what is human freedom essay

Essay on Freedom

Students are often asked to write an essay on Freedom in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Freedom

Understanding freedom.

Freedom is a fundamental human right. It is the power to act, speak, or think without restraint. Freedom allows us to make choices and express ourselves.

The Importance of Freedom

Freedom is vital for personal development. It helps us discover who we are and encourages creativity and innovation. Without freedom, our world would lack diversity and progress.

Freedom with Responsibility

However, freedom comes with responsibility. We must respect others’ rights and freedoms. Misuse of freedom can lead to chaos and conflict. Therefore, it’s crucial to use freedom wisely.

Also check:

250 Words Essay on Freedom

Freedom, a concept often taken for granted, is a cornerstone of modern civilization. It’s synonymous with autonomy, self-determination, and the capacity to make choices without coercion. Freedom, however, is not absolute; it’s a relative term, defined by societal norms, legal frameworks, and cultural contexts.

The Dialectics of Freedom

Freedom can be broadly categorized into two types: positive and negative. Negative freedom refers to the absence of external constraints, allowing individuals to act according to their will. In contrast, positive freedom is the ability to act in one’s best interest, which often requires societal support and resources. The dialectics of these two types of freedom form the crux of many political and philosophical debates.

Freedom and Responsibility

Freedom is inextricably linked with responsibility. Every choice made in freedom has consequences, and individuals must bear the responsibility for their actions. This interplay between freedom and responsibility is a key aspect of ethical and moral judgments.

Freedom in the Modern World

In the modern world, freedom is often associated with democratic rights and civil liberties. However, the rise of digital technology poses new challenges. Questions about data privacy, surveillance, and censorship have sparked debates about the boundaries of freedom in the digital age.

In conclusion, freedom is a complex and multifaceted concept. It’s a fundamental human right, yet its interpretation and application vary widely across different societies and contexts. Understanding the nuances of freedom helps us navigate the ethical and moral dilemmas of our time.

500 Words Essay on Freedom

Freedom, a concept deeply ingrained in human consciousness, is often perceived as the absence of restrictions and the ability to exercise one’s rights and powers at will. It is a fundamental right and the cornerstone of modern democratic societies. However, the concept of freedom is multifaceted, and its interpretation varies across different socio-cultural and political contexts.

The Philosophical Perspective

Freedom and democracy.

In the realm of politics, freedom is the bedrock of democracy. It ensures the right to express one’s opinions, to choose one’s leaders, and to live without fear of oppression. However, freedom in a democratic society is not absolute. It is balanced with the responsibility to respect the freedom and rights of others. This balance is often a source of conflict and debate, as societies grapple with the question of where to draw the line between individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Freedom and Human Rights

Freedom is also closely linked to human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations, recognizes freedom as a basic human right. It encompasses not only political and civil liberties but also economic, social, and cultural rights. However, the realization of these rights remains a challenge in many parts of the world, where freedom is curtailed by oppressive regimes, social inequalities, and cultural norms.

The Paradox of Freedom

Conclusion: the future of freedom.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

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

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 !

Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

Question of the Month

What is freedom, each answer below receives a book. apologies to the entrants not included..

Freedom is the power of a sentient being to exercise its will. Desiring a particular outcome, people bend their thoughts and their efforts toward realizing it – toward a goal. Their capacity to work towards their goal is their freedom. The perfect expression of freedom would be found in someone who, having an unerring idea of what is good, and a similarly unerring idea of how to realize it, then experienced no impediment to pursuing it. This perfect level of freedom might be experienced by a supreme God, or by a Buddha. Personal, internal impairments to freedom manifest mainly as ignorance of what is good, or of the means to attaining it, while external impairments include physical and cultural obstacles to its realization. The bigger and more numerous these impairments are, the lower the level of freedom.

The internal impairments are the most significant. To someone who has a clear understanding of what is good and how to achieve it, the external constraints are comparatively minor. This is illustrated in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom, an old slave who has no political (that is, external) liberty, endures injustice and hardship, while his owners enjoy lives of comparative ease. But, though he does sometimes feel sadness and discouragement at the injustices inflicted on himself and others, as a Christian he remains convinced that the real bondage in life consists in sin. So he would not trade places with his masters if it required renouncing his faith and living as they do. To take another angle, the central teaching of the Buddha is liberation from suffering – a freedom which surely all sentient beings desire. The reason we don’t have it yet, he says, is our ignorance . From the Buddhist point of view, even Uncle Tom is ignorant in this sense, although he is still far ahead of his supposed owners.

To become free, then, we must first seek knowledge of the way things really are, and then put ourselves into the correct relationship with that knowledge.

Paul Vitols, North Vancouver, B.C.

Let’s look at this question through three lenses: ethical, metaphysical, and political.

Ethically, according to Epicurus, freedom is not ‘fulfilling all desires’, but instead, being free from vain, unnecessary, or addictive desires. The addict is enslaved even when he obtains his drug; but the virtuous person is free because she doesn’t even desire the drug. Freedom is when the anger, anxiety, greed, hatred, and unnecessary desires drop away in the presence of what’s beloved or sacred. This means that the greatest freedom is ‘freedom from’ something, not ‘freedom to’ do something. (These two types of freedoms correspond to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ types of freedom.)

Metaphysically – as concerning free will – the key may be understanding how human choice can be caused but not determined . In the case of free will, freedom emerges from, but is not reducible to, the activity of the brain. In ways we do not yet understand, humans sometimes have the ability to look over and choose between competing paths. When it comes to consciousness and free will, I trust my introspection that both exist more than I trust the supposedly ‘scientific’ worldviews which have no room for either.

As for politics, the most important freedom is freedom of speech. We need this for truth, good thinking, tolerance, open-mindedness, humility, self-confidence, love, and humor. We discover truth only when we are free to explore alternative ideas. We think well only when people are free to give us feedback. We develop the virtues of tolerance and open-mindedness only when we are free to hear disagreeable ideas. We develop humility when our ideas are tested in a free public arena, while self-confidence arises from those ideas that survive these tests. We love only in freedom as we learn to love others in spite of their ideas, not because of them. And we can laugh deeply only where there is freedom to potentially offend. “Give me freedom or give me death!” is not actually a choice, for we are all dead without freedom.

Paul Stearns, Blinn College, Georgia

There are many kinds of freedom – positive, negative, political, social, etc – but I think that most people would say that generally speaking, freedom is the ability to do what one wants. However, what if what one wants is constrained by external factors, such as alcohol, drugs, or torture? We might also add internal impediments, such as extraordinary emotion, and maybe genetic factors. In these cases, we say that one’s will is not completely free. This view is philosophically called ‘soft determinism’, but it is compatible with having a limited free will.

One interpretation of physical science pushes the idea of constrained will to the ultimate, to complete impotence. This view is often called ‘hard determinism’, and is incompatible with free will. In this view, everyone’s choosing is constrained absolutely by causal physical laws. No one is ever free to choose, this position says, because no one could have willed anything other than what she does will. Hard determinism requires that higher levels of organization above atoms do not add new laws of causation to the strictly physical, but that idea is just a conjecture.

A third view, called ‘indeterminism’, depends on the idea that not all events have a cause. Any uncaused event would seem to just happen. But that won’t do it for freedom. If I make a choice, I want to say that is my choice, not that it happened at random: I made it; I caused it. But how could that be possible?

I would answer that if what I will is the product of my reasoning , then I am the cause, and moreover, that my reasoning is distinct from the causal physical laws of nature. At this point, I have left indeterminism and returned to soft determinism, but with a new perspective. Reasoning raises us above hard determinism because hard determinism means events obeying one set of laws – the physical ones – while reasoning means obeying another set: the laws of logic. This process is subject to human error, and the inputs to it may sometimes be garbage; but amazingly, we often get it right! Our freedom is limited in various further ways; but our ability to choose through reasoning is enough to raise us above being the ludicrous, pathetic, epiphenomenal puppets of hard determinism.

John Talley, Rutherfordton, North Carolina

Freedom can be considered metaphysically and morally. To be free metaphysically means to have some control over one’s thoughts and decisions. One is not reduced to reacting to outside causes. To be free morally means to have the ability to live according to moral standards – to produce some good, and to attain some virtue. Moral freedom means that we can aspire to what is morally good, or resist what is good. As such, the moral life needs an objective standard by which to measure which actions are good and which are bad.

If hard determinism is true then we have no control over our thought and decisions. Rather, everything is explicable in terms of matter, energy, time, and natural laws, and we are but a small part of the cosmic system, which does not have us in mind, and which cannot give freedom. Some determinists, such as Sam Harris, admit as much. Others try to ignore this idea and its amoral implications, since they are so counterintuitive. They call themselves ‘compatibilists’. But if determinism is true, moral freedom disappears for at least two reasons. Firstly, morality requires the metaphysical freedom that determinism rules out. If a child throws a rock through a window, we scold the child, not the rock, because the former had a choice while the latter did not. Ascribing real moral guilt in criminal cases also requires metaphysical freedom, for the same reason. Secondly, if determinism, or even naturalism, is true, there is no objective good that we should pursue. Naturalism is the idea that there is nothing beyond the natural world – no realm of objective values, virtues, and duties, for instance. But if this is true, then there’s no objective good to freely choose. All is reduced to natural properties, which have no moral value. Morality dissolves away into chemistry and conditioning.

Since metaphysical freedom exists (we know this because we experience choosing) and moral freedom is possible (since some moral goals are objectively good), we need a worldview which allows both kinds of freedom. It must accept that human beings are able to transcend the causal confines of the material cosmos. It must also grant humans the ability to act with respect to objective moral values. Judeo-Christian theism is one worldview which fulfils these needs, given its claim that humans are free moral agents who answer to (God’s) objective moral standards.

Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary

According to Hannah Arendt, thinking about freedom is a hopeless enterprise, since one cannot conceive of freedom without immediately being caught in a contradiction. This is that we are free and hence responsible, but inner freedom (free will) cannot fully develop from the natural principles of causality. In the physical world, everything happens according to necessity governed by causality. So, assuming that we are entirely material beings governed by the laws of physics, it is impossible to even consider the idea of human freedom. To say that we are free beings, by contrast, automatically assumes that we are a free cause – that is, we’re able to cause something with our will that is itself without cause in the physical world! This idea of ‘transcendental will’, first introduced by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), says that free will must be non-physical in order to operate – in other words, not part of the causal system of the physical world. Yet even this doesn’t fully address the issue of freedom. In order for freedom to have any meaning, one has to also act through something in the external world, thereby interrupting a necessary, physical, chain of causes. However, to act is to use a fundamentally different faculty than the one we use to think with. Thought cannot extend itself to the realm of action. This gap between action and thought – a gap through which freedom cannot pass – reveals that it is impossible to have a theoretical grasp of freedom! So all in all, the traditional understanding of free will is an incoherent conception.

Actually, politics and law both assume freedom to be a self-evident truth, especially in a modern liberal democracy. Indeed, the very evidence of human freedom, the tangible transformation that happens in the material world due to our ideas, flows best from our collective action in this public realm.

Shinyoung Choi, Centreville, Virginia

“I will slay the children I have borne!” are the words of Medea in Euripides’ play of that name. Medea takes vengeance on her husband Jason for betraying her for another woman, by murdering her own children and Jason’s new wife. The tragedy of this drama relates well to the question of human freedom. Medea showed by her actions that she was free to do things which by their nature would normally be assumed to be outside the realm of possibility. Having the ability to choose one thing over another on the basis of desire is what Immanuel Kant dismissively called ‘the Idea of Freedom’. Kant, though, asserts a different definition of freedom. He formulated a positive conception of freedom as the free capacity for choice that characterizes the essence of being human. However, the radical nature of this freedom implies that we are free even to choose the option of being free or unfree.

Kant argued of freedom that “insofar as it is not restrained under certain rules, it is the most terrible thing there could be.” Instead, to realize its true potential value, freedom must be ‘consistent with itself’. That is to say, my use of freedom must be consistent with everyone else’s use of their freedom. This law of consistency is established by reason, since reason requires consistency in its ideas. Indeed, Kant argues that an action is truly free only if it is motivated by reason alone. This ability to be motivated by reason alone Kant called ‘the autonomy of the will’. If, on the other hand, we choose to subjugate our reason to our desires and passions, we become slaves to our animalistic instincts and are not acting freely. So, by this argument, freedom is the ability to be governed by reason to act in accordance with and for the sake of the law of freedom . Thus, freedom is not what we want to do, but what we ought to do. Should we ignore the laws of nature, we would cease to exist as natural beings; but should we ignore our reason and disobey the law of freedom, we would cease to be human beings.

Medea, just like all human beings, had freedom of choice. She chose to make her reason the slave of her passion for revenge, and thus lost her true freedom. I believe that the real tragedy is not in that we as human beings have the freedom of choice, but that we freely choose to be unfree. Without true freedom, we lose our humanity and bring suffering on ourselves – as illustrated in this and all the other tragedies of drama and of history.

Nella Leontieva, Sydney

In an article I read just after Christmas, but which was first published in 1974, the science fiction author Ursula Le Guin says “To be free, after all, is not to be undisciplined.” Two weeks later, by chance I came across a quotation, apparently from Aristotle: “Through discipline comes freedom.” Both statements struck me as intuitively obvious, to the extent that to the question ‘What is Freedom?’ I would answer ‘Freedom is discipline’. However, I cannot ground this approach further except in the existentialist sense, in which sense I would say it is fundamental.

How can this inversion of freedom be justified? Broadly, freedom is the ability to choose. But no-one, or nothing, can choose in isolation – there are always constraints. How much freedom somebody actually has boils down to the nature of these constraints and how the individual deals with them. Constraints impose to varying degrees the requirement for an individual to discipline their choices. For example, a person might be constrained by a political system, and discipline themselves to act circumspectly within the confines of that system. They might consider that they physically have the freedom to act otherwise, such as to take part in a demonstration, but are constrained by other priorities. For example, they need to keep their job in order to feed their children, so that they choose not to use that freedom. Such an individual may still regard themselves as having freedom in other contexts, and ultimately may always regard their mind as free. Nothing external can constrain what one thinks: freedom concerns what we do with those thoughts.

Lindsay Dannatt, Amesbury, Wiltshire

Freedom is being able to attempt to do what we desire to do, with reasonable knowledge, which no-one can or will obstruct us from achieving through an arbitrary exercise of their will .

To clarify this, let me distinguish between usual and unusual desires. The usual ones are desires that anyone can reasonably expect to be satisfied as part of everyday life, while the unusual are desires no-one can expect to be satisfied. Examples of a usual desire include wanting to buy groceries from a shop, or wanting to earn enough money to pay your bills, while an example of an unusual desire is wanting to headline the Glastonbury Festival. Although it’s certainly the case that people might prevent me from achieving that goal through an arbitrary exercise of their will, it is not at all guaranteed that a lack of this impediment will result in my achieving the goal. We cannot claim a lack of freedom on the basis that our unusual desires go unsatisfied. Meanwhile, it is almost certainly guaranteed that I can shop for groceries if no-one else attempts to stop me through arbitrary actions.

An arbitrary act is an act carried out according to no concrete or explicit set of rules applicable to all. A person might invent their own rules and act according to them, but this is still arbitrary because their act is not mediated by a set of rules applicable to all. On these same lines, a person in a dictatorship is not free, because although there may be a set of rules ostensibly applicable to all, the application of these rules is at the discretion of the political leader or government. Contrariwise, a person can experience a just law as unfair and feel that their freedom is decreased when in fact the full freedom of all depends on that law. For example, a law against vandalism may be experienced by some political activists as unfair, or even unjust, but it applies equally to everyone. If this latter condition is not met, people are not free.

Let me add that we cannot define freedom as ‘the absence of constraint or interference’, since we cannot know that interference isn’t taking place. We can conceive of hard-to-see manipulative systems which evade even our most careful investigation. And their non-existence is equally imperceptible to us.

Alastair Gray, Brighton

Freedom is an amalgam of dreams, strivings, and controlled premeditated actions which yield repeatable demonstrable successes in the world . There is collective freedom and individual freedom . I’ll only consider individual freedom here, but with minimal tweaking this concept could apply to collective freedom, too.

Every baby is born with at least one freedom – the ability to find, suckle at, and leave the breast. Other actions are doable, but are ragged and out of control. Over time more freedom is achieved. How does that happen? First, through crying, cooing, smiling, the newborn learns to communicate. First word, first step, first bike ride – all are major freedom breakthroughs. All are building blocks to future successes.

Let a dot on a page represent a specific individual and a closed line immediately about the dot represent a fence, limiting freedom. Freedom is a push upon this fence. A newly gained freedom forces the fence to back even further away from the dot, expanding the area enclosed about the individual. This area depicts the accumulated freedoms gained in life. The shape is random, not circular, since it is governed by the diversity and complexity of the individual’s successes. If Spanish is not learned, freedom to use Spanish was not gained. But if freedom with the violin is gained, that freedom would force the fence to retreat, adding a ‘violin-shaped’ bulge of freedom. The broader the skill, the wider the bulge. The greater the complexity, the deeper the bulge.

The fence limiting each individual’s freedom is unique. Its struts consist of the individual’s DNA, location, historical time frame, the community morays, the laws of the land, and any barrier which inhibits the individual’s goals. At an individual’s maximum sustained effort to be free from their constraints, the fence becomes razor wire. Continued sustained effort at the edge, without breaking through or expanding one’s territory, leaves the individual shattered, bleeding, and possibly broken.

Years fly, in time the hair greys or is lost, along with the greying of memory and other mental and physical abilities. Freedom weakens. Strength to hold back the fence’s elasticity weakens as well. So begins freedom’s loss in a step-by-step retreat.

Bob Preston, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Freedom is an illusion. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. But man is not so much condemned to be free as condemned to bear the consequences of his choices and to take responsibility for his actions. This is not freedom . Freedom differs from free will. We do have choice , no matter what; but it is very questionable whether choosing between several unattractive options corresponds with actual freedom . Freedom would be the situation in which our choices, made through our free will, have no substantial consequences, which, say, limit our choices. This is impossible.

Man has a free will, but that does not make him ultimately free. On the contrary, our choices are mainly driven by survival in a competitive environment. Moreover, as long as people live with others, their freedom is limited by morals, laws, obligations and responsibilities – and that’s in countries where human rights are being respected. So all the freedoms we experience or aspire to are relative: freedom of opinion, freedom of action, freedom to choose a career, residence, or partner. Every choice necessarily leads to a commitment, and thus to obligations and responsibilities. These in turn lead to limitations; but also to meaning. The relative freedom to make a positive contribution to the world gives life meaning, and that is what man ultimately seeks.

Caroline Deforche, Lichtervelde, Belgium

Freedom? Bah, humbug! When humanity goes extinct, there will be no such thing as freedom. In the meantime, it is never more than a minimized concession from a grudging status quo. When it comes to dealing with each other, we are wrenching, scraping, clutching, covetous creatures, hard as a flint from which no generous fire glows. The problem with discerning this general truth is, not everyone is paid enough to be as true to human nature as merchant bankers, and society bludgeons the rest of us with rules that determine who does the squeezing in any given social structure – be it a family, a club, a company, or the state.

If this perspective seems to be a pessimistic denial of the ‘human spirit’, consider slavery and serfdom: both are means of squeezing others that their given society’s status quo condones. And, moreover, both states still exist, on the fringes – proving how little stands between humanity and savagery. The moral alternatives demand faith in the dubious artifice of absolute references: God(s), Ancestors, Equality, the Greater Good… However, if your preferred moral reference is at odds with the status quo’s, then you will feel you’re being denied your ‘freedom’.

So, freedom depends on the status quo, which, in turn, depends on whichever monoliths justify it. Absolute monarchies have often derived their power from the supposed will of God. Here there can be no freedom – just loyalty . Communism bases its moral claim on monolithic Equality, where the equal individuals cannot themselves be trusted with something as lethal as freedom, so it is held back by the Party. Capitalism says the squeezing should be done by those who succeed at accumulating economic spoils, and their attendant cast of amoral deal-brokers. Which is all fine. No system is perfect; and freedom is whatever exception you can wrench back from an unfavourable status quo. To win freedom, you must either negotiate or revolt. In turn, a successful status quo adapts to the ever-changing dynamics of who holds the power, and the will, to squeeze others. So freedom is a spectral illusion. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of it; but then it’s gone, wrenched back out of your feeble grasp.

Andrew Wrigley, York

As sky, so too water As air, so swims the silver cloud As body, so too the human mind is free To act to love to live to dream to be As circumstance reflects serendipity ‘I am the architect of my own destiny’ So say Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. This strange friend and foe: freedom Is mine, is me A mind to mirror to will to learn to choose For as living erodes all roads and thee ‘You are the architect of your own history’ So say the existentialists in a Paris café, For freedom, like sky, cloud, rain, and air Is what it means to be. Yes, thinkers, dreamers, disbelievers This is freedom: At any moment we can change our course Outrun contingency, outwit facticity Petition our thrownness to let us be For we are the architects of our own lives. This is the meaning of being free.

Bianca Laleh, Totnes, Devon

Next Question of the Month

The next question is: What’s the Most Fundamental Value? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 22nd June 2021. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

This site uses cookies to recognize users and allow us to analyse site usage. By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy . X

• 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

number 60 • Summer 2024

• Subscribe or Renew

Freedom and the Human Person

Peter augustine lawler & richard reinsch.

F or friends of liberty, the early 21st century has been a confusing time. We are living through a period of rapid and perhaps unprecedented social and economic change, and our established ways of thinking about public questions have not been serving us well. Regaining our balance will require us to open our eyes to the simultaneously disturbing and encouraging trends before us. But perhaps more than that, we are both required and have the opportunity to reflect anew on who we are as free and relational persons. We can and must think more deeply about the contents of a fully human life, as knowing who we are is an indispensable prelude to figuring out what to do to sustain the future of personal and political liberty.

Some of our most familiar political and intellectual categories, adapted to suit 20th-century debates, now cause us to fall into a simpleminded individualism that we cannot really believe. Too many conservatives, for instance, persist in the tired distinction between individual freedom and collectivism. That unrealistic bifurcation helped discredit the communist or fascist reduction of the particular person to nothing but an expendable cog in a machine, plugging away in pursuit of some glorious paradise to come at the end of History. But today that distinction too often ends up placing in the same repulsive category any understanding of the person as a relational part of a larger whole — of a country, family, church, or even nature. It thus causes conservatives to dismiss what students of humanity from Aristotle to today's evolutionary psychologists know to be true: that we social animals are "hardwired" by instinct to find meaning in serving personal causes greater than ourselves, and that reconciling freedom with personal significance is only possible in a relational context that is less about rights than about duties.

The same simpleminded individualism leaves us unsure about how to approach the difficulties of the modern American economy. Given the complicated challenges posed by globalization, the fading away of the middle class, the breakdown of the family among the poor, the growing economic distance separating our "cognitive elite" from the decreasingly "marginally productive" ordinary American, and the indisputable need to trim our entitlements in order to save them (for a while), our ways of speaking about responsibility, work, mobility, and opportunity seem increasingly out of touch.

Everyone knows that success in the marketplace requires skills and habits that are usually acquired through good schools, strong families, active citizenship, and even solicitous and judgmental churches. Those relational institutions, however, are threatened, in different ways, by the unmediated effects of both the market and big, impersonal government. We also know that most people find that worthy lives are shaped by both love and work, and that the flourishing of love and work are interdependent. We even know that love and work are both limits on government, even as we know that middle-class Americans who have good jobs, strong families, and "church homes" are also our best citizens.

What we really know should point our political life in rather definite directions. Does our familiar political vocabulary provide us what we need to articulate those directions? Or does it confuse us more in this already confusing time? We have every reason to wonder whether even conservative Americans have access to a plausible account of the reality of our personhood, an account that could serve as the foundation of a public philosophy that would properly limit and direct a sustainable political life for free persons. What we lack most is an authentically empirical theory adequate to the complexities of American life in our time.

The natural inclination of any conservative is to seek out such a theory in our deep and diverse tradition of liberty, rather than invent one out of whole cloth. And if our search is guided by a sense of how our changing circumstances require us to reflect on the relational character of the human person, our tradition will not disappoint. But we have no choice but to look beyond the most familiar fixtures of that tradition toward some neglected American theorists of liberty who have highlighted the shortcomings of an overly individualistic understanding of American life. Complacently excessive individualism is the opiate of the American "public intellectuals" of our time.

One neglected resource in correcting for that excess is America's most original and deepest 19th-century thinker: Orestes Brownson. Author of The American Republic (published in 1865) and of much more, Brownson explained that our country's "providential constitution" is deeper and more comprehensively compelling than the Lockean theorizing of Jefferson and other leading founders and framers. Our framers, who built for the ages as great statesmen do, drew from all the sources that history, philosophy, political precedent, religion, and the rest of our civilized tradition had given them. It is because they built as statesmen, and not as abstract theorists, that they built better than they knew .

For Brownson, to think clearly about both our Constitution and about particular human beings means avoiding the excesses of thinking too universally (or abstractly) or too particularly (or selfishly). It requires finding a mean between the two extremes of American political thought. On one side, Americans properly appropriate the truthful dogma of human equality, and remembering that all persons equally possess rights is what directs us away from the excessive concern for particularity that characterized aristocratic Southerners in Brownson's time, with all their secessionist, racist, and even pagan impulses. But at the opposite extreme, humanitarians and their abstract egalitarianism — like some transcendentalist, pantheist Northerners in Brownson's time — have divorced the theory of equality from its properly personal theological context. What remains is an empty universalism that overvalues the possibilities for redemption in political reform and denies the truth about personal being, and therefore about personal rights. As the Yankee Brownson acknowledged, despite their many faults, the Southerners were right to defend the particularity of relational individuality; they claimed to know and love real persons and so to have no need for any interest in abstract "humanitarianism."

The American, constitutional mean between abstract universalism and tribal secessionism, according to Brownson, is a limited political unity of citizens who know they are also more than and less than citizens. All of us equally are shaped by natural, personal imperatives having to do with flourishing as material, political, and spiritual beings. When we forget any of the three, we fall into trouble. The material being is concerned with the personal subsistence of himself and his family. The political being is concerned with the common good shared by citizens in a "territorial democracy" in a particular part of the world. The spiritual being is concerned with discovering his relational duties to his loving personal Creator and sharing that personal news with his fellow creatures through the church.

The fully human being attends to all three parts of who he is as a free and relational person born to know, love, and die. He doesn't regard himself as less than he really is by thinking of himself as only a producer and consumer or only a citizen, and he doesn't think of himself as more than he is by confusing his limited and dutiful freedom with the unlimited freedom of God.

This full account of who each of us is means that the economy, the family, and the church aren't to be politicized. True theology is "catholic" in the sense of not being the exclusive preserve of a particular political community or merely "civil theology." This full account of the person's relational responsibilities also means that the political community is for more than serving the selfish needs of particular persons; politics doesn't exist for the sake of economics. Thus loyalty to your country is a real and indispensable virtue — one, Brownson says, particularly lacking in any country too obsessed with rights. What raises the country above the tribe is that this loyalty is to a genuinely common good, a real conception of justice. The American Constitution, Brownson explains, reconciles "liberty with law, and law with liberty" through the devoted affirmation of mediating constitutional principles such as self-government, federalism, the separation of powers, and religious freedom.

Rightly understood, we can see in Brownson's idea of law and liberty a theoretical justification for an enduring practice of American liberty that affirms a constitutional order that "secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those of society."

Brownson, at the very least, can help today's Americans to think seriously about the complex interplay between political and economic liberties and the relational life of creatures and citizens. It is that kind of thinking that the friends of liberty require if they are to overcome the confusion that defines our time.

PERSONHOOD AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

To see how Brownson might help us think about some contemporary challenges, we can begin by looking more closely at the features of America's current political economy, keeping in mind his view of the whole truth about the free and relational person.

When they think about economics, many conservatives and libertarians focus almost exclusively on the injustice and counter-productivity of constraints on the freedom of entrepreneurs, "job creators," and members of our cognitive elite. But this perspective is flat and one-dimensional. It fails to consider the legitimate fears of a larger cross-section of our working and middle classes. Many members of the middle class — people who run small businesses, do skilled manual labor, and make up "middle management" — feel less and less secure these days, and with good reason. The various "safety nets" that cushioned workers and their families from market competition are eroding: Unions and various forms of tenure are toast, as are employer and employee loyalty, pensions, and, for many ordinary jobs, even benefits. Some people celebrate the new birth of freedom in which all employees become independent contractors, selling their flexible skills to whoever needs them at the moment. But others talk about the sinking — meaning the decreasing productivity and status — of members of the middle class, especially but not only the bottom half of the middle class. Their skills are worth less than ever, and so even when they work hard they make less and less. Given their inability to find jobs that accord them at least the dignity of providing for those they love (as unionized factory jobs did half a century ago), they sometimes decide that work just isn't worth it.

Economic inequality is rapidly increasing, and candid libertarian futurists like George Mason University law professor Tyler Cowen acknowledge that this trend will continue. But our libertarians are right that inequality by itself hardly undermines the case for liberty. A prosperous free country is a place where everyone is becoming better off, although some, because of their hard work and natural gifts, are finding far more success than others. Libertarians often point to the progress of technology as benefitting us all. And thanks to technological development and the global competitive marketplace, productivity has increased. But wages have stagnated, and many Americans don't see the democratic benefits of the progress of economic liberty.

Meanwhile, our entitlement programs are costing us more, and we can't afford to fund them as we now do for much longer. In this respect, progressives have mostly become "conservatives" in the precise sense, defending the benefits status quo and often in ways that are misleading or downright dishonest. President Obama lied to many Americans when he said that they could keep the health plans they had, and he misled Americans when he campaigned on the promise that entitlement reform could be avoided. In both cases, he was offering an impossible level of stability. James Capretta, among others, has shown that the future of our entitlement system is imperiled less by our culture of dependency than by our huge demographic transformation. We have too many old people and not enough young and productive ones. So we're stuck saying that the old need to become more productive — and to some limited extent they can be, given improving health and longevity. The truth is, however, that not all that much can be expected from such remediation.

The primary cause of our entitlement crisis is less the culture of dependency than evolving individualism. While the millennial lifestyle is often discussed as the proof of our society's increasing individualism, evidence is also abundant among the elderly. People are living longer because they are more attentive, as concerned individuals, to the risk factors that imperil their existence. And they are having fewer children, at least in part because they view generating replacements (out of love) as imposing intolerable burdens on their autonomous and productive lives. There is a connection, of course, between this individualism and dependency: As relational institutions like marriage and churches atrophy, government often ends up stepping in to fill the void. That's one reason why single women, and especially single mothers, tend to vote Democratic while married women tend to vote Republican.

The impending entitlement implosion will make it hard for the elderly to experience their techno-gift of unprecedented longevity as they should — as a genuine new birth of freedom. We could say they'll just have to rely more on their families, as their grandparents did in the midst of the Depression. But the disintegration of our relational institutions — including, of course, the intergenerational bonds of family — is reflected in the fact that one of our fastest growing demographic categories is men over 65 without any close connections to a spouse or children. Part of the new birth of freedom has been the explosion of divorce among parents whose children are finally out of the house. With so many years left, why not be responsive to every aspect of one's quality of life?

All in all, many of our most promising and troubling economic and cultural changes can be traced to an increasingly individualistic philosophy of living. The more consistently individualistic ethic is deeply linked, of course, to the fact that we live in a world in which children are growing rarer and in which marriage is becoming a whimsical lifestyle option rooted solely in feeling in love. Europe is becoming post-political, post-religious, and post-familial, as political philosopher Pierre Manent has observed, and he sees this as a form of progress that is based on hatred of bodies or those relational constraints we necessarily have as social beings born to love and die. And our country, truth to tell, is not that much different now. The libertarian notions that citizenship is just another word for "rent-seeking" and that national borders are nothing but arbitrary barriers to the uninhibited flourishing of the global marketplace are becoming mainstream. Certainly many libertarians and many of our "role models" in Silicon Valley are also easily seduced by the transhumanist impulse that we can live a sempiternal existence as conscious machines.

From this liberationist perspective, it is easy to define social progress as the growing understanding of Americans — men and women, gay and straight — as equally free to determine their personal identities independently of religious and political oppression. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy has been advancing that view for more than two decades, and his outlook is increasingly dominant. Women are free, as Kennedy (with two other justices) said in the plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, not to understand themselves as mothers and to be unfettered political and economic actors just like men. Gays, Kennedy added in Lawrence v. Texas a decade later, are free to determine what relational autonomy means for themselves, just like straights. Despite government regulation and NSA intrusiveness, these are clearly the best of times to be a free individual.

As determinants of success, race and inherited social status are being replaced by inherited intelligence, the capacity for self-discipline and hard work, the willingness to defer gratification for a bigger payoff later, and (perhaps above all) technical education and skills. As the Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey understands it, the successful knowledge worker has a quick-study capacity for abstract (or deracinated) and conceptual (or impersonal) thought, a readiness to process complexity by relating to machines and to people in terms of productive roles and interests. As Tyler Cowen believes, those who are getting more productive and so deservedly wealthier can either work easily with "genius machines" or manage and market those nerds who work so well with the machines. Meanwhile, most Americans are becoming less marginally productive and so "deserve" their stagnant or declining status and wealth.

The result is that America is more of a meritocracy based on productivity than ever. Cowen informs us in his provocative 2013 book, Average Is Over , that America is dividing into two increasingly distant economic classes. Average means "middle class" — what Marx called the petite bourgeoisie, or small business owners, skilled laborers, middle management, and the like. Cowen concedes much to Marxism by saying that the techno-progress of capitalism means that America is no longer a middle-class country — that is, a country where most of the features of life are shared in common by the overwhelming majority of citizens.

But Cowen seems blind to how much will be lost in the cause of freedom should his prognostications come true. America's middle-class orientation inspired its citizens to better themselves by working freely for high levels of income. It is what made Americans uniquely hostile to socialism. This perspective has also made Americans quite judgmental about work and its place in our welfare system. This middle-class view even made us compassionate enough to fund a safety net of entitlements for the "working poor" and those — such as children and the disabled — genuinely unable to care for themselves. Cowen speculates that the safety nets will almost disappear as the classes become so distant from each other that the fabulously rich will resist doing anything much for the seemingly unproductive poor with whom they share little in common.

Who can deny that social mobility is on the decline, as Charles Murray, for one, has explained? The argument that blames the failing members of the lower middle class for their envious lack of virtue, however, might have less and less explanatory value. And if Murray is right about "assortative mating," then the rich are not only getting richer, they're getting smarter, too — and so less and less like most Americans. The real democratic remedies for envy are shared citizenship and shared opportunity, but both are diminishing. And the noblest remedy for envy, of course, is satisfaction with what you have, which is hard to achieve if you don't have or are losing what it takes to live a dignified relational life.

Envy is also mitigated by the perception that those who have wealth and power deserve what they have — that they are not only good people, but use what they have to display their virtue. But one overlooked disadvantage of the new cognitive or industrious and rational elite is that the virtues that make possible their superiority are the opposite of paternalistic and do not tie them to the lower classes. The aristocracies of old, as Alexis de Tocqueville explains, justified their privileges through their honorable and charitable concern for those for whom they thought of themselves as responsible. They thought they deserved their money and property, which they often did not earn, because they knew how to use them with generosity and class.

Today's Silicon Valley elite thinks of its contribution to society in terms of innovative and creative forms of productivity, and its relationship to ordinary people in terms of manipulation and control. Libertarians complain about NSA surveillance, but of greater importance is the "big data" (generated in the service of unimaginably huge profits) yielded by the ability of Google and Facebook to capture the intimate details of our lives by monitoring our online activity. Some Silicon Valley billionaires give lots of money away to worthy causes, of course, but they don't connect their productive activity to any concern for its effects on its consumers.

The original character of Silicon Valley was a joyful combination of productivity with a kind of bohemian self-fulfillment — hippies and other nonconformist misfits who found creative satisfaction through their work. That's the image still projected by the "Googleplex," the corporate headquarters of Google. And certainly Silicon Valley embraces the social liberationism of the 1960s and the general cause of "diversity." But it turns out that techno-creativity is no more easy going than other forms of entrepreneurial productivity. Techno-creativity — or ingenious invention — has always been at the core of modern liberty and prosperity, and it is in Silicon Valley that we see how such invention can be deployed on an almost inconceivably grand scale to transform, liberate, and constrain the ways in which we all live. Members of our cognitive elite merely exercise a new form of power resulting from their intellectual labor.

Libertarian futurists like Cowen and Lindsey sometimes write as if the whole point of this remarkable techno-progress — the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of "human capital" — is to combine the emancipatory spirit of the hippies' 1960s with the optimistic spirit of liberty in the service of individual productivity of Ronald Reagan's 1980s. Cowen says that "the light at the end of the tunnel" is the coming of a world in which we will have plenty of everything and all the time in the world to play enjoyable games. Lindsey writes that Marx's view of communism was wrong in only one respect: In order to live in a world of bohemian enjoyment, we will need to remain productive.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE PERSON

Despite these displays of unprecedented individualism and the musings of libertarian futurists, however, there is plenty of evidence that our relational natures persist and will not be satisfied with techno-progress devoid of interpersonal responsibility.

Marriage and parenting may be disappearing in large parts of sophisticated Europe and Japan, but they are certainly not fading among our high achievers. Not only are they marrying; their marriages are stable and involve a shared commitment to the raising of children. Parenthood, of course, cannot quite be called either productive (or paid) work or personal enjoyment. It is a third and more natural category, one Marx could never integrate into his description of unobsessive self-fulfillment at history's end. Today's sophisticated parents, for that reason, are actually conservatives when it comes to parental responsibilities.

Their de facto affirmation of marriage highlights the emotional shortcomings of being merely a productive and consuming individual, of being bourgeois and bohemian. Marriage and children move us from thinking about our individual freedom and productivity and toward thinking about the blessings of being embodied and being in love with beings with bodies. There may be nothing more personal and relational than parenting.

Parenting is serious and deliberate in our cognitive-elite families (whose kids are now surging ahead of the rest of society by virtue of both nature and nurture), while it is generally getting worse among most Americans. Although ordinary Americans may have more traditional "family values" than our sophisticates, they seem less and less capable of acting on them. Their families are getting more pathological, with more single moms, deadbeat dads, and dependence on the government.

To counteract these distressing trends, many libertarians and conservatives stress that public policy should attenuate inequality by preparing as many people as possible for the demands of productive work. This mindset is what drives the federal government's involvement in the Common Core education standards and its efforts to make students "college and career ready." Politicians and policymakers have put forward reforms to maximize choice and accountability in education. There have also been proposals for deregulatory and tax-cutting efforts meant to encourage entrepreneurship and job growth, along with other efforts to facilitate upward mobility and wealth creation.

While not disagreeing entirely with this sort of conventional economic analysis, others on the right (a group coming to be known as "reform conservatives") articulate proposals that focus on facilitating the relational lives of members of our middle class. Tax reform should focus on relief for families and the self-employed. The reformers also emphasize mending — not ending or declaring unconstitutional — the entitlement programs that form a genuine "safety net" and do not serve primarily as a disincentive to work. They insistently remind us that both big government and Silicon Valley's big data and big technology threaten the small, relational organizations that ordinary people depend upon to find meaning. Families, churches, neighborhoods, and communities provide people with opportunities to be more than productive individuals, and so more than parts of someone else's script.

This kind of conservatism is also skeptical of the claims that the key to improving ordinary life is simply increasing productivity, and that there is a clear connection between productivity and job creation in our high-tech era. The jobless recovery has been great for those who own stock and other capital and worthless or worse for those who don't. The percentage of Americans who own stock is on the decline, and that fact alone suggests a bit about the proletarianization of the middle class.

Still, a conservative attuned to Brownson's whole, relational person must be highly skeptical of any form of reductionist determinism — either Marxist or libertarian — that confidently predicts the inevitability of the dwindling of the middle class into nothing. That confidence is offensive to the aspirations of free men and women to control their own dignified destiny. A "conservative personalism" similarly rejects the techno-determinist conceit that the arc of our progress is inevitably in the direction of more individual liberty, more money, and more fun. Technological development is a wonderful revelation of human freedom and surely irreversible, but it is also, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, a profound trial of our free will.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION

It is through free will that we subordinate the technological "how" to the personal "why." This project points us to the ground of our freedom and necessarily prompts the question of its purpose. It therefore returns us to our personal and relational religious heritage. When it comes to religion especially, the current condition of our liberty is confusing.

Freedom of religion is good for political life, insofar as political action can be limited to matters that don't require the controversial shaping of souls or intrusions into the realm of conscience. But freedom of religion, Alexis de Tocqueville explained, is especially good for religion, as it gives churches the ability to sustain their independence as bodies of thought and action resisting the skeptical, materialistic, and even freedom-denying or passively fatalistic excesses of democracy.

Religion, Tocqueville reminds us, is actually a limit on the freedom of the isolated, self-obsessed individual. The loves and demands it places upon us draw us out of ourselves. Our personal and social duties become magnified in their importance to us. So it is through religion that Americans gain a sense of common morality and common duties, and through religion that Americans grow confident of the equality of all unique and irreplaceable creatures under God. It is through religion that Americans have come to believe that universal education should be more than techno-vocational, because each of us is more than a merely productive being with interests.

Some Americans today celebrate the freeing of the individual from the dogmatic constraints of religious morality and the liberation of personal lives — even spiritual lives — from the constraints of church. Certainly we can no longer say that Americans are bound by a common religious morality when it comes, say, to marriage and the family. And our Supreme Court has led the way in affirming "relational autonomy," or the individual's choice about how to construct his free personal identity. A nation that has recently become very pro-choice when it comes to contraception, divorce, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage has certainly achieved a new birth of freedom from religion in public life. And more and more Americans — although still a fairly small minority — agree with our "new atheists" that "religion poisons everything" and that almost all of the repressive pathologies that have distorted the world can be traced back to religious authority. We can say that Americans are freer than ever from the intrusive influence of churches as organized bodies of thought and action.

But observant religious believers — those who actually deeply identify with religious institutions as sources of personal and relational authority — say we actually have less religious freedom than ever. There is less respect for the teaching authority of the church as a source of the moral guidance that is especially necessary in a democracy — a form of guidance that also limits the authority of government and the market. We no longer seem to be in agreement that the free exercise of religion is freedom for religion and not merely freedom of private conscience. So the Obamacare contraceptive mandate intrudes on the freedom of the church to be an authoritative body for believers. Indeed, the emerging consensus is that a church's opinions on abortion and marriage are to be dismissed as unreasonable and, if contrary to the prevailing view of rights, no different from the views of racists and other moral idiots. So the display of liberty that is genuine religious diversity is now an offense against "diversity" in the corporate-bureaucratic sense.

Our religious identity is not a political creation, nor is it a wholly privatized or isolated experience of conscience. Religious liberty, as Brownson reminds us, creates room for church as an organized body of thought and action. It is how we relational persons become most open to the truth about who we are. That is not to say that the church, properly understood, asks for more from the state than the recognition that free and relational persons may voluntarily submit to its corporate authority. As Brownson says, all the church needs from government is freedom to evangelize or to shape souls, and our Constitution accords the churches this autonomy.

The trends just described, some critics of American culture contend, show that our Lockean and founding-era idea of liberty (as it has unfolded over history) has always been deeply hostile to the freedom of church as church. As a consequence, genuinely faithful Catholics, for instance, have to oppose themselves to the civilizational wrecking ball that is the American idea of liberty. The situation of Catholics in America, they say, is becoming more and more like the situation of dissidents under communism: Persecution for one's faith is just around the corner. These Catholic critics — like Alasdair MacIntyre and Patrick Deneen — now favor a political order more directly concerned with privileging virtue over liberty or directing liberty with virtue. They add that the position of the Church in America is so weak, in part, because so many Catholics have been seduced by the proposition that being a good Catholic can be compatible with being a good American — an idea that is impossible if, like MacIntyre and Deneen, you see being a good American as equivalent to being the free individual that Locke describes. These "traditionalist" Catholic critics are more and more certain that they have little to be grateful for — and so little to be loyal to — in America. From a political point of view, they have become secessionists, opposing their religious duty to the civic spirit.

But there are also serious Catholics, and other moral and social conservatives, who believe in using Lockean or libertarian means for non-libertarian ends. By this they mean that our economic and political liberty can only be affirmed as good for those who deploy their liberty in the service of purposeful, relational lives. Every human being, in truth, is a free economic actor, a citizen, someone's child (and maybe someone's parent), and a creature of God. Political activity should largely be about protecting and expanding the space for religious institutions, home schooling, and genuinely countercultural or religious ways of life that will allow people to live out their full relational identities.

These more hopeful conservatives have in mind a compromise that would reject, in light of recent experience, the notion that our churches can combine their charitable functions with the welfare state without undermining their singular missions. But their compromise would insist that those missions can be pursued within the confines of American life. The way to deal with the contraceptive mandate, for instance, would be to get government as far as possible out of the insurance business, and to make the institutional churches in general less dependent on government funding and regulation. In a different way, these libertarian non-libertarians are secessionists too. They want to recover the distinction between a modest public realm and an expansive private realm.

AN AMERICAN THEORY OF LIBERTY

In the spirit (and close to the letter) of Brownson, we should conclude by trying to reconcile both our churches and our libertarians to our country's civilizing mission. To do this, we have to see the limits of the abstract principles with which we conservatives often tend to define America's founding and its public life. Our political arrangements have always been a compromise between such principles and the complex, relational character of the free human person. As James Stoner argues: 

To be true to the spirit of the Declaration means, from my perspective, not that we are bound to the most radical reading of its most abstract truth, but that we ought to recover the spirited aspiration to self-government that gave the American Revolution its force and its justification. Rather than look to an unelected judiciary for the formulation of our ideals — or to the liberal philosophers who want to rule through them — we should neither shy away from free debate on important social questions nor demand that every consensus work out its derivation from first things in order to count.

It took a French Catholic priest, Father Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger (chaplain to the French Resistance in World War II) to reveal America to itself, or to remind America that its legacy begins with men locked in dry political argument. Bruckberger's book Image of America (published in America in 1959) beautifully accounts for our Declaration of Independence and its mixture of natural theology (in its second paragraph) with the providential God (featured in the last section). Bruckberger observes that the Continental Congress, while not rejecting Jefferson's deistic formulation of "Nature's God" in the document's opening, inserts toward the end two descriptions of God as a creator and judge, as a personal God.

The truth is, Bruckberger observes, "that Congress and Jefferson had different concepts of God" and that they held to "two profoundly different philosophies." Jefferson and the reigning Lockean philosophy of the day held to an impersonal, past-tense God, more of a "what" than a "who." But the fundamentally Christian (and specifically Calvinist, more often than not) members of Congress thought of God as a personal, present-tense, relational "who." It is the Christian contribution to the founding compromise that made the God of nature personal, judgmental, relational, and providential (and so loving).

The living, giving God of the Bible is what secures, more than Jefferson's Lockean contributions, our faith in the irreducible personal significance of each one of us. Without that faith, there would be no accounting fully for Lincoln's claim that America is, more than anything else, all about dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. Without it, we would find it all too easy to account for the contradiction between Jefferson's moving words about the ways our race-based slavery did violence to men and women with rights and his indifference to taking even modest risks to bring American slavery to a timely end. Living under the God who cares for us all is the foundation of a multidimensional, relational country in which men and women are more than citizens but citizens still. On many levels they are called to freely care for one another as well as to respect each person's freedom as a being made in the image of God.

"The greatest luck of all for the Declaration," Bruckberger claims, "was precisely the divergence and compromise between the Puritan tradition and what Jefferson wrote." The Declaration cast in a strictly Puritan mold would have produced theocratic offenses against our true freedom as citizens and creatures. Alternatively, "[h]ad it been written from the standpoint of the lax philosophy of the day it would have been a-religious, if not actually offensive to Christians." From a genuinely American point of view, understanding free persons as only un-relational bearers of rights — or as producers and consumers or free individuals and nothing more — really is a "lax philosophy" that reduces each of us to less than what we are.

The Declaration, by combining these views about who each of us is, provides the "philosophy that most manifests the equality of all men in their natural and supernatural dignity," Bruckberger concludes. It is a document at the foundation of a tradition that truthfully relies on appeals to both Lockean and Christian understandings of who we are as free and equal beings, reconciling individual freedom with political and religious devotion and personal sacrifice on behalf of our fellow citizens and creatures.

We can say, as John Courtney Murray did in the spirit of Brownson, that the Founders built "better than they knew." They were statesmen who did not think as abstract theorists, choosing instead to engage in prudential compromise in the interest of national unity. Jefferson, for example, thought the congress's amendments to his Declaration mangled its intention, but he accommodated them with dignity. Such statesmanship reconciled universality and particularity on multiple levels. The universalism of Jefferson was from one view too abstract and from another too particular and selfish. The egalitarian theological universalism of the Puritans was too intrusively personal, and so it ridiculously and tyrannically clamped down on the particular person's freedom. But it was also personal and relational, and so it affirmed the unique irreplaceability of every particular creature.

There is no direct matrix of translation from the founding insight concerning equal personal and relational liberty under God to concrete policy realms. But that insight does suggest that the spirit of prudential compromise ought to pervade our deliberations regarding the family, entitlements, abortion, religious liberty, taxation, and regulation, and our efforts to reconcile citizenship and civic spirit with the globalizing imperatives of the marketplace. Today's factional divisions are not so different from those of the founding generation, and we might even say that a true conservative both instinctively and prudentially searches for the mean between fundamentalism and libertarianism — or even between liberalism and libertarianism. The goal must be always to do justice to the full and complicated truth about who we are.

"Civilization," as Murray's fellow Catholic scholar Thomas Gilby put it, "is formed by men locked together in argument." Our Declaration and Constitution, properly understood, sustain "the deliberate sense of the community" as a body capable of self-government, open to the truth about who each of us is, and glorying in its inheritance of the multifaceted and genuinely providential Western constitutional tradition given to America. As Solzhenitsyn memorably reminded us, our hopes for political and technological progress are both chastened and directed by the enduring truth that the one true human progress is made over the course of each particular human life toward a kind of personal and relational perfection in wisdom and virtue — progress that comes through responsibly and courageously and lovingly acting in light of what we cannot help but know about who we are. From this view, the unprecedented challenges to — as well as opportunities for — living as purposeful beings found in our technological world should be understood as gifts to be used well or badly according to our free wills. The challenges of our time are especially confusing because they so readily detach us from our traditional and relational institutions and sources of guidance. The first step toward making sense of them — toward finding our true place in the world — is recovering through deliberation and, often, compromise the truth about who each of us is as a free and relational person.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and executive editor of  Perspectives on Political Science .

Richard Reinsch is a fellow at Liberty Fund and the editor of the Library of Law and Liberty.

Conservatives, Hispanics, and the Immigrant Experience

Mike gonzalez, overselling the earned income tax credit, lawrence m. mead, a weekly newsletter with free essays from past issues of national affairs and the public interest that shed light on the week's pressing issues..

advertisement

Sign-in to your National Affairs subscriber account.

Forgot password? | MANAGE MY ACCOUNT

Already a subscriber? Activate your account.

Unlimited access to intelligent essays on the nation’s affairs..

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

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.

Essay on Human Rights: Samples in 500 and 1500

• Updated on  
• Jun 20, 2024

Essay writing is an integral part of the school curriculum and various academic and competitive exams like IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. It is designed to test your command of the English language and how well you can gather your thoughts and present them in a structure with a flow. To master your ability to write an essay, you must read as much as possible and practise on any given topic. This blog brings you a detailed guide on how to write an essay on Human Rights , with useful essay samples on Human rights.

This Blog Includes:

The basic human rights, 200 words essay on human rights, 500 words essay on human rights, 500+ words essay on human rights in india, 1500 words essay on human rights, importance of human rights, essay on human rights pdf, what are human rights.

Human rights mark everyone as free and equal, irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed, religion and nationality. The United Nations adopted human rights in light of the atrocities people faced during the Second World War. On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its adoption led to the recognition of human rights as the foundation for freedom, justice and peace for every individual. Although it’s not legally binding, most nations have incorporated these human rights into their constitutions and domestic legal frameworks. Human rights safeguard us from discrimination and guarantee that our most basic needs are protected.

Also Read: Essay on Yoga Day

Also Read: Speech on Yoga Day

Before we move on to the essays on human rights, let’s check out the basics of what they are.

Also Read: What are Human Rights?

Also Read: 7 Impactful Human Rights Movies Everyone Must Watch!

Here is a 200-word short sample essay on basic Human Rights.

Human rights are a set of rights given to every human being regardless of their gender, caste, creed, religion, nation, location or economic status. These are said to be moral principles that illustrate certain standards of human behaviour. Protected by law , these rights are applicable everywhere and at any time. Basic human rights include the right to life, right to a fair trial, right to remedy by a competent tribunal, right to liberty and personal security, right to own property, right to education, right of peaceful assembly and association, right to marriage and family, right to nationality and freedom to change it, freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement, right of opinion and information, right to adequate living standard and freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence.

Also Read: Law Courses

Check out this 500-word long essay on Human Rights.

Every person has dignity and value. One of the ways that we recognise the fundamental worth of every person is by acknowledging and respecting their human rights. Human rights are a set of principles concerned with equality and fairness. They recognise our freedom to make choices about our lives and develop our potential as human beings. They are about living a life free from fear, harassment or discrimination.

Human rights can broadly be defined as the basic rights that people worldwide have agreed are essential. These include the right to life, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to health, education and an adequate standard of living. These human rights are the same for all people everywhere – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of our background, where we live, what we think or believe. This basic property is what makes human rights’ universal’.

Human rights connect us all through a shared set of rights and responsibilities. People’s ability to enjoy their human rights depends on other people respecting those rights. This means that human rights involve responsibility and duties towards other people and the community. Individuals have a responsibility to ensure that they exercise their rights with consideration for the rights of others. For example, when someone uses their right to freedom of speech, they should do so without interfering with someone else’s right to privacy.

Governments have a particular responsibility to ensure that people can enjoy their rights. They must establish and maintain laws and services that enable people to enjoy a life in which their rights are respected and protected. For example, the right to education says that everyone is entitled to a good education. Therefore, governments must provide good quality education facilities and services to their people. If the government fails to respect or protect their basic human rights, people can take it into account.

Values of tolerance, equality and respect can help reduce friction within society. Putting human rights ideas into practice can help us create the kind of society we want to live in. There has been tremendous growth in how we think about and apply human rights ideas in recent decades. This growth has had many positive results – knowledge about human rights can empower individuals and offer solutions for specific problems.

Human rights are an important part of how people interact with others at all levels of society – in the family, the community, school, workplace, politics and international relations. Therefore, people everywhere must strive to understand what human rights are. When people better understand human rights, it is easier for them to promote justice and the well-being of society. 

Also Read: Important Articles in Indian Constitution

Here is a human rights essay focused on India.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It has been rightly proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Created with certain unalienable rights….” Similarly, the Indian Constitution has ensured and enshrined Fundamental rights for all citizens irrespective of caste, creed, religion, colour, sex or nationality. These basic rights, commonly known as human rights, are recognised the world over as basic rights with which every individual is born.

In recognition of human rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made on the 10th of December, 1948. This declaration is the basic instrument of human rights. Even though this declaration has no legal bindings and authority, it forms the basis of all laws on human rights. The necessity of formulating laws to protect human rights is now being felt all over the world. According to social thinkers, the issue of human rights became very important after World War II concluded. It is important for social stability both at the national and international levels. Wherever there is a breach of human rights, there is conflict at one level or the other.

Given the increasing importance of the subject, it becomes necessary that educational institutions recognise the subject of human rights as an independent discipline. The course contents and curriculum of the discipline of human rights may vary according to the nature and circumstances of a particular institution. Still, generally, it should include the rights of a child, rights of minorities, rights of the needy and the disabled, right to live, convention on women, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation etc.

Since the formation of the United Nations , the promotion and protection of human rights have been its main focus. The United Nations has created a wide range of mechanisms for monitoring human rights violations. The conventional mechanisms include treaties and organisations, U.N. special reporters, representatives and experts and working groups. Asian countries like China argue in favour of collective rights. According to Chinese thinkers, European countries lay stress upon individual rights and values while Asian countries esteem collective rights and obligations to the family and society as a whole.

With the freedom movement the world over after World War II, the end of colonisation also ended the policy of apartheid and thereby the most aggressive violation of human rights. With the spread of education, women are asserting their rights. Women’s movements play an important role in spreading the message of human rights. They are fighting for their rights and supporting the struggle for human rights of other weaker and deprived sections like bonded labour, child labour, landless labour, unemployed persons, Dalits and elderly people.

Unfortunately, violation of human rights continues in most parts of the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide can still be seen in several parts of the world. Large sections of the world population are deprived of the necessities of life i.e. food, shelter and security of life. Right to minimum basic needs viz. Work, health care, education and shelter are denied to them. These deprivations amount to the negation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Also Read: Human Rights Courses

Check out this detailed 1500-word essay on human rights.

The human right to live and exist, the right to equality, including equality before the law, non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence, the right to practice any profession or occupation, the right against exploitation, prohibiting all forms of forced labour, child labour and trafficking in human beings, the right to freedom of conscience, practice and propagation of religion and the right to legal remedies for enforcement of the above are basic human rights. These rights and freedoms are the very foundations of democracy.

Obviously, in a democracy, the people enjoy the maximum number of freedoms and rights. Besides these are political rights, which include the right to contest an election and vote freely for a candidate of one’s choice. Human rights are a benchmark of a developed and civilised society. But rights cannot exist in a vacuum. They have their corresponding duties. Rights and duties are the two aspects of the same coin.

Liberty never means license. Rights presuppose the rule of law, where everyone in the society follows a code of conduct and behaviour for the good of all. It is the sense of duty and tolerance that gives meaning to rights. Rights have their basis in the ‘live and let live’ principle. For example, my right to speech and expression involves my duty to allow others to enjoy the same freedom of speech and expression. Rights and duties are inextricably interlinked and interdependent. A perfect balance is to be maintained between the two. Whenever there is an imbalance, there is chaos.

A sense of tolerance, propriety and adjustment is a must to enjoy rights and freedom. Human life sans basic freedom and rights is meaningless. Freedom is the most precious possession without which life would become intolerable, a mere abject and slavish existence. In this context, Milton’s famous and oft-quoted lines from his Paradise Lost come to mind: “To reign is worth ambition though in hell/Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

However, liberty cannot survive without its corresponding obligations and duties. An individual is a part of society in which he enjoys certain rights and freedom only because of the fulfilment of certain duties and obligations towards others. Thus, freedom is based on mutual respect’s rights. A fine balance must be maintained between the two, or there will be anarchy and bloodshed. Therefore, human rights can best be preserved and protected in a society steeped in morality, discipline and social order.

Violation of human rights is most common in totalitarian and despotic states. In the theocratic states, there is much persecution, and violation in the name of religion and the minorities suffer the most. Even in democracies, there is widespread violation and infringement of human rights and freedom. The women, children and the weaker sections of society are victims of these transgressions and violence.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ main concern is to protect and promote human rights and freedom in the world’s nations. In its various sessions held from time to time in Geneva, it adopts various measures to encourage worldwide observations of these basic human rights and freedom. It calls on its member states to furnish information regarding measures that comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whenever there is a complaint of a violation of these rights. In addition, it reviews human rights situations in various countries and initiates remedial measures when required.

The U.N. Commission was much concerned and dismayed at the apartheid being practised in South Africa till recently. The Secretary-General then declared, “The United Nations cannot tolerate apartheid. It is a legalised system of racial discrimination, violating the most basic human rights in South Africa. It contradicts the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter. That is why over the last forty years, my predecessors and I have urged the Government of South Africa to dismantle it.”

Now, although apartheid is no longer practised in that country, other forms of apartheid are being blatantly practised worldwide. For example, sex apartheid is most rampant. Women are subject to abuse and exploitation. They are not treated equally and get less pay than their male counterparts for the same jobs. In employment, promotions, possession of property etc., they are most discriminated against. Similarly, the rights of children are not observed properly. They are forced to work hard in very dangerous situations, sexually assaulted and exploited, sold and bonded for labour.

The Commission found that religious persecution, torture, summary executions without judicial trials, intolerance, slavery-like practices, kidnapping, political disappearance, etc., are being practised even in the so-called advanced countries and societies. The continued acts of extreme violence, terrorism and extremism in various parts of the world like Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon, Chile, China, and Myanmar, etc., by the governments, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, and mafia outfits, etc., is a matter of grave concern for the entire human race.

Violation of freedom and rights by terrorist groups backed by states is one of the most difficult problems society faces. For example, Pakistan has been openly collaborating with various terrorist groups, indulging in extreme violence in India and other countries. In this regard the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a significant resolution, which was co-sponsored by India, focusing on gross violation of human rights perpetrated by state-backed terrorist groups.

The resolution expressed its solidarity with the victims of terrorism and proposed that a U.N. Fund for victims of terrorism be established soon. The Indian delegation recalled that according to the Vienna Declaration, terrorism is nothing but the destruction of human rights. It shows total disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. The delegation further argued that terrorism cannot be treated as a mere crime because it is systematic and widespread in its killing of civilians.

