"Freedom" requires modifiers

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

For the word “freedom” to have any meaning, it is necessary to specify:

  1. Whose freedom; and

  2. Freedom to do what, or from what.

Once you have done that, then the word takes on meaning, and then certain things about freedom can be seen. And in many cases, freedom becomes a zero-sum game.

For example, in the American Civil War, both sides were fighting for “freedom.” The Confederacy was fighting for the freedom of the seceding states to depart the Union, and for the freedom of slaveowners to own slaves. The Union was (by the end) fighting for the freedom of the slaves themselves from the condition of slavery.

The freedom of slaveowners to own slaves, and the freedom of the slaves from the condition of slavery, were mutually exclusive. This is an example of freedom being a zero-sum game. It isn’t always, but it is more often than many realize.

Libertarians like to use the word as synonymous with limitations placed on government. In fact, it’s not that simple. As in the case of slavery, many times private persons’ liberty conflicts, particularly when one person is wealthy and powerful and another is not. While the government can certainly be an instrument of oppression, in almost all cases when that occurs it has acted for the private benefit of powerful individuals, rather than for the common good. It is not so much the strength of the government that is at issue, as whose interests it serves.

All of this become clear if we insist upon the word “freedom” being accompanied by its proper modifiers. Whose freedom, to do (or from) what? Unless these questions are answered, the word is only air.

2

Ask the people in Iraq about their freedom from Saddam and how much better it is now.

3

Actually durring the Civil War, the Union fought for the preservation of the country, not to free slaves.

4

Ah, but there you have identified the qualifiers: Whose freedom? The Iraqis. To do, or from, what? From the abuses inflicted upon them by Saddam. Not so hard.

5

After the Battle of Antietam and issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, that was no longer true.

6

That was just an outcome of the war. But that doesn’t matter.

7

No, it was a change in the Union’s war aims. Lincoln issued the Proclamation for the explicit purpose of changing the war from one over union and secession to one over slavery. That was how he kept the British and French from supporting the Confederacy.

Cynical or not, from that point on the Union aimed to free the slaves.

Well . . . no, I guess it doesn’t. :wink:

8

soo… the war was not about slavery. just like the war today is about is not about WMDs, which is the only reason why people besides america’s owners would support it. youre saying lincoln SAID it was a war about the freedom of black people because he wanted europe’s help in maintaining financial control over the wealth of the south. is that not exactly the same as bush saying the war is now about the freedom of arabs in order to keep the support of the war in his pursuit of the wealth of iraq?

nobody starts a war for religious reasons, not even when they arent stupid reasons. ive said it before.

“is there any man, is there any woman- let me say is there any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is commercial and industrial rivalry?” - woodrow wilson

it aimed to maintain support just like you say, not free anybody, because that would result in less money for the owners. europe, actually, apparently wanted to free them. i dont think so, i think lincoln was trying to throw a wrench in the south’s productive abilities, and he knew he would have to free them someday just like every other country, or else they would violently revolt, which is more expensive.

i think europe wanted that money that would come from new york being able to trade with europe without being tariffed twice, and they knew, as lincoln did, that emancipation would help with this. who said they would have quit supporting the north if we didnt free slaves, and how do we know they arent all liars or indirectly referring to money?

also, black people were pretty oppressed for a pretty long time much like iraqis and afghanis (remember them? no) will be. if we really cared about their freedom, we would have invested more in liberia and the transportation there (not because thats where they belong, but because christian white people are too inferior to handle their freedom for a hundred years. “the bible supports segregation!” jesus christ i hate that book) or in developing afghanistan and helping it with its main export industry, whatever that is (im alluding to its lack of oil, not heroin).

parenthetical asides aside, the pattern is clear: no powerful country gives two shits about freedom, unless its the free market.

9

Future Man:

I don’t think you’re being fair, either to Lincoln or to the people of the north. I think a majority of northerners, and I know Lincoln himself, believed slavery was wrong and ought to be abolished.

