Health Care/Joan Retsinas

What Would Kant Do? A Brake on Renegade Individualism

Needed: the wisdom of Immanuel Kant, to curb renegades’ zeal to flout government. nnThe libertarian strain runs deep in America, emerging as a clarion response to rules, laws, restrictions. Pick a law that purports to improve the public health. Or safety. Or pollution. Or guns. Do you want the government to tell you that you must get vaccinated? No. Do you want the government to dictate highway speed limits? No. Gun laws? What about “no smoking” edicts? Mandatory restrictions of any kind at any time? No. No. No.

The call for freedom-from-rules speaks to the renegade, an iconic figure in American history. It is now, though, when we need Kant, a 19th century Enlightenment philosopher. He proposed a test that Americans should ask before they shout: “no.” Kant urged that one should "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” In short, if I can do it, so can everybody else. If I want to flout a law, then let everybody — and, by extension, let that law lapse. Let my “right,” my freedom from a rule, be universal.

Consider vaccination. “Anti-vaxers” are resisting the laws, yelling “ no, I do not want myself, or my children, to be vaccinated.” They have various justifications. Some trust herd immunity. Some trust their own immune systems. Some distrust science. Some think they live in a bubble-like silo of health, or that a divine benevolence protects them. Most don’t like Uncle Sam, or the states’ mini-Uncle Sams, dictating to them. Whatever the justification, most argue for themselves. Kant would ask: Do they want nobody to be vaccinated? Using Kant’s dictum, they would have to decide: should my decision be a universal one?

We now see the uptick in measles, once thought, too optimistically, to be on the road to extinction. Polio too has emerged. In 1994, experts declared the United States “polio free.” Polio has surfaced, first in an unvaccinated adult in New York, now in the county’s wastewater. Diphtheria has spiked in Africa; the United States is at risk.

On to pollution. Corporate behemoths that are poisoning a river, or the air, or the ground have justified their action: jobs, the economy, the scientists’ hyper-hysteria. They want an “out,” an “exit strategy” from the rules; indeed, they may pay for such an “out.” Kant would ask: do they want all polluters to have the same option, letting more of our world make more of us sicker? The corporation, and its supportive politicians, may be willing to let one chunk of one rural county devolve into a superfund site. Is that polluter and supporters willing to let major chunks of more states do the same?

As for tobacco, the government has not banned the sale of cigarettes, but made them more expensive via taxes. Governments, though, buoyed by statistics on second-hand smoke, have forced restaurants, government offices, sports arenas, schools, supermarkets, trains, planes … to ban smoking. At first, renegades objected: it is my right. And at first we had an absurd delineation of space: non-smoking and smoking areas. But, thinking of Kant, does anybody want to return to a smoke-filled airplane or train?

Finally, guns, with the myriad restrictions that vary by state, arouse the renegade, bolstered by the Constitution. It is an American’s right to buy, to carry, to store guns. The framers of the Constitution did not foresee machine guns, 3-D computer-generated guns, the school massacres, the Wild West of urban gang warfare.

Regardless, though, Kant poses the “universal” test that should be a brake on the enthusiasm for an unregulated Gun-World. Do we want everybody to be able to buy a gun? To carry it wherever they want? To store it however they want? The protesters holding placards at legislative hearings are not going to shoot up a school, or kill their spouse, or let their children play with loaded weapons. But Kant would argue: if you want that freedom, then that freedom should be universal.

The Independent American can still be Independent. But let that Independent icon test his unfettered enthusiasm (a.k.a Trumpism) for “no” against Kant’s “universal action” maxim. If we reject all those laws, we all, including the renegades, will suffer.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email joan.retsinas@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024

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