In reading libertarian literature, it’s relatively easy to find an idea that states that liberty is not a mean but rather, it’s the end. However inspiring the idea might be, is it true that liberty isn’t a mean but instead, the highest political end?
The reason I’m asking this question is that I’m uncertain if liberty is the highest political end. Rather, I think happiness is the highest political end.
In economics, students will learn the concept of saturation point of a person. This is the theoretical point where all wants and needs of the person are satisfied and another unit of “wants and needs” good won’t increase the well being of the individual. Let me demonstrate this concept.
If a monkey has one million bananas and it’s impossible for this monkey to finish it all while discounting temporal issue — to make it clearer, the monkey is so full that another banana down its throat would cause puking, and this would happen before the monkey get to its 1,000,000th banana, discounting interest rate — would the monkey be happy with the addition of one more banana to its wealth, if the monkey could count at all?
No.
From purely economic point of view, happiness is achieved through the fulfillment of wants and needs. This comes from the concept of utility which is the basis of welfare economics. Through this, I’d postulate that restriction to the satisfaction of wants and needs leads to unhappiness. Extrapolating the idea, the pursuit of happiness will include commodity trading (why must it includes trade? Remember why trade occurs in the first place!), whatever the commodity might be, physical or spiritual, if it’s tradable. In order to trade to pursue happiness, a person must be free to trade.
However, surely if one is free to do anything but yet, the person is unable to improve his welfare by moving closer to his saturation point, such true liberty is useless. Surely, liberty is useless when a person is unable to achieve happiness.
Through this, it seems to me that liberty is only a mean to achieve happiness with happiness being the end, not liberty.
This begs another question, is there any other mean to achieve happiness besides liberty? Is it possible to achieve happiness without liberty? Not just economic liberty but liberty in general.
I need to read more. Through experience however, I’m inclined to say without liberty, achieving happiness is harder than it should be.
2 replies on “[946] Of is liberty an end or a mean?”
[…] weeks ago, I settled with the idea that liberty is a mean to an end. This is a contrarian position vis-Ã -vis mainstream libertarianism. Further, I accept that the end […]
well, not sure much about liberty but one thing i can postulate about human and happiness: A could only need RM100 to be happy but not neccessarily B. The greed does not come with same yardstick in everyone. Moreover, happy depends on happenings.