The Nature of Freedom

Freedom's Origins and Requirements

De: Scott Robinson

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Freedom means different things to different people. The truth of this can be established in a five-minute Google search: those who champion freedom almost never do so in the ideal or the abstract, but within whatever domain works for them in particular.

Here are some examples of those very subjective freedoms:

• The freedom to take up knitting
• The freedom to learn a foreign language
• The freedom to go to church
• The freedom to speak one’s opinion publicly
• The freedom to participate in the political process
• The freedom to not go to church
• The freedom to love and marry whomever they please
• The freedom to own a weapon
• The freedom to access information
• The freedom to be ethnically, sexually, or ideologically different at no societal cost

And these...

• The freedom to force others to practice a religion
• The freedom to deny service to an outsider
• The freedom to exploit others economically
• The freedom to control the media
• The freedom to ignore the rule of law
• The freedom to deny the vote to dissenters
• The freedom to silence those dissenters
• The freedom to jail one’s political opponents
• The freedom to take another country’s land and resources
• The freedom to kill members of a rival group

All of these qualify as freedom to someone. But, of course, the first 10 freedoms are freedoms that don’t intrude on anyone else’s freedoms, while the remaining 10 all grant freedoms to some by taking away the freedoms of others. Call it zero-sum freedom.

We’re left, then, with a question: is there such a thing as non-subjective freedom? Is freedom truly a natural state, untainted by human whims and foibles? If so, what is the nature of that freedom?