I am often asked why I don’t wear a helmet. While tempted to give the standard Harley-rider response, “if you don’t already know, you wouldn’t understand”—I will try to explain.
It’s 6:30 on a beautiful Colorado summer morning, a Monday. The red sun is rising, the air is crisp, the mountains are glowing. Going to work might require a great effort, except for the ten-mile trip on my bike over country roads. Recalling this, I jump our of bed, shower, dress, bolt breakfast, and eagerly wheel the Harley out of the garage. I hit the starter; as always, the throaty rumble fills me with joyful eagerness. I climb on, slip the clutch, and I am spiritually airborne. No cager for me; I love the wind through my hair and beard. To dampen that pleasure by interposing a barrier between me and the wind would be obscene. It has been said that wearing a helmet is to riding a motorcycle what wearing a condom is to sex.
Recent events in Iraq are but the latest example of how American public opinion can be galvanized and united by even poorly conceptualized appeals to freedom. President Bush repeatedly invoked the right of the Iraqi people to live under “freedom” even as his father stirred emotion and hawkishness by lamenting the plight of the “freedom loving” people of Kuwait. Those of us who grew up during the Cold War heard endlessly that we were engaged in a Manichaean struggle between good and evil or freedom versus tyranny, liberty versus “slavery.” There is, it seems, no more noble battle than the fight for freedom, and the lack of freedom for Soviet citizens led Jimmy Carter to boycott the Olympics. “Live free or die” reads the New Hampshire license plate. And we remember Patrick Henry for valuing freedom over life itself—“Give me liberty or give me death.” The Harley-Davidson Motor Company advertised its product as the “Great American Freedom Machine,” and Virginia Slims thrived by pressing on women their newly acquired freedom to smoke.
If asked, virtually all Americans would explain “freedom” as absence of constraint; the classic view of Thomas Hobbes and Pinocchio, when the latter revels in having “no strings on me.” I will call this the “absence-of-constraint view of freedom.” This view means being able to “go to hell in my own way” if I choose to do so; to be able to cross Broadway in New York City against the light even though the benefit of doing so (getting across 30 seconds earlier) pales in comparison to the real risk of getting creamed by a taxicab driven by a maniac with no apparent respect for life. All teenagers eagerly await emancipation so they can drink to excess, throw up, and imperil their own lives and those of others by driving. And every elementary school, high school, or university administrator knows that the best way to encourage a sort of behavior is to forbid it, on pain of whatever. Fundamentalist schools, camps, or conventions that strictly forbid dancing, drinking, smoking, or sex experience explosions of such behavior.
Tell me that I may not smoke, and the urge to smoke becomes my ultimate concern. The Bible recognizes the power of this understanding of freedom in the story of Adam and Eve, when they perversely eat of the only fruit forbidden to them in the Garden of Eden, despite the huge variety of permitted fruit and the explicit prohibition from God himself. Indeed, the imperative for freedom may well be ubiquitous across all life; witness the exuberance of horses when they are first turned out to pasture in the spring, or the trapped coyote who will chew his leg off to escape being trapped. And though the research scientist or confinement agriculturalist or zookeeper may tell us that the captive animal is far better off in captivity than his or her wild counterpart, not having to worry about food, water, climatic extremes, predation, disease, and so on, the appropriate response to such people is “open the gate or cages and see if the animals really want to choose security over freedom.”
Yet despite the patent power of the commonsense view of freedom, the idea that freedom is freedom from external compulsion or subjugation, it has been challenged since the dawn of articulated philosophical thought by an impressive panoply of philosophers—Plato, the Stoics, Kant, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel, to name a few. According to this alternate view, one is not free when one is unconstrained, but only when one acts in accordance with the rational order. I shall call this view adherence to the “rational-order view of freedom.” This view of course presupposes that there is a rational order, and that it can be known, and that unenlightened people can be “forced to be free,” forced to do what they would choose to do if they were rational or smart enough to know the truth. Such a view is explicit in Plato, when he divides people into natural ranked classes, with only the relatively few superior individuals capable of grasping the Good and the True, and with those individuals ruling with absolute power over the unenlightened. Further, the rulers are justified in imposing the right way (orthodoxy) on others, through the propagandistic manipulation of their beliefs, the promulgation of “noble lies,” the censorship of art, literature, and music that can cause people to be led astray by emotion, and by force. Believing in such a system, it is not surprising that Plato despised democracy, seeing it as analogous to a team of horses running in all directions without a leader, and holding that the pooled ignorance represented by democracy does not yield knowledge or wisdom—a large number of nothings does not add up to something! No wonder, then, that Karl Popper sees Plato as a prototypical enemy of an open society based in democracy, and that the rhetoric of “freedom is obedience” is so congenial to totalitarian regimes as George Orwell famously saw.
