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TITLE (supplied by the customer): "Protection of Civil Liberties"

DESCRIPTION (supplied by the customer): Develop an argumentative research paper on why civil liberties should always be protected. Research Area: Civil liberties. Project's Purpose: Argue for the protection of civil liberties at all times. Objectives: Have a balanced argument-voice the view of the other side. 

PROJECT DEVELOPED:

Introduction.

There have always seemed to exist the recognition of some basic, albeit possibly ill-defined at times, core of what can be called human rights, property rights, and civil liberties. Irrespective of whether these constitute a rather nominal body of basic or advanced freedoms that may not be effectively enforced at all times in all jurisdictions, the pressing need to secure this pillar underlying the very incentive of engaging in a social contract has rarely been questioned. However, the relevance of the theme would at times seem to vary, growing more of a burning issue in times of crises, institutional transition, and otherwise major upheavals. In the present study, we will argue that this topic pertains to a body of rather controversial issues, whose very complexity and mixed implications of cost-benefit analysis largely account for the inherent difficulty involved in the decision making and in particular enforceability of choice. There appears to exist a lower-bound core of weak freedoms, civil liberties included, whose claim to formal legal protection could not be called into question. The strong from of liberties, on the other hand, constitutes a space of rights and freedoms in excess of the critical core, and their enforceability, conceptual and practical alike, may be subject to country-specific resources and otherwise institutional constraints. At any rate, civil liberties may not be studied outside the social context, as if they pertained to the decision-making setting facing a person in a world of one's own. The existing body of literature takes every position on a continuum between the extreme individualistic libertarian and communitarian socialist maintaining the societal good over private initiative. The general prescribed scenarios do not seem to be robust either intertemporally or across jurisdictions, which calls for extended theories explicitly incorporating these two dimensions into the analysis of this sensitive issue never neutral to the political context.

Discussion.

The earliest studies into the issue trace back to the advent of the early Individualist doctrine that gave rise to some path-breaking propositions, such as Smith's famous invisible hand principle. The latter is largely based in the premise that selfish behavior of rational, utility-maximizing individual may, if left alone (laissez faire), attain the greatest good for society, which result would never be secured by the most altruistic conduct. That seemingly paradoxical result builds on the observation that it is the selfish incentive and concern for private benefit that is most consistent at all times and hence reliable as a driving force. Such a spontaneous field of individual profit maximization would not result in a chaos and anarchy, because, unlike the dog-eat-dog jungle conditions, only humans have the benefit of trading. Trade is a condition complementary to specialization according to competitive advantage, and its principle is the same for individual and nations alike. They will trade until they reach a point (later to be defined as Pareto-efficiency) at which there is no more potential to improve their choices-i.e. no individual's well-being can be improved without compromising that of another individual.

The later doctrine of utilitarian ethics takes a similar stance by proclaiming the attainment of the greatest good for the greatest number of people as the ultimate virtue of any moral code in the society. Since its major proponent, John Stuart Mill, was a social scientist and a political economist, I would remain much too cautious to overlook the possibility that his opinion was biased by the predominant at the time, if a bit too naive, political-economic tradition rating efficiency over the rest of benchmarks, thus adhering to a satisfying proxy for what any economic system would be expected to assure. The underlying implicit assumption behind these simple scenarios is that the distributive mechanism is costless, in that as long as the society can ensure the greatest total good, it becomes a matter of arbitrary choice of how to compensate the losers thus enticing them into the particular social choice. I reality, the distribution mechanism remains an issue in its own right. One accedes, the latter pertains to what constitutes the normative (subjective) philosophy, while efficiency criterion stresses the positive (objective) implications.

John Rawls of Harvard is considered the leading present-day ethical theorist, and his theory of social contract takes a polar stance with respect to utilitarianism. In particular, he suggests that it is the well-being of the worst-off individual that ought to be priority over the aggregate social good. This emphasis on the lower-bound criteria would seem to come closest to individual definition of goodness and derivative constitutional settings. However, it is oftentimes not the critical lower benchmarks that yield an apple of discord (though some radical individualists call for utmost freedoms and yet for no safety nets per se), but rather the priority of upper-level interests and freedoms possibly at the price of some social goals being compromised. Rawls (1999) interprets the underlying premise of any civilian liberties as having to do with the innate freedom of self-improvement and self-fulfilling, lifelong search for a personal concept of the Good. That might seem, on the margin, to approach the stance in moral philosophy, whereby the individual shall not be judged guilty of deeds he himself fails to define as evil [Cheeseman, 2000: 315-322]. 

