(1) Freedom from or negative freedom. Having no handcuffs -- being left alone. Freedom from direct physical constraints and the deliberate actions of other people. If a Singaporean law says you can't piss in elevators, that impinges on your freedom to piss in elevators.
(2) Freedom to or positive freedom. Understood in various ways. Here's three.
(i) Sometimes thought of (I think) as having the resources.
You're not free to fly to NY without the money. You're not free to be a rocket scientist without the education. You're not free to control your political destiny without access to information.
The "freegan" living on the street might be guaranteed a large number of rights, but he still doesn't have a dime in his pocket. The everyday person might in one sense possess "freedom of speech", but he/she doesn't have what Rupert Murdoch's got.
(ii) Sometimes thought of as any situation where you bind yourself to give yourself options -- ie, give up on freedom-from to gain freedom-to.
In being constrained by society (or institutions within it), you give up anarchic freedom to gain various benefits and opportunities.
Bob Brandom's example: When you say "This substance is copper", you bind yourself by linguistic norms, your words aren't free to mean anything whatsoever. You commit yourself to the melting point of this substance being 1084 degrees celsisus and not 1086, whether you realize it or not.
(iii) Sometimes thought of as realizing potentialities -- ie having a particular set of personal resources. You're not truly free unless you're developed, unless you have certain physical and mental capacities. The redneck is a prisoner of his ignorance. The McDonald's regular is a slave of his obesity.
I think Isaiah Berlin called this sort of freedom the thin edge of the wedge of totalitarianism. Once you start passing laws for mandatory once-a-week workouts, where does it end?
Compulsory education goes hand in hand with giving the state enormous power over you.
(3)Autonomy, being self-governing, authentic. Having authentic desires. Being true to your true self (which, incidentally, doesn't require that free will exist). Following the law you set for yourself, or the law your "higher self" or true nature might set.
Being addicted to smoking, or subject to indoctrination (by school, by advertising, etc), reduces your autonomy.
(4) Freedom from domination. Freedom from anyone having power over you, whether they exercise it or not. Freedom, also, from worrying about how that power is going to be exercised, what might provoke it, how to keep it from being exercised, etc.
Like living next to a superpower that has nuclear weapons when you do not -- you go out of your way to maintain good relations. Like being a character in a Kafka story, where you're subject to some arbitrary or illogical authority, the sword of Damascus dangling over your head, and you have no idea what the authority is going to do to you. Like living in East Germany when one in fifty people collaborated with the state police, and you constantly had to be on the lookout.
It's partly that there's always a threat of exercise, which limits your options (indirectly impinges on freedom-from). It's partly that this unclear worry uses up mental bandwidth, obsesses you, deforms you. And it's partly the simple fact of being in the power of another: you've got a leash around your neck, and no matter how far you run, you can always be jerked back in. Your freedom has bounds.
Proposed ID card laws, where information about you is collected into a single database -- it's sometimes said that you only need worry if you're a criminal -- to which it's sometimes replied that one should be careful whom one empowers -- machinery has been put in place for the state to exercise more control, whether it does so in benign way or not
Like living next to a superpower that has nuclear weapons when you do not -- you go out of your way to maintain good relations. Like being a character in a Kafka story, where you're subject to some arbitrary or illogical authority, the sword of Damascus dangling over your head, and you have no idea what the authority is going to do to you. Like living in East Germany when one in fifty people collaborated with the state police, and you constantly had to be on the lookout.
It's partly that there's always a threat of exercise, which limits your options (indirectly impinges on freedom-from). It's partly that this unclear worry uses up mental bandwidth, obsesses you, deforms you. And it's partly the simple fact of being in the power of another: you've got a leash around your neck, and no matter how far you run, you can always be jerked back in. Your freedom has bounds.
Proposed ID card laws, where information about you is collected into a single database -- it's sometimes said that you only need worry if you're a criminal -- to which it's sometimes replied that one should be careful whom one empowers -- machinery has been put in place for the state to exercise more control, whether it does so in benign way or not
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق