Freedom and Sociability

This chapter offers a sympathetic reconstruction of liberal sociability, which Tsakyrakis holds up as an alternative to the ‘total freedom’ that he attributes to the doctrine of proportionality. Liberal sociability seeks to answer a question, so central to human rights law, about the ‘fair balance between the individual and society’. As is well known, the orthodox doctrine of proportionality tries to do so at the limitation stage, when it assesses the justifiability of rights-interfering measures advancing the public interest. Tsakyrakis, though, thinks that this comes too late. For him, the freedom to do as one pleases is not worth protecting, even prima facie. Rather, freedom must be situated from the outset within a framework of social interaction. As the chapter explains, liberal sociability views rights not as inhering in the isolated individual but as emerging from the relationship of interacting persons. Its central insight is that what we do in social interaction unavoidably affects others in morally significant ways, and so it would be morally obtuse -indifferent to those morally significant effects- to insist on being free to do what we want, as ‘total freedom’ maintains. Hence, the claims we can properly press against others ought to be worked out from a moralised understanding of various forms of social interaction. Such an understanding primarily serves to identify the morally relevant interests, as these are implicated in social interaction, and in light of those interests prescribe a system of organising social interaction that affords all participants equal concern and respect and thus upholds their dignity. The chapter argues that, thus understood, liberal sociability does not hold personal life hostage to community visions of the good life. It is antithetical to communitarianism insofar as the latter negates the equal concern and respect that flows from human dignity. Nor does it privilege the gregarious over the eccentric and the recluse. It does not presuppose an ethically thick social context or promote togetherness. Rather, it insists that social interaction has limits, beyond which others cannot have a say in what individuals do.