The greatest problem here lies, not in the practical unobservability of individual perceptions (which thus are manipulable and cannot be basis for social choice), but rather in the conceptual controversy involved. On the one hand, according to a formal tradition in classical economics (see, e.g. Varian, 1992: 140-146), the individual utility of certain goods varies, and the price that different individuals would pay on the margin must reflect their so-called reference price (it has just been defined). However, the market imposes the same average price on all consumers, thus leaving some better-off, others less so. I chose to apply this apparatus in light of the apparent analogy: the value of the set of freedoms, rights, and provisions varies across society members, while they are all forced to pay the same price. The individualist approach would allow for a utility-based discrimination, whereby each member would love to pay according to his value on the margin-which would amount to inconsistent bindingness of constraints within the society. Such solution, though logical (or at least consistent with the theory in its broader applications), seems highly impractical if absurd. For one, the rights accounting would maintain that some people's rights are other people's obligations, so no bypassing of constraints should be allowed as a freedom. For another, one would have to decide what is of greatest value: non-discrimination per se, nominal freedoms (that may or may not be effective), or well-defined property rights (no matter how optimal or fair)? Along the same lines, would individual members or groups would want more liberties for other individuals/groups just as they would for themselves? Selfish incentive does not imply that automatically. Hence, while invisible hand could assure negative (shall not hurt) rights, claiming the same for positive (shall help) freedoms would be too strong an assertion.

Rawls adduces another idea behind the robust system favoring individual freedoms without compromising the quality of civil society. He goes on to say that private definitions shall be allowed insofar as they are socially acceptable. He interprets the best individual conduct as treating the others status as if it was unknown to you. That would assure symmetric (equal and fair) distribution of opportunities and utmost respect for [relative] property rights (albeit less than formally defined).

Before going any further, it could be useful to provide a distinction between categories such as human rights, liberties, civil liberties, and fundamental liberties. Feldman (2002: 6) defines civil liberties as specifically pertaining to the ways in which they define the civil society, or pertain to status as a citizen of a state, rather than as merely a member of the human society. I would interpret the latter definition in light of the externality notion long adopted in the new institutional and economics literature (e.g. Varian, 1992). Externality pertains to any decision making setting in which the resultant effect affects agents outside the decision makers' domain. In other words, the resultant social effect (whether benefit or cost) exceeds that intended by the private choice. Some of the best illustrations of the principle involve air pollution, smoking, sexual content in advertising, or any choice or mechanism improving the interests of one group at the expense of some other category of stakeholders. While within a society, individual freedoms cannot possibly be defined as reduced and absolute categories in themselves, for they necessarily involve difficult tradeoffs and invoke the legacy of 'political correctness'.

Since human rights represent too broad a category to be formally defined in any parsimonious taxonomy, Feldman uses the term as technically pertaining to the body of rights and freedoms encapsulated in the internationally ratified conventions, especially after the WWII. Fundamental freedoms deserve a special enforcement guarantee, and some of them are set in constitutional stone (even though these constitutional rights may still be violated de facto).

The question of why liberty is good and whether it should be secured on a constant basis dwell on the following question: is a liberty defined as a good in its own right or is it aimed at advancing some ultimate good? This deontological versus teleontological dichotomy, in my opinion, pertains to whether the good is so primarily short-run that its value can be sensed immediately or whether it's a long-run value whose recognition requires a more abstract effort and a possibly higher level of rationality. Indeed, the individual benefits are the most apparent or readily observable kind of value, while social (collective) choices might involve effects that are less so. That pertains to the inherent gap between the private cost/benefit analysis and social, between individual rationality and group rationality. Most social choices aren't easily enforceable because they are not immediately supported by private incentive. In fact, most public goods such as clean air, effective military, basic research, primary education, and healthcare would probably never evolve under the invisible hand alone. However, the mere fact that social choices are difficult to organize and enforce (definitely not spontaneously) does not suggest their existence as 'unnatural' relative to private choices and individual freedoms ...
  
  

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