Violation of human rights, whether by states, terrorists, separatist groups, armed fundamentalists or extremists, is condemnable. Regardless of the motivation, such acts should be condemned categorically in all forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever they are committed, as acts of aggression aimed at destroying human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy. The Indian delegation also underlined concerns about the growing connection between terrorist groups and the consequent commission of serious crimes. These include rape, torture, arson, looting, murder, kidnappings, blasts, and extortion, etc.

Violation of human rights and freedom gives rise to alienation, dissatisfaction, frustration and acts of terrorism. Governments run by ambitious and self-seeking people often use repressive measures and find violence and terror an effective means of control. However, state terrorism, violence, and human freedom transgressions are very dangerous strategies. This has been the background of all revolutions in the world. Whenever there is systematic and widespread state persecution and violation of human rights, rebellion and revolution have taken place. The French, American, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are glowing examples of human history.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 resulted from long and systematic oppression of the Indian masses. The rapidly increasing discontent, frustration and alienation with British rule gave rise to strong national feelings and demand for political privileges and rights. Ultimately the Indian people, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, made the British leave India, setting the country free and independent.

Human rights and freedom ought to be preserved at all costs. Their curtailment degrades human life. The political needs of a country may reshape Human rights, but they should not be completely distorted. Tyranny, regimentation, etc., are inimical of humanity and should be resisted effectively and united. The sanctity of human values, freedom and rights must be preserved and protected. Human Rights Commissions should be established in all countries to take care of human freedom and rights. In cases of violation of human rights, affected individuals should be properly compensated, and it should be ensured that these do not take place in future.

These commissions can become effective instruments in percolating the sensitivity to human rights down to the lowest levels of governments and administrations. The formation of the National Human Rights Commission in October 1993 in India is commendable and should be followed by other countries.

Also Read: Law Courses in India

Human rights are of utmost importance to seek basic equality and human dignity. Human rights ensure that the basic needs of every human are met. They protect vulnerable groups from discrimination and abuse, allow people to stand up for themselves, and follow any religion without fear and give them the freedom to express their thoughts freely. In addition, they grant people access to basic education and equal work opportunities. Thus implementing these rights is crucial to ensure freedom, peace and safety.

Human Rights Day is annually celebrated on the 10th of December.

Human Rights Day is celebrated to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UNGA in 1948.

Some of the common Human Rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture and the right to work and education.

Popular Essay Topics

We hope our sample essays on Human Rights have given you some great ideas. For more information on such interesting blogs, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

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

Contact no. *

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

45,000+ 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.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Why Freedom Is Important (Fully Explained)

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on Published: April 27, 2022  - Last updated: July 4, 2023

Categories Society , Culture , History , Leadership , Self Improvement

What’s freedom, and why is it so important? In short, freedom is the ability to make decisions for ourselves. We’re free to think and speak our minds, to choose our path in life, and to associate with anyone we want. This allows us to be individuals and create our own unique life. That’s why freedom is such a basic human right – without it, we couldn’t truly be ourselves. And that would be a pretty bleak world indeed.

Benefits Of Freedom

Freedom is one of the most essential things in the world. It makes us human and is something we should all value.

If you’re wondering why freedom is so important, here are some of the benefits that come with freedom :

• You have a fundamental natural right to be who you want.
• Freedom is important for a long, happy life.
• Freedom allows you to make your own choices.
• Freedom gives you the right to free expression.
• You have a right to be free from discrimination.

Freedom Is About Trust

Free will is the ability to act intuitively, or in other words, to act without external compulsion. People are free when they can develop in the best way for them.

Why is this so important?

Well, it’s quite simple: it’s necessary to trust. Trust is a key element of leadership and life in general.

For example, you need your team’s trust if you want them to believe in you as a leader and, more importantly, strive toward the goals you set for yourself and the company. You can best build your employees’ trust by giving them freedom (as long as it’s handled well).

The same is true for yourself: To trust yourself, you need freedom. Freedom allows us to try new things and make mistakes to learn and grow from our experiences.

We Are Free To Follow Our Path

We’re free to choose and go our own way in life. It’s this freedom to choose that makes us who we’re today.

Each human being has a uniquely personal path, and it’s our responsibility to follow it. It’s up to you to decide what you want to do, what you want to be, where you want to go, and how you want to live.

The most important thing is that YOU make these decisions yourself; they shouldn’t be made by someone else! You have the freedom of choice!

You have the freedom of choice because we all have different interests and desires; therefore, no one can tell another person what to do with their life or how to live it! For society to survive and thrive, it needs diverse views and opinions on issues such as religion, politics, economics, etc.

So don’t let anyone pressure you. Remember that just because someone has a different worldview than you doesn’t mean theirs isn’t valid!

Freedom Is Important For Happiness

Freedom is important for our happiness because it allows us to make choices that make us happy, make mistakes, and learn from them.

So our happiness depends on how we feel about our choices and continue to make in life.

Freedom allows people to make choices that they’re proud of. This makes them happier because they know they’ve earned happiness through their free will. For some people, the most crucial thing will be economic freedom; for others, free speech will matter more.

Everyone wants to be proud of the choices they’ve made in life. It’s an encouraging feeling when you realize that you’re exactly where you want to be in life because of the choices you made for yourself along the way.

The Things That Give a Sense of Self-Worth and Freedom

The close friends around you, the job you enjoy doing every day, the promotions or awards at work – all these things give you a sense of self-worth and pride because you achieved them with your own hands.

These feelings cannot be reproduced if you live a controlled lifestyle where almost everything is dictated by others. This leaves no room for personal growth or choices, leading to dissatisfaction because there will always be something missing if you never had the chance to create it yourself.

Moreover, freedom not only gives people the opportunity to make choices but also to make mistakes. We need them to grow into mature adults who can successfully navigate difficult situations with their newly acquired knowledge and experience from past mistakes.

Without mistakes, we’d never learn from them and therefore do nothing to correct them. This means that what’s been done wrong will continue until someone else steps in or until it self-destructs (e.g., a business model) because of its incessant mistakes.

The bottom line is that freedom helps make us happier because it allows us to make choices that make us happy.

Social And Non-Social Freedom

In the social or collective sense, freedom means that a person is free to participate in building and shaping his or her world. This can include political, religious, professional, artistic, and other groups, organizations, and institutions.

Freedom in this context is synonymous with individual freedom:

• The power to decide whether or not to belong.
• The power to be oneself without fear of exclusion.
• The power to express oneself as one sees fit.
• The power to pursue happiness on your terms when others have the same opportunities.

Freedoms We Take For Granted

From a purely personal perspective, there are many freedoms that we often take for granted. You can choose where you live, what you eat, and who your friends are. You are also free to be yourself and express yourself as you see fit.

You can pursue your passions in life and be independent of others.

You can do whatever you want on any given day or evening, within reason, of course. You can get up early or sleep in; make breakfast or skip it; exercise or do nothing at all; go out with friends or stay home alone and watch TV; be serious or act silly – all without bowing to the demands of others. This kind of social freedom helps people feel authentic in their own lives.

The freedom to create also falls into the category of non-social freedoms because it doesn’t usually require the participation of other people.

Generally, it’s an individual activity that most people believe has value beyond money because it promotes self-actualization and positively contributes to society.

Freedom Is An Integrity Issue

As the saying goes, “Freedom isn’t free.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the human spirit. Each of us deeply desires to be who or what he or she uniquely is. This is our birthright and should never be compromised by others – or ourselves.

Freedom Begins at Home

This pursuit of freedom begins at home, where we’re taught how to think about ourselves and others – and how to behave if we want to continue to receive love and acceptance from those closest to us.

As children, we learn early on that safety requires obedience – which can only mean giving up personal power and bending to someone else’s will (usually an authority figure). In this way, we can be conditioned from an early age to believe that freedom means doing what makes other people happy and avoiding anything that makes them unhappy.

We grow up learning to live within certain acceptable boundaries – and then spend our lives trying not to fit within those boundaries as adults!

Why Is The Right To Freedom Important?

The right to liberty is important because it allows us to have power over our lives and strive for a better life. It’s one of the basic rights we all deserve as human beings, regardless of where we live or our circumstances.

For example, political freedom is a basic constitutional right in the United States. Although there are many countries in the world where citizens don’t have the same freedoms as people in the United States, the US government was founded on individual freedom and freedom of expression.

In the African American community, people like Martin Luther King Jr, Susan B. Anthony, and Malcolm X were champions of freedom and civil rights who worked tirelessly to ensure that more Americans had access to freedom and civil liberties.

The right to peaceful protest, peaceful assembly, and public debate are important parts of any democracy and essential to any democratic society.

Freedom in Nation-States

Freedom is an essential part of America’s identity as a nation. Throughout history, Americans and the citizens of other nations with a similar belief in freedom have fought for this fundamental right. It is formally enshrined in the United States Constitution.

In the United Kingdom, although there is no written constitution, free society is based on case law established in the courts and a system of government and society that originated in the Magna Carta of 1215.

Press freedom is one of the most important hallmarks of progressive and free nations because it enables citizens to hold those governing them accountable to fundamental values of freedom and good governance.

Freedom Allows Us To Make Mistakes And Learn From Them

In an ideal world, we’d all make the same mistake simultaneously, so there would be no danger of suffering from severe déjà vu!

But in the real world, many of us disagree about what counts as a mistake and what counts as learning from our mistakes. Some people believe that you shouldn’t make mistakes. They tell you to avoid mistakes because they “only lead to trouble.” Those who’re more safety-conscious may think it’s best to avoid mistakes because they can harm and hurt you, likely resulting in emotional and financial damage.

Others think we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes if we believe it’ll help us learn new things and become better people.

Most people probably think somewhere between these two extremes – that there’s nothing wrong with making a few mistakes here and there, but that we’re also not doing ourselves much harm by not learning from them.

We must have the fundamental freedom to make mistakes and learn from them without fear of being punished or called before an angry mob demanding answers or even death from them. This principle applies equally in professional as in personal life.

Personal Freedom Means Being Who You Want To Be

True freedom is the right to do what you want with your life, liberty, and property. However, most of us have no idea how to use our freedoms in a way that works for us.

Instead, we sometimes allow ourselves to be controlled by people not interested in helping us grow.

• Freedom means being able to do what you want, not what other people tell you you must do. It also means taking responsibility for your actions and not blaming others for things out of your control.
• Freedom is important because it allows us to live a life without fear or oppression from those who would seek our enslavement through force or coercion.
• Freedom allows us to pursue happiness while ensuring our rights are protected at all times; this includes things like religious freedom, speech rights, and many others that have been granted under law throughout history (such as voting rights).

Human Freedom Is A Right, Not A Privilege. We All Deserve It

Freedom is a right, not a privilege. It’s the most important human right because if you take away someone’s ability to determine their actions or if you take away their autonomy, you fundamentally change what it means to be human.

The human rights associated with freedom are:

• You have the right to freedom.
• You deserve the right to freedom because it’s necessary for your mental health and well-being.
• You deserve the right to freedom because it’s an inalienable part of being human: we’re creatures capable of making choices and shaping our lives through rational action.
• You also have a right to freedom because everyone deserves the same basic human dignity.

Everyone deserves the right to be free from oppression, slavery, and repression. No one should be made a slave or forced into slavery or poverty against his or her will by a person or group that’s more powerful than he or her; that’s why there are laws against everything from kidnapping to enslavement on every continent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is freedom.

Freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. It is a fundamental human right and is associated with liberty and independence.

Why is freedom considered important?

Freedom is important because it allows individuals to express themselves, make choices and decisions, and pursue their life goals. It enables creativity, encourages personal and societal growth, and forms the foundation for democracy.

How does freedom contribute to democracy?

Freedom is a fundamental pillar of democracy. It allows citizens to participate actively in their governance, express their opinions openly, and help foster a system where power is in the hands of the people.

What types of freedom are typically discussed in the context of its importance?

Various types of freedom are discussed, including political, economic, and personal. Political freedom refers to the right to participate in the political process, economic freedom pertains to the ability to engage in economic activity without undue restraint, and personal freedom refers to the ability to make choices about one’s life.

What are the potential downsides or abuses of freedom?

