Liberty Alone

Sometimes I think there’s a lot of confusion between these two. It explains a lot of the confusion over what liberal means for those involved in Liberal Conspiracy.

Liberalism is not humanitarianism, although the two are very often held by the same person, and the two often seem to be confused.

Liberalism is a political system which treats people as individuals with a limited number of equal rights, a system which seeks to remove coercion from people’s lives and remove concentrations of power. It seeks to free individuals to pursue their own lives in the manner they see fit. Liberals often disagree on the best means to do this, but at heart it comes down to the same things.

Humanitarianism is a social philosophy. In common with liberalism it holds that all people have the same equal rights and each person is of worth in their own right, but it goes further to say that you are morally bound to help others when they need help.

As I said, these two views are often held by the same person (indeed, I hold both of them), but its also possible to hold one without the other. A liberal can pursue liberal ends, but not care about others at all - this is how laissez-faire liberalism and libertarianism are often mischaracterised.
A humanitarian can also be a totalitarian if they view the best way to help people is to dominate their lives - this is all too common, aspects of it are prevalent in today’s politics on all sides.

As a concrete example, we can take the case of health care. A liberal view is that you can spend what you like on your own health care, or you can spend nothing if you wish. It is up to you. You must accept the consequences of your actions. The only place for state intervention in forcing you to spend resources on health care is in the case of a virulent, dangerous, communicable disease (in the past smallpox, today some flu strains would warrant this).
An extension of this, which I believe is still within liberal principles, but which also has a dash of humanitarianism, is that those who do not have enough resources to purchase a basic level of health care (the basic level will vary with medical technology, today I think it is considerably higher than in 1906- although it doesn’t cover state of the art procedures), then the state has a duty to ensure they can get that level of health care.

What a liberal state does not do is force people to buy the health care. It is up to the individual what they do with their resources and to take responsibility for them. Stupidity is not a crime in a liberal state.

Where a humanitarian point of view differs is in that last point, a humanitarian would consider it their duty to help someone who is suffering because of their decision not to use their resources for health care. In a liberal system, these humanitarian individuals would voluntarily use some of their resources to help such people, often through forming voluntary associations and charities.

A non-liberal humanitarian view is to use the state to force people to get the coverage and/or to force people to help others. This is not only illiberal because it removes the right of the individual to pursue their own ends, it also forces everyone to accept the humanitarian creed (or that particular version of it).
That is an easy trap to fall into, especially with the last 70 odd years being dominated by state intervention and the uncritical manner which the media portrays government intervention in so many parts of our lives. Too many people fall into the trap of thinking the only way to help people is through the state, the liberal recognises the opposite is true, that the state, given too much power, moves away from its enabling role towards an enslaving and impoverishing role.

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