This is the same mentality displayed by the Soviets when they committed dissidents to insane asylums. Such a measure was not simply cynical incarceration. It was based in a genuine belief that only a crazy (irrational) person would take exception to Party policy. Because the Party knew the truth, the rational order, defiance or deviance had to be a mark of mental illness.
One might raise the following objection to this second view of freedom: Is this not in fact doubletalk, literal nonsense—“freedom is obedience,” being “forced to be free”? People may indeed talk that way; but doing so is, in fact, as Anselm said, uttering more “flatus vocus,” a breath of wind, like any vacuous contradiction. Though it is tempting to say that this sort of talk is nothing but a bunch of hot air, this isn’t necessarily the case. It’s possible to argue along these lines in a way that makes sense, avoiding absurd doubletalk and sounding quite reasonable.
The Stoics defended this view in the following way: Human life is metaphorically comparable to being chained to an oxcart going to Larissa. One may accommodate one’s behavior to the oxcart; stop when it stops, go when it goes. A person who does this is acting rationally in harmony with necessity, and thus is free. Or one may fight, resist, fail to move when the oxcart moves, or try to move when it stands still. One will still end up in Larissa, dragged, battered, and bruised. Such a person is not free.
Or consider a parent with a young son: The child is bitten by a dog who may be rabid and the only safe medical measure is for the child to undergo a painful series of injections, or else the child may die a horrible death. If one asks the child to choose, not being old enough to understand death, let alone agonizing death, but knowing and fearing the sting of a hypodermic needle, he may say, “No shots! I would rather die!” No one would say that the parent is respecting the child’s freedom by letting him choose not to take the injections and possibly die the agonizing death. Why not? Because the child does not fully understand the options and does not know what dying in agony even means! He knows only that injections hurt and thus he ignorantly chooses death.
On this view, all but a few of us are like children, incapable of rational choice because of our intellectual limitations. Others may choose for us because they are wiser. They do not violate our freedom because they choose what we would choose if we were fully rational or wise. Thus the child, when he grows up, will thank the parent later for making the wise choice he was incapable of making. In this sense, freedom is not freedom from, it is freedom to; freedom to do what we would do were we but wise enough!
Probably most societies in human history have been structured along the paternalistic model of freedom just discussed. Whether it is royalty, aristocracy, priesthoods, sages, nobility, some classes are presumed to have better access to the truth, the rational order, than everyone else. All feudal, monarchic, and totalitarian societies are built foursquare upon that conceptual model. Plato’s presumption is difficult to overcome—some people are wiser than others, let the wise rule. Freedom is no longer freedom from, it is freedom to do the right thing.
The seductive nature of this argument is easy to see when one formulates it as Robert Paul Wolff once did in a class I took from him. “No sane person,” said Wolff, “would presume to take out his or her own appendix. And, as they say, a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client. Most of us don’t try to unclog our own sewers, repair our own automobiles, or change our own oil. If we feel this way about relatively minor tasks, how much the more so should we feel the same way about the most important task we undertake—that of governing! Governing is far too pervasive to be a part-time job we can perform with little knowledge and little attention as one does in a democracy. Like the far more minor tasks, we should leave it to experts and specialists.”
The genius of Wolff’s formulation is that it makes plain a flaw in the rational-order view of freedom. Surgery is an empirical area of expertise, as are law, unclogging sewers, fixing cars, and changing oil. There are demonstrable correct and incorrect ways to do these things—it is clearly wrong to put cooking oil in a car or not replace a drain plug. But when it comes to governing, we are dealing with ethical judgments, where the correct answer is not patently obvious, though I believe we can determine better and worse decisions given some fundamental shared values, as for example, when our society eliminated racial segregation. But for every clear instance like that one, there are myriad others not so clear—for example, should a nation interfere with a foreign government that does not treat its citizens fairly?
In other words, what is wrong with freedom as obedience to the true, or to the rational order, is not so much that it is absurd to suggest there is a rational order, but rather that we have no good way of knowing that we have found it! And without demonstrable certainty that we are correct, what right have we to force others to share our vision? To put it another way, we cannot be nearly as sure of the truth of our valuation judgments as we are of our factual ones. If that is the case, can we or ought we cavalierly abridge the absence-of-constraint view of freedom that most people have and hold dearly, for the sake of what we cannot prove is the rational order that all people would choose if they only understood?
