Sunday, March 31, 2002 The Objectivist Center, Posner, and Lindsey By Diana Hsieh @ 10:54 AM Back in October, The Objectivist Center published their position statement on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The last paragraph of that statement caused me a fair amount of consternation. It reads: 8. Just as our government may take action against other countries and groups that pose a genuine threat, even if they have not actually attacked us, so it may use its police powers domestically to identify and deal with threats from individuals and groups even if they have not yet acted violently. The first responsibility of government is to ensure the security of its citizens--i.e., protect their right to life. In doing so, however, it must also respect their rights to liberty, property, and privacy. Measures that limit the latter rights are justified only if they are objectively required for security and are tailored to minimize restrictions on other rights. This formulation of a tradeoff between security and liberty seems to embody the sort of pragmatic approach to rights that Objectivism has always rejected. We are most emphatically not more secure by limiting our liberties, but rather less secure. Increased security measures which restrict liberties may better protect us from criminals, but at the great cost of allowing the leviathan to trample over us as it sees fit. Unchecked governments, not criminals, have been and continue to be the greatest threat to human life. Nevertheless, the government also does need to protect our security in the sense of our right to life. If a government does not prevent us from bring blown up by terrorists, then it is not doing its job, just as it would not be doing its job if it stood idly by while murderous thugs roamed the streets looking for fresh prey. And, of course, the paragraph does specifically say that the government must respect "rights to liberty, property, and privacy" in protecting the right to life. I suspect that much of my discomfort with this section of the position statement is the result of a serious lack of context. There is little explication of the origin and justification of the ideas. There are no concrete examples to clarify meaning. (Such explication need not have been included in the position statement; a separate article would have been just fine.) In light of these intellectual reservations, I was very interested to read some rather interesting comments by Brink Lindsey concerning the legitimacy of the notion of a tradeoff between security and liberty. Responding to Richard Posner's comments at Cato, Lindsey writes: Posner's formulation -- that liberty is just one competing value among many -- is not one that libertarians like myself are likely to cotton to. But the fact is that, in the case of civil liberties, even libertarians with a principled commitment to the protection of individual rights should acknowledge that tradeoffs and balancing are unavoidable. The reason is that, with respect to civil liberties, considerations of protecting individual rights are found on both sides of the equation. On the one hand, government has a responsibility to protect our persons and property from violence and harm -- in other words, to safeguard our liberty. But while it is providing security for our rights, it must not trample the rights of suspects or potential perpetrators of violence. The challenge, then, is to protect liberty adequately without violating liberty excessively in the process. It's a balancing act, and liberty's on both sides of the balance. Those knee-jerk civil libertarians who think that any expansion of law enforcement or prosecutorial powers is necessarily a setback for liberty are therefore dead wrong. It may very well be that a small curtailment of the freedoms of suspects can yield enormous gains in protecting the freedoms of the rest of us -- in the current context, that includes the freedom from being vaporized by a suitcase nuke or dying horribly from smallpox. Lindsey seems to be arguing the same essential point as the troublesome last paragraph in the TOC statement. But because Lindsey's comments include argument and explication, rather than mere statement, the issue is far more clear to me. However, there is still much to be explored about this idea of balancing security and liberty. For example, how do we determine what constitutes an appropriate tradeoff? What measures are legitimately negotiable depending upon the particular circumstances faced by a government? What measures would be intolerable no matter what? In order to prevent ourselves from sliding down a slippery slope, we need specific principles to guide our decisions as to what would constitute a legitimate tradeoff and what would not. Additionally, this problem of protecting security seems related to other (potentially) legitimate government powers to initiate coercion, such as the power of a subpoena to force an unwilling person to testify. Rand endorsed such subpoenas on the grounds that a refusal to testify would subvert justice. But perhaps a better argument could be made on the grounds that the security-liberty interest of all people is much greater than the liberty-liberty interest of the witness in most of these cases. Such an argument might even point to reasons for rejecting subpoenas where the person faces significant risk of death (from the Mafia, perhaps) as a result of his testimony, as then the security-liberty of the witness is at stake. (That's a confused explanation. I'll have to try to do better later.) As I said, much to explore. Update: Due to serious philosophic and moral objections, I am no longer associated with The Objectivist Center in any way, shape, or form. My reasons why can be found on my web page on The Many False Friends of Objectivism.   E-mail Diana Hsieh    PermaLink ()    Comments []