Burning Down the House by Andrew Koppelman

Author:Andrew Koppelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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All liberals, libertarians and Rawlsians alike, think that we each have the right to direct our own lives, and that we have a duty to respect one another by not interfering in others’ choices about what ends to pursue. The ideal is powerful and attractive. Its possibility depends, however, on the existence of selves of the right kind: self-governing agents who really do make choices about what ends to pursue. When a person is incapable of making such choices, such non-manipulative relations are impossible. That is why it is appropriate to paternalize children.30 Since the purpose of liberal rights is to allow persons to exercise their moral and rational powers, liberalism requires that persons develop those powers to some minimum degree.

Liberty is not just free movement in a world without obstacles. That is what we would encounter in the vacuum of outer space, where we would die within seconds. Freedom requires both internal and external conditions.

The self-governing self does not just materialize in the world. It has to be constructed, and there are typical pitfalls in the process of construction. The most potent grassroots political force in the formulation of drug policy is parents who are concerned that their children will be seduced by the lure of drug use.31 These parents are not crazy. They are trying to make their children into autonomous people who are capable of choosing and pursuing real goods, and they are trying to ward off real hazards that can frustrate these goals.

Outlawing the ingestion of certain chemicals is a clumsy strategy for constructing the liberal self, however. There is no one-to-one relationship between any chemical and any behavior. The danger that any drug presents to the liberal self depends on the norms that surround its use.

The same drug can be harmless in one society and disastrous in another, or even in different situations in the same society. Consumption of alcohol was not generally regarded as a social problem at all in colonial America, when Americans annually consumed more than seven gallons of absolute alcohol per capita. The Puritans did backbreaking labor on their farms, and regular shots of beer, cider, or spirits helped get through the day. Drunkenness was stigmatized and rare. Alcohol became regarded as a problem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when per capita annual consumption was approximately two gallons, but intoxication and dissipation were common.32

The goal of policy should be to minimize not drug use but a certain kind of destructive drug use, and to construct and reinforce social norms of appropriate behavior toward drugs. Many drug users have the capacity to consume responsibly. This skill set should be more widely available. But we should also acknowledge the limitations of what can be accomplished in this regard. The substances that give Kleiman pause, whose allure he thinks too powerful for grudging toleration to work, suggest that there are fields in which paternalism is unavoidable. Some situations overwhelm our capacity for self-government. All government can do when confronted with such cases is keep us from hurting ourselves.

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