Is the medical mask an attack on individual freedom?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, most countries have adopted the obligation to wear a medical mask in public. In this hard year, full of unpleasant restrictions and constant degradation of life quality the medical mask became the negative symbol of the new normal. Today, all over the world, there are protests with people who burn the masks and claim that the obligation to wear them restricts their liberty.
It is hard and quite unpleasant to wear a mask in public under the threat of criminal fines (just in some countries), and probably, to a certain degree, this legal pressure fuels the feeling that this object affects our liberty. But it is just an illusion and an extremely simplistic argument that denotes that we don’t understand the limits of our freedom. Are we allowed to act as we please? Not really. Earth is a crowded place and, in manifesting our behavior and freedom, we should always consider other living beings and their properties, because our freedom is limited by theirs.
The argument that the medical mask restricts our freedom is flawed and we can reject it even if we analyze it from a libertarian perspective. Seeing that libertarians are claiming to be the advocates of maximal freedom I will build the argument with the help of two pillars of their doctrine: the „non-aggression principle” and self-ownership.
The non-aggression principle stays at the core of the libertarian doctrine and can be traced to the Golden Rule „Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you” which appears in most religions. I could have argued my case by only using the non-aggression principle but seeing that the mask is considered a restriction of our physical freedom I opted to slightly expand my argumentation. In the libertarian doctrine, the basic form of propriety is self-ownership. If you’re not the owner of your body you are not free and cannot exercise other forms of liberty.
So, if we limit the analysis to the fact that an external body (the Government) forces an individual to wear a mask, imposing an unpleasant restriction, we could be tempted to agree that individual freedom is under attack. And I have seen libertarians and other advocates of freedom claiming that the mask is a liberty breach. In a normal context, I would probably agree with them. I grew up in Eastern Europe and any attack on liberty awakens unpleasant memories from before the fall of the Iron Curtain, so I am pro-freedom and sensible to any excess of statism. But in the problem of the masks, I believe that they are wrong.
If we consider the non-aggression principle the problem of wearing or not a mask changes. If a „free” human being rejects the mask and infects me, and indirectly my family, I should be entitled to compensation because his action would be an aggression upon me. If infected, due to his selfish action, I will pay health costs, my capacity to work will diminish, and maybe some of the close ones will die, meaning that my properties (starting with my body) will be affected by his refusal to wear a mask. My proprietary rights will be strongly affected because somebody didn’t acknowledge the limits of his freedom. Today we all know about SAR-COV-2 so when we decide to ignore minimal rules we put others in danger and we are potential aggressors.
In an ideal free world, the ones who are infected would use the legal system and try to obtain fair compensation. The problem is that SAR-COV-2 is extremely contagious and if infected it would usually be close to impossible to identify the one who made us ill. This means that if infected we will not be able to find the guilty party and seek legal compensation. We would not have the means to protect our freedom and proprieties from the actions of the ones who don’t understand the limits of their freedom.
Thinking about the health costs, the argument is valid even in the EU states with strong social health systems. The contribution of each EU citizen is only for his health insurance and, eventually, some relatives. If, in the name of freedom, we decide to ignore the basic protection rules and contribute to an increase in the number of cases we should be willing to pay the additional health costs for the ones we infect. We can not see the virus so the masks are the only affordable way to be sure that we don’t externalize our costs to some unfortunate victims.
Seeing that not wearing a mask implies that an individual does not care about the possibility of infecting other human beings, and being a potential aggressor, we could reason that a libertarian rejecting the medical mask is not a true libertarian.
We are claiming that masks affect our liberty but fail to understand that our freedom stops at the point where it affects the liberty of others. When we accept the fact that by not wearing a mask we could potentially aggress others, a new problem arises because we are forced to do something different to respect the freedom of others. We live in crowded towns and cities and it is difficult to assure a maximal level of liberty for all the inhabitants. Also, we don’t have enough clinical data to be sure that no mask is needed if we are vaccinated so the only solution would be to implement social distancing. In these pandemic conditions, only by social distancing and frequent sanitization of public spaces, we hope that we are not committing aggression against our peers.
In a crowded town keeping social distance would imply imposing a draconic schedule that would allow the citizens to use the public goods and shops. Probably, in cities with millions of inhabitants, the citizens would be able to use the roads for 10–15 minutes once a week. Another solution could be to impose a tax for using public goods, but this would make us prisoners in our homes and would make freedom of movement a benefit of the rich.
Unlike social distancing, the medical mask increases our possibility to travel, go for a walk, and socialize. The medical mask is viewed as the symbol of restrictions although, in reality, it has increased our freedom. Without the mask, we would have been forced to over a year of home arrest. This blamed object is the only thing that has allowed us to keep living a relatively normal life.
