Wait a minute

Commentaries on life, liberty, and everything in between.

Filed under: Hegel

Wait a minute – Is there a distinction between freedom and liberty?

Cuneiform_freedom
First, I wanted to call this post, ‘What is the distinction between freedom and liberty’ – but as I started to think about it a better question seems to be is there a distinction? There is not much help to get from the Oxford dictionary since it defines liberty as: “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s behaviour or political views.” And freedom is: “the power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity.” Judging by those two definitions if there is a distinction between freedom and liberty it seems to be a semantic one.

But, I am not satisfied, so lets look beyond the words themselves. Freedom consists of the word free with the abstract suffix ‘-dom’ indicating that is it a state that an individual is or is not in. This means that a given individual is either in a state of freedom or not meaning, I would argue, that freedom requires an active act of judgment in a given situation to determine if that individual is free or not. Since the individual can preform this active act it would stand to reason that the individual should actively claim his or her freedom, given that there is no external force hindering this. Based on this argumentation I am of the conviction that freedom is something that the individual needs to claim.

Now lets deliberate liberty. Liberty comes from the Greek word eleutheros. A ruff translation would be ‘belonging to the people’. We cannot be sure about this translation, but if this translation is correct then liberty is something that belongs to all freemen/people, and therefor we have a strong argumentation for the philosophical concept liberty being a natural right, something that all individuals have, because they are alive. Philosophers like Hegel and others have determents those rights as being an inalienable, meaning that the individual cannot discard those rights. The consequence of this is that Liberty, unlike Freedom, does not require an active act on behalf of the individual meaning that liberty should be contemplated to be passive.

This leads me to conclude that there is a distinction between freedom and liberty; freedom is something that requires the individual to make an active choice where liberty is a passive right that is granted to the individual because he or she exists.

For a more inept etymological argument, I can recommend Joseph R. Stromberg - Freedom vs. Liberty
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo