Is there such thing as true freedom? (My thought is that only in an anarchist society there would be-meaning that even the slightest rule or law would detain one's freedom to do as one pleases...)

Even in a world without laws or social rules, our ability to do exactly as we please would, presumably, be constrained by by all sorts of things--our own abilities, the actions of other people, gravity. (This won't be true, of course, if we could somehow adjust our desires so that we didn't want anything that we were constrained from having. But if we can do this, we might as easily do this in the world with laws.) In fact, the existence of rules and laws seems actually to allow us to do more of what we want. For example, the enforced convention that we drive on the right side of the road (in the US) allows us more efficiently and effectively to move about and do many of the things we want to do, even if it prohibits us from driving however we like with legal impunity. So, I doubt that anarchy would give us the "true freedom" you seek. But I wonder how much value we really place on "freedom" in this sense.

POKER - the card game, not Wittgenstein's - seems to have taken many by storm, especially college students. Its ethical (not to mention legal) status, however, eludes us. Is it unethical to play poker? If your answer to this question relies on conceiving of poker as "gambling", then would poker tournaments, in which an entry fee is paid and one cannot lose more than that entry fee (your chips no longer represent real money), deserve the same appraisal? Is gambling unethical, and is there any such thing as something being inherently addictive, or do different people just get addicted to different things because of who they are? Here's a preliminary thought: Our socio/economic system is rather unjust, with many poor people and a few very rich ones. At the poker table, however, a just meritocracy exists: those with intelligence win and climb up the economic ladder. Win one poker tournament for $5, and you now have the entry fee for 5 more such tournaments. For intelligent people currently working...

The society of poker players displays a kind of procedural fairness--if everyone starts with the same amount then there is no one to blame for future discrepancies other than Lady Luck and the players' own decisions. But is this type of procedural fairness all that is required in a just society? Many would argue that a just society, or more broadly a good society is one that takes care of those below a certain level of well-being no matter how they got there . In many cases it's just bad luck when a person's life is turned upside-down by natural disaster, but I don't think we would consider a society good if it therefore did absolutely nothing about this suffering.