Here’s the thing, though. Lincoln wasn’t elected king or dictator. He was elected president of the pre-Civil War United States. In those days, one referred to the country in the plural. It was “the United States are,” not “the United States is,” the way we say today. The states were first, the federal union second. When Lincoln offered Lee, who disapproved of both slavery and secession, the job as commander of the Union armed forces, Lee declined because he didn’t want to make war against his “country,” by which he meant the state of Virginia. So he made war on behalf of his “country,” virginia, against his “country,” the United States.

Lincoln didn’t believe he had the constitutional authority to abolish slavery in any state. He was probably right. He did believe he had the authority to keep slavery out of the western territories and new states. That’s not as clear, but certainly he made it a campaign promise, and that prompted the southern states to secede. When the war broke out, Lincoln’s original goal was to restore the old, pre-Civil War union, with United States in the plural and the states first. And so he made the famous statement that if he could restore the union by freeing all the slaves, by freeing none of them, or by freeing some and leaving others be, he would.

Well, turns out he couldn’t restore the union except by freeing the slaves, and so he changed the character of the war. Not only did that keep Britain and France out of the fight, but it also gave the north something more uplifting to fight for. They weren’t just suppressing a rebellion any more, or forcing breakaway states back into the union willy-nilly, they were fighting for freedom and to right a terrible wrong.

All those sentiments were sincere, even though that wasn’t the original union war aim. And so I stand by what I said before: the Civil War was fought from the beginning by the Confederate States to protect slavery, and was fought in the end by the United States to abolish slavery. And so both sides were fighting for freedom.

The only question was: whose freedom, to do (or from) what?

10

That quote is oversimplified when it comes to religion and most any other kind of movement. That’s because if you believe that your group is superior, then it’s natural that you’d want to dominate every valuable thing around. It’s what you think you deserve.

11

I’m with Future Man here. Lincoln ended slavery not because he knew it was wrong but because it was a something to use against the South and end the war. Of course Lincoln also an avid supporter of the American Colonization Society, you know send free blacks to Liberia. I’m sure back then very few soldiers in the Union fought to free slaves, but most did to save the country. Just like today how many people would join the Army for the freedom of the people of Iraq. Is it a good thing yes, but do you really want to risk your life for it.

12

That doesn’t mean Lincoln didn’t know it was wrong, and didn’t want to see it ended. Many of his statements prior to the war showed that he did, that he was a sincere emancipationist – although not a believer in racial equality.

You’re drawing an anachronistic equation here, that abolitionism = belief in racial equality. At that time, it most definitely did not. A lot of people believed that blacks were substantially inferior to whites, but at the same time believed that slavery was wrong and that the slaves should be set free. Opposition to slavery, coupled with belief in Negro inferiority or a belief that a biracial society was impossible, led to a desire to resettle freed blacks somewhere outside the U.S. It was very common, and it most definitely did NOT mean the person was not an abolitionist. In fact, it meant he was: anyone who believed in slavery wanted black people kept right where they were.

As for the troops in the Civil War, they were already fighting, and mainly they fought because they were drafted (on both sides), or because they volunteered back when they didn’t know any better. Why else do anything as stupid and self-destructive as fight a war? But since they were in it, the question “what are we fighting for?” becomes important. Give a soldier a cause he can really believe in, and he’ll fight harder than he will for one he doesn’t really care about.

Save the country? It took a really perceptive person to see that a divided United States was on the road to ruin. As far as most northerners were concerned, the only reason to oppose secession was plain bull-headed national pride. There was considerable sentiment for letting the south go its own way, so much so that if the Confederacy hadn’t fired the first shot, the war probably wouldn’t have happened.

I don’t want to get too much further into the Civil War, though, which is tangential to what I want to talk about here. I only brought it up because it illustrates the point about freedom that I want to make. Freedom requires modifiers. Whatever you may believe about why the Union was fighting the war, the fact remains that the “freedom” of slaveowners to own slaves deserves that term just as much as the “freedom” of their slaves from the condition of slavery. And without those qualifiers, the word “freedom” has no meaning.

It’s more important to see how that applies to today’s political realities, than those of the 1860s.

13

If you guys bother to read about the time period you’d find that many religious groups in the North were very much against the idea of slavery. President Adams and Ben Franklin were against it. Even the cranky Schopenhaur was against it, and spoke out against American slavery.

