freedom in real sense essay

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Locke On Freedom

John Locke’s views on the nature of freedom of action and freedom of will have played an influential role in the philosophy of action and in moral psychology. Locke offers distinctive accounts of action and forbearance, of will and willing, of voluntary (as opposed to involuntary) actions and forbearances, and of freedom (as opposed to necessity). These positions lead him to dismiss the traditional question of free will as absurd, but also raise new questions, such as whether we are (or can be) free in respect of willing and whether we are free to will what we will, questions to which he gives divergent answers. Locke also discusses the (much misunderstood) question of what determines the will, providing one answer to it at one time, and then changing his mind upon consideration of some constructive criticism proposed by his friend, William Molyneux. In conjunction with this change of mind, Locke introduces a new doctrine (concerning the ability to suspend the fulfillment of one’s desires) that has caused much consternation among his interpreters, in part because it threatens incoherence. As we will see, Locke’s initial views do suffer from clear difficulties that are remedied by his later change of mind, all without introducing incoherence.

Note on the text: Locke’s theory of freedom is contained in Book II, Chapter xxi of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . The chapter underwent five revisions in Locke’s lifetime [E1 (1689), E2 (1694), E3 (1695), E4 (1700), and E5 (1706)], with the last edition published posthumously. Significant changes, including a considerable lengthening of the chapter, occur in E2; and important changes appear in E5.

1. Actions and Forbearances

2. will and willing, 3. voluntary vs. involuntary action/forbearance, 4. freedom and necessity, 5. free will, 6. freedom in respect of willing, 7. freedom to will, 8. determination of the will, 9. the doctrine of suspension, 10. compatibilism or incompatibilism, select primary sources, select secondary sources, additional secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

For Locke, the question of whether human beings are free is the question of whether human beings are free with respect to their actions and forbearances . As he puts it:

[T]he Idea of Liberty , is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E1–4 II.xxi.8: 237)

In order to understand Locke’s conception of freedom, then, we need to understand his conception of action and forbearance.

There are three main accounts of Locke’s theory of action. According to what we might call the “Doing” theory of action, actions are things that we do (actively), as contrasted to things that merely happen to us (passively). If someone pushes my arm up, then my arm rises, but, one might say, I did not raise it. That my arm rose is something that happened to me, not something I did . By contrast, when I signal to a friend who has been looking for me, I do something inasmuch as I am not a mere passive recipient of a stimulus over which I have no control. According to some interpreters (e.g., Stuart 2013: 405, 451), Locke’s actions are doings in this sense. According to the “Composite” or “Millian” theory of action, an action is “[n]ot one thing, but a series of two things; the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect” (Mill 1974 [1843]: 55). On this view, for example, the action of raising my hand is composed of (i) willing to produce the effect of my hand’s rising and (ii) the effect itself, where (ii) results from (i). According to some interpreters (arguably, Lowe 1986: 120–121; Lowe 1995: 141—though it is possible that Lowe’s theory applies only to voluntary actions), Locke’s actions are composite in this sense. Finally, according to what we might call the “Deflationary” conception of action, actions are simply motions of bodies or operations of minds.

Some of what Locke says suggests that he holds the “Doing” theory of action: “when [a Body] is set in motion it self, that Motion is rather a Passion, than an Action in it”, for “when the Ball obeys the stroke of a Billiard-stick, it is not any action of the Ball, but bare passion” (E1–5 II.xxi.4: 235—see also E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285–286). Here Locke is clearly working with a sense of “action” according to which actions are opposed to passions. But, on reflection, it is unlikely that this is what Locke means by “action” when he writes about voluntary/involuntary actions and freedom of action. For Locke describes “a Man striking himself, or his Friend, by a Convulsive motion of his Arm, which it is not in his Power…to…forbear” as “acting” (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238), and describes the convulsive leg motion caused by “that odd Disease called Chorea Sancti Viti [St. Vitus’s Dance]” as an “Action” (E1–5 II.xxi.11: 239). It would be a mistake to think of these convulsive motions as “doings”, for they are clearly things that “happen” to us in just the way that it happens to me that my arm rises when someone else raises it. Examples of convulsive actions also suggest that the Millian account of Locke’s theory of action is mistaken. For in the case of convulsive motion, there is no volition that one’s limbs move; indeed, if there is volition in such cases, it is usually a volition that one’s limbs not move. Such actions, then, cannot be composed of a volition and the motion that is willed, for the relevant volition is absent (more on volition below).

We are therefore left with the Deflationary conception of action, which is well supported by the text. There are, Locke says, “but two sorts of Action, whereof we have any Idea , viz. Thinking and Motion” (E1–5 II.xxi.4: 235—see also E1–5 II.xxi.8: 237 and E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285); “Thinking, and Motion…are the two Ideas which comprehend in them all Action” (E1–5 II.xxii.10: 293). It may be that, in the sense in which “action” is opposed to “passion”, some corporeal motions and mental operations, being produced by external causes rather than self-initiated, are not actions. But that is not the sense in which all motions and thoughts are “called and counted Actions ” in Locke’s theory of action (E4–5 II.xxi.72: 285). As seems clear, convulsive motions are actions inasmuch as they are motions, and thoughts that occur in the mind unbidden are actions inasmuch as they are mental operations.

What, then, according to Locke, are forbearances? On some interpretations (close counterparts to the Millian conception of action), Locke takes forbearances to be voluntary not-doings (e.g., Stuart 2013: 407) or voluntary omissions to act (e.g., Lowe 1995: 123). There are texts that suggest as much:

sitting still , or holding one’s peace , when walking or speaking are propos’d, [are] mere forbearances, requiring…the determination of the Will . (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248)

However, Locke distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary forbearances (E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236), and it makes no sense to characterize an involuntary forbearance as an involuntary voluntary not-doing. So it is unlikely that Locke thinks of forbearances as voluntary not-doings. This leaves the Deflationary conception of forbearance, according to which a forbearance is the opposite of an action, namely an episode of rest or absence of thought. On this conception, to say that someone forbore running is to say that she did not run, not that she voluntarily failed to run. Every forbearance would be an instance of inaction, not a refraining.

In E2–5, Locke stipulates that he uses the word “action” to “comprehend the forbearance too of any Action proposed”, in order to “avoid the multiplying of words” (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248). The reason he so stipulates is not that he literally takes forbearances to be actions (as he puts it, they “pass for” actions), but that most everything that he wants to say about actions (in particular, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, and the account of freedom of action) applies pari passu to forbearances (see below).

Within the category of actions, Locke distinguishes between those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. To understand this distinction, we need to understand Locke’s account of the will and his account of willing (or volition). For Locke, the will is a power (ability, faculty—see E1–5 II.xxi.20: 244) possessed by a person (or by that person’s mind). Locke explains how we come by the idea of power (in Humean vein, as the result of observation of constant conjunctions—“like Changes [being] made, in the same things, by like Agents, and by the like ways” (E1–5 II.xxi.1: 233)), but does not offer a theory of the nature of power. What we are told is that “ Powers are Relations” (E1–5 II.xxi.19: 243), relations “to Action or Change” (E1–5 II.xxi.3: 234), and that powers are either active (powers to make changes) or passive (powers to receive changes) (E1–5 II.xxi.2: 234). In this sense, the will is an active relation to actions.

Locke’s predecessors had thought of the will as intimately related to the faculty of desire or appetite. For the Scholastics (whose works Locke read as a student at Oxford), the will is the power of rational appetite. For Thomas Hobbes (by whom Locke was deeply influenced even though this was not something he could advertise, because Hobbes was a pariah in Locke’s intellectual and political circles), the will is simply the power of desire itself. Remnants of this desiderative conception of the will remain in Locke’s theory, particularly in the first edition of the Essay . Here, for example, is Locke’s official E1 account of the will:

This Power the Mind has to prefer the consideration of any Idea to the not considering it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest. (E1 II.xxi.5: 236)

And here is Locke’s official E1 account of preferring:

Well, but what is this Preferring ? It is nothing but the being pleased more with the one , than the other . (E1 II.xxi.28: 248)

So, in E1, the will is the mind’s power to be more pleased with the consideration of an idea than with the not considering it, or to be more pleased with the motion of a part of one’s body than with its remaining at rest. When we lack something that would deliver more pleasure than we currently experience, we become uneasy at its absence. And this kind of uneasiness (or pain: E1–5 II.vii.1: 128), is what Locke describes as desire (E1–5 II.xx.6: 230; E2–5 II.xxi.31–32: 251) (though also as “joined with”, “scarce distinguishable from”, and a “cause” of desire—see Section 8 below). So, in E1, the will is the mind’s power to desire or want the consideration of an idea more than the not considering it, or to desire or want the motion of a part of one’s body more than its remaining at rest. (At E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236, Locke adds “and vice versâ ”, to clarify that it can also happen, even according to the E1 account, that one prefers not considering an idea to considering it, or not moving to moving.) [ 1 ]

In keeping with this conception of the will as desire, Locke in E1 then defines an exercise of the will, which he calls “willing” or “volition”, as an “actual preferring” of one thing to another (E1 II.xxi.5: 236). For example, I have the power to prefer the upward motion of my arm to its remaining at rest by my side. This power, in E1, is one aspect of my will. When I exercise this power, I actually prefer the upward motion of my arm to its remaining at rest, i.e., I am more pleased with my arm’s upward motion than I am with its continuing to rest. This is what Locke, in E1, thinks of as my willing the upward motion of my arm (or, as he sometimes puts it, my willing or volition to move my arm upward ).

In E2–5, Locke explicitly gives up this conception of the will and willing, explaining why he does so, making corresponding changes in the text of the Essay , even while leaving passages that continue to suggest the desiderative conception. He writes: “[T]hough a Man would preferr flying to walking, yet who can say he ever wills it?” (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 241). The thought here is that, as Locke (rightly) recognizes, my being more pleased with flying than walking does not consist in (or even entail) my willing to fly. This is in large part because it is necessarily implied in willing motion of a certain sort that one exert dominion that one takes oneself to have (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 241), that “the mind [endeavor] to give rise…to [the motion], which it takes to be in its power” (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250). So if I do not believe that it is in my power to fly, then it is impossible for me to will the motion of flying, even though I might be more pleased with flying than I am with any alternative. Locke concludes (with the understatement) that “ Preferring which seems perhaps best to express the Act of Volition , does it not precisely” (E2–5 II.xxi.15: 240–241).

In addition, Locke points out that it is possible for “the Will and Desire [to] run counter”. For example, as a result of being coerced or threatened, I might will to persuade someone of something, even though I desire that I not succeed in persuading her. Or, suffering from gout, I might desire to be eased of the pain in my feet, and yet at the same time, recognizing that the translation of such pain would affect my health for the worse, will that I not be eased of my foot pain. In concluding that “ desiring and willing are two distinct Acts of the mind”, Locke must be assuming (reasonably) that it is not possible to will an action and its contrary at the same time (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250). [ 2 ]

With what conception of the will and willing does Locke replace the abandoned desiderative conception? The answer is that in E2–5 Locke describes the will as a kind of directive or commanding faculty, the power to direct (or issue commands to) one’s body or mind: it is, he writes,

a Power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds, and motions of our Bodies, barely by a thought or preference of the mind ordering, or as it were commanding the doing or not doing such or such particular action. (E2–5 II.xxi.5: 236)

Consonant with this non-desiderative, directive conception of the will, Locke claims that

Volition , or Willing , is an act of the Mind directing its thought to the production of any Action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it, (E2–5 II.xxi.28: 248)

Volition is nothing, but that particular determination of the mind, whereby, barely by a thought, the mind endeavours to give rise, continuation, or stop to any Action, which it takes to be in its power. (E2–5 II.xxi.30: 250)

Every volition, then, is a volition to act or to forbear , where willing to act is a matter of commanding one’s body to move or one’s mind to think, and willing to forbear is a matter of commanding one’s body to rest or one’s mind not to think. Unlike a desiderative power, which is essentially passive (as involving the ability to be more pleased with one thing than another), the will in E2–5 is an intrinsically active power, the exercise of which involves the issuing of mental commands directed at one’s own body and mind.

Within the category of actions/forbearances, Locke distinguishes between those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. Locke does not define voluntariness and involuntariness in E1, but he does in E2–5:

The forbearance or performance of [an] action, consequent to such order or command of the mind is called Voluntary . And whatsoever action is performed without such a thought of the mind is called Involuntary . (E2–4 II.xxi.5: 236—in E5, “or performance” is omitted from the first sentence)

Locke is telling us that what makes an action/forbearance voluntary is that it is consequent to a volition, and that what makes an action/forbearance involuntary is that it is performed without a volition. The operative words here are “consequent to” and “without”. What do they mean? (Henceforth, following Locke’s lead, I will not distinguish between actions and forbearances unless the context calls for it.)

We can begin with something Locke says only in E1:

Volition, or the Act of Willing, signifies nothing properly, but the actual producing of something that is voluntary. (E1 II.xxi.33: 259)

On reflection, this is mistaken, but it does provide a clue to Locke’s conception of voluntariness. The mistake (of which Locke likely became aware, given that the statement clashes with the rest of his views and was removed from E2–5) is that not every instance of willing an action is followed by the action itself. To use one of Locke’s own examples, if I am locked in a room and will to leave, my volition will not result in my leaving (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). So willing cannot signify the “actual producing” of a voluntary action. However, it is reasonable to assume that, for Locke, willing will “produce” a voluntary action if nothing hinders the willed episode of motion or thought. And this makes it likely that Locke takes a voluntary action to be not merely temporally consequent to, but actually caused by, the right kind of volition (Yaffe 2000; for a contrary view, see Hoffman 2005).

Understandably, some commentators have worried about the problem of deviant causation, and whether Locke has an answer to it (e.g., Lowe 1995: 122–123; Yaffe 2000: 104; Lowe 2005: 141–147). The problem is that if I let go of a climbing rope, not as a direct result of willing to let it go, but as a result of being discomfited/paralyzed/shaken by the volition itself, then my letting go of the rope would not count as voluntary even though it was caused by a volition to let go of the rope. The solution to this problem, if there is one, is to claim that, in order for an action to count as voluntary, it is not sufficient for it to be caused by the right kind of volition: in addition, it is necessary that the action be caused in the right way (or non-deviantly) by the right kind of volition. Spelling out the necessary and sufficient conditions for non-deviant causation is a steep climb. Chances are that Locke was no more aware of this problem, and was in no better position to answer it, than anyone else was before Chisholm (1966), Taylor (1966) and Davidson (1980) brought it to the attention of the philosophical community.

Locke’s view, then, is that an action is voluntary inasmuch as its performance is caused by a volition. The volition, as we have so far presumed, must be of the right kind. For example, Locke would not count the motion of my left arm as voluntary if it were caused by a volition that my right arm move (or a volition that my left arm remain at rest). Locke assumes (reasonably) that in order for an action A to be voluntary, it must be caused (in the right way) by a volition that A occur (or, as Locke sometimes puts it, by a volition to do A ).

What, then, on Locke’s view, is it for an action to be involuntary ? Locke says that an involuntary action is performed “without” a volition. This might suggest that an action of mine is involuntary only when I have no volition that the action occur. Perhaps this is what Locke believes. But it is more reasonable to suppose that Locke would also count as involuntary an action that, though preceded by the right kind of volition, is either not caused by the volition or caused by the volition but not in the right way. [ 3 ]

Some commentators have worried that Locke’s “locked room” example is a problematic illustration of his theory of voluntariness, at least as applied to forbearances (e.g., Lowe 1986: 154–157; Stuart 2013: 420). Locke imagines a man who is “carried, while fast asleep, into a Room, where is a Person he longs to see and speak with”, but who is “there locked fast in, beyond his Power to get out: he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable Company” and “stays willingly” in the room. Locke makes clear that, on his view, the man’s remaining in the room is a voluntary forbearance to leave (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). But one might worry that if the man is unable to leave the room, then it is false to say that his volition not to leave causes his not leaving. At best, it might be argued, the man’s not leaving is overdetermined (Stuart 2013: 420). But, as some authors have recently argued, cases of overdetermination are rightly described as involving two (or more) causes, not a single joint cause or no cause at all (see, e.g., Schaffer 2003). On such a view of overdetermination, it is unproblematic for Locke to describe the man in the locked room as caused to remain both by his volition to remain and by the door’s being locked. [ 4 ]

Another problem that has been raised for Locke stems from his example of a man who falls into a river when a bridge breaks under him. Locke describes the man as willing not to fall, even as he is falling (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238). The worry here is that Locke holds that the objects of volition are actions or forbearances, so the man would need to be described as willing to forbear from falling. But, it might be argued, falling is not an action, for it is something that merely happens to the man, and not an exercise of his agency; so his willingly forbearing from falling would be willingly forbearing from something that is not an action, and this is impossible (Stuart 2013: 405). The answer to this worry is that falling is an action, according to Locke’s Deflationary conception of action, which counts the motion of one’s body in any direction as a bona fide action (see Section 1 above).

Some commentators think that Lockean freedom (or, as Locke also calls it, “liberty”) is a single power, the power to do what one wills (Yolton 1970: 144; D. Locke 1975: 96; O’Higgins 1976: 119—see Chappell 1994: 103). However, as Locke describes it, freedom is a “two-way” power, really a combination of two conditional powers belonging to an agent, that is, to someone endowed with a will (see Chappell 2007: 142). (A tennis ball, for example, “has not Liberty , is not a free Agent”, because it is incapable of volition (E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238).) In E1, Locke’s definition reflects his conception of the will as a power of preferring X to Y , or being more pleased with X than with Y . But in E2–5, Locke’s definition reflects his modified conception of the will as a power to issue commands to one’s body or mind (see Section 2 above):

[S]o far as a Man has a power to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a Man Free . (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237) So that the Idea of Liberty , is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any particular Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237) Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition , or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct. (E2–5 II.xxi.10: 238) Liberty …is the power a Man has to do or forbear doing any particular Action, according as its doing or forbearance has the actual preference in the Mind, which is the same thing as to say, according as he himself wills it. (E1–5 II.xxi.15: 241)

The central claim here is that a human being (person, agent) is free with respect to a particular action A (or forbearance to perform A ) inasmuch as (i) if she wills to do A then she has the power to do A and (ii) if she wills to forbear doing A then she has the power to forbear doing A (see, e.g., Chappell 1994: 103). [ 5 ] So, for example, a woman in a locked room is not free with respect to the act of leaving (or with respect to the forbearance to leave) because she does not have the power to leave if and when she wills to leave, and a woman who is falling (the bridge under her having crumbled) is not free with respect to the forbearance to fall (or with respect to the act of falling) because she does not have the power to forbear falling if she wills not to fall (E1–5 II.xxi.9–10: 238). (Locke describes agents who are unfree with respect to some action as acting under, or by, necessity—E1–5 II.xxi.8: 238; E1–5 II.xxi.9: 238.) But if the door of the room is unlocked, then the woman in the room is able to stay if she wills to stay, and is able to leave if she wills to leave: she is therefore both free with respect to staying and free with respect to leaving.

