The Orbis

In his 2001 presidential address to the American Historical Association, historian Eric Foner declared freedom to be "the most central idea in American political culture, an idea that anchors the American sense of exceptional national identity." Indeed, the United States views its claim to freedom as an exceptional duty — one that has often led to a rhetoric of polarity. Throughout the twentieth century, America's identity was forged by the rhetoric of war and the division of the planet into the "free world" and the unfree world. Sir Isaiah Berlin's 1959 essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty," characterized the rift between Eastern and Western conceptions of freedom during the Cold War. Berlin distinguished the United States' negative liberty — the absence of external obstacles to the fulfillment of one's desires — from the Soviet Union's positive liberty, which subordinated the interests of the individual to those of the whole society by identifying the state as the executor of the common good. Today, Russia lags far behind the United States in terms of development, and the threat of communism appears to have diminished. Although the United States no longer defines itself as the Soviet Union's antithesis, the type of American negative liberty Berlin described in 1959 still defines the rhetorical identity of American freedom.

 The relationship between how America defines freedom and how it chooses to defend it proves analogous to the genome of an organism and its environmentally-dependent expression: a historically inherited trait prescribes inclination towards a certain type of behavior and the environment determines whether that proclivity is acted upon. The United States maintains its historical identity, yet the rapid evolution of the global environment alters the country's economic, social and political composition. As the United States attempts to liberate the world through the forcible spread of democracy, it has proven both at home and abroad that disregarding individual rights is often an acceptable step toward achieving national goals. Torture inflicted by U.S. officials on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison is the most recently publicized example of the dangers and hypocrisy of positive liberty. A moral examination of what happened at Abu Ghraib and why reveals the inherent flaws of positive liberty as a methodology motivated and condoned by an identity of exceptionalism.

Between October and December of 2003, there were numerous instances of abuse against Iraqi detainees by American and British soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. As accounts of torture and photos of abuse filled the media several months later, news of American military conduct in Iraq enraged the world. The U.S.-led war in Iraq had not gained the blessings of many nations, and the prison scandal only cast further suspicion over America's purpose and attitude toward war. Although initial reactions reflected public outrage and national embarrassment, American domestic shock soon fizzled and news of Abu Ghraib disappeared from front-page headlines. It was clear by the American public's ephemeral dismay that citizens had generally accepted America's positive liberty methods. The Patriot Act had demonstrated that domestic civil liberties could be checked for the sake of national security; it only made sense that these rules would be extended to those with whom America was at war.

Following the Abu Ghraib abuses, American extenuation of its war crimes was asserted by the highest-ranking governmental officials. Former White House counsel and current Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales defended the application of torture on Abu Ghraib detainees upon the grounds of positive liberty. His thinking was that if the subjugation and torture of a few could result in the obtainment of vital information that would benefit the American war effort, national security and the general common good, then the torture could be justified.

To calculate at what point individual injury for the sake of the whole is beneficial is to partake in a theoretical game of moral titrations. Classical utilitarian theory, which places the maximum aggregate happiness of all individuals as the highest moral goal, offers a suitable defense for such positive liberty techniques as those applied at Abu Ghraib. The Greatest Happiness Principle, central to utilitarian theory, provides a simple arithmetic means of calculating aggregate happiness: subtract net pain of all affected individuals from the net pleasure. Indeed if one can accept the difficulties of allotting a numerical pleasure to happiness and pain, then it might be satisfactory to accept this logic: the abuse of a few dozen Iraqi soldiers seems a reasonable trade for democracy and freedom to millions of Iraqi citizens, along with national security for millions of Americans.

In order to understand why the Abu Ghraib abuses are an example of the base flaws of positive liberty methodology, one must understand the fallacy of a common good. This can be demonstrated by examining one of the most universally accepted examples of immorality, the institution of slavery. Slavery is perhaps the primary example of what Foner calls "the contradiction between the rhetoric of universal liberty and the actual limits of freedom within the United States." Slavery denies individuals their freedoms for the benefit of the majority. Similarly, terrorist action against the United States could be justified if the result of the crimes was more beneficial than harmful to the general world population. The very evildoers the United States seeks to eradicate rationalize their own endeavors similarly; terrorists, self-proclaimed adjudicators of global justice, violently subdue individuals for purposes they deem to bring about the greatest common good. This, too, is the thinking of policy-makers like Alberto Gonzalez who believe humans may be utilized as hypothetical imperatives, or means to ends, that will achieve nebulous American goals such as freedom, democracy and the pursuit of happiness.

A language of exceptionalism is central to the American identity. Such language relies on rhetoric that overly contrasts American justice with its enemy's inevitable depravity. In other words, the American identity necessitates the existence of morally inferior entities. Americans were told their country had both the right and the obligation to dismantle a tyrannical Iraqi regime, to use its military power to increase the happiness of mankind. American positive liberty not only subordinates individual Abu Ghraib detainees to its goals of greater, expanded liberty, but it exalts the United States to the rank of arbiter of the global good and international justice.

Today, in this post Sept. 11 era, the intellectual community has dedicated itself to the examination of how global interconnectedness has affected American history. This investigation, however, also proves critically insightful in its reverse. U.S. torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners must be examined from a flipped vantage point: "How does the US's domestic environment set precedent for U.S. action abroad?"

The current climate of American politics and cultural identity is fervently patriotic. The recent increase of U.S. domestic legislation aimed at curbing civil liberties has met relatively little dissent. Bumper stickers proclaiming "Freedom Will Be Defended!" and "IRAQI FREEDOM" abound. These displays of national pride are not only a testament to the influence of the government's freedom rhetoric, but to Americans' formidable misconceptions and generalizations of freedom. Whether Americans are conscious of it or not, the American identity is undergoing a very real conceptual shift in its definition of freedom. Americans' notions of freedom increasingly stray farther from a position of negative liberty; moral justification is based less on individual freedom and more on a phony perception of a calculable common good. In order for the United States to act in the name of justice abroad, it must be checked by an electorate that understands the importance of an undeterred commitment to individual freedom at home. Only then will the nation be able to partake in a meaningful conversation with the rest of the world. Each American's ability to comprehend and actively defend freedom of noninterference will determine the morality of the United States' global conduct and its commitment truly to ensure liberty and justice for all.

Zoë Pastorfield-Li is a freshman at Columbia University.

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