I can understand how it could be considered that in a very non-free society, but no. Freedom exists only as an equilibrium between your freedom and that of others, between paralyzing order and utter chaos.
But in the end we all win, for each unit of freedom we give away (or invest), we get more back (ideally).
So is equilibrium the right word? Or maybe we are talking about different things. I don't know, I'm not making a statement or counter-argument here, just thinking out loud.
There are definitely attempts in the world to restrict freedom not in the word of efficiency, but control and power. The line between the two can be blurry.
Seems like you are describing freedom from consequences, not the ability to make choices, because that's available now and to the barbarian. I'm not sure which society has no consequences.
By that logic, there is no such thing as restriction of freedom, as it assumes even someone's ability to jail you does not restrict your freedom in any way. People in jail are free as a corollary. How is this not absurd? It only makes sense if you hate freedom and want to argue against it to people low on rhetoric.
* Freedom is the limitation of choice.
My counter-argument is this:
Limitations on choice through potential consequences are ultimately self-imposed. To have any effect, they require me to refuse to consider the possibility of the alternative. To the extent they limit my action, it is through my choice, possibly implicit, to let them limit my actions. The option of making the choice never goes away no matter how grievous the potential consequence.
Since this is in a discussion around a post by Snowden, we can take him as an example. He did something that, according to this theory of freedom, is impossible. He wasn't free to do it, his choice was limited by potential punishment. Yet he did, the possibility of making the supposedly impossible choice was still there.
Consider a hypothetical man who has lived isolated indoors all life playing video games, never gone to school, never watched TV, nobody told him about any consequences. One day at the age of 25 he finally discovers a door to the outside and goes through and thinks "oh man, this is like GTA!" and goes around punching the elderly, stealing things, breaking all manner of laws as he has been taught is how you get points. Eventually the strange man is caught and sent to prison, but until that point, was he more free than we are? He was subject to the same laws and social consequences as we are, but they weren't able to limit his choices because of his ignorance. Clearly it can't be the laws themselves that limit choices if this is the case.
It appears to me there is something strange about the given definition of freedom. It lends itself to producing paradoxes, where people who aren't free are capable of being simultaneously free, and the same sources of limitation successfully limit some people but not others based on what attitude they have toward them. This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete.
Assuming you meant the literal opposite, I can agree there's a bit of nuance but it's true in the "spirit of the law" sense. I really don't understand why you're still trying to take it so literally.
>This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete
Words aren't perfect nor immutable, no definition is complete, but it's relatively easy to see what it's trying to say. It does not follow an absolute implication that punishment is not a restriction of freedom. There are less ambiguous definitions but this one is acceptable and beautifully simple.
If it were code it'd be a single-liner that works for 99.9% of users. But the "best" implementation works for 99.91%, is slow, 200 lines, no one understands and inexplicably broke for someone.
I don't think the poetic appeal of the definition is useful if the definition itself lends itself to contradictions.
When we read authors too close to home that say things we already think are true and share our views, we'll let almost any nonsense argument slip by. That's a waste of time if I ever saw one.
Reading philosophy books is difficult (for me), because my instinct is to have a conversation, ask questions, explore notions and branches, spend more time on some things than others. It's the railroad aspect of philosophy books (whether I "agree" or "disagree", which is rarely binary), that makes them feel stifling :-/
Even the classics like Plato - or perhaps most particularly classics like Plato - they tend to lose me after the first dozen "As everybody can plainly see...." "We can all agree that..." "It is an understood fact that...".
Maybe it's you who has already made up their mind?
Okay so I am in prison. Am I still totally free in that moment?
The question isn't whether we are free under all circumstances, but whether we are free now.
I think it more often means "permissible" or "practical".
Not really that different to today, except that it's a circle of elders and their lead is codified in laws.
But breaking these laws will still get you "banished" aka deported if you are not a citizen, and if you are citizen you will face consequences for your noncompliance, which in some places can still reach all the way up to the death sentence.
So in a way it's still all just barbaric societies, but with extra steps.
You've got it. Proper civilization and a free society are still a long way off. Laws and democracy limit the variance (good and bad) but don't automatically create a better outcome. We still need people to make the right decisions. And these systems of law and democracy which serve mainly to promote stability introduce their own problems by encouraging people to confuse "legal" or "popular" with "right", and "illegal" or "unpopular" with "wrong".
Would appreciate your thoughts
EDIT: in any case, beyond a fairly low minimum, freedom is usually not so much about raw number of choices as it is about relative number of choices, comparing what options others have access to and what options do we have access to. So I think we should focus and work more towards "healthy freedom ranges" and freedom equality and coverage (not leaving some people out) than pretending that any single change increases or reduces our freedom in a dramatic fixed amount. To me, the freedom scale is clearly not linear. (Now I'm not even so sure "freedom" is the right word to focus on. It's more about "unobstructed human potential" than about "possibilities" to me.)
As surveillance gets easier, we need to choose having crime for the sake of privacy. As the manufacture of dangerous materials and weapons gets easier, we need to choose between living in a more dangerous world, or slowing human progress.
Not every culture has the same risk tolerance. Not every time period has the same risks.
I'm not saying decentralizing more is gonna give you more freedom, more like a different take. I think your point is still valid, there has to be an equilibrium and I just don't know where it lays.
The idea that we would have to revert to independent bands of hunter-gatherers to achieve freedom acts as a mental block. This is not to say that this movement away from freedom is completely ahistorical but that cultural attitudes about power have been much more dynamic, flexible, and even seasonal than the kind of linear movement toward inevitable constraints that might fit into the theory. By examining the many different types of arrengements people have instituted, we might learn new ways of organizing ourselves. There are plenty of opportunities to do so in the world today.
A lot of canals and turnpikes were also built by the government--the Erie Canal and the National Road being preeminent examples. Contemporary railroads, such as the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad were usually private. Land grants for railroads were largely limited to the western railroads and for a surprisingly short period of time--only about 1850-1871 were major land grants being used for railroads.
Overall, railroads got roughly the same amount of government support as did canals and roads, maybe even somewhat less. Although this should generally be understood as all infrastructure more or less requiring generous amounts of government support.
What are you talking about? Snowden is talking about the Freedom of the mind.
There's also an important difference between negative and positive rights/freedoms.
I notice that this discussion nests inside moral philosophy. We need to grapple with the tools and constructs in that discipline when thinking about freedom.
I think it’s more to do with how interconnected we all are now. A few centuries ago the ripple effects of your decision might impact a hundred people. Now it might reach thousands. Or more.
What does this mean? As in your freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose? Or something else?
The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.
The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.
You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.