Sarah Conly

When we say something has intrinsic value, we mean that it has value in itself, regardless of what it may produce. We generally think that humans have intrinsic value, for example, so that the death of a human is always a loss. That is why we believe that it is almost always wrong to kill a person, even if that person is disagreeable and unproductive.

Other things, though, have value only for what they can give us. Take toothpaste — it’s valuable, but only because it helps to protect your teeth. If we had a better way of protecting teeth, all those tubes of Crest and Colgate would land in the trash. Some things, of course, have both kinds of value: my dentist has intrinsic value because he is a human being, and instrumental value because he can keep those teeth healthier.

I argue that liberties have only instrumental value. That is, freedom of action of a particular kind is valuable only if it has good consequences; to be more specific, if it has more good consequences than bad consequences. Some liberties have a great deal of value — the liberty to vote, for example. Others have none at all, because they have no good consequences, or because their good consequences are outweighed by their bad consequences. Losing those liberties is no loss.

This has not been a popular position in modern philosophy. Immanuel Kant is the philosopher most closely connected to the idea that liberty is a good in itself, and that our autonomy is what gives us value, but there are many others. John Locke believed in the value of liberty and greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence of our unalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty to defend the value of liberty of action. And there are many contemporary libertarians who think that the protection of liberty is paramount; Robert Nozick is the best known of these.

Sarah Conly

I am always shocked when I read that a respected researcher has produced shoddy work. I shouldn’t be, though; it happens in every field. Remember Cyril Burt‘s infamous twin studies? And much more recently, there was Marc Hauser’s sloppy research into animal cognition at Harvard, which resulted in him leaving academia. Whether it is overconfidence, overambition, or a series of innocent oversights, mistakes creep in.

Fortunately, most scientific discoveries are founded on reliable, replicable work, and that is true in behavioral economics too. The groundbreaking work by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman is still very well-regarded, and Kahneman, sometimes referred to as “the grandfather of behavioral economics,” received a Nobel Prize for his work. Richard Thaler received a Nobel more recently for his own contributions to behavioral economics.

Behavioral economics has been a very hot field with lots of people jumping on the research bandwagon, and no doubt some of them have not done the solid work they need to before sharing their supposed results. But the field itself is strong and has yielded and will yield valuable insights into our behavior. And yes, parallel work by evolutionary biologists contributes to our understanding that we are not purely rational agents who are always motivated in a way that results in getting what is best for us.

Sarah Conly

We use a lot of language that suggests that liberty is intrinsically valuable, which shows up everywhere from the Declaration of Independence, as I just mentioned, to popular country songs today. But that isn’t the way we act.

People talk about freedom of speech as a precious thing, for example, but we all want restrictions on speech. We don’t want people to be able to give away state secrets, or make threats, or commit libel or slander, or engage in false advertising. We make those things illegal. Cyberbullying is becoming illegal in more and more places, precisely because we are discovering how harmful it can be. Our laws evolve when we see that protection is needed, and we generally regard that as a reasonable practical matter.

Or, consider driving: We love the freedom of the road. However, we accept speed limits, drunk-driving laws, vehicle safety standards, no-passing zones, traffic lights, and the highway patrol, because we know that otherwise we can get killed. We don’t want the roads to be completely free; we don’t want some maniac driving one hundred miles an hour through a school zone to express his freedom of choice.

Our standards as to what is acceptable liberty change all the time, because circumstances change, and a liberty that once might have been harmless can become dangerous.

We see this in medical practice: before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you were free to buy any so-called drug you wanted. Then the FDA came along and said that remedies had to be tested to see that they were helpful and not harmful, because too many people were being scammed by snake oil salesmen. We see it in environmental law: Is it okay to burn your trash outside? It was once, but with larger and denser populations, individual households all burning their trash is harmful, so most municipalities don’t allow it.

My position is that we could make these changes more efficiently if we just admitted that what we are doing is looking at the consequences that arise from a given liberty and judging whether it should be allowed.

Sarah Conly

Both individual-level and social-level restrictions on liberty are important. Both kinds require the same justification: Is allowing a liberty doing so much harm that restricting it would be beneficial, even given the costs of restricting it?

Many liberties, of course, affect both the individual and the society around that person, but some more greatly one or the other. Seat belt laws, for example, are primarily justified by the good they do for the individual. The death or injury of a person who didn’t wear a seat belt does have costs to others, but the primary loss is to that person. So, we have seat belt laws because sometimes individuals are shortsighted about their own safety.

Social-level restrictions on liberty are familiar to us, because many have been accepted since societies first formed. Theft is illegal, for example. It might be quite beneficial to the individual thief if stealing were allowed, but it is bad for society to have that be a practice. So we try to restrict stealing by threatening punishment.

Of course, many restrictions are extremely beneficial to both the individual and society. Requiring vaccinations against a highly dangerous and highly contagious disease protects both the individual and the society in which that person lives.

Sarah Conly

Individual-level restrictions are tricky to design.

First, it is harder to know what will benefit an individual. We can be pretty certain that some social policies are desired by society — like laws against theft — but less sure of what will benefit a particular person, who may have unusual goals.

Second, if we did want to enforce restrictions for the sake of the individual — paternalistic restrictions — we might find the costs of such restrictions too great. How could we make people eat their five servings of vegetables a day? We don’t want diet monitors because the costs would be silly — not just the financial costs but the psychological costs to the people being monitored. It is not worth it. It’s easier to promote the accessibility of fresh vegetables.

So when it comes to individual-level restrictions, we want to restrict liberties generally recognized to be harmful, which we can restrict without excessive cost. I would make cigarettes illegal, for example. There is plenty of reason to think that people start to smoke with a lot of what are called cognitive biases, basically poor thinking (including as to how easily they will be able to quit, and how harmful smoking is likely to be to them). And for just about everyone, we know that cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and other smoking-related diseases are contrary to their long-term goals. I don’t think anyone on his deathbed says, “I’ll never see my grandchildren or enjoy another sunset, but it was worth it to smoke all those Marlboros.” And people who don’t start smoking don’t miss it.

So it seems best to just prevent smoking. And this is doable, because it won’t require monitoring individual people — it requires shutting down an industry devoted to producing addictive carcinogens.

Sarah Conly

I don’t know enough of the facts about cell phone usage to know what would be right here, honestly. How much harm is it doing? How much do people enjoy the unrestricted use of their phones? How painful would it be to change their habits, and for how long would that pain last? Are there policies that would reduce phone usage that would be less costly than a restriction (incentives to put the phone down, for example)? How would this restriction occur? Would it allow incursions into privacy that could be dangerous? Would it just drive people crazy? Answers to all these questions need to be known before we know if a restriction on liberty is justified.

Sarah Conly

Do we want the state to abuse its power? No, we obviously don’t. But abuses can take many forms.

Telling businesses they have the liberty to pollute is an abuse of power; telling commercial fishermen that they have the freedom to fish all they want in what was previously a five-hundred-thousand-square-mile protected national monument is an abuse of power; gutting environmental protections so that developers have the liberty to clear forests, drill, and build on land without regard to endangered species is an abuse of power.

All of these moves allow the government to curry favor with certain groups, even though they are a huge loss for the rest of us. A release from restrictions can be as bad as a restriction.

If you elect terrible people, they will find a way to do harm. And again, the policy I promote is not “Let the state do whatever it wants.” It is that liberty is valuable as a means to an end. Thus we should evaluate, carefully and thoroughly, individual liberties as to their effects and act accordingly. In some cases, liberty should absolutely be protected. In others, liberty should be restricted — including the liberty of the state to act in certain ways if that liberty is used to do harm.

Sarah Conly

Sure, there is a difference. In one case, we are limiting giant corporations who are hurting us, and in the other we are limiting individuals who might hurt both themselves and us. But the underlying premise is the same: sometimes a liberty hurts us in a serious way.

If we want to limit you, an individual, from hurting me in a serious way, we accept that: no one objects to a law that stops you from stealing from me. If we want to limit you, an individual, from hurting yourself, we already accept that in many cases. We think it is right to require prescriptions for many medications, because the world of medicine is incredibly complicated and reading WebMD doesn’t actually make you an expert — you could kill yourself, and that is definitely not what you want. We think it is right to have safety standards for cars instead of making you do all your own research into which cars are safe and which might, in an unregulated market, essentially be heavy-duty cardboard, because you don’t have the time or expertise for that.

One bad choice and, again, you might kill yourself when the cheap car you choose implodes when you are in a fender bender. I am just saying there are more cases like this than we may have realized, and being aware of them and responding to them will help us, as individuals, get where we want to be.

Sarah Conly

I am quite old. Thus, I remember, for example, getting a smallpox vaccination, since this was required if you wanted to go to public school in the state of Virginia. I do not remember, or know, when this regulation was enacted, or how it was greeted at that point. But certainly, by the time I was entering school, no one was fussing about it. It was just one of those things you did. Well, I am sure I fussed about getting a shot, but whether it was required by the state was not an issue.

I do remember the enactment of desegregation, however. While Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, many schools in the South did not start to integrate until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At that point, there was more than fussing; there was, in many places, an uproar. But now, how many people are outraged by the fact of school integration? No doubt there are some, just as there are neo-Nazis and flat-earthers, but it is accepted by every reasonable person.

I similarly remember the introduction of drunk-driving laws, and how that was resented. “I drive better drunk than most people drive sober” was a common refrain, and yes, there were complaints that such laws were an infringement on personal liberty. Yet now people take laws against drunk driving to be completely reasonable.

The point here is that while we do sometimes resent a restriction when it is first enacted, if it is in fact beneficial, we come to accept it. We want integrated schools and safe driving. Once we learn more about such restrictions and experience them, we often begin to think them necessary to a functioning society. Politicians don’t like to do anything that will make them even temporarily unpopular, but with enough social support they can make necessary changes. We need to think about what is best for us as individuals and as a society in the long term.