Notice that freedom, on Locke’s conception of it, is a property of substances (persons, human beings, agents). This simply follows from the fact that freedom is a dual power and from the fact that “ Powers belong only to Agents , and are Attributes only of Substances ” (E1–5 II.xxi.16: 241). At no point does Locke offer an account of performing actions or forbearances freely , as if freedom were a way of performing an action or a way of forbearing to perform an action. (For a contrary view, see LoLordo 2012: 27.)

Locke does write that

[w]here-ever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a Man’s power; where-ever doing or not doing, will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not Free . (E2–5 II.xxi.8: 237)

The “follow upon” language might suggest a counterfactual analysis of the claim that an agent has the power to do A if she wills to do A , namely, that if she were to will to do A then she would do A (e.g., Lowe 1995: 129; Stuart 2013: 407—for a similar account that trades the subjunctive conditionals for indicative conditionals, see Yaffe 2000: 15). The counterfactual analysis is tempting, but also unlikely to capture Locke’s meaning, especially if he has a Deflationary conception of action/forbearance (see Section 1 above). It might happen, for example, that I am prevented (by chains or a force field) from raising my arm, but that if I were to will that my arm rise, you would immediately (break the chains or disable the force field and) raise my arm. Under these conditions, I would not be free with respect to my arm’s rising, but it would be true that if I were to will that my arm rise, then my arm would rise. So Locke’s dual power conception of freedom of action is not captured by any counterfactual conditional or pair of counterfactual conditionals.

Does Locke think that there is a conceptual connection between freedom of action and voluntary action? It might be thought that freedom with respect to a particular action requires that the action be voluntary, so that if an action is not voluntary then one is not free with respect to it. In defense of this, one might point to Locke’s falling man, whose falling is not voluntary and who is also not free with respect to the act of falling (Stuart 2013: 408). But the falling man’s unfreedom with respect to the act of falling is not explained by the involuntariness of his falling. In general, it is possible for one’s action to be involuntary even as one is free with respect to it. Imagine that you let your four-year old daughter raise your arm (just for fun). According to Locke’s conception of voluntariness, the motion of your arm is not voluntary, because it is not caused by any volition of yours (indeed, we can even imagine that you do not even have a volition that your arm rise). But, according to Locke’s conception of freedom, you are most certainly free with respect to your arm’s rising: (i) if you will that your arm rise, you have the power to raise it, and (ii) if you will that your arm not rise, you have the power to forbear raising it.

Voluntariness, then, is not necessary for freedom; but it is also not sufficient for freedom, as Locke’s “locked room” and “paralytick” cases show. The man in the locked room wills to stay and talk to the other person in the room, and this volition is causally responsible for his staying in the room: on Locke’s theory, his remaining in the room is, therefore, voluntary. But the man in the locked room “is not at liberty not to stay, he has not freedom to be gone” (E1–5 II.xxi.10: 238). The reason is that even if the man wills to leave, he does not have the power to leave. Similarly, if the paralyzed person wills to remain at rest (thinking, mistakenly, that he could move if he willed to move) and his remaining at rest is caused (at least in part) by his volition not to move, then his “sitting still…is truly voluntary”. But in this case, says Locke, “there is want of Freedom ” because “a Palsie [hinders] his Legs from obeying the determination of his Mind, if it would thereby transferr his Body to another Place” (E2–5 II.xxi.11: 239): that is, the paralyzed person is unable to move even if he wills to move.

Thus far, we have been focusing on freedom with respect to motion or rest of one’s body . But, as we have seen, Locke thinks that actions encompass acts of mind (in addition to acts of body). So, in addition to thinking that some acts of mind are voluntary (e.g., the mental acts of combining and abstracting ideas involved in the production of abstract ideas of mixed modes—E2–5 II.xxxii.12: 387–388), Locke thinks that we are free with respect to some mental actions (and their forbearances). For example, if I am able to combine two ideas at will, and I am able to forbear combining two ideas if I will not to combine them, then I am free with respect to the mental action of combining two ideas. It can also happen that we are not free with respect to our mental acts:

A Man on the Rack, is not at liberty to lay by the Idea of pain, and divert himself with other Contemplations. (E4–5 II.xxi.12: 239)

In this case, even though the man on the rack might will to be rid of the pain, he does not have the power to avoid feeling it. [ 6 ]

Is the will free? This question made sense to Scholastic philosophers (including, e.g., Bramhall, who engaged in a protracted debate on the subject with Hobbes), who tended not to distinguish between the question of whether the will is free and the question of whether the mind or soul is free with respect to willing, and, indeed, some of whom thought that acts cannot themselves be free (or freely done) unless the will to do them is itself free. But, according to Locke, the question, if literally understood, “is altogether improper” (E1–5 II.xxi.14: 240). This follows directly from Locke’s account of the will and his account of freedom. The will is a power (in E2–5, the power to order the motion or rest of one’s body and the power to order the consideration or non-consideration of an idea—see Section 2 above), and freedom is a power, namely the power to do or not do as one wills (see Section 4 above). But, as Locke emphasizes, the question of whether one power has another power is “a Question at first sight too grosly absurd to make a Dispute, or need an Answer”. The reason is that it is absurd to suppose that powers are capable of having powers, for

Powers belong only to Agents , and are Attributes only of Substances , and not of Powers themselves. (E1–5 II.xxi.16: 241)

The question of whether the will is free, then, presupposes that the will is a substance, rather than a power, and therefore makes no more sense than the question of whether a man’s “Sleep be Swift, or his Vertue square” (E1–5 II.xxi.14: 240). To suppose that the will is free (or unfree!) is therefore to make a category mistake (see Ryle 1949: chapter 1).

The fact that it makes no sense to suppose that the will itself is free (or unfree) does not entail that there are no significant questions to be asked about the relation between freedom and the will. Indeed, Locke thinks that there are two such questions, and that these are the questions that capture “what is meant, when it is disputed, Whether the will be free” (E2–5 II.xxi.22: 245). The first (discussed at E1–5 II.xxi.23–24) is whether agents (human beings, persons) are free with respect to willing-one-way-or-another; more particularly, whether agents are able, if they so will, to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to a proposed action. The second (discussed at E1–5 II.xxi.25) is whether agents are free with respect to willing-a-particular-action. The majority of commentators think that Locke answers both of these questions negatively, at least in E1–4 (see Chappell 1994, Lowe 1995, Jolley 1999, Glauser 2003, Stuart 2013, and Leisinger 2017), and some think that Locke then qualifies his answer(s) in E2–5 in a way that potentially introduces inconsistency into his moral psychology (e.g., Chappell 1994). Other commentators think that Locke answers the first question negatively for most actions, but with one important qualification that is clarified and made more explicit in E5, and that he answers the second question positively, all without falling into inconsistency (Rickless 2000; Garrett 2015). What follows is a summary of the interpretive controversies. In the rest of this Section, we focus on the first question. In the next, we focus on the second question.

In E1–4, Locke states his answer to the first question thus:

[ A ] Man in respect of willing any Action in his power once proposed to his Thoughts cannot be free . (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245)

His argument for the necessity of having either a volition that action A occur or a volition that action A not occur, once A has been proposed to one’s thoughts, is simple and clever: (1) Either A will occur or A will not occur; (2) If A occurs, this will be the result of the agent having willed A to occur; (3) If A does not occur, this will be the result of the agent having willed A not to occur; therefore, (4) The agent necessarily wills one way or the other with respect to A ’s occurrence (see Chappell 1994: 105–106). It follows directly that “in respect of the act of willing , a Man is not free” (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245). For, first, “ Willing , or Volition [is] an Action” (E1–5 II.xxi.23: 245—this because actions comprise motions of the body and operations of mind, and volition is one of the most important mental operations—E1–5 II.vi.2: 128), and, second, freedom with respect to action A , as Locke defines it, consists in (i) the power to do A if one wills to do A and (ii) the power not to do A if one wills not to do A . Thus, if an agent does not have the power to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to A (even if the agent wills to avoid willing one way or the other with respect to A ), then the agent is not free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to A .

In his New Essays on Human Understanding (ready for publication in 1704, but not published then because that was the year of Locke’s death) Gottfried Leibniz famously questions premise (3) of this argument:

I would have thought that one can suspend one’s choice, and that this happens quite often, especially when other thoughts interrupt one’s deliberation. Thus, although it is necessary that the action about which one is deliberating must exist or not exist, it doesn’t follow at all that one necessarily has to decide on its existence or non-existence. For its non-existence could well come about in the absence of any decision. (Leibniz 1704 [1981]: 181)

Leibniz’s worry is that, even if one is thinking about whether or not to do A , it is often possible to postpone willing whether to do A , and the non-occurrence of A might well result from such postponement. Under these conditions, it would be false to say that A ’s non-occurrence results from any sort of volition that A not occur. Leibniz illustrates the claim with an amusing reference to a case that the Areopagites (judges on the Areopagus, the highest court of appeals in Ancient Athens) were having trouble deciding, their solution (i.e., de facto , but not de jure , acquittal) being to adjourn it “to a date in the distant future, giving themselves a hundred years to think about it” (Leibniz 1704 [1981]: 181).

It is something of a concern, then, that Locke himself appears committed to agreeing with Leibniz’s criticism of his own argument, at least in E2–5. For in E2–5 (but not in E1) Locke emphasizes his acceptance of the doctrine of suspension, according to which any agent has the “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”, during which time the will is not yet “determined to action” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263). That is, Locke acknowledges in E2–5, even as he does not remove or alter the argument of II.xxi.23 in E2–4, that it is possible to postpone willing with respect to whether to will one way or the other with respect to some proposed action (see Chappell 1994: 106–107).

However, Locke makes changes in E5 that have suggested to some commentators how he would avoid Leibniz’s criticism without giving up the doctrine of suspension. Recall Locke’s answer to the first question:

[A] Man in respect of willing any Action in his power once proposed to his Thoughts cannot be free. (E1–4 II.xxi.23: 245)

Here, now, is Locke’s restatement of his answer in E5:

[A] Man in respect of willing , or the Act of Volition, when any Action in his power is once proposed to his Thoughts , as presently to be done, cannot be free. (E5 II.xxi.23: 245—added material italicized)

The crucial addition here is the phrase “as presently to be done”. In E5, Locke is not saying that it is with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to any proposed action that an agent is not free: what he is saying is that it is with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to any proposed action as presently to be done that an agent is not free. Some actions that are proposed to us are to occur at the time of proposal : as I am singing, a friend might propose that I stop singing right now . Other actions that are proposed to us are to occur at a time later than the time of proposal : at the beginning of a long bicycle trip, a friend might propose that we take a rest once we have reached our destination. Locke is telling us in E5 that premise (3) is supposed to apply to the former, not to the latter, sort of actions. If this is right, then it is no accident that Locke’s own illustration of the argument of II.xxi.23 involves “a Man that is walking, to whom it is proposed to give off walking” (E1–5 II.xxi.24: 246).

So, as Locke incipiently recognizes as early as E1 but explicitly underlines in E5, his initial answer to the first question is an overgeneralization, and needs to be restricted to those actions that are proposed to us as presently to be done (see Rickless 2000: 49–55; Glauser 2003: 710; Garrett 2015: 274–277). But it is also possible that Locke comes to recognize, and eventually underline, a second restriction. At the moment, I am sitting in a chair. In a few minutes, my children will walk in and propose that I get up and make dinner. I am busy, my mind is occupied, so I will likely postpone (perhaps only for a few minutes) making a decision about whether to get up. The result of such postponement is that I will not get up right away, but this will not be because I have willed not to get up right away. Again, it seems that premise (3) is false, for reasons similar to the ones described by Leibniz. But this time, the relevant action (getting up) is proposed as presently to be done. Locke’s E5 emendations do not explicitly address this sort of example.

However, in E2–5, but not in E1, Locke emphasizes the fact that in his “walking man” example, the man either “continues the Action [of walking], or puts an end to it” (E2–5 II.xxi.24: 246). This suggests a different restriction, on top of the “as presently to be done” restriction. It may be that Locke is thinking that premise (3) applies, not to actions of all kinds, but only to processes in which one is currently engaged. The walking man is already in motion, constantly putting one leg in front of the other. When it is proposed to him that he give off walking, he has no option but to will one way or the other with respect to whether to give off walking: if he stops walking, this will be because he willed that his walking cease; and if he continues to walk, this will be because he willed that his walking continue. Either way, he must will one way or the other with respect to whether to stop walking. By contrast, when I am sitting in my chair, I am not engaged in a process: I am (or, at least, my body is) simply at rest. It is for this reason that it is possible for me to avoid willing with respect to whether to get up right now: processes require volition to secure their continuation, but mere states (non-processes) do not (see Rickless 2000: 49–55; for a contrary view, see Glauser 2003: 710).

Locke’s considered answer to the first question, then, is this: (i) when an action that is a process in which the agent is currently engaged is proposed as presently to be continued or stopped, the agent is not free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to its continuing, but (ii) when an action is not a process in which the agent is currently engaged or is proposed as to be done sometime in the future, then it is possible for the agent to be free with respect to willing one way or the other with respect to its performance or non-performance. Given that, as Locke puts it in E5, the vast majority of voluntary actions “that succeed one another every moment that we are awake” (E5 II.xxi.24: 246) are (i)-actions rather than (ii)-actions, it makes sense for him to summarize his answer to the first question as that it is “in most cases [that] a Man is not at Liberty to forbear the act of volition” (E5 II.xxi.56: 270). But, as Locke also emphasizes, one has the ability, at least with respect to (ii)-actions, to suspend willing. So there is no inconsistency at the heart of Locke’s theory of freedom in respect of willing.

The second question regarding the relation between freedom and the will that Locke takes to be significant is “ Whether a Man be at liberty to will which of the two he pleases , Motion or Rest ” (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247). Consider a particular action A . What Locke is asking is whether an agent is free with respect to the action of willing that A occur . For example, suppose that I am sitting in a chair and that A is the action of walking to the fridge. Locke wants to know whether I am free with respect to willing the action of walking to the fridge.

Most commentators think that Locke’s answer to this question is NO. The main evidence for this interpretation is what Locke says about the question immediately after raising it:

This Question carries the absurdity of it so manifestly in it self, that one might thereby sufficiently be convinced, that Liberty concerns not the Will. (E5 II.xxi.25: 247)

It is tempting to suppose that the thought that “Liberty concerns not the Will” is the thought that agents are not free to will, and that Locke is saying that we are driven to this thought because the second question is absurd, in the sense of demanding a negative answer.

But it is difficult to make sense of what Locke goes on to say in II.xxi.25 if he is interpreted as answering the second question negatively. Section 25 continues:

For to ask, whether a Man be at liberty to will either Motion, or Rest; Speaking, or Silence; which he pleases, is to ask, whether a Man can will , what he wills ; or be pleased with what he is pleased with. (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247)

Locke says that the second question reduces to another that can be put in two different ways: whether a man can will what he wills, and whether a man can be pleased with what pleases him. (The reason it can be put in these two different ways, at least in E1, is that Locke there adopts a desiderative theory of willing, according to which willing an action is a matter of being more pleased with the action than with its forbearance.) But asking whether a man can will what he wills, or whether a man can be pleased with what he is pleased with, is similar to asking whether a man can steal what he steals. And the answer to all of these questions is: “OF COURSE!”

It is obvious that whatever it is that a man actually steals he can steal. Similarly, it is obvious that whatever it is that a man actually wills (or is actually pleased with) is something that he can will (or can be pleased with). The reason is that it is a self-evident maxim (just as self-evident as the maxim that whatever is, is—see E1–5 IV.vii.4: 592–594) that whatever is actual is possible. Locke, it seems, wishes to answer the second question in the affirmative!

This raises the issue of what Locke could possibly mean, then, when he describes the second question as “absurd”. One possibility is that, for Locke, a question counts as absurd not only when the answer to it is obviously in the negative (think: “Is the will free?”), but also when the answer to it is obviously in the affirmative (think: “Is it possible for you to do what you are actually doing?”). But it also raises the issue of why Locke would think that the second question actually reduces to an absurd question of the latter sort. One possible solution derives from Locke’s theory of freedom of action. As we have seen, Locke thinks that one is free with respect to action A if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to do A , then one can do A , and (ii) if one (actually) wills not to do A , then one can avoid doing A . Applying this theory directly to the case in which A is the action of willing to do B , we arrive at the following: one is free with respect to willing to do B if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to will to do B , then one can will to do B , and (ii) if one (actually) wills to avoid willing to do B , then one can avoid willing to do B . Suppose, then, that willing to will to do an action is just willing to do that action, and willing to avoid willing to do an action is just not willing to do that action. In that case, one is free with respect to willing to do B if and only if (i) if one (actually) wills to do B , then one can will to do B , and (ii) if one (actually) avoids willing to do B , then one can avoid willing to do B . Given that actuality obviously entails possibility, it follows that (i) and (ii) are both obviously true. This is one explanation for why Locke might think that the question of whether one is free with respect to willing to do B reduces to an absurd question, the answer to which is obviously in the affirmative. It may be for this reason that Locke says that the question is one that “needs no answer” (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247).

Locke goes on to say, at the end of II.xxi.25, that

they, who can make a Question of it [i.e., of the second question], must suppose one Will to determine the Acts of another, and another to determinate that; and so on in infinitum . (E1–5 II.xxi.25: 247)

It is unclear what Locke means by this. One possibility, consistent with the majority interpretation that Locke provides a negative answer to the second question, is that Locke is providing an argument here for the claim that the proposition that it is possible to be free with respect to willing to do an action leads to a vicious infinite regress of wills. The thought here is that being free with respect to willing to do an action, on Locke’s theory, requires being able to will to do an action if one wills to will to do it; that being free with respect to willing to will to do an action then requires being able to will to will to do it if one wills to will to will to do it; and so on, ad infinitum . But another possible interpretation, consistent with the minority interpretation that Locke provides an affirmative answer to the second question, is that Locke’s argument here is not meant to target those who answer the question affirmatively, but is rather designed to target those who would “make a question” of the second question, i.e., those who think that the answer to the second question is un obvious, and worth disputing. These people are the ones who think that willing to will to do A does not reduce to willing to do A , and that willing to avoid willing to do A does not reduce to avoiding willing to do A . These are the people who are committed to the existence of an infinite regress of wills, each determining the volitions of its successor. According to Locke, who accepts the reductions, the infinite regress of wills can’t get started (see Rickless 2000: 56–65; Garrett 2015: 269–274).

The next important question for Locke is “what is it determines the Will” (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249—the question is also raised in the same Section in E1). Locke gives one answer to this question in E1, and a completely different answer in E2–5. The E1 answer is that the will is always determined by “ the greater Good ” (E1 II.xxi.29: 251), though, when he is writing more carefully, Locke says that it is only “the appearance of Good, greater Good” that determines the will (E1 II.xxi.33: 256, E1 II.xxi.38: 270). Regarding the good, Locke is a hedonist:

Good and Evil…are nothing but Pleasure and Pain, or that which occasions, or procures Pleasure or Pain to us. (E1–5 II.xxviii.5: 351—see also E1–5 II.xx.2: 229 and E2–5 II.xxi.42: 259)

So Locke’s E1 view is that the will is determined by what appears to us to promise pleasure and avoid pain.

When in 1692 Locke asks his friend, William Molyneux, to comment on the first (1690) edition of the Essay , Molyneux expressly worries that Locke’s E1 account of freedom appears to “make all Sins to proceed from our Understandings, or to be against Conscience; and not at all from the Depravity of our Wills”, and that “it seems harsh to say, that a Man shall be Damn’d, because he understands no better than he does” (de Beer 1979: 601). Molyneux’s point is well taken, and Locke acknowledges as much in his reply (de Beer 1979: 625). The source of the problem for the E1 account is that, with respect to the good (at least in the future), appearance does not always correspond with reality: it is possible for us to make mistakes about what is apt to produce the greatest pleasure and the least pain. Sometimes this is because we underestimate how pleasurable future pleasures will be (relative to present pleasures) or overestimate how painful present pains are (relative to future pains); and sometimes this is because we just make simple mistakes of fact, thinking, for example, that bloodletting will ease the pain of gout. As Molyneux sees it, we are not responsible for many of these mistakes, and yet it seems clear that we deserve (divine) punishment for making the wrong choices in our lives (e.g., when we choose the present pleasures of debauchery and villainy over the pleasures of heaven). Our sins, in other words, should be understood to proceed from the defective exercise of our wills, rather than from the defective state of our knowledge.

Part of Locke’s answer in E2–5 is that what determines the will is not the appearance of greater good, but rather “always some uneasiness” (E2–4 II.xxi.29: 249—the word “uneasiness” is italicized in E5). “Uneasiness” is Locke’s word for “[a]ll pain of the body of what sort soever, and disquiet of the mind” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251). On this view, then, our wills are determined by pains (of the mind or of the body). How this answer is supposed to address Molyneux’s concern is not, as yet, entirely clear.

What, to begin, does Locke mean by “determination”? On a “causal” reading, for a will W to be determined by X is for X to cause W to be exercised in a particular way. One might say, for example, that fear of the tiger caused Bill to choose to run away from it, and, in one sense, that Bill’s volition to run away from the tiger was determined by his fear of it. On a “teleological” reading, for a will W to be determined by X is for the agent to will the achievement or avoidance of X as a goal. One might say, for example, that the pleasure of eating the cake determined my will in the sense of fixing the content of my volition (as the volition to acquire the pleasure of eating the cake) (see Stuart 2013: 439; LoLordo 2012: 55–56).

It would be anachronistic to suppose that Locke is using the word “determine” as we do today when we discuss causal determinism (see the entry on causal determinism ). And the desire to avoid anachronism might lead us to adopt the teleological interpretation of determination. But there are many indications in E2–5 II.xxi that Locke has something approaching the causal interpretation in mind. Locke’s picture of bodies, both large and small, is largely a mechanistic one (though he allows for phenomena that can’t be explained mechanistically, such as gravitation, cohesion of body parts, and magnetism): bodies, he writes, “knock, impell, and resist one another,…and that is all they can do” (E1–5 IV.x.10: 624). And there are indications that this mechanistic model of corporeal behavior affects Locke’s model of mental phenomena. Throughout the Sections of II.xxi added in E2–5, Locke talks of uneasiness moving the mind (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.43–44: 260), setting us upon a change of state or action or work (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251; E2–5 II.xxi.37: 255; E2–5 II.xxi.44: 260), working on the mind (E2–5 II.xxi.29: 249; E2–5 II.xxi.33: 252), exerting pressure (E2–5 II.xxi.32: 251; E2–5 II.xxi.45: 262), driving us (E2–5 II.xxi.34: 252; E2–5 II.xxi.35: 253), pushing us (E2–5 II.xxi.34: 252), operating on the will, sometimes forcibly (E2–5 II.xxi.36: 254; E2–5 II.xxi.37: 255; E2–5 II.xxi.57: 271), laying hold on the will (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 256), influencing the will (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 256; E2–5 II.xxi.39: 257), taking the will (E2–5 II.xxi.45: 262), spurring to action (E2–5 II.xxi.40: 258), carrying us into action (E2–5 II.xxi.53: 268), and being counterbalanced by other mental states (E2–5 II.xxi.57: 272; E2–5 II.xxi.65: 277). It is difficult to read all of these statements without thinking that Locke thinks of uneasiness as exerting not merely a pull, but also a push, on the mind.

Locke’s view, then, seems to be that our volitions are caused (though not, perhaps, deterministically, i.e., in a way that is fixed by initial conditions and the laws of nature) by uneasinesses. How is this supposed to work? As Locke sees it, either “all pain causes desire equal to it self” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251) or desire is simply identified with “ uneasiness in the want [i.e., lack] of an absent good” (E2–5 II.xxi.31: 251). So the desire that either is or is caused by uneasiness is a desire for the removal of that uneasiness, and this is what proximately spurs us to take means to secure that removal.

Locke provides evidence from observation and from “the reason of the thing” for the claim that it is uneasiness, rather than perceived good, that determines the will. Empirically, Locke notes that agents generally do not seek a change of state unless they experience some sort of pain that leads them to will its extinction. A poor, indolent man who is content with his lot, even one who recognizes that he would be happier if he worked his way to greater wealth, is not ipso facto motivated to work. A drunkard who recognizes that his health will suffer and wealth will dissipate if he continues to drink does not, merely as a result of this recognition, stop drinking: but if he finds himself thirsty for drink and uneasy at the thought of missing his drinking companions, then he will go to the tavern. That is, Locke recognizes the possibility of akratic action, i.e., pursuing the worse in full knowledge that it is worse (E II.xxi.35: 253–254). (For more on Locke on akrasia, see Vailati 1990, Glauser 2014, and Moauro and Rickless 2019.)

Regarding “the reason of the thing”, Locke claims that “we constantly desire happiness” (E2–5 II.xxi.39: 257), where happiness is “the utmost Pleasure we are capable of” (E2–5 II.xxi.42: 258). Moreover, he says, any amount of uneasiness is inconsistent with happiness, “a little pain serving to marr all the pleasure” we experience. Locke concludes from this that we are always motivated to get rid of pain before securing any particular pleasure (E2–5 II.xxi.36: 254). Locke also argues that absent goods cannot move the will, because they don’t exist yet; by contrast, on his theory, the will is determined by something that already exists in the mind, namely uneasiness (E2–5 II.xxi.37: 254–255). Finally, Locke argues that if the will were determined by the perceived greater good, every agent would be consistently focused on the attainment of “the infinite eternal Joys of Heaven”. But, as is evidently the case, many agents are far more concerned about other matters than they are about getting into heaven. And this entails that the will must be determined by something other than the perceived greater good, namely, uneasiness (E2–5 II.xxi.38: 255–256). (For interesting criticisms of these arguments, see Stuart 2013: 453–456.)

So far, Locke has argued that the wrong turns we make in life do not usually proceed from defects in our understandings. What spurs us to act or forbear acting is not perception of the greater good, but some uneasiness instead. This answers part, but not the whole, of Molyneux’s worry. What Locke still needs to explain is why agents can be justly held responsible for choices that are motivated by uneasinesses. After all, what level of pain we feel and when we feel it is oftentimes not within our control. Locke’s answer relies on what has come to be known as the “doctrine of suspension”.

Having argued that uneasiness, rather than perception of the greater good, is what determines the will, Locke turns to the question of which of all the uneasinesses that beset us “has the precedency in determining the will to the next action”. His answer:

that ordinarily, which is the most pressing of those [uneasinesses], that are judged capable of being then removed. (E2–5 II.xxi.40: 257)

Locke therefore assumes that uneasinesses can be ranked in order of intensity or strength, and that among all the uneasinesses importuning an agent, the one that ordinarily determines her will is the one that exerts the greatest pressure on her mind. The picture with which Locke appears to be working is of a mind that is the playground of various forces of varying strengths exerting different degrees of influence on the will, where the will is determined by the strongest of those forces.

Notice, however, Locke’s use of the word “ordinarily”. Sometimes, as Locke emphasizes, the will is not determined by the most pressing uneasiness:

For the mind having in most cases, as is evident in Experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263)

This is the doctrine of suspension. On this view, we agents have the “power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will , and engaging us in action” (E2–5 II.xxi.50: 266). As Locke makes clear, this power to prevent the will’s determination, that is, this power to avoid willing, is absent when the action proposed is to be done presently and involves the continuation or stopping of a process in which one is currently engaged (see Section 6 above). But when it comes to “chusing a remote [i.e., future] Good as an end to be pursued”, agents are “at Liberty in respect of willing ” (E5 II.xxi.56: 270). [ 7 ]

Some commentators (e.g., Chappell 1994: 118) think that, at least in E5, Locke comes to see that the doctrine of suspension conflicts with his answer to the question of whether we are free to will what we will (raised in II.xxi.25). This is because they take Locke’s answer to the latter question to be negative, and take the doctrine of suspension to entail a positive answer to the same question, at least with respect to some actions. But there are good reasons to think that there is no inconsistency here: for Locke’s answer to the II.xxi.25 question is arguably in the affirmative (see Section 7 above). [ 8 ]

Commentators also wonder whether the doctrine of suspension introduces an account of freedom that differs from Locke’s official account, both in E1 and in E2–5. The problem is that Locke says that “in [the power to suspend the prosecution of one’s desires] lies the liberty Man has”, that the power to suspend is “the source of all liberty” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263), that it is “the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual Beings” (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 266), and that it is “the great inlet, and exercise of all the liberty Men have, are capable of, or can be useful to them” (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 267). These passages suggest that Locke takes freedom to be (something intimately related to) the power to suspend our desires, a power that cannot simply be identified with the two-way power that Locke identifies with freedom of action at II.xxi.8 ff. (see Yaffe 2000: 12–74).

But there is a simple interpretation of these passages that does not require us to read Locke as offering a different account of freedom as the ability to suspend. The power to suspend is the power to keep one’s will from being determined, that is, the power to forbear willing to do A if one wills to forbear willing to do A . This is just one part of the freedom to will to do A , according to Locke’s definition of freedom of action applied to the action of willing to do A . (The other part is the power to will to do A if one wills to will to do A .) Thus if, as Locke seems to argue in II.xxi.23–24, we are (except under very unusual circumstances) free with respect to the act of willing with respect to a future course of action, then it follows immediately that we have the power to suspend. Locke’s claims about the power to suspend being the source of all liberty and the hinge on which liberty turns can be understood as claims that the power to suspend is a particularly important aspect of freedom of action as applied to the action of willing. What makes it important is the fact that it is the misuse of this freedom that accounts for our responsibility for actions that conduce to our own unhappiness or misery.

How so? Locke claims that the power of suspension was given to us (by God) for a reason, so that we might “examine, view, and judge, of the good or evil of what we are going to do” (E2–5 II.xxi.47: 263) in order to discover

whether that particular thing, which is then proposed, or desired, lie in the way to [our] main end, and make a real part of that which is [our] greatest good. (E2–5 II.xxi.52: 267)

When we make the kinds of mistakes for which we deserve punishment, such as falling into gluttony or envy or selfishness, it is not because we have, after deliberation and investigation, perhaps through no fault of our own, acquired a mistaken view of the facts; it is because we engage in “a too hasty compliance with our desires” (E2–5 II.xxi.53: 268) and fail to “hinder blind Precipitancy” (E2–5 II.xxi.67: 279). What matters is not that we have failed to will the forbearing to will to go to the movies or clean the fridge. What matters is that we have failed to will the forbearing to prosecute our most pressing desires, allowing ourselves to be guided by uneasinesses that might, for all we know, lead us to evil. If we have the power to suspend the prosecution of our desires (including our most pressing desire), then we misuse it when we do not exercise it (or when we fail to exercise it when its exercise is called for). So, not only is Locke’s doctrine of suspension consistent with his account of the freedom to will, it also provides part of the answer to Molyneux’s worry:

And here we may see how it comes to pass, that a Man may justly incur punishment…: Because, by a too hasty choice of his own making, he has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil…He has vitiated his own Palate, and must be answerable to himself for the sickness and death that follows from it. (E2–5 II.xxi.56: 270–271) [ 9 ]

Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with causal determinism, and incompatibilism is the thesis that free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Is Locke a compatibilist or an incompatibilist?

The fact that Locke thinks that freedom of action is compatible with the will’s being determined by uneasiness might immediately suggest that Locke is a compatibilist. But, as we have seen ( Section 8 above), it is illegitimate to infer compatibility with causal determinism from compatibility with determination of the will by uneasiness. Still, the evidence strongly suggests that Locke would have embraced compatibilism, if the issue had been put to him directly. Freedom of action, on Locke’s account, is a matter of being able to do what one wills and being able to forbear what one wills to forbear. Although we sometimes act under necessity (compulsion or restraint—E1–5 II.xxi.13: 240), the mere fact (if it is a fact) that our actions are determined by the laws of nature and antecedent events does not threaten our freedom with respect to their performance. As Locke makes clear, if the door to my room is unlocked, I am free with respect to the act of leaving the room, because I have the ability to stay or leave as I will. It is only when the door is locked, or when I am chained, or when my path is blocked, or something else deprives me of the ability to stay or leave, that I am unfree with respect to the act of leaving. Determinism by itself represents no threat to our freedom of action. In this respect, Locke is a forerunner of many other compatibilist theories of freedom, including, for example, those of G.E. Moore (1912) and A.J. Ayer (1954). (For a contrary view, see Schouls 1992: 121. And for a response to Schouls 1992, see Davidson 2003: 213 ff.)

• de Beer, E.S. (ed), 1979, The Correspondence of John Locke , volume 4, Letters 1242–1701, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1704 [1981], New Essays on Human Understanding , edited by Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Locke, John, 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , edited by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Ayer, A.J., 1954, “Freedom and Necessity”, in Philosophical Essays , London: Macmillan, pp. 271–284.
• Chappell, Vere, 1994, “Locke on the Freedom of the Will”, in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context , edited by G.A.J. Rogers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–121.
• –––, 2004, “Review of Liberty Worth the Name , by Gideon Yaffe”, Mind , 113: 420–424.
• –––, 2007, “Power in Locke’s Essay ”, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” , edited by Lex Newman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–156.
• Chisholm, Roderick, 1966, “Freedom and Action”, in Freedom and Determinism , edited by Keith Lehrer, New York: Random House, pp. 11–44.
• Davidson, Donald, 1980, “Freedom to Act”, in Essays on Actions and Events , Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 63–81.
• Davidson, Jack D., 2003, “Locke’s Finely Spun Liberty”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 33: 203–227.
• Dicker, Georges, 2019, Locke on Knowledge and Reality: A Commentary on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 9.
• Garrett, Don, 2015, “Liberty and Suspension in Locke’s Theory of the Will”, in A Companion to Locke , edited by Matthew Stuart, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 260–278.
• Glauser, Richard, 2003, “Thinking and Willing in Locke’s Theory of Human Freedom”, Dialogue , 42: 695–724.
• –––, 2014, ‘Locke and the Problem of Weakness of the Will’, in Mind, Values, and Metaphysics , Anne Reboul (ed.), Cham: Springer, pp. 483–499.
• Hoffman, Paul, 2005, “Locke on the Locked Room”, Locke Studies , 5: 57–73.
• Jolley, Nicholas, 1999, Locke: His Philosophical Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Leisinger, Matthew A., 2017, ‘Locke’s Arguments Against the Freedom to Will’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 25: 642–662.
• Locke, Don, 1975, “Three Concepts of Free Action, Part 1”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplemental Volume), 49: 95–112.
• LoLordo, Antonia, 2012, Locke’s Moral Man , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lowe, E.J., 1986, “Necessity and the Will in Locke’s Theory of Action”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 3: 149–163.
• –––, 1995, Locke on Human Understanding , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, “Locke: Compatibilist Event-Causalist or Libertarian Substance-Causalist?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 48: 688–701.
• –––, 2005, Locke , London: Routledge.
• Magri, Tito, 2000, “Locke, Suspension of Desire, and the Remote Good”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 8: 55–70.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1974 [1843], System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive , in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , Vol. 7, edited by J.M. Robson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Moauro, Leonardo, and Rickless, Samuel C., 2019, ‘Does Locke Have an Akrasia Problem?’, Journal of Modern Philosophy , 1: 9. doi:10.32881/jomp.39
• Moore, G.E., 1912, Ethics , London: Williams and Norgate.
• O’Higgins, J., 1976, “Introduction” and “Notes”, in Determinism and Freewill: Anthony Collins’ A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty , edited by J. O’Higgins, The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 1–45 and 115–124.
• Rickless, Samuel C., 2000, “Locke on the Freedom to Will”, Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies ), 31: 43–67.
• –––, 2001, “Review of Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency , by Gideon Yaffe”, Locke Studies , 1: 235–255.
• –––, 2014, Locke , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Ryle, Gilbert, 1949, The Concept of Mind , London: Hutchinson.
• Schaffer, Jonathan, 2003, “Overdetermining Causes”, Philosophical Studies , 114: 23–45.
• Schouls, Peter, 1992, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Stuart, Matthew, 2013, Locke’s Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Taylor, Richard, 1966, Action and Purpose , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Vailati, Ezio, 1990, ‘Leibniz on Locke on Weakness of Will’, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 28: 213–228.
• Walsh, Julie, 2014, “Locke and the Power to Suspend Desire”, Locke Studies , 14: 121–157.
• –––, 2018, ‘Locke’s Last Word on Freedom: Correspondence with Limborch’, Res Philosophica , 95: 637–661.
• Yaffe, Gideon, 2000, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Yolton, John W., 1970, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Broad, Jacqueline, 2006, “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability”, Journal of the History of Ideas , 67: 489–510.
• Chappell, Vere, 1994, “Locke on the Intellectual Basis of Sin”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 32: 197–207.
• –––, 1998, “Locke on the Suspension of Desire”, Locke Newsletter (now Locke Studies ), 29: 23–38.
• Colman, John, 1983, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Corneanu, Sorana, 2011, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Darwall, Stephen, 1995, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, 1640–1740 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Glauser, Richard, 2009, “Liberté, Compatibilisme et Agnosticisme chez Locke”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 107: 675–697.
• Harris, James, 2005, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• LoLordo, Antonia, 2013, “Reply to Rickless”, Locke Studies , 13: 55–64.
• Marko, Jonathan S., 2017, ‘Why Locke’s Of Power Is Not a Metaphysical Pronouncement: Locke’s Response to Molyneux’s Critique’, Philosophy and Theology: Marquette University Quarterly , 29: 41–68.
• Rickless, Samuel C., 2013, “Locke on Active Power, Freedom, and Moral Agency”, Locke Studies , 13: 33–54.
• –––, 2013, ‘Will and Motivation’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century , Peter R. Anstey (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 393–414.
• Schindler, D. C., 2017, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, Chapter 1.
• Sleigh, Robert, Vere Chappell, and Michael Della Rocca, 1998, ‘Determinism and Human Freedom’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy , Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Volume 2: 1195–1278.
• Walsh, Julie, 2010, “‘Things’ for ‘Actions’: Locke’s Mistake in ‘Of Power’”, Locke Studies , 10: 85–94.
• Wolfe, Charles T, 2009, “Locke’s Compatibilism: Suspension of Desire of Suspension of Determinism?” in Action, Ethics and Responsibility , edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and Harry Silverstein, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 109–126.
• Yaffe, Gideon, 2001, “Locke on Refraining, Suspending, and the Freedom to Will”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 18: 373–391.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Locke: Ethics entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , by Julie Walsh.

agency | Collins, Anthony | compatibilism | determinism: causal | euthanasia: voluntary | free will | Hobbes, Thomas | Hume, David: on free will | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | Locke, John | Locke, John: moral philosophy | Masham, Lady Damaris

Copyright © 2020 by Samuel Rickless < srickless @ ucsd . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

The New York Times

Opinionator | freedom and reality: a response.

Freedom and Reality: A Response

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

It has been a privilege to read the comments posted in response to my July 25 th post, “ The Limits of the Coded World ” and I am exceedingly grateful for the time, energy and passion so many readers put into them. While my first temptation was to answer each and every one, reality began to set in as the numbers increased, and I soon realized I would have to settle for a more general response treating as many of the objections and remarks as I could. This is what I would like to do now.

Free will does not need to be “saved” from determinism, because there was never any real threat there to begin with, from either science or religion.

If I had to distill my entire response into one sentence, it would be this: it’s not about the monkeys! It was unfortunate that the details of the monkey experiment — in which researchers were able to use computers wired to the monkey’s brains to predict the outcome of certain decisions — dominated so much attention, since it could have been replaced by mention of any number of similar experiments, or indeed by a fictional scenario. My intention in bringing it up at all was twofold: first, to take an example of the sort of research that has repeatedly sparked sensationalist commentary in the popular press about the end of free will; and second, to show how plausible and in some sense automatic the link between predictability and the problem of free will can be (which was born out by the number of readers who used the experiment to start their own inquiry into free will).

As readers know, my next step was to argue that predictability no more indicates lack of free will than does unpredictability indicate its presence. Several readers noted an apparent contradiction between this claim, that “we have no reason to assume that either predictability or lack of predictability has anything to say about free will,” and one of the article’s concluding statements, that “I am free because neither science nor religion can ever tell me, with certainty, what my future will be and what I should do about it.”

Indeed, when juxtaposed without the intervening text, the statements seem clearly opposed. However, not only is there no contradiction between them, the entire weight of my arguments depends on understanding why there is none. In the first sentence I am talking about using models to more or less accurately guess at future outcomes; in the second I am talking about a model of the ultimate nature of reality as a kind of knowledge waiting to be decoded — what I called in the article “the code of codes,” a phrase I lifted from one of my mentors, the late Richard Rorty — and how the impossibility of that model is what guarantees freedom.

The reason why predictability in the first sense has no bearing on free will is, in fact, precisely because predictability in the second sense is impossible. The theoretical predictability of everything that occurs in a universe whose ultimate reality is conceived of as a kind of knowledge or code is what goes by the shorthand of determinism. In the old debate between free will and determinism, determinism has always played the default position, the backdrop from which free will must be wrested if we are to have any defensible concept of responsibility. From what I could tell, a great number of commentators on my article shared at least this idea with Galen Strawson : that we live in a deterministic universe, and if the concept of free will has any importance at all it is merely as a kind of necessary illusion. My position is precisely the opposite: free will does not need to be “saved” from determinism, because there was never any real threat there to begin with, either of a scientific nature or a religious one.

Knowledge can never be complete. Completed knowledge is oxymoronic, self-defeating.

The reason for this is that when we assume a deterministic universe of any kind we are implicitly importing into our thinking the code of codes, a model of reality that is not only false, but also logically impossible. Let’s see why.

To make a choice that in any sense could be considered “free,” we would have to claim that it was at some point unconstrained. But, the hard determinist would argue, there can never be any point at which a choice is unconstrained, because even if we exclude any and all obvious constraints, such as hunger or coercion, the chooser is constrained by (and this is Strawson’s “basic argument”) how he or she is at the time of the choosing, a sum total of effects over which he or she could never exercise causality.

This constraint of “how he or she is,” however, is pure fiction, a treatment of tangible reality as if it were decodable knowledge, requiring a kind of God’s eye perspective capable of knowing every instance and every possible interpretation of every aspect of a person’s history, culture, genes and general chemistry, to mention only a few variables. It refers to a reality that self-proclaimed rationalists and science advocates pay lip service to in their insistence on basing all claims on hard, tangible facts, but is in fact as elusive, as metaphysical and ultimately as incompatible with anything we could call human knowledge as would be a monotheistic religion’s understanding of God.

When some readers sardonically (I assume) reduced by argument to “ignorance=freedom,” then, they were right in a way; but the rub lies in how we understand ignorance. The commonplace understanding would miss the point entirely: it is not ignorance against the backdrop of ultimate knowledge that equates to freedom; rather, it is constitutive, essential ignorance. This, again, needs expansion.

Knowledge can never be complete. This is the case not merely because there will always be something more to know; rather, it is so because completed knowledge is oxymoronic, self-defeating. AI theorists have long dreamed of what Daniel Dennett once called heterophenomenology, the idea that, with an accurate-enough understanding of the human brain my description of another person’s experience could become indiscernible from that experience itself. My point it not merely that heterophenomenology is impossible from a technological perspective or undesirable from an ethical perspective; rather, it is impossible from a logical perspective, since the very phenomenon we are seeking to describe, in this case the conscious experience of another person, would cease to exist without the minimal opacity separating his or her consciousness from mine. Analogously, all knowledge requires this kind of minimal opacity, because knowing something involves, at a minimum, a synthesis of discrete perceptions across space or time.

Richard Dawkins has called those espousing open dialogue between faith and science “the Neville Chamberlain school of evolution.”

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated this point with implacable rigor in a story about a man who loses the ability to forget, and with that also ceases to think, perceive, and eventually to live, because, as Borges points out, thinking necessarily involves abstraction, the forgetting of differences. Because of what we can thus call our constitutive ignorance, then, we are free — only and precisely because as beings who cannot possibly occupy all times and spatial perspectives without thereby ceasing to be what we are, we are constantly faced with choices. All these choices — to the extent that they are choices and not simply responses to stimuli or reactions to forces exerted on us — have at least some element that cannot be traced to a direct determination, but could only be blamed, for the sake of defending a deterministic thesis, on the ideal and completely fanciful determinism of “how we are” at the time of the decision to be made.

Far from a mere philosophical wish fulfillment or fuzzy, humanistic thinking, then, this kind of freedom is real, hard-nosed and practical. Indeed, courts of law and ethics panels may take specific determinations into account when casting judgment on responsibility, but most of us would agree that it would be absurd for them to waste time considering philosophical, scientific or religious theories of general determinism. The purpose of  both my original piece and this response  has been to show that, philosophically speaking as well, this real and practical freedom has nothing to fear from philosophical, scientific or religious pipedreams.

This last remark leads me to the one more issue that many readers brought up, and which I can only touch on now in passing: religion. In a recent blog post Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, labels me an “accommodationist” who tries to “denigrate science” and vindicate “other ways of knowing.” Professor Coyne goes on to contrast my (alleged) position to “the scientific ‘model of the world,'” which, he adds, has “been extraordinarily successful at solving problems, while other ‘models’ haven’t done squat.” Passing over the fact that, far from denigrating them, I am fervent and open admirer of the natural sciences (my first academic interests were physics and mathematics), I’m content to let Professor Coyne’s dismissal of every cultural, literary, philosophical or artistic achievement in history speak for itself.

What I find of interest here is the label accommodationism, because the intent behind the current deployment of the term by the new atheist block is to associate explicitly those so labeled with the tragic failure of the Chamberlain government to stand up to Hitler. Indeed, Richard Dawkins has called those espousing open dialogue between faith and science “the Neville Chamberlain school of evolution.” One can only be astonished by the audacity of the rhetorical game they are playing: somehow with a twist of the tongue those arguing for greater intellectual tolerance have been allied with the worst example of intolerance in history.

One of the aims of my recent work has indeed been to provide a philosophical defense of moderate religious belief. Certain ways of believing, I have argued, are extremely effective at undermining the implicit model of reality supporting the philosophical mistake I described above, a model of reality that religious fundamentalists also depend on. While fundamentalisms of all kinds are unified in their belief that the ultimate nature of reality is a code that can be read and understood, religious moderates, along with those secularists we would call agnostics, are profoundly suspicious of any claims that one can come to know reality as it is in itself. I believe that such believers and skeptics are neither less scientific nor less religious for their suspicion. They are, however, more tolerant of discord; more prone to dialog, to patient inquiry, to trial and error, and to acknowledging the potential insights of other ways of thinking and other disciplines than their own. They are less righteously assured of the certainty of their own positions and have, historically, been less inclined to be prodded to violence than those who are beholden to the code of codes. If being an accommodationist means promoting these values, then I welcome the label.

William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His next book, “In Defense of Religious Moderation,” will be published by Columbia University Press in 2011.

What's Next

Tools for thinking: Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of freedom

Freedoms and restrictions. Stand on the right. Don’t smoke. Photo by Phil Dolby/Flickr

by Maria Kasmirli   + BIO

‘Freedom’ is a powerful word. We all respond positively to it, and under its banner revolutions have been started, wars have been fought, and political campaigns are continually being waged. But what exactly do we mean by ‘freedom’? The fact that politicians of all parties claim to believe in freedom suggests that people don’t always have the same thing in mind when they talk about it. Might there be different kinds of freedom and, if so, could the different kinds conflict with each other? Could the promotion of one kind of freedom limit another kind? Could people even be coerced in the name of freedom?

The 20th-century political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) thought that the answer to both these questions was ‘Yes’, and in his essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) he distinguished two kinds of freedom (or liberty; Berlin used the words interchangeably), which he called negative freedom and positive freedom .

Negative freedom is freedom from interference. You are negatively free to the extent that other people do not restrict what you can do. If other people prevent you from doing something, either directly by what they do, or indirectly by supporting social and economic arrangements that disadvantage you, then to that extent they restrict your negative freedom. Berlin stresses that it is only restrictions imposed by other people that count as limitations of one’s freedom. Restrictions due to natural causes do not count. The fact that I cannot levitate is a physical limitation but not a limitation of my freedom.

Virtually everyone agrees that we must accept some restrictions on our negative freedom if we are to avoid chaos. All states require their citizens to follow laws and regulations designed to help them live together and make society function smoothly. We accept these restrictions on our freedom as a trade-off for other benefits, such as peace, security and prosperity. At the same time, most of us would insist that there are some areas of life that should not be regulated, and where individuals should have considerable, if not complete, freedom. A major debate in political philosophy concerns the boundaries of this area of personal negative freedom. For example, should the state place restrictions on what we may say or read, or on what sexual activities we may engage in?

Whereas negative freedom is freedom from control by others, positive freedom is freedom to control oneself. To be positively free is to be one’s own master, acting rationally and choosing responsibly in line with one’s interests. This might seem to be simply the counterpart of negative freedom; I control myself to the extent that no one else controls me. However, a gap can open between positive and negative freedom, since a person might be lacking in self-control even when he is not restrained by others. Think, for example, of a drug addict who cannot kick the habit that is killing him. He is not positively free (that is, acting rationally in his own best interests) even though his negative freedom is not being limited (no one is forcing him to take the drug).

In such cases, Berlin notes, it is natural to talk of something like two selves: a lower self, which is irrational and impulsive, and a higher self, which is rational and far-sighted. And the suggestion is that a person is positively free only if his higher self is dominant. If this is right, then we might be able to make a person more free by coercing him. If we prevent the addict from taking the drug, we might help his higher self to gain control. By limiting his negative freedom, we would increase his positive freedom. It is easy to see how this view could be abused to justify interventions that are misguided or malign.

B erlin argued that the gap between positive and negative freedom, and the risk of abuse, increases further if we identify the higher, or ‘real’, self, with a social group (‘a tribe, a race, a church, a state’). For we might then conclude that individuals are free only when the group suppresses individual desires (which stem from lower, nonsocial selves) and imposes its will upon them. What particularly worried Berlin about this move was that it justifies the coercion of individuals, not merely as a means of securing social benefits, such as security and cooperation, but as a way of freeing the individuals themselves. The coercion is not seen as coercion at all, but as liberation, and protests against it can be dismissed as expressions of the lower self, like the addict’s craving for his fix. Berlin called this a ‘monstrous impersonation’, which allows those in power ‘to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their “real” selves’. (The reader might be reminded of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which shows how a Stalinist political party imposes its conception of truth on an individual, ‘freeing’ him to love the Party leader.)

Berlin was thinking of how ideas of freedom had been abused by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and he was right to highlight the dangers of this kind of thinking. But it does not follow that it is always wrong to promote positive freedom. (Berlin does not claim that it is, and he notes that the notion of negative freedom can be abused in a similar way.) Some people might need help to understand their best interests and achieve their full potential, and we could believe that the state has a responsibility to help them do so. Indeed, this is the main rationale for compulsory education. We require children to attend school (severely limiting their negative freedom) because we believe it is in their own best interests. To leave children free to do whatever they like would, arguably, amount to neglect or abuse. In the case of adults, too, it is arguable that the state has a responsibility to help its citizens live rich and fulfilling lives, through cultural, educational and health programmes. (The need for such help might be especially pressing in freemarket societies, where advertisers continually tempt us to indulge our ‘lower’ appetites.) It might be, too, that some people find meaning and purpose through identification with a wider social or political movement, such as feminism, and that in helping them to do so we are helping to liberate them.

Of course, this raises many further questions. Does our current education system really work in children’s best interests, or does it just mould them into a form that is socially and economically useful? Who decides what counts as a rich and fulfilling life? What means can the state legitimately use to help people live well? Is coercion ever acceptable? These are questions about what kind of society we want to live in, and they have no easy answers. But in giving us the distinction between negative and positive freedom, Berlin has given us a powerful tool for thinking about them.

Childhood and adolescence

For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life

Luara Ferracioli

Meaning and the good life

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

Warren Ward

Philosophy of mind

Think of mental disorders as the mind’s ‘sticky tendencies’

Kristopher Nielsen

Philosophy cannot resolve the question ‘How should we live?’

David Ellis

Values and beliefs

Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it

Miriam Schoenfield

Gender and identity

What we can learn about respect and identity from ‘plurals’

Elizabeth Schechter

The Paradox of Freedom: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror

By maria popova.

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” James Baldwin wrote in contemplating how we imprison ourselves , “freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” It is hard not to instinctually bristle at this notion — we all like to see ourselves as autonomous agents of our own destiny who would never willfully relinquish our freedom. And yet we do — beyond the baseline laws of physics and their perennially disquieting corollary regarding free will, which presupposes that even the nature of the faculty doing the relinquishing is not the sovereign entity we wish it were, we are governed by myriad ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that mitigate the parameters of our freedom. Neuroscientist Christoph Koch put it perfectly in his treatise on free will : “Freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess.”

What determines the degree to which we are free is what the great German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in his first major work, the prescient 1941 treasure Escape from Freedom ( public library ) — a book Fromm deems “a diagnosis rather than a prognosis,” written during humanity’s grimmest descent into madness in WWII, laying out the foundational ideas on which Fromm would later draw in considering the basis of a sane society .

At the heart of Fromm’s thesis is the notion that freedom is a diamagnetic force — by one pole, it compels us to escape to it, which Fromm calls positive freedom ; by the other, it drives us to escape from it, a manifestation of negative freedom . While modern civilization has liberated human beings in a number of practical ways and has furnished us with various positive freedoms, its psychological impacts has given rise to an epidemic of negative freedom. Fromm writes:

Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.

A decade before Hannah Arendt examined how tyrants use isolation and alienation as a weapon of oppression in her classic treatise on the origins of totalitarianism, Fromm writes:

The understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces.

In a foreword penned a quarter century after the book’s initial publication, Fromm adds a sentiment of chilling resonance today, yet another half-century later:

Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.

Writing in an era when man contained every woman as well , Fromm considers the seedbed of our surrender:

The crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed — he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship.

The only way humanity can save itself, Fromm argues, is by addressing this disconnect between our “intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness.” He considers the task before us:

As far as I can see there is only one answer: the increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason. We can not hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation; maybe it will take a thousand years until man has lifted himself from a pre-human history of hundreds of thousands of years. At this crucial moment, however, a modicum of increased insight — objectivity — can make the difference between life and death for the human race. For this reason the development of a scientific and dynamic social psychology is of vital importance. Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.

With an eye to the unbearable moral question of the Holocaust — what made millions cooperative and complicit with the murder of millions — Fromm points out that many people chose to answer it with convenient rationalizations: that it was only “the madness of a few individuals”; or that particular nations, such as Germans and Italians, were especially susceptible to mass manipulation due to a lack of sufficiently long training in democracy; or that Hitler and his pawns gained power over the masses using only trickery and brute force. These, Fromm admonishes, are dangerous delusions that preclude us from confronting the heart of the problem and thus disable us from preventing future outbreaks of inhumanity. He writes in the foreword to the 1965 edition:

In the years that have elapsed since [the Holocaust], the fallacy of these arguments has become apparent. We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for. We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a peculiarly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state. Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism.

In consonance with Baldwin’s assertion that “one hasn’t got to have an enormous military machine in order to be un-free when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, in fact, not to want to be free,” Fromm examines the paradoxical nature of freedom:

Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? If there is not, how can we account for the attraction which submission to a leader has for so many today? Is submission always to an overt authority, or is there also submission to internalized authorities, such as duty or conscience, to inner compulsions or to anonymous authorities like public opinion? Is there a hidden satisfaction in submitting, and what is its essence? What is it that creates in men an insatiable lust for power? Is it the strength of their vital energy — or is it a fundamental weakness and inability to experience life spontaneously and lovingly? What are the psychological conditions that make for the strength of these strivings? What are the social conditions upon which such psychological conditions in turn are based?

The answer, Fromm argues, lies in understanding “the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process.” In the same year when the young Alan Watts told his parents that “there is a universe inside one, which contains Hitler and all forms of human madness as well as love and beauty,” Fromm counters Freud’s insistence on a static human nature and writes:

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function — although it has that too — but it has also a creative function. Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history. […] But man is not only made by history — history is made by man. The solution of this seeming contradiction constitutes the field of social psychology. Its task is to show not only how passions, desires, anxieties change and develop as a result of the social process, but also how man’s energies thus shaped into specific forms in their turn become productive forces, molding the social process … Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own. Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.

The root of negative freedom, Fromm observes, is our increasing sense of alienation, which leaves unnourished our elemental hunger for connection to the world beyond ourselves. Presaging the modern epidemic of collective loneliness , he writes:

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. This relatedness to others is not identical with physical contact. An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.” On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness… Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

Fromm considers our two great antidotes to the alienation of moral aloneness — love and work:

There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

How to counter the forces that make for negative freedom and amplify those that make for positive freedom is what Fromm investigates in the remainder of Escape from Freedom . Complement it with Simone de Beauvoir on what freedom really means and mathematician Lillian Lieber, of whom Einstein was an ardent admirer, on our basic misconception about freedom , then revisit Fromm on the art of living , the art of loving , how to transcend the common laziness of optimism and pessimism , the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding , and the key to a sane society .

