Francis Fukuyama 2
Part Two of his essay:
The Moral Case
The second justification for a liberal society is a moral one: a liberal society protects human dignity by granting citizens an equal right to autonomy. The ability to make fundamental life choices is a critical human characteristic. Every individual wants to determine their life’s goals: what they will do for a living, whom they will marry, where they will live, with whom they will associate and transact, what and how they should speak, and what they will believe. It is this freedom that gives human beings dignity, and unlike intelligence, physical appearance, skin color, or other secondary characteristics, it is universally shared by all human beings. At a minimum, the law protects autonomy by granting and enforcing citizens’ rights to speak, associate, and believe. But over time autonomy has come to encompass the right to have a share in political power and to participate in self-government through the right to vote. Liberalism has thus become tied to democracy, which can be seen as an expression of collective autonomy.
The view of liberalism as a means of protecting basic human dignity that emerged in Europe by the time of the French Revolution has now been written into countless constitutions of liberal democracies around the world in the form of the “right to dignity,” that appears in the basic laws of countries as diverse as Germany, South Africa, and Japan. Most contemporary politicians would be hard-pressed to explain precisely what human quality gave people equal dignity, but they would have a vague sense that it implied something about the capacity for choice, and the ability to make decisions about one’s own life course without undue interference from governments or the broader society.
Liberal theory asserted that these rights applied to all human beings universally, as in the Declaration of Independence’s opening phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But in practice, liberal regimes made invidious distinctions between individuals, and did not regard all of the people under their jurisdiction as full human beings. The United States did not grant citizenship and franchise to African Americans until passage of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Amendments in the wake of the Civil War, and after Reconstruction shamefully took them back in a period that stretched up to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. And the country also did not grant women the right to vote until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. Similarly, European democracies opened up the franchise to all adults only gradually, removing restrictions based on property ownership, gender, and race in a slow process that stretched into the middle of the twentieth century.
The Moral Case
The second justification for a liberal society is a moral one: a liberal society protects human dignity by granting citizens an equal right to autonomy. The ability to make fundamental life choices is a critical human characteristic. Every individual wants to determine their life’s goals: what they will do for a living, whom they will marry, where they will live, with whom they will associate and transact, what and how they should speak, and what they will believe. It is this freedom that gives human beings dignity, and unlike intelligence, physical appearance, skin color, or other secondary characteristics, it is universally shared by all human beings. At a minimum, the law protects autonomy by granting and enforcing citizens’ rights to speak, associate, and believe. But over time autonomy has come to encompass the right to have a share in political power and to participate in self-government through the right to vote. Liberalism has thus become tied to democracy, which can be seen as an expression of collective autonomy.
The view of liberalism as a means of protecting basic human dignity that emerged in Europe by the time of the French Revolution has now been written into countless constitutions of liberal democracies around the world in the form of the “right to dignity,” that appears in the basic laws of countries as diverse as Germany, South Africa, and Japan. Most contemporary politicians would be hard-pressed to explain precisely what human quality gave people equal dignity, but they would have a vague sense that it implied something about the capacity for choice, and the ability to make decisions about one’s own life course without undue interference from governments or the broader society.
Liberal theory asserted that these rights applied to all human beings universally, as in the Declaration of Independence’s opening phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But in practice, liberal regimes made invidious distinctions between individuals, and did not regard all of the people under their jurisdiction as full human beings. The United States did not grant citizenship and franchise to African Americans until passage of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Amendments in the wake of the Civil War, and after Reconstruction shamefully took them back in a period that stretched up to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. And the country also did not grant women the right to vote until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. Similarly, European democracies opened up the franchise to all adults only gradually, removing restrictions based on property ownership, gender, and race in a slow process that stretched into the middle of the twentieth century.
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