A very large social trend had been building for quite a long time, as you’ll find with most social movements at any time. It takes a long time to build critical mass.

The war, and again all wars, have more than one goal and motivation. That’s an adult perspective.

14

I know many of the founders were against it, even Jefferson was against it but he was afraid of what to do and even Washington freed his slaves in his will. Also the rhetoric of the Revolution was against slavery. How can a nation created with the ideas of freedom and equality have slavery.

15

That’s exactly what I’m getting at.

The answer is that the word “freedom,” all by its lonesome out in space with no qualifiers, has no meaning.

Now, certainly slavery doesn’t very well go with “all men are created equal.” But setting that aside, the privileged (in this case, slaveowners) all too commonly view “freedom” in terms of THEIR freedom to enjoy their privileges (in this case, the privilege of owning slaves).

The only way to free the slaves was to deny their owners the freedom to enjoy their property. And the only way to protect the slaveowners’ property was to continue the practice of slavery. In this case, with respect to these two freedoms, a zero-sum game was in progress. Both sets of people could not have the freedoms that they wanted, because they were mutually exclusive. And since the slaveowners had influence over the new government while the slaves had none . . .

Now, translate that into modern times. We no longer allow people the freedom to own slaves in this country. But you still hear cries about “freedom” on behalf of employers to treat their employees as they would, or hire and fire as they would without restriction; you still hear cries about “freedom” on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever inflated prices they want to their captive market; you still hear cries about “freedom” on behalf of polluting industries to do what they wish with land that they own.

And all these cries for freedom really are for freedom – just as the cries of the slaveowners in outrage against abolitionists were. But the question, as always, is: whose freedom, to do what?

And also: whose freedom, to do what (or from what), does the freedom being championed deny?

16

Ben Franklin wrote that he wanted to free his two slaves but had no idea how to do it. He was afraid that they would die. I assume that’s because there was no social mechanism to help them survive.

The idea of freedom for slaves in part developed because people were around them, for a couple a hundred years, and started to realise that they had enough human characterists to qualify. That and the change occurance of religious morals being important to some energized the situation.

17

Nav,

Interesting topic. I agree with your thesis, perhaps not as much with your analysis. Anyway, I hope I won’t take the subject too far off topic by questioning the legitimacy of the Union’s actions in the Civil War.

Were the southern states constitutionally permitted to secede?

If they were, wasn’t the Civil War as anti-freedom as it was pro-freedom?

18

Freedom is categorical imperative and so it’s not real, but the CI concept trumps any law, as laws are simply ethics.

19

For the word “freedom” to have any meaning, it is necessary to specify:

  1. Whose freedom; and

  2. Freedom to do what, or from what.

    In answer to 1), every person. In answer to 2), from force.

20

That was unspecified in the Constitution itself. There’s nothing in there that says “a state may secede from the United States by doing A, B, C,” and nothing on the other hand that says “this Constitution is permanent and once joined, no state may secede from it.” Some have argued that the Tenth Amendment implies a power to secede, but it does not: it is a division of powers under the Constitution, with all those not specified as belonging to the federal government reserved to the states, and seceding from the Constitution is not a power under it; secession deprives the 10th Amendment, like the rest of the Constitution, of all force. Some have argued on the other hand that the clause calling the Constitution the “supreme law of the land” makes secession illegal, but it does not: secession would void that clause just as it would the remainder of the Constitution.

So really there’s no answer, except that it was widely believed and assumed, prior to the secession itself, that the states did have the right. And Lincoln nodded to that assumption by provoking the Confederacy into firing the first shot, rather than just starting the war himself.

ALL actions of government that are pro-freedom are also anti-freedom. That’s the point I’m making here. The Confederacy was upholding both the states’ right to secede, and slaveowners’ rights to their property. The Union was upholding both the United States’ right to exist (since if secession had been allowed to stand, it would have led to further fragmentation and ultimately to the dissolution of both nations), and the right of black people not to be slaves.

Freedom is often a zero-sum game. That’s why one has to define who’s freedom one is talking about, and to do what, or from what.