— Published April 17, 2018 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/04/17/erich-fromm-escape-from-freedom/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, books culture erich fromm philosophy politics psychology, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

F or centuries , philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires. The great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant reaffirmed this link between freedom and goodness. If we are not free to choose, he argued, then it would make no sense to say we ought to choose the path of righteousness.

Today, the assumption of free will runs through every aspect of American politics, from welfare provision to criminal law. It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life. As Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope , American “values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will.”

So what happens if this faith erodes?

The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species . Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.

Explore the June 2016 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something .

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

In 2002, two psychologists had a simple but brilliant idea: Instead of speculating about what might happen if people lost belief in their capacity to choose, they could run an experiment to find out. Kathleen Vohs, then at the University of Utah, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of Pittsburgh, asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. Would differences in abstract philosophical beliefs influence people’s decisions?

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

It seems that when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions. Consequently, they act less responsibly and give in to their baser instincts. Vohs emphasized that this result is not limited to the contrived conditions of a lab experiment. “You see the same effects with people who naturally believe more or less in free will,” she said.

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.

Another pioneer of research into the psychology of free will, Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, has extended these findings. For example, he and colleagues found that students with a weaker belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate than were those whose belief in free will was stronger. Likewise, those primed to hold a deterministic view by reading statements like “Science has demonstrated that free will is an illusion” were less likely to give money to a homeless person or lend someone a cellphone.

Further studies by Baumeister and colleagues have linked a diminished belief in free will to stress, unhappiness, and a lesser commitment to relationships. They found that when subjects were induced to believe that “all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules,” those subjects came away with a lower sense of life’s meaningfulness. Early this year, other researchers published a study showing that a weaker belief in free will correlates with poor academic performance.

The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Few scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand. Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. “Imagine,” he told me, “that I’m deliberating whether to do my duty, such as to parachute into enemy territory, or something more mundane like to risk my job by reporting on some wrongdoing. If everyone accepts that there is no free will, then I’ll know that people will say, ‘Whatever he did, he had no choice—we can’t blame him.’ So I know I’m not going to be condemned for taking the selfish option.” This, he believes, is very dangerous for society, and “the more people accept the determinist picture, the worse things will get.”

Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. Only the initiated, behind those walls, should dare to, as he put it to me, “look the dark truth in the face.” Smilansky says he realizes that there is something drastic, even terrible, about this idea—but if the choice is between the true and the good, then for the sake of society, the true must go.

Smilansky’s arguments may sound odd at first, given his contention that the world is devoid of free will: If we are not really deciding anything, who cares what information is let loose? But new information, of course, is a sensory input like any other; it can change our behavior, even if we are not the conscious agents of that change. In the language of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire us to make the best of ourselves, but it does stimulate us to do so.

Illusionism is a minority position among academic philosophers, most of whom still hope that the good and the true can be reconciled. But it represents an ancient strand of thought among intellectual elites. Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism.

Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control . Luckily, he argues, we don’t need them. Belief in free will comes naturally to us. Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear. Most scientists “don’t realize what effect these ideas can have,” Smilansky told me. “Promoting determinism is complacent and dangerous.”

Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. Some simply don’t agree that these consequences might include the collapse of civilization. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his 2012 book, Free Will , set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

“We need our beliefs to track what is true,” Harris told me. Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things. But if we instead accept that “human behavior arises from neurophysiology,” he argued, then we can better understand what is really causing people to do bad things despite this threat of punishment—and how to stop them. “We need,” Harris told me, “to know what are the levers we can pull as a society to encourage people to be the best version of themselves they can be.”

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.

Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Holding people responsible for their actions might sound like a keystone of civilized life, but we pay a high price for it: Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment.

“Compare the response to Hurricane Katrina,” Harris suggested, with “the response to the 9/11 act of terrorism.” For many Americans, the men who hijacked those planes are the embodiment of criminals who freely choose to do evil. But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon—and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response.

Although the scale of the two catastrophes was similar, the reactions were wildly different. Nobody was striving to exact revenge on tropical storms or declare a War on Weather, so responses to Katrina could simply focus on rebuilding and preventing future disasters. The response to 9/11 , Harris argues, was clouded by outrage and the desire for vengeance, and has led to the unnecessary loss of countless more lives. Harris is not saying that we shouldn’t have reacted at all to 9/11, only that a coolheaded response would have looked very different and likely been much less wasteful. “Hatred is toxic,” he told me, “and can destabilize individual lives and whole societies. Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone.”

Whereas the evidence from Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues suggests that social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life—Harris thinks that social benefits will result from seeing other people’s behavior in the very same light. From that vantage point, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better.

What’s more, Harris argues, as ordinary people come to better understand how their brains work, many of the problems documented by Vohs and others will dissipate. Determinism, he writes in his book, does not mean “that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.” Certain kinds of action require us to become conscious of a choice—to weigh arguments and appraise evidence. True, if we were put in exactly the same situation again, then 100 times out of 100 we would make the same decision, “just like rewinding a movie and playing it again.” But the act of deliberation—the wrestling with facts and emotions that we feel is essential to our nature—is nonetheless real.

The big problem, in Harris’s view, is that people often confuse determinism with fatalism. Determinism is the belief that our decisions are part of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Fatalism, on the other hand, is the belief that our decisions don’t really matter, because whatever is destined to happen will happen—like Oedipus’s marriage to his mother, despite his efforts to avoid that fate.

When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference. But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus (like a different idea about free will), they will behave differently and so have different lives. If people better understood these fine distinctions, Harris believes, the consequences of losing faith in free will would be much less negative than Vohs’s and Baumeister’s experiments suggest.

Can one go further still? Is there a way forward that preserves both the inspiring power of belief in free will and the compassionate understanding that comes with determinism?

Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency.

Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will , he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.

For Waller, it simply doesn’t matter that these processes are underpinned by a causal chain of firing neurons. In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.

Waller believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment. Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result.

Waller’s definition of free will is in keeping with how a lot of ordinary people see it. One 2010 study found that people mostly thought of free will in terms of following their desires, free of coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head). As long as we continue to believe in this kind of practical free will, that should be enough to preserve the sorts of ideals and ethical standards examined by Vohs and Baumeister.

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Home ›
• Reviews ›

Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis

Henry E. Allison, Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis , Cambridge University Press, 2020, 531pp., $140.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107145115.

Reviewed by Allen Wood, Indiana University, Bloomington

The title of this hefty book might easily mislead. The book is in effect a detailed survey of Kant's entire philosophy, including even many Reflexionen from Kant's Nachlass , as seen from the standpoint of one of its leading scholars of the past half century. It encompasses the development of Kant's philosophy from Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) all the way to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793-94) and even Metaphysics of Morals (1798). The book's ten chapters divide evenly between Kant's writings before the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and his writings after that. It is sometimes evident that Henry E. Allison is reading the early writings as preparatory to his interpretation of the works for which Kant is much better known. But since Allison himself thinks Kant's mature views about freedom developed relatively late, and that the crucial turn came only between 1785 and 1788, it is hard to resist the conclusion that in the first 230 pages or so Allison is coming to terms with Kant's early writings more as an end in itself rather than a means to understanding Kant's later philosophy.

How can one review such a book? Many ostensible book reviews are really discussions of the topic of the book by someone other than the book's author. Such reviews are sometimes interesting and informative, even if they are mainly a display of the reviewer's thoughts. But I have always thought that the first duty of a review is to inform its readers about the contents of the book. Criticisms are valuable, if informed and economically argued, because you can learn something about a book's contents by seeing how they might be challenged. I have for many years agreed with much in Allison's reading of Kant but also disagreed with a fair amount of it. Below I will criticize his views, mainly those in the second half of the book, hoping that even my criticisms will inform more than merely judge.

Chapter 1 deals with writings produced between 1755 and 1759. The first of these is Universal Natural History , now best known because it proposed the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, and explained its origin and motions in generally Newtonian terms but, unlike Newton, without any appeal to divine design. Like this work itself, Allison's discussion says nothing explicitly about free will. It focuses on the place of rational beings, and especially human beings on earth, in Kant's highly speculative cosmology. There follows a fairly detailed discussion of Kant's first treatise on metaphysics, the Latin essay whose short title is Nova dilucidatio (1755). Allison discusses Kant's treatment of the relation of logic to metaphysics, the first version of his so-called "possibility" proof for God's existence, and then his critical discussion of the views of Wolff and Crusius on freedom of the will. We get Allison's fairly detailed expositions of their positions as well as Kant's reactions to them. In a short dialogue, which was part of Nova dilucidatio , Kant portrays a Wolffian compatibilist named Caius defeating a Crusian incompatibilist named Titus. Chapter 1 ends with Allison's discussion of Kant's essay on optimism (1755) and several Reflexionen on this subject from the late 1750s.

Chapter 2 deals with Kant's metaphysical views in the early 1760s, including his Prize Essay (published 1764), the essay on Negative Magnitudes (1764) and the Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence (1763). The Prize Essay contains a methodological attack on the synthetic method in metaphysics practiced by the Wolffians. Kant's introduction of the concept of negative magnitudes and the distinction between logical and real possibility represents a development that came to fruition in the Beweisgrund essay, of which Allison gives us an admirably detailed and critical 17-page discussion. He points out the ways this essay still adheres, in its treatment of the divine will, to Wolffian compatibilism in contrast to Crusius' defense of the liberty of indifference. The chapter ends with a discussion of Baumgarten's views on freedom of the will and Kant's treatment of them in his metaphysics lectures of 1764. Kant here defends the idea that true freedom and virtue consists in a harmony between reason and sensible desire rather than the Stoic disparagement of the sensual.

Chapter 3 turns attention to Kant's moral philosophy in the same period. In the Prize Essay , Kant was drawn to the moral sense theory of Hutcheson. Allison here expounds Hutcheson, and the version of Hutcheson to which Kant was attracted, as a form of metaethical 'non-cognitivism'. This offers us a now familiar reading of philosophers like Hutcheson and Hume, but I can't resist the temptation to interject that it seems to me an anachronistic way to read Scottish moral sense theory which does these philosophers no favors. Allison perceptively notes, however, that Kant was never fully committed to Hutcheson's views. He resisted them from the start on the ground that they provide no satisfactory account of the notion of obligation, which Kant, along with Baumgarten, regarded as the fundamental concept needed in moral philosophy. Allison proceeds to an informative discussion of Kant's lectures on ethics of 1765-66, which includes some detailed exposition of both Hutcheson and Baumgarten as well as Kant's critical reflections on them. The chapter concludes with an account of the moral philosophy contained in his published treatise Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (1766). Allison observes here "it is easy to see that his position is an unstable halfway-house" which again can offer no satisfactory account of obligation because feeling "lacks the requisite normative force" (121).

In Chapter 4 Allison addresses Kant's encounter with the works of Rousseau in the late 1760s and the radical change in his moral philosophy it produced. It begins with a discussion of Kant's (unpublished) Remarks on the Beautiful and Sublime. There is a 30-page exposition and discussion of Rousseau's views on freedom in Émile , and on free will in "Confession of Faith by A Savoyard Vicar" in that work, and of Kant's reactions to them in the Remarks . There is a shorter section on Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766). Allison admits that this work has little to say directly about free will, but he argues that we can discern by implication that Rousseau had an impact on this work too. Given how enigmatic the Dreams is, a reader (or at least this one) remains skeptical about this. But the upshot of this chapter, which is convincing, is Allison's argument that it is during this period that Kant breaks with Wolffian compatibilism. Allison traces to Rousseau the central Kantian ideas that freedom of the will is closely bound up both with self-consciousness and moral virtue as self-mastery.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the 1770s, which Allison, using the common phrase for it, calls the "Silent Decade," in which Kant published very little. It begins with Kant's remark that 1769 gave him "great light." Allison understands this as Kant's coming to reject the Leibnizian and Wolffian view that sense and understanding differ only in degree of clarity, replacing it with the now familiar Kantian idea that they are separate faculties that must co-operate in all thought and cognition. This soon led Kant to the distinction between a sensible and an intelligible world -- or better put, to conceiving of the world as both sensible and intelligible. Allison thus understands this distinction (correctly in my view) as conceptual rather than metaphysical. It does not designate two different realms of objects (one of which is claimed to exist but to be mysteriously beyond our ken) but rather distinguishes between the faculty that intuits and the faculty that thinks. Allison provides a relatively brief discussion of Kant's 1770 Inaugural Dissertation. This is followed by a roughly 40-page discussion of Reflexionen on freedom from the 1770s and a 10-page discussion of the Collins lectures on moral philosophy dating from the late 1770s. It is difficult to summarize this chapter because it consists largely of a series of remarks about a series of short reflections. However, toward the end of the chapter, Allison summarizes the result by saying that "by the end of the 'Silent Decade' Kant had arrived at the view that both the theoretical and the practical use of reason required an appeal to at least the conception of freedom in the transcendental sense" -- that is, freedom as a capacity to cause a state or series of states von selbst, and not grounded on a prior natural cause. This, Allison concludes, "was also essentially the view that he held in the first Critique" (233).

Chapter 6 finally brings us to that work, and it begins Allison's discussion of the views on freedom for which Kant is best known. We are given a 15-page exposition of the Third Antinomy, followed by an account of how Allison thinks the problem of freedom relates to transcendental idealism. Then Allison attempts to define the problem of freedom as Kant saw it in the first Critique, followed by a sketch ( Schattenriss ) of Kant's solution. I agree with much of what Allison says here, in particular with his claims that "by things in themselves Kant understands things considered in abstraction from the temporal relations in which they stand" (254) and that Kant's account "neither claims that there are any putatively intelligible causes nor, if there were, how they are to be conceived." (265). He acknowledges that the term "transcendental cause" "seems to suggest a mysterious noumenal power;" and I think Allison is right to suggest that the term should be taken to refer to a "transcendental concept of a cause rather than, as usually assumed, a metaphysically distinct noumenal entity" (280). I am not in full agreement with everything Allison says here, but I do agree with his conclusion that Kant's aim is to establish no more than the logical compatibility of freedom and natural determinism.

Allison then discusses the often overlooked mention of freedom in the Canon of Pure Reason, where Kant claims that practical freedom is knowable empirically, and argues that the metaphysical problem of freedom is one of transcendent metaphysics, whose resolution (or rather, whose dismissal as beyond our powers to solve) should have no effect on our empirical judgments of imputability. Here and throughout the rest of the book, Allison quarrels with what I regard as Kant's entirely sensible view the Canon expresses on this score. Disappointingly (to me), Allison tries to revive the notion that Kant requires a metaphysical explanation of freedom in order to satisfy the demands of practical reason. However, Allison also discusses the conception of the moral incentive in the Canon, which is different from the one Kant presented in the Groundwork and afterward. Here I think Allison successfully corrects some errors about this part of the Critique that are found in his 2011 commentary on the Groundwork . Specifically, he sees that Kant's argument there for faith in God and a moral world concerns solely the nature of the rational incentives of morality, and not worries about the strength of moral motivation based on our moral weakness.

Chapter 7 is about the Groundwork and its treatment of the concepts of freedom and autonomy. He perceptively begins by discussing Kant's argument for freedom as a presupposition of both theoretical and practical reason that he presented in his review of Schulz. Allison's discussion of the Groundwork , especially of the notoriously difficult Third Section, is long and complex. I won't attempt to summarize Allison's argument, in part because the complexity resists summary and in part because I do not understand it. Let me be candid here. I use this phrase in precisely that technical sense in which one philosopher says he does not understand something another philosopher says when what he really means is that he thinks the other philosopher's views are utterly wrongheaded. Allison belongs to that fairly sizable club of Kant interpreters (of which I am definitely not a member) who think the deduction of freedom and the moral law in the Groundwork was both a failure and that Kant eventually realized this, and who then think Kant rescued his position only in the second Critique with his introduction of the famous 'fact of reason'. I doubt that any philosopher's wrestling match with the problem of freedom (whatever position on that problem the philosopher may want to defend) will ever result in complete victory for the philosopher. Kant's wisest claim here is that "freedom can never be comprehended, nor can insight into it ever be gained" ( Groundwork 4:459). But I see no evidence that Kant ever admitted the Groundwork 's arguments were a failure, or that the second Critique offers a different account that improves on them.

Most who consider them a failure do so because they think he is committed there to an extravagantly metaphysical version of transcendental idealism as part of his argument. Allison avoids this error (for reasons I've already hinted at above), so his diagnosis of Kant's alleged failure must be different. One charge Allison makes is that Kant's argument is viciously circular -- which echoes Kant's own statements at Groundwork 4:450-452; but of course on the following page Kant argues that this appearance of circularity is a false one which he has removed. So the charge of circularity cannot be one we have evidence Kant accepted. The other way Allison criticizes Kant's argument is by saying it claims only that reason can be practical and not that pure reason can be. But Kant explicitly equates these two questions at Groundwork 4:461. It is true that Kant denies that either proposition can be given an explanation, since we can form no metaphysical concept of it or claim any insight into its real possibility. The most we can hope to achieve is an understanding of why freedom and morality are incomprehensible to us ( Groundwork 4:465). But Kant consistently maintains that freedom must nevertheless be presupposed as a condition of both theoretical and practical reason. Allison's tortuous argument in this chapter is throughout designed (though in my view often through misunderstandings and distortions) to pave the way for his treatment of the problem of freedom in the second Critique. Between 1785 and 1788, according to Allison, Kant's views on freedom and reason underwent a radical change -- what Karl Ameriks has called "the great reversal" -- so that the second Critique gives us -- in the form of the "fact of reason" -- the deduction of both freedom and the moral law that the Groundwork so conspicuously failed to provide.

This takes us to Chapter 8, fully sixty pages in length, which also resists summary, because it contains wide-ranging observations about Kant's moral philosophy and moral psychology, as well as (or as part of) his account of how the 'fact of reason' provides the needed deduction of the moral law. One thing I find curious here is that although Kant's argument in the Third Section of the Groundwork may in fact have been a failure, there is no direct evidence whatever that Kant himself ever thought this. On the contrary, in the Preface to the second Critique, he writes that the present work: "presupposes, indeed, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, but only insofar as this constitutes preliminary acquaintance with the principle of duty and provides and justifies a determinate formula of it" (Critique of Practical Reason 5:8). As Allison himself notes, this directly echoes the Groundwork i tself, whose aim was to "search for and establish the supreme principle of morality" ( Groundwork 4:392). The search provided and the establishment (deduction) justified the system of formulas of the moral law we find in the Groundwork , especially the formula of autonomy, which is the one given at Critique of Practical Reason 5:30, where the 'fact of reason' is introduced. What the Preface to the second Critique says is simply that this work accepts the results of the Groundwork on both these points. Perhaps surprisingly, Allison does not even directly dispute this. Instead he shifts his ground. Instead of claiming that the second Critique repudiates the deduction of the Groundwork , he claims that the two works had different aims. "The task of the second Critique is primarily systematic in nature and involves establishing the unity of reason" (352).

