Which Is More Important - Freedom Or Safety?

957 Words4 Pages
Man, with his capacity to rationalize and formulate opinion, has always striven for his freedom to fully utilize these capabilities and influence others of his kind. However, man is also a violent, unaccommodating creature. Hence, when opinions collide and a clash of interests occur, humankind has always come to blows. To define freedom is simple but to define how much freedom is enough freedom is a more complicated question. Does freedom end where the safety of society in general begins? If so, what are the proportions by which we measure the importance of safety against that of freedom? There must exist a balance between the importance of freedom and that of safety because neither is good without the other. However, more often than not, our primal instinct to survive would force us to grudgingly accept that safety must have a slight priority over freedom. Without any guarantees on safety, not many would fully want to exercise their freedom. This is especially true for societies which are not suffering under the yoke of political oppression with zero prospects of any future. For such ‘normal’ societies, if an expression of freedom can kill, it is not worth the risk. After all, slight restrictions on freedom would not really harm anyone. Freedom, without safety, is useless. Its existence depends very much upon the level of risk people have to take to express this freedom. There cannot be true freedom in an environment of danger. Certain curbs on freedom also have to be enforced to ensure the safety of the general public. This is a small price to pay for more wide ranging degrees of freedom to exist. Such curbs on freedom come in the form of laws which make it an offence for certain inflammatory and dangerous opinions to be made public. Most governments adopt this line. For example, British law would soon prohibit any derogatory remarks made publicly about the
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