Benjamin Studebaker

Recently, Arizona governor Jan Brewer (R) vetoed a controversial piece of legislation that would have allowed businesses in Arizona to refuse service to homosexuals on the grounds that to do otherwise would infringe upon their religious freedom. The bill was widely condemned, and I had no wish to pile on, but I’ve read a piece that offers an interesting defense of the bill. While I don’t think the argument ultimately holds up, it’s an argument that needs to be taken seriously and picked apart.

The argument goes something like this:

1. Free thought requires that we be permitted to believe in a diverse, unlimited pluralism of different moral doctrines.
2. Integral to believing something in the morally relevant sense is being able to put one’s belief into action.
3. Many people (predominately certain varieties of religious people) believe that homosexuality is morally abhorrent and that to trade with, associate with, or in other ways publicly affirm homosexuals is to be complicit in a morally abhorrent act.
4. To force people who believe morality requires that they refuse to do business with homosexuals to do so anyway  is to prevent people from putting their beliefs into action.
5. Therefore, when the state makes businesses take on homosexuals as customers, the state infringes on free thought.

Often times, when I pick on arguments, I identify some point in the argument in which the logic does not follow or some premise in the argument that, on reflection, is not true. I can do no such thing in this case–this argument is both valid and sound. The problem is, so is this argument:

1. Equality in the marketplace requires that all people be able to participate in the market as equals.
2. Laws that permit people to put certain racist/sexist/ethnocentric/anti-gay/religious/philosophical views into practice result in those people not being able to participate in the market as equals.
3. Therefore, allowing people to act on many kinds of beliefs infringes on equality in the marketplace.

These two arguments seem to produce no resolution of any kind to this dispute. They seem to imply wholly irreconcilable principles, principles that we must choose between. At that point, our society appears to divide between those who feel deep down that equality is more important and those that feel deep down that freedom is more important. We vote, and whichever principle has more people feeling it at that particular moment in history wins the day. Might makes right.

Does that strike you as really inadequate? It should. There is a way to actually resolve the dispute. What we need to do is compare the value of freedom to equality that makes use of our reasoning, not sheer gut instincts. Whichever position you hold in this debate, we can definitely agree that there are many people who have gut instincts that lead in the wrong direction. We can do this by considering what else these principles imply. The free thought argument I presented above can be used to justify allowing people to kick black customers out of their establishments just as easily as it can gays:

1. Free thought requires that we be permitted to believe in a diverse, unlimited pluralism of different moral doctrines.
2. Integral to believing something in the morally relevant sense is being able to put one’s belief into action.
3. Many people believe that non-white people bear the mark of Cain and that it is therefore morally impermissible to trade with, associate with, or in other ways publicly affirm non-white people.
4. To force people who believe non-white people bear the mark of Cain to do business with them anyway is to prevent people from putting their beliefs into action.
5. Therefore, when the state makes businesses take on non-white customers, the state infringes on free thought.

Not only that, but this same argument can be used to force the state to let people do just about anything. Let’s do the reductio ad absurdum:

1. Free thought requires that we be permitted to believe in a diverse, unlimited pluralism of different moral doctrines.
2. Integral to believing something in the morally relevant sense is being able to put one’s belief into action.
3. Some people believe that we are morally required to cleanse the world of impure peoples via genocide.
4. To force people who believe in genocide to not commit genocide is to prevent those people from putting their beliefs in action.
5. Therefore, when the state stops genocide, the state infringes on free thought.

The state is an inherently coercive instrument–everything that is against the law is something that some number of people believe in, and to the extent that the law forces them not to act on those beliefs, those people have their freedom of thought limited. In some cases, giving people more freedom is bad. In some cases, equality is bad too–even the most committed Marxist likely does not believe we should put out everyone’s eyes so that the blind people don’t have to feel singled out. The only way to avoid making grave moral mistakes is to never give any moral principle, even one like freedom or equality, an unquestioned preeminence.

We need to remember that philosophical concepts like freedom and inequality are meant to make our lives go better, to improve our quality of life. The consequences of our actions, not the actions in themselves, determine their value to us. Sometimes allowing people to be free means allowing people to hold different views about what kinds of movies are good, and sometimes allowing people to be free means allowing people to kill each other. Ultimately, all our principles convert into a universal moral currency, that of utility, or simple usefulness to the common human aim we share–the pursuit of our desires alongside the mitigation of our suffering. We can and should argue about what the best way to conceive of our desires and our sufferings is, and what the best strategy is for pursuing the former and mitigating the latter, but when we elevate abstractions about the realities of what those abstractions mean when put into practice, we get silly bills like the one Governor Brewer mercifully vetoed.