Social Issues | Introduction
Pick up any newspaper in the United States today, and one can find evidence of the constant conflicts that result from the tension between the rights of the individual and the needs and desires of the common good.
Protecting individual rights is the cornerstone of the founding principle of the United States. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal, and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights enumerates the most important of the citizenry’s individual rights. Yet the state must, and does, curb individual rights on a daily basis, through laws and the courts. How much the state should curb individual rights, and in what areas the state should get involved, however, is a never-ending, constantly shifting debate that gets played out in the media and in politics.
In this book, Current Issues: Opposing Viewpoints, a multitude of debates emphasize this tension. Should gun rights of citizens, for example, be curbed to protect the type of senseless massacre that occurred in Littleton, Colorado, where thirteen people were killed by two student gunmen who also took their own lives. For some, including President Bill Clinton and a host of others, the answer is an emphatic yes. Only by curbing certain types of ammunition and weaponry, insisting on background checks on buyers, and imposing stiff fines on those that violate these rules, can this type of violence be curbed. Essentially, those that favor involvement of the state believe that the state can and should become involved in solving social problems. The state should go beyond punishing perpetrators to preventing possible infractions, which necessitates laws that place curbs on the right of individuals to purchase guns. As sociologist Amitai Etzioni argues, “no right is absolute and all must be balanced against the common good.”
Those who favor individual rights believe that the state cannot fix problems that essentially reside in the human heart. Using the Littleton, Colorado, example, these people would argue that laws, curbs on ammunition, or any other such measures could not have stopped those teenage gunmen. Aberrant, terrible crimes will happen, but they are the cost of freedom. Free- dom cannot be predicated on the actions of the insane, the radical, or the twisted in society. Individual rights must, by their very nature, guarantee the freedoms of the average, law-abiding citizen. When the state gets involved, it punishes all for the crimes of a few, and this cannot be acceptable to the citizenry as a whole, many argue. In fact, fear of tyranny, of the state overstepping its bounds, is the essence of what America’s founders attempted to prevent. As philosophy professor Tibor R. Machan proclaims, “The only truly public good is the protection of individual rights, nothing else.”
Because the United States is based on democratic principles, an uneasy balance exists between those that believe individual rights must take precedence in society and those that believe the state must place limits on those rights. This balance has factored into nearly every issue under public debate. Thomas Jefferson foresaw the conflict, but believed that the nation should err on the side of the individual, arguing that a government “shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” As the viewpoints in this volume reflect, the definition of what constitutes the common good, what Jefferson would term “improvement,” is much in debate.
