Ability to make your own choices. The way I understand barbaric societies is that whatever your elders come up with you are obliged to follow their lead, if you object you will be banished or killed.
You can still do that in any society. Even though it's illegal, you can run a red light or cheat on your taxes. The notion that you somehow can't is just mauvaise foi. Of course you can. You're choosing not to.
Seems like you are describing freedom from consequences, not the ability to make choices, because that's available now and to the barbarian. I'm not sure which society has no consequences.
>You can still do that in any society. Even though it's illegal, you can run a red light or cheat on your taxes
By that logic, there is no such thing as restriction of freedom, as it assumes even someone's ability to jail you does not restrict your freedom in any way. People in jail are free as a corollary. How is this not absurd? It only makes sense if you hate freedom and want to argue against it to people low on rhetoric.
Freedom is indeed the ability to make your own choices, but you must not understand it in a strictly technical context, more like a social/legal one. It simply isn't viable to physically prevent every action society considers you not free to take, so the restriction of freedom comes in the form of later punishment, it doesn't magically stop being restriction of freedom just because technical possibility is still there.
Ok, let's agree that the proposition we are discussing is this:
* Freedom is the limitation of choice.
My counter-argument is this:
Limitations on choice through potential consequences are ultimately self-imposed. To have any effect, they require me to refuse to consider the possibility of the alternative. To the extent they limit my action, it is through my choice, possibly implicit, to let them limit my actions. The option of making the choice never goes away no matter how grievous the potential consequence.
Since this is in a discussion around a post by Snowden, we can take him as an example. He did something that, according to this theory of freedom, is impossible. He wasn't free to do it, his choice was limited by potential punishment. Yet he did, the possibility of making the supposedly impossible choice was still there.
Consider a hypothetical man who has lived isolated indoors all life playing video games, never gone to school, never watched TV, nobody told him about any consequences. One day at the age of 25 he finally discovers a door to the outside and goes through and thinks "oh man, this is like GTA!" and goes around punching the elderly, stealing things, breaking all manner of laws as he has been taught is how you get points. Eventually the strange man is caught and sent to prison, but until that point, was he more free than we are? He was subject to the same laws and social consequences as we are, but they weren't able to limit his choices because of his ignorance. Clearly it can't be the laws themselves that limit choices if this is the case.
It appears to me there is something strange about the given definition of freedom. It lends itself to producing paradoxes, where people who aren't free are capable of being simultaneously free, and the same sources of limitation successfully limit some people but not others based on what attitude they have toward them. This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete.
Assuming you meant the literal opposite, I can agree there's a bit of nuance but it's true in the "spirit of the law" sense. I really don't understand why you're still trying to take it so literally.
>This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete
Words aren't perfect nor immutable, no definition is complete, but it's relatively easy to see what it's trying to say. It does not follow an absolute implication that punishment is not a restriction of freedom. There are less ambiguous definitions but this one is acceptable and beautifully simple.
If it were code it'd be a single-liner that works for 99.9% of users. But the "best" implementation works for 99.91%, is slow, 200 lines, no one understands and inexplicably broke for someone.
If we are to investigate whether freedom is desirable, don't we owe it to ourselves to find out what freedom is first, find out if we are free, if we even can be free? Otherwise we can debate in circles about different meanings of the word and ultimately get nowhere.
I don't think the poetic appeal of the definition is useful if the definition itself lends itself to contradictions.
I'm pretty sure everyone understands what you are saying, but I don't think you've demonstrated that you understand what you are arguing against. Just an observation.
One can read and disagree (that's what makes reading philosophy hard; you want to argue, discuss, counter the narrative, take it into another direction, deny the assumption, put forward another hypothesis or explanation... but the book just sits there, static and smug, plowing ahead with whatever very specific point and perspective auther has already made up their mind on :)
It's the authors we disagree with we should read the most enthusiastically, because they may just provide an insight into what it is to have different opinions, and we may just be forced to admit they have a point.
When we read authors too close to home that say things we already think are true and share our views, we'll let almost any nonsense argument slip by. That's a waste of time if I ever saw one.
Discussing things with people I disagree is awesome!
Reading philosophy books is difficult (for me), because my instinct is to have a conversation, ask questions, explore notions and branches, spend more time on some things than others. It's the railroad aspect of philosophy books (whether I "agree" or "disagree", which is rarely binary), that makes them feel stifling :-/
Even the classics like Plato - or perhaps most particularly classics like Plato - they tend to lose me after the first dozen "As everybody can plainly see...." "We can all agree that..." "It is an understood fact that...".
> but the book just sits there, static and smug, plowing ahead with whatever very specific point and perspective auther has already made up their mind on
Maybe it's you who has already made up their mind?
If you plunge a sword into your chest, you also can't make choices later on. Does that mean it's impossible to choose to plunge a sword into your chest?
You are free to make a choice even when the end result is restricting future freedom (sword=death, illegal action=prison/death). So you can in any moment "be totally free" in virtually any society as long as concerns for freedom in future moments are irrelevant to you
What did you smoke, my friend? I really like your search engine, don't destroy it's image for me. Freedom is not strictly equal to technical possibility, it's not even the same word.
Aww come on, I don't want you to agree with me, I want us to have an interesting discussion about what freedom is and ultimately why we want it. It's worth while, trust me.
> you are obliged to follow their lead, if you object you will be banished or killed
Not really that different to today, except that it's a circle of elders and their lead is codified in laws.
But breaking these laws will still get you "banished" aka deported if you are not a citizen, and if you are citizen you will face consequences for your noncompliance, which in some places can still reach all the way up to the death sentence.
So in a way it's still all just barbaric societies, but with extra steps.
> So in a way it's still all just barbaric societies, but with extra steps.
You've got it. Proper civilization and a free society are still a long way off. Laws and democracy limit the variance (good and bad) but don't automatically create a better outcome. We still need people to make the right decisions. And these systems of law and democracy which serve mainly to promote stability introduce their own problems by encouraging people to confuse "legal" or "popular" with "right", and "illegal" or "unpopular" with "wrong".
