EQUALITY AND LIBERTY DEMANDS AS POLITICAL CONCEPTS

Liberalism is based on the concepts of liberty and equality. Liberals typically feel that government is essential to protect individuals from harm caused by others, but they also recognize that government can be a threat to liberty. As a result, there is tension between the demands for equality and the demands for liberty, which this paper attempts to explain using Stuart Mill and Plato’s concepts.

Liberalism derives from two interconnected aspects of Western society. The first is the West’s emphasis on individualism, as opposed to other people’s emphasis on position, caste, and custom. Throughout much of the past, the individual has been submerged in and lesser to his clan, tribe, cultural group, or kingdom. Liberalism is the peak of developments in Western society that produced a sense of the importance of human individuality, liberation of the individual from complete subservience to the group, and a relaxation of the tight hold of custom, law, and authority. Liberalism also derives from the practice of adversariality in European political and economic life, a process in which institutionalized competition, such as the contest between different political parties in electoral contests, between prosecution and defense in an opponent procedure, or between the various producers in a market economy, generates a dynamic social order. Adversarial systems have always been shaky, however, and it took a long time for the belief in adversariality to emerge from the more traditional view, traceable at least to Plato, that the state should be natural structure, like a beehive, in which the different social classes cooperate by performing distinct yet matching roles. The idea that competition is an essential part of a political system and that good government needs a vigorous opposition was still considered strange in most European countries in the early 19th century.

Underlying the liberal idea in adversariality is the conviction that human beings are necessarily rational creatures capable of settling their political differences through dialogue and compromise. This aspect of liberalism became particularly famous in 20th-century projects aimed at eliminating war and resolving disagreements between states through organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice (World Court). Liberalism has a close but sometimes uneasy connection with democracy. At the center of democratic principle is the belief that governments obtain their authority from the popular election; liberalism, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the scope of governmental activity. Liberals often have been cautious of democracy, then, because of fears that it might generate a tyranny by the mass. One might smartly say, therefore, that democracy looks after the masses and liberalism after unpopular minorities.

Like other political doctrines, liberalism is highly sensitive to time and situations. Each country’s freedom is different, and it changes in each generation. The historical advancement of liberalism over recent centuries has been a movement from doubt of the state’s power on the ground that it tends to be abused, to a willingness to use the power of government to correct perceived inequities in the distribution of wealth resulting from economic competition. The expansion of governmental authority and responsibility sought by liberals in the 20th century was opposed to the contraction of government advocated by liberals a century before. In the 19th century liberals generally formed the party of business and the entrepreneurial middle class; for much of the 20th century, they were more likely to work to restrict and control business to provide greater opportunities for laborers and consumers. In each case, however, the liberals’ motivation was the same: hostility to concentrations of power that threaten the freedom of the individual and stopping him from realizing his full potential, along with a willingness to reexamine and modify social institutions in the light of new needs. This desire is tempered by an aversion to sudden, catastrophic change, which is what differentiates the liberal from the radical. It is this very enthusiasm to welcome and support useful change, however, that distinguishes the liberal from the conservative, who believes that change is at least as likely to result in a loss as in gain.

Aristotle’s idea of justice as proportional equality has a fundamental insight. The idea offers a framework for a sane argument between egalitarian and non-egalitarian ideas of justice, its focal point being the question of the basis for an adequate equality. Both sides accept truth as equal balance. Aristotle’s analysis makes it clear that the argument involves the features deciding whether two persons are to be considered equal or unequal in a distributive context.

On the formal level of clear conceptual explication, justice and equality are linked through these principles of legal and proportional justice. Justice cannot be explained without these equality policies; the equality principles only receive their normative importance in their role as principles of justice.

Official and proportional equality is simply a conceptual plan. It needs to be made accurate — i.e., its open variables need to be filled out. The formal hypothesis remains quite empty as long as it remains vague when or through what features two or more people or cases should be considered equal. All debates over the proper notion of justice, i.e., over who is due what can be understood as debates over the question of which cases are equal and which unequal. For this reason, equality theorists are correct in implying that the claim that persons are owed equality becomes informative only when one is told — what kind of equality they are owed. Every normative theory implies a certain idea of justice. To outline their position, egalitarians must thus take account of a specific (egalitarian) conception of equality. To do so, they need to identify substantive principles of equality, discussed below.

Libertarianism and economic liberalism represent minimalist positions concerning distributive justice. Citing Locke, they both assume an original right to freedom and possessions, thus arguing against redistribution and social rights and for the free market. They assert an opposition between equality and liberty: the individual right to liberty can be limited only for the sake of foreign and local peace. For this reason, libertarians consider maintaining communal order the state’s only lawful duty. They assert a natural right to self-ownership that entitles everybody to thus far unowned bits of the external world using mixing their labor with it. All individuals can thus claim possessions if “enough and as good” is left over for others (Locke’s proviso). Correspondingly, they secure market freedoms and oppose the use of redistributive taxation plans for the sake of social justice as equality. A principal objection to libertarian theory is that its understanding of the Lockean proviso — nobody’s situation should be worsened through a previous acquisition of property — leads to an excessively weak obligation and is thus unacceptable. With a broader and fairer interpretation of what it means for one a situation to be worse than another, however, justifying personal appropriation and, a fortiori, all further ownership rights, becomes much more challenging. If the proviso recognizes the full range of interests and alternatives that self-owners have, then it will not generate unrestricted rights over different amounts of resources. Another objection is that precisely if one’s free accomplishment is what is meant to count, as the libertarians argue, success should not depend strictly on luck, extraordinary natural gifts, inherited property, and status. In other words, an equal opportunity also needs to be at least present as a counterbalance, ensuring that the destiny of human beings is determined by their decisions and not by certain social situations. Equal opportunity thus seems to be the usually vague minimal formula at work in every egalitarian conception of distributive justice. Many egalitarians, however, wish for more — namely, an equality of (at least necessary) life conditions.

In any event, with a shift away from a strictly negative idea of freedom, economic liberalism can indeed itself point the way to more social and economic equality. For with such a change, what is at stake is not only assuring an equal right to self-defense but also furnishing everyone more or less the same chance to make use of the right to freedom. In other words, certain essential goods need to be provided to assure the equitable or ‘fair value of the fundamental liberties.’

Liberal Democracy

We get a somewhat different perspective on Mill’s utilitarian and liberal principles by seeing how he applies them to social and political issues. We might begin by focusing on Mill’s defense of a democratic form of liberalism in Considerations on Representative Government and Principles of Political Economy.

In Considerations on Representative Democracy Mill argues that a form of representative democracy is the best ideal form of government (Berger, 1984). It is not an invariant ideal that holds regardless of historical or social circumstances. But he does think that it is the best form of government for societies with sufficient resources, security, and culture of self-reliance. In particular, Mill believes that representative democracy is best when it is best because it best satisfies two criteria of all good government. Mill’s ultimate approach is that good government should promote the common good of its citizens. Mill does not explicitly invoke his version of utilitarianism. Perhaps he wants his defense of representative democracy to rest on more ecumenical premises. But Mill understands this political criterion of the common interest in broadly consequentialist or result-oriented terms. Moreover, though he may not mention the higher pleasures doctrine explicitly, it is also evident that Mill understands the good of each in broadly perfectionist terms that emphasize the importance of an active and autonomous form of life that exercises intellectual, deliberative, and creative capacities.

Representative Democracy

Mill thinks that there are two ways in which democracy is, under the right circumstances, best suited to promote the common good. First, he believes that democracy plays an important epistemic role in identifying the common good. Proper deliberation about issues affecting the common good requires identifying how different policies would bear on the interests of affected parties and so requires the proper representation and articulation of the benefits of citizens. But the failure of imagination and the operation of personal bias present obstacles to the adequate representation of the interests of others. Universal suffrage and political participation provide the best assurance that policymakers will duly appreciate the sake of the governed (Berger, 1984).

Second, Mill thinks that democracy is also the best form of government because of the constitutive effects of political participation on the improvement of the moral capacities of citizens. To the extent that the governed can and do participate in public debate and elections, they exercise those very deliberative functions that it is the aim of government to develop. They learn to gather information about their options, deliberate about their merits, and choose a representative that will give expression to their ideas and preferences. But they deliberate and choose with others about a public agenda, and in so doing they cultivate abilities to form a conception of a common interest, to take principled stands, to exchange reasons with others, and to learn from others. So far, these would seem to be arguments for widespread—indeed, universal—direct democracy. In fact, unlike many of Mill’s contemporaries interested in expanding the franchise, Mill defends the extension of the franchise to women too, rejecting any restriction on their franchise as baseless. But Mill qualifies this defense of direct democracy in various significant ways.

Democracy presumably involves rule by the will of the people. We might say that a political system is democratic insofar as the content of its policy decisions reflects the will of the citizens. Direct democracy, in which every citizen votes on legislation, is one way for policy decisions to reflect the will of the people. But direct democracy is impractical in anything but a small community. Mill defends representative, rather than direct, democracy. Mill believes that officials are charged with the task of voting, after free and open discussion, their considered views about what would promote the common good. Here Mill expresses doubts about an interest group model of democracy, according to which representatives are advocates of the parochial interests of their constituents and democracy is seen as an impartial aggregation and set of compromises among parochial interests. Instead, Mill regards representatives as fiduciaries in a public trust, in which each agent aims at a genuinely common good, and in which individual and collective deliberations are shaped by a diversity of experiences and perspectives.

Many needs are local, and, even when the needs are general, their satisfaction may depend heavily on local conditions. For this reason, Mill advocates a federal system in which a central representative body has more limited functions and local or municipal representative bodies govern in matters involving domestic affairs or local detail, such as the creation and maintenance of local infrastructure, including roads, courts, jails, and schools. However, one important function of a central government, Mill believes, is the need to protect local political minorities from being systematically disadvantaged by local political majorities. Here he shows his concern with individual rights against the tyranny of the majority, which was a focus of On Liberty, and suggests that constitutional guarantees may be better preserved by central, rather than local, authorities. Unfortunately, he does not dedicate much attention to exactly which individual rights should be recognized constitutionally.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, a representative democracy, either local or federal, should employ proportional, rather than winner-take-all, representation. We can see how proportional representation fits with the epistemic argument for freedom. The winner-take-all representation may eliminate or reduce practical expression of minority points of view so essential for free and informed inquiry about the common good and respect the interests of political minorities.

References

Berger, F., 1984, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Knopf. Norcross, A., 2008, “A Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism,” in The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism, H. West (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell.