Universal Freedom

Universal Freedom

Introduction

Freedom is the ability of human beings have to act according to his own will, throughout his life, making it responsible for their actions. Historically, especially since the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and nineteenth, freedom is often closely linked with the concepts of justice and equality.

The Meaning of Freedom

Philosophers often separate Freedom or freedom into two broad kinds, negative and positive. To call a Freedom negative is not to judge it—negative liberties are not by definition worse or less valuable than positive liberties. Rather, negative Freedom connotes the absence of constraints, interference, or obstacles. Positive Freedom connotes the presence of something, usually a power or a capacity of some kind. If somebody ties a bird to the ground, this means it lacks the negative Freedom to fly. The reason it cannot fly is because someone stops it. However, suppose the reason the bird cannot fly is that it is a penguin—a flightless bird. It does not have the positive Freedom to fly. The reason it cannot fly is because it lacks the relevant capacity, not because there is an obstacle in its way.

Philosophers have offered a number of accounts of negative Freedom. One straightforward definition is that Freedom is the absence of any obstacles to achieving one's goals. On this view, anything—including other people, the weather, animals, laws of physics—that make it more difficult to achieve ones ends counts as an infringement on Freedom. This definition, like most, allows that there is a continuum between being completely free and completely unfree. A person with no obstacles is freer than a person with one major obstacle, which is in turn freer than a person with two major obstacles.

The Value of Freedom

Once one settles on an account of what Freedom is, one can then ...