Blog - 6/29/25 - Freedom
Freedom is the power to think, speak or act as one wants without hindrance or restraint. License is freedom that allows or is used with irresponsibility. We must use our wisdom to distinguish between the exercise of moral freedom and license.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In the Declaration of Independence, liberty meant freedom from a tyrannical ruler (the king of England), and freedom from exploitation. In the 18th century, freedom still principally signified freedom from domination by others and few people saw much reason for maximizing choice-making opportunities. Freedom had a moral content. It imposed heavy obligations on those fortunate enough to enjoy it. It was not the ability to choose whatever one wanted but the ability to act without restraint for the general good.
After the industrial revolution, in much of the Western world, human fulfillment and human liberation themselves came to be associated with the ability to choose. Choice went from being a benefit of freedom to freedom's very essence. As a result, personal experience and private life--as opposed to communal experience and public life--increasingly became recognized as the principal source of political values.
Both having choices and making choices are largely what count these days as being, indeed feeling, free. Is the association of freedom with value-neutral choice-making a good thing? Moralists warn that in the choice of things we are more often directed by the caprice of fashions, and the customs of the age, than we are by solid reason or our understanding. The fetishization of individual preferences could be seen as leading to a world washed clean of moral concerns, replaced with nothing more than prices and cash.
As we are all aware, the vast expansion of choice in the modern world does not always lead us to feel free and fulfilled. Choice has metastasized and turned oppressive. The oppression can take relatively trivial forms: for instance, the paralysis induced in a giant supermarket by the sight of over 40,000 separate products on sale, including hundreds of different varieties of shampoo, soap, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and mustard. And this range of choice, of course, is nothing compared with what is available online. Amazon stocks 12.2 million individual products of its own and sells over 340 million more. Sometimes, the contemporary obligation of continuous personal choice-making in daily life has turned into a source of exhaustion, distress, even loneliness and alienation. The excess of choices can also do direct material harm, for example when the large and confusing range of available loan products allowed unscrupulous real estate agents to trick millions of unsophisticated home buyers into mortgages that led them straight into bankruptcy during the financial crisis of 2008.
Choice itself needs to be more explicitly linked to basic moral considerations. The problem, though, is that precious little agreement exists in our society as to what these basic moral considerations actually consist of, and democracy is a terrible means of deciding on them.**
As an American, I have the ability to choose to gamble regularly, maximize my use of oil and gas, and inject collagen into my lips. Since it's not against the law we have the "right" to do these things, and certainly the corporations behind these products would lobby intensely to keep these practices legal, but what about the underlying moral consideration? How do these behaviors contribute to the common good?
While many of us are hyper-focussed on our freedom of choice, the original freedoms that this country was founded on, namely to not be ruled by an oppressive monarch, are deteriorating.
It seems that the more we advance as a society, the more we feel the need to legislate. Set limits. Raise fences. Make the rules clear. And, if possible, make the punishments even clearer for those who dare to violate them.
The problem is that the more it is regulated from outside, the less it is from within. The more we have to look at society to know what we can or cannot do, the less we will develop a moral of our own that starts from good sense and empathy.
As Albert Camus warned, "I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules...Where lucidity reigns, a scale of values becomes unnecessary." Camus does not accept the existence of absolute values that can govern his life, but neither does he deny the scale of social values nor does he intend to destroy it to raise an altar to nihilism.
Absolute freedom leads to repression. "You are always free at the expense of someone else", said Caligula. Sometimes, while exercising our freedom, we cross personal boundaries to interfere with the freedom of others and restrict it. That is why Camus does not propose the search for absolute freedom that can degenerate into debauchery and chaos, but advocates a sense of justice and order based on individual conscience. (psychology-spot.com)