Welcome friends!
Ah yes, freedom. I don’t know why but it’s been on mind a lot recently. Such a complicated and elusive issue or that’s the way it seems to me anyway. Just the type of thing I like to think about for my little blog posts. You’ve got to think about something so you might as well think about something a little funny and messed up, right? Simple issues are just so damned boring. (Fortunately in my experience almost nothing is as simple as some people would have it be, but still …) Anyway, a couple of random thoughts about freedom crossed my mind the other day so I thought I’d spend a few moments to jot them down.
My first thought is that the concept of freedom has both an external and internal dimension and both dimensions have their share of interesting features. I considered just talking about both dimensions in this post but maybe that’s too much so let me just say a few words about the external dimension of freedom this time and next time I’ll take up the internal dimension (depending on what manner of lunacy hits the news in the interim, but in a future post anyway).
So what do I mean by the external dimension of freedom? Well, I’m thinking of the sort of freedom that appears to emanate from one’s environment as opposed to emanating from one’s own head or heart. Now this external dimension of freedom seems to me to also have two dimensions: what one might call a legal dimension and another I suppose one might call a material dimension. That in turn leads me to my first observation about the external dimension of freedom. For some reason or other I think people in the US and possibly other Western countries as well tend to think of external freedom primarily in terms of the legal dimension rather than the material dimension and even then only in a peculiarly restricted sense of the legal dimension. And that’s just a recipe for confusion all around.
What the heck am I babbling about? Well, let me just set up a little example to get the discussion going on a more concrete basis. Let’s say some guy has fallen on hard times and is living under a bridge but sees a castle on a hill and says to himself, “I think I’ll go live in that castle.” Lo and behold, he finds it impossible. He actually makes it to the castle one day and forces the door but the police arrive and promptly cart him off to jail. Consider the following question: Was this guy ever free to live in the castle?
You see where I’m going with this, right? Hello! Ambiguous language alert! The answer clearly depends on what we mean by freedom in this context and that’s just not all that obvious to me. One way to think about this issue would be to check if there were any government laws or edicts that expressly prohibited the guy from moving into the castle. You know, something like, “It is hereby decreed no one living under the bridge shall henceforth live in the castle.” If there were a law like that on the books I think we’d all be on the same page in saying, no, apparently this guy was not free to live in the castle. That’s what I’m calling the legal dimension of the external dimension of freedom. Is whatever it is allowed under the law? (By the way, I hope having two levels of dimensions isn’t too confusing for anyone. I’m just too lazy to get out the thesaurus right now.)
What about the case where there is no such law or edict? Well, now I think we’re starting to get into a more ambiguous and hence interesting situation. One perspective might be to say, yes, the guy was free to live in the castle, he just didn’t have enough money to buy it and thus obtain the legal right to live there. I suppose one might say he was free to live in the castle conditional on the fact that he came up with the money to buy it. Hmm, so now in place of or in addition to our questions about freedom we have questions about conditional freedom. I’m not sure we’ve made all that much progress because one thing we would probably want to check is whether there were any laws or edicts that prohibited the guy from coming up with the money to buy the castle. Anyway, it would seem a little strange to me to say the guy was free to live in the castle conditional on his coming up with the money to buy the castle in the context of a law that prohibited him from obtaining the necessary funds. In that situation I think the answer would again be pretty clear: the guy was apparently not free to live in the castle. In that case we would still be dealing primarily with the legal dimension of freedom even though we would be starting to see the intrusion of a more material sense of freedom in terms of money and economic power serving as the intermediary between what this guy wants and what he can actually get.
What about the case where there is no such law or edict? Well, market systems entail certain legal rules or if you want to use academic language institutions governing how one can legally obtain money, and they typically also come with requirements that one pay at least something in taxes, and those rules and requirements might theoretically have prevented the guy in question from accumulating enough dough to buy the castle. You know, maybe if he could have just robbed a bank or skipped out on his taxes for a year or three he would have been in the place like a shot but since he was sticking to the rules then no. So did the presence of these legal rules limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle? The situation is getting a little more interesting (to me anyway) because now we’re operating at the nexus of legal and material freedom and the language is starting to get a little weird.
