Monday, 5 December 2016

What are the advantages and disadvantages of freedom?

There are two essential points to consider
when thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of freedom. The first is that freedom is a
continuum, not an absolute. If you think about the degree of freedom enjoyed by all the people
in the world, you will come up with a spectrum which has, for instance, a wealthy and unattached
American or European at one end of it, and a prisoner in a North Korean gulag at the other.
Neither of these individuals, however, is completely free or completely unfree; and it may not
be obvious where on the line you should draw the division between freedom and
unfreedom.

The second point is that, in a society, the freedom of one
individual may result in the unfreedom of another. If I am free to hold loud parties that last
all night, my next-door neighbor is not free to sleep. Freedom, therefore, becomes a problem
when it is burdensome to another.

The question, therefore, is really this:
how much freedom is the optimum amount? We can probably agree that the ideal is much closer to
the free than to the unfree end of the spectrum. We would rather be the wealthy American than
the North Korean prisoner. Many wealthy Americans, however, voluntarily take steps which will
obviously limit their freedom, such as starting a family or running for office. The optimum
amount of freedom, therefore, obviously differs somewhat with individual
tastes.

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