Freedom Is Not More Essential Than Safety
It isn’t any less so either.
It is easy to embrace freedom when everybody else behaves as you would like. The challenge comes when others use it to contradict some of our convictions. Then we begin to question whether we should set limits on other people’s liberties. We will tell ourselves that the decision isn’t about being free to speak but preventing the effects of what is said. Ironically, when other people’s limit-setting curtails our freedom, we often have no qualms about launching a freedom-of-speech rampage instead of wondering whether they may have a point.
The adage that ‘your freedom ends where your neighbour’s starts’ comes to mind. So does hate speech. Some freedom arguments are so childish it is hard to find the time and energy to face them. Anybody can agree that nobody should be free to kill or steal only to satisfy their murderous or kleptomaniac nature. A hard truth to accept is that, as romanticised as it is, freedom is not more important to civilisation than rules or safety. Of course, we shouldn’t consider it any less essential: taking out any of these tenets results in a doomed system.
Thankfully, we have science. Science does not care about what we believe in: it just tells us that two plus two equals four, the Earth is round, vaccination is effective, and climate change poses an…