The Right to Exit
Is It a Necessary and Sufficient Condition for a Society to Be Free?
I’ve been watching the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” lately. The series is an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same title. For the readers who have never heard about it, this dystopia takes place in the context of worldwide infertility where the United States of America has disappeared following a civil war. Their former territories are now ruled by the theonomic government of the totalitarian state of Gilead. In Gilead, women are totally subjected, with some of them enslaved for purely reproductive purposes.
I don’t intend to go deeper into the plot here but one of the strengths of this series, especially during its first two seasons, is the incredible feeling of oppression that it creates. We follow the story of June (sometimes told in the first person), one of those handmaids who has no other function in this society than to give birth to children. June, like several other women in the same situation, tries to escape from Gilead for the promised land of Canada, a country that still apparently has a decent government. The feeling of oppression mostly comes from the fact that, obviously, it's very hard to escape from Gilead. The series shows flashbacks where panicked people at airports are desperately trying to leave the country shortly after the coup, many of them being barred from doing so. Once fully established, Gilead did everything it could to force its inhabitants to remain in the country.
Barring people from leaving is a characteristic that Gilead shares with many authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the world, past and present. The reason for this is obvious enough. Individuals subjugated to the authority of a regime that they consider unjustified have reasons to either change it or escape its perimeter of sovereignty. This is even more true if the regime takes from them basic political and civil rights and makes their life miserable. If the regime is strongly established, exit is the only plausible option that remains, at least over the short run. On the other hand, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes can’t allow their population to leave (except for some individuals causing more troubles than anything else), at the risk of disorganizing their society and undermining the overarching goals they are pursuing.
These considerations largely account for the role that some liberal thinkers are willing to grant to the right to exit. For, imagine a regime like Gilead’s with all the characteristics that make it despicable not only from a liberal but more broadly from a humanitarian perspective. Suppose however that contrary to real and fictional totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, it grants its subjects the total freedom to leave when they wish to. Would our attitude toward this regime be changed because it grants the right to exit to its inhabitants? For sure, we would still find the principles and rules that the regime is imposing on its subjects objectionable. But we would maybe be less concerned, at least as long we’re confident that people really do have the complete freedom to go live elsewhere. We could then expect that the regime will not last for long, simply because there will quickly be a shortage of individuals to have authority over.
This is the kind of reasoning that is at play in the philosopher Chandran Kukathas’s discussion of two fictional societies, Panoptica and Mytopia.[1] The people in Panoptica enjoy what we would call liberal rights and freedom. They can speak freely, own things – including means of production, and create associations and terminate them when they wish. They are constrained though by the fact that they cannot exit Panoptica, neither by going live elsewhere nor by creating “inside” the country a subcommunity with a restricted regime of freedoms and liberties for their (voluntary) members. By comparison, Mytopia is a more traditional society. It is composed of several communities, all of them severely restricting individuals’ freedom. This may not be Gilead but people don’t have the same extended rights as in Panoptica. However, nothing bars individuals from going from one community to another or creating their own community with more freedom. They are also presumably free to just leave the country. Precisely because of that, Mytopia scores higher than Panoptica in terms of liberalism. The people of Panoptica are in a way “forced to be free,” those in Mytopia can choose, but are never coerced, to be unfree.
The roots of this somehow counterintuitive judgment come from the particular way liberal thinkers like Kukathas understand the relationship between agreement and justification. For many liberals (and others), justification presupposes agreement. The justification of principles and rules is, at the bottom, grounded in the fact that persons (or an ideal representation of them) agree to live by these principles and follow these rules. If we agree that people should be free to marry whom they want, then the principle and the corresponding rules of non-exclusively heterosexual marriage are justified. The problem is that such kind of agreement may be difficult to obtain. This difficulty may be a source of conflicts and, at the extreme, cause attempts of illegitimate subjugation of some by others. Easier to achieve however is an agreement to do something. Even if we disagree about the reasons why, we may agree to follow specific rules. It can be for purely pragmatic reasons, or because we think that these rules realize an ideal conception of justice or morality, and so on. But sometimes we may also fail to reach an agreement in this sense. There are then only two alternatives available: either one of the parties tries to persuade or even force others to follow the same course of action, or the parties organize society so that each can follow the rules and abide by the principles they deem the best, the most reasonable, or something else.
In this perspective, justification is not tied to agreement, but more radically to the possibility of peacefully disagreeing by leaving. If we disagree at a too fundamental level, we’ll just part ways and this is the very possibility that underlies the justification of the principles and rules we choose to adopt. The regime of Gilead is legitimate and its rules justified, not because people, in general, agree with them, but because they can disagree by leaving – either geographically (going to live elsewhere) or institutionally (following a different set of rules). The right to exit is then nothing but a particular version of the broader freedom to associate and disassociate that is unanimously recognized as one of the fundamental liberal rights. However, under this version of liberalism, this right achieves a higher status, one that does not tolerate any compromise with any other freedom or other value.
With this status, the right to exit becomes a regulative ideal that can be used to conceive ideal societies. This is exactly its function in Robert Nozick’s “utopia of utopias” thought experiment:[2]
“Imagine a possible world in which to live; this world need not contain everyone else now alive, and it may contain beings who have never actually lived. Every rational creature in this world you have imagined will have the same rights of imagining a possible world for himself to live in (in which all other rational inhabitants have the same imagining rights, and so on) as you have. The other inhabitants of the world you have imagined may choose to stay in the world which has been created for them (they have been created for) or they may choose to leave it and inhabit a world of their own imagining. If they choose to leave your world and live in another, your world is without them. You may choose to abandon your imagined world, now without its emigrants. This process goes on; worlds are created, people leave them, create new worlds, and so on.”[3]
What makes this thought experiment quite interesting[4] is not only its incredible complexity but the fact that it precisely plays on the idea that justification is tied to the possibility of choosing which “world” or “association” to live in. As Nozick’s discussion indicates, we can form of small number of conjectures based on it. For instance, it is highly unlikely that an association where one member exercises despotic powers over the rest of its inhabitants will be stable – these inhabitants are likely to choose to live elsewhere. We can also conjecture that associations will compete to attract the most valuable individuals and that each individual will receive the equivalent value of their marginal contribution to the association they belong to. Also, associations are likely to be diverse enough to benefit from the division of labor and comparative advantages.
