The Freedom Museum and freedom: “there is no right answer”
Skimming through a Reader from a while back, I notice the following ad for “the nation’s first museum dedicated to freedom and the 1st Amendment”. Yes, it’s the Chicago-based Freedom Museum…
…with an ad that communicates outright ambiguity and equivocation regarding the sanctity of individual rights?
Yo…
“When should the needs of many infringe on the rights of one?” beckons the ad. It’s response: “there is no right answer”.
Come again? Am I not understanding the definition of “freedom”, the ideal the Freedom Museum purportedly stands for? You know, freedom: the state of being lacking external coercion or compulsion. Freedom: the ability to act according to one’s will. Freedom: the opposite of collective imposition.
According to utilitarianism and other common-good analysis, fine; you’re correct – there is no fundamentally correct answer to the question. It requires an arbitrary case-by-case decision-making process. But if freedom is the bedrock – if freedom is the underlying philosophy inspiring subsequent action, there is a right answer to the question posed by the ad. When should the needs of many infringe on the rights of one? NEVER.
As Ayn Rand said in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:
When ‘the common good’ of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
