Out of curiosity, what is your foundation for 'individual liberty' in Thedas? What does it mean, and what is the rational or ideological justification for it?
Liberty, like equality, is something that means different things to different people, and without a unifying principle and foundation it can simply be an excuse for tyranny and oppression by an individual on others in the name of their infringements of her own liberty. After all, forcing restraint on someone is limiting their liberties.
So when you set out to individual liberty (a label that is frequently contrary and contradictory to 'greater good'), what will make your efforts more than the strongman of the hour threatening others to get their way and preferences?
For the issue of mages, how will you justify individuals restrictions on mages with mandated policing to mages who claim that doing so infringes with their individual liberty? And if you restrict mundanes from trying to do what they see as necessary to preserve their freedoms, why should they believe your individual freedoms deserves to usurp their group freedom?
For elves, how will you enforce demands against segregation that is in many respects mutual? Will you deny humans the individual liberty to house, hire, or sell to elves if they don't want to? Will you attempt to prevent them from having any means to push back, or will you strip them of arms to preserve the elves rights to weapons?
When you say you will end the Dwarven caste system- what will you do about people already in castes? Will you overthrow the nobility and kingdom and install a puppet government that reflects your views, regardless of the individual views of various parts of the populace? Will you rend the current castes, and force everyone to take different jobs and specialties at this time in their lives? That would be difficult at best, for a society on a permanent war footing against a constantly present foe- and what would be your measure of success, anyway? Radical change over five days? Weeks? Months? Years? Generations? Destroying the warrior caste on the front lines, replacing the smith castes and other specialties who have no good replacements, replacing the governmental bureacracy- that would be change, but it wouldn't necessarily work out well. But if you leave it to the future generations, you'll likely not see much change: so many people choose to follow what their parents were, especially in pre-universal education settings where family is the primary source of teaching.
I do hope you give it some thought. As it is, your greater good of 'personal liberty' is sounding quite a bit like 'personal preferences enforced on others', and easily allowing rollback by people concerned with their personal liberties and interests.
My concept of individual liberty is people being free to try and do as they please with their own lives, so long as they do not actively interfere with anothers right to do so. That means murder, theft, slavery and sexual assualt are all still illegal.
On mages, I have no restrictions specific to mages. It would be illegal for anyone to control the mind of another it just so happens that blood magic is the easiest way to go about that. It would technically be legal for a person to become an abomination, but they tend to go crazy and start killing everyone or start trying to forcfully control others, so they would likely be punished for those other crimes. As to the specified policing, I'm talking about a group of people trained and equiped to fight mages and abominations because I don't think the guys running down cutpurses in the market square are quite up to the job.
Regarding elves, I said ending the de jure oppression not the de facto. The elves should be allowed to have weapons, but if a smith refuses to sell to an elf I'm not going to put a sword to his throat.
Now the Dwarves, I said ending the state sponsored caste system, the caste symstem itself would very likely remain in effect. In the state caste system it is a crime to impersonate another caste, in a de facto caste system a servant could try and become a smith but customers would be few and far between and they would likely fail. A noble could try and become a servant but who would hire them. The difference is they wouldn't be criminals for trying. Also this would allow for legal protection for casteless, under the state sponsored caste system any dwarf with a caste could kill a casteless without fear of legal repercussion.
I fail to see how removing laws that infringe the individual liberty of one would violate the individual liberty of another.
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Countries should want that when facing economic and financial decline.
