View source for Freedom, lockdown, and COVID-19

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[[Category:Chris Bertram]]
[[Category:Coercion]]
[[Category:Coronavirus disease 2019]]
[[Category:Liberty]]
[[Category:Freedom]]
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{{URL | url = https://crookedtimber.org/2020/05/06/freedom-lockdown-and-covid-19}}
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{{DES | des = "... you can’t force someone to do what they are unfree to do... People who are more-or-less confined to their homes can’t easily be forced to work in workplaces that expose them to the threat of COVID-19... even under lockdown many workers, such as health workers and bus drivers are effectively so forced..." | show=}}
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{{List|title=Freedom, lockdown, and COVID-19|links=true}}
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Despite the UK now having the highest death toll from COVID-19 in Europe and the second-highest in the world after the United States, the right-wingers of the Telegraph and the Spectator, abetted by the erstwhile Marxists of Spiked! and similar persist in denouncing lockdown as a tyrannical assault on freedom. It is clear that compulsory social distancing measures do indeed reduce people’s negative liberty by constraining the set of actions they can legally perform. Most people, however, view this as a sensible price to reduce the threat COVID-19 presents to each of us and to others, particularly the most vulneralble, the elderly, health workers, transport workers etc. After all, if you are dead then your freedom is worth nothing.

As students of freedom know, however, there is more than one way of understanding the concept. Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting. In particular, they either fail to notice or deny that the workplace is coercive. After all, the people who work for the person to whom they are now subordinate freely contracted into that position, didn’t they? I don’t think I need to repeat the familiar points about choices, options, and structural oppression here.

Instead I invite you to consider what will happen if and when lockdown is lifted. Jerry Cohen made the point in his essay “Are Disadvantaged Workers Who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs?” that you can’t force someone to do what they are unfree to do. If workers are unfree to contract for less than the minimum wage or to work in unsafe conditions they bosses can’t (legally) force them to do those things. The same, rather obviously, goes for lockdown. People who are more-or-less confined to their homes can’t easily be forced to work in workplaces that expose them to the threat of COVID-19. (I know that even under lockdown many workers, such as health workers and bus drivers are effectively so forced, and COVID has rather powerfully exposed some of the divides that exist among different groups of workers.)

If and when lockdown is lifted then expect the same voices who call it a tyrannical invasion of freedom also to call for the deployment of force and coercion against those reluctant to expose themselves to the risk of death. For example, those unpicked crops won’t pick themselves and there will be plenty of unemployed (soon to be once-more relabelled “scroungers”) who can be made to replace the migrants who have stopped coming. In many cases it will be hard for employers to get people back to work because they will fear the legal consequences of doing so if sick employees or the families of the dead sue them for putting people in an unsafe environment. So I expect our partisans of negative freedom to call for changes in or exemptions to health and safety law to make such forcings of people back into work possible. In a crisis, health and safety will be a luxury we can’t afford.

In those historical debates about the meaning of freedom, the partisans of negative liberty accused the supposed advocates of positive liberty of wanting to force people to be free. As the COVID-19 crisis drags on, with profits falling and taxes rising, we can expect the critics of lockdown “tyranny” to themselves be calling for ordinary people to be forced to be free.
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