Philosophical Essay on Freedom

Philosophical Essay on Freedom

How far does freedom go?

The Liberty It is a concept widely used in politics, especially when it comes to justifying the most radical positions and the most socially questionable decisions. Since its establishment as an indisputable public value with the triumph of liberalism from the seventeenth century, refer to freedom It has become a common place in the leadership of the masses and in the political harangues of the different political actors of the society. But what exactly is freedom and how far does it go remain questions that merit debate in contemporary postindustrial society.

Freedom, as defined in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, is “the natural faculty that man has to act in one way or another, and in not to act, so he is responsible for his actions ”, that is, it is about the ability to decide one's own course and assume the consequences that it imply. In other words, freedom becomes a form of free will.

This last term is common in religious discourse: it is said that God, creator and controller of the world, allows us free agency and therefore does not intervene to protect us from the possible catastrophic consequences of our actions and decisions. This, despite the fact that God, according to most creeds, dictated very specific laws to his faithful, on whose fulfillment - especially in the great monotheisms - salvation or punishment would depend eternal.

But free will also implies that human beings must find a model of society that allows them to behave in a good way. Thus, it must propose its own laws and authorities, it must conduct itself in an organized way towards the common welfare, which supposes an inevitable tension between the individual will and the needs of the collective. It is within the framework of this tension that modern societies have developed.

What does it mean to be free?

A free person, in principle, is a person who enjoys the fullness of his rights and fully fulfills his responsibilities. Among the dictionary definitions of freedom are, for example, the absence of conditions of freedom. slavery, prison or state coercion, so that freedom necessarily passes through the agreement with the free will. However, freedom cannot be understood as the absolute enjoyment of one's desire.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between two types of freedoms: positive and negative. The first are those that empower the individual to act, while the second are those that consist of the absence of obstacles to act. In this sense, for example, a walker possesses the positive freedom to walk at the pace he wants, but at the same time possesses the negative freedom to travel the roads not obstructed, say, by a police operation that is taking place in a neighborhood near.

From this it follows that all freedom exists within a framework of possibilities determined by certain social norms and laws, insofar as the common welfare is imposed on individual whim, or even, that the protection of individual welfare depends on the restriction of certain decisions. That is, after all, what it means to live in society: to obey a social pact with which we have decided to govern our lives, to avoid the temptation of chaos and anarchy.

This is where ethics comes into play in the debate. To what extent are individuals really autonomous and can they make decisions that harm third parties or even themselves? This is a question that is asked not only in the framework of politics but also in that of public health and other similar areas.

Does a person have the right to end their own life? Suppose yes. Does a pregnant woman have the right to do so, thus causing the death of her child as well? And if she does, does another woman have the right to terminate the pregnancy at her will? Can a person refuse to receive a vaccine knowing that they could transmit the disease to others? Can a tenant increase the rental cost of his property in the middle of a natural disaster? How far does individual freedom go when that violates that of third parties?

Freedom and responsibility 

Many of these issues can be resolved if we understand freedom as one side of the coin that has responsibility on the other side. One cannot exist without the other. The exercise of individual freedom should not necessarily lead to an act of impunity, nor should it necessarily be considered something morally acceptable.

The legal and the moral must be borders that channel free will in order to find a just balance between order and freedom in our societies. This is not an easy task, however, and politics is the field in which this debate must take place, in order to do so. try to achieve the promise of the French revolutionaries: freedom, equality and fraternity among the persons.

References:

• "Essay" in WIkipedia.
• "Freedom" in Wikipedia.
• "Freedom" in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• "Freedom" in the FASTA University (Argentina).
• "Positive and Negative Liberty" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Liberty (human rights)" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre, whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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