Should we trade freedom for protection?

We already have. They’re called laws! Laws are at least intended to protect some of us from others of us (e.g., zoning, criminal law, noise ordinances, clean food laws, etc,). Many of the functions of good government are premised on the need to protect freedom through laws limiting it in some way (can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, taxes supporting public order and infrastructure, child care standards, minimum education requirements, required car insurance and registration, second-hand smoke, etc.)

In other words, you can speak simplistically about America “The Land of the Free,” but that freedom is a relative status, relative to the number and extent of laws necessary to protect the most basic freedoms.

Even “most basic freedoms” are argued in bars and legislatures. What about laws designed to protect us from ourselves, such as seat-belt laws or the need to wear a life jacket in your fishing boat? How “basic” is it that our neighbors’ front yard is a wildflower garden, not grass-covered; or that a house is not a stipulated distance from the street?

We might wonder whether such laws subjectively limit our basic freedom to be different from someone else’s contrary values. Also important is whether any limitation on our freedom is “fair” in its constraints, or arbitrary in the manner it was proposed, reached law, and in its enforcement.

Adjudicating such variables is not likely to be easy, but a helpful criterion is a balance between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” Laws give some of us freedom to do and be what we choose, but not at the expense of others. These others, in turn, require laws that allow them to be free from the effects of our freedom to rights (e.g., speed limits, noise ordinances, child protection). Laws attempt to strike a reasoned balance between these two kinds of freedom. Many sources of social discord ignore considerations of freedom to and freedom from.

For example, arguments over gun control. Gun owners want to be free to collect and use an arsenal (they claim) for personal defense and recreation. According to polls, most citizens want to be free from (their fear of excessive) rights of gun owners to own military style weapons that can be used to commit a greater degree of death and bodily harm than if those weapons were outlawed and the freedom to own such weapons subject to justifiable policing and control. Doesn’t everyone have the freedom to feel free in a theater, club, church, or home without fear from military-grade arsenals that are, as we have no doubt seen, easily subject to abuse?

Outside of laws, social discord about transgender individuals’ freedom to be is not a threat to others, who have no viable worry about freedom needed from such individuals. Arguments about rest rooms are specious.

If a transgender female (previously male) enters a ladies room, there are no urinals and s/he will need to use a private stall just like every woman. There is no possibility of harm to other women (any more than in any room) and nothing to see. Males’ freedom to be transgendered is not a threat to the freedom of other men to be free from them. Avoid them if you prefer, but their freedom to be who they think they are is no threat to anyone’s need to be free from them. The same rationale applies to other LGBTQ individuals whom we have no reason to be in fear from than heterosexuals.

“Primary sex characteristics” are the anatomical differences between boy and girl babies. But later-developing gender and gender roles are socially created and deviations are noted by interested segments of society. Sexist observations about “Tom boy” girls and effeminate males nonetheless show the flexibility of gender roles. Transgender individuals seek to take that flexibility one step further since they strongly feel they’re in the wrong body, so to speak. Their freedom to be who they choose to be creates no situation of freedom from on the part of anyone that requires treating their freedom to be in any different way.

Not all laws and legal deliberations are predicated on the age-old freedom to/freedom from distinction. But it at least presents one basis for examining opinions about freedom. My freedom to can create a need for your protection from any significant ill effects of my freedom. Your protection from those perceived ill effects requires limiting my freedom to in some way or degree. Consider that the next time you complain about someone’s expression of their freedom to, and whether it seriously trespasses on your need to be free from it.

Thomas A. Regelski is an emeritus distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Send comments to tom.regelski@helsinki.fi.