Freedom and Limits
I am sure that with a little time and effort I could write a book on all the limitations of freedom, but it appears in so many ways, in so many places, and on so many scales, so there must be some way that I can simplify it. It seems that freedom has one real variable which it is dependent upon and that is ability, or one's ability to implement their choice in changes from one situation to the next. So if freedom is implicitly contingent upon one's ability to exercise choice, it makes logical sense that any examination of freedom will begin with an examination of that limiting ability. What inhibits that ability. What promotes or enhances it. It also seems there are two major ability areas by which one's freedom is increased or decreased. They are "the physical" and "the mental". The physical should be fairly obvious. There are no humans who can defy gravity and fly at will without mechanical aid, this is a liberty that we simply do not have at this point in time. If one were to choose to jump off a cliff and fly, odds are that they would be fairly disappointed by that choice due to their own inability to fly. That means that his or her ability to exercise the choice between flying and falling to the ground in that situation
The mental aspect of freedom is slightly more abstract, and therefore slightly more difficult to explain. Someone who does not have legs may not have the freedom to get up and walk whenever he/she would like. We as individuals and society as a whole are all inevitably bound by our abilities. Mental freedom depends almost exclusively upon one understanding all of the choices that they have in every situation. Out of natural curiosity, similar tests were done on dogs, after each had demonstrated the ability to hold a stick in its mouth. One who does not have legs lacks the ability to choose between walking and not walking. If one does not understand the function of the stop button on their VCR, they will not have the ability to exercise the choice of stopping the movie that is playing at will (unless they figure out some method of turning the power off, which we are assuming they either will not, or can not). By educating that person, their ability to exercise choice (between playing a movie and stopping it) has been increased. Airplanes increase our freedom to fly (our ability to exercise choice between flying and not flying), but they do not make even that aspect of freedom complete. The monkeys might have had a greater ability to manipulate a stick, but the dogs were also able to take a stick and drag it along the ground, even if at greater difficulty. That is to say, both knew that there was a stick that they were able to manipulate. This is, of course, impossible for us to do. Both knew that there was something out of reach. If one person has the freedom to kill 50 people, that destroys the freedom of those 50 people, and, because it will probably affect many more than that on an emotional level (they might not, for example, feel free to walk around the streets at night anymore), killing those 50 people will have decreased many other people's freedom. In the case of the dog, it was because the dog was unable to conceive of its options.
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Acceptance Essays
