Obedient Freedom - Rules and Justification

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Obedient Freedom

I will argue tentatively: 

a free society is characterised by 

• a typifying dilemma, and 

• the need to provide a solution to it.

A free society is challenged by Rousseau's problem: 

under what circumstances would it be possible for individuals 

• to be obedient to the rules of society, and 

• yet remain free? 

Freedom and Equality

The dilemma arises under the presupposition that people are supposed to be free and equal.

Freedom meaning: 

• individuals are not to be interfered with in their autonomous actions unless grounds (supporting corresponding rules) can be advanced that represent reasons intelligible and acceptable to those to be interfered with.

Equality meaning: 

• an individual's eligibility to be treated according to the proviso established above under "Freedom."

Obedient Freedom - Vetting the Rules

The dilemma that contributes to the definition of freedom consists in the possibility that a free and equal person might not understand and endorse rules that she is asked to heed.

Rules may be efficacious; that is one is required to honour them. But such efficacious rules need not be justified, that is accepted by those heeding them. 

A free society needs rules, and it needs to enforce these rules. However unlike an unfree society, in a free society every citizen has a right to demand that the rules she follows are justified in a way that she can ratify (accept, agree to).

If the rules of a free society are not required to be put to the test of such justification, they can be made in arbitrary fashion, in which case the non-consenting citizenry is no more free and equal. 

Instead we have 

• wilful law-makers, and 

• hapless, non-consenting rule-takers, which means that there is a class of people, who are subject to

1. arbitrariness, and thus not free, while being at the same time 
2. unequal to other citizens by virtue of their preclusion from vetting society's valid rules.

Rules

What an unfree society and a free society have in common is that their members will find that restraints of morality are worthy of their respect and that, therefore, they should submit to the authority of morality. In other words, it is reasonable and ultimately self-serving to subject oneself to rules.

Why?

Because individual behaviour entirely unrestrained by such norms yields a lower level of personal benefits, i.e. if each person seeks to best promote her own goals, all will be worse off. Thus, the absence of rules or rules insufficient to achieve social cooperation of a vital kind, such as required for effective defence operations, may make the difference between perdition and survival:

If a plurality of members of a community were each to claim supreme leadership, say in a hunting or warring enterprise, soon the need would arise for rules to protect the inevitable requirement that only one person can effectively exercise this function. Alternatively, imagine groups, perhaps tribes, that had never before been in lethal conflict with other groups. One type of group is relying on a sole religious leader, whereas the other type of group is practising a division of labour among several functional specialised leaders, none of which being solely responsible for warfare. Say, these groups come to clash. The multi-leader groups operate based on the decisions of a committee compromising all specialised leaders, rather than one commander-in-chief. Let us also assume that the single-leader war parties turn out to be more effective in waging war and therefore end up victorious in each of the many battles. This may effectively bring about unreasoned selection of a single-leader model of hierarchy. It was natural to have the religious leader command war activities - in truth an accident. Yet the choice proved effective, established in superiority of the single-leader type of group, whose concept of military hierarchy other groups assimilate to.   

Thus, from a mixture of experience and reasoning, but also by virtue of unreasoned selection, human communities accumulate a canon of rules that everybody is expected to abide by.

Note, this is true both for an unfree community and a free one.

Successful social cooperation depends upon the curtailment of certain narrowly conceived forms of personal autonomy and advantage.

Rule following is necessary for bringing about a social order that benefits all. 

Writes Gerald Gaus:

... social cooperation requires us to be confident that rational others will refrain from opportunistic cheating on cooperative arrangement.

Christiane Bicchieri has recently stressed the way that acceptance of social rules transforms mixed motive interactions such as the Prisoners' Dilemma into types of coordination games.

Gaus G., (2012), The Order of Public Reason. A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, Cambridge University Press, p. 103

Gaus emphasises:

... communities of humans who follow cooperative norms better promote their individual goals than do communities who do not (and so are stuck playing Prisoners' Dilemmas).

Surely it is not just an accident that all human communities are devoted to rule following ... [T]he quintessential functions of social rules is to allow individuals to better advance their ends. [...]

[R]ule-based, cooperative, reasoning is best for us, and it tells us not always to decide on the grounds what is best for us.

Ibid.,  p.104

And Gaus immediately adds the very important proposition:

As Brian Skyrms has  demonstrated so well, although rationality cannot explain this uniquely human characteristic [of being obedient to rules and authorities in order to become personally the better-off and even freer, I.G.T.U.], an evolutionary account can do so." 

Ibid.,   p.104

Human beings, as Hayek suggested, are just as much goal-seekers, as they are rule-followers. Put differently, they are susceptible to private urges, aims and ambitions ("anthropocentric freedom,") but also absorb and embrace rules that restrict personal volition and prefigure the admissible paths along which to pursue autonomous intentions.

Punishment (coercion) becomes a vital ingredient in a rule-honouring society, i.e. a social equilibrium based on the observation of moral restraints.

Moral Calculus in a Free Society

With that, back to the beginning of this post:

Freedom is a condition in which coercion is applied to enforce rules that invite broad public approval, where the latter is based on accepting grounds that are intelligible and reasonable to each free individual, i.e. these grounds broadly conform to his moral standards - that is, while they may not be perfectly congruent with his moral assumptions and conclusions ( = his moral calculus), they are acceptable to his moral calculus.

Justified rules may be dispersed over an ambit of accommodation, leaving space for grounds and permutations of grounds that need not be fully concurrent, as the following analogy may help to explain.

Perhaps justified grounds may resemble those motivating a group of three friends agreeing to take a trip to Paris, with two agreeing on route A, and the third desiring a different route B, the former finally agreeing to route B, considering that the deviant choice nonetheless still basically conforms to the idea of the trip, its destination and time constraints, and the desire to see along the way certain new parts of the country and some of their exciting sights, while pleasing the proponent of route B, who is deemed by all to have merits (driving and providing the car) that call for accommodation concerning the issue at hand.

If this analogy is valid, the challenge of freedom is to improve the conditions that foster accommodation of this type and still insure peaceful solutions and continuity of freedom even in situations where a common ambit of moral understanding is absent.