Individual rights are a flagship of our liberal societies. I wouldn’t want to live in a system that tramples on them. However, certain situations cast doubt on the political viability of such sacred freedom.
I did not hesitate to receive the vaccines protecting me from COVID-19. I saw in this gesture a chance to increase my freedom and that of all society, hampered by a deadly virus commanding, by force of circumstances, a host of constraints to those who wanted to avoid the disaster. I was not, however, a proponent of compulsory vaccination, which I considered too intrusive to be enforced. I would have liked, in other words, that all those who could have had a sufficient sense of the common good to decide, freely, to be vaccinated.
The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), one of the fathers of political liberalism, defended a similar conception of freedom. For him, humans, reasonable and inhabited by a kind of universal morality, must be able to limit their own freedom when the rights of others or the common good demand it. In doing so, they coerce themselves freely and thus avoid a state intervention likely to go too far in the imposed restrictions. Made to live in society, humans must show responsibility to one another to preserve their freedom.
“Unfortunately, observes the political scientist Jean-François Caron, this natural restriction […] ‘clearly lacking in the health crisis caused by COVID-19’ and it continues to be at a standstill in the case of healthcare workers refusing the vaccine. Faced with such realities, adds Caron, “there is reason to be skeptical about the capacity of human beings to project their freedom into its necessary collective dimension”. Should we understand that in times of crisis, only coercion is effective, a worrying conclusion for the future of our democracies?
In Irresponsible citizenship (PUL, 2021, 136 pages), Caron attributes the attitude of those opposed to the health measures recommended by democratic states to a cultural crisis of political authority. The latter is accompanied by “selfish, anti-social and hyperindividualist behaviors”, as well as “identity feudalism”, an extreme version of multiculturalism, in which cultural or religious beliefs take precedence over the common good. This situation, of course, threatens liberalism in that it generates, on the part of those who abide by the rules, a demand for a more coercive state.
Caron fears this development, harmful for our democracies. “Despite all its current imperfections,” he wrote, “liberal ideology must be preserved. “For this, it must find a better balance between individual rights and” the essential civic spirit which must animate the members of a society “. The difficulty in this enterprise lies in the fact, brilliantly exposed by Caron in this short essay, that the tendencies which threaten liberal societies find their source in liberalism itself.
Conspiracy theories certainly preceded liberalism, but the latter is not unrelated to their proliferation and diffusion. Freedom of speech, unbridled, can go crazy. The principle of equality, poorly understood, discredits the words of experts and sinks into a distressing relativism. Mistrust of any form of authority breeds antisocial individualism. The decline of traditional religions, finally, frees the right to doubt, but does not eliminate the need to find meaning in reality. When an irrational event like the onset of COVID-19 occurs, which science or reason struggles to explain, questionable theories take up space.
Added to this portrait, the “rights revolution”, which sanctifies individual rights and those of minority groups, undermines what remains of the state’s capacity to defend the common good based on a shared sense of community. .
Resolutely partisan, despite everything, of liberalism, Caron warns against the temptation of coercion or that of turning back. He wants to believe in the possibility of saving liberal democracy by inviting citizens to “self-regulate their behavior around universal principles of justice” which constitute what he calls, taking inspiration from the American philosopher John Rawls, “practical public reason. “. An educational effort in this direction is urgent, he concludes.
A prolific essayist and excellent popularizer, Jean-François Caron claims a lucid but optimistic liberalism. His small and very enlightening essay, which goes to the essentials with rare efficiency, sets the example.