralism, this essay suggests, was beset by a kind of conceptual confusion which its proponents recognized but could not – or would not – resolve.

Lacanian Biopolitics of COVID-19

Abstract A public debate has raged in Europe and the Americas for the last year, almost as predictable in its substance as in its form: Has the suppression of individual liberties, in the form of lockdowns, curfews, imposed mask-wearing, and vaccination justified by and indeed legitimated by the sanitary crisis? On virtually all levels of public debate, positions have been formulated on the right (or responsibility) of public authorities to require citizens to take measures in the name of their own personal health and the health of others. In International Studies, biopolitics has become the go-to concept for both analyzing and politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. Three variants of biopolitical analysis dominate, overlapping, and mutually dependent: those stemming the insights of Foucault’s late work, those inspired by Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and those that extended the global analysis of Hardt and Negri. In a recently published book, The Inverse of Biopolitics, Laurent interprets biopolitics in an alternative vein, finding in the final phase of Lacan’s teaching, beginning around 1970, a preoccupation with the “speaking body,” condensed in the hybrid term parlêtre, both speaking-being and being-speaking. This article draws out the implications of this alternative conceptualization of biopolitics for the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19, State Intervention, and Confucian Paternalism

For many in the West, paternalism manifest as state interference carries a pejorative connotation, as it is often taken to entail unjustified restrictions on autonomy and self-determination and frequently believed to precipitate bureaucracy, corruption, and inefficiency. Meanwhile, uncritical deference to policies in which individual liberties remain essentially unchecked by state oversight has faced renewed scrutiny since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many across the globe are now coming to believe that we must accept greater governmental intervention in our lives, particularly during times of widespread health crises. This paper explores normative considerations justifying state intervention with respect to public health policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of Confucian paternalism, which is distinguished from a more general concept of paternalism widely used in contemporary philosophical discourse. It argues that the “soft” paternalism apropos to Confucianism has pragmatic benefits for the development of healthcare policies due to which it is not only morally warranted but even preferable to alternatives in terms of safeguarding population health.

Friedrich Hayek on Taxation and Income Redistribution

Friedrich Hayek was a staunch advocate of the free market principle. He was convinced that progressive taxation was a great threat to individual liberty and social fairness, particularly because there is no limit how high a progressive rate can be in it. The only explanation by which a progressive taxation can be defended is a wish to alter the income distribution, but this approach cannot be explained by any scientific argument. Progressive taxation is unjust and short-sighted while, according to Hayek, a proportional tax system satisfies a standard of fairness and justice because it applies the same general rule to all and prevents discrimination against the well-off taxpayers. Key words: redistribution, fiscal system, tax policy, Friedrich Hayek.

Legal recommendations and psychological advice sports administrators can implement in the next pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed sports administrators’ lack of crisis management preparedness and athletes, coaches, and support staff’s lack of mental preparedness for a pandemic. Sports administrators were in the unenviable position of having to protect the health of their athletes, staff, and the wider population by preventing the spread of the COVID-19 disease with restrictive policies, such as bio-bubbles and quarantines, while at the same time not restricting anyone’s liberty and unalienable rights to pursue happiness. This article informs sports administrators how to balance health instructions from regulatory bodies with measures protecting individual liberty. It provides sports administrator’s legal recommendations they can follow and psychological advice that they can pass on to their athletes, coaches, and support staff. The article also explains to coaches and support staff how to manage, and athletes how to successfully cope with, future bio-bubbles, quarantines, and the next pandemic.

Mind the gap! Organized hypocrisy in EU cooperation with Southern neighbor countries on international protection

Abstract The European Union (EU) has reacted to the migration crises of the last decade with growing externalization of migration management to neighbor countries often accused of not respecting human rights and individual liberties. Focusing on EU cooperation with the Southern neighborhood, as defined within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) framework, this paper investigates the recent developments in the EU's external migration policies, demonstrating that there is a gap between EU discourses and policy instruments identified by the EU as strategic tools of the European migration and asylum policy (MAP). Five Southern neighbor countries (SNCs) have been selected, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, to assess the extent to which the EU, when cooperating on migration and asylum issues, places international protection at risk instead of playing the role of humanitarian actor in accordance with the ideals and principles it defends. The research critically analyzes the EU's cooperation with SNCs concerning migration, as developed via international agreements, action plans, and mobility partnerships under the umbrella of the ENP. In particular, it explores the incompatibility between the European MAP instruments and international protection. MAP, the qualitative analysis shows, represents a clear mismatch between EU talk and action, outlining another case of organized hypocrisy.

Environmental protection or economic growth? The effects of preferences for individual freedoms

Environmental protection is often seen in conflict with individual freedom and economic growth. The proponents of environmental protection suggest that the environment is a global resource that must be protected for future generations, even at the expense of economic growth and individual freedoms. The opponents claim that environmental protection should not come at the expense of individual rights and liberties, economic growth included. This paper studies the associations between public preferences for environmental protection, economic growth, and individual freedoms in eleven post-soviet countries on a representative dataset (N = 20006, age 18+, M ± SD: 46,04 ± 17,07; 58% women, 46,8% upper education). Methodologically we rely on correlations, principal component analysis, and ordinal regression analyses. The results suggest that preferences for most personal freedoms studied predict environmental protection and economic growth preferences. In addition, preferences for civil rights, rights for democracy, gender equality, income inequality, and the low role of the army in politics predicted higher preferences for environmental protection and economic growth. Interestingly, the government’s right to video surveillance in public areas, though diminishing personal freedoms in terms of anonymity, predicted higher preferences for environmental protection and economic growth. The importance of God in lives proved to increase preferences for environmental protection but was negatively related to preferences for economic growth. We suggest the government communicate the need for environmental protection as a part of the rights for individual freedom to live in a clean environment.

Varieties of food democracy: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT The concept of food democracy has been developed to articulate norms and ideals of democracy as a counterpressure to ‘food control’ from concentrated and transnational corporate power in the agri-food system. Yet to date, a comprehensive overview is missing to identify the various elements and dimensions of food democracy conceptualizations and to reflect on what exactly is democratic about food democracy. To address this gap, a systematic literature review was conducted to assess consensus, common and outlying dimensions of food democracy conceptualizations and the epistemological synergies and struggles around different understandings of democracy in the research field. Analysis uncovers more than 20 different food democracy dimensions, the most common of which (deliberation, knowledge democracy, food choice, civic co-planning, rights protection) diverge along two predominant schools of thought, epistemological positions and strategies for change: first, food democracy as a process of open and inclusive public deliberation in participatory settings; second, food democracy as the protection of individual rights, liberties and private (consumer) freedom. Through the lens of varied democracy perspectives, we discuss implications for further development of food democracy in research, policy and agri-food systems interventions.

Liberalism and the problem of domination

We can distinguish two liberal paradigms that stand in opposition to each other. Liberalism as non-domination seeks to eliminate identities resulting from domination and oppression and hindering the emancipation of individuals. Liberalism as recognition holds that ‘the idea of a human world without identities makes no sense’ (Appiah) and considers identities to have their source in individual liberty and to provide the grounds for pluralism. The two liberal paradigms come to largely different results regarding the role of the state and civil society. The paradigm of non-domination tends to enforce individual rights, if necessary against a hostile cultural and religious context. The paradigm of recognition defends mostly individual liberties, if necessary at the expense of certain individual rights. Liberalism stands here in front of a major dilemma: Either it protects individual rights in the sense of freedom as non-domination, or it defends individual liberties in Isaiah Berlin's tradition of negative liberty– in too many cases and in too many parts of the world, liberalism, understood in the terms presented here, cannot have it both ways. This review article argues that the liberal paradigms of non-domination and recognition are complementary; liberalism is about both recognition and non-domination. Following policy recommendation can be drawn: (1) Democratic institutions (parliament, political parties and constitutional courts) and democratic rights (right to vote, right of assembly and freedom of speech) are most efficient in fighting domination. (2) Although social identities are not fixed and open to change, they cannot be engineered by the state or civil society organizations and grow out of some form of social consensus. (3) The consensus around identities takes place within the pluralist public and civil sphere of a community. (4) While the support in the development of individual capabilities by the state is effective against domination, also history and collective memory help to overcome the traumatic experience of domination. (5) Systemic transformation requires the support from below, notably from the civil society, and is based on individual liberties.

