Do face mask requirements violate our personal freedoms?

Hello, my name is Tim and I am mask exempt.

I have reasonably bad asthma, so—especially when my face gets warm—poor air circulation can trigger an attack. Now very rarely have I felt the need to take off my mask in public and I prefer wearing it for several reasons. I like the security it gives to those around me, for instance, as many of those that I work with are vulnerable people.

I know that there are many good reasons to not wear a mask. Medical reasons being at the top of that list. This, therefore, is not a wide-angle lens looking at all possible reasons that someone might have for not wearing a mask, and whether they should or shouldn’t. This instead will be a narrow lens looking at one particular version of an argument that’s often heard, especially on social media, for not wearing a mask.

That reason is “freedom.”

Or, more specifically, some version of “being required to wear a mask in a public place is an encroachment upon my personal civil freedoms”, or “wearing a mask somehow violates my rights as a citizen of a particular state or country, or generally as a human being.”

Now, as a person with a keen interest in ethics, I find this argument really fascinating. It’s made even more so when you look closely at the socio-ethnic makeup of the people asserting this view the loudest. However, this not that post either!

Sticking with the ethics, realistically I believe this “freedom” argument is in reality, quite a low maturity version of a well-known ethical debate surrounding the ideas of freedom, determinism, and autonomy.

The value of freedom

Now most of us, at least in the West, will respond positively to the question: Are you free? Freedom is a culturally significant high value that we have.

Freedom from slavery, for instance. Freedom from tyranny, freedom from poverty, freedom from financial dependence, freedom to pursue our best life, freedom of the press, freedom of diversity, and freedom of belief. There are many freedoms that we passionately pursue and aggressively defend.

Freedom is essential to the fabric of our civic and civil codes. This is especially true in Britain, some larger European countries, and in America, where a lot of these arguments against masks are being amplified. Because freedom is so emotively woven into the fabrics of who we are, it’s quite difficult to challenge arguments based upon it.

However, if you were to ask many of those same people, just how free are you, and what things can have a determinant influence on your freedoms, although we get a wide spectrum of answers, rarely will someone say “nothing.” Most people will agree that many things will have an influence on our personal freedoms, and that none of us have gained totally autonomous freedom.

Are we really free?

My personal freedom does not give me liberty to take off and fly because I’m determined by the law of gravity. My freedom to sleep with multiple partners is determined by the covenant of marriage. My freedom to not eat caviar for breakfast is determined by my bank balance. My freedom to not eat Shredded Wheat for breakfast is determined by my taste buds.

Now some of those restrictions on my freedom are more powerfully determined than others. I can choose to go into debt to buy caviar for breakfast, or to eat Shredded Wheat even though I might vomit it up. I could even choose to have extramarital affairs, even though it would devastate my life and family. But those influences are still a strong determining factor in whether I will make certain choices.

Something like the law of gravity, however, is a much harder thing to choose against. Even though I could choose to get on a plane, I wouldn’t truly be flying. Instead, I would be propelled into and through the air by a machine. I could jump off a cliff, but again I wouldn’t technically be flying I would be falling. I could use a hang glider, but I would be floating or drifting or gliding upon thermal currents. None of this would allow me to fly in the same way a bird—or Superman—would. Other laws such as entropy, thermodynamics, relativity, and time also have high (if not unavoidable) determinate affects on what I can and can’t do.

All this is by way of saying that no human is autonomously free. I am simply not free to do anything that I would like at any time, regardless of influences or consequences. That freedom simply does not exist.

Of course, within civil society, our freedoms are limited even further than natural laws by both legal codes and by common values. I’m “free” to murder someone, for instance, but I’m not really free to murder someone because if I did so, then freedoms would be forcefully taken away from me to ensure that I wouldn’t do it again. I’m free to drive 150 miles an hour on the motorway. But again, I’m not really free to do that because I’d be breaking a law put in place to save lives. Public endangerment is one of the main reasons we have laws that limit freedoms, as well as civil moral consensuses. All this determines the choices we make on how we live.

How does this apply to masks?

So, with a freedom argument for not wearing a mask, I wonder where the determinant lines are and how consistent an opinion like this can truly be.

I understand that mask wearing (at least outside of many large Asian cities) is a recent phenomenon. It’s also uncomfortable, and there is conflicting research on just how beneficial it is. Further, freedom to wear a mask or not is also wrapped up in a much larger set of questions about life during a pandemic and what other freedoms have been restricted. It’s part of a bigger thing.

But for the sake of my thought experiment here, if a person simply says ‘I refuse to wear a mask because being required to do so violates my civil rights or personal freedoms’, then there are questions we need to ask of that person:

We need to ask, to begin with, questions about public endangerment or civil responsibility, and at what point their feelings of freedom should overrule another’s feelings of security or even another’s health and safety.

We also need to ask questions about consistency. If, for instance, you were picking up your children from school, and another man was waiting by the school gates not wearing any clothes, would asking him to cover his bits up violate his personal freedoms? Would his rights have been violated when the police take him away in their car?

Is it a violation of your personal freedoms when the law requires you to wear a seatbelt? How about uniform codes in the army? What about on duty members of law enforcement being identifiable with ID? What about uniform codes in schools? At what level, therefore, does “wearing a mask is an encroachment on my personal freedoms” become different from any of these things?

Freedom plus…

Usually, the argument needs something else like, ‘it’s an encroachment on my freedom, and I don’t believe it serves any greater good.’ At that point, however, it’s not a freedom argument, but a medical effectiveness argument. Now I’m not a medical expert, so I’m going to follow the medical advice that I’m given.

You instead might add something else to it like, ‘it’s encroaching on my personal freedoms, and it makes criminals harder to identify.’ That’s not a freedom issue either, it’s a law enforcement issue.

Or it could be, ‘it’s an encroachment on my personal freedoms, and it makes it harder for me to breathe.’ Again, that’s a medical issue which needs to be discussed with a doctor.

So simply saying, ‘wearing the mask violates my personal freedoms or encroaches upon my human rights’ feels to me like an incomplete, inconsistent, and frankly ill-considered argument based on a real misunderstanding of how freedom, determinism, and autonomy work both in a human being and in modern society.

I think it’s an interesting question to explore and I believe that there certainly are legitimate reasons not to wear a mask, but I’m not yet convinced that ‘freedom’ on its own is a mature enough argument to be acceptable. At least not in the forms I’ve seen presented.

I’m open to have my mind changed, but right now I’m wearing a mask, and—without medical exemption—I’d prefer you did too.

All the best.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash