Trivialization of liberty

Collapsed concept of freedom
Simplistic understanding of liberty
Misguided civil libertarianism
Tension between choice and freedom

Nature

Civil-libertarians protect the right to free choice, but not necessarily equality; strive for liberty rather than liberation. Individual freedom is a problem if not embedded within an ethical context which recognizes the social implications and responsibilities of liberty.

Incidence

When a feminist activist in the USA, the plaintiff in a lawsuit defending her and other women's right to go shirt-free like men at a public beach, insisted that the legal defence be based upon a women's equal right to go shirt-free rather than a civil-libertarian right to freedom of expression, a host of civil-libertarians who were formerly her backers withdrew support. The woman and 11 other feminists withdrew from the lawsuit rather than let themselves be party to setting a legal precedent based upon values that, in their view, were so often misused by the likes of pornographers and naturist paedophiles against women and children.

Claim

The reduction of the concept of liberty to doing what one wants to do destroys the profundity of the experience. Freedom is found in the midst of and because of constraints, not in the absence of them.

If history is any indicator, a milieu in which pure liberty reigns results in the strong prevailing over the weak and the wealthy overpowering the poor; men are privileged over women and small, underdeveloped countries are at the mercy of larger industrial powers. Large newspapers take over smaller ones, and strong corporations raid the weak. Pure liberty is "survival of the fittest" and the "law of the jungle" wrapped in a kinder and gentler bow. Philosophies of liberty and free choice – divested of any analysis of or remedies for power imbalances – lead to such travesties as international free-trade agreements where corporations have the "free choice" to pick up and move at will to the Third World, pitting the workers and the health and environmental standards of one country against another.