Canadian political philosopher George Grant argues that Liberalism is the political philosophy that makes freedom the absolute value of political life and if deeply embraced, the absolute value of personal life too. If freedom really is the essence of human existence, then based on this outlook one's priority will always be to seek to limit freedom to the least extent possible. But I wonder if this emphasis has a certain kind of fundamental risk to it related to the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons.
John Stuart Mill certainly helped clarify the Liberal approach for the budding Whig and Liberal political parties of the 19th century. One's freedom should not be limited unless it could be seen to directly cause harms to others. "Liberal" democratic societies, therefore, should continuously experiment with withdrawing limitations on freedom. According to Mill, the happy byproduct of this approach would be a better society for everyone because individuals are better than governments to explore and understand the possibilities (plans of life) that can make them, and potentially others, more happy.
We have lived with this approach being the predominant approach in industrialized countries for last century and a half. With the aid of abundant fossil energy it has produced a global culture of affluence for many. But we also seem beset by a growing array of crises, that seem to have the hallmarks of instances of tragedies of the commons (soil crisis, fish crisis, water crisis, extinction crisis, debt crisis, pollution crisis, climate crisis, energy crisis, democratic deficit, automation crisis, obesity crisis, drug crisis, anxiety crisis, depression crisis).
Tragedies of the commons, as I understand them, occur whenever harms can result from actions undertaken for an individual's own benefit that are not born by that individual alone but are spread among some wider number of morally relevant parties. When such conditions are present, there must be some kind of formal response that can restrict the behaviour in a way that effectively (although not necessarily perfectly) prevents the harms from being offloaded (externalized) onto others. Unless these measures are reasonably effective, "defection" from responsibility will be continuously encouraged (to the point of absolute necessity) and growth of the harms will rise to unmanageable proportions for everyone.
Or, as the logical puzzle "the prisoner's dilemma" makes clear (especially if repeated over many iterations when modelling behaviours), simply pursuing self advantage as a strategy without mutual limits effectively imposed by all those affected by your decisions can never lead to optimal outcomes for all involved, but only sub-optimal outcomes. Reason demands binding rules on all parties negatively affected by each other's actions.
The problem as I see it is that Liberalism encourages us to always "push towards the red line" in terms of our society's allowance of behaviours that can turn out to trigger tragedies of the commons. The basic approach of Liberalism is always to seek and experiment with the removal of limits in order to discern if suspected harms are not actually real. In economics this takes the form of the goal of reaching Pareto Optimality or the maximally efficient economy in terms of the production that can be wrung from any given natural environment. This approach might not be a problem if human life and human societies are relatively simple. If this is the case then people in such societies could risk being continuously experimental about removing limits because they could relatively easily discern if missteps had occurred and pull back by re-instituting those limits or by creating new binding rules.
But societies today are not simple-- They are complex and rapidly evolving technological societies, in which new activities are continuously being added to human life in an ever changing and ever complex "technological ecology" as Marshall McLuhan might put it. The negative effects of such changes often take decades to manifest, as we can see with the impacts of DDT and automobiles. And technologies can interact in ways that can "synergize" completely new and unexpected negative effects, such as we are beginning to sense with various forms of social media. Running economies continuously at Pareto Optimality means that any declines in ecological conditions leave no room for adjustment.
But since our instinct in liberal societies is to leave people as free as possible and to have faith in democracy and our innovative ability to fix problems (i.e. technology), we generally assume that we will be able to create whatever limits or systems of management that might reveal themselves to be necessary. But might it be possible, if societies are complex enough for this ability to discern the sources of tragedies of the commons to be overwhelmed? If the number of new behaviours being introduced becomes so high we might reach a point that we cannot discern among the complexity the specific behaviours (technological activities) leading to the harms poised to runaway into tragedy.
Put another way, might Liberalism be a political and personal philosophy suitable only for relatively simple societies in which harms and their sources can be easily recognized (e.g. my fist hitting your nose) rather than the complex globally interconnected technological societies we live in today? In such societies problems unleashed by technological activities and the synergy between those activities might take so long to manifest themselves that by the time we notice they are problematic that they may have become so deeply embedded that they are effectively beyond practical control (cultural momentum/technological dependency). Perhaps, therefore, it is time for us to consider returning to being a society of laws (harm seekers, lawmakers and law enforcers). A cautionary philosophy, might be the only political philosophy that can adequately deal with the main threats of the present and the future.
But since we cannot name "technology" or our favourite political philosophy "liberalism" (aka neo-conservatism) as problems, we must find people to blame for our growing fears. So we blame immigrants, or we blame the supporters of opposing mainstream liberal/neo-conservative political parties, or we blame prominent public figures (Trump, etc), or nebulously defined sinister groups (terrorists of the right or left). We put faces to our growing fears and then see ourselves as being on the other team.
Evolution has inclined us to respond in such ways. We evolved to manage threats from specific human individuals in small groups, not complex problems unleashed by synergizing technological ecologies and the abstractions of longstanding political philosophies working their way out in globalized societies. But we must be able to name the sources of the threats we are facing or we will be inevitably drawn towards the personalization of our problems. To "technology" I would add the name "liberalism" as a fundamental source of the growing cascade of unfolding global tragedies that we face today.
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