The Nature of Authentic Freedom

In posts to these pages, when I refer to freedom, I generally refer to authentic freedom. I do so to distinguish my conception of freedom from the libertarian conception that would be naturally assumed in this context. Recently I was asked to explain my conception of freedom.

Humans are social animal. Our survival depends on cooperation with one another to overcome the scarcity we face in the natural world. We are an intelligent species, and we are found in intelligently collaborative groups. The terms and conditions of this collaboration form the basis of our collective life and the background for our individual life. These terms and conditions, at the most basic level, form our political culture, our "system of justice."

It is within the context of a system of justice that we speak of freedom. Freedom is our notion of the boundary between the individual and the collective, the balance of rights and duties that ensures to the individual the good of humane dignity and self-respect in the face of the necessity to cooperate with others. Freedom protects the individual from the claims of the collective and requires the collective to work for the individual, and not against him. Freedom ensures to the individual a life worth living.

In this formulation I do not make reference to force, aggression, or coercion. What is important is preservation of human dignity and self respect from degradation by the collective arrangements we must enter into. Collective arrangements may be inhumane whatever form they may take: the family, a corporation, a school, or the state. Authentic freedom is concerned with the proper balance between the individual and the individual's obligations and duties in society as a whole. Whether a relationship may be involuntary (family or state) or voluntary (employment or place of worship) in nature, human dignity, self respect, and a life worth living must be preserved.

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls defines the characteristic principles of liberal conceptions of justice.* A system of justice may reasonably be characterized as liberal if...

• First, it enumerates basic rights and liberties of the kind familiar from a constitutional regime;
  
  
• Second, it assigns these rights, liberties, and opportunities a special priority, especially with respect to the claims of the general good and values of a prefectionistic nature; and
  
  
• Third, it assures for all citizens the requisite primary goods to enable them to make intelligent and effective use of their freedoms.

The third characteristic is important to ensuring that freedom is authentic. Rawls explains* that the guarantee of constitutional liberties alone constitutes a mere formalism. Alone, without the additional guarantee of the proper basic, all-purpose goods, the constitutional protection of a bill of rights constitutes an impoverishment of liberalism, and indeed, not a liberalism at all. It is, rather, libertarianism. The guarantee of, for instance, a basic education to all, distinguishes a liberal from a libertarian conception of justice. This guarantee is essential to ensuring that our freedoms produce a social life that provides us not only with survival, but with a life worth living.

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* Section 1.2, page 14.
* Section 5.3, page 49.