Ranking liberty

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." - John Milton, from Areopagitica.

That bothers me some; I'm not sure it's a good idea to rank liberties.

It bothers me too, though perhaps for a slightly different reason. Once you start ranking liberties, you run into the question of what happens when two highly valued liberties collide.

Milton was writing in 1644 against government licensing of books, so he was arguing in a very specific context. In that setting, freedom to think, speak, publish, and debate seemed to him the foundation upon which many other freedoms rested. If the authorities can decide what may be said, they gain enormous leverage over religion, politics, science, and nearly everything else. That's probably why he called it "above all liberties."

But there is another tradition, associated with thinkers like Isaiah Berlin, that treats liberty as plural rather than singular. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, property rights, due process, personal autonomy—these are distinct values that sometimes support each other and sometimes conflict. There may be no objective way to place them all on one ladder.

Your reaction reminds me of practical politics. A person may rank free expression highest until the government imprisons them without trial. Another may prize due process above all until censorship prevents them from criticizing the government. The importance of a liberty often becomes most visible when it is the one under threat.

There's also a hint of paradox in Milton himself. He was a fierce advocate of freedom of expression, but not always for views he strongly opposed. Many champions of liberty discover that their favorite liberty is universal in theory and somewhat less universal in practice.

I suspect Milton's statement works best as rhetoric rather than as political philosophy. As rhetoric, it's powerful. As a complete theory of freedom, it leaves unanswered why one liberty should permanently outrank all the others.

The quote does raise an interesting question, though: if you were forced to choose a "first among equals" liberty, would there be one? Or do you think the very act of ranking them is a mistake?

There was a cantankerous Monseigneur in a neighborhood I once lived in who thought it sinful to sleep in on Sunday without attending Mass and who, accordingly, began ringing a full set of bells every Sunday at six am for a full hour.  It took going over his head to the bishop to stop him. 

That is a wonderfully concrete example of the problem.

The Monseigneur would likely have argued from his liberty: the freedom to practice and proclaim his religion, perhaps even the freedom of a church to ring its bells. The people trying to sleep could point to their own liberty: the peaceful enjoyment of their homes and freedom from being involuntarily drafted into someone else's religious observance at six in the morning.

Neither liberty is obviously fake. The conflict arises because liberties don't exist in a vacuum. One person's exercise of a freedom can become an imposition on others.

In a sense, modern liberal societies are built around managing exactly these collisions. Most people would agree that a church may ring bells. Most people would also agree that there are limits on volume, duration, and timing. The bishop, in effect, seems to have decided that an hour of bells at dawn crossed the line from religious expression into nuisance.

It reminds me of the old saying that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The saying is oversimplified, but it captures something important: liberties often have boundaries defined by the liberties of others.

Milton's formulation can seem unsettling because it suggests that freedom of expression should prevail "above all liberties." But if we applied that literally, the Monseigneur's bells might be untouchable. After all, they were a form of expression according to conscience. Yet most of us instinctively feel that the sleepers had rights too.

What strikes me about your story is that the solution wasn't to abolish the bells altogether. It was to appeal to a higher authority that could balance competing claims. The bishop apparently recognized that encouraging Mass attendance was not worth alienating an entire neighborhood before sunrise.

And, knowing human nature, I can't help wondering whether the Monseigneur was motivated partly by theology and partly by temperament. Some people seem to regard being ignored as a challenge to be corrected by increasing the volume.

That's an important observation, and one that often gets overlooked when people talk about liberty as if it were simply the absence of constraints.

Many of the most significant choices people make involve voluntarily accepting obligations and limitations. A priest accepts vows and ecclesiastical authority. A married person gives up certain freedoms of action in exchange for commitments to a spouse. Parents surrender enormous amounts of time, money, sleep, and autonomy for the sake of their children. Property ownership brings taxes, maintenance duties, zoning restrictions, and liability. Even boarding an airplane means consenting to security screening, schedules, and a long list of rules.

In that sense, liberty is not just freedom from obligations; it is also the freedom to undertake obligations.

This was a theme in the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, who noticed that free societies are filled with voluntary associations and commitments. People do not remain isolated, maximally unconstrained individuals. They join churches, families, clubs, businesses, professions, and communities, each of which imposes rules and expectations.

