The Freedom to be Bad

From ‘Anti-Discrimination Laws (Part 2)

The non sequitur move from “X is wrong” to “X should be illegal” usually hinges on the implicit notion that it is the State’s job to redesign society from the top down, and that in a free society no one should have the freedom to be bad. However, this is a questionable assumption at best.

All property rights assume, at some level, that the law should give us a certain degree of freedom to be bad. Your body is your property, your thoughts are your property, your earned possessions are your property and your business is your property. To coerce someone under threat of violence to use their own property in a way he or she does not want to is a violation of the basic principle of freedom.

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Similarly, to argue that anyone has a “right” to property that is not his, whether it be someone else’s body, money, business or thoughts, is antithetical to the principles of a free society…. the cost of freedom is that people will behave in ways you may not always agree with. Put simply, in a free society people should have the freedom to be bad. This perspective is lost once we start to view the State as a nanny tasked with the vocation of making us good – a viewpoint which lurks implicitly behind much of the recent anti-discrimination policies.

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