Definitions of Freedom

Americans greatly prize freedom and are rightly proud of their heritage of freedom as a society, yet many would find it difficult to define freedom in a clear and comprehensive way. Indeed, it seems more and more that many Americans would be willing to give away their hard-won freedoms for a false sense of security--surveys have found voters willing to curtail free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, and other freedoms as a trade for reducing crime and controlling dissidence. This would truly be a case fitting the old saying that one would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. These voters are not thinking of the amount of effort it took to gain these freedoms in the first place, to assure these freedoms against tyranny, and to maintain these freedoms for the very people unthinkingly willing not to give them up.

An examination of various writers who have tried to define freedom or who have a definition of freedom that is inherent in their writings shows that people usually define freedom in terms of what is of most direct interest to them. Freedom means choice, and choice entails deciding how to fulfill one's sense of and obligation to self and responsibility. This definition fits the political realm in which we usually think about freedom. The persons living in a dictatorship have had choice taken from them. They are told what to do, what to think, how to behave. They do not choose, and they are not responsible for anything except "choosing" to ac

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ood, however, and instead concentrates on the question of how government actions can be justified only when they prevent harm. He thus states that the government should not interfere with communication that has no potential for harm. This raises the question of what constitutes harm, of course, and how to identify that harm. This is where the real issue of freedom of speech is to be found, and it involves not only how to make this decision but who is to do so. Ultimately, we come back to the people themselves making this decision, for they are the source of government power in our system, and this brings us to the anomaly that the people have to have freedom of speech to express themselves on the question of freedom of speech. At the same time, Greenawalt notes that there are both consequentialist and non-consequentialist arguments for freedom of speech so that some seek to justify speech on the basis that it creates a good, while others find freedom of speech a good in itself. Freedom of speech was deemed a necessity by the Founding Fathers in the American system because they knew how much the other liberties they were trying to assure depended on that one freedom. They had direct experience of a system that did not prote

Category: Philosophy - D