This is a point often forgotten by those who attempt to impose the rational order on others not sharing their vision. Let’s take a timely example. For some thirty years, the human medical community has declared obesity to be a disease, sometimes America’s number one disease, just as it has more obviously debatably declared compulsive gambling, alcoholism, and child abuse “diseases.” If obesity is a disease, a nondebatable factual flaw in the bodily machinery that shortens one’s life, which nobody wants, the government may plausibly take stringent measures to curtail obesity, such as possibly heavily taxing sweets (as we do tobacco) or prohibiting soft drink sales in schools, thereby, righteously impinging on our freedom. (In Summer of 2004, Medicare declared obesity a disease whose treatment it would pay for.)
But is obesity simply a factual disease, an incontestable defect like a fracture? I would argue not. First of all, one can objectively spot a fracture—if the bone is broken, it is broken. But what is called “obesity” varies from culture to culture and era to era! (Fifty years after her star’s ascendance, Marilyn Monroe is criticized as “fat.”)
What does today’s medical community mean by obese? Historically, from actuarial tables, they derive “ideal” weights for individuals of a certain age and height. “Ideal” means that weight which correlated with longest life expectancy. If you exceed that weight, you are at risk for a shorter life, and therefore (?) you are sick.
But is this coherent? A person may rationally value many things over a longer life! For example, a person five feet tall may be told that if she drops from 200 pounds in weight, given all other relevant risk factors, she is likelier to live to seventy-two years of age rather than die at seventy-one and a half. It’s perfectly rational for this person to respond by saying, “I cannot both lose that weight and satisfy my love of ice cream. I am forty years old, and would rather eat all the ice cream I wish for the next thirty-two years and risk living six months less.” No one can affirm, in other words, that increased life span is the only rational choice in such a situation!
Thus the government’s and the medical community’s condemnation of obesity is not factually warranted and confirmed; it is rather based on a series of debatable value judgments that it is not irrational to reject. It is a judgment about which sort of life I should value and pursue, and that sort of a judgment is paradigmatic of the sort of judgment where people seek freedom!
Recall that one basic motivation for individual liberties in our constitution was freedom of religion. Imagine a government arguing as follows against that desire: “Look, you are a Jew. And as a Jew you will be persecuted—that is historically evident. And anyway, we will surely persecute you even if no one else does. Therefore, you should convert to Protestantism immediately and live unmolested—that would be true freedom, obedience to the rational order.”
Having examined the two views of freedom, let us relate our discussion to the issue of mandatory helmet laws. In today’s world, we have roundly rejected the Old English common law notion that a person doesn’t own his or her own life—God and the king do, and thus that suicide is a crime. In the U.S. also, we have great distaste for the old British idea that one set of exams can decide for a young person whether or not that person goes to college. In today’s society, opportunities to make of your own life what you see fit are rife. If you flunk out of college, you can always get accepted somewhere and do it over. We do not stop people from applying to medical school even if they don’t have a chance of getting in and are wasting their own resources and a school’s time by applying.
In short, we presume that personal freedom about matters affecting our own lives is the same thing as a lack of constraint, with some minor exceptions—as children we must be educated to a certain level; as a young adult I must serve in the military if drafted. No one can force me to accept a career or an occupation on the basis of “that would be best for you in my or our view.” The one caveat is that what you choose should not directly harm others.
By extension of this view, society ought to require me to wear a helmet or a seat belt only when my not wearing one entails a significant and demonstrable cost to society. Thus, I think it completely reasonable for society to demand that I have adequate health insurance to cover whatever injuries I sustain if I choose not to wear a helmet (or even to choose to ride a motorcycle). But if I do have such insurance or such healthcare resources, what I wear or fail to wear is my own business, even if helmets demonstrably minimize injuries and deaths.1 Forcing people to protect themselves for their own benefit is incoherent, unless they are children too young to make a reasonable choice. Thus, I would support the requirement that children while riding motorcycles wear helmets. But if we invoke the second sense of freedom—“it’s what you would do if you were rational”—we can equally well invoke the same point about motorcycle riding. After all, motorcycles are demonstrably more dangerous than cars, so why not forbid motorcycles altogether? Similarly with skiing, parachuting, riding horses or bulls, and driving ATVs!