How Well Do Religious Exemptions Apply to Mandates for COVID-19 Vaccines?

In the United States, religious exemptions to health-driven mandates enjoy, and should enjoy, protected status in medical ethics and healthcare law. Religious exemptions are defined as seriously professed exceptions to state or federal laws, which appeal to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, allowing workers to request an exception to a job requirement, including a health-protective mandate, if it “conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, or observances”. In medical ethics, such religious exceptions are usually justified on the basis of the principle of autonomy, where personally held convictions, reflected in scripture or established religious norms, are safeguarded on the basis of the first amendment, thereby constituting an important area in which societal good must yield to individual liberty. Acknowledging the longstanding category of “religious exemptions”, and referencing some examples that adhere to its parameters in good faith (e.g., objections made by some institutions to HPV vaccines), I argue that, to date, no coherent basis for religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccines has been offered through appeal to the principle of autonomy, or, in a healthcare context, to “medical freedom”. Indeed, proponents of characterizing these exemptions as legitimate misconstrue autonomy and abuse the reputation of the religious traditions they invoke in defense of their endeavors to opt out. The upshot is not only an error in interpreting the principle of autonomy, whereby it is issued a “blank check”, but also a dishonesty in itself whereby a contested political position becomes deliberately disguised as a protected religious value. “Sincerely held beliefs”, I conclude, appear no longer to constitute the standard for religious accommodation in the era of COVID-19. Individual declaration, seemingly free of any reasonable constraint, does. This is a shift that has serious consequences for public health and, more broadly, the public good.

Resistance to COVID-19 vaccination and the social contract: evidence from Italy

Confronted with stalled vaccination efforts against COVID-19, many governments embraced mandates and other measures to incentivize vaccination that excluded the unvaccinated from aspects of social and economic life. Even still, many citizens remained unvaccinated. We advance a social contract framework for understanding who remains unvaccinated and why. We leverage both observational and individual-level survey evidence from Italy to study the relationship between vaccination status and social context, social trust, political partisanship, and adherence to core institutional structures such as the rule of law and collective commitments. We find that attitudes toward the rule of law and collective commitments outside the domain of vaccination are strongly associated with compliance with vaccine mandates and incentives. Partisanship also corresponds with vaccine behaviors, as supporters of parties whose leaders criticized aggressive policies to incentivize or mandate vaccination and emphasized individual liberty are least likely to comply. Our findings suggest appeals emphasizing individual benefits may be more effective than appeals emphasizing collective responsibility.

The American Anti-Vaxxer COVID Dead: A Dynamic Chronicle of Failed Sacrifices

Unlike earlier pandemics, where a “politics of blame” was directed against those who spread infection, the COVID pandemic in the United States has created occasions for the deployment of a “politics of commendation” for performing acts of sacrifice. Frontline healthcare workers have been celebrated for sacrificing themselves in service to their patients, even as critics have charged their being hapless victims of “social murder” at the hands of irresponsible medical administrators. Governmental officials, notably in Texas, have also recommended the elderly to refuse COVID care, die and thus sacrifice themselves selflessly for the benefit of the younger generation. Lately, COVID vaccine-refusal has been seen as an act of noble political sacrifice—typically to further individual liberty against the coercive power of the Federal government’s promotion or mandating of vaccination. Anti-vaxxers embracing the role of such political sacrifices, however, generally fail to realize this aspiration, insofar they are often just culpable of their own demise by neglecting public health advisories. Furthermore, the partisan politicization of their deaths militates against the normal recognition of their being sacrifices. Party political calculations have frequently demanded denial of the COVID origins of the anti-vaxxer deaths, and also effectively eliminated any normal attendant rites of reciprocation, memorialization or sacralization of the victims, typical of sacrifices, proper.

Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution by Max M. Edling

Reviewed by: Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution by Max M. Edling Craig Green Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution. By Max M. Edling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 206 pages. Cloth, ebook. Having already written two outstanding books about the early American republic, Max M. Edling revisits this period in Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution, which examines American states and federalism.1 The book promotes what Edling calls a "Unionist interpretation" (15) of the Constitution, claiming that sharp limits on interstate government meant the Constitution was more important for creating union and statehood than for producing democracy, individual liberty, or market economics. Edling's thesis challenges widespread assumptions that the American Revolution and the Constitution directly transformed social, economic, and civic life, demanding instead that scholars should focus on state-law authorities "that actually regulated civic rights" (15).2 Perfecting the Union uses three categories of evidence—international law, American history, and European philosophy—to define the federal government's constraints and the American states' autonomy. Mirroring the book's organizational structure, this review considers those categories in sequence. Edling's first category of evidence to identify original limits on the federal government (chapter 1) comes from international law, but the full scope of his argument is not clear. For example, Edling's Unionist theory claims that national solidarity was an enduring problem for the United States, comparing America to loose-knit confederacies under the European law of nations. But how prescriptive were international analogies for the creation of American statehood and union? Edling cites David C. Hendrickson, who described the Constitution as a peace pact among independent sovereigns, and other scholars have likewise suggested that the Articles of Confederation were a treaty among American states as autonomous international entities.3 Some of those authors have argued not only that the United [End Page 403] States was influenced by international law but also that the United States and the American states were formal creatures of international law. The assumption that American states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania were comparable to international sovereigns such as Spain or France is hard to defend, but perhaps Edling can avoid such exaggerations insofar as he combines international law with other legal sources.4 For example, Edling cites British colonialism as an example of his Unionist thesis, yet prerevolutionary colonists disputed the power of Parliament and the crown exclusively based on British law, not the law of nations.5 When Edling labels prerevolutionary British history as "Unionist," that implicitly suggests at least a possibility that postrevolutionary relationships among states and the United States also were not derived solely from international law. Edling demonstrates that international law was one reference point for the early American republic—alongside British colonial law, Native governance, and colonists' own innovations—but it was not uniquely authoritative for the development of constitutional federalism and American states. Edling's reliance on international law seems more troublesome in his argument that "the federal government was never created to regulate domestic affairs" (14) as opposed to "international affairs" (12). Edling's words "international" and "domestic" are not how most people distinguish the constitutional authority of the federal government and the American states. The conventional adjectives are interstate and intrastate. Congress has always had constitutional power over policies that are "domestic" rather than "international," including interstate commerce, bankruptcy, taxing and spending, intellectual property, counterfeiting, the post office, and more. Each of those powers has had broad practical effects over time, including the production of "a stronger federal union … to stand up to European powers and to conquer the North American continent" (8), but such geopolitical implications do not mean that the federal powers were themselves international.6 The law of nations' distinction between "international" and [End Page 404] "domestic" affairs did not solve the constitutional problems of defining federal power and constitutional statehood.7 In chapter 2, Edling's second effort to specify the federal government's limitations highlights continuities between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. For example, under both regimes, the United States tried to limit threats from European...

Reproducing crises: Understanding the role of law in the COVID‐19 global pandemic

AbstractGovernmental responses to the COVID‐19 global pandemic have generated numerous constitutionals, policy, legal, and political‐economic debates. Scholarly engagements with the sociolegal and policy consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic have been dominated by discussion on the role of emergency powers, the suspension of individual civil liberties, the suspension of economic rules in order to guarantee economic survival, and social regulation of public spaces and of workplaces. This paper aims to explore how a critical sociolegal scholarship can contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the role of law in creating the unequal conditions that propitiated the COVID‐19 pandemic and that might enable further crises. This introduction offers a roadmap for theorizing the limits of law, the operationalization of emergency powers and the different policies implemented by global south and north countries in response to the pandemic. This introduction is structured as follow: (1) provides a general overview of the law and society tradition and its engagement with the COVID‐19 pandemic; (2) engages with three key consequences of the pandemic, labor, and the lockdown; colonial implications; and the limits of law; (3) introduces the papers in this special issue; (4) sketches a proposal for the critical sociolegal scholarship of law and crises.

