Mandatory Seat Belts (Reprise)
- (“commentary” length version)
Once again the proposal has arisen to mandate seat belt use in New Hampshire, and once again you have taken the side of the ‘virtuous’, throwing out the phrase “Live Free and Die” to belittle defenders of liberty and arguing that the end justifies the means.
Notwithstanding the bold assertion with which you titled your editorial, your argument never actually addresses whether seat belt laws violate individual rights. Rather, you seem to concede the point and respond with a resounding “So What? It is justified!” But your justifications lack any substantive moral foundation.
Driving without seat belts is undoubtedly marginally riskier than not, but there are many personal behaviors – say smoking or drinking, or bicycling on the roads, or playing a contact sport – that increase our risk of injury or death. All can result in some amount of ‘extra’ misery and death each year, and at various times most of these have been the subject of efforts by some compassionate souls to protect us from ourselves. But most of us value our freedom to choose such activities despite their risks, not just because they also offer benefits and pleasures that their detractors can’t appreciate but more fundamentally because the freedom to choose our own fates is the only true freedom. Just as the freedom to say only what everyone else agrees is true is not “freedom of speech”, the freedom to do only what everyone else agrees is good for you is not “freedom of action”. If we grant government the authority to circumscribe behavior solely because it is potentially self-destructive we have sold our freedom for a false security.
On the other hand the argument that our financial involvement gives us the right to mandate behavior that minimizes the expense is appealing; and it might be legitimate if our involvement was the result of a social covenant rather than of a social policy. But it is not. As a matter of policy we have chosen to cover – either through the insurance risk-pool or by direct subsidy – the medical needs of the severely injured, regardless of their own complicity in their predicament. And in implementing that policy we give individuals no practical way of opting out, and ourselves no mechanism for holding them accountable; in fact we take great pains to circumvent the normal mechanisms by which the costs of individual choices would accrue to the individual.
That policy is certainly compassionate and arguably pragmatic, and some would contend that doing anything else would be immoral. But it is also voluntary: as a society we have assumed the burden by our own choice and for our own moral and practical purposes; and having volunteered for our own reasons to take on that responsibility we have no moral claim on those to whom our compassion flows.
Imagine that your parents volunteer to pay your family medical bills. You appreciate their help, but you neither requested the assistance nor negotiated any conditions for its provision; they chose to help for their own reasons, to make their children and grandchildren more secure. Can they now demand that you exercise for some number of hours per week? Can they dictate the menus for your meals? The hobbies you pursue? The vices you indulge or renounce? Does accepting help from someone who imposes it obligate you to indulge their notions of what is good for you? Does the fact that your choices determine the extent of their self-imposed obligation give them a moral authority over your behavior?
Most of us would insist not. Yet that is the justification you offer for mandating seat belt use for the drivers of New Hampshire.
The fact is that we should all wear seat belts. We really should, and the excuses people make for not doing so are pretty pathetic and the costs of doing so are vanishingly small. We also all should refrain from smoking, and should eat vegetables seven times a week, and should exercise regularly. To reduce the risk of AIDS we should all use condoms or remain monogamous. Many activities would reduce risks and improve our lives. But is that enough to mandate them? If we grant the principle that government can and should mandate behavior solely because it might, under some circumstance, create personal harm and social cost then the only thing that prevents extending it in those and other ways is fickle political will.
By what tenet of our founding political philosophy, and under what article of our Constitution, is the government granted authority to enforce such things? And should we really trust it with that authority?
I’m not sure I do. Do you?
© Copyright 2005, Augustus P. Lowell