three answers about freedom

some thoughts on my favourite topic

I think about freedom a lot and this pervades my writing. But since I have an unusually large number of freedom-focused events coming up over the next few weeks — an episode of my podcast, a debate, some talks — I thought now would be a good time to set out some thoughts on the topic.

Today, I’m going to focus on what it is to do things freely. If you like, you can see this as a sequel to the piece I recently published here about what I think liberalism is. You can also see it as a prequel to the follow-up piece I’m intending to publish here, sometime in the next couple of weeks, on the value of freedom.

I’ll be upfront, however, about the fact that neither of these pieces will provide any kind of survey. If you know me in person, you’ll know I’m happy to talk all day about competing theories of freedom, and that I enjoy reading widely about these things. But I’m not going to give you an overview of what everyone else thinks. And I’m not going to go into inside-baseball details about why, for instance, I think the negative/positive distinction is, in most uses, not very helpful.

Rather, I’m simply going to tell you where I stand on some of the basics of a topic that’s one of my favourite things to think about. I’ll do this by addressing some of the questions that interest me the most.

1) What does it mean to do things freely?

I find that thinking about doing things freely is a good route into thinking about what freedom is. For instance, lately I’ve been writing a short book about free speech, and I begin it by discussing what’s happening in different kinds of instances in which we’d ordinarily say that a person ‘cannot speak freely’. One reason for taking this route is that it helps me underpin an individualist account of free speech: an account, for instance, that moves past a focus on free speech’s aggregate value. Another reason is that it helps me identify some category errors that often occur in public discussion of free-speech matters.

But this approach also helps make freedom seem more tangible. That is, thinking about our experiences of doing things freely, and of not being able to do things freely, gives us a solid starting point for taking on the difficult task of thinking about freedom as a more abstract notion. It helps when we want to think about freedom as a ‘value’, for instance, to be compared against other values, like equality and justice.

Consider the following range of instances in which you’d probably agree that, in some sense, ‘I cannot speak freely’:

• All the things I do have been determined since before I was born

• An evil demon controls the content of all the things I think and say

• I’m in a coma

• I have a swollen broken jaw

• A bandana is tied tightly around my lower face

• I’m locked in a cupboard in a cellar

• I’m in a forest far away from anyone else and have no communication devices

• I’ve lost the key to the clubhouse where the discussion event is taking place

• I’ve been disinvited from the clubhouse discussion event

• I’m on a mountain pass above a school amongst signs saying “speech will cause avalanches!”

• The government of the place where I live is fining inhabitants a million dollars per uttered word

• A robber is holding a gun to my head

[This is what Pixabay had to offer as a free image of an evil demon]

Here are two conclusions I’ve reached by thinking about the similarities and differences between instances like these — instances which show that the phrase ‘I cannot speak freely’ is ordinarily used and understood in various different ways.

First, that there’s a useful distinction to be made between instances in which: 1) I don’t have the personal capacity to speak freely, whether temporarily or more persistently; and instances in which 2) I do have the personal capacity to speak freely, but something external is either preventing or inhibiting me from exercising this personal capacity. Compare, for instance, the determinism scenario and the bandana.

Second, that there’s a useful distinction to be made between instances in which: 1) speaking freely simply isn’t a current possibility for me, either because I’m lacking capacity or opportunity; and instances in which 2) speaking freely is a current possibility, but I choose not to do so, because I’m inhibited by some expected consequence. Compare, for instance, the bandana and the government fine.

There are other ways of cutting the deck of instances. And I come to many more conclusions in my book, not least when I move beyond parsing different ordinary meanings of ‘I cannot speak freely’, and get on to how we should morally evaluate and respond to different kinds of constraints on speech. But I think the two distinctions above are generally useful when thinking about what it means to ‘be free’, in the sense of being the kind of creature that can do things freely.

Of course, there’s another important sense of ‘being free’, where it pertains to whether you’re being respected as the kind of creature that can do things freely. Whether, for instance, your freedom-related rights are protected and promoted in the country where you live. But thinking about personal freedom as a matter of capacity and exercise can help us to see the relation between these two kinds of ‘being free’.

Consider the following example. A few years back, I was chatting with a fellow freedom-loving friend about some egregious example of state overreach. Suddenly, he said, “Of course, the state can’t ever really constrain our free speech, because we have free will!” Now straightaway you’ll see there’s a problem with what he said.

