4.1 The Freedom of the Individual

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define community.
• Identify the responsibilities of the individual as a member of a group.
• Discuss the need for individual freedom in a group.
• Analyze how different systems treat the individual.
• Define civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights.

If all people lived separately, each person would be free to act in any way they want. However, each person lives in many different communities based on their family, ethnicity, religion, and place of residence, and their actions affect other people. A community is a group of people with shared interests and values. National communities today may include people of different ages, races, educational backgrounds, and incomes. In some of these communities, individuals or groups with weapons and economic power force people into a community. In other national communities, people enter into agreements regarding what they can do as individuals and what restrictions the government can set for the common good. How do community members voluntarily decide when the government can restrict individual action for the good of that community?

An individual has community responsibilities, or duties or obligations to the community, including all things that are expected of individuals if they wish to remain members of that community. These responsibilities include cooperation, respect, and participation (or, as Chapter 1: What Is Politics and What Is Political Science? put it, civic engagement). Community responsibilities go beyond thinking and acting as individuals to sharing common beliefs about society’s order and the treatment of others. Each country guarantees certain civil liberties to its people, but how governments interpret these liberties varies widely.

Civil rights and civil liberties are often used interchangeably, but the terms are distinct. Civil liberties are guarantees of freedom from government interference. To determine whether a civil liberty is at stake when a limit is placed on an action, one must ask if the action being considered is a fundamental liberty, who is restricting the action, and whether the restriction is justified based on greater community needs.

For example, the right to vote is not explicitly stated in the US Constitution, but US citizens now view it as fundamental to the US style of democracy. The Constitution does prohibit denial of the right to vote on the basis of race or sex, and it states that certain people are elected to office, but nowhere does it guarantee a right to vote or say who gets to do the voting. However, the right to vote is now seen as so fundamental to the United States’ democratic identity that limits placed on that right are usually considered to be an infringement of the fundamental implied agreement between the people and the government. Indeed, this general point about constitution's including implied rights played a significant role in the thinking of many of the authors and ratifiers of the US Constitution when formulated during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although the founders tended not to see voting as a civil liberty each adult was entitled to, they did believe that other civil liberties exist that are taken for granted by the Constitution without being explicitly stated within it. Indeed, according to many of the Constitution's founders, it was important for the US Constitution not to be construed as an exhaustive list of civil liberties. This is so because they feared that attempting to list the full range of our rights might give rise to the view that civil liberties come only as grants or gifts from the government. Most of the founders, on the contrary, held that individuals have natural rights that entail civil liberties, which the government must not imperil. These natural rights can be understood by reason and so do not need an elaborate listing in a constitutional document, especially when doing so might cause confusion about the origin of these rights, causing some to see them as government-granted and not inalienable endowments conferred by what the Declaration of Independence calls "nature and nature's God." This example from the thought of the founders of the Constitution illustrates the general point that many constitutions can be seen as containing implied civil liberties not formulated explicitly within their text.

On the other hand, civil rights are government guarantees of equal treatment without discrimination based on characteristics an individual shares with a particular population. Civil rights often refers to the right to freedom from discrimination based, for example, on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, age, or national origin. To determine whether civil rights abuses are occurring, one must ask whether similarly situated persons are being treated differently. Chapter 7 focuses specifically on civil rights.

Both civil liberties and civil rights fall under the umbrella of human rights. Human rights activists assert that human rights are inalienable—that is, they can be neither given nor taken away, and they are due to all persons. Chapter 3: Political Ideology considered this idea in the context of the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Locke viewed inalienable rights as emanating from human nature before government existed and as objective moral truths to establish common behavior equally applicable to all persons; thus, in his view, only minimal government was necessary. Hobbes also saw them as emanating from human nature, but he viewed that nature as a selfish one that community and government rules must restrain.

Today, intergovernmental or nongovernmental organizations may formally recognize and enshrine statements of human or inalienable rights. However, the protection of human rights around the world is fraught with difficulties. Not all areas of the world share the same political and legal philosophy regarding human rights, and individual governments implement these philosophies within specific nations.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted in 1948.⁵ A number of Islamic countries have issues with the UDHR, arguing that it attempts to impose Western philosophies on other cultures. The members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation) adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990.⁶The Cairo Declaration rejects the UDHR’s right to change religions, broad freedom of expression, and broad freedoms of women and marriage.⁷

These differences are symbolic of the second issue with human rights: statements of human rights are nonbinding. As part of their sovereignty, governments are free to ignore or follow human rights declarations at will. For example, in 1948, South Africa practiced apartheid, racial segregation, and discrimination and objected to statements in the UDHR supporting equality and denouncing racial segregation and discrimination.⁸ Apartheid raised issues of human rights, civil liberties, and civil rights; discriminating against individuals because of their race is a violation of a civil right, and restrictions on freedom of movement and the freedom to choose whom to marry are violations of civil liberties. After a long struggle led by Nelson Mandela, apartheid ended in South Africa in the early 1990s, and South Africa has since come to support the UDHR.⁹ However, that change came from within South Africa. While some international pressure may have contributed to the shift, it was only when South Africa’s government changed its national civil liberties and its stance on human rights that it agreed to the human rights declarations. Today, the South African Bill of Rights includes portions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹⁰

The only power in the nonbinding nongovernmental UDHR is the weight of social and economic pressure that those who adhere to the declaration bring to bear. No government can be forced to accept the rights enumerated in the UDHR or to protect them within their territory. The world imposed economic and social sanctions on South Africa to pressure it to change its policy of apartheid, but it was not until the South African government changed its position that it abolished apartheid and accepted the UDHR.¹¹ As this example illustrates, human rights declarations are primarily idealistic, but they can be used to put economic or social pressure on governments to urge them to change policies. People can also use them to guide the creation of civil liberties within a particular country and to instruct governments on how to respect them.

Examining the definitions of civil liberties, civil rights, and human rights reveals how each relates to the relationship between the individual and the community and how governments regulate that relationship. The United States Constitution is one example of a country’s guarantees of civil liberties. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, establish these guarantees.¹² The United States grants each of these rights to all persons, not just to citizens. Over time, the US Constitution has been interpreted to protect more people and activities from potential government interference. Still, for the good of the community, there are limits on individual actions. It is the job of the government to enforce these limits.