I always
avoid to write here about themes that I have treated before. Nevertheless,
sometimes it happens. It can be that I have forgotten what I had written about before,
which is not strange if you realize that I write these blogs already for
thirteen years. Or it can be that I want to add something to what I have written
before, or that new developments put an old theme in a new light. Now, I want to
talk again about the so-called Frankfurt-style cases (named after Harry
Frankfurt, who discussed them first). In the first place, Frankfurt-style cases
are about responsibility but they are also about freedom, and in that respect
they are relevant for the corona crisis. In this blog I am going to discuss such
a Frankfurt-style case and I’ll show how it is relevant for our idea of freedom
in the corona crisis.
When we
talk about freedom, there is a tendency to think that it means that you can and
are allowed to do what you like. But the present corona measures, and
especially the forced self-confinement, restrict us very much. Therefore, you
often hear: Our freedom is at stake. It’s true that some government leaders abuse
the crisis by intentionally increasing their powers, more than is necessary to
bring the virus under control. Other authorities issue weird measures like a
ban on gardening. However, here I don’t want to talk about this but on the idea
of freedom. For, when philosophers think of freedom, usually they don’t think of
an unlimited individual choice to do what you like, but they have something
else in mind. They call someone free, if this person can follow his/her own
choices. This can also happen if the number of options is limited, by nature or
by man. To be exactly, a person is free if
- s/he has
alternative options to choose from
- if this
choice is her or his own choice.
In my blog dated
23 February 2012 I discussed this Frankfurt-style case (see there for the
references): Jones is in a voting booth deliberating whether to vote for the
Democratic or for the Republican presidential candidate. Unbeknownst to Jones,
a neurosurgeon, Black, has implanted a mechanism in Jones’s brain that allows
Black to monitor Jones’s neural states and alter them if need be. Black is a diehard
Democrat, and should Black detect neural activity indicating that a Republican choice
is forthcoming, Black is prepared to activate his mechanism to ensure that
Jones instead votes Democratic. As a matter of fact, Jones chooses on his own
to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, so Black never intervenes.
Take now the present corona crisis. A new nasty virus has spread all over
the world: the coronavirus. It makes that many people must be hospitalized, and
many people infected by the virus die. The medical services threaten to become
overloaded and to collapse. It is absolutely necessary to take radical
measures, including forcing people to stay at home, the so-called
self-confinement. You are a rational person and according to you the only
option is to accept the measures proclaimed by your government, including self-confinement.
And so you do. You leave your house only for buying food, for physical exercise
or for other reasons allowed by the government. It’s true that, if you would
break the coronavirus emergency laws, you would get a high fine and be forced by
the police to return home. However, this never happens, for you are fully
convinced that the best you can do is obeying the coronavirus emergency laws.
In other words, it’s your free choice to follow these laws.
As said, Frankfurt-style
cases like the one I just presented were used to discuss the question whether someone
is responsible for his or her actions, even if in practice s/he has only one
option. However, they tell us also much about the idea of freedom. As we have
seen, a common idea of freedom is the view that you can and are allowed to do
what you like. I think that it is acceptable to add here “unless it hurts other
people and affects the freedom of others”. Now the present situation is such
that, unless people restrict their usual behaviour, they’ll hurt other people:
If they would keep going along with family, friends, colleagues and others in
the usual way, many people would die of the coronavirus and many others would become
seriously ill and some of them would become handicapped in some way. This makes
that restricting yourself and even going into self-confinement is the only kind
of behaviour that respects the freedom of others. Actually, this is the only
rational way to do. And so you conclude that the only thing you can reasonably
do is to accept the coronavirus emergency laws. That you would be fined and be
forced to stay at home, if you break these laws, doesn’t even come to your
mind. In the end it’s not your government’s fault that there is such a nasty
virus in the world. Following these laws is your own choice.
The upshot
is that you can still be free, even if you have only one option. And this is the
situation of the present corona crisis. So, don’t complain that your freedom is
affected by these emergency measures. Another question is, of course, which
measures are the best and whether the measures taken are the best, let alone whether
some governments or politicians abuse the corona crisis for increasing their power.
Postscript
And so it happens that the Frankfurt-style cases no
longer are thought experiments but have become real-life scenarios.
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