Is Liberty Bad for Your Health?

While it did not prioritize the value of liberty, ancient political philosophy did nonetheless directly equate social justice with the public health of the shared political community. By contrast, modern political philosophy has prioritized the value of individual liberty, but only at the cost of undermining the equation of justice and with the communitarian conception of health made by the ancients. Indeed, health ceased almost entirely to be a category for evaluating social justice, being replaced instead by the priority of liberty rights to self-preservation and exclusive claims to private property. In light of recent empirical work on the social determinants of health inequities even in those modern liberal societies that prioritize individual liberty, this might well be taken to suggest that liberty is bad for your health. But is liberty necessarily bad for your health? This depends entirely on how liberty is construed in relation to justice and equity, and indeed the concept of health itself. I explore recent work in contemporary political philosophy on the concept of liberty to suggest ways in which this political ideal may be harmonized once more with an appropriate concept of health, thus giving recognition to public health as an imperative of social justice.