People talk about freedom all the time, but do they ever really think about what it means to be free?
Let's take a couple of examples to use as thought experiments. No one should be surprised when my first thought turns to language. Here's too much linguistic freedom in action:
Gukb fsilmpmer splifffdd ..;;, !!! @ WASKKQS&&&&^^^^ zzzzmzmzmllllz(
If we want to take advantage of language, we have to obey some rules -- a whole lot of them, many layers of rules. In situations where your native language is being spoken, your ear is finely tuned to detect unbelievably minute departures from normal language sounds. You can detect a non-native speaker a mile away from a slightly mispronounced vowel, or even just a missing glottal stop where you would normally expect it. And don't even get me started on grammar. For every way to get something right, there are 100 ways to get it wrong.
And yet, once we learn to work within the rules of the language, we experience a much higher, much more powerful freedom to effectively express ourselves, influence people, and generally interact with the world. I spoke of many layers before. With mastery of language, you are 'free' to use that tool in ways that can ruin lives, or cause the deaths of millions of people. You can ruin someone's lifetime reputation for goodness with a single word. You can go to prison for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. This is because language is a tool of power, not a tool of good: you can build something wonderful with it, or cut your hand off; or worse, you can cut somebody else's hand off.
So when we say Freedom of Speech, we mean a very specific thing that implies layer upon layer of rules and constraints: linguistic, social, legal, and moral. But also cultural, political, religious, and interpersonal constraints are no less important in one's choice of words and manner of speaking.
Now another example: driving. Imagine getting in a car and driving to your destination in a way that suits you, straight to your destination, but at the expense of everybody else: not only over lines, and through traffic lights, but also over curbs, through houses, diagonally across an Interstate highway, and over pedestrians. This is what Total Freedom looks like in the world of driving. But in an area containing millions of people, this type of freedom leads to nobody getting anywhere - you or anyone else. So what do we do? We surrender certain kinds of freedom in order to obtain a different, more powerful kind -- one that leads to millions of people getting where they want to go, with generally less efficiency for each individual, but far greater efficiency in the whole system.
Freedom of Movement (in the driving sense), means choosing to stay within white and yellow lines painted on the road surface, to stop and go at the behest of a big light fixture suspended above the street, to travel at a certain speed (ok, I know), to read signs, and to follow all kinds of other rules and conventions.
So what can we learn from these examples? What perspective can they lend to our understanding of the world? What does it mean for people to have to purchase one kind of freedom at the expense of another?
Do you feel the sacrifice of not being able to drive in a straight line to buy groceries? Do you consider it an imposition that, instead of being able to say "BBBBlasdfplk ;lk s sdlkuu a;lksdup" or "Tell me where Chestnut Street is or I'll pull your intestines out through your nose" like you really want, you have to say instead "Excuse me, could you please tell me where Chestnut Street is?" Probably not if you've lived long enough to experience the successful use of your social and linguistic tool sets.
The purpose of these two examples is to illustrate or make clear that it's kind of useless to refer to 'freedom' as primary virtue -- something that's good in its own right apart from any other consideration. I think that freedom is a secondary virtue. In other words, to speak meaningfully about freedom, we have to be specific about 'how free?' and 'free to do what?'.
In general, I would say that when people are extoling the virtues of freedom, what they really mean is a freedom to do, say, and think things that they approve of. For example, I could be persuaded to bet actual money that the people who want maximum freedom around buying, owning, and using guns; and the people who want maximum freedom to run around bare nekkid would remove each others' freedoms in a trice if it were in their power to do so. If that is true, then it illustrates my point that what they want is not Freedom in general, but very specific degrees of freedom in very specific areas for certain groups of people. And this is perfectly normal and unsurprising because the world, indeed the entire cosmos, is nothing less than one huge ballet of tradeoffs, and life consists pretty much entirely in learning how to live within a huge set of constraints -- economic, social, legal, political, psychological, hormonal, neurochemical, orthopedic, muscular, gravitational, atmospheric, electromagnetic, chemical, and who knows how many others.
How, then, do we talk about freedoms? I think that there are several good ways.
First, freedoms, like rights, are inseparably linked to responsibilities, a fact that we often ignore or forget. Freedom for you to speak your mind means that others have the right to say things that you disagree with 100% and quite possibly detest. And the responsibility that accompanies this right or freedom is to embrace the fact that you live on the same planet and breathe the same air as those other people, and must therefore find a way to co-exist peacefully with them. The reason this is a responsibility you can't avoid is that, if you don't acknowledge that their freedom is as valid as yours, then what you want is not Freedom, but Tyranny, a very slippery weapon that's easily wrested from your grasp and pointed back at you.
Second, you get what you pay for. Remember all those pesky constraints? There are lots of ways of expressing this idea: there is no free lunch; there are no solutions, only trade-offs; we most value that for which we make the most sacrifice; we earn our daily bread. This is where we buy the ability to travel around ourselves by obeying a constellation of laws whose goal is for everybody to be able to move around. This is why we spend years cultivating a mastery of language so that we can interact with others. What we grow up with, or grow accustomed to, we easily take for granted unless we're exposed to the lack of it. As a society, it is incumbent on us to find ways to help the rising generation really internalize the value of the inheritances that their forebearers bought with blood and tears so they do not squander them.
Third, the freedom to act or speak does not mean the freedom from the consequences of those actions or words.
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