Against Autonomy
The left has always been anti-freedom. A trip in Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine proves it.
I was going through some drafts of things I have written and in one of them was a link to a 2013 NYT opinion piece that has to rank up there with the dumbest collection of words ever published.
It was called “Three Cheers for the Nanny State” by Sarah Conly. Conly is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and is also the author of a book titled, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism in 2013, followed up in 2016 by One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? – so you can guess about how the opinion piece went (it is now behind the NYT paywall and I’m not paying for it).
Conly argues “the crucial point is that in some situations it’s just difficult for us to take in the relevant information and choose accordingly,” therefore “we need help.” And although she admits that it is not “always a mistake when someone does something imprudent,” the “needs of the majority” must be taken into account.
This argues against John Stuart Mill’s seminal work On Liberty, she rejects Mills idea of autonomy as inviolable. Mill, as well as other philosophers and political theorists like him, posited that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those decisions affect no one other than themselves.
In 1859, Mill wrote that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone’s freedom of action was to prevent harm to others. According to Mill’s “harm principle,” we should almost never stop people from behavior that affects only themselves because people know best what they themselves want. That “almost,” though, is important. It’s fair to stop us, Mill argued, when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll definitely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the river.
Mill just didn’t think this would happen very often but if today is any proof, he was wrong. Many times, we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It’s well established by now that we often don’t think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.
The individual can and will make voluntary trade-offs when integrating into society. We voluntarily subjugate decisions that would maximize their benefit to those that better their community. What I understood from On Liberty is an individual’s right to decide for themselves was inviolable. Mill never presupposes that individuals will always make the correct decision; he just states that nothing should interfere with his ability to make that decision.
Conly asks that we accept three aspects of her “paternalism” as true for her thesis to have merit. For her version of paternalism to be workable, we must:
Accept that the world is simply too complex for us to understand and,
People are too stupid to act in their own best interests and make the “right” decisions,
There is human authority above the individual that can understand this complexity and can never make the wrong decision.
This line of “reasoning” is remarkable as it mostly comes from academics and political elites who simultaneously argue that while you, the weak-minded plebian can’t be expected to make decisions for yourself, somehow a collection of individual elites can make that decision for you.
Well, we all know how good our government is at getting it right. From whether eggs or coffee are good/bad for you to going to war, there are examples that Conly is wrong in anything except a theoretical sense. Take the cases of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the left will constantly argue that these were mistakes and errors on the part of the Bush government but things like “leading from behind” and Benghazi are not the fault of the Obama Administration and represent “smart” policy. No matter if you support or oppose either of these positions, they both can’t represent correct decisions by the government.
This is not the way America is structured or is designed to work. I’ve long held the opinion that our troubles are not because somehow our Constitution has failed us; we have failed it by trying to operate a collectivist system in the framework designed for a representative republic. Years ago, I wrote:
America doesn’t need a new governmental system. What we absolutely don’t need is the socialism of the Obama administration, the Marxism of the Occupy Wall Street “movement” or the communism of the columnists of the New York Times. Our Constitution (and the governance that flows from it) was never designed to operate under such circumstances. What we are doing today just as ineffective as trying to change a flat tire with a frying pan or to fry an egg with a lug wrench. Our government isn’t working, not because it isn’t the right system, it is because the things that it is being driven to do were never part of its scope. It didn’t leave us, we left it.
America is not now, and never has been, a “top down” culture; rather it is “bottom up”. We simply have never done command and control; we are a nation born of rebels.
I’ve also made the argument that respecting autonomy is the chief way to bear witness to the intrinsic value of individuality.
What Conly and authoritarians like her really want is the “right” people making decisions for the rank and file based on their idea of “right”. Happiness is efficiency through subservience to authority. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
How 1984 of her…
What is stupendously arrogant and obtuse is her third maxim that there is an authority outside of the individual that infallibly always make what would be the best decision for us. If she were a Catholic Thomist theologian I might be inclined to agree with her that there is such an authority, Who is God, Who nonetheless allows us free will to make our own bad decisions. But what she is referring to is a select elite of fellow academics (or maybe just herself writ large!) It is the insuperable arrogance of the Left to consider itself all knowing and infallible. But of course in their own imaginings they are the divine philosopher-kings!
The problem with the idea that there is a human authority above the individual that always -- or even often -- knows better is the fact that the individuals that make up this "authority" never -- NEVER -- pay any real price for being wrong.
Your doctor gives you bad advice and you can sue him and he can lose his license.
Your governor orders you to take medicine you don't need and he still gets reelected and paid if it kills you.
You can't get back at "the government," and you can't get back at the individuals making these decisions, either. That reason alone is enough to cull that herd and severely limit their realm of influence.