What are the limitations on our personal liberty? Are all of them justified?

Authors Avatar

What are the limitations on our personal liberty?  Are all of them justified?

Liberty can be interpreted as meaning the freedom to do something without restrictions.  The principal interpretations of liberty are ‘negative liberty’, which can be understood as freedom from restrictions; ‘positive liberty’, which can be understood as freedom to do things; and the view that there is such a small difference between these two interpretations that a distinction is unwarranted, as the ability to do something necessarily involves a lack of restrictions.  The differences between the two interpretations regard the way in which people wish to treat liberty.  Those who view liberty in the ‘negative’ sense generally feel that the role of law should be as limited as possible, whereas those who view it in the ‘positive’ sense generally feel that laws are needed so as to help people to achieve their full potential liberty.  The interpretation taken by recent British governments has mostly been the latter, though some governments have considered the former in some situations.

In this essay I will consider two areas of liberty:  that of an individual’s liberty in the private domain and that of an individual’s liberty in the public domain.  I will assess whether particular British (although sometimes not Scottish) and European laws that limit personal liberty are justified, and will assess other things that affect personal liberty, such as economic circumstances.  The areas of law that I will focus to examine existing laws that regulate liberty in the public domain are roaming laws and drug/drink driving laws.  The areas that I will focus on to examine existing laws that regulate liberty in the private realm are drug laws and SM laws, focusing on comparisons between those states in which drug use is severely punished and those in which it is not, the 1990 police operation ‘Operation Spanner’ and the 2008 ban on possession of extreme pornography.  It should be assumed that the tool that I will use to judge the justifiability of certain laws will be J. S. Mill’s ‘harm principle’, which states that an individual should have total personal liberty in those areas of their lives that may directly harm only themselves.

Join now!

Operation Spanner was a 1990 police operation following the chance finding by the Greater Manchester Police Service of a video depicting SM acts.  It led to the conviction of sixteen men under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act.  These men received prison sentences of up to four and a half years for partaking in the fully consensual SM activity, even though Section 86 of the Act names ‘consent’ as a suitable defence, on the grounds that the acts were too extreme to not necessitate conviction, regardless of consent.  The convictions were upheld by the UK Court of Appeal and ...

This is a preview of the whole essay