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
As stated before, however, there are degrees to freedom. Someone who does not have legs may not have the freedom to get up and walk whenever he/she would like. However, their freedom of mobility would be increased by a wheelchair (assuming that their arms were working well enough to use it). This would increase their freedom, not make it as complete as someone who has two legs (as the subject would not, for example, have the freedom to jump). 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 mental aspect of freedom is slightly more abstract, and therefore slightly more difficult to explain. There were some classic experiments done a while ago which required monkeys to make use of a tool (usually a stick) in order to obtain fruit that was out of their reach. Different monkeys were able to figure out what needed to be done with different levels of speed and efficiency, but they were still all eventually able to use a stick as a tool to get what they were after (like a banana). These monkeys had the ability to exercise choice between using a stick to reach the banana and not getting the banana. 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. This is why murder is viewed as a violation of other people's freedom and therefore not something that is done or condoned by l
Some common words found in the essay are:
, exercise choice, ability exercise choice, ability exercise, mental freedom, physical freedom, reach monkeys, 50 people, lacks ability, exercise choice flying, lacks ability choose, monkeys ability, one's ability, aspect freedom,
Approximate Word count = 1128
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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