VALUE CHOICES: FREEDOM AND EQUALITY The literature on values and value choice is vast and subtle. Even if one accepts the proposition that the very use of the term value, instead of earlier terms such as principles or goods, is in fact a modern development which implies movement from objective norms to subjective preferences in the ethical arena, any discussion of values is haunted by the ghosts of more than two thousand years of debate over moral philosophy in the Western world alone. To adequately place current controversies in the context of the history of that debate would be an enormous task. Accordingly, the propositions about values set forth in this paper will be presented in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, and must stand or fall on the basis of how much sense they make to the reader. Seemingly, the two most fundamental values held by Americans (and probably by most contemporary Western men and women) are freedom and equality. Actually, of course, these two values are closely related and in some sense interdependent. It is hard to be free if you have a superior with potential power over you, and hard to be equal if you are not free, since your lack of freedom usually implies someone else's superior power. Like most statements about values in the real world, this one requires qualification: it is possible to conceive of a superiority which does not imply domination (for example, a superiority in musical talent) just as it is to conceive of an equality in which freedom is not lost to individual superiors but to the totality of one's coequals. Indeed, much of the theory underlying liberal democracy implies or requires just such an assumption. However, in the realm of practical politics, freedom (liberty) and equality have ordinarily been the rallying cries of opposing groups with divergent interests or concerns. Both freedom and equality are highly ambiguous terms and both — freedom, especially, perhaps — are the basis of other “values.” In the case of equality there is the conflict between “formal” equality (equality before the law or equality of opportunity) and actual equality, often today called “equality of result." This conflict of concepts of equality is at the root of most of the debate about race relations in the contemporary United States. The legal possibility that every American boy (or girl) can grow up to be president is a matter of formal equality before the law of the constitution. But a situation in which every student in a class automatically gets an “A” involves equality of result. The same thing is true of a situation wherein grades are distributed in terms of any characteristics other than the work of the course itself (see (17-19) on equality). Freedom is even more complex conceptually, with a host of definitions and emphases extant (see (20-22) on freedom). But most of these boil down to the contrast between freedom considered as lack of constraint imposed by other human beings (no one is sitting on me and holding me down) and freedom considered as ability to exercise power over others and the external world (I am strong enough to sit up without help) (23).* These different views of freedom are often expressed as being differences between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” The political history of Western Europe in the modern era is in large measure the story of the growing centralization of governmental power at the expense of the freedom (autonomy) of lower units of government, of the replacement of the virtual anarchy of feudal Europe by the rising nation-state system. This has been accompanied by a growing uniformity of law (and language and culture as well of course at *This is classically stated by the father of modern liberalism, Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (23). The book was, of course, written originally in the 17th century.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==