Disempowering Women and Constructing Muslims as ‘Other’: A Study of India’s Anti-Conversion Legislations

As a constitutional democracy, India remains committed to the cherished values of individual liberty and freedom of conscience which form the core of the fundamental rights enshrined in our constitution. However, in the last few years, we have witnessed a marked departure and foundational shift in the pursuit of these values. What we see in terms of the curtailment of women’s freedom, dictating personal relationship choices and maligning Muslims as a danger to Hindu women’s honour, delivers a severe blow to our pluralistic ethos and the cherished values of coexistence. The recently enacted legislations dressed up as anti-conversion laws to criminalise love choices bear a clear reflection of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws in many ways. Against the background of the state making intrusions into private spaces, denying the right to choose partners and acting as an oppressive surveillance agency, this study argues that these laws subvert the vision of our constitutional democracy and defy various judicial orders. It examines the literature on Hindu rights for women, analyses the contents of the legislation considering the contemporary discourse, to argue that these laws amount to undoing our achievements as a secular modern nation in the last seven decades.

Mill's Constitution of Liberty: an alternative behavioural policy framework

AbstractThis paper offers an interpretation of the behavioural evidence that casts doubt over whether people always have preferences or, if they do, that they are stable. If people do not have preferences in this sense, then the usual policy evaluation standard of preference satisfaction cannot be used in these cases. The paper then develops, to fill this gap, a Millian policy framework where policy is judged by whether it advances what Mill understands by individual liberty in On Liberty. This yields many recognisable policies but offers a different evaluative standard for them. It also yields some policy innovations: e.g. a basic income and a flat tax.

Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell

Bell’s remarkable book examines racial politics at three “abolitionist colleges” that offered interracial education in the nineteenth century—Oberlin College, Berea College, and the short-lived New York Central College (1848–1860), which was the most radical of the group. These schools were among the institutions in the United States most committed to multiracial democracy. According to Bell, although the schools were run largely by white men, the Black students were the ones continually pushing the colleges to honor their commitment to universal human equality. These colleges emerged when racist violence and prejudice were spreading and hardening in both the North and South. Black students also faced challenges on these supposedly enlightened campuses. The most progressive white allies were not immune to fears of amalgamation—interracial mixing—which clearly showed limits in white egalitarian thinking. As in the abolitionist movement generally, white paternalism and its emphasis on racial uplift also worked against the universalist equality that Black men and women advanced. Even white college leaders’ particular understanding of equality, as about opportunity and individual liberty, “could make whites oblivious to the continued significance of race” at these colleges (89). Ultimately, as Bell puts it, whites in these college “communities were more comfortable reforming specific racial injustices than reimagining race itself” (10).This shortsightedness had profound effects on the schools’ trajectories following the Civil War. Bell documents in incredible detail how practices of interracial sociability and exchange broke down at Berea and Oberlin. College officials no longer enforced social equality on campus. Students could choose to associate closely with students of other races—or not. Prior historians explain this declension as part and parcel of the emergent Jim Crow regime. Bell offers a more satisfying explanation. The pre-existing limitations of white collegians and college leaders’ egalitarian thinking, coupled with the feeling that they had won the big struggle—abolishing slavery—produced indifference to their institutions’ historic missions. Many whites at abolitionist colleges came to accept contemporary Darwinian ideas of social evolutionism, namely that humans developed in stages and that Black people were simply at an earlier stage. This notion deviated dramatically from the ideal of equality that Black students championed.Degrees of Equality is a mode of social and cultural history based on impeccable archival research. Bell mined student writings, institutional sources, public accounts of the colleges, and records of extracurricular groups to great effect, all of it allowing Bell to ground his arguments in evocative descriptions of students’ lived experience. Better still, Bell situates his case studies not only in the histories of race and higher education in the nineteenth century but also in sociological debates about how to foster egalitarian communities. Bell explicitly addresses how his study speaks to “contact theory,” which examines how intergroup interactions can challenge prejudice and produce shared feeling. He lends support to sociological critiques of color-blindness, which often sustain prejudice and inequality, as Bell shows that it did in the postbellum years. Chapter 3 draws especially well from sociological theory. By reading the experiences of four Oberlin alumnae in light of Black feminist scholarship, Bell uncovers the many subtle ways in which the college and abolitionists continued to indulge prejudice, and why radical challenges to these practices were so necessary.Bell ends by suggesting that this history offers much to modern university administrators, as they try to create racially egalitarian spaces on campuses. Degrees of Equality shows how deep and careful historical research can speak to larger interdisciplinary conversations within the present moment. This book demands the attention of historians of American education, abolition, and race in the nineteenth century.