President Bush often likes to speak of a “culture of life”, a catch phrase that neatly frames his opposition to reproductive choice and stem cell research. The tragic case of Terri Schiavo, now featuring dangerously irresponsible and unprecedented Congressional intervention, is only latest chapter in his conservative playbook.

It is high time to end the melodrama of Republican political opportunism and regain control of this debate.

Progressives must do this not because we’re “right” or because our position in this case enjoys broad majority support. It is because by defending what Justice Brandeis called “the right to be left alone” we can offer Americans a powerful framework for assessing the legitimacy – and morality – of government intrusion and paternalism in our most personal decisions. To help articulate what I’ll call a “Culture of Living”, we can turn to one of the best friends a libertarian ever had, John Stuart Mill.

In his classic On Liberty, Mill sought to provide a framework for evaluating “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” By society, Mill meant both the informal sanctions of the community (castigation, opprobrium) and the legal action or paternalism of the state. He drew a clear distinction between what he called “self-regarding” behavior (from religion to private drinking) and “other-regarding” acts (such as public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, crimes, trade, and other economic activity). In Mill’s system, virtually any government interference with a person’s self-regarding acts was unjustified and morally unsupportable:

The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people, if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct. Secondly, that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection.

Mill made one major exception his broad concept of personal liberty and privacy: slavery. For Mill, the state cannot allow an individual to offer himself into bondage, thus bringing his freedom to an end. “The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free,” Mill wrote. “It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom.” In this special case, government paternalism and intervention in an individual’s self-regarding actions is morally justified and required.

The “not free to be unfree” standard for state intervention, however, introduces an expanded notion of personal autonomy into the debate over government paternalism. By prohibiting contracts of servitude, Mill in essence is saying that individuals cannot be allowed to act in ways that curtail their own moral agency. Autonomous, rational individuals can and do freely make decisions; slaves living in a state of coercion do not. (It is this respect for the preservation of individual autonomy that can allow the state to regulate other seemingly “self-regarding” behaviors where the likelihood and severity of injury could end a person’s autonomy and leave them a burden to their family or a ward of the state. Thus, we can justify laws requiring motorcycle helmets or banning the use of narcotics; prohibitions on cigarette smoking may not withstand the same scrutiny.)

The bondage of slavery is not the only type of coercion that severely impacts personal autonomy and the free exercise of rational decision-making. Individuals confronting the prolonged, extreme and continuous pain of many terminal illnesses clearly face a condition of diminished autonomy. And a woman who exists in a “persistent vegetative state” enjoys no autonomy at all. Certainly, the same government that rightly prevents one person from surrendering his free, autonomous existence cannot then require another to remain in an analogous state of coercion.

Which brings us to Terri Schiavo. Prior to her illness, she expressed her end-of-life wishes to her husband, a man she freely chose as her partner. Throughout this 15-year tragedy, the judicial system has honored those preferences and, in the absence of a living will, recognized her husband as her proxy. Both the Florida and U.S. courts rightly chose to respect personal freedom and uphold the principle of autonomy in self-regarding acts.

Ours is – or rather should be – a culture that sees preserving individual autonomy as vital to liberty. Call it “the Culture of Living.” It is a culture that values the privacy, personal freedom and unique path to happiness of each American. A woman’s body and the decisions she and her partner make regarding their reproductive choices are no one’s business but their own, and certainly not the government’s. A society that values personal autonomy sees in emerging stem cell technologies the potential to free its members from the prospect of currently incurable diseases. A Culture of Living does not condemn the terminally ill to the enslavement of their own bodies. And that culture certainly should respect the decision a woman freely made 15 years ago as to how and whether her life, no longer free, shall be continued.

John Stuart Mill the libertarian was also John Stuart Mill the utilitarian, with all of the contradictions and threats to personal liberty and societal virtue that implies. But in this he has much to offer us today:

All that makes existence valuable to any one depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people…The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty.

—Perrspective 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) |