[weikel]

The role of government is to protect against invasion and keep order neither it nor the majority has any right to impose a moral agenda.

[That Subliminal Kid]

Society has a right and an obligation to enforce certain standards of conduct. Those who violate these standards should be punished as the society as a whole sees fit. These decisions are made by elected officials and the judiciary they appoint.

Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease. -- Thomas Jefferson to William H. Crawford, 1816

[thucydides]

The most important restraints are not legal and have nothing to do with the state. In fact, calling the legal machinery into play is often the result of the failure to observe moral restraint. So conservatives can be very libertarian in the sense that they do not favor state action in matters of moral obligation, even though they strongly support the moral obligation. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which everyone wants to see his policy preferences forced on others through the use of the state's monopoly on the use of coercion.

[Jean S]

Can you try your link again? I get an error message.

[RAT Patrol]

What I believe the "indivual liberty trumps all" crowd misses is the truth that true liberty for ALL can only exist inside order and morality. Otherwise, liberty begins to exist ONLY for the immoral. Immorality and morality cannot coexist. Immorality corrupts morality but not the other way around. If my liberty choice is to live a traditionally moral life and raise my family in that environment a naked person on the street corrupts my liberty.

However, immorality can exist freely alongside morality with it's liberty only restrained by rules of privacy. How will I know what you do in the privacy of your own home? Saying "you cannot do that here" is different than saying "you cannot do that at all."

I've said all this before so I'll end it with my soup example. If I have 6 guests for dinner and I serve soup but 3 guests want salt and 3 do not how do I give EVERYONE exactly what they want? Obviously, I leave the salt out and the ones who want it can add it. Salt corrupts the whole pot. It cannot be removed like a pizza topping. Immorality is the same in society.

Maybe a lame example but there you go. Liberty DEMANDS order and morality based on a consensus of the INDIVIDUALS that make up a community.

[KrisKrinkle]

Regarding liberty, morality and order.

"What are the limits of each?"

If nothing else, they are limited by the ability of one person or group to force his or their will upon another person or group. (Forcing morality is tricky. You might force someone to act according to your morality, but that is not the same as forcing them to adopt your morality. For the latter, you have to convince them or brainwash them.)

"Are there any limits to a person's freedom?"

Yes. Rights, even natural/unalienable rights, are limited by other rights. That limits a person's freedom. Also, when one can give up all or part of one's freedom--as when one gets married and agrees to forgo certain freedoms that may have been previously held.

"Or can the community in which he lives enact prohibitions -- moral prohibitions -- against things like pornography, as an example -- or any things it doesn't like."

Simply put, that goes back to the answer to the first question. If the community has the capability to force its will on the individual, then the community certainly can enact the noted prohibitions. I think what you really meant to ask is "should" the community be allowed to do so. That depends upon the communicty or society in which the person lives. It is short sighted to forget that our community/society, either as we believe it to be or as it actually is, is the only community/society that exists or ever existed.

"Must moral ideas and standards -- and the upholding of them -- be at the mercy of liberty, or vice versa, at all times? Can there be a middle ground?"

I find the questions to be fuzzy, but focusing on the "at all times" in the first question, the answer has to be no. As to the second question, the conflict is usually not moral ideas and standards versus liberty. Rather it is uaually one of two things. First, one set of moral ideas and standards versus another set, with both sides saying the other has no morals or standards. Or second one person's rights in liberty versus another's.

"To have order, must liberty be curbed?"

Yes, but liberty is best curbed by self discipline.

"Or is it a gray area, with one not superseding the other?"

It is a gray area because it is a matter of one set of rights coming into conflict with another set of rights. Which one supersedes the other depends on which side has the ability to execute superior force in a given situation.

"Finally, do majorities have the right to "impose their will" upon society,..."

Depends upon the society in question. In some societies, yes. In other societies, the minority rules. In our society, not to the point that the rights of the minority are infringed.

"... or is majoritarianism an implausible, dangerous doctrine?"

If exercised badly or as the only element of a doctrine, yes.

[Aedammair]

I think that if you were to do thorough historical research, you would find that the colonists (post ratification of the constitution; my source is Democracy in America) laid down numerous rules to be followed if a person wanted to remain in and part of a community. Each community might have had different rules, but they were allowed to enact them, and nobody considered it a breach of the constituition. So the idea that the founding fathers were attached to the "do it if it feels good" philosophy is preposterous.

[x]

The pre-1960s idea that local communities could ban objectionable pornographic material had many good points. To be sure it led to important works by Joyce, Lawrence, and Nabokov being banned, but those works had more significance as forbidden fruit than they do now, when they're forced on college kids along with everything else. Even now, the movie ratings system acts as a self-censorship by the movie industry to avoid the imposition of community censorship.

Some other issues, though.

Allow local censorship and it will be extended to material judged objectionable on the grounds of ethnic sensitivities. The older argument that political speech was to be separated from pornography has been complicated by the balkanization of society into many ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities, each of whom is "offended" by something. For many today the personal is the political and vice versa. The old "community" offended by pornography has to face other groups offended by attempted bans on pornography and the ideas behind it.

What overturned the older system was the "Hitler argument" together with the postwar rise of the educated, and rather self-indulgent, metropolitan, upper middle classes and the massive culture industry. The older, prewar, provincial America didn't have any trouble with the older system of community review and supervision. Economic centralization and cultural standardization opened the door to greater freedom of expression. When what New York, Los Angeles, or Washington thought became the standard, local elites and publics lost their nerve.

Also, there's bound to be great debate revolving around what "liberty" means. Is it always to be personal freedom for the individual or does it also involve the rights of communities to govern themselves?

At its inception the American Revolution was a struggle for community or group liberty ("Taxation without representation is tyranny"). In retrospect, it's come to be seen as a struggle for individual liberty ("Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness").

The Anti-Federalists have come to be seen by many as champions of liberty, but their liberty was more community or state liberty than personal or individual freedom. In the country's early years the larger nation provided a way of escaping the onerous burdens of state and local governments. Those used to the present-day federal behemoth don't always appreciate that.

The danger of purely individual liberty is that it's quite compatible with an imperial order imposed from above which in the name of personal freedom weakens all intermediary and independent institutions that stand between the individual and the government. The danger of group or community liberty is that it is used and abused by some very nasty regimes in defense of some very heinous practices.

Also, every system of laws, including libertarian ones, implies certain moral principles. If you exclude one person's moral principles from having any effect on the laws, has something of the right of self-government been lost? Doubtless some people's ideas must be excluded as being abhorrent, but the question still remains.

Today's conservatives and libertarians seem to be very troubled, imperiled even, by this conflict between two ideas of liberty. Greater freedom for the state or community does not mean greater freedom for the individual. But it's clear that greater freedom for the individual may actually weaken individuals and society if freedom and choice are without consequences.

Today's individuals are far more likely to use their liberty in ways that go against the standards of morality that once predominated. Immoral conduct was once accompanied by censure and disapproval, by rejection or failure. For many today, "freedom" has come to mean the absence of such censure and disapproval. Without social condemnation and sanctions against immorality, questions of morality are more and more pushed into the political realm in spite of our pronounced unwillingness to deal with such questions by using state power.