The Conflict Between Liberty and General Welfare

The liberty and general welfare are two theories in which supporting one can lead to adversarial effects on the other. Liberty means state of acting freely within a group or society from restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of behavior, way of life or political interests and general welfare is the concern of the authority to protect peace, health, safety and morality of its group of people. Whereas in the process of public welfare there may arise an issue with individual’s rights this is an acute issue and decisions should be made very carefully.

So, if there is a conflict between liberty and general welfare my decision to support one will depend on the situation because there are both advantages and disadvantages to both the concepts. Here are some of the examples and arguments to support one over the other.

• Liberty can lead to more contented individuals

When people are free to express their views without feeling the tension to be arrested or sued into silence, the inner minds of citizens feel free to express artistically. They can write poems, books or blogs in website on art, religion, politics, society by not worrying about muzzled by the government, when citizens feel free to express they feel more contented, they think they have opportunity to concentrate on acute things of life that go beyond the simple raw existence of life

Liberty of an individual can be helpful in the case of democracy it says that only majority rules then what is the condition of individual in a minority group there is a prevailing problem such as people living in majority group expects the society to be homogenous but why?

• Abuse of liberty granted

We have right to smoke in our country but it is a punishable offence to smoke in public because it concerns the public health so in this situation general welfare of giving importance to public health is more important than personal rights similarly there are many other situations like right to speech cannot be misused to publicly disturb others in inappropriate place and time. He can also be arrested for doing this.

So many people even oppose to pay taxes and argue why they need to give their money and show wrong documents to file reduce taxation fee on them but they need to pay because the government need the money to build a better nation by developing in all perspectives and he is also one of them getting benefited.

There are many other concerns like in some countries individuals are allowed to have guns for their personal protections there are many repercussions due to this. There are so many examples that happened in America where mass shooting have created a havoc and lead to death of many people there is a recent disaster happened in new Zealand so in this type of scenarios public welfare should be given more importance than individuals who are fancying to have gun. From the above we can interpolate that both have its own pros and cons so one should be able to judge the situation take decisions accordingly.