Q1: Is there a tension between liberty and morality? Explain
Liberty is the name of freedom. It is about living a free life without any external pressure or force. It ensures that one person's rights and freedom shouldn't interrupt and interfere with the rights and freedoms of another person. Here whatever the actions of any person are like moral or immoral. Liberty does not enforce someone to be good or moral in behaviors. However the morality is a bit different from liberty in sense of realizing your actions’ impact on other. Morality is about not harming anyone. There is also liberty in picking up the morality. Morality is voluntary and can be picked up deliberately, and one individual cannot exert pressure on another person to behave in good way according to his set standards, by applying restrictions, pressure, punishment or in any other way. Both prohibitions and human misery on human freedom are burdens, so enforcement of good by any means, including punishment or prohibitions, requires justification and clarification. Nothing can be said for sure whether a person behave according to ethics or not even after punishment (Paul, 1068)
So a tension lies in liberty and morality. People can’t be forced to realize their responsibility to behave nicely to others until he/she doesn’t realize themselves. Although morality cannot be forced on another, the liberty is about the concept that people have enough morality to live ethically and act in right way.
In liberty the person is free to act in the way he/she wants, no matter what others think about him/her. It is just the choice of person. On the same time a person if behaving with liberty cannot violate others’ rights and cannot force them to act against their choice and judgment. For example, under liberty a person is free to earn as much money as he wants to earn according to his abilities and he is also free to use the money the way he wants e.g. he may save for retirement, buy health insurance or daily useable things or he may invest the earned money in business. The person can’t be stopped by society or government to make wealth and use it in his desired way. In the same way a person has the liberty to drink wine or gamble on a house. But it is immoral and unethical for a person to have a gambled house though he is not forced from outside. So under liberty the rights of person are fully recognized and he is not forced to be moral and he can be fully selfish
But on the same time it is difficult for majority of the people to realize and acknowledge that a persons’ life belong to him only for better or worse. He can’t be forced to behave with ethics or to follow the standards of others’ life. In liberal society people posses’ definite right and freedom to live their lives according to their wishes and enjoy their own liberty, and their own happiness according to their views. (Tibor, 2004) In all this everyone has to accept that his next door neighbor and all the individuals in the society have the right to behave according to the established norms which should not be quite improper or immoral according to one’s ethics standards. If they are about to ruin their lives with immoral activities like alcohol or drug abuse, or if their actions are trivial, useless and meaningless, there is nothing anyone has the right to do apart from motivating them to change their ways. (James Edwin, 2007). They lives are regulated through earning on causes that are non-ethical or disgusting, still they have a complete right to do that and no one may restrict them from by ways other than persuasion and convincing. For example, you can hate the homosexuality but you cannot force others to avoid it (Chai R. Feldblum, 2006)
References
Chai R. Feldblum, (2006) Moral Conflict and Liberty: Gay Rights and Religion
James Edwin Mahon, (2007) The Morality of On Liberty [Available online at
http://www.historyofethics.org/122007/122007Mahon.shtml
Marcus G. Singer, (1959) "On Duties to Oneself", Ethics 69
Paul E., (1968) "Duties to Oneself and the Concept of Morality", Inquiry 11, p. 149.
The Moral Basis for Economic Liberty
Tibor R. Machan, (2004), Liberty versus Morality: The Free Society's Troublesome Solution [Available online at] http://journal.apee.org/index.php?title=999653.pdf
Q2: Argue against a bill of rights. Tell why the original constitution - according to your argument - did not need a bill of rights.
The Bill of Rights is a list of limits on government power. For instance, what the Founders saw as the natural and birth right of people to freely speak and worship, was supported by the First Amendment’s prohibitions on Congress from creating laws abridging freedom of speech or establishing a religion. For another instance, Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements safeguarded the natural right of freedom from unreasonable government interruption in a person’s home.
A constitutionally entrenched Bill gives dramatic power judges than actually they posses. It gives the judges an authority to override Parliament. However a statute-based Bill would not have those consequences; rather it would limit the judges to their general role of manipulating and analyzing the laws founded by Parliament, but according to the Bill of Rights. Parliament can change this form of Bill of rights. Parliament also has the ability by certain and direct language at any specific time to disqualify or override the statutory rights. However if the parliament follows this way, it must pay attention on the effects of its proposed law on the rights that are protected by Bill and it should be able to handle the effects efficiently. The question can’t be ignored without paying attention to it and the rights can’t be excluded or disqualified by unclear or general words.
The general arguments to support the view that Bill of rights was not needed in the constitution are:
1. The government was ignorant to the individual’s interests and was not much close to the matter. The nation was diverse enough and the federal government was complex to support and protect individual rights. Government was inaccessible for individuals and it was not able to bother about the people’s rights.
2. The constitution was sufficient enough to be relied on. The constitution body had already protected and supported a variety of certain rights. For instance rules against ex post facto laws, habeas corpus, trial by jury in states where a crime is committed and bills of attainder (i.e., passing a law against a specific individual). So in my view the Bills of rights was an unnecessary addition to the document
3. Any person who violated the People’s right can be thrown out of the office. So in such nation where the people can throw out the officials from the office, a Bill of rights is unneeded. A public official who oppressed his constituents did so at the peril of his office.
4. The congress gets certain powers with the constitution. Listing the rights was not needed. Congress cannot violate as it doesn’t have the ability to do so. It is the most important argument against the Bill of rights from my side.
5. When more rights are listed the Bills of rights even more dangerous or ineffective at the same time. Governments can abuse the rights that are not listed as the rights may not be on the list.
6. Other Important arguments against a Bill of Rights are that the majority will and should prevail, in all circumstances and there is no need to offer additional protection and support for basic rights
7. Further the Bill of Rights is foreign to the traditions and it gives too much power and authority to judges and it may add more costs.
References:
The Bill of Rights: A Brief History [Available online at] https://www.aclu.org/racial-justice_prisoners-rights_drug-law-reform_immigrants-rights/bill-rights-brief-history
The Bill of Rights: Its History and Significance [Available online at] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/billofrightsintro.html
Bill of Rights of the United States of America (1791) [Available online at] http://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/bill-of-rights/