While freedom is fundamentally important, it can potentially be abused. It does not mean the absence of all rules and regulations. Freedom comes with responsibilities, and when misused, it can lead to harm or the encroachment of others’ rights. For instance, hate speech, or actions that harm others or society, is an abuse of freedom.

How does the importance of freedom relate to human rights?

Freedom is a foundational human right, as recognized by international human rights treaties. It connects to numerous other rights, including the right to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from fear and want. By respecting freedom, we uphold the dignity and worth of each person.

Can there be limitations on freedom?

Yes, there can be reasonable limitations on freedom, particularly when a person’s exercise of their freedom infringes upon the rights of others or threatens public safety. However, any limitations must be clearly defined by law, necessary, and proportionate to the aim.

Is freedom always associated with positive outcomes?

Freedom typically leads to positive outcomes such as personal growth, creativity, and democratic participation. However, unchecked or misused freedom can sometimes lead to negative outcomes, like social discord or violating of others’ rights. Therefore, freedom needs to be exercised responsibly.

How does freedom contribute to societal growth and progress?

Freedom allows for innovation, creativity, and competition, which drive societal growth. It also encourages the free exchange of ideas, fostering intellectual development and progress. By enabling citizens to participate in decision-making processes actively, it also aids in creating more responsive and inclusive societies.

What can individuals do to promote and protect freedom?

Individuals can promote and protect freedom by exercising their rights responsibly, respecting the freedoms of others, staying informed about their rights, and advocating for laws and systems that protect freedom. Civic participation, education, and peaceful advocacy are all important tools in promoting freedom.

In short, freedom is important to everyone, as individuals, societies, and nations.

• As individuals, you have the freedom to choose your friends and pursue your own educational goals.
• We can enact laws protecting our rights and freedoms as a society.
• As a nation, we enjoy the freedom of an independent government that allows us to make our own foreign policy decisions.

Philosophical Notebooks

Arendt, “what is freedom”.

Hannah Arendt’s essay from  Between Past and Future .

The word freedom has two common senses: the philosophical idea of free will, and the political idea of action.  Arendt argues that free will as a property of individuals is a relatively recent invention, having been created by Christians for theological reasons.  Freedom as a matter of action in the world is the original sense of the term, stemming from the Greek and Roman experience of public life.  Given the endless philosophical problems with the idea of free will, Arendt argues that we ought to think of freedom as political first and foremost, not as a property of individual will but as the human capacity to interrupt old processes and begin new ones.

Accounts of freedom have to deal with a basic contradiction between our consciousness and our conscience; we believe we are free and so responsible, but in our everyday experience, we seem to be entirely led by causality.  In politics, we take freedom to be self-evident, and this assumption guides our laws, communities, and judgements.  However, in science and theory, we take it to be obvious that everything has a cause.

Kant faces this contradiction head-on, and says that freedom cannot be an object of introspection.  He accepts a split between practical freedom and theoretical non-freedom as axiomatic for ethics and science, respectively.

The original attack on freedom did not come from science but philosophy.  As soon as we consider an apparently free act, we see two forms of causality.  First, inner motivation, and second, the causality of the outer world.  Kant does not fully solve this problem. His division between a “pure” theoretical reason and a  “practical” reason centred on free will implied that the free-willing agent never appeared in the phenomenal world.  While this move might preserve a moral law which is as significant as natural law, it does not solve the problem that thought, in both its theoretical and pre-theoretical forms, is incompatible with freedom.

Arendt’s basic thesis that this problem arose because philosophy took freedom out of its native home, politics, and placed it into the individual as free will.  The initial justification for this statement is that freedom is the youngest subject of metaphysics; its first appearance before modernity was in Paul and Augustine as they tried to work out the problem of religious conversion.

The field in which freedom has always been an issue is politics.  Our capacity for action always has to be tied to the problem of freedom; as Arendt says, “for action and politics, among all the capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists, and we can hardly touch a single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of man’s liberty”  (Arendt 1961, 146).   There are other political issues such as justice and equality, but freedom is the one reason that “men live together in political organization at all … The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action” (Arendt 1961, 146).

The freedom which all political theory, even tyrannical theories, must take for granted is the very opposite of “inner freedom,” the inward space in which man escapes coercion and “feels free.”  This inner freedom has no outward manifestations and is politically irrelevant.  It is always derivative, in that it is always a retreat from the world.  It cannot be confused with the heart or the mind, which always function in concert with the world.

The derivative nature of inner freedom is more obvious if we go back to its origins.  It is not the modern individual defending himself from social conformity, but the ancient Greek and Romans and their public actions.  The appearance of freedom in Augustine was preceded by attempts to divorce freedom from politics.  Epictetus’s claim that freedom is being free from one’s desires is just a straight reversal of the ancient political notion that freedom came from power over others.  Freedom was only possible if man owned a home in the world, a place in which all the necessities of survival were taken care of.  Epictetus moved these worldly relationships into the self.

Despite the influence this idea of inner freedom has had, it seems clear it would never have appeared if people had not already had an experience of political freedom as a worldly, tangible reality: “Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word” (Arendt 1961, 148).  This freedom was preceded by liberation from the necessities of life, but further required the company of other free men.

Not every human relation involves freedom; freedom is only possibly in a politically guaranteed public realm.  She says, “Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter” (Arendt 1961, 149).

The problem today is that we can no longer take this coincidence of politics and freedom for granted.  Totalitarian governments are capable of subordinating all spheres of life to politics and a nonrecognition of civil rights, such as privacy and the right to freedom from politics.  This can make us doubt the connection or even compatibility between freedom and politics.  We end up believing that freedom begins where politics ends.

The idea that political liberty is a potential freedom from politics has its roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, who often identified political freedom with security.  The purpose of politics and government was to guarantee security, and this security made freedom possible (defined as activities outside the political realm). This essay wants to defend the claim that the whole point of politics is freedom.

Freedom in the context of politics is not about the will.  It is not about a freedom of choice which decides between two things, one good and one evil, a choice which is predetermined by an existing motive.  Rather, it is “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known” (Arendt 1961, 151).

Action, to be free, has to be free from two things: motive and intended goals.  Motives and goals are involved in every single act, but they are determining factors, and free action has to be able to transcend them.  Arendt says, “Action insofar as it is determined is guided by a future aim whose desirability the intellect has grasped before the will wills it, whereby the intellect calls upon the will, since only the will can dictate action …” (Arendt 1961, 151).

To recognize an aim is not a matter of freedom, but of right or wrong judgement.  The power to dictate action is not freedom but strength or weakness. Free action is not under the guidance of the will or the intellect, though it needs both to execute any particular goal.  Instead, it is guided by what Arendt calls a principle.  Principles do not operate from within the self, like motives do; they inspire from without.  They are too general to prescribe particular goals, though every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principle once the act has begun.  Unlike the intellect’s judgement which is prior to the action, and unlike the will which initiates the action, the inspiring principle only manifests in the act itself.  The judgement can lose its validity, and the will exhausts itself in the action, but the principle loses nothing in strength or validity throughout the course of the action.

Unlike a goal, a principle can be repeated, and unlike a motive, a principle can be universal, unbound to any particular person or group.  Principles can be things like honour, glory, love of equality, or excellence, but also fear, hatred, or distrust.  Freedom, or its opposite, appear wherever such principles are actualized.  Men are free, as opposed to only have a capacity for freedom, as long as they act.  To act and to be free are the same thing.

It feels strange to derive freedom from politics because we are used to thinking of freedom in terms of the will.  We think this way not only because all acts have to be preceded by a cognitive act, but because of the implicit liberal belief that “perfect liberty is incompatible with the existence of society.”  This claim entails the further claim that only acts, as opposed to thinking, are dangerous, and this is one of the fundamental tenets of liberalism.  Liberalism, despite its name, as worked hard to banish freedom from the public realm because it thought politics was exclusively about the maintenance of life and the safeguarding of its interests.  However,  “where life is at stake all action is by definition under the sway of necessity, and the proper realm to take care of life’s necessities is the gigantic and still increasing sphere of social and economic life whose administration has overshadowed the political realm ever since the beginning of the modern age.” (Arendt 1961, 155)

Despite all this, Arendt insists that freedom is the raison d’être of politics.  This claim about the interdependence of freedom and politics contradicts modern social theories.  However, it does not follow from this that we need to return to older theories.

Older traditions of freedom rely entirely too much on privacy and religious conversion.  It was Christianity that introduced the idea of freedom being a property of the will; the Greeks and Romans had no notion of this.  Further, Greek philosophy was developed in almost complete opposition to activity within the polis.

After Paul and Augustine, freedom and free will became almost synonymous, and freedom was something experienced in solitude, “where no man might hinder the hot contention wherein I had engaged with myself,” as Augustine said, a conflict in the “inner dwelling” of the soul.  The will has a self-paralyzing effect which Paul summed up in his lament, “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

This conflict between what one consciously wills and what one does is a rock that traditional accounts of free will have floundered on.  These accounts, in effect, thought freedom was a property of the “I-will,” when they should have seen it as a political property of the “I-can,” of capacity for action.

For us, will, will-power, and the will-to-power are nearly identical; the seat of power in the person is the faculty experience as will.  For the sake of this will-to-power we have reduced the role of reason; we feel gripped by a necessity which turns us away from the right and the beautiful:

“ The necessity which prevents me from doing what I know and will may arise from the world, or from my own body, or from an insufficiency of talents, gifts and qualities which are bestowed upon man by birth and over which he has hardly more power than he has over other circumstances; all these factors, the psychological ones not excluded, condition the person from the outside as far as the I-will and the I-know, that is, the ego itself, are concerned; the power that meets these circumstances, that liberates, as it were, willing and knowing from their bondage to necessity is the I-can.  Only where the I-will and the I-can coincide does freedom come to pass.”  (Arendt 1961, 160)

When we talk about the limits on will-power, we tend to think of powerlessness with respect to the surrounding world.  We need to remember that in the earlier accounts of will, the defeat of the will was not by circumstance.  Rather, the older accounts have it as a conflict within the will itself:

“Christian will-power was discovered as an organ of self-liberation and immediately found wanting.  It is as though the I-will immediately paralyzed the I-can, as though the moment men willed freedom, they lost their capacity to be free.  In the deadly conflict with worldly desires and intentions from which will-power was supposed to liberate the self, the most willing seemed to be able to achieve was oppression.  Because of the will’s impotence, its incapacity to generate genuine power, its constant defeat in the struggle with the self, in which the power of the I-can exhausted itself, the will-to-power turned at once into a will-to-oppression.  I can only hint here at the fatal consequences for political theory of this equation of freedom with the human capacity to will; it was one of the causes why even today we almost automatically equate power with oppression or, at least, with rule over others.” (Arendt 1961, 162)

Arendt has already said that philosophy discovered freedom once it was no longer associated with acting with others.  Freedom ceased to be about public action and became sovereignty , “the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them” (Arendt 1961, 163).

Rousseau is an example of this.  He argued that power had to be sovereign and indivisible, because “a divided will would be inconceivable.”  In an ideal state, “the citizens had no communications one with another” and to avoid factions “each citizen should think only his own thoughts.”  Arendt thinks such a community would be built on quicksand, since all political business is done in networks of people.  A state without communication between the people would be tyranny.  She continues,

“Politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.  For it leads either to a denial of human freedom—namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign—or to the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all others.”  (Arendt 1961, 164)

Sovereignty can only be maintained by violence, which is essentially unpolitical.  Freedom and sovereignty cannot coexist: “Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the ‘general will’ of an organized group.  If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce” (Arendt 1961, 164-165).

Since our common idea of freedom rose out of religious concerns and an anti-political philosophical tradition, it is difficult for us to imagine a kind of freedom which is not an attribute of the will, but of doing and acting.  The Greeks and Romans had two verbs for what we call “to act.”  One had the sense of “to begin, to lead, and finally, to rule,” and the other was “to carry something through,” or continuing something which had begun.

In both cases, action has two stages.  First, a spontaneous beginning in which something new appears.  Freedom was about spontaneity.  The word is also attached to ruling; only someone who already ruled, such as household heads freed from economy concerns by their slaves and family, could be free for life in the polis. Once freed, they were rulers among rulers, among peers, whose help they enlisted to begin new enterprises.

As for the Romans, Augustine’s theology had an account of individual free will.  However, in his political work The City of God , he spoke more from a Roman background: “freedom is conceived there not as an inner human disposition but as a character of human existence in the world.  Man does not possess freedom so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe … God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.”  (Arendt 1961, 167).

