Liberty handout

Freedom is overlooked as a legal and social concept, with few attempts to define it. Lon Fuller articulated the critical question about freedom: “How can the freedom of human beings be affected or advanced by social arrangement, that is by laws, customs, institutions, or other forms of social order that can be changed or preserved by purposive human actions?” Freedom needs to be defined in the context of this question—as an ideal to be advanced by our social institutions, laws, and customs. The article first begins with a framework for freedom established by Lon Fuller in a neglected article which emphasized "freedom to" rather than "freedom from." The article then posits that freedom is a certain kind of relationship that exists between individuals and their kin, tribe, religious society, city, state, sovereign, or other body politic under conditions in which (1) such body is subject to the rule of law with real checks on power such that legal standards be general, promulgated, clear, prospective, consistent, satisfiable, stable and applied; (2) there exists democratic and representative government at all pertinent levels of community in which the individual is engaged and by which arrangements the individual's actions may from time to time be legitimately directed; (3) fundamental human rights are not only expressed in the constitution and law, but operate as trumps on the will of the majority or sovereign; and(4) the general welfare or social justice is sufficiently observed that the exercise of fundamental rights and privileges is meaningful, but such rights and privileges are not suppressed by attempts to serve general welfare or social justice. Each of these four “modalities” is explored in turn. The article also applies concepts of law as social planning from Yale Professor Scott Shapiro's new book, Legality, to affirm the role of government to enhance choice and individual freedom. In its truest sense, freedom is similar to citizenship, with both attendant rights and obligations. Forthcoming in Pace Law Review 37.2 (2017).

2000

Liberal Düşünce Dergisi, 2007

the answer is reasonably clear. You area free when nothing prevents you doing what you want. You are free in society, free in the social sense, when other people don't prevent you from doing what you want. _ and an answer At this point we face the fi rst of many important complications. Suppose you have some awful disease, such as cancer. It may well be interfering extensively with your ability to carry on your life. At worst, it might kill you, or leave you incapable of doing much of anything at all. In one obvious sense, a person in that condition is "unfree." And yet, that same person might be as free as it is possible to be in the political and moral sense. Nobody gave him the cancer, nobody is infl icting it on him. It isn't anybody's fault -neither that of the poor victim himself, nor is it anyone else's fault. However, as we all know, there is intense pressure in modern countries in the direction of imposing taxes on all and sundry in order to create and maintain institutions for reducing the threat or the potency of cancer. And this might be done in the name of freedom, since, after all, cancer (and so on) no doubt can be reasonably described as undercutting the freedom of the person who suffers from it. Yes, it may: but as I pointed out, it may also be true that the cancer is nobody's doing. This is not always so, to be sure. I do not address here the cases in which it perhaps is somebody's doing: perhaps it was brought on by smoking, say. However, the interesting cases for present purposes are those in which there is no individual or set of them on whom we can put the blame. We are interested in the case where it "just happens." But taxes, of course, do not "just happen." They are deliberately imposed by governments on citizens. It may sometimes feel like it, but taxes really do not just fall out of the sky on us. Death and taxes are both said to be inevitable, but they are hugely different in that the fi rst happens no matter what -whereas the second happens by deliberate human choice. And not everybody's choice, either. Enthusiasts for democracy, especially, have a habit of insisting that what democratically elected governments do is, as it were, done by each and everyone of us, just because we all have the vote. That's what Al Queda said in reference to the murdering of all those people in the Twin Trade Towers: Americans were all equally to blame, since the all had the vote and all paid taxes. Uh, huh. But it's a fraud, of course. What a majority of my fellow countrymen do is one thing, and what I do is another. The fact is that when people are taxed, they are being deprived of income which (normally) they made, and this is an imposition on their liberty. Cancer may be an imposition on my liberty, but it's not an imposition by my fellow men. Taxes imposed on me are such an imposition, and they are imposed by my fellow men. It is possible to think that we ought to have a choice about this. But we typically don't.

Journal of Religion and Society, 2021

Today, freedom is often seen as a negative quality, relieved of constraints and unhitched from morality. This libertarian concept of freedom clashes with more positive notions of freedom as "power to do good," found in classical philosophy and in traditional religions. We note resonances between the author's Catholic position and concepts of freedom proposed by Aristotle and by ancient and modern Jewish writers who argue that true freedom is not amoral, but is inseparable from justice and from private and civic virtue. While oppressive or inappropriate constraints can obviously damage our freedom, wellchosen constraints can enhance it, and are necessary for a fair and humane society. We consider firstly some basic philosophical notions of freedom and, in general terms, their practical consequences; secondly the implications for our economies and societies of how freedom is understood and practiced; finally, some considerations on what a positive and moral concept of freedom implies for political issues and public policy.

International Journal of Advanced Research

If you ask one hundred people this question, you"ll receive one hundred different answers, because every person understands this phenomenon in his or her own way. I wonder whether this notion can be accurately defined and it seems to me that the answer is no. Steiner says that we must look for freedom in conscious action. He doesn't say that we will necessarily find it! He explores the various compulsions of motives at different levels, and points out that freedom does not exist if we are still within the grip of the various forces acting within us. What is freedom? Is it an absolute right? We are born to become free. Freedom is defined from different aspects and according to different cultures, freedom varies from one culture to another. Some define freedom as a natural right, the human being is born with. Everyone wants to be free and independent from others. Freedom is the right to do what one wants, live where he wants, eat what he wants, learns what he wants, and chooses the religion in which he believes, without ignoring or harming other rights. The concept of freedom has a long history before it was recognized as a fundamental human right by the international community, and has been entrenched in various legal documents. How can we live free? From my point of view, we can live free by respecting others rights to live free too. We can"t ignore the rights of the people with whom we live in the society. We can"t simply do what we want and ignore others. We must take other people rights into consideration. The idea behind freedom is to be respectful and useful to our society. Freedom is important to everyone. If someone is deprived from this innate right, he will definitely feel as if he is not a respectful human being. When freedom is guaranteed, I can think freely, go where I want, say my opinion without fear from people who would not like my opinion. Freedom of opinion is among the most important branches of freedom.

2013

Political Theory, 2010

Contemporary political philosophers discuss the idea of freedom in terms of two distinctions: Berlin's famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, and Skinner and Pettit's divide between liberal and republican liberty. In this essay I proceed to recast the debate by showing that there are two strands in liberalism, Hobbesian and Lockean, and that the latter inherited its conception of civil liberty from republican thought. I also argue that the contemporary debate on freedom lacks a perspicuous account of the various conceptions of freedom, mainly because it leaves aside the classic contrast between natural liberty and civil liberty. Once we consider both the negative/positive distinction and the natural/civil one, we can classify all conceptions of freedom within four basic irreducible categories. In light of the resulting framework I show that there are two distinct conceptions of republican liberty, natural and civil, and that the former is coupled with an ideal of individual self-control.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2021

I want to expound the fundamental thought of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts: a freely acting individual is her relation to every other freely acting individual. Their relation is this: they know each other to be free. This knowledge is practical, that is, it is activity, and it is a relation, that is, they who are so related act one toward the other. This knowledge, this activity, this relation, which the free individual is, is the relation of right.