Five kindred principles that ground respect for the inviolability of liberty
Five kindred principles that ground respect for the inviolability of liberty, each tapping into a distinct intuition about why freedom matters.
(1) No coercion except in self-defense — Force has only one moral use: to stop force. All other coercion is tyranny in disguise.
(2) Embracement of free will — People act, choose, and create; a society that denies agency denies humanity itself.
(3) Sovereignty of the individual — Each person owns their life and choices, bound only by the same right in others.
(4) Voluntaryism — Human relations are just when they arise from mutual agreement, never compulsion.
(5) Freedom as bottom-up discovery — Liberty is how truth, order, and human flourishing emerge: not from command, but from the spontaneous experiments of self-directed lives.