Dare to be free

We live in profoundly risk-averse times. And this has had a tremendous impact on individual freedom. Every aspect is increasingly overshadowed by a concern over the seemingly adverse consequences of our actions. Every potential decision, right down to what we choose to eat or drink, is increasingly regulated by officialdom.

In this context, how do we start to re-make the case for individual freedom? The answer lies not in denying but in embracing the risks and the responsibilities that come with freedom.

There’s certainly a straightforward way to argue for the freedom to take risks, especially risks that don’t directly affect anyone else, and that is to see risk as a form of harm to the risk-taker. If smoking, or drinking excessively, or eating too many pies, harms me by increasing my long-term health risks, that’s my own business. If I bet my rent on a spin of the roulette wheel, and end up eating cold baked beans for a month, how does that harm anyone else? If I take up mountaineering, or motorcycle racing, or lion taming, and suffer life-changing injuries, I am the one who suffers harm, and therefore I should be free to do what I think best.

I have a great deal of sympathy for this argument taken from classic liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm principle’, especially in this puritanical age. It’s important to defend our freedom to make choices about our own lives, small as well as large, even when others think they’re bad choices and not in our own interests.

Yet the negative impacts of an individual’s actions or even just their bad luck do extend beyond that individual. Financially, practically or emotionally, it’s almost impossible to think of a risk that doesn’t resonate somehow along the social bonds tying us together. To live as if each of us is, in John Donne’s words, ‘an island’ is neither possible nor, I would suggest, desirable. We are human by virtue of growing up in human society – our lives interwoven with other humans.

To argue that the authorities should keep their noses out of our riskier actions is not to deny this inescapable web of human connection. The question is not whether our actions have effects on others, but who should have the authority to criticise or constrain those actions. Is it those who are involved with us – practically, or emotionally – or public bodies with a blueprint for desirable lifestyles that we’re all urged to follow?

Governments and campaign groups may claim to have our best interests at heart, but they don’t in the way our family and friends do. People who know us understand that there is more to life than being healthy, safe and solvent. They can see positive, as well as negative, aspects of risk-taking – the potential rewards as well as the possible harms.

Public bodies, by contrast, tend to have population-level targets for us, the public, that don’t take into account harder-to-measure values such as pleasure, altruism, curiosity or autonomy. Preserving bodily health, financial stability and safety in general are almost moral imperatives in themselves today. The scope of Bessie Smith’s ‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness if I Do’ has shrunk so far that we can’t even be trusted to choose what we look at online, let alone what we do in the real world.

Putting oneself at risk is framed as an invitation to harm: at best, reckless and feckless; at worst, wantonly self-destructive. To take a risk is seen as irresponsible. I want to turn this argument around. Far from being irresponsible, taking risks is the only way to be a truly responsible adult. To live a life devoted to constraining uncertainty, minimising bad possibilities and maximising predictability, is to live as a child. It’s not only permissible to take risks – in fact, it’s intrinsic to being a moral agent.

There is a school of moral philosophy that is focussed entirely on the consequences of one’s actions: consequentialism, particularly utilitarianism. To decide what to do, a good utilitarian tries to predict the outcomes of different courses of action, choosing the one that will probably lead to the best state of affairs for the greatest number of people affected.

I say ‘probably’, because it’s impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out. This leads to arguments about whether it’s better to minimise the worst harm that can happen, maximise the best possible outcome or calculate the ‘expected’ (average) outcome and follow the numbers. Then comes the question of what we mean by the ‘best’ state of affairs. Who gets to decide the measure of ‘best’? Utilitarianism, while neat in theory, is very tricky in practice.

Another school of moral philosophy, intentionalism, avoids these tricky questions by judging the intentions of the person who acts. If the intentions are good, but the action turns out to result in a bad state of affairs, the agent is still a good person. The German 18th-century philosophy Immanuel Kant is often credited with formalising this approach, by asserting that what matters most is a ‘good will’. Kant distinguished the moral universe from the cause-and-effect physical universe of our everyday experience. In the physical world, we are governed by physical laws, but in the moral universe individuals are capable of governing themselves, by choosing to act according to moral laws.

This idea of ‘pure’ agency – that we should be judged only by our intentions, not the outcomes of our actions – doesn’t quite match our everyday moral instincts. We can sympathise with the well-meaning person whose well-intentioned actions go wrong, but we don’t necessarily think that their ‘good will’ lets them off the hook.

Suppose you borrow my car to drive somebody to hospital. Unfortunately for you – and for me – when you bring it back you hit the gatepost. Who should be responsible for getting the car (and possibly the gatepost) repaired? Surely it’s you, because you were driving. Not only that, when you decided to take the car, you took on responsibility for its safe return.

Real life is full of examples like this: we take on projects, large and small, with varying degrees of uncertainty about how they will turn out. By initiating something new, we take on responsibility for seeing it through. This may involve unforeseen challenges. It may mean learning new skills we didn’t expect to need. It may bring new obligations that we didn’t anticipate.

I took a show about risk to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. Early in the show, I would ask a random audience member, ‘What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?’. Several people answered, ‘getting married’. This always got a laugh (especially as that person was usually sitting with their spouse and sometimes children) followed by reflective silence.

Is getting married the same as a spin of the roulette wheel? That’s a cheeky thing to say about your life partner. Did you get lucky? Or have you tied yourself to a lifetime of snoring and being talked over at dinner? But marriage is not a spin of the roulette wheel. It’s not a single decision after which there is nothing to be done but sit back and wait for fate to take its course.

Marriage is an open-ended commitment to another person, ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’, without knowing what challenges the future will bring. You may acquire new obligations to children. You may have to find new strengths you didn’t know were in you, to cope with what life throws at you. Hopefully, you will also find new possibilities open to you, new opportunities that you could not have foreseen when you first said, ‘I do’.

Marriage is, in short, the kind of risk that responsible adults take, because we recognise that responsibility extends beyond our intentions, beyond what we can predict and beyond what we explicitly agree to take on.

Having children is another example. So is starting a business, setting in motion a political campaign, leading an expedition – anything new which needs others to make it happen is not a single risk, but an unfolding, branching series of risks that cascade from the first decision, committing you to a path that can’t be retraced if you regret choosing it. More decisions, more risks, more actions will be required of you along the way, each one causing outcomes you couldn’t predict but now can’t rewind.

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Human Condition (1958), calls this ‘the burden of irreversibility and unpredictability’, which is an inescapable part of human action. It’s inevitable that ‘he who acts never quite knows what he is doing… he always becomes “guilty” of consequences he never intended or even foresaw… no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of his deed, he can never undo it’.

Philosophical discussion of moral responsibility often includes the ‘control condition’ – the idea that one’s responsibility extends only as far as one’s control. Philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel introduced the idea of ‘moral luck’ to challenge this idea. Luck can, and does, affect our moral judgment of individuals and actions. A ‘good will’ is not enough: we judge people differently if their actions turn out to have better or worse consequences due to things beyond their control. The drunk driver who kills is condemned more harshly than the equally drunk driver who is lucky enough to encounter no pedestrian on the way home.

But, as Arendt points out, every worthwhile human enterprise involves factors beyond an individual’s control. Not only the vagaries of nature and the unknowability of the complex physical world, but the fundamental unpredictability of other people. ‘The fact that man is capable of the unexpected means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.’ Not even the most sophisticated computer imaginable could predict the future of the human world, because humans are free to transcend the deterministic laws of nature. We have a unique capacity to defy statistical probability with unprecedented actions that set new things in motion.

Because every significant project – from a marriage to a political campaign – needs more than one person to make it happen, it can never be under the control of a single individual, not even the person who set it in motion. This means that to act in any significant way, to set in motion anything that could influence the world, is to take a risk.

Freedom is not liberation from responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, but freedom to act in full acceptance of that responsibility. Freedom to act, that is, without being able to know for what, exactly, one will turn out to be responsible.

This is what philosopher Margaret Urban Walker calls ‘impure’ agency. We are human agents, ‘agents of, rather than outside, the world of space, time, and causality’, and our responsibilities outrun our capacity to control the world around us. If ‘pure agents’ really existed, says Urban Walker, and insisted that their responsibilities – moral and practical – ended at the limit of their control, they would be able to walk away from all unforeseen, unplanned or uncontrolled outcomes of their actions. ‘Relationships, situations and encounters in which emerge uncontrolled and uninvited needs, demands and opportunities to enable or harm’ would be no grounds for moral claims upon such ‘pure agents’.

We could not live together, trusting each other to assume the burdens of our web of human commitments, if everyone insisted on thus limiting their obligations to others. Dependability may not seem to be an especially glorious virtue, but, without it, society rapidly falls apart. Moral luck, far from being a curious paradox of interest only to philosophers, is ‘a fact of our moral situation and our human kind of agency’, Urban Walker writes. Recognising the reality of this situation is itself part of being a moral agent.

To children who act without understanding we say, ‘it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t know’, even when their actions have terrible consequences. Adults are expected to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, no matter how unforeseen. In our current, risk-averse society, our knowledge of this fact turns out to be a constraint on our willingness to act, to start new things, and to take on open-ended responsibilities.

All sorts of things that previous generations regarded as normal parts of life – relationships, children, starting a business or a voluntary community group – are now understood less as exciting opportunities but more as risky Pandora’s boxes of potential harm. Uncertainty about how things will turn out is regarded as a reason not to do them, in case they turn out badly.

When we do begin new things, we’re encouraged to do them in ways that minimise that uncertainty. Dating apps, for example, feel more controllable than just talking to strangers in a bar; potential partners are viewed through a screen and communication can be carefully crafted before sending. In person, spontaneous looks and words might betray our feelings and leave us emotionally vulnerable to another person’s actions.

There is a deep pessimism in this tendency to think about risk mainly in terms of harm, rather than opportunity. Embarking on a risky project is generally something we do because we hope for good outcomes, not bad. Underlying this pessimism is a lack of faith in our human ability to cope with uncertainty, to follow through with our responsibilities in unforeseen situations. This is consistent with the general trend to see adults more and more like children: too emotionally fragile to act rationally in upsetting situations; too immature to be relied upon when the going gets tough; vulnerable, not dependable.

No wonder we’re inclined to discuss risk as a state of impending harm from which we should all be protected, and not as a way of understanding action, as an integral part of human life.

What, then, should an adult who values freedom do about risk? It’s not a question of taking risks for the sake of danger. If you feel that doing more risky things will build your habit of courage, fine, but suddenly taking up mountaineering will do little to shift the infantilising, risk-averse mood in our society.

Instead, we need to take on the inherent risk that any worthwhile human enterprise entails, wholeheartedly, and with full acceptance of the moral responsibility that brings. As much as one can – and should – prepare for any project, plan ahead for potential problems and anticipate the unexpected, there will always be unforeseen challenges.

These are, what Urban Walker calls, ‘the decisive moral tests one did not invite… the faulty or horrifying results that one invited but did not control and that one is expected to find resources to address or redress without taking refuge in denial, demoralisation, or paralysis’.

It is our willingness to live up to our responsibilities at such times that is the real test of our integrity as moral agents. But that willingness to commit to a project in full knowledge of the risks involved, and live up to our responsibilities when the going gets tough, is also what constitutes real freedom to act in, and on, the world.

Timandra Harkness is a writer, performer and broadcaster. She is the author most recently of Technology is Not the Problem, published by HQ.

This is an edited version of a Letters on Liberty pamphlet, Risk and Responsibility, which can be purchased in full here. Subscribe to the Academy of Ideas Substack for this and more.