Political Philosophy and the Bathroom Wars

May 24, 2016 by

by  Joseph M. Knippenberg, Public Discourse:

A recent statement by the Attorney General provides a window into the intellectual history surrounding the concept of “human dignity” and the selfhood from which it arises.

Earlier this month, when she announced that the Obama Administration was filing a lawsuit against North Carolina over its “bathroom bill,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch traversed a significant portion of the history of political philosophy within a few short paragraphs. I’m quite confident that she didn’t mean to do so, and I’m sure that she isn’t altogether aware of the issues she raised. But raise them she did, thereby offering us the opportunity to get beyond the controversies of the moment and examine some of the deeper reasons for our current predicament.

Early in her statement, Lynch said that the governor and North Carolina legislature “created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals, who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security—a right taken for granted by most of us.” Just a few paragraphs later, she added:

This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.

I’ve italicized the most telling expressions.

In the first passage, “safety and security,” Lynch speaks in the language of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the greatest exponents of classical liberalism. For them, the purpose of government is to guard against the predations to which we’re vulnerable in “the state of nature,” where life is, as Hobbes famously put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” A state that provides security gives us what we most need, enabling us to pursue our happiness wherever and however we will, so long as we don’t harm others along the way.

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