A More Robust Freedom

In my next few posts, my hope is to persuade you that at least part of our current divisions arise from subtle but important disagreement on the meaning of freedom. My suggestion will be that the ethics driving our daily lives should be thickened by the biblical account of freedom. We should not accept a lower standard.

In Freed for Freedom, I summarized that biblical plumb line of freedom (Amos 7:7–8) as “non-domination.” The description is apt, but the language is from the contemporaneous Roman Republic. One manifested the good of libertas (‘liberty”) only if one avoided dominatio (being subject to a master). In other words, one is free only if no external agent has the power to interfere in one’s choices, even benignly. If one must rely on the good graces of an external agent who can interfere whenever they want, one is not free. To be free is to be one’s own master (Pettit, 1–2).

To grasp non-domination as our standard of freedom, consider the case in which domination is normative for all mammals: rearing children.

American courts would describe my children with another phrase derived from the Roman Republic’s reflections on freedom. Their legal status is sui juris, which means they are ‘on their own authority.’ When they were born, their status was alieni juris, which means they were subject to the authority of their parents. Our job was to nurture them so they were prepared to live as free persons. Such preparation requires an arc of increasing independence paralleled with decreasing paternalistic capacity to interfere in their affairs.

The legal status they acquired at age eighteen is of course a helpful fiction. All three are sui juris, yet not all are equally free. Our eldest is fully on his own authority, but my wife and I retain a paternalistic capacity to interfere in the affairs of our youngest, a college student, by virtue of her financial dependence on us. Whether we interfere or not, she’s aware of our benign domination to the extent there is always the possibility of our limiting her choices or at least imposing a cost on her choices. If we do our job well, our capacity to interfere in her affairs will ebb rapidly over the next few years. The movement from paternalistic domination to non-domination is the hope of the formative years.

Adults experience varying degrees of unfreedom whenever we depend on the good will of another in order to enjoy the basic liberties that characterize communities of friends. My daughter would experience unfreedom if she encounters a professor by whom passing grades are arbitrarily granted. Family members themselves become unfree when the peace and joy of their home depends on the unfree behavior of an addict or one suffering from mental disease. Good citizens experience unfreedom when fearful to walk community streets due to the risk of attack by gang members or incarceration by a capricious legal system. Minorities experience unfreedom when majorities fail to ensure equality under the law (Pettit, 1).

When we are free, we do not depend on the mercy, favor, good behavior, or whim of another with power to limit or block our normal liberties. We are obviously unfree when others dominate through their actual interference. But we are also unfree when they wield the power to interfere, whether they use it or not.

We feel a little less human when we are unfree. That frustration turns to rage when we experience extreme unfreedom. Throughout history, we have given our lives for freedom. For freedom means we’ve been delivered from the domination which obstructs our path to real communion.

In my few posts, I’ll describe two alternative accounts of freedom and suggest why their ubiquity presents problems.

Pettit, Phillip. 2013. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. The Seeley Lectures. Cambridge University Press.

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