Liberty & Equality: Some Thoughts

Are liberty and equality opposed?

I can act however I choose so long as it doesn’t harm another individual. But how far will we take that concept? Don’t we affect others with every action we take and avoid? As a legitimate restriction, could this be too much of a burden? Where do we draw the line? If I move to a cabin, far-removed from all human contact—then am I harming those who my skills would have benefited? Do we have responsibilities to all of the alternatives for every action we take?

Perhaps we don’t have to go to such an extreme. Could we say, instead, that there are good and bad ways to spend one’s time? The bad ways are not beneficial at all, a waste of time and resources. This category would greatly outnumber the second: the good actions. It seems unlikely that we could weigh, for every action, the cost we caused by having acted this way and not that way. It seems, also, that we couldn’t be held morally responsible for the result of not having acted a certain way. But this, perhaps, applies only to beneficial uses of one’s time.

How should we define beneficial uses of one’s time? An action that contributes to some good while not actively detracting from some other (passively detracting understood as the kind of unlimited alternatives we mentioned earlier). If I bring economic benefit to myself, but in the process severely harm the livelihoods of thousands of workers, then this is not a beneficial use of my time. But this is not so clearly defined: what if I bring benefit to myself and maintain the livelihood of those same workers when I could have distributed the wealth at least somewhat more equally? Is that a beneficial use of my time? Is that a moral act? I suppose we could say that it is ethically justified, but not morally exemplary.

There is a part of me that wants to say that I should not have had the ability to make that decision. The distribution of pay should be more equitable. This doesn’t mean that the manager and the worker receive the same amount of money—it simply means that they both receive a percentage of the company’s profits. Which would be a form of workplace democracy.

It appears as though we will have to expand our categories to three: maleficent, neutral, and beneficial. Under these categories, my decision to increase personal profits and maintain the worker’s would be neutral. But even this seems charitable to me. It seems an abuse of liberty. Liberty for the wolves, after all, is death for the sheep. The problem arises again and again: our institutions. Could we re-cast our institutions in more equitable ways? This would take the aforementioned business decision out of my hands. I wouldn’t be able to abuse equality under the banner of liberty.

We restrict liberty all the time. We say that you can’t murder others, or steal from others because these things are bad for society overall. You don’t have the liberty to kill me because that would be direct harm. So we’re back to the question of how far-reaching we want our definition of harm to be. We restrict liberties when it’s in the public’s best interest to do so.

What sort of difference is there in direct, active murder and indirect, passive death-dealing? Is there an important difference?