The existance of social behaviour can be looked at in two very different ways: (1) as you say, man made; and (2) as organic. or natural. Social organization in the form of laws and government, while being facially man-made, are actually explained in a deeper way as being a manifestation of the organic or natural state of affairs of a particular social time and place. This is what I meant when I said âTo me, social control over the individual is as natural as your assertion of individual self-autonomyâ. The âsocial controlâ here meant that it is natural for a society to form and to organize itself, to make and follow very specific written and unwritten rules. (For me to say âItâs all organicâ might be an extreme statement given the compromises that take place in a representative democracy. But for purposes of argument, I want to push the point.)
The ânaturalnessâ of âindividual autonomyâ must then be seen in this context. The idea of the individual is a social rule, or a construct, or a belief and understanding, or even better, it is a social rule to follow.
This is not the chicken and the egg problem - Which came first, the individual or the society. At least I donât think so. This is more an argument about definition: The meaning of âindividualâ is a socially constructed idea. Thus Individual liberty is only sought out in societies under which the underlying idea reaches some (logical) point of saying âThe individual must be left freeâ - the implication of âbeing leftâ to be free is that the individual starts out as free and the society takes some of its freedoms away. The âfreeâ in fact is merely a tautology on the meaning of the idea, âIndividualâ. Thus, as a contrast, if you define the actors that make up the society as merely âparts of a whole,â then individual freedom either means nothing, or it is a contradiction.
Long-winded as all that is, and as contradictory to both of our common sense notions of freedom, it needs to be seen as an explanation of the problems we have in actually defining Rights and Restrictions. Individual Rights are no longer rationally or naturally necessary properties of the Human. They are the merely definitional of what it means to be human in a given society at a given time. As a definition, it can change tomorrow, or yesterday, as it has over the last 200 years of American constitutional history.
Restrictions are the other side of the same coin, but they are in a sense deeper and perhaps more primary: The social needs will define that what it needs in order to function; these social needs then become, in the eyes of the conscious individual who is taught to consider such things as liberty and freewill as a restriction.
As for freewill, I think it is a concept determined by the above social argument. As an implied premis of your argument, it needed to be mentioned and treated as such. But I agree that to get into the discussion of freewill and determinism is beyond the scope of this debate.