Two Concepts of Freedom
"agency freedom" and "autonomous freedom"
TL;DR: There are two types of freedom: agency freedom and autonomous freedom. Agency freedom is the perception of being free and having choices. This type of freedom determines the limits of our free will and moral responsibility. Autonomous freedom is acting in accordance with our higher-order principles. This autonomously free state creates and consents to the social contract since the social contract represents our higher-order principles of freedom and reason expressed through universal principles.
What is freedom? Is it a state of being or an action? Do we all have it, or can we only pursue it? Is it even real or worth having?
When writers use phrases like freedom, autonomy, free will, consent, and liberty, they risk talking past one another. As a result, the words tend to go undefined, and as they’re thrown around, readers are left to only guess at their meaning.
It should be noted that philosophers also disagree on how to define these terms. For instance, political philosophers and legal theorists use “consent” in importantly different ways. Some mean actual consent, some mean hypothetical consent, some mean tacit consent, some mean the preference of the voting majority, and others don’t quite know what they mean. It confuses the field and lets thinkers go off in different directions as they conflate and abuse these “nice-sounding” terms.
Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” offered some clarity on different meanings of the term “liberty” to distinguish “liberty from” (negative liberty) and “liberty to” (positive liberty).
I hope to do the same for freedom, which I’ve noticed means different things to different people. I’ll divide the term into two types. I’ll call them agency freedom and autonomous freedom.
It should first be noted that how I define “freedom” is closer to what philosophers describe as “autonomy,” which is an internal state, rather than “liberty,” which concerns one’s external relationship with others.
Agency Freedom
Agency freedom is only the phenomenological feeling of freedom. It is the real sensation of being free when one performs an action. It’s also the foundation of free will, in the same way that how we sense the world is the foundation of reality. Just like everything else in our universe, free will exists because it’s perceived to exist.
For example, we say that a chair exists because we perceive a chair to exist. We don’t call a chair “something that causes the perception of a chair, but which objectively we cannot call a chair since its existence as such is subject to our perceptions of it.” Instead, we call it a chair.
The same goes for free will. If we do not have the sensation of free will, then we don’t have free will and, therefore, can’t be held responsible for our choices.
Agency freedom is broad enough to include all beings with the capacity to experience freedom in a certain realm of their thoughts or actions. And it determines the limits of our moral responsibility.
For instance, we have agency freedom in our voluntary movements and speech. And we don’t have this freedom in our involuntary convulsions or speech produced by Tourette Syndrome. We can be held responsible for the former, and not for the latter.
Countless things influence our exercise of agency freedom, yet the actions are still the product of our will, and we have ultimate authority over the extent we are affected.
We could be passive viewers in our advertising consumption or conscious consumers alert to psychological tricks. Agency freedom gives us that power to decide which we’ll be.
Let’s use a habitual smoker as an example. The smoker isn’t being forced by the laws of physics to light up another cigarette. Despite the powerful urges to smoke, the smoker still has the experience of control over his actions, rather than demonic possession. He feels like he could act differently, despite the urges he’s subject to. Freedom means that the buck still stops with him.
Many try to deny their sense of agency freedom because they want to deny the responsibility that comes with it. They just couldn’t help themselves in a certain situation and should be absolved from blame. Yet we have a sense to know then this is merely an excuse. If someone came inside your house and started smoking, you wouldn’t feel pity for the smoker whose actions were entirely outside his control. You’d ask him what his problem was and kick him out. We know that the person could have acted differently, addiction or not.
We recognize the bounds of agency freedom intuitively. We know when it’s appropriate to make moral judgments of others (making poor health choices) and when it isn’t (being subject to genetic diseases).
We’ve all had desires that led us to perform a certain action. Yet that doesn’t mean we lost control of our actions. We are only influenced by desires with a range of different strengths. So long as we are conscious, we are free.
Agency freedom is sufficient to create free will and moral responsibility. However, it is not very relevant for developing the social contract. What is relevant is autonomous freedom.
