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Don't make a scene. Don't say anything. People will continue for all eternity upsetting their neighbours as long as their neighbours are quiet about it. Very little of what we do is entirely our business, we are a social species living in close proximity on a small planet in an interconnected universe. Many of the things we do have more implications on other people than they have on us. Virtually everything we do has some implications for others. The simple idea that there are self-regarding and other regarding actions is wrong. Every action we perform has consequences that ripple out and effect everybody and everything around us. But not equally. The key thing to bear in mind is that limiting a freedom is a major loss of personal utility, but that does not imply that it is never justified, either “morally” or in more neutral utilitarian calculus. Minor limits on freedom are minor issues and need not be noticed.

Living as a human being requires compromise. Clothes are one way of conforming. A lot of young people who enjoy being seen to be radical say clothes are a bourgeois infringement of their personal liberty and freedom of expression or something of the sort. But they are a means of showing solidarity, community and avoiding offending people. It is one thing to have a naturist holiday in a special resort where everybody knows the rules, it is something quite different to try to act the same way in a regular town or city where people cannot avoid you.

We make people accept us the way we are. We impose ourselves on the community. And we think the community should just get used to it. I'm here, I offend you, I'm glad, that's your problem. The libertarian approach to the issue is to say that the individual is right and any infringements on the individual is a terrible and unforgivable crime. So the libertarian is in a real philosophical quandary when a streaker runs onto a football pitch. One individual expressing his fundamental rights, 50,000 others have theirs impeded in the process. How do they answer the issue? Badly.

I contend that all our actions have some impact on other people. In the case of the streaker the sum is simple, no matter how fundamental a freedom the streaker claims to be expressing the crowd have greater rights. Only if the streaker was in imminent danger of great personal harm would the interruption of the game be justified, needing a pee would not be an excuse, needing publicity would not, neither would being short of clean dry clothes. More complicated issues arise in the real world in which the interests of the individual need to be weighed against those of others. Uniforms are a good one. The dress code in schools and places of work often generates special pleading. Is it a fundamental human right to wear a low cut top and a figure hugging trousers? Some women seem to claim so. Their clothes cannot be merely functional they must express personality. (Strange how many women keep their personality in their bra and pants.) Why can't I wear trousers in the shop, the men do. But I don't want trousers like that... I want, well, er...awwwghh! Basically what she wants is everybody else to wear uniform and her body to be the centre of attention. She thinks that is her right.

Indecent Exposure

Living in a society limits your freedom of action and pays massive dividends elsewhere. This has always been the case. It is perfectly understandable that people want it all. They want comfort, security, the protection of the law and at the same time they want no limits on their freedom. Sorry, it will not happen. And it is not an ideal worth aiming for. Expressing the opinion that people have basic rights is not a good idea. Take away the structures of state and society and your basic rights are likely not to be an issue for long, we rely on other people for basic survival. If we stopped having states and governments 9 out of 10 of us would be dead within a decade. We rely on the existence of other members of our species for our survival. Human rights are not God-given, not inherent in our genes or our souls, they are constructs, social and legal constructs. Without law there is no right, just a predictable recurring grievance. Society and law is the basis of rights. Not the individual.

Both societies and individuals can exercise rights and benefit from them. There is no simple formula for getting the balance right. It depends on consensus, a shared idea of desirable aims and objectives. These can never be fixed, should never be fixed. Constitutional law is a mistake because it tries to make permanent a temporary agreement on an issue and to tie it up with invisible bonds of words. When the fledgling United States wrote a constitution it created great problems for itself by trying to tie the hands of its successors for all time. It created a union out of a short-lived consensus and tried to make that union permanent. This caused a little local difficulty a century later. Come and join our club, its free to join and if you try to leave we'll not let you, and we'll fight to stop you doing so in ways that you cannot even imagine. America still has yet to lose as many men in any other war.

Other problems come from such nonsense on stilts as the right to bear arms in the interests of a well run militia. Quite what relevance that has in the twenty first century is a bit beyond me. Is China being actively deterred from invading the USA by the thought of Chuck Heston and a million hillbillies with rifles? Really? I thought that the aircraft carriers, strategic bombers and nuclear submarines had a little more of an impact on their plans. At the end of the eighteenth century an armed population might have been important but today it is irrelevant, if any country is mad enough to contemplate invading the USA they would almost certainly be looking for lebensraum not a bunch of uppity people to try to enslave. Hunting rifles and Uzi machine pistols are little use against neutron bombs.

In Britain we have the supposed nightmare scenario, only criminals own guns. And? The problem with that exactly is? I don't see it. We don't have huge numbers of armed robberies and 99% of all occasions in which guns are pointed there are criminals on both sides of the gun. There will always be an advantage in pointing a gun first, and the more guns that are in circulation the more will be pointed and the more will be fired. I don't feel naked without a gun. I know the feeling of carrying a gun and the sense of extra power that it gives, but that feeling of power is just as much of an illusion as the feeling that cigarettes relieve stress. I could kill with this gun, [throb] but I don't have anybody to kill, yet. The guns and cigarettes cause the problems that they claim to cure. When everybody has guns the world becomes more dangerous. This is similar to the scenario with cars, their general availability makes them a source of danger, children are considered at risk from walking to school so they must be driven instead. The widespread ownership of guns leads to the widespread use of guns, which feeds the fear of guns, which feeds the feeling of a need for guns. But that is where the analogy with cars breaks down because cars are generally useful. Most guns are not.

I would like to see a total ban on the ownership of handguns, including replicas. They have no legitimate function. Private historical collections? Wankers, get a life. As to the so called right of self defence I just don't see where guns come in. They are not defensive weapons. They are weapons of aggression or deterrence. I do not see a basic fundamental human right in the threat to kill people.

Hunting rifles and shotguns are a different matter. I see no problem in regulating the legitimate use of such devices. A hunting rifle does not need an 18 shot magazine and a rapid fire option. It does not need to fold up to be easily concealed under a coat. It does not need to be on display in the back window of a pick-up truck. One piece single shot bolt action rifles are very practical for hunting deer and bear. They can be carried in locked compartments in vehicles and stored in strong locked compartments bolted to the wall or floor of homes. I have fired a shotgun many times, a large single shot bolt action gun and a double barrel breach loading gun. I have never been in such a target rich environment that I felt the need for more than two shots, any more would hardly be sporting, would it? While such devices could be used to kill people quite easily (as can cars, 'planes, hoes, kitchen knives, baseball bats, rocks, etc.) they do not offer the ease of misuse of the assault rifle, pistol or submachine gun which have only one use: killing people.

The United States of America has a very strange constitution and set of basic assumptions because it is a nation based on an uneasy set of ideas; the rights of states, the right and fit functions of government, the necessity of government and yet at the same time it had to show that the revolutionary war was right and its leaders were patriots and freedom fighters not rebels and terrorists. The legacy of that revolution lives on to this day with the uneasy truce between the idea of government and the supposedly higher rights of the individual. When empowered by the constitution selfish and opportunist individuals will always try to claim the moral high ground. They succeed so often because the entire American culture is based on a set of absurd individualist gobbledegook that dates from the era of the revolution. Nobody ever dares to ask how the unfettered selfish actions of a quarter of a billion people can somehow result in optimum happiness for all. To ask such a thing would be un-American.

While Adam Smith showed that the seemingly counterintuitive idea that when everybody just does their own thing the result is an efficient distribution of resources without any planning I am unaware of any theory that explains how a similar magical rapprochement will occur if people simply pursue their own selfish desires in all matters with no regard for the common good. And yet it is that missing idea that American culture seems predicated upon.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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