Understanding Liberty, and Biting the Bullet I

'Liberty' (in a political sense) is certainly a word that's been thrown around a lot and, over the course of history, used in many different ways. I think the way that it's used now, to mean something akin to classical liberalism, or 'freedom from' is the sense most in tune with our intuitions. But it seems that there is some inevitable 'bullet biting' that has to go on (by which I mean, accepting something counter-intuitive), whatever one understands liberty to mean. I will use the term 'free' interchangably with liberty, but this shouldn't be confused with the concept of 'free will'.

Take the following case

Case 1. John is unable to spontaneously fly, due to his lack of wings.

It seems pretty clear that John is not made unfree due to his lack of ability to fly. John's inability to get from A to B by only conventional means such as walking, does not mean that he has had his liberty infringed. At least, that's my intuition, and I think it would be nearly everyone's.

Case 2. Phil is disabled from the waist down, and has been that way since birth.

Here surely we would say, at least on the first take, that Phil is less free because he cannot walk. Usually, we wouldn't question the reason why Phil is disabled; we would think that his disability is a sufficient reason to say that he suffers from a lack of liberty; he cannot do as others do.

But what is the difference between Phil and John? Both of them are unable to move in certain ways due to that being the way that they were born. How might we try to reconcile this conflict of our intuitions?
I think we have two (quite similar) options open to us:
A. John is free but Phil is not because Phil's cause for lack of liberty can be fixed, whereas John's cannot.
B. John is free but Phil is not because the default position for humans is to have the same abilities and otherwise as John does, whereas the same is not true for Phil.

Let's look at response A first. The argument here is that it is possible to reduce (if not completely remove) Phil's lack of liberty by giving him some sort of operation (or possibly just giving him a wheelchair). Since this can't be done with John, the two are not analogous. However, I think this response gives some very strange results. Consider the following scenario:

Case 3. There are two groups of people, X-ites and Y-ites. X-ites are very primitive and Y-ites are very technologically advanced, especially in the area of medical care. They live on separate islands and do not know of each other's existence. One person in the X-ite group is Phil from Case 2, who is disabled. The X-ites are completely unable to help him, due to their lack of knowledge.

So Phil's lack of liberty cannot be fixed on the X-ite island. Under at least one reading of response A, Phil is free because it isn't possible to fix his disability. Now consider one day when the X-ites and Y-ites make contact. The Y-ites, being very hospitable people, offer free medical treatment for all X-ites. At some point between the making contact and the offering of medical treatment, Phil became unfree. The very contact between the groups, or the very offer of healthcare, infringed Phil's liberty. If calling Phil free was counter-intuitive, then this is extremely counter-intuitive.
But there is another reading of A. This time we say that it is possible to fix Phil's disability; therefore he is unfree. Sure, it might not be possible on the X-ite island. But under a broader understanding of the term, it is possible. I think there are two problems with this reading of response A. Firstly, it questionably links freedom with technological advance. It says that because some people, somewhere in the universe, can fix Phil's disability, he is unfree. Before they could do so, Phil was as free as the rest of us, despite his disability. But at the moment that some scientist discovered how to cure people who are disabled from the waist down, Phil's liberty suddenly dropped. Is it true that mere technological advance renders people unfree (and if so, should we ban such advances?)? Secondly, we might ask why the possibility of some person somewhere being able to fix the disability means that Phil is unfree. Suppose that there are some aliens on a distant planet who can give any creature working wings. Is John unfree because of this fact?
Thus, it seems that neither reading of response A is satisfactory.

I now look at response B. This claims that since the default for humans is to not have wings, John is not unfree; but since the default is for humans to not be disabled, Phil is unfree. There are at least three problems with this response. Firstly, it again has some odd results. Suppose that a virus spread through the human race which affected everybody's DNA such that they all became disabled from the waist down and would forever more have similarly disabled children. The 'default' for humans now is undoubtedly to be disabled. According to response B, Phil has now been made free, since his situation no longer contrasts to that of the default human. Again; very counter-intuitive. The second problem with response B is that it places too high an emphasis on default abilities. The default for humans is to, with a small amount of practice, be able to roll their tongue. I can't. Am I unfree because of this? The third problem is that understanding liberty as meaning that we are free to the extent that we resemble the default human is nowhere near enough of a complete definition, as it only relates to physical attributes of the person. This shall be seen more in future blogs.

As I have shown, to call John free but Phil not is incoherent. The two are analogous; and thus we should call either both free, or both unfree; therefore our initial intuitions are wrong. My instinct is to bite the 'Phil-bullet' and say that they are both free, because to call someone unfree on account of their inability to fly (and therefore possibly endorse coercing the scientist who chooses to research something else when he had the possibility of researching human flight) seems ridiculous.

Next blog on the topic, I will look at the importance of human action and intentionality.