Fatbikes and the Principle of Natural Liberty
The Pros and Cons of an Open Social Morality
The French newspaper Le Monde published an interesting article (in French) a few days ago about the problems caused by the rising number of so-called “fatbikes” circulating on the Parisian bike lanes. Fatbikes are ugly electric bikes with large wheels and often with unbridled engines. In principle, their maximal speed is around 25km/hour but if their engine is unbridled, they can be as fast as 50km/h. Their size and their speed create danger for “regular” bikers, especially as they add up to an already very diverse fauna of vehicles circulating on the bike lanes, in a context where the traffic on Parisian bike lanes has sensibly increased over the past year.
I’m no longer living in Paris and I don’t use any kind of bike, so you might wonder why I’m talking about this topic here. The reason is that I think fatbikes and the concerns they create are a good illustration of the implications of what is sometimes called the “principle of natural liberty.” Fatbikes are a specific case of a more general pattern according to which societies rely on a principle according to which an action that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted, you will see a lot of new coordination and collective action problems regularly appearing, necessitating relentless adjustments. This entails costs, but this also has a lot of advantages. Let’s figure out which.
What I call the principle of natural liberty (PNL) is a feature of a more general social morality, i.e., a set of rules that determine what is permitted and obligatory in given circumstances. The core of the PNL is the presumption in favor of liberty. Depending on the scope of this presumption, the PNL comes in different versions. The strongest one is that one doesn’t need any permission to perform some action a and, if asked by someone else to provide a justification for performing a, she may not have to cite a reason. A corollary is that if someone else interferes with one’s doing a, he has to provide a reason justifying his interference. The weakest version just says that, when nobody else is involved, one doesn’t need any permission to perform some action a.
A convenient way to reformulate the PNL is in terms of a “closure rule,” a rule of practical reason that states, for any possible set of circumstances, whether an action a is obligatory, permitted, or forbidden. The rule would run something like “whatever is not prohibited is permitted.” So, unless there is a rule that forbids some action a, action a is presumed permitted. It follows that the onus of proof falls on those who believe or judge that a is forbidden. It is up to them to demonstrate that, within the prevailing social morality, there is a decisive reason that justifies prohibiting a. This closure rule has a perfect opposite: “whatever is not permitted is prohibited.” Under this rule, one is not permitted to perform action a unless there is a rule permitting a. The burden of proof is reversed: persons who perform an action that is already not permitted have to provide a justification for that.
The point of reformulating moralities in terms of closure rules is that it makes them relatively easy to teach and to learn. In a quite fascinating article, Gerald Gaus and Shaun Nichols have experimentally evaluated the learnability of two proto-social moralities each based on one of the two closure rules.[1] They present participants with the task of learning the rules of a game. In one framing, rules are formulated as permission rules, and in the other framing, rules are formulated as prohibition rules. The participants are then asked to infer the remaining rules of the game. The results suggest that participants learn the rules of the game by inferring closure principles, that is, by using one of the two closure rules (which are not part of the rules of the game per se) almost spontaneously. What emerges is that participants who have participated in the “permission framing” tend to use the closure rule “whatever is not permitted is prohibited,” while participants who have been submitted to the prohibition framing tend to use the “whatever is not prohibited is permitted” closure principle that corresponds to the PNL. The bottom line is that social moralities based on one or the other closure rules can be taught and learned, but a bias is introduced by the way the rules of morality are framed.
Is there any reason to prefer social moralities based on the PNL that presumes that an action is permitted unless there is a rule that prohibits it? Let’s go back to the fatbikes story. This story is only the continuation of the difficulties faced by big cities where new means of transportation are regularly emerging. A few years ago, similar concerns were expressed regarding the surge in the number of electric scooters. In the Parisian case, these concerns were so pressing that the city forbade economic services of self-disposable electric scooters. It is highly likely that a similar regulation will sooner or later be enacted for fatbikes.[2] Electric scooters and fatbikes illustrate well the pros and cons of what I would call an open social morality, i.e., a social morality whose rules are inferred based on the PNL. Within such a social morality, you can expect a lot of new activities and practices to emerge regularly. As a matter of fact, the scope of permitted actions is extremely large, even open-ended. Since it is impossible to conceive in advance all the possible types of activities and practices that may emerge at some point, there is a lot of space to innovate and experiment. This is especially true regarding new technologies. New technologies provide opportunities for new practices that were either impossible or too costly before. Since it is hardly possible to anticipate technological progress and change (though we can of course make conjectures), it is impossible to prohibit new practices in advance.
There are clear pros and cons in having an open social morality. The drawbacks are related to the unending disruptions caused by the emergence of new practices. Le Monde’s article illustrates well such disruptions, that go from minor annoyances to putting people’s physical integrity in jeopardy. The main advantage is that it increases the likelihood that life-improving practices will emerge. An open social morality encourages or at least permits a high exploration rate of the moral space. The judgment of new practices must be made ex post, only once it has emerged and its benefits and costs can be tangibly evaluated.
“Closed” social moralities that reject the PNL have the opposite characteristics. They are by nature very conservative. That tends to limit the emergence of new coordination and collective action problems. On the downside, the rate of innovation (not only moral but also technological and organizational) is necessarily kept low. That doesn’t mean that closed social moralities are in stasis and cannot adapt, but that the process will be slower than in open social moralities. In their article, Gaus and Nichols highlight a particular difficulty. Closed social moralities can cope with new practices through analogy or similarity. For instance, “blogging” can be viewed as similar to academic publishing, or “cyber-terrorism” as analogical to “terrorism.” Then, the idea would be to extend the domain of application of already existing rules to new practices that are judged as similar to those these rules apply. As Gaus and Nichols point out, however, the difficulty is that the extension of rules based on similarity judgments will always be controversial and uncertain. This is likely to slow down the process of rendering a new practice permitted. On top of that, this creates an ambiguity that may make the rules of social morality harder to teach and to learn.
Open social moralities also face this problem. For instance, it is unclear how to cope with issues related to the use of private information in the current technological context where this information is made more easily accessible. Whether the established legislation is adapted is the same as asking if an analogy holds between the classical use of personal data for commercial purposes and the modern case where these data are digital. But while in a closed social morality, the controversial nature of analogies will likely block innovation, it is less likely to have this effect in open social moralities.
To end this essay, I want to point out that the open/closed social morality distinction is ideal-typical. Depending on the kind of moral issues at stake, we may want to prefer more or less openness. For instance, the precautionary principle that is promoted and accepted when health considerations are at stake can be interpreted as an island of closeness in what is mostly (in Western liberal democracies) an ocean of openness. This is not necessarily problematic. There are domains of moral life where experimentation and innovation are welcome (as for transportation means) and others where we may legitimately wish more predictability and to limit risks. Also, open social moralities are not protected from turning into closed ones. The phenomenon of normalization that I’ve discussed in a previous essay exactly illustrates this. Normalization refers to the process through which the diversity of practices is reduced, either through intentional interventions or nonintentional mechanisms. When social morality normalizes, it becomes less open by making the emergence of new practices more difficult or even impossible. Up to a point at least, normalization is unavoidable and even beneficial. The question is where the tipping point is.
[1] Gerald Gaus and Shaun Nichols, “Moral Learning in the Open Society: The Theory and Practice of Natural Liberty,” Social Philosophy and Policy 34, no. 1 (2017): 79–101.
[2] Admittedly, there is a small difference in the case of fatbikes. Here, part of the problem comes from the fact that their engines are unbridled, which make them not legally qualify to circulate on the bike lanes (they should circulate on the road with a license plate). So, actually, there is already a legal rule explicitly forbidding the practice. However, as the rule is not enforced at all, it doesn’t count as a “true” rule of social morality.