A second thing I find curious about the "great reversal" club is that its members suddenly scatter when it comes to saying what the mysterious "fact of reason" is, or how it succeeds where the Groundwork failed. Each of them seems to have his or her own story to tell about 'fact of reason'. Some of these stories are interesting, but none of them seem to me to show that there has been any "great reversal" in Kant's thinking between 1785 and 1788. In Allison's case, the claim is that it does so by establishing "the unity of reason." But did the Groundwork deny the "unity of reason"? On the contrary, its argument depended on the fact that we cannot self-consistently regard our judgments (theoretical or practical) as predetermined by alien causes ( Groundwork 4: 448). This was his response to the worry, repeated throughout the Groundwork , that morality itself might be merely a "cobweb of the brain." And in any case how is the bold (or even brazen) assertion that the moral law is a "fact of reason" supposed to remove these worries if the argument of the Groundwork did not?

Let me briefly, and as a confirmed outsider to the "great reversal" club, offer my own thoughts about "the fact of reason," which follow a suggestion made to me by Marilia Espirito Santo: Any deduction in Kant aims at justifying our claim to something of which we are already in possession. In the first Critique, this was the categories, which we use both in common sense and science; in the Groundwork it was freedom, which we take for granted in our use of reason (whether theoretical or practical), and the moral law, which Kant argued is co-implied by freedom. But a Kantian deduction is always a deduction only of the real possibility of that which it justifies. To achieve actual cognition through the categories, we also need empirical intuition. There is, of course, no empirical intuition of the moral law; but there is an awareness of actual obligation in a particular case, the act by which our own reason imposes the obligation on ourselves. This act, as I see it, is what Kant means when he uses the term Faktum der Vernunft. It is self-authenticating, but only if a deduction of its real possibility has already been provided (namely, that given in the Third Section of the Groundwork, which, as we have seen, Kant says explicitly that he is presupposing in the second Critique). Appeal to the "fact of reason" therefore cannot offer, and is not intended by Kant to offer, any new deduction or justification of either freedom or the moral law. To someone who rejects the argument of the Groundwork, appealing to "the fact of reason" in response to moral skepticism would be, in a phrase Allison quotes from me (but I was merely quoting it from Paul Guyer), only so much "moralistic bluster."

Chapter 9 is about the third Critique. It is not directly about the issue of free will at all, but about the way that work attempts to provide a transition from nature to freedom, or from theoretical to practical reason. It contains thoughtful reflections on the difficult task of explaining how aesthetic and biological purposiveness can effect a transition from nature to freedom. Allison also has worthwhile things to say about the interest (both empirical and intellectual) that we take in the beautiful. And he also provides an exposition of Kant's unique presentation of his ethical theory in the Methodology of the third Critique, arguing for the unity of natural and moral purposiveness through representation of the human being as the ultimate end of nature and the culture of discipline as that about the human being which makes humanity such an end.

The final Chapter 10 is titled "Kant's Final Thoughts about Freedom." Roughly the first third of it is devoted to replying to the objection, first presented by Reinhold and later (more famously) by Sidgwick, that Kant's conception of freedom is both ambiguous and untenable because it commits him to the position that only our dutiful acts are imputable, while violations of duty are subject to natural necessity and we can't be held responsible for them. This discussion may be of interest to readers who take these objections more seriously than I do, since I think they arise from quite elementary misunderstandings of Kant's views on freedom and imputability. The misunderstandings are perhaps understandable misreadings of some things Kant says in the Third Section of the Groundwork -- the same errors that often lead even those sympathetic to Kant to conclude that the argument of that section is a failure. Allison correctly locates the error as resulting from preoccupation with metaphysical issues which Kant consistently declares to be moot. Allison here insightfully observes that if Sidgwick's interpretation of Kant were correct, then it would imply that no acts, neither good nor evil ones, could be imputed to us.

Most of Chapter 10 is devoted to a discussion of Kant's thesis of radical evil, presented in Part One of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Allison is one of those who thinks this thesis is (in his words) "philosophical, or equivalently, conceptual," and that "the demonstration of a universal propensity to evil, at least as Kant construes it, is a relatively trivial result" (492). It is astonishing to me that anyone could regard as a "trivial," merely "conceptual" truth that all human beings without exception have a radical, innate and inextirpable propensity to place the rationally inferior incentives of inclination or self-love ahead of the rationally supreme incentive of morality. Goethe was shocked and outraged at the thought that Kant endorsed such a gloomy, backward and misanthropic view. Allison, however, can barely manage a yawn.

It is an error to extract the thesis of radical evil from its context in the Religion, where Kant is plainly engaged in the task of producing a version of the Christian doctrine of original sin that can be offered to reason as an acceptable interpretation of it. Kant is clearly not fully committed to that doctrine, since in the Religion he proposes to contrast it with the modern (or "heroic") view that humanity is morally progressing. Kant's own position on these opposed positions is not one of unconditional commitment to either side. In the final paragraph of the Anthropology , which is later than the Religion , Kant seems to favor the modern "heroic" position. No account of Kant on radical evil is defensible if it cannot accommodate the fact that Kant is not fully committed to the thesis of radical evil. Thus any position that seeks to find, either in Kant or independently of him, some sort of conceptual or transcendental proof of the thesis must be a non-starter -- at least as an interpretation of Kant.

In contrast to his earlier writings on this topic, Allison now seems to concede that Kant regards the thesis as empirical, and he even accepts the claim, first made by Sharon Anderson-Gold and then argued in more detail by myself, that radical evil is to be identified with the empirical human propensity to competitiveness or "unsociable sociability." Kant was clear that moral philosophy has empirical "anthropological" presuppositions as well as an a priori moral principle. He did not confuse the two. Allison himself seems to admit this -- from time to time -- when he speaks of "Kant's unflattering view of human nature" (431); but is this view, not shared by Schiller, Goethe or Herder, then merely a conceptual claim?

Allison insists that there is "a distinction of level" to be drawn between the empirical manifestations of radical evil and the basically conceptual nature of it. As I see it, the basic issue should be whether, how far and for what purposes Kant accepts the thesis of radical evil at all. Allison's interpretation of it commits him to the position that Kant is fully committed to the thesis on a priori grounds, which Allison seeks variously in the conditions of imputability, in Kant's defense of "rigorism" (against "latitudinarianism") and in the very concept of obligation as self-constraint. Perhaps Allison, in direct defiance of Kant, can make out these "conceptual" arguments for the thesis of radical evil (though I doubt it). But Kant explicitly says that the thesis might be proven "later on" by "anthropological research" ( Religion 6:25); it cannot be used by "moral dogmatics" but only for the purposes of "moral discipline" ( Religion 6:50-51). In other words, Kant explicitly regards the thesis that human nature contains a radical propensity to evil as a morally useful but still unproven empirical claim.

So now I have once again aired my longstanding disagreements with Allison as far as I felt it suitable to air them in a book review. But let me now try to sum up my assessment of this huge book, considered as a whole. Just yesterday I was talking with a prospective philosophy graduate student who has a strong interest in Kant but only limited acquaintance with his writings, and desires to acquire the expertise he will need to become a serious Kant scholar. What I told him was this: You need to start reading through Kant's works, perhaps in chronological order, at least what is offered in English in the Cambridge edition. But you may also need to accompany this with an informed and philosophically acute account of what you are reading. Is there such a thing, all in one place? I told him Henry Allison's brand new book is what I would recommend. Even where I think it is wrong, what you will get is an expert view argued by someone who has spent his life studying these texts and now shares with us the cumulative results of that study. I know of no other book that does this with the breathtaking scope of this one. In the world of Kant studies, this book may be almost as irreplaceable as its author.

Liberty, freedom and real freedom

• Feature Article
• Published: March 2005
• Volume 42 , pages 36–39, ( 2005 )

Cite this article

• Stein Ringen  

275 Accesses

Explore all metrics

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA) Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Suggested Further Reading

Berlin, Isaiah. 2002. Liberty . Ed. Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Google Scholar  

Mill, John Stuart [1859] 1991. On Liberty and Other Essays . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 1999. Sex and Social Justice . New York: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Ringen, Stein. 1997. Citizens, Families, and Reform . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Alan ed. 1979. The Idea of Freedom . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sen, Amartya, 2002. Rationality and Freedom . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Download references

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Additional information

Stein Ringen is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Oxford University. He is author of Citizens, Families, and Reform .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Ringen, S. Liberty, freedom and real freedom. Soc 42 , 36–39 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02802985

Download citation

Issue Date : March 2005

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02802985

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Liberal Theory
• Classical View
• Attractive Idea
• Rawlsian Theory
• Negative Liberty
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

13.7 Cosmos & Culture

Is freedom just an illusion maybe we don't want to know.

Marcelo Gleiser

A computer designed by hobbyists to look like a brain on display at a Berlin fair in 2012. What happens when we go from crude models to complete working simulations of this all-important organ? Britta Pedersen/DPA/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

A computer designed by hobbyists to look like a brain on display at a Berlin fair in 2012. What happens when we go from crude models to complete working simulations of this all-important organ?

The possibility that machines will be able to simulate the human brain is all over the news these days. In the United States, President Obama's Brain Initiative promises $100 million to fund research into "how we think, learn, and remember." In Europe, the Blue Brain Project , headed by Henry Markram, will attempt to recreate the human brain in all of its minute detail so as to engender an artificial mind.

The premise here is that if brains somehow sustain the mind and we deconstruct the brain in detail and we put the information back together in powerful computers, we should be able to recreate consciousness from computer code. Or such is the hope, anyway.

Since the brain integrates external stimuli to give us our experience of reality, would simulated brains be able to recreate reality? And if so, could we be fooled by a simulation, unable to distinguish reality and fantasy?

In his dialogue The Republic , Plato offered the Allegory of the Cave , one of the first meditations on the nature of reality and, more importantly, on how limited our perception of the world is.

The theme has been revisited countless times, for example in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix . In the 24 centuries separating Plato and Keanu Reeves, we've witnessed the birth of modern science and our growing ability to create mind-bogglingly amazing simulations, virtual allegories that imitate or satirize our world. An obvious question, made famous by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003, is whether we live in a simulation. And if we do, the next question is, who are the simulators?

In his Allegory , Plato imagined a group of "slaves" chained since birth to a cave. The chained ones could only face forward, toward a wall. Their world was that wall and the images and shadows they could see on it. They were unaware that behind them simulators had made a huge fire and were lifting various objects in front of it. The images and shadows the chained ones saw, their whole reality, were simply projections from these objects. Plato's point was that we are like the chained ones, ignorant of the true nature of reality.

Our senses recreate a small portion of what is out there; only in the pure recesses of the mind, through the power of reason, can we understand the true nature of reality. So, the only perfect circle is the idea of a circle, not the one we draw.

We know that Plato was right, at least in part. Our sensorial perception does give us an incomplete picture of the world, even when amplified by scientific tools such as telescopes and microscopes. Every tool has limits and we can only see as far as it lets us.

I imagine the reader is familiar with the video game The Sims . As the name already says, it is a simulation of reality, where the characters are people doing the things we normally do everyday (well, some activities are pretty weird): go to school, eat, go to the doctor, take care of children and pets, date, etc. Now imagine a hyper-advanced version of the game, where the characters have enough autonomy and ability to self-reflect so as to feel real. Even if, ultimately, the simulators are in control, the characters believe themselves free and independent, responsible for their actions. Clearly, these simulated characters are just a modern version of the chained ones, having the illusion of knowing what their reality is like and, more to the point, having the illusion of personal freedom.

Bostrom suggested something similar, but now we are the chained ones. If simulations continue to grow in sophistication, as they should, we can imagine that, in a not-so-far future, we should be able to create virtual worlds which are practically indistinguishable from the real world, at least as we are able to perceive and measure it. (The simulations would have to grow in detail as we probe deeper into the nature of things, from subatomic particles to the confines of outer space.) We can thus imagine that other intelligent civilizations could be doing the same; or that our descendants are doing it now and we are their game. In this case, we would be nothing but a simulation controlled by the simulators, be they post-human or extraterrestrial.

But here is the thing: if we are truly unable to tell (given that we don't have Keanu Reeves around), does it make a difference if we are a simulation? Does freedom only matter when we are aware that we don't have it?

Note that this is different from having social inequality in the world, with some being freer than others; in the simulation we are all in the same boat, no one freer than any other.

Plato argued that if a chained one had been freed, he would be so terrified that he would quickly run back to the chains and face the wall. He believed, correctly, that only with knowledge can we break the chains and truly ascend to freedom.

We must learn all that we can about the brain, of course. But we must also wonder if there is such a thing as learning too much about how the mind works. Especially if we will have to pay with our freedom.

You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

• Nick Bostrom
• Henry Markram

Essays About Freedom: 5 Helpful Examples and 7 Prompts

Freedom seems simple at first; however, it is quite a nuanced topic at a closer glance. If you are writing essays about freedom, read our guide of essay examples and writing prompts.

In a world where we constantly hear about violence, oppression, and war, few things are more important than freedom. It is the ability to act, speak, or think what we want without being controlled or subjected. It can be considered the gateway to achieving our goals, as we can take the necessary steps. 

However, freedom is not always “doing whatever we want.” True freedom means to do what is righteous and reasonable, even if there is the option to do otherwise. Moreover, freedom must come with responsibility; this is why laws are in place to keep society orderly but not too micro-managed, to an extent.

5 Examples of Essays About Freedom

1. essay on “freedom” by pragati ghosh, 2. acceptance is freedom by edmund perry, 3. reflecting on the meaning of freedom by marquita herald.

• 4.  Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

5. What are freedom and liberty? by Yasmin Youssef

1. what is freedom, 2. freedom in the contemporary world, 3. is freedom “not free”, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning freedom, 5. freedom vs. security, 6. free speech and hate speech, 7. an experience of freedom.

“Freedom is non denial of our basic rights as humans. Some freedom is specific to the age group that we fall into. A child is free to be loved and cared by parents and other members of family and play around. So this nurturing may be the idea of freedom to a child. Living in a crime free society in safe surroundings may mean freedom to a bit grown up child.”

In her essay, Ghosh briefly describes what freedom means to her. It is the ability to live your life doing what you want. However, she writes that we must keep in mind the dignity and freedom of others. One cannot simply kill and steal from people in the name of freedom; it is not absolute. She also notes that different cultures and age groups have different notions of freedom. Freedom is a beautiful thing, but it must be exercised in moderation. 

“They demonstrate that true freedom is about being accepted, through the scenarios that Ambrose Flack has written for them to endure. In The Strangers That Came to Town, the Duvitches become truly free at the finale of the story. In our own lives, we must ask: what can we do to help others become truly free?”

Perry’s essay discusses freedom in the context of Ambrose Flack’s short story The Strangers That Came to Town : acceptance is the key to being free. When the immigrant Duvitch family moved into a new town, they were not accepted by the community and were deprived of the freedom to live without shame and ridicule. However, when some townspeople reach out, the Duvitches feel empowered and relieved and are no longer afraid to go out and be themselves. 

“Freedom is many things, but those issues that are often in the forefront of conversations these days include the freedom to choose, to be who you truly are, to express yourself and to live your life as you desire so long as you do not hurt or restrict the personal freedom of others. I’ve compiled a collection of powerful quotations on the meaning of freedom to share with you, and if there is a single unifying theme it is that we must remember at all times that, regardless of where you live, freedom is not carved in stone, nor does it come without a price.”

In her short essay, Herald contemplates on freedom and what it truly means. She embraces her freedom and uses it to live her life to the fullest and to teach those around her. She values freedom and closes her essay with a list of quotations on the meaning of freedom, all with something in common: freedom has a price. With our freedom, we must be responsible. You might also be interested in these essays about consumerism .

4.   Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

“Freedom demands of one, or rather obligates one to concern ourselves with the affairs of the world around us. If you look at the world around a human being, countries where freedom is lacking, the overall population is less concerned with their fellow man, then in a freer society. The same can be said of individuals, the more freedom a human being has, and the more responsible one acts to other, on the whole.”

Carlson writes about freedom from a more religious perspective, saying that it is a right given to us by God. However, authentic freedom is doing what is right and what will help others rather than simply doing what one wants. If freedom were exercised with “doing what we want” in mind, the world would be disorderly. True freedom requires us to care for others and work together to better society. 

“In my opinion, the concepts of freedom and liberty are what makes us moral human beings. They include individual capacities to think, reason, choose and value different situations. It also means taking individual responsibility for ourselves, our decisions and actions. It includes self-governance and self-determination in combination with critical thinking, respect, transparency and tolerance. We should let no stone unturned in the attempt to reach a state of full freedom and liberty, even if it seems unrealistic and utopic.”

Youssef’s essay describes the concepts of freedom and liberty and how they allow us to do what we want without harming others. She notes that respect for others does not always mean agreeing with them. We can disagree, but we should not use our freedom to infringe on that of the people around us. To her, freedom allows us to choose what is good, think critically, and innovate. 

7 Prompts for Essays About Freedom

Freedom is quite a broad topic and can mean different things to different people. For your essay, define freedom and explain what it means to you. For example, freedom could mean having the right to vote, the right to work, or the right to choose your path in life. Then, discuss how you exercise your freedom based on these definitions and views. 

The world as we know it is constantly changing, and so is the entire concept of freedom. Research the state of freedom in the world today and center your essay on the topic of modern freedom. For example, discuss freedom while still needing to work to pay bills and ask, “Can we truly be free when we cannot choose with the constraints of social norms?” You may compare your situation to the state of freedom in other countries and in the past if you wish. 

A common saying goes like this: “Freedom is not free.” Reflect on this quote and write your essay about what it means to you: how do you understand it? In addition, explain whether you believe it to be true or not, depending on your interpretation. 

Many contemporary issues exemplify both the pros and cons of freedom; for example, slavery shows the worst when freedom is taken away, while gun violence exposes the disadvantages of too much freedom. First, discuss one issue regarding freedom and briefly touch on its causes and effects. Then, be sure to explain how it relates to freedom. 

Some believe that more laws curtail the right to freedom and liberty. In contrast, others believe that freedom and regulation can coexist, saying that freedom must come with the responsibility to ensure a safe and orderly society. Take a stand on this issue and argue for your position, supporting your response with adequate details and credible sources. 

Many people, especially online, have used their freedom of speech to attack others based on race and gender, among other things. Many argue that hate speech is still free and should be protected, while others want it regulated. Is it infringing on freedom? You decide and be sure to support your answer adequately. Include a rebuttal of the opposing viewpoint for a more credible argumentative essay. 

For your essay, you can also reflect on a time you felt free. It could be your first time going out alone, moving into a new house, or even going to another country. How did it make you feel? Reflect on your feelings, particularly your sense of freedom, and explain them in detail. 

Check out our guide packed full of transition words for essays .If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

View all posts

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

7.1: Freedom? Is it Real? A Myth? Maybe Not!

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 2779

\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)

\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)

\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)

\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)

What is Free Will?

