Freedom is not a goal, but a direction

* Freedom is the limitation of choice.

My counter-argument is this:

Limitations on choice through potential consequences are ultimately self-imposed. To have any effect, they require me to refuse to consider the possibility of the alternative. To the extent they limit my action, it is through my choice, possibly implicit, to let them limit my actions. The option of making the choice never goes away no matter how grievous the potential consequence.

Since this is in a discussion around a post by Snowden, we can take him as an example. He did something that, according to this theory of freedom, is impossible. He wasn't free to do it, his choice was limited by potential punishment. Yet he did, the possibility of making the supposedly impossible choice was still there.

Consider a hypothetical man who has lived isolated indoors all life playing video games, never gone to school, never watched TV, nobody told him about any consequences. One day at the age of 25 he finally discovers a door to the outside and goes through and thinks "oh man, this is like GTA!" and goes around punching the elderly, stealing things, breaking all manner of laws as he has been taught is how you get points. Eventually the strange man is caught and sent to prison, but until that point, was he more free than we are? He was subject to the same laws and social consequences as we are, but they weren't able to limit his choices because of his ignorance. Clearly it can't be the laws themselves that limit choices if this is the case.

It appears to me there is something strange about the given definition of freedom. It lends itself to producing paradoxes, where people who aren't free are capable of being simultaneously free, and the same sources of limitation successfully limit some people but not others based on what attitude they have toward them. This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete.

1) Your degree of freedom is strictly a relationship between you and those who are able to legitimately use violence against you. Legitimate here meaning you have no means of recourse besides violence of your own.

2) How free you are is then expressed as a graph of all possible actions you may take which are not prohibited by the threat of legitimate violence (often expressed as "law").

3) Then a "free and equal society" is one the total size of the graph is optimized for. This mandates laws which delegitimize violence except where strictly necessary to enforce said delegitimization.

4) The only addition that is typically made in large, agrarian societies is the legitimization of the private ownership and transfer of property. Thus we have "free, equal and orderly" societies.

These lead us to the usual functions of the military (to protect from external violence), the police (to protect from domestic violence), and the courts (to resolve disputes, usually over property, which would otherwise turn violent). From there, any encroachment of the state (such as mandating participation in various insurance schemes) into the graph of its citizens would be strictly perceived as a curtailing of freedom.

It's important to note that these terms necessarily exclude material circumstance from their definition. They also define violence in the strict sense of physical force. You are not less free because you may be sick or poor, since these are not interactions with people who may use legitimate violence.

Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster.

Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc.

I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not?

So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...