What is the right balance between liberty and safety?
This month, Sam Director, assistant professor at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies, visited our campus to ask this philosophical question—and also apply real public policy problems. Director’s talk, which focused on liberalism and bioethics and addressed two topics that might not seem immediately related, nonetheless created a strong argument for their connection.
As in his research, Director applied essential liberal principles to the increasingly contentious topic of public health. The framework outlined here allowed for using these ideals on pressing matters such as vaccination, stay-at-home orders, and business closures, arguing that the imposed mandates may have violated many of the tenets of liberalism.
As a student in attendance, I thought that the talk resonated with the principles of liberal philosophy—an approach to which I am personally sympathetic. Much of the audience seemed to agree. Tobey Condon ‘26, a frequent participant in Institute programming, commented that “the intersection of liberalism and public health raises interesting questions about how we treat sensitive national issues. While constitutional principles inform us that we should start by considering the liberty of the individual, public health turns this on its head with a top-down origin of government authority that puts the exercise of its citizens’ freedoms last rather than first.”
This was the first lunch talk of the year, and my fellow students and I found this one very engaging. With palpable enthusiasm for such challenging topics, we are looking forward to the Institute’s fall semester slate of speakers.
Kale Helms, a junior studying Economics, spent part of this past summer working at The Adam Smith Institute in London.
