CDC Reports 843 Cyclosporiasis Cases Across U.S., Ohio Records 177
Public Health Without Permission Is Just Another Absolute Power
An outbreak that sends hundreds to emergency care tests not only medicine, but the limits of political power held on trust for the preservation of life and health.
An intestinal parasite is a small thing, yet it can lay bare large questions of power. In the United States, federal authorities report some 843 cases of cyclosporiasis spread across 31 states, with 86 hospitalizations and, so far, no deaths. One state alone, Ohio, counts 177 cases, most occurring in June. The illness, by their own description, brings violent diarrhea, dehydration, and fatigue, and may drive the weakest among you to emergency care. Here, then, is no fanciful fear, but a real threat to life and health. When men fall sick in such numbers, they naturally turn to public authority; the question is not whether they may do so, but upon what terms they must obey.
In the Second Treatise of Government, when I defined political power, I limited it to the right of making laws with penalties only for the public good, and for the preservation of property in the broad sense—lives, liberties, and estates. Power beyond that definition stands in need of very strict proof, or it is mere usurpation. In a disease outbreak, the end of preserving life and health is evident, and therefore some common authority to collect reports, trace causes, and warn the public falls plainly within the trust men might reasonably place in government. To have no such power, and leave every household to its own lights against a parasite that spreads unseen, would be to abandon people to a harsher state of nature.
Yet even here the first principle holds: persons are naturally free, equal, and independent. Any claim that some men may rule others—even for health—must be justified to their reason. When federal offices such as these Centers for Disease Control, and state departments of health, gather compulsory reports or issue directions that affect how people live, trade, or travel, they are not acting on private kindness, but on public power. That power is held on trust. The people are not the property of the magistrate, to be driven like a herd for their own imagined good, but the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world about His business, whose lives may be ordered by civil authority only so far as reason shows it stands for their preservation.
This brings me to prerogative, which I once described as the power to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law and sometimes even against it, so long as it remains revocable by the people. In an outbreak where the source is yet unknown—federal authorities here frankly say the cause is still under investigation—some measure of discretion in tracing foods, issuing warnings, and perhaps pausing certain trades will be necessary. But prerogative is a dangerous medicine. If it is not closely tied to the visible benefit of those subject to it, and bounded by known laws and open justification, it slips from emergency care into arbitrary rule, which is worse than the disease it claims to cure.
Hence the importance of evidence and transparency. In my Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I urged that assent ought to be proportioned to the proofs we possess; to believe, or to command belief, beyond evidence is not a virtue but a fault. The reports here themselves confess their limits: clustered data, incomplete sourcing, an unknown origin of infection. That uncertainty does not forbid action, for men must often act on probabilities where strict demonstration fails; but it does lay upon rulers a double duty. First, to speak plainly about what is known and what is conjecture. Secondly, to shape any burdens they impose—on movement, on trade, on the sale of such foods as raspberries or lettuce have elsewhere been linked with this illness—no heavier than the present evidence can sustain.
Property too is touched by such measures. When a merchant’s goods are seized or his trade is halted because they are suspected of carrying infection, his estate is put in question. Yet, because no man has a right to poison another, whether wittingly or by ignorance, the magistrate may interpose to prevent harm, provided two conditions hold. First, that the rules be general and known in advance as far as possible, so that no man is subject to the mere will of an inspector who is judge in his own case. Secondly, that any restriction leave men, as I once wrote of the common earth, with enough and as good—alternative means to maintain their lives by honest industry, not crushed under a long train of health decrees that never visibly end.
The present outbreak, so far as reported, shows authorities collecting data, warning of serious illness, and seeking its cause; these are acts well within the trust granted for the preservation of life. Whether that trust is kept will depend not on their titles, but on their manner of rule: evidence made public, reasons plainly given, measures carefully fitted to the danger, powers relinquished when the emergency passes. Where public health becomes a perpetual pretext for unbounded discretion, men are thrown back on their ancient right to resist usurpation and appeal to heaven. A free people must be willing to be guided for their safety, but never to be silently governed for their good.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — Assent must be proportioned to the evidence; believing beyond one's proofs is a failure of duty, not a mark of faith.