On Freedom
The more I talk about freedom, the more I think people don’t really understand it, myself included. So I want to organize what I’ve been thinking about here. Feel free to criticize, ridicule, or add to whatever I say here.
For some, freedom implies equal opportunity. Equal opportunity itself is a bit vague — the idea of opportunity implies self-selection, so random selection and forced selection are not compatible. That is, if people have an equal opportunity to go into x, y, z industries, and any individual applies to any subset of x, y and z, selecting people using a random number generator wouldn’t be really equal opportunity, because the people applying to multiple industries would have a greater chance at getting into one of them. Random selection would favor those with broader tastes, so if you’re like Ayn Rand’s “hero” in Anthem, you’ll be sorely disappointed if you don’t get the one job you think is deserving of your mind. But, like forced selection, the real problem with random selection is that you yourself don’t get to make the decision.
Meritocratic ways of selection are unequal when looking at upstream preparation. Or, to use a word out of the Leftist Dictionary, different amounts of privilege factor into something like getting a job. Whether its race, gender, or economic background, a random sample of Americans fresh out of high school will be far from equal, and it will probably be apparent who has the most advantage going into a job hunt or college applications. Not to mention numerous studies that show that comparable (read: nearly identical except name or leisure activity) resumes don’t get equally picked by hiring committees/managers. As long as there’s a human on the other end deciding who to hire, “equal opportunity” in applying to jobs really only means you can submit a piece of paper, equal consideration is not assured.
If we are to have true equal opportunity for applying to jobs or colleges, then there must be an equality of outcome in terms of education, an upstream factor to applying to jobs and colleges. While the government tries to do this with standards like Common Core, other factors like teachers’ quality of instruction or parental engagement in their children’s education also affect individual outcomes. While equal education may be a necessity for equal opportunity at the next step of life, it cannot really be guaranteed without a significant climb up the slope of diminishing returns.
More broadly, at any place in society we would like to see equal opportunity, there is likely a prerequisite place/process in society that must satisfy an equality of outcome. This rule may have one exception, a base case, such that if equal opportunity is truly provided at the base case, then we may be able to assume that downstream propagations of success or failure are overwhelmingly determined by the individual and not outside circumstances. Given that human lives are complex, and our paths through life are not based on any quantifiable first principles, it is a hard statement to argue for. A more likely “base case” is a set of “top of the stream” circumstances that must be made equal, locking in certain initial conditions for everyone, so that the uniqueness of the individual alone influences their life thereafter. This is to me a dead end, so maybe we can look at things a different way and come back to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome.
There’s an idea of liberty and claim rights that together can form a (possibly complete) set of individual and collective rights. As I’ve written in another post, The Two Dimensionality of Signed Rights, liberty rights are permissions, while claims are essentially forbidding or compelling someone to do something. Paraphrasing more from Wikipedia, a world of liberty rights means you have permission to do anything (nothing is right or wrong, its just allowed), while a world of claim rights is like Anthem, where people are either obligated to do certain things or forbidden. Our world is a mix of these rights.
A truly free world, then, already exists in nature: it is a world of only liberty rights. This is why a predator has no moral qualms killing prey — the predator has the same authority granting a permission to kill as the prey has permission to run. However, this true freedom is not really what most Americans want, because it would also imply that we’re free to kill each other at will. You can’t have a justice system when there’s nothing you can do wrong.
So the idea of justice must be rooted in the idea of claims, or that we can have reasonable expectations about others’ actions. We are permitted to do all the things we are not forbidden from doing, and if we do something forbidden, there must be some cost to us to balance the scales. Similarly, we are not permitted to refrain from certain obligations — like paying taxes, but we can get more fundamental than taxes.
In nature, raising young can be drastically different from species to species. Many creatures employ a “fire and forget” approach to offspring, with the evolutionary tactic of having a huge number of offspring offset the high probability that any single one will die. In some cases, such as certain sea turtles, the number of offspring turn the probability of survival into a dependent probability based on the other baby turtles. As the baby turtles hatch and run towards the sea, they are often attacked by hungry seagulls or other predatory birds. The turtles that make it to the sea must be physically capable of waddling through the sand, but they must also be lucky enough to not be eaten, and the traits that help a baby turtle waddle through the sand may not help it survive a seagull attack. The process of natural selection doesn’t need to choose the fastest turtle, only one that is just sufficiently strong enough to make it to the ocean before dying some other way. While this may seem like equal opportunity for the turtles, it is not. The turtles that hatch earlier may be more likely to be eaten, as the later turtles may have a higher probability of surviving against not-so-hungry seagulls. To have a truly equal opportunity, it must be shown that the only factor in the success of a baby turtle making it to the sea is that turtle’s own ability to get there. That is, the only failure case must be a baby turtle incapable of tasting saltwater before it dies of exposure.
In nerd speak. a baby turtle’s probability of success cannot be dependent on the other turtles’ success or failure. Each turtle must be independent of each other turtle. This independence is contradictory to the evolutionary mechanism of having many babies, though, so a natural boundary from evolutionary design prevents equal opportunity.
The other side of the coin are more collectivist species, generally mammals and often birds, that take time to raise their young instead of relying only on instinct to guide newborns. A naturally selected inclination to care for young can be the basis of all claim rights: a parent has an obligation to raise its young. The case for this obligation is a fundamental feeling that the parent possesses. That this feeling exists is, to me, the most defensible proof of the necessity of claim rights in civilization. It is not only a natural, evolutionary mechanism to ensure survival, but a fundamental part of the human experience to feel a connection to others.
Civilizations were built from tribes, which themselves exist as a collection of nuclear families. If parents did not have a feeling that it is necessary to raise young, there would be no edge connecting the nodes of the family structure. The base feeling of caring for young is what creates the “family” set that is distinct from the singleton set of “individual”. A liberty right, a permission, does not shape the topology of human connection because it does not imply any relationship between people, only a sort of potential energy of a relationship. Claim rights directly imply a relationship, a kind of kinetic energy between people.
So, with a deep emotional connection to a child, is a parent really free? Surely the parents without emotional connection are still free to walk away or free to take care of their child. But is betraying a deep, natural emotion an act of freedom, the cost of which is emotional devastation? Acts like infanticide or abortion are present to some degree in all societies, and their mental and emotional costs are well known to be highly negative. The freedom of choice is present in rejecting a child, but the emotional consequences are not for all but the most repressed individuals. Perhaps we are all at some level slaves of our emotions or emotional consequences, and this is the most base contradiction in our idea of freedom: we are permitted to do as we please, but our emotions are obligated to respond in a specific way to ensure survival of ourselves and our children.
In our freedom to choose any action our imagination presents us are also natural claims we put on ourselves, which we call emotions. We feel obligations to eat, to sleep. In terms of individual survival in an evolutionary sense, a person only needs to feel some minimum obligation to a select few others to ensure their line continues. In a societal sense, there is still only a minimum of claim rights that people must follow to propagate the civilization through generations. Perhaps true freedom is finding these minimums and living them, but something in me thinks this society would be a hollow utilitarianism. Maybe more important than freedom is a sense of belonging and fulfillment socially, which must go beyond the minimum. Looking at history, a far worse punishment than prison in many societies was banishment.