Autonomous Freedom
Autonomous freedom reflects what philosophers may describe as autonomy. I’ll use Gerald Dworkin’s definition of autonomy, which is the second-order capacity to reflect on one’s first-order preferences and modify them following higher-order reflection.
To simplify, we exercise autonomous freedom when we act in accordance with our higher-order principles. These principles are determined by our subjective sense of the good and other values that we choose to give importance to.
To return to the smoker, while we could say he has agency freedom, we couldn’t say that he is autonomously free if he values his health. He is acting on his first-order desires, rather than his higher-order principles, which would demand that he stop smoking.
Importantly, for creating the social contract, being autonomously free means we can reflect and act in accordance with our higher-order principles of freedom and reason. And by acting in accordance with these principles, we can create an objective ethical system.
When creating the social contract, our rules would reflect what we would decide in our autonomously free states. Although our autonomously free states would also want the rules to respect our agency-free states and would place moral responsibility only to the extent we have agency free, our agency-free states aren’t themselves parties to the agreement.
Actual consent, therefore, isn’t necessary or sufficient for the social contract. The social contract is an expression of our autonomous freedom, not our literal freedom.
If it’s possible to consent to the natural law, it is only our autonomous (enlightened, albeit hypothetical selves) that consents to it. In this way, we are only free in the Kantian sense by obeying the social contract. While this idea is open to abuse, it doesn’t make it wrong, yet it requires us to be skeptical of any overactive government relying on this type of freedom.
To summarize, autonomous freedom is exercised when we live under a law that our higher-order principles would legislate. As one book title describes it, “Discipline Equals Freedom.”
The Role of Government
Since our autonomous free states create the rules of the social contract, not all actions exercised by our agency freedom will be respected under these rules, even if these actions don’t violate the harm principle.
Instead, they would only be respected to the extent that our autonomously free selves want these actions to be respected.
For instance, when we only have agency freedom, we may procrastinate, watch too much TV, eat junk food, or act in other ways that deviate from our principles. Yet our autonomously free selves would still want these actions to be respected both morally and legally.
However, our agency freedom may do things like purchase dangerously unsafe products or agree to immoral contracts. Our autonomously free states would want to have rules to protect us from the consequences of these types of actions.
So while our autonomously free selves would generally want others to respect actions exercised under agency freedom, they may also want—in extreme cases—to create moral and legal rules that justify a third party to step in and override our free actions.
This idea, however, risks granting license to an authoritarian government acting under the guise of true freedom.
This is why personal liberty must remain fundamental under a theory of natural law. There will be actions where paternalism would be justified, like nullifying unconscionable contracts or creating consumer protection laws. Yet there will be clear cases where the government is acting outside of the limits of acceptable paternalism.
Autonomous freedom doesn’t only justify paternalism. It also limits what government can rightly do. A just government would respond differently to actions exercised under agency freedom rather than autonomous freedom.
For example, the law has different standards and penalties for voluntary manslaughter (or heat of passion murder) and first-degree murder (or depraved-heart murder). A just government would recognize that a murderer assented to the murder differently if they were acting under the heat of passion (for example, being cruelly harassed, yet not to the point of physical endangerment) rather than acting in cold blood.
While we are still responsible for heat of passion murder, that type of killing doesn’t necessarily conform to our higher-order principles as cold-blooded murder would. Despite producing the same result, our free states are different in both scenarios, and a just government would recognize the distinction and limit its punishments accordingly. A just state would look at intentions as well as actions and punish those who had less control over their intentions less harshly.
The concept of “higher order freedom” doesn’t always justify more government power. A just government would recognize that we fall short of our autonomously free selves both when we act stupidly and when we act wrongly. It has the right to save us from some stupid decisions, and it should take it easy on us when our passions lead us to do wrong.
Agency freedom and autonomous freedom are two very different types of freedom that are too often conflated—even by me. In the future, I’ll mean agency freedom when discussing free will and responsibility and autonomous freedom when discussing the social contract.