Your Money or Your Life!

This post is based on a passage from this essay:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

The author (Carter) is discussing liberty. In the quotation below, he summarizes the views of Steiner, who holds that only physical impediments count as restrictions on freedom. This is in contrast to the views of others mentioned in the article, who consider social constraints (such as laws) to limit liberty.

I quote: "Consider the coercive threat ‘Your money or your life!’. This does not make it impossible for you to refuse to hand over your money, only much less desirable for you to do so. If you decide not to hand over the money, you will of course be killed. That will count as a restriction of your freedom, because it will render physically impossible a great number of actions on your part."

The language here is hilarious. Steiner takes certain assumptions, and follows them to their utterly impractical conclusion. The passage is richly ironic because of the balance of cool logic and the idea that we are free to commit suicide. " 'That ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices' (Second Treatise, parags. 6 and 57)" (Locke quoted in Carter). If no one in their right minds would do something, freedom to do it helps no one. This suggests a social definition for freedom: if most people would prefer to keep both their money and their life but end up losing one, than freedom is restricted. More generally, if most people who want to do something end up not doing it, than freedom is impaired. This includes a variety of non-political restrictions. Suppose a tyrannical government imprisons Alice in her house. Bob is imprisoned in his house by a huge buildup of snow outside the door. Snow is vastly easier to deal with than a tyrannical government, and freeing Alice has the same result as freeing Bob, so we're better off freeing Bob than Alice. Calling Bob free but not Alice is too narrow a definition because it suggests that we should prioritize freeing Alice.

Take another example: bicycling to work. If many people want to do this but are afraid of being hit by cars and bicycling to work doesn't happen, then they are not free to bicycle to work. An enslaved slave who likes following orders is not free because most people's desires wouldn't be met. Note that the definition is based on what actually happens, making it as inclusive as possible. Not all freedoms can be granted. If you want to murder people for fun but everyone else would rather you didn't, than you shouldn't be allowed to.