Augustine was left with a tension between his theological account of free will and his account of political freedom as the capacity for beginnings.  Arendt thinks he could have avoided this if he had paid more attention to some of the things Jesus said.  Arendt sees in the Gospels a strong account of the power of human freedom, not as will but as faith .  She offers an idiosyncratic idea of miracles as the interruption of the natural series of events, or the disruption of an automatic process.

Human life is surrounded by automatic processes, and this extends into the political realm.  Automation is a part of all processes, no matter their origin.  Begun in freedom, historical processes can become automatic and lead to death as surely as biological processes.  The periods of being free have always been relatively short.  Cultures grow and then decline into petrified automation.

In those periods of decline, freedom continues to exist, but is hidden and not worldly – it is unactualized. She says,“Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a ‘miracle’—that is, something which could not be expected” (Arendt 1961, 169).  It is in this sense that humans are capable of miracles, of “infinite improbabilities.”

History, unlike nature, is full of unpredictable events, but they do not appear because of automatic processes.  They appear because man is an acting being.  She continues,

“Hence it is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for an to expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm.  And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favour of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.”  (Arendt 1961, 170)

The final paragraph is great:

“Objectively, that is, seen from the outside and without taking into account that man is a beginning and a beginning, the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming.  Not quite so overwhelming, to be sure, but very nearly so as the chances that no earth would ever rise out of cosmic occurrences, that no life would develop out of inorganic processes, and that no man would emerge out of the evolution of animal life. The decisive difference between the ‘infinite improbabilities’ on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the miraculous character inherent in those events which establish historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the ‘miracles.’  It is men who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.” (Arendt 1961, 170-171)

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

24/7 writing help on your phone

To install StudyMoose App tap and then “Add to Home Screen”

Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom.

Save to my list

Remove from my list

Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom.. (2016, Sep 20). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay

"Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom.." StudyMoose , 20 Sep 2016, https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay

StudyMoose. (2016). Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom. . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay [Accessed: 1 Aug. 2024]

"Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom.." StudyMoose, Sep 20, 2016. Accessed August 1, 2024. https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay

"Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom.," StudyMoose , 20-Sep-2016. [Online]. Available: https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay. [Accessed: 1-Aug-2024]

StudyMoose. (2016). Exploring the multifaceted definition of human freedom. . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/human-freedom-essay [Accessed: 1-Aug-2024]

• Exploring Myth: A Multifaceted Definition Pages: 2 (306 words)
• True Definition of Freedom: How Has Freedom Changed Over Time Pages: 4 (920 words)
• The Multifaceted Notion of Freedom: Perceptions and Realities Pages: 3 (681 words)
• Exploring Reproductive Rights: A Multifaceted View Pages: 4 (1154 words)
• Exploring Relativism: Unveiling the Multifaceted Nature of a Complex Concept Pages: 3 (693 words)
• Exploring the Multifaceted Characters of Moonlight Pages: 2 (535 words)
• Exploring Identity: The Multifaceted Meaning of Hispanic Pages: 2 (531 words)
• Exploring the Multifaceted Concept of Revenge in John Greens Paper Towns Pages: 3 (853 words)
• Exploring the Multifaceted Theme of Home and Family in I Stand Here Ironing Pages: 3 (825 words)
• Exploring the Essence of Western Civilization: A Multifaceted Perspective Pages: 2 (559 words)

👋 Hi! I’m your smart assistant Amy!

Don’t know where to start? Type your requirements and I’ll connect you to an academic expert within 3 minutes.

‘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 Rise of a New Kind of Parenting Guru
• The 50 Best Romance Novels to Read Right Now
• The Uneasy Alliance Between Kamala Harris and Volodymyr Zelensky
• The Young Women Challenging Iran’s Regime
• Ilona Maher TikToks Through the Olympics
• Can Food Really Change Your Hormones?
• Column: The Prosecutor Versus Felon Narrative Helps No One
• Get Our Paris Olympics Newsletter in Your Inbox

Contact us at [email protected]

Universal Declaration of Human Rights - Human rights at your fingertips

Human Rights at Your Finger Tips

• Back to Contents
• 2 Chart of Australian Treaty Ratifications as of May 2012
• 3 Chart of related rights and articles in human rights instruments
• 4 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• 5 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
• 6 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• 7 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
• 8 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
• 9 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
• 10 Convention on the Rights of the Child
• 11 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• 12 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• 13 Principles relating to the Status of National Institutions (Paris Principles)
• 14 Useful resources

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A(III) of 10 December 1948.

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly,

Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

2. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

1. Everyone has the right to a nationality.

2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Review the declaration on the UN website.

Further reading

• What is the Universal Declaration on Human Rights?
• Explore an Introduction to Human Rights
• Find out about how the Australian Human Rights Commission was established
• Review the latest speeches from Australian Human Rights Commissioners
• Understand the Commission's proposals for an Australian Huma Rights Act

Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

What is freedom and responsibility in philosophy, relationship between responsibility and freedom, sartre: freedom and responsibility, works cited.

As a human being, it is hard to make a decision because of the uncertainty of the outcome, but it is definitely essential for human being to understand clearly the concept and connection between freedom and responsibility to recognize the existence of human being and it is only by the process of existence that somebody realizes or defines himself.

• A person may acquire freedom, but he has not fulfilled responsibility and this may keep grief inside him.
• Sartre asserted that complete responsibility should not be believed as resignation, but it is just the necessary condition of the outcomes of the freedom.
• Freedom is attained if a person accepts responsibility since responsibility and freedom possess a symbiotic connection in philosophy.
• A man attains his essence by personal selections and activities and it is only by the process of existence that somebody realizes or defines himself.
• The meaning of the expression that existence precedes essence is that, to start with, there is existence of man, develops, emerges on the scene, and, just eventually, defines his identity.
• The first clear value that Socrates declares concerning a society is justice and truth.

Freedom and responsibility play a crucial part in determining our decisions in life. As a human being, it is hard to make a decision because of the uncertainty of the outcome, but it is definitely essential for human being to understand clearly the concept and connection between freedom and responsibility to recognize the existence of human being and it is only by the process of existence that somebody realizes or defines himself.

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand and if a person does not want to assume responsibility, perhaps, he will not have freedom since the two ideas accompany each other. If a person avoids responsibility, he will eventually undergo slavery directly or indirectly.

Some people can dream about freedom without considering that different responsibilities will accompany their freedom. A person may acquire freedom, but he has not fulfilled responsibility and this may keep grief inside him. Everybody can remove completely this grief through accepting both the responsibility and freedom.

Sartre stated, “the essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and himself as a way of being” (Sartre 52).

Thoreau (375) stated that the essence of freedom should be also similar in God and to the people, and this shows that every human being has a freedom of indifference.

Additionally, Sartre (98) asserted that complete responsibility should not be believed as resignation, but it is just the necessary condition of the outcomes of the freedom. Sartre does not agree on the existence of inclination or taste, permitting just “choices of being,” although this insufficient inspirational description does not allow someone of his responsibility.

Man can be uninformed about all his selections, but they are owned by him even so. Sartre praises the idea of responsibility; even though he permits that it concurrently attacks and frees man (Sartre 98). Thoreau states, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 116).

This means that by going to the Walden, he showed that he is free to make that decision, but also had to assume responsibility and find all the essentials in life as consequences.

Freedom is attained if a person accepts responsibility since responsibility and freedom possess a symbiotic connection in philosophy. In line with Sartre, every person is basically free and is free to create choices and initiate since there are no previous morals narrow their personal perception.

As free creators, people are responsible for every component for themselves, including emotions, actions, perception, and more importantly, people are free to decide. According to Sartre, “one may choose anything if it is on the grounds of free involvement” (Sartre 48).

Even though all people are free to decide their fate, they should, as well, accept responsibility for their decisions. Personal freedom of perception, hence, is both a curse and a blessing, and it is a blessing since it provides humanity the reward of free will to form a person’s life and the universe. It permits somebody to make an individual kind of values without certain limitations or restrictions.

According to Socrates, virtue and wisdom have close relationship, so his hard work provides to develop society altogether. In line with the perception of Socrates, if human beings are bright, nobody will ever do wrong, and their wisdom will result to healthier and more satisfying life.

Therefore, the philosopher, in accordance with Sartre, does not simply follow conceptual intellectual paths for the benefit of pleasure, but is dedicated in practices of the greatest moral value.

There are no specific reasons for judging a certain action good or bad, or right or wrong, nor are there any reasons for concluding that a change is moral setback or moral advancement. Sartre explains that existence precedes essence, which addresses that freedom and responsibility relative to human decisions or selections.

Only through action and choice do values form, for “value is nothing else, but the meaning that you choose” (Sartre 49). This notion signifies that human being, together with human reality, is in existence before any impression of morals and values.

Therefore, because no preformed essence or implication about the meaning of ‘being human,’ people should create their personal idea of existence through stating responsibility for and control of their activities and decisions.

As a result, a man attains his essence by personal selections and activities and it is only by the process of existence that somebody realizes or defines himself. Whether a person will die or live due to their decisions should be secondary in their decision making and they should simply ask if their actions are wrong or right, or bad or good (Cooper 26).

Sartre said: “in any case, what is that by existentialism we mean a doctrine which makes human life possible and, in addition, declares that every truth and every action implies a human setting and a human subjectivity” (Sartre 10).

Normally, people put focus on the dark side of human life and rarely put the emphasis on the positive side and consider existentialism as anything unattractive. This is the reason people are considered naturalist.

The close relationship between freedom and responsibility informs us about the value of philosophical life. This is demonstrated when Sartre states that if there is no existence of God, at least another being exists in whom existence precedes essence and a human being that was present before may be identified through whichever concept, and this existing being is considered a man.

The meaning of the expression that existence precedes essence is that, to start with, there is existence of man, develops, emerges on the scene, and, just eventually, defines his identity. Just eventually, he will be something, a man himself will have created what he has defined himself to be and this shows that human nature does not exist since God does not exist to conceive it.

Through daily living, everybody is engaging endlessly in the process of forming themselves or one’s identity. With nonexistence of any previous moral principle to adhere to, man has the basic freedom to make their personal system of beliefs and this personal freedom of perception is accompanied with the load of responsibility for the selections and decisions somebody creates.

Every human being should be responsible for the choices they create and if somebody does not accept responsibility for the actions and choices he or she makes, one will be operating in bad faith, a kind of self-deception that results to sense of forlornness, anguish, despair, and anxiety.

The first clear value that Socrates declares concerning a society is justice and truth since he reveals this in the initial step of his defense, which shows these as essential values for him (Cooper 17).

He presented clearly that he does not undervalue justice and truth, and consider them as important elements of nationality and society.

Therefore, citizens might be believed to be ‘good’ in his perception if they adhere to the good value of justice and truth in their community, particularly as Socrates performs during the court proceeding. All through his life, Socrates administered that the unexamined life does not merit questioning whatever thing.

In conclusion, it can be established that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand and if a person makes a choice, he or she must assume the responsibilities that accompany the choices made.

Freedom is achieved if a person accepts the responsibility and it is considered that a man is responsible for all elements for themselves, which contain the ability to make choices and do anything. Through daily living, everybody is engaging endlessly in the process of forming themselves or one’s identity.

Nevertheless, even when operating in bad faith, one is creating the selection of shunning responsibility, and it demonstrates that everybody cannot shun choice that helps them recall the fact that the destiny of a man is within himself. Freedom is also a curse since the responsibility of structuring somebody’s life is accompanied with freedom to decide.

Cooper, John. Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. Print.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions: Selections from Being and Nothingness. New York: Citadel, 1957. Print.

Thoreau, Henry. Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2009. Print.

• Rivalry and Central Planning by Don Lavoie: Study Analysis
• Freedom and the Role of Civilization
• Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s Views on Morality
• Philosophical movement
• Relationship Between Body and Consciousness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Human Freedom as Contextual Deliberation
• Freedom and Determinism
• Susan Wolf’s Philosophy
• Rousseau and Kant on their respective accounts of freedom and right
• Inconsistency of the Compatibilist
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, April 10). Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/freedom-and-responsibility-2/

"Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay." IvyPanda , 10 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/freedom-and-responsibility-2/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay'. 10 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay." April 10, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/freedom-and-responsibility-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay." April 10, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/freedom-and-responsibility-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Philosophy and Relationship between Freedom and Responsibility Essay." April 10, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/freedom-and-responsibility-2/.