Give Us Liberty, Though Not To Harm Others

We are free to do as we wish in countless ways. Free to speak up, to be heard, to participate, to gather with others, to choose our line of work, to choose our friends and how to spend our free time, to travel from one end of the country to the other, to choose how we worship or don’t.

Josie in Ajo: Freedom! Being blessed to get up in the morning and do what we want to do. A lot of countries don’t have that. A lot of people don’t wake up to that. It’s such a blessing to have freedom!
And yet we are not free to do anything we darn well please.

Bill in Superior: I should have liberty but I shouldn’t be allowed to set off fireworks in my front yard to celebrate the 4th of July.

“Give Us Liberty, Though Not To Harm Others” is the fourth of “10 principles to unite America” that look both to the past and to the future, reminding us of what we hold dear as Americans and at the same time challenging us to do better. They stand out as common purpose for our nation.

Introduction to this project

Use of uncommon methods

Based on four very different locales

Several participants in the project spontaneously raise an old adage: “My right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”   I have the liberty to swing my arms.  I don’t have the liberty in the course of that to whack you in the face.

When I posed a series of hypotheticals of this type, the unanimous view was that the individual liberty we enjoy stops short of harming others – when the excesses directly hurt a particular individual and even beyond that when our actions indirectly harm unseen victims or the population as a whole.

There was complete agreement, for instance, that none of us has the liberty to drive a vehicle that is belching smoke from the tailpipe. Even if the noxious fumes don’t induce those standing on the sidewalk to gasp and wheeze, they add to the burden in the air that inexorably endangers us all.

I do not have the liberty to bop you in the face, nor blow cigarette smoke in your face, nor these days even to breathe in your face.

Carmin in Concord: Liberty is two-sided . . . I also have the liberty to be free from other people unreasonably impacting on me.

Unreasonably?  There’s the catch.  Some offenses are nothing more than petty annoyances.  There are crazy, complicated cases about who is harming whom that end up in courts of law.  In other situations, society officially condones certain extenuating circumstances, for instance that of self-defense.

Nowhere though has this ideal been tested more than by the COVID-19 crisis that ensnares every one of us at this very moment. We have had a choice. Continue to come and go as we please, gathering together as we normally do, thereby putting not only ourselves but others at risk.  Or to do as we have been asked, which most recently has meant getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in confined spaces, so as not to jeopardize ourselves or others. It’s the classic standoff between between individual liberty and collective responsibility.

The fact of the matter is that we routinely accept limitations — some of them might chafe, while others are second nature to us — in order for society to function. Think no further than the chaos that would result if all of us didn’t abide not only with traffic laws but with the unwritten rules of the road that guide mutual cooperation between drivers.

The central tenet here is clear-cut. “Harm” means to injure, damage, hurt. Cherished as our liberties are, none of us has the right to inflict any of that on others.

The general public accepts that. When asked the limits on personal liberty,* only 9% of voters answered they should be able to do whatever they please. A combined 90% placed restrictions on their actions. Of those, 49% replied “so long as it won’t harm anyone else.” Another 41% took it still another step: “so long as it is in keeping with the overall well-being of society.”

Thereby underscoring the principle of “Give Me Liberty, Though Not To Harm Others” — individually or collectively.

* Our Common Purpose’s nationwide poll of 1,500 voters conducted by SurveyUSA in June 2020.