Image: Students of Liberty.
Friedrich A. Hayek was, is and will probably remain one of the most important exponents in the field of study of the liberal current, his contributions have not only added value to economics and philosophy but have been taken up by many scholars of law and economic policy, making countless mentions and acknowledgements in the works of these scholars.
Hayek was clear that to enjoy full freedom not only required a certain knowledge of how to act in the face of the setbacks presented by a social ecosystem, which usually transited through two extremes: good and evil, but also a solid and conscious responsibility on the part of the individual executing such action. Why did Hayek consider responsibility as an ally of freedom? How fundamental is the role of responsibility today if what we seek is a freer future?
Friedrich Hayek has left us, the lovers of freedom, valuable lessons and undoubtedly many of these present exercises of reflection that are of great interest for the progress of it, when attending to the state of meditation regarding these lessons it is likely that we plot certain concerns that will transport us to issues that perhaps would never have been addressed or at least conceived with due esteem.
When we pay closer attention to the thoughts that Hayek, in his work, "The Foundations of Freedom" wrote for us, we can adopt a certain air of confusion and even similarity with what is happening nowadays:
“Undoubtedly, many people are afraid of freedom, because the opportunity to make one's own life also means an unceasing task, a discipline that man must impose on himself in order to achieve his ends”.
And surely the reader will be able to perceive the same plot that Hayek seemed to live if we compare it with what we face when justifying the defense of freedom, if this is as I have just described, why does it seem that nothing has changed since the time Hayek published his work (1960) until today? Does the same distrust of freedom still exist? Well, it seems so to me, at least with many people, although it is true that from 1960 to 2020 a lot of progress has been made in the field of individual freedoms, we must also take into account that in many places of the globe those same individual freedoms were violated due to the different governmental regimes that have taken place, and the more the citizen's field of action decreases, generally the field of action of the governmental system in turn increases, what happens if I feel aberration for a responsibility of my actions? The most probable thing is that others end up taking responsibility for them, the fact in question postulated here is not my thing, it is not an idea that I have just come up with, in fact it was commented on years ago by a liberal thinker, Friedrich Hayek:
"The complementarity of freedom and responsibility means that the reasons in favor of freedom apply only to those to whom responsibility can be imputed and cannot be attributed to children, to idiots to madmen; it presupposes that a person is capable of learning from experience and of guiding his actions by the knowledge thus acquired; it is invalid for those who have not yet learned enough or are incapable of learning."
Based on the foregoing, we can elucidate that in effect, in order to be responsible for your actions you must be empowered with mental maturity and with certain knowledge that can generate awareness regarding the acts that you carry out and the effects that emanate from them.
This is contemplated in a positive manner in Mexican Criminal Law, receiving the denomination of "Causes of Imputability", which for space reasons I will try to address this issue on another occasion, having clarified this, we now need to find the person who will assume the responsibility for the acts performed by the imputable subjects, although it is a legal issue, this is very useful in Hayek's understanding of the issue of liability, so much so that the same author explains it in subsequent lines to the paragraph just quoted:
"In personal relations the transition from guardianship to full responsibility may be gradual and indistinct, and those milder forms of coercion which exist between individuals - in which the State must not interfere - may be adjusted to degrees of responsibility. Now, politically and legally, for freedom to be effective, the differentiation must be clearly and definitely established and determined by impersonal general rules".
As I mentioned in previous paragraphs, in the event that a person who has committed a certain offense for his actions is legally considered as an unimputable subject will result in a liability that cannot fall on a subject, i.e., there will be no one to face such charges. For this the law has contemplated the figure of the guardian, which is the name given to the person who is in charge of the protection and care of another person who is a minor or who suffers from some mental capacity that limits him/her in recognizing the scope that his acts may have, in this case the guardian will absorb the burden of responsibility of the unimputable person, as well as the figure of “Cause of unimputability”, this is a rather deep topic that I will keep for another occasion, in order not to cause drowsiness to the reader by such technical issues.
Returning to the ideas of the Austrian thinker and answering one of the questions asked in the introduction of Why did Hayek consider responsibility as an ally of freedom? It is the same author of the work "The Road to Serfdom" who explains it to us in the work we have chosen for this study:
"The freedom of action which is the condition of moral merit also includes the freedom to act wrongly. We only praise or censure when a person has the opportunity to choose, when his compliance with a rule is not obtained by force, but merely by voluntary choice".
And finally, he sentences the idea with:
"(...) the main reason for the responsibility for our decisions is to draw our attention to the causes of the events that depend on our actions. The main function of the belief in individual responsibility is to make us use our own knowledge and ability to the utmost in the pursuit of our ends."
Hayek has already earned his place on the pedestal of the great liberal thinkers, next to renowned figures who have cemented the ideas that we treasure today, but to continue in pursuit of an improvement it is necessary that we take the role of the protagonists and give not only solution to the question at the beginning; How fundamental is the role of responsibility today if what we seek is a freer future? But that we set in motion our own actions aimed at that common goal (a freer future) at the same time that we take responsibility for those actions.
This article was originally published in Spanish in Students for Liberty.
