In a post by Brown University professor Jason Brennan on the (new, I think) liberal libertarian blog Bleeding-Heart Libertarians, he discusses whether liberty is an inherently social concept or whether, as Brennan argues, liberty is simply the absence of wrongful interference. It strikes me, though, that both he and the right-wing libertarian he's arguing with have things wrong. Liberty isn't specifically about interference, a word which implies agency. It's just about restrictions. The purest form of authoritarianism, we are told, is that everything not forbidden is compulsory. The real point of that definition is that in that sort of world, the individual has zero actual discretion about how they live their lives. Note that this does not necessarily imply that life is unremittingly horrible; one might live in a fairly benign authoritarian regime where you were required to do lots of things that you happened to enjoy. But freedom, or liberty, is certainly not a component of this system. Now, since I'm calling this a regime I've sort of implied an agent, but I don't see that I have any more liberty if some sort of impersonal, abstract forces have deprived me of all ability to choose how I live my life. So I would tend to define liberty as the lack of restrictions on one's ability to choose how to life one's life. There's no logical maximum of liberty of this kind, of course, but it's clear to me that a very poor person has less of it than a very rich person, in the same way you have less liberty if you get stuck in a tiny little cave.
But then again, there's no particular reason to talk about everything in terms of liberty.
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While I agree with your basic supposition that freedom is the ability of an individual to live their life as they choose, I must disagree with the way in which you seem to be equating freedom with social position. While a rich person might be able to buy more things than a poor person, he or she is constrained in what they feel they are allowed to do by the social pressures of the world around. The less one is obviously wealth, they more society is will to allow them to do. In fact, I would have to say that the individual in the cave is the most free of us all, as he or she is completely free to do what ever they choose without worry of societal pressure. Always assuming that they are not maliciously placed there are confined by armed guards.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I actually had the thought about social pressures as I was writing that line, but decided against trying to incorporate a caveat.
ReplyDeleteThe point is that the guy in the cave can't do anything outside of the cave. And I'm assuming there isn't an internet outlet in the cave, or really anything except this guy. So yeah, he can do whatever he wants free from constraints, but only within the incredibly narrow window of things it's possible to do within that cave by himself. I'd feel pretty damn trapped in that situation, pretty damn unfree.
I'd also note that I think we use the word "free" colloquially in the way I'm using it. "Free time" isn't specifically time when no one is imposing on you, it's time that's unconstrained. If you have decided to go grocery shopping from 4 to 4:30 on a given day, that half-hour is not free time with respect to the rest of the world, because you're scheduled during it.