When projected into the real world, this model corresponds to a community of communities that people are free to leave if they wish to enter another one (if they are accepted) or to create a new one. This is a utopia of utopias, where each is free to live by the rules they choose, even if these rules are “illiberal” or lead to bad outcomes. In this utopia, justification is not tied to an agreement (though people choosing to live in the same community presumably agree on something) but to the freedom that individuals have to sort themselves out.
There are several objections to this conception of liberal justification, especially when we try to figure out more precisely how this ideal model could concretely work in our contemporary world. Let’s enumerate the most important of them:
(i) A formal freedom to exit is insufficient, individuals must have an effective capacity to exit, which supposes that
a. The costs of exiting are not too high.
b. Individuals can enter into another community or association (acknowledging that creating a new one is often not an option).
(ii) Communities and associations are not fully independent from each other, especially due to external effects.
(iii) The possibility of exit, if effective, can undermine the pursuit of other ideals and values, in particular by limiting individuals’ (legal and moral) commitment to cooperative ventures.
Objections (i) and (ii) are relatively familiar and indicate that the right to exist (and by extension, the freedom to associate) cannot be realized in an institutional vacuum. What is needed is a rule-based political order that organizes the interactions between the various associations and communities. At the international level, (i.b.) implies for instance that immigration is an effective possibility and guaranteed by enforced rules. More generally, the adequate treatment of these two objections requires a polycentric political order that legitimately imposes a system of rules to all communities and associations. The bottom line is that the “realistic utopia” that realizes the right to exit is neither a liberal anarchy (like Kukathas’s liberal archipelago) nor the current post-Westphalian international order of nation-states. The former lacks a common set of rules and the latter is not organized around a genuine and effective right to exit.
Objection (iii) is less commonly seen but is, in my view, the most fundamental. It indeed shows the problem in considering the right to exit in the abstraction of other rights, freedoms, and liberties. Why is a society like Gilead unlikely, or actually unable, to offer the right to exist to its members? Because it relies on ideals, values, and rules that are incompatible with this right. Gilead, like any totalitarian society, is organized around a perfectionist ideal (an ideal of fertility wrapped with religious insanities) the pursuit of which requires the subjugation of the quasi-totality of its population. If not enough individuals adhere to this ideal, or at least are forced to pursue it, then it cannot be attained and the society loses its very reason for existence. Needless to say, no form of subjugation is possible within the confines of liberal rights and freedoms. To subjugate someone is by definition to negate this person’s humanity and to fail to respect her as a person. You cannot do that while respecting this person’s freedom of speech or political rights. The moral problem with Gilead is not that it forbids its members to leave, it is that it subjugates them and because of that, denies them the right to exit.
In the case of totalitarian societies, this mistake is essentially benign because it is obvious that the right to exit is incompatible with their values and ideals. The problem is more acute however for societies or communities that pursue perfectionist ideals without subjugating individuals. Think of communities that don’t cultivate moral and personal autonomy in their members and that provide them with an education such that the various kinds of liberties and freedoms are viewed as less important values than others. For the members of such communities, the effective cost of exit is often prohibitive and, in the meantime, this is required for these communities to continue to exist. Liberals like Kukathas would answer that there is no problem here: as long as they have the formal right to exit, the members of these communities are free. Indeed, Kukathas denies that objection (i) above is relevant at all.[5] But if you think that (i) has some weight, then you have a problem. Providing individuals with an effective right to exit entails giving them capabilities that cannot be developed outside an extensive system of rights and freedoms beyond the right to exit, the very kind of system that is likely to be inimical to many perfectionist ideals. The bottom line is that Kukathas’s fictional society of Mytopia is either impossible or irrelevant. It is impossible if we assume that individuals do exercise, at least up to a point, their right to exit. In this case, illiberal societies are unlikely to survive over the long run. It is irrelevant if we assume that individuals cannot in practice exercise their right to exit. In this case, why should we even bother at all that individuals can in principle exit if they don’t have the ability to do it? The idea that justification doesn’t depend on agreement then loses most of its appeal.
The reason why liberals like Kukathas stick to the requirement of the formal right to exit is, beyond the fact that an effective ability to exit is difficult to guarantee, that it allows to keep a convenient neutrality, if not indifference, towards ways of life. Not all ways of life are compatible with liberal rights and freedoms. The society of Panoptica, where individuals are free except for the fact that they cannot leave it, is not neutral regarding the good life. Many ways of life cannot strive in such a society. To justify Panoptica would require taking a stance over which ways of life are justified. The right to exit goes with the idea that we don’t have to, and we should not mess with how others are living. This may be appealing intellectually, up to a point at least. However, liberalism is ultimately tied to ways of life that are constituted by a large range of freedoms and liberties beyond the right to exit. In reality, these freedoms, liberties, and rights will most often come together, though in different configurations.
[1] Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2007)p; 98-9.
[2] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974 [2013]), p. 297-306.
[3] Ibid., p. 299.
[4] Though far less well-known than Rawls’s original position thought experiment, I find it in a way far more interesting and evocative.
[5] Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, p. 110-3.