What is at stake with this issue of Free Will are notions of responsibility and in particular moral responsibility. The more advances in science that present the picture of the universe as being deterministic, the more there arises the question of whether or not human actions are in any way exempt from that idea that all physical events are determined by prior events. How are humans to be considered possessed of free will when their actions might be described as being determined by their prior states of being?

Free Will or Not? Determinism or Free Will?

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors. Factors of historical concern have included metaphysical constraints (for example, logical, nomological, or theological determinism), physical constraints (ex., chains or imprisonment), social constraints (ex., threat of punishment, censure, or structural constraints), and mental constraints (ex, compulsions, phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions). The principle of free will has religious, legal, ethical, and scientific implications. [1] For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. In the law, it affects considerations of punishment and rehabilitation. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In science, neuroscientific findings regarding free will may suggest different ways of predicting human behavior…. The need to reconcile freedom of will with a deterministic universe is known as the Problem of Free Will or sometimes referred to as the Dilemma of Determinism . This dilemma leads to a moral dilemma as well: How are we to assign responsibility for our actions if they are caused entirely by past events?

Are you free? What makes you think so?

Humans are either free or they are not. They either possess free will and can use it or they do not have it at all. They either have it and can use it as often as they want to do so or they have only the appearance of free will and really never make decisions or choices devoid of prior influences that determine the outcome of the decision or choice making procedure.

That there may be social or physical constraints is not the issue here. Humans are not able to fly using only their own bodies to propel them through the air. You could say that humans are not "free" to do so but that would be to misuse the word "free" and change its meaning from "being able to choose" to "being physically able to do".

There may be repercussions or consequences for our actions so that a person might want to say something like "I am not free to rob a bank and by that mean that if they did they would be pursued and captured and imprisoned. If persons have free will, then that might mean simply that they can make the choice to rob a bank and flee capture. So "freedom" does not mean the ability to make decisions and to act without undesirable consequences.

Freedom in this context of the freedom versus determinism issue has a meaning that identifies it with possessing free will or being able to make choices for ones self.

Freedom's Not Just Another Word By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER, February 7 th , 2005 New York Times

.......There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world, though many people to the left and right believe that they have found it. And, yet, there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways.

The words themselves have a surprising history. The oldest known word with such a meaning comes to us from ancient Iraq. The Sumerian " ama-ar-gi ," found on tablets in the ruins of the city-state of Lagash, which flourished four millenniums ago, derived from the verb " ama-gi ," which literally meant "going home to mother." It described the condition of emancipated servants who returned to their own free families - an interesting link to the monument in Baghdad. (In contemporary America, the ancient characters for " ama-ar-gi " have become the logos of some libertarian organizations, as well as tattoos among members of politically conservative motorcycle gangs, who may not know that the inscriptions on their biceps mean heading home to mom.)

Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave. (In science, eleutherodactylic means separate fingers or toes.) Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, an Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging. ...

Freedom? Is it real?

Most people born in the 20 th Century were raised with a conflicting set of beliefs concerning the issue of freedom. On the one hand people have been taught or encouraged to believe that they are responsible for their actions and that they are capable of choosing from among the options that are presented to them. Yet there is in the language that is used and in the ideas people claim to hold as true another view entirely, namely that there are forces, or a force, over which humans have no control and that determines what occurs. There are those who claim that they are free and believe that here is such a thing as fate or destiny at the same time.

Questions to Consider

• How can it be that people are free to chose their own paths through life and yet all has been set out by the forces (deities) that have determined each person's ultimate end or destiny?
• Are humans free to make decisions concerning their behavior or not?
• If humans are not free then what becomes of the notion of responsibility and accountability?
• What is to be done with those humans who commit crimes if they did so due to factors over which they had no control?
• Are you one of those people who claim to believe in fate?
• Do you think that all things occur as they were meant to occur?
• Do you believe that "what will be will be?" ( que sera sera )

If you do and you think that you are free to make decisions and that the future is undetermined you are a believer in contradictory ideas. The idea of a fate or destiny rests on the belief (in the absence of proof that is clearly convincing) that there is some power or agency that does determine the sets of experiences to be encountered by humans as well as their ultimate demise in both time and manner. You are believing in things that cannot all be true at the same time.

Does infallible foreknowledge of a human act by a deity or the "fates" take away free will? People that can consistently maintain both free will and infallible foreknowledge are called compatibilists. They have a very difficult time providing evidence and reasoning to support their position. People that prove that only one of them can be true are called Incompatibilists. They hold that free will and infallible foreknowledge by any entity contradict with each other. Here are attempts to explain and argue for each of these views.

C has determined that at time (T) you will be in location (F) and event (E) that you are hit by a meteorite and die. Opps! Sorry! Now, you can do whatever you like but if there is such a fate then at T you will be at F and then E you die. Sorry again. But you can make a decision to remain where you are now at location (l) when time T comes and avoid E. But you do not know the future and so when T comes around you have made decisions that place you at F and you get hit and die.

Were you free to decide to remain at l or to go to some other location (O) when T came? People are brought up to believe that they are, but if there is a C that has determined that you are to be at F at T and get hit then you do not have such freedom to make the decision to be at O, act on it and to be at O, or I, and not die.

If it is your C to be at F at T and have E occur then you have been determined by C to make the decisions that put you at F at T. You have no choice to decide to do anything but to be at F at T.

Okay let's try to get freedom back into this. Let's say now you are at l and it is getting close to T and you decide of your own free will (if you have a free will) to go to a location (O) other than (F). If there is fate then when you decide to go to O something will happen that will force you, against your apparent free will, to go from O instead be at F at T where you get E. But are we still free? Well not quite, because when we make decisions to go from O we do not feel as if we are being forced to go to F. We make decisions throughout our daily life and it appears as if they are free and not forced and that our bodies are not being forced into physical places by physicals agents. So if there is fate and fate determines what happens to us it is not through a series of physical agents acting like thugs and forcing us to do things. No we realize our predetermined fate by actions that appear to be our own choosing. If there is fate it would be fate that acts through us and gives us desires and aims and values and goals and they cause our decisions and they lead to our experiences and to our choices that bring us to F at T to have E. This would be such as to make the decision to go to O and as you are making your way to go to O you are on spot F at time T when you are hit by the meteorite E.

Conclusion: If there is fate, there is no free will.

OK, let's suppose that there is a cause of events (C), a fate or fates or deity or deities that determine each person's destiny but has no foreknowledge of what will happen and no control over the decision making of humans. The C knows you are at L and wants to arrange that at time T you are at F and have E. So now if there is this sort of fate then some things, some events, will occur where you would react and move from L to F at T and have E. In this case C made you move to F at T. Were you free? Did you have free will? Could you have decided to go to O and not to F at time T? Perhaps, but if there is a C then when you make a decision in your daily life to go to O you would be forced to be at F by some agencies or agents that put you at F at T and boom E. Is this what daily life feels like? Are we regularly deciding to do one thing or go to one place only to be forced to another? If there is fate then it determines everything that happens and the events that lead up to the "Big Events" that are so memorable and the benchmarks of our lives. If there is fate then it determines everything that happens whether large or small events because they all contribute to the production of the memorable and the benchmarks of our lives. If there is such a fate operative we would experience a near constant subversion of our free will choices and the events we do experience will seem forced against our wills. This is not our experience on a minute by minute or hour by hour basis!

Consider this:

The idea of a Fate or Destiny rests on the belief (in the absence of proof that is clearly convincing) that there is some power or agency that determines the sets of experiences to be encountered by humans as well as their ultimate demise in both time and manner. As there is no convincing proof such an agency exists we will examine another sense in which freedom or free will is challenged.

Are humans free to determine each and every one of their own actions or is there some force, agency, or process that determines it as a result of prior experiences?

Consider some simple definitions for the basic positions:

• Causal determinism - every event has a cause
• Hard determinism - causal determinism is true, and therefore, free action and moral responsibility are impossible
• Soft determinism (or compatibilism) - causal determinism is true, but we still act as free, morally responsible agents when, in the absence of external constraints, our actions are caused by our desires
• Indeterminism - causal determinism is false, since free, uncaused actions that we are morally responsible for are possible

Examine this chart to learn of the positions of the traditions on five claims.

Problems and Arguments

So here we have one form of the problem with the idea of human freedom. Are humans possessed of the capacity to make a decision, a choice, that is not fully determined by antecedent conditions or not? Are humans free, so free that they can do things that are totally unbound by the laws of the physical universe, totally undetermined by previous acts and events and physical circumstances? Or, alternatively, are humans potentially predictable as a physical object, say a dropped book. Pick up a book, hold it about four feet above the ground and let it go. The book will drop to the ground. The book has no choice. The book's actions are determined by the laws of the physical universe. The law of gravity operates on the book.

Well, there are those who believe that there is perhaps nothing more obvious than that they are free. They believe that they make decisions all the time. They believe that they have free will.

There are others who believe that humans are physical beings that are bound by the laws of the physical universes and that as the human brain are also part of that universe there are laws governing the operations of the brain as well. There are those who believe that the day will come when humans know enough about the laws of the human brain and behavior that humans will be able to predict with great accuracy exactly what a human being will do in a given situation. They believe that human behavior will be as predictable as a book when dropped. They believe that people will need to abandon the idea of human freedom.

Now you might not agree with them. You may think that you know that you are free. How do you know that you weren't just encouraged to believe that, taught to believe that, conditioned to believe that, trained to believe that, reinforced into believing that?

Freedom or Myth

You lift up a large book, say a textbook, and raise it four feet above the ground. You let it go and it hits the ground. No problem there! No surprises, just what you expected. Now suppose you lift up the book again and raise it four feet above the ground. In your other hand you hold a single sheet of paper, say printer paper, 8 1/2 x 11 inches. You hold the piece of paper at the same height you are holding the book. You let them go at the same time and they both fall to the ground. The book hits first then the paper. Do it again. Raise them both and then let them go and again. Well each time the same thing happens. The book hits the ground first and the piece of paper arrives on the ground a second or so later. Why does the book hit the ground first?

Did you answer that the book falls faster and hits the ground first because it is heavier? Lots of people think this. If you do you are in some pretty popular company.

But consider this:

You lift up a large book, say a textbook, and raise it four feet above the ground. You let it go and it hits the ground. No surprises, just what you expected. Now suppose in your other hand you hold a single sheet of paper. You crumple up the paper pretty well. You squeeze it into a small ball. You hold the paper ball four feet above the ground at the same time you are holding the book. You let them go at the same time and they both fall to the ground. Do it again. Raise them both and then let them go. What happens?

Well the book and the crumpled piece of paper hit the ground at just about the same time. Do it again if you doubt that. Well if you thought that the book was hitting the ground first because it was heavier than the single piece of paper, you have a couple of choices as to what to believe now:

• Somehow the single piece of paper gained a lot of weight and now falls almost as fast as the textbook.
• The textbook somehow lost weight and is now about as light as the single piece of paper.
• You were wrong when you thought that the book falls faster because it is heavier.

If you thought that heavier things fall faster than light things, you were wrong! Oh my, now what to believe! Galileo disproved that idea about heavy things falling faster than lighter things because of the weight. He disproved it over 400 years ago. OK, what's my point here. That the idea about heavy things falling faster than lighter things because of the weight is still popular and it appears to a lot of people to be very obvious but, it is wrong.

On how things fall and why they fall as they do. See the following video for common misconceptions.

Misconceptions About Falling Objects

So if your belief about why things fall was not correct or not true at all, then consider this: maybe, just maybe, the belief most people have about human freedom is wrong as well. Not everything is as it appears to be.

Let's look at ideas of human freedom, even radical ideas. Let's start with exploring what most people already believe and then let's consider the ideas of the critics of freedom, the determinists.

There are 3 main positions in the free will debate:

• Hard Determinism
• Libertarianism
• Compatibilism

Hard Determinists and libertarians are both Incompatibilists. They both subscribe to the Incompatibilist thesis that determinism is incompatible with acting freely.

Do We Have Free Will or is Everything Determined?

Philosophy Applications

• Do Humans have free will, if so, how free is it? In other words, are all human actions determined, if so how so, to what degree?
• Suppose that you are a bank teller and are held up at gun point. You decide that heroics are out of the question and hand over the money. Are you acting freely? Why or why not?
• Psychologists have found that a belief in Determinism caused an increase in immoral behavior. If science succeeds in showing that there is no free will, should we nevertheless pretend that we have free will? Could we do such a thing?
• Foreknowledge and Freedom
• Elephant and Feather-Free Fall
• Acceleration and Gravity
• Determinism and Free Will

Vocabulary Quizlet 7.1

‘Freedom’ Means Something Different to Liberals and Conservatives. Here’s How the Definition Split—And Why That Still Matters

W e tend to think of freedom as an emancipatory ideal—and with good reason. Throughout history, the desire to be free inspired countless marginalized groups to challenge the rule of political and economic elites. Liberty was the watchword of the Atlantic revolutionaries who, at the end of the 18th century, toppled autocratic kings, arrogant elites and ( in Haiti ) slaveholders, thus putting an end to the Old Regime. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Black civil rights activists and feminists fought for the expansion of democracy in the name of freedom, while populists and progressives struggled to put an end to the economic domination of workers.

While these groups had different objectives and ambitions, sometimes putting them at odds with one another, they all agreed that their main goal—freedom—required enhancing the people’s voice in government. When the late Rep. John Lewis called on Americans to “let freedom ring” , he was drawing on this tradition.

But there is another side to the story of freedom as well. Over the past 250 years, the cry for liberty has also been used by conservatives to defend elite interests. In their view, true freedom is not about collective control over government; it consists in the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods. From this perspective, preserving freedom has little to do with making government accountable to the people. Democratically elected majorities, conservatives point out, pose just as much, or even more of a threat to personal security and individual right—especially the right to property—as rapacious kings or greedy elites. This means that freedom can best be preserved by institutions that curb the power of those majorities, or simply by shrinking the sphere of government as much as possible.

This particular way of thinking about freedom was pioneered in the late 18th century by the defenders of the Old Regime. From the 1770s onward, as revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic rebelled in the name of liberty, a flood of pamphlets, treatises and newspaper articles appeared with titles such as Some Observations On Liberty , Civil Liberty Asserted or On the Liberty of the Citizen . Their authors vehemently denied that the Atlantic Revolutions would bring greater freedom. As, for instance, the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson—a staunch opponent of the American Revolution—explained, liberty consisted in the “security of our rights.” And from that perspective, the American colonists already were free, even though they lacked control over the way in which they were governed. As British subjects, they enjoyed “more security than was ever before enjoyed by any people.” This meant that the colonists’ liberty was best preserved by maintaining the status quo; their attempts to govern themselves could only end in anarchy and mob rule.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

In the course of the 19th century this view became widespread among European elites, who continued to vehemently oppose the advent of democracy. Benjamin Constant, one of Europe’s most celebrated political thinkers, rejected the example of the French revolutionaries, arguing that they had confused liberty with “participation in collective power.” Instead, freedom-lovers should look to the British constitution, where hierarchies were firmly entrenched. Here, Constant claimed, freedom, understood as “peaceful enjoyment and private independence,” was perfectly secure—even though less than five percent of British adults could vote. The Hungarian politician Józseph Eötvös, among many others, agreed. Writing in the wake of the brutally suppressed revolutions that rose against several European monarchies in 1848, he complained that the insurgents, battling for manhood suffrage, had confused liberty with “the principle of the people’s supremacy.” But such confusion could only lead to democratic despotism. True liberty—defined by Eötvös as respect for “well-earned rights”—could best be achieved by limiting state power as much as possible, not by democratization.

In the U.S., conservatives were likewise eager to claim that they, and they alone, were the true defenders of freedom. In the 1790s, some of the more extreme Federalists tried to counter the democratic gains of the preceding decade in the name of liberty. In the view of the staunch Federalist Noah Webster, for instance, it was a mistake to think that “to obtain liberty, and establish a free government, nothing was necessary but to get rid of kings, nobles, and priests.” To preserve true freedom—which Webster defined as the peaceful enjoyment of one’s life and property—popular power instead needed to be curbed, preferably by reserving the Senate for the wealthy. Yet such views were slower to gain traction in the United States than in Europe. To Webster’s dismay, overall, his contemporaries believed that freedom could best be preserved by extending democracy rather than by restricting popular control over government.

But by the end of the 19th century, conservative attempts to reclaim the concept of freedom did catch on. The abolition of slavery, rapid industrialization and mass migration from Europe expanded the agricultural and industrial working classes exponentially, as well as giving them greater political agency. This fueled increasing anxiety about popular government among American elites, who now began to claim that “mass democracy” posed a major threat to liberty, notably the right to property. Francis Parkman, scion of a powerful Boston family, was just one of a growing number of statesmen who raised doubts about the wisdom of universal suffrage, as “the masses of the nation … want equality more than they want liberty.”

William Graham Sumner, an influential Yale professor, likewise spoke for many when he warned of the advent of a new, democratic kind of despotism—a danger that could best be avoided by restricting the sphere of government as much as possible. “ Laissez faire ,” or, in blunt English, “mind your own business,” Sumner concluded, was “the doctrine of liberty.”

Being alert to this history can help us to understand why, today, people can use the same word—“freedom”—to mean two very different things. When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy. Hundreds of years later, those two competing views of freedom remain largely unreconcilable.

Annelien de Dijn is the author of Freedom: An Unruly History , available now from Harvard University Press.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• The New Face of Doctor Who
• Putin’s Enemies Are Struggling to Unite
• Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control
• Scientists Are Finding Out Just How Toxic Your Stuff Is
• Boredom Makes Us Human
• John Mulaney Has What Late Night Needs
• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

Freedom Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on freedom.

Freedom is something that everybody has heard of but if you ask for its meaning then everyone will give you different meaning. This is so because everyone has a different opinion about freedom. For some freedom means the freedom of going anywhere they like, for some it means to speak up form themselves, and for some, it is liberty of doing anything they like.

Meaning of Freedom

The real meaning of freedom according to books is. Freedom refers to a state of independence where you can do what you like without any restriction by anyone. Moreover, freedom can be called a state of mind where you have the right and freedom of doing what you can think off. Also, you can feel freedom from within.

The Indian Freedom

Indian is a country which was earlier ruled by Britisher and to get rid of these rulers India fight back and earn their freedom. But during this long fight, many people lost their lives and because of the sacrifice of those people and every citizen of the country, India is a free country and the world largest democracy in the world.

Moreover, after independence India become one of those countries who give his citizen some freedom right without and restrictions.

The Indian Freedom Right

India drafted a constitution during the days of struggle with the Britishers and after independence it became applicable. In this constitution, the Indian citizen was given several fundaments right which is applicable to all citizen equally. More importantly, these right are the freedom that the constitution has given to every citizen.

These right are right to equality, right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of religion¸ culture and educational right, right to constitutional remedies, right to education. All these right give every freedom that they can’t get in any other country.

Value of Freedom

The real value of anything can only be understood by those who have earned it or who have sacrificed their lives for it. Freedom also means liberalization from oppression. It also means the freedom from racism, from harm, from the opposition, from discrimination and many more things.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Freedom does not mean that you violate others right, it does not mean that you disregard other rights. Moreover, freedom means enchanting the beauty of nature and the environment around us.

The Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is the most common and prominent right that every citizen enjoy. Also, it is important because it is essential for the all-over development of the country.

Moreover, it gives way to open debates that helps in the discussion of thought and ideas that are essential for the growth of society.

Besides, this is the only right that links with all the other rights closely. More importantly, it is essential to express one’s view of his/her view about society and other things.

To conclude, we can say that Freedom is not what we think it is. It is a psychological concept everyone has different views on. Similarly, it has a different value for different people. But freedom links with happiness in a broadway.

FAQs on Freedom

Q.1 What is the true meaning of freedom? A.1 Freedom truly means giving equal opportunity to everyone for liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Q.2 What is freedom of expression means? A.2 Freedom of expression means the freedom to express one’s own ideas and opinions through the medium of writing, speech, and other forms of communication without causing any harm to someone’s reputation.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Responsibility, Freedom, Empowerment, and Mental Health

How to empower yourself by decluttering your mind..

Posted November 21, 2021 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Freedom and responsibility are essential to mental health.
• Freedom comes from becoming self-aware and taking responsibility. Taking responsibility involves decluttering your mind.
• The more responsibility you take, the greater the peace of mind, freedom, and self-empowerment you’ll experience.

From an existential perspective, freedom and responsibility are inseparable. They constitute the foundation for understanding our experience, developing our sense of identity , and leading a purposeful and meaningful life.

Psychological or personal freedom, as opposed to political freedom or liberty – although it impacts our ability to make political choices – relates to our capacity to make choices in taking action, which in turn determine the possibilities and opportunities we create for our future. Your life is (and will be) the sum of all the actions and non-actions you take (and don’t take).

Personal freedom represents the highest value in existentialism. This kind of freedom is internal freedom and requires self-awareness. Lack of self-awareness means living a life dominated by the illusion of freedom and without existential choices.

The illusion of freedom

Real freedom is internal, as it relates to becoming aware (and later free) of the psychological and social conditioning that was placed upon us since the day we were born and has been progressively reinforced to us ever since.

Given our fragility and vulnerability, as the child that we once were, it was useful for us to learn to be obedient and compliant by fulfilling the wishes and expectations of our caregivers. At that time, we had no choice but to be dependent in order to be taken care of. This was the genesis of our inauthentic or false-self (e.g. being a perfectionist or a people pleaser).

As we grow up, however, this dependency is no longer useful. To become a free adult, we need to learn to let go of this dependency. This includes the constant pressure to conform with and to please others.

Failure to do so means living in a permanent child-like state trapped inside the body of an adult. It means to keep making unconscious life choices out of compulsion or conditioning. Over time, this will very likely compromise our mental health (e.g. experiencing depression , anxiety , and even despair). These are the psychological indicators telling us the time to reclaim our authentic or true-self (our freedom) has come.

This reclaiming of our true self entails becoming self-differentiated by decluttering our minds and unburdening ourselves from external expectations, belief structures, roles, duties, and obligations that were imposed on us. This process of self-liberation doesn’t mean we don’t need to fulfill any external expectations, or don’t have beliefs, roles or duties. It means that we choose them freely by making conscious life choices.

Freedom, then, means becoming aware of what we can do to reach our full human potential. Only when we have choices, can we exercise our freedom. This requires self-awareness.

Freedom and self-awareness

There cannot be freedom without self-awareness. To be free means to have choices to choose from. The only way to have choices is to become self-aware, so self-awareness gives us life’s choices. Self-awareness is having clarity about who we are. This includes knowing our personality , strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. Self-awareness also allows us to understand others and how they perceive us, and our responses to them. It is the first step in creating what you want, where you focus your attention and reactions to determine where you go in life. The benefits of gaining self-awareness include greater clarity and peace of mind.

Most importantly, self-awareness is transformational, as it derives self-transformation – it transforms how you view yourself and are viewed by others. Once we become self-aware, we are then in a position to know what to take responsibility for. Personal freedom comes by taking responsibility for making choices to live authentically.

Taking responsibility is empowering and leads to freedom

Taking responsibility empowers us by making us accountable for our own behavior, to think critically, perform well under pressure, and handle challenges with ease.

Owning our decisions provides us with a powerful focus on what we want. Responsibility begins with knowing what we want and creating a plan to get there – not because of a sense of duty, but from our own desire.

When we take responsibility, we take ownership of behavior and its consequences. We accept our choices and their outcomes – without blaming others or life’s circumstances. This makes us strong and resilient .

The degree of freedom we experience in life is a direct proportion of the amount of responsibility we take.

Seven benefits of taking responsibility

By taking responsibility we:

• Live more meaningful and purposeful lives
• Experience personal (inner) power and authority
• Create individuation
• Attain differentiation
• Embody our truth
• Create freedom for ourselves
• Feel empowered, capable, and proud of ourselves

In what area of your life could you take only 10% more responsibility today?

What your life would be like if you were going to do this today?

Overend, P. (2021). Working with power in existential therapy. Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 32 (2), 309-321.

Salicru, S. (2021). A practical and contemporary model of depression for our times—A timeless existential clinician’s perspective. Open Journal of Depression, 10 (2), 54-89. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojd.2021.102005

Spinelli, E. (2007). Practising existential psychotherapy: The relational world . Sage.

Sebastian Salicru is a registered psychologist, psychotherapist, and board-approved supervisor, with over 25 years of professional experience in both clinical and corporate settings. He is the author of Leadership Results.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Freedom vs. Liberty: How Subtle Differences Between These Two Big Ideas Changed Our World

by Sam Jacobs | May 2, 2019

“I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life.”

About Sam Jacobs

Related Posts

• The Case For Christian Nationalism: A Review and Rebuttal
• Your Right to Bodily Integrity
• Three Revolutionary Ideas
• The Politics of Reaction: Civil Rights & Social Media Purges
• The Great Fallacy of Diversity

Related Articles

TGIF: The Nonsense of Statist Political Economy

by Sheldon Richman | May 17, 2024

In the video "How Capitalism Makes You Less Free," self-described Marxist Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, boldly asserts that all societies must have some kind of economic planning. That's...

The Continuing Farce of the U.S. Tariff War

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | May 16, 2024

In recent years, American politics has been mired in a narrative of fear and suspicion surrounding China—a narrative perpetuated by successive administrations, defined by nothing so much as speculation and hysteria, and which has fueled the production of a plethora of...

Inheriting Wealth is Good for You (And Society)

by Brad Pearce | May 15, 2024

It seems as if hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear about some celebrity or industrialist saying that he doesn’t intend to leave his fortune to his children. There is a widespread belief in the Anglophone world that inheriting money will make children lazy and...

Palestinian and Israeli Civilians Have a Mutual Interest in Peace

by Lora Karch Dulgarian | May 15, 2024

Palestinian and Israeli civilians are uniquely brought together in their disdain and disagreement with the strategies executed in this unwanted war. The destruction caused by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the terrorist organization Hamas have each...

Conflicts of Interest, Fearmongering, and Data Control Under the Guise of National Security

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | May 14, 2024

In a recent article in The Washington Post, their spotlight falls on a group of tech billionaires, former government officials, and industry advisers who have orchestrated a campaign against TikTok, culminating in calls for its ban or forced sale. This concerted...

George Washington Warned Against A ‘Passionate Attachment’ To Israel

by Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | May 14, 2024

As war rages in Gaza, the intensifying debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship spotlights a glaring political paradox: Those Americans who view George Washington with deepest reverence—that is, would-be “conservatives”—are often the ones who most zealously violate...

D iscover Society

Measured – factual – critical.

• Covid-19 Chronicles
• Policy & Politics

Let’s talk about security and freedom

• By discoversociety
• September 05, 2017
• 2017 , Articles , DS48

Barry Knight

We live by the stories we tell ourselves. The most important storyline is how to live a good life, since this determines what we believe in, how we act, and the institutions we build. The key text here is the famous 1977 essay by Berger and Neuhaus , which examines the importance of mediating structures such as family, church, workplace, trade union and community association in connecting individuals to society. In a healthy society, these connections are at the heart of the common public good.

In the period following the Second World War such mediating structures formed the bedrock for organising British society. This, combined with government policies that pursued full employment and a welfare state, led to social advance on a scale never seen before. This was planned during the wartime Conservative-led coalition government and implemented in full by the Labour government after 1945. The leitmotif was “security”. Politicians of all stripes were determined to avoid the return of the dark days of the 1930s depression.

In the 1970s, this story failed. The post-war consensus between parties buckled under the weight of “stagflation” – the coincidence of low economic growth, high unemployment and high inflation. This resulted in industrial disorder and social unrest, from which a strong leader emerged with a new story. Following her election victory in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was determined to raise the status of business, money-making and growth by creating an “enterprise culture”. The new philosophy was based on five principles: free markets, small state, low tax, individual liberty and big defence.

The watchword for this approach was ‘freedom’. The importance of security was downplayed, since this had produced a ‘dependency culture’. Moreover, Thatcher believed that expenditure on the welfare state was wasteful because it undermined economic growth. While many people criticized the social dimensions of this approach, the economic consequences were remarkable, and median household income has more than doubled in real terms in the 40 years since 1977.

To achieve such growth, society shifted from an economy based on production to one based on consumption. Zygmunt Bauman has described this as moving from ‘solid modernity’ to ‘liquid modernity’. (1) While in the past we saw ourselves as ‘pilgrims’ in search of deeper meaning in a stable world, we now see ourselves as “tourists” in search of multiple but fleeting social experiences. As a result, we now find it harder to construct a durable sense of ourselves as we tend to live a fast life in a kaleidoscope of relationships.

This has created a crisis of meaning. While mediating institutions have declined, shopping has filled the void. As Neal Lawson puts it in All consuming , “Shopping has been emotionally, culturally and socially grafted onto us.” (2) He also says that for many it is an addiction that fails to satisfy us: “Turbo-consumerism is the heroin of human happiness.” An extreme form of such consumerism can be found in ‘celebrity culture’ in which famous individuals transform their fame into product brands, which the public then consumes. In emulating celebrities, ordinary people use the ‘selfie’, posting their photos on social media to display the illusion that life is ‘all about me’. Such developments were foreseen 50 years ago by Guy Debord in his 1967 Society of the spectacle in which “authentic social life has been replaced with its representation.” (3) Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing”. This condition is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life”.

The price is a soul sickness at the heart of our society, which breeds deep insecurity and unhappiness for many, while violating the basis in nature on which our species depends. The Webb Memorial Trust reviewed the evidence on social attitudes, housing, work, finances, and health, and concluded that the UK is a deeply insecure society. Such insecurity permeates society and is not restricted to the one-fifth of the population who experience chronic poverty.

So, while pursuit of the word ‘freedom’ may have led to much progress, it has come at the expense of “security”. Looking back at history, it appears that security and freedom are antinomies. In their book, The Fourth Revolution Micklethwait and Wooldridge trace the history of government over the past 500 years and find that one or other of these two concepts has been central to the story of societies during different periods. (4) In the 17 th century, security rose to the fore influenced by the work of Thomas Hobbes, but by the 19 th century liberty got the upper hand through the influence of John Stuart Mill. In the mid 20 th century, security became paramount though the influence of Beatrice Webb, only to be replaced by freedom from the 1970s onwards under the influence of Milton Friedman.

We see this dynamic in the organization of contemporary politics, in which the dominance of two political parties encourages bifurcation, one stressing freedom and the other security. And yet, this framing has failed us as a society – the pursuit of one at the expense of the other leads to distortions when what we need is balance. Our current trajectory, based on freedom, encourages untrammelled economic growth, even though Carbon Tracker warns that the destruction of our ecosystem is just around the corner. At the same, there is no obvious alternative because the framing of the current narrative on security takes us back to yesterday’s world of the welfare state for which there is little capacity, finance or public support.

So how do we make progress? The two camps are increasingly polarised, and communication between them seems to occur through shouting. Ponder for a moment the extraordinary fact that, despite all the problems that Greece faces, a Greek foundation – the Stavros Niarchos Foundation – has committed $150 million to Johns Hopkins University to lead a worldwide effort to restore open and inclusive discourse to rescue our democracies.

So how can we make progress? The first helpful step would be to admit our confusion. As Yanis Varoufakis puts it: “Nothing humanizes us like aporia – that state of intense puzzlement in which we find ourselves when our certainties fall to pieces… and when the aporia casts its net far and wide to ensnare the whole of humanity, we know we are at a very special moment in history.” (5)

Such a perspective takes us back to basics, forcing us to rethink our values and to decide what kind of society we want. We attempted to do this in Rethinking poverty: What makes a good society . We used many techniques – surveys, focus groups and participative research to find out what kind of society people want.

Our results show that people want security and freedom. Rather than being antinomies, people see them as complementary. People’s views are complicated and nuanced, and cannot easily be captured in opinion polls that yield binary answers. While our results are provisional, detailed analysis of the results suggests that there are five core principles in what people want from their society:

• We all have a decent basic standard of living
• So, we are secure and free to choose how to lead our lives
• Developing our potential and flourishing materially and emotionally
• Participating, contributing and treating all with care and respect
• And building a fair and sustainable future for the next generations

One underlying concept that links these five principles is the idea of ‘community’. This reflects the fact that, if there is one factor above all others that people value most, it is the quality of the relationships they have. This is the source of people’s sense of security and freedom.

The conclusions of Rethinking poverty: What makes a good society set out the implications of the findings for the methods of developing a society we want. The conclusions are that a completely different approach is needed, and we cannot rely on politics to do this for us. A good society is one that we create, it cannot be something done to us. As Terry Pratchett wrote in Witches Abroad , “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage”. Nowhere is this truer than in relation to the ending of poverty, a process that now can and must involve the poor as their own agents of change

Notes: (1) Bauman, Z. (2013) Liquid modernity , New York: John Wiley and Sons. (2) Lawson, N. (2009) All consuming , London: Penguin. (3) Debord, G. (1994) The society of the spectacle , New York: Zone Books. (4) Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. (2015) The fourth revolution: The global race to reinvent the state , London: Penguin. (5) Varoufakis, Y. (2011) The global minotaur, University of Chicago Press Economics Books

Barry Knight is a social scientist and statistician, and Director of the Webb Memorial Trust . Having advised the Ford Foundation and the CS Mott Foundation, he now works with the Global Fund for Community Foundations, the Arab Reform Initiative and the European Foundation Centre.   He is co-chair of the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace and is the author or editor of 14 books on poverty, civil society, community development and democracy.

Share this:

The opinions expressed in the items published here are those of the authors and not Discover Society.

• Editorial Board
• Author Index
• Topic Index

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Freedom in 100, 200 and 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 15, 2023

Before starting to write an essay on freedom, you must understand what this multifaceted term means. Freedom is not just a term, but a concept holding several meanings. Freedom generally refers to being able to act, speak or think as one wants without any restrictions or hindrances. Freedom encompasses the ability to make independent decisions and express your thoughts without any fear so that one can achieve their goals and aspirations. Let’s check out some essays on freedom for more brief information.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Freedom in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Freedom in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Freedom in 300 Words

Also Read: English Essay Topics

Also Read: How to Write an Essay in English

Also Read: Speech on Republic Day for Class 12th

Essay on Freedom in 100 Words

Freedom is considered the essence of human existence because it serves as the cornerstone on which societal developments and individual identities are shaped. Countries with democracy consider freedom as one of the fundamental rights for every individual to make choices and live life according to their free will, desires and aspirations. This free will to make decisions has been a driving force behind countless movements, revolutions and societal progress throughout history.

Political freedom entails the right to participate in governance, express dissent, and engage in public discourse without the threat of censorship or retribution. It is the bedrock of democratic societies, fostering an environment where diverse voices can be heard.

Also Read: In Pursuit of Freedom- India’s Journey to Independence From 1857 to 1947

Essay on Freedom in 200 Words

Freedom is considered the lifeblood of human progress and the foundation of a just and equitable society. It is a beacon of hope that inspires individuals to strive for a world where every person can live with dignity and pursue their dreams without fear or constraint. Some consider freedom as the catalyst for personal growth and the cultivation of one’s unique identity, enabling individuals to explore their full potential and contribute their talents to the world.

• On a personal level, freedom is synonymous with autonomy and self-determination . It grants individuals the liberty to choose their paths, make decisions in accordance with their values, and pursue their passions without the shackles of external influence.
• In the political sphere, it underpins the democratic process, allowing individuals to participate in governance and express their opinions without retribution.
• Socially, it ensures equality and respect for all, regardless of differences in race, gender, or beliefs.

However, freedom comes with the responsibility to exercise it within the bounds of respect for others and collective well-being. Balancing individual liberties with the greater good is crucial for maintaining societal harmony. Upholding freedom requires a commitment to fostering a world where everyone can live with dignity and pursue their aspirations without undue restrictions.

Also read: Essay on Isaac Newton

Essay on Freedom in 300 Words

Freedom is considered the inherent right that lies at the core of human existence. It encompasses the ability to think, act and speak without any restrictions or coercion, allowing individuals to pursue their aspirations and live their lives according to their own values and beliefs. Ranging from personal to political domains, freedom shapes the essence of human dignity and progress.

• In the political sphere, freedom is the bedrock of democratic societies, fostering an environment where citizens have the right to participate in the decision-making process, voice their concerns, and hold their leaders accountable.
• It serves as a safeguard against tyranny and authoritarian government , ensuring that governance remains transparent, inclusive, and responsive to the needs of the people.
• Social freedom is essential for fostering inclusivity and equality within communities. It demands the eradication of discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or any other characteristic, creating a space where every individual is treated with dignity and respect.
• Social freedom facilitates the celebration of diversity and the recognition of the intrinsic worth of every human being, promoting a society that thrives on mutual understanding and cooperation.
• On an individual or personal level, freedom signifies the autonomy to make choices, follow one’s passions, and cultivate a sense of self-worth. It encourages individuals to pursue their aspirations and fulfil their potential, fostering personal growth and fulfilment.
• The ability to express oneself freely and to pursue one’s ambitions without fear of reprisal or oppression is integral to the development of a healthy and vibrant society.

However, exercising freedom necessitates a responsible approach that respects the rights and freedoms of others. The delicate balance between individual liberty and collective well-being demands a conscientious understanding of the impact of one’s actions on the broader community. Upholding and protecting the principles of freedom requires a collective commitment to fostering an environment where everyone can thrive and contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Freedom generally refers to being able to act, speak or think as one wants without any restrictions or hindrances. Freedom encompasses the ability to make independent decisions and express your thoughts without any fear so that one can achieve their goals and aspirations.

Someone with free will to think, act and speak without any external restrictions is considered a free person. However, this is the bookish definition of this broader concept, where the ground reality can be far different than this.

Writing an essay on freedom in 100 words requires you to describe the definition of this term, and what it means at different levels, such as individual or personal, social and political. freedom comes with the responsibility to exercise it within the bounds of respect for others and collective well-being.

Related Articles:

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing webpage and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out