We hear a lot of arguments these days about how much power should be exercised over us and by whom.
But here’s a question you won’t hear many people asking: By what right do men exercise power over each other, in the first place?
This is the question Auberon Herbert explores in his essay “The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State.”
Herbert asks, “How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?”
That moral element is more important than we think because it cuts to the heart of where government power may be rightfully limited.
It also presents a moral case that rightness or wrongness of a particular action cannot be based upon whether a majority agrees with it.
Otherwise, we’d be conceding that mere numbers give us the unlimited right to take whatever we want from others, including the right to act for ourselves.
Does that sound moral to you?
And yet it perfectly describes an attitude held by many in our society.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr said:
“State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”
Keeping our own moral compasses regularly calibrated can help us better recognize the difference between legitimate law that protects freedom and artificial rules that diminish it.
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