The answer is, of course, we do not overtly accept the principle that society can make you do something solely for your own good as legitimate grounds for revoking your freedom from constraint. Not only is this a reasonable slippery slope argument of the form, “If we forbid you from doing X because X is dangerous, pretty soon we have to forbid you from doing Y, which is demonstrably equally dangerous.” (What makes it reasonable is the higher-order moral principle of treating morally equivalent situations in morally equivalent ways. Ordinary slippery slope arguments require assimilating different cases to the current situation by virtue of an imaginative leap of the form “next thing you know, we will forbid eating cookies because cholesterol can kill you too.” But no one can demonstrate that eating cookies is as dangerous as riding or riding with no helmet.)
Even more important, nobody can lay claim to know my own good better than I do. (Recall the case of obesity, where my values about what affects me trump your values about what ought to affect me.) You certainly (either you as an individual or you as a society) are entitled to try to convince me that I am wrong about my own best interest or good (as people and the government do about smoking), but not entitled to force me into surrendering my absence of constraint choices (as we increasingly do now with bicycle helmets being required by law.)
Helmet laws are in essence claims that society knows what you ought to want to do, rather than what you do want to do, better than you do. But society’s failure to apply that sort of logic across the board to other areas bespeaks an unreasoned bias against courting danger in motorcycles while not worrying about courting danger in equally or more dangerous but less dramatic areas.
The real problem with helmet laws is their patent disregard for the kind of freedom people really care about—being allowed to go to hell in our own way. In addition, they suggest that there really is an objective answer to “what is the best thing for me to do?” that can be provided by others, rather than being provided by myself. And they help create a society in which so-called experts’ value judgments trump those of individuals. Of course, too, the argument that we raised with regard to the child bitten by the dog—“You will thank me when you grow up,”—does not apply to grownups, though there are people who will be grateful someday for being forced to wear a helmet, if they have an accident and others who may be sorry they were not forced to do so. But that is not the point. The point is that possibly being grateful in the future does not trump our desire not to be coerced regarding our choices that affect only ourselves.
There is another possible move the helmet-law or rational-order view of freedom advocate can generate here. Nothing affects just you. I have been told by well-meaning friends that my choosing not to wear a helmet has major potential negative consequences for society as a whole, even if I have adequate insurance. The claim is that “society has a lot invested in you, future generations of students could be harmed by not having you as a teacher, society and animals would lose the benefit of your work in bioethics, you have a responsibility to your family,” and so on. The problem with such claims, of course, is that they obliterate the commonsensical, perfectly reasonable distinction between choices I make that affect me and choices I make that affect and harm others, by saying that all choices affect others. If that’s true for dangerous choices, it’s equally true for nondangerous choices. If I choose to become a musician rather than a surgeon, I am behaving immorally, because someone has determined that I would be a better surgeon than musician and that surgery is more valuable than music. And this in turn would inherently supplant all personal choice by an algorithmic utilitarian calculus that is inherently undoable in the absence of perfect knowledge, which neither you nor experts nor society could ever possess.
Excessive emphasis on safety, health, and “welfare” as dictated by “experts” is turning American society from a society of reckless adventurers, risk-takers, ocean and continent crossers, and zealous protectors of individual choice to a nation of helmet wearers. We’re in danger of losing freedom of expression to a ridiculous compulsion not to offend, articulated in political correctness—though true education is inherently offensive. Let us not now sacrifice absence of constraint to a saccharine—and false—will to tepid security.
For many years I received a barrage of criticism from a colleague in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition for not wearing a helmet, which criticism was rendered all the more obnoxious in virtue of being delivered in one of the more odious of British accents in a loud, nasal voice. Every time we would meet, he would launch into his “Gotcha chorus”: “Oy see yoor still naht wearing an ’elmet. What is wrong with yew? You live by your brine; what will you do if you injure it?” I would usually smile, and try to steer the conversation elsewhere. One day I had had enough, as his foghorn brays were disseminated to a dozen colleagues at a committee meeting. As he reached the “what will you do if you injure your brine,” I responded as follows: “What will I do? Easy. I will join the Department of Food Science and Nutrition.” The topic has never come up again. Would that such an elegant squelch could silence all those critics who want to replace my freedom with their choices.
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1 It is questionable whether helmets do indeed reduce injuries and deaths. There are strong arguments that they do not. See, for example, “The Wild One” in Forbes (May 1999), where it is argued that though helmets reduce death from head injury, they increase deaths from neck injuries. For purposes of this chapter, we assume that helmets do reduce deaths and injuries, and argue against mandatory helmet laws despite that premise. If they do not, our argument is easier to make.