Absolute principles vs. absolute power

GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 11.2.2021

According to recent UK legislation imposed to enforce the new hotel quarantine rules, those who travel to red-listed countries such as Portugal, for example, and fail to report it, risk up to ten years in jail.

In a recent article, Lord Jonathan Sumption (a former judge of the UK Supreme Court) defined Matt Hancock, the minister who’s behind the hotel quarantine rules and this new legislation, a “tyrant”. Like all tyrants, Lord Sumption argues, Mr. Hancock believes that the end justifies the means: he will stop at nothing in order to pursue this end, whatever it takes (Draghi style): i.e. without any regard to the liberties, lives, wealth and humanity which are crushed in the process. 

In a previous article, Lord Sumption had already pointed out that new Covid legislation made the UK a “police state” and was the expression of a collective “hysteria”: surely, these are words which must have not been easy to write for a person who until only a few years ago was a judge of the UK Supreme Court.

However laudable are Lord Sumption conclusions, his reasoning expresses some fundamental, logical inconsistencies which are quite typical of those who would like to defend liberty but cannot make the necessary intellectual step to actually do it.

In fact, at one point Lord Sumption states that “There are no absolute principles, but only pros and cons”. 

Really?

You can’t have your cake and eat it too

GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 23.9.2020

Like many other articles of The Telegraph, this beautiful one by Allison Pearson, where she criticizes the government for violating liberty too much rather than too little, would be almost unthinkable in any Italian newspaper.

However, the very concept of violating liberty “too much” is part of a paradigm which itself is incompatible with liberty (scientifically defined) and which, in the long run, inevitably contributes to increase (and not to decrease) the legal violations of liberty.

For the same reasons why you cannot logically steal “too much” or “too little” (you can steal a lot or a little, but either you steal or you don’t), you cannot violate liberty “too much” or “too little”. Either you violate liberty or you don’t. Either you are in favour of a social structure in which the government can legally do things that individuals cannot do without committing a crime, or you’re against it. It’s not about seeing the world in black and white: it’s about applying logic where logic is needed.