Question

is Liberty absolute?

Answer 1

yes liberty absolute

Answer 2

This perception is largely due to the fact that they have accepted the libertarian notion of liberty. The libertarian movement has done much to injure the cause of liberty by crippling the terms with which they mean to defend it, predominantly due to the fact that liberty is not the goal of the libertarians, not in the capitalist sense. In terms of philosophic hierarchy, the libertarians put the cart before the horse in the sense that they attempt to argue for the political supremacy of liberty while ignoring the underlying philosophic foundation requisite to reach that conclusion.

Libertarianism holds liberty as an ultimate political end – what liberty means is, adhering strictly to subjectivist dicta, for each man to determine on his own. More simply, libertarians do not define their terms. They agree that “liberty” is the goal which they should pursue in a political context, but they make no distinction between one libertarian’s understanding of liberty and another’s. So long as “liberty,” free from context or explanation, is an individual’s political goal, then the libertarians will count him as one of their own.

It is this sort of a priori intrinsicism which places liberty as a supreme value, to be pursued in and of itself, that allows libertarians to arrive at any number of incredibly dangerous, deeply irrational policy positions: that Iran has the “right” to elect a theocratic dictatorship for itself, that “big business” is as much a threat to liberty as is “big government” simply because it is big, that the nihilistic Occupy Wall Street Movement is actually a broad base of freedom-fighting allies just waiting to be tapped into, that child pornography should be legalized, etc. (all are very real positions held by those professing libertarianism as their ideology). The natural end of such a philosophy is – as conservatives rightly note – amorality and its political corollary: anarchy, the political manifestation of the belief that no man’s morality or choices are any more valid than those of any other. This prevents man from stopping all sorts of violations of individual rights, even against oneself. Why is the victim’s notion of right or wrong superior to that of his attacker? This is the same argument employed by modern totalitarian regimes of the 20th and 21st Centuries to take and maintain power. This is the consistent application of libertarianism. (However, this is not at all an excuse for or defense of the conservatives and their errors in relation to this issue.)

The position of the liberals is essentially the same as that of the conservatives, but for different reasons. It is not for the defense of law and order that the liberals often defend limitations on liberty. More often than not, they base their argument on some altruist idea of “public responsibility.” Though liberty is “good,” they claim, factors such as the “common good” or the “general welfare” must be taken into account. This defense is essentially the same as the conservatives’; that on a desert island, man has absolute liberty but that he “voluntarily” gives his “tacit consent” to surrender some of his liberties when living in a society. Conservatives defend this on the grounds that “the common good” requires law and order; the liberals do the same on the grounds that it is man’s “duty” to be his brothers’ keeper. Both stances are merely two sides of the same altruist coin.

The Leftist conception of liberty is the same as the libertarians’ insofar as it is built on subjectivism and includes illegitimate forms of liberty, thus turning “liberty” itself into an anti-concept. But unlike the libertarians, the Leftists construct their positions exclusively on the total inversion of liberty, not simply its misapplication. I.e., though it is possible for libertarians to simultaneously and irrationally hold the “universal liberty to hold, use, and dispose of one’s property without injuring another’s liberty” in its proper sense and the “liberty from physical want” as supported by the Occupiers on the same moral plane, Leftists solely profess allegiance to the latter notion. They then apply that notion consistently to warp the first, thus interpreting it to mean that to deny someone what they want at any time would be “injuring another’s liberty.” And so, the Leftists would consider such denials an improper use of one’s “property rights,” now rendered worthless by the underlying moral principles. Therefore, man exercising his liberty (in its rational sense) becomes a violation of liberty; to claim that man has the right to his own property is to deny the “rights” that another also has to his property; to give to the deserving that which they have earned violates the “right” of the undeserving to that which they have not; and to be “truly free,” man must be “free from choice” and “free from the responsibility to think,” i.e., only when he submits himself to the will of the state.