Freedom
(I found this lying around - N)
Driving to and from Canberra I sometimes take a break from my usual 3-hours-of-video-game-music-remixes partyfest and listen to a podcast or two instead. I'm not sure that it's a good idea because I then frequently want to make notes on what I'm listening to, which would be a life-limiting move at 110 kilometres per hour. For example, this weeks' episode of The philosopher's zone had a pretty interesting discussion of the concept of "freedom" in the context of the abolition of slavery. Up until quite recently, relatively, people were still making the argument that slaves were more free than paid workers. This is a pretty intruiging concept to modern ears and comes down, predictably, to what it means to be free.
You can approach the definition of "freedom" in two ways. The first might be in terms of what freedom is not -- a "negative approach". Taking this track, one might say that freedom implies a lack of constraints: you are free if nobody prevents you from doing what you want to do. This seems to be a pretty common definition (it's basically the one in the dictionary).
Another (much trickier) definition is to take the positive approach and attempt to nail down what freedom is, rather than what it is not. Perhaps "being able to realise your full potential" is a reasonable start at this definition. The 20th-century political philosopher Isiah Berlin is most famous for describing these two approaches in Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin argues that, at least in a political context, the positive approach to a definition of freedom is suspect: it contains within it some definition of human characteristics, which political parties may freely disagree upon (and thus abuse).
In fact, this definition forms the crux of the "slaves are more free" argument -- they are guaranteed food and shelter and, if their master is kind, may live well their whole lives. But even "negative freedom" as presented above is subject to the same problem: you may still have a master, but he may choose not to impose any constraints.
In response to this problem there has been a recent revival of the centuries-old concept of the "Republican concept of liberty", which says that one is free "not to the extent that nobody as a matter of fact interferes with me, but to the extent that [one] does not live under the arbitrary will of another person".
Alan Saunders: So, in Isaiah Berlin's concept of negative liberty I could be free, even though I were a slave, simply because my master decided not to impose constraints upon me, whereas in the republican concept of liberty, I wouldn't be free, simply because I was a slave; is that what it amounts to?
Sue Mendus: That's what it amounts to, exactly that.
(Snipped from the full transcript.)
Freedom is rather a core concept in Western (and, I guess, all) political systems: how strange that the best definition we have is in terms of what it is not.
Driving to and from Canberra I sometimes take a break from my usual 3-hours-of-video-game-music-remixes partyfest and listen to a podcast or two instead. I'm not sure that it's a good idea because I then frequently want to make notes on what I'm listening to, which would be a life-limiting move at 110 kilometres per hour. For example, this weeks' episode of The philosopher's zone had a pretty interesting discussion of the concept of "freedom" in the context of the abolition of slavery. Up until quite recently, relatively, people were still making the argument that slaves were more free than paid workers. This is a pretty intruiging concept to modern ears and comes down, predictably, to what it means to be free.
You can approach the definition of "freedom" in two ways. The first might be in terms of what freedom is not -- a "negative approach". Taking this track, one might say that freedom implies a lack of constraints: you are free if nobody prevents you from doing what you want to do. This seems to be a pretty common definition (it's basically the one in the dictionary).
Another (much trickier) definition is to take the positive approach and attempt to nail down what freedom is, rather than what it is not. Perhaps "being able to realise your full potential" is a reasonable start at this definition. The 20th-century political philosopher Isiah Berlin is most famous for describing these two approaches in Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin argues that, at least in a political context, the positive approach to a definition of freedom is suspect: it contains within it some definition of human characteristics, which political parties may freely disagree upon (and thus abuse).
In fact, this definition forms the crux of the "slaves are more free" argument -- they are guaranteed food and shelter and, if their master is kind, may live well their whole lives. But even "negative freedom" as presented above is subject to the same problem: you may still have a master, but he may choose not to impose any constraints.
In response to this problem there has been a recent revival of the centuries-old concept of the "Republican concept of liberty", which says that one is free "not to the extent that nobody as a matter of fact interferes with me, but to the extent that [one] does not live under the arbitrary will of another person".
Alan Saunders: So, in Isaiah Berlin's concept of negative liberty I could be free, even though I were a slave, simply because my master decided not to impose constraints upon me, whereas in the republican concept of liberty, I wouldn't be free, simply because I was a slave; is that what it amounts to?
Sue Mendus: That's what it amounts to, exactly that.
(Snipped from the full transcript.)
Freedom is rather a core concept in Western (and, I guess, all) political systems: how strange that the best definition we have is in terms of what it is not.