Views on liberty: the rational choice

“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.” Robert Frost

I spoke in a previous post about misuse of common good. In fact it is very hard to define what is good for an individual let alone the whole of humanity. Maybe it is not what seems good at first.

Being a drunk may be bad for most, but for people like Charles Bukowski or William S. Buroughs and many other artists it was an essential component of life. This is what busybodies and moralist don’t realise, as they are often driven by, to paraphrase, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

They claim that people need to be protected from themselves as they do not make good or rational choices. But what is good? What is rational? Most people are “rational” in their way, as in they have a rational process which leads to their decisions, just because their process is different than mine does not mean it is bad (well obviously my reason is superior, but yours certainly is not). Off course emotion can also be a big part of this process, but this is also true of everyone.

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There is always a trade-off between pleasure and pain, between now and future and it is not the same for all. Some want to live until their 90s in retirement others want to “live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”, and it is their choice. Personally I want to die looking gorgeous at 150. But that’s just me.

„When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions...The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic...It is usual to call an action irrational if it aims, at the expense of "material" and tangible advantages, at the attainment of "ideal" or "higher" satisfactions...However, the striving after these higher ends is neither more nor less rational or irrational than that after other human ends. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action”

Off course it needs to be stated that freedom and responsibility cannot be separated. You should be able to live as you wish, but willing to take full responsibility for the results. Most people tend to want just the cool part of freedom, sex drugs rock n’ roll, skip the hangover please. They expect for the costs to be supported by others, and things don’t work like that.

For a quick example, many supporters of abortion say “a woman’s body is her own business”, but when you analyse their ideology you notice it’s her business only when it suits them for a specific purpose. When she gets sick, the ones on the left left want government healthcare, her body’s maintenance becomes the business of taxpayers. If instead of abortion she chooses to have the baby, prenatal care, childbirth, day-care and a whole lot of other services are no longer her business.

The 16-year-old's version of liberty, saying to a parent stay out of my room, I don't need a curfew, and hey, when's dinner can I have money to go out? This cannot work for adults. You should do whatever the hell you want, but should not expect to be supported by others as a default state.