Michael Moore believes that while it maybe morally wrong to ingest drugs, that a general principle of liberty should allow free citizens the political liberty to ingest them for recreational purposes. He believes this because he believes the freedom to harm oneself (using recreational drugs) is of a higher order than politically restricting that liberty to do so. He shows historically how t a general principle of liberty is elusive since “Anything that could be called a general right to liberty has proved elusive to the considerable number of philosophers who have pursue it” (Moore, 82). Moore distinguishes between legal rights that should be allotted to an individual from moral rights and believes that something that can be considered immoral can still be considered legal based on the premises that govern individual rights as they should appear under the legal systems (in his examples in this case he refers to the US constitution). As this essay shows, Moore argues for this right in spite of the fact that addiction—the hallmark of irrational behavior—limits the freedom of an individual to make a free rational choice.
Because a philosophical general principle of liberty is elusive to pin down philosophically, Moore prefers to focus on a general principle of liberty as found within political philosophy. Political philosophy rests on actual philosophy, and the general principle of liberty that he advocates is a negative sense of political liberty which views “Liberty [as] the absence of constraint, and political liberty is the absence of coercive legal sanction” (More, 63). Moore is advocating for a legal right to use drugs recreationally, he finds this, for the sake of his specific argument, justified since the intrinsic moral value of his conclusions is less important then to what extent the state should legislate against the right to imbibe drugs. This is the liberty of the government to leave one to their own devices, which contrasts a principle of liberty that allows one to pursue the ends that their individual nature values. Moore cites Jane Thompson’s argument for the legality of abortion, and in much the same way finds argues a derived right to liberty should exist regardless of whether or not this is immoral (Moore, 71). Under political liberty understood under this libertarian value system, a person should have a right to commit “immoral” actions, so long as this immorality does not break the law. For punishment also entails a “harm” to a person, so what must be deduced is whether or not the “harm” of the punishment outweighs the infraction for which it is being implemented as retribution (which Moore believes ought to be rehabilitation, not vindictive in nature). He argues thusly, “Such a theory would not prohibit anything that is not immoral, and it would not prohibit much that is not seriously immoral that the badness of not punishing it outweighed the good protected by the presumption of liberty” (Moore, 75).
This principle of political liberty protects people from blaming a drug for an outcome for their “immoral” or “illegal” behavior, since Moore believes that outcomes of drug use should be seen as primary and the use of recreational drugs should not be used as a scapegoat to be criminalized. This does not excuse users from being held accountable for their actions while being on drugs, but allows a user to take drugs at their own risk, knowing full well that they will be held just as accountable for infractions committed against others, or the state while using these substances.
Moore’s fundamental argument is not about the morality of drug use, but whether or not people should be allotted certain immoralities in their life. A good analogy for this would be a relationship between a parent and a child, with the parent representing the laws of the state and the child representing a free individual within that state. There are two models of parenting that must be compared in this example. In the first, there is a parenting model, which spies on the child, and then severely punishes them for their infractions. Under this model, the child is “classically conditioned” to avoid doing the wrong thing for fear of punishment when infractions to the rules are committed. The child in this case cannot be considered a moral actor doing the right thing out of principle, but someone who is scarred to do the wrong thing out of fear of punishment. This way of parenting and teaching right from wrong also involves a serious time commitment on the parent, who must constantly be monitoring her children.
The other model of parenting would be to endeavor to teach the child right from wrong and hope that he decides to make the right choices. This Moore believes is the right way to think about recreational drugs. He admits that harms that they can cause, but thinks that it would be a greater harm to the justice of individual rights to restrict an individuals freedom to harm his or her self, “My own sense is that we are not free to do these things, that we do wrong when we do them, and that such wrong is sometimes strong enough reason to overcome the presumption of liberty to justify punishment” (Moore, 108). A state the tries to lead through good principles and the advocates moral foundations is a state that risks having citizens make the wrong decisions en masse to the point that society will suffer these consequences. Yet the state is also setting itself up for the hope that citizens will use their freedom to make the right choices, and in the process become better rounded individuals who are compelling moral agents able to discern the right choice and arrive there in some cases by making the wrong choice—such as young citizens experimenting with recreational drugs and learning the respective merits and demerits of certain substances on their own.
However, this understanding does not immediately address addiction, when a person is no longer in control of his or her actions. For once a person has become addicted to a substance, irrationality is a hallmark of their behavior, which will lead to them making the “wrong” decision of using harmful drugs even against the better judgment of their rational mind since, “most addictive behavior can be traced back to irrationality in the choice, in belief formation, or the information acquisition of the agent” (Elster, 25). Under addiction, a person may have a strong desire to quit a substance, might see the harm that it causes in his or her life, but be unable to due to the biochemical attachment that can occur between ingested addicted substances and the way the body operates.
Yet even in cases of addiction, legally barring a person from substance will not necessarily prevent them from using them. And if addiction is a biochemical pull, punishing them will not necessarily cure them. In this case, addiction is best dealt with a strong foundation of family and community support. Addiction cannot be effectively fought with legislation, but governments can offer people a way out of it by building strong public health systems. It seems silly to the point of humor that one would assume, based on the nature of addiction as espoused by Elster’s and Pogge’s social scientific analysis that legislation and their law represent a way out. This matters because while Moore admits that he finds recreational drug use immoral, he does not believe that it should be illegal because he believes that in trying to promote a lesser good, the state would be negating a higher good of the general principle of liberty which should protect a person from state interference in ingesting drugs for the pleasurable feelings they offer their users. Addiction can lead to the diminishing of this pleasure and can take choice out of the equation for an individual. Yet the parent/child example is relevant here. Just because a parent wants his child to avoid bad behavior, does not mean that he should follow him or her around with a drone video taping his or her every move. At a certain point a person ought to be free to make his or her own choices, for better or worse.
Works Cited
de Greiff, Pablo Drugs and the limits of Liberalism. Cornell University Press. Ithaca and London. 1999. Print.
