Question Is freedom really so desirable? Is it not better to be captive but cared for, than "free" to die of famine, disease or conflict? This example is physical, but mental captivity (e.g., constraining our thoughts to what we believe) can be more comforting than opening our minds to thoughts we might find uncomfortable or incomprehensible. Freedom, particularly in the Western World, is often held up as an ideal for which to strive. Is it really as good as it is made out to be?

Accepted:
December 2, 2006

Comments

Better a contented pig than a miserable Socrates, or the reverse, as this issue is sometimes put. We often say that freedom is a good because it allows us to flourish as human beings, while being looked after and safe in the absence of freedom is to be treated more as a thing than an autonomous individual. We do in fact tend to take risks and head off in new directions when it would be safer not to do so, and this might suggest that we do value freedom regardless of its results in terms of human happiness. Whether it is better to go for more freedom and more risk, or less, is something which only an individual can resolve as part of his or her own life decisions, and there seems not to be one answer that would have to cover everyone. But we can make sense of either response here, and that suggests that you are right in suggesting that a preference for freedom over safety is not something that is automatically the right decision ethically.

"Is freedom always better than a lack of freedom?" Well, doesn’t the answer to this question depend on what sort of freedom is at stake and what one might receive in compensation for losing that particular sort of freedom? No human being is free to do anything she might happen to want to do, nor should we be moved to tears by this fact. I am not free to fly like a bird, nor to travel to the Sun. In the US, I am not free to kill openly whomever I want and stay out of jail. Yet even in jail, I retain certain freedoms: to pace my cell, to think about my mother, to count to a million, to rearrange my clothing in my drawers as many times as I like, to talk or not to talk to my cell-mate. Of course, we never hold up a person in jail as a paradigm of freedom, but this is not because we believe that a person in jail has no freedoms, but because we believe that he lacks important freedoms that the rest of us on the outside thankfully possess.

So what makes a particular freedom an important freedom? Why does freedom of expression seem like a more important freedom than freedom to rearrange my clothing in my drawer? Why don’t we think that we should protect a person’s freedom to act on his own conception of a good life, if that conception includes, or even entails, the torment and death of others?

My own view is that one simply can’t answer these questions without appealing to some substantive conception of human well-being and some substantive conception of our obligations to others. Freedom to die of famine, violence, or disease tend not to be valuable at all, since pain, disability, and death do not in themselves make a human life go better and usually make it go much worse, though like other things, these harms might in certain circumstances bring along compensating benefits. Freedom to be raised by a loving parent or guardian, to receive an excellent education, to eat nutritious and delicious food, to form intimate relationships of our own preferences, to spend time and share conversation with our friends, to make sense of the world and our place in it, and to live in beautiful surroundings all constitute valuable freedoms, because the possession of these goods does tend to make a human life go better, though again, in particular circumstances, these goods might bring along evils that outweigh the benefit that they provide.