The interesting question is whether these surrendered liberties are actually losses. A bachelor can decide at noon to spend the afternoon fishing. A parent usually cannot. Yet many parents would say their lives became richer, more meaningful, or more complete despite having less day-to-day freedom. The same could be said of priests, soldiers, scholars, or anyone devoted to a demanding vocation.

The paradox is that a life spent maximizing immediate freedom of action can sometimes end up feeling empty, while a life structured by commitments can feel liberating in another sense. Not because the commitments remove constraints, but because they give direction and purpose.

That may be one reason Milton's ranking of liberties feels incomplete. Freedom of conscience and expression are immensely important, but human beings do not merely exercise liberties. They also choose loyalties, duties, and identities that inevitably narrow some options while opening others. A completely unconstrained life is not obviously the freest life, nor is it obviously the happiest.

We have free speech, but not freedom to incite riot, slander, break copyright.  The right to bear arms can be regulated for public safety and banning them in sensitive locations, etc.

Exactly. In practice, most societies do not treat rights as absolute. They treat them as extremely important, but subject to limits when they conflict with other rights or compelling public interests.

The classic example is free speech. Most people support broad freedom of expression, but few would defend fraud, perjury, defamation, threats, or incitement to imminent violence as protected in the same way as political debate or religious discussion. Likewise, copyright law limits what one may publish, not because society opposes expression, but because it is balancing expression against creators' interests.

The same pattern appears with arms. Even in countries with strong protections for gun ownership, there are usually restrictions concerning who may possess them, where they may be carried, and what kinds are permitted. The underlying principle is that one person's liberty can create risks for others, so some accommodation must be found.

This is one reason constitutional law is often less about declaring rights than about balancing them. Courts spend much of their time asking questions like: How serious is the restriction? How important is the governmental interest? Is there a less restrictive way to achieve the same goal?

The philosopher Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once remarked that "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." The saying is not a complete theory of liberty, but it captures the intuition that rights exist within a community of other rights-holders.

That brings us back to Milton. His quotation is stirring because it reminds us that freedom of conscience and expression are precious and easily abused by authorities. But if taken literally—"above all liberties"—it becomes difficult to explain why libel laws, copyright laws, noise ordinances, courtroom rules, classified information restrictions, or even your bell-ringing Monseigneur should ever face limits.

My own inclination is that liberties resemble the legs of a table more than rungs on a ladder. Freedom of speech, religion, association, property, due process, privacy, and personal security support one another. Remove one entirely and the structure becomes unstable. The challenge is not deciding which liberty sits at the top, but figuring out how they can coexist when they inevitably bump into each other.

I would remark that the Holmes quote is not quite accurate.  Such a swing is still assault.

Quite right. The saying is memorable, but legally and philosophically it is sloppier than people often realize.

If I swing my fist and stop an inch from your nose, I may already have committed assault in many legal systems if I intentionally put you in reasonable fear of imminent harmful contact. No actual impact is required. If I strike your nose, that becomes battery (in jurisdictions that distinguish the two).

So the saying is not really a statement of law. It is a metaphor about the limits of liberty.

In fact, your correction points to something deeper. The conflict between liberties often begins before physical harm occurs. We prohibit threats, intimidation, reckless endangerment, fraud, and various other behaviors not merely because they have already injured someone but because they invade interests that society has decided deserve protection.

The Monseigneur's bells are another example. He was not physically harming anyone. Yet most people would agree that an hour of bells at six in the morning can constitute a genuine interference with others' lives.

What this suggests is that liberty is not bounded only by direct injury. It is bounded by a more complicated network of social expectations, rights, obligations, and reciprocal accommodations.

One reason these debates never quite end is that reasonable people disagree about where those boundaries should be drawn. Almost everyone agrees that assault, slander, fraud, and incitement can be restricted. The hard cases lie in the gray areas: offensive speech, public demonstrations, nuisance, privacy, intellectual property, and so forth.

Your observation also illustrates why lawyers often become suspicious of elegant one-sentence principles. They are useful guides, but once actual cases arrive, the details start multiplying. "Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" sounds crystal clear until someone asks whether the fist must actually touch the nose, how close it can come, whether the swing was intentional, whether the nose owner consented, whether there was a threat, and what damages resulted. Then an entire body of law suddenly appears.