Individual Liberty and the Common Good Aren’t in Tension

By Fred Bauer

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Some people today are inclined to pose an opposition between the “common good” and individual liberty. There may sometimes be tension between attending to the good of the whole and allowing a range of individual choices, but personal liberty can itself contribute to the common good, as the response to COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies.

The American response to this pandemic has involved a massive exertion of state power at all levels — from state and local closures of businesses to travel bans to the invocation of the Defense Production Act. However, as Michael Brendan Dougherty has noted, this response has also slashed regulations. Government agencies helped cause a logjam for testing. The CDC had created a flawed version of coronavirus testing and issued very strict limits on who could even be tested; cumbersome regulatory burdens made it harder for private companies to roll out their own tests. Now, many of those restrictions have been relaxed, and non-state actors are churning out tests. Authorities at various levels have at least temporarily reformed some licensing laws (by allowing medical professionals to work across state lines, for instance). The federal government has eased restrictions on the production of various medical supplies.

It’s chic in some quarters to sneer at the market as merely an engine of atavistic greed, but the market has also been a vehicle for addressing this health crisis. Companies ranging from My Pillow to Brooks Brothers have shifted to the production of medical supplies. The technology company Battelle has scaled up a system of mask disinfecting. A variety of medical companies are working at lightning speed to develop new testing and explore vaccination programs. The robustness of the American market economy means that the country is not dependent on the actions of the state alone.

The fact that these businesses and nonprofits can pivot to provide aid during this crisis suggests how it might be valuable for a government to nurture certain internal supply chains and diverse institutional actors. That pre-existing infrastructure allows for a wide-ranging responsiveness to diverse challenges. The nimbleness of these private actors also shows how the market can be harnessed to confront challenges to the body politic as a whole.

Various other liberties have also helped address public challenges. Freedom of speech and the press have helped spread information, sometimes counter to the official organs of political power. While many government officials were discounting the risk of coronavirus (even Anthony Fauci said as late as March 9 that healthy young Americans could feel free to “go on a cruise ship”), pseudonymous accounts on social media were sounding the klaxon. This discrepancy between major bureaucracies and online discourse can be seen in this cache of emails published by the New York Times, in which a senior medical adviser to Veterans Affairs approvingly cites the “chatter on the blogs” in late January that “the WHO and CDC are behind the curve.” Until the past ten days, government agencies and many large media outlets proclaimed that there were no health benefits to wearing a mask in public. Contrary to this “official” knowledge, an online samizdat mask subculture began circulating studies about the possible efficacy of masks as well as instructions on how to make them. Now, many political officials are encouraging them. Especially in the wake of 2016, many politicians and major American companies have called for the suppression of “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” But, in the age of coronavirus, yesterday’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

It would perhaps be a bit utopian to believe that the free exchange of ideas alone will allow truth to come out; postmodern propaganda techniques suggest that flooding the zone can allow even a false message to gain a foothold. Nevertheless, the open exchange of ideas does allow falsehoods to be challenged and knowledge to be disseminated. When so many institutions seem sclerotic, those freedoms of debate and inquiry provide an opportunity for reformers to challenge decadence and the confusion of credentials with competence.

Attention to both the common good and individual dignity will also be necessary in discussions about how to “reopen” the economy. There’s a temptation to think of the economy as a binary on-off switch that sits on the president’s desk. A better metaphor might be a board of dimmer switches — composed of many different sectors, all of which can be more or less “on” and which multiple hands can direct. Federal, state, and local officials all have a voice in this matter, as do institutional stakeholders and private individuals.

Decisions about reopening the economy will have to weigh technical questions about the transmissibility of coronavirus as well as normative questions about how to balance risks from the coronavirus and other dangers. For instance, as part of the lockdown in many states, hospitals and medical offices have banned elective medical procedures, and many physical-therapy providers have also closed. “Elective” procedures here don’t necessarily mean cosmetic rhinoplasties; they also include some brain surgeries, cancer operations, joint replacements, organ transplants, and dental procedures. Many of these procedures have been canceled to give hospitals breathing room in case a surge of coronavirus patients hits, to conserve personal protective equipment, and to minimize the risks of spreading the disease.

Delaying these treatments indefinitely could have long-term public-health consequences; for instance, a middle-aged person who can hardly stand because of a bad knee will be more vulnerable to a host of health problems down the road. The longer the delay, the bigger backlogs will be when elective procedures are allowed again. There are economic consequences here, too. This reduction in medical services has caused many hospitals and other medical providers to furlough staff. Such furloughs might also imperil the nation’s medical infrastructure. Thus, health-care providers and government officials might have to make some complex calculations about when, where, and to what extent elective procedures should be allowed or encouraged. (Part of these calculations would involve preconditions for a reopening of these surgeries, such as a sufficient supply of personal protective equipment. And it would be quite possible to reopen some of American medicine while also keeping major theme parks closed.)

More broadly, individual and private cooperative efforts will be needed to cope with the pandemic’s massive disruptions to both public health and the economy. While government officials obviously have a role to play in creating regulations and policy initiatives in the name of public welfare, recognizing the potential of collaborative decentralization can itself contribute to the public welfare. A range of individual gifts can help strengthen and succor a community ravaged by catastrophe.