If you’re thinking yes, those legal rules limited the guy’s freedom to live in the castle, and like most people you put a positive value on freedom, then you’re well on your way to developing that particular malady of the imagination known as anarchism in which one sees government and laws and property rights and so on as impediments to freedom rather than as expressions of or even requirements for freedom. But surely that’s a funny way to look at the situation. What would happen if we eliminated those rules? Let’s say by hook or by crook the guy managed to rake in enough cash to buy the castle and move in. Let’s say the following week a more heavily armed and better financed group of miscreants kicked in the front door and promptly threw the guy out the window. Why not? Certainly sounds to me like the guy wouldn’t have been free to live in the castle under those conditions. He’s lying on the pavement at this point. It seems to me we’re now talking strictly about the material dimension of freedom. Laws have nothing to do with it but just try it sometime and see what happens. By the way, you know the situation I’m describing here corresponds to how they actually managed things for centuries in the bad old days, right? I’m not just making things up over here. Heck, they’re probably still doing things this way is certain places around the globe right now.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking no, those legal rules did not limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle and were, instead, what rendered it even theoretically possible for him to do so by creating the legal framework that would allow him to accumulate funds without getting ripped off and robbed by other people and that would also enforce his property rights if ever he got enough cash to buy the place. So under this perspective the legal rules surrounding the market system supported the guy’s freedom to live in the castle. However, the fact of the matter remains that under these rules the guy might still have been unable to accumulate the required amount of money, right? If he wasn’t born to money, didn’t have a head for business and finance, wasn’t drawn to fields that were particularly lucrative, had the misfortune of living during a recession, depression, war, and so on, well then the guy would most likely have been out of luck. So even with these rules and institutions the guy wouldn’t necessarily have been free to live in the castle in a material sense.
Of course, in order to accommodate the guy’s desire to live in the castle we could always have changed things around not only in terms of the legal framework surrounding how he could accumulate money and the policies affecting his overall economic situation but directly in terms of the distribution of castles. For example, we could theoretically have said something like, look, a lot of people want to live in the castle and we think it’s important they all have that experience so we’re passing a law that everyone can live in the castle for a week. (Yes, the guy was either living on a very small island or there were an awful lot of castles about, but that’s not important here.) That would seem to me to render the guy free to live in the castle, at least for a few days. But that would represent a rather limited sort of freedom, would it not? He would still have to move out by the end of the week and in a sense such a rule would also limit his freedom to live in the castle for longer than a week.
By this point you may be thinking yes, yes, I get it: lots of issues about freedom. What’s the point? Fair question. It’s interesting to me because it seems to me many people get a little funny when they think about issues of the general type of people wanting to live in castles, that is, distributional issues. In particular, many people seem to me to want to discuss these issues in the language of personal freedom but to me that just seems so confusing for the reasons I’ve just discussed. You know, what kind of freedom? Whose freedom? It just seems so much clearer to me to talk about these distributional issues in terms of, well, the morality of distributing resources along certain dimensions. Look, we’ve got a castle on a hill. Who’s going to live there? Why? It’s all about how we specify the winners and losers under a given economic system for distributing scarce resources. And I’m not saying it’s a simple issue by any means. I certainly don’t know the answer, although I have some ideas we could discuss someday. Maybe it involves future considerations such as incentives or the question of who can best care for the castle. Maybe it involves who would get the most out of living in the castle. Maybe it involves who has the strongest right to live in the castle. But one thing seems clear to me: the only way to make the issue appear to hinge on freedom is to pretend other people don’t exist so the issue becomes merely what one wants to do and one’s freedom to do it. But we all know other people actually do exist, right? So we’re not going to get anywhere if all we can agree upon is that freedom is good.
If you’ve read my previous posts then you’ll recognize all I’m really doing here is going over yet again the liberal ethos I’m always talking about but this time from a slightly different angle. Recall that under the liberal ethos there is a realm in which one’s actions do not have a significant effect on other people and in that realm it does, indeed, make sense to portray the basic issue as one of supporting or not supporting personal freedom as a sort of general abstract value. But then there’s the other realm in which one’s actions do have a significant effect on other people. That is the realm that includes economic issues like the distribution of scarce resources. In that realm we’re talking about resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires and in that realm it just doesn’t make sense to me to portray the issue as hinging on one’s attitude toward personal freedom. Too many people are involved. If you’re talking about personal freedom in this context all you’re probably doing is talking in circles by meandering willy nilly through various potential conceptions and dimensions of freedom and confusing the hell out of everyone including quite possibly yourself. You’ve got to go beyond the value of freedom and into the messy details of these sorts of interpersonal conflicts. I know, that’s a heck of a lot more work than just saying you support freedom, isn’t it? But that’s the nature of the beast. What else can we do? Start babbling simplistic nonsense like some conservative libertarian or anarchist? Life is complicated. Let’s at least have some fun talking about it.