I mean, on the one hand, he was clearly at risk of letting the state get away with horrific things. But on the other hand, one of the central reasons most people value free speech is as a means for expressing freely-chosen ideas. To that end, free speech is surely a kind of practical instantiation of free will. So how do we square this? Where exactly was my friend going wrong?

Well first, he was jamming together a matter of fundamental personal capacity with a matter of external constraint on the exercise of that capacity. But once you see it in these terms, you can also see he had it the wrong way round. In other words, it’s thanks to you having free will that the state can constrain your free speech! If you didn’t have the capacity to speak freely, then what would the state be constraining if, for instance, it locked you in a cupboard or fined you for uttering words? Something, for sure. But not your ‘speaking freely’. You can only be constrained from doing something you have the capacity to do.

2) What’s the relation between acting freely and acting how you want to?

Now, you might have noticed that I haven’t explicitly pinned down what ‘freely’ itself means. I mean, what exactly is it to speak freely as opposed to speaking non-freely, or in some other manner? One superficial answer could be that to speak freely is to speak in line with your desires. Indeed, I think many people would assume that when I was talking above about ‘speaking freely’, I was referring to something like ‘being able to speak the words I want to speak’. But let’s test this out on the robber example.

Imagine the robber is holding a gun to my head, and he’s ordering me to say the words, “I leave you my fortune!”. I use this example in the book I’m writing to discuss some interesting claims G.A. Cohen makes about how free you can be when you’re being ‘forced’ to do something. But it’s also a useful example for thinking more broadly about the relation between freedom and volition. About the relation, that is, between freedom and your ‘willing’ or ‘wanting’.

It’s a useful example to that end because, on the surface, what seems to be happening is that I’m too scared of the expected consequences to communicate with the robber in the way that I want to — in the way that reflects the thoughts I really want to express. That is, it seems that I’m being pressured by the robber into refraining from uttering the words I want to utter.

It seems this way because it’s reasonable to assume that — instead of whimpering the words “I leave you my fortune” — what I really want to express to the robber is something more along the lines of, “Who the hell do you think you are to point a gun at me? Not that you’ve bothered to ask, but I’ve already written in my will that I’m leaving all my money to the World Wildlife Fund, and you’re an idiot to think that anything I say under duress would change that!”.

Imagine, however, that this assumption isn’t correct. That actually, I’d immediately recognised the robber as my long-lost son, whom I’d thought was dead! And that as soon as I realised my son wasn’t dead, I decided I should forsake the WWF and leave my fortune to him instead, regardless of the fact he was pointing a gun at me. Now, if that were the case, then it couldn’t be that I was being pressured into refraining from saying what I wanted to say, because the thing I wanted to say, and the thing my son was pressuring me into saying, would be the same thing!

In other words, it seems as if ‘speaking freely’ is different from ‘being able to say the words you want to say’. I mean, if the only thing you could ever say was “I hate donuts”, but you also never wanted to say that thing — not because you like donuts (actually, you do hate them!), but because you really really hate it as a phrase, and you never want it to pass your lips, even in the context of saying “I hate the phrase ‘I hate donuts’!”. Then, when saying the phrase, even though it’s true that you hate donuts, you would no more be ‘speaking freely’ than a wind-up doll with a speech mechanism is speaking freely when its lips move and the word “Mama” is played through a speaker under its tiny T-shirt.

Moreover, the distinction between not wanting to say “I hate donuts” because you don’t want to say the phrase, and not wanting to say “I hate donuts” because truly you like donuts, points us towards the kind of ‘wanting’ that is relevant here. It’s not that what’s important to ‘speaking freely’ is being able to communicate your wants in the sense of sharing what you desire, in some ‘base’ first-order sense. Rather, it’s being able to make your own choices about what — and what not — to say. In other words, it’s about ‘wanting’ to say something because that’s what you’ve decided to say, regardless of whether it correctly expresses your base desires.

I’ve written here before about my belief that the power to do things freely — the power of being a ‘free agent’ — is an ontologically distinctive and morally important feature of being a human. This belief is at the heart of the Lockean type of classical liberalism that I espouse and wrote about in my recent liberalism piece. Being a ‘free agent’, in this sense, means being able — at least some of the time — to make reasoned decisions about how to act, and to act on those decisions.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of our actions are free in this sense, but rather that we have the capacity to act in this way, in at least some situations. This paves the way for arguing that instances in which we are prevented from exercising this capacity are instances in which something bad — and sometimes something wrong — is happening.

3) Does any of this freedom stuff really matter if determinism obtains?

No! Sorry.