Go Ahead. Make My Day.

Latest rev: 2012FEB25

Objecting to Radical Freedom

Nature does not constrain ideas. 
If I think, then I am free.

 — Freedom is Radical

If freedom is radical — if nature is silent, void of prescription, leaving thought inherently unconstrained — the effect on moral theory is deep and wide. Freedom is natural. Factual. Non-contingent. Universal.

Axiomatic.

A seismic rumble stirs below the fissured crust of meta-ethics.

Radical freedom entails significant logical consequences, especially that moral constraint is artificial. Since nature does not prescribe, every moral concept and prescription must be invented.

Besides any other characteristics that might describe it, given the radical axiom, ethics is completely conventional: wherever there is moral content, we create it. Moral philosophy must proceed from the exclusively human origin of ethics.

And there sits the crucible, transforming: radical freedom is a simple, elegant axiom, but it melts the ancient rock beneath moral theory. Axiomatic freedom is a paradigm shift. Let the fireworks begin.


1. A New Lexicon

Rhetorical snafus can develop, using a single word to mean many things. Freedom as an axiom belongs to a rhetorical class completely different from freedom as a moral concept, so the two must be kept distinct. Here is a brief lexicon to clarify radical freedom and its place in moral theory:

Traditional, familiar notions of freedom are not superseded, obliterated or substituted by radical freedom. Political and personal freedoms we normally call "rights," for instance, remain intact as moral constructs invented by us.

When speaking of them, however, it isn't possible to justify political (or any other) freedoms directly on radical freedom, as if appealing to a moral principle. Nature contains no ought. Radical freedom is an amoral condition. The term is not a moral term and in itself, it justifies absolutely nothing.

That is its character: not a moral term or concept; not a principle; a natural condition. Since it is natural, radical freedom can be treated as a fact — an ordinary fact, not a "moral fact." The fact is the void: nature's lack of constraint upon ideas.

Radical freedom is the environment in which all ideas grow, not a cause or source of ethical ideas. Objections to radical freedom's role in ethics because it is not a moral term must avoid a class mistake: radical freedom is the ecosystem, not the tree. Radical freedom is the (un)condition surrounding every form of thought, including the ethical.

In moral philosophy, radical freedom belongs to meta-ethics.

Freedom occurs in thinking. Thus radical freedom moves the paradigm in meta-ethics away from moral sentiment and towards reason as the valid path to moral judgment.

We cannot own, grant or achieve radical freedom, nor can others take it from us. Unlike specific freedoms, it's a condition: a characteristic of thinking, a lack of constraint upon the content of thought. It is a void: a silence. If anyone can (mis)appropriate this silence, regulate it or control it, withhold it or transfer it to others, please notify the nearest philosopher, asap.

We cannot conventionally create a "right" directly to radical freedom. Such a statement would be a syntax error, amounting to: "I have a right to this axiom" — ie., to the silence of nature on human ethics.

It is also illogical — and improper form — (though some will try) to call specific traditional freedoms axiomatic. Sometimes specific freedoms conflict in practice, as any appellate court can well attest. But colliding principles make bad axioms. If freedom is radical, practical freedoms are conventional — invented by us (thus we can adjudicate priorities). Radical freedom is natural — the only freedom that can be axiomatic.



2. Challenges

Freedom is expressed when we think and that event does not always occur. Heidegger believed it is vanishing rare, for instance. His definition of thinking* brings up an issue to be resolved concerning the role of involuntary emotion (reflex) in human thought. Is thought ever dispassionate enough to call it thinking, therefore free?
*For Heidegger, rational analysis of objects and concepts is not all that thinking is; it also encompasses our visceral "experience of Being." This mixes the notion of "thinking" with "qualia." Many philosophers would call this a mistake. I do.

Radical freedom entails that ethics is invented, indicating conventional "moral norms" — and potential disagreement. Some people will reject moral norms, or commit normatively "evil" acts. If they are thinking, their actions are chosen. Nothing about radical freedom, as nature or as theory, precludes this choice. Viewing free choice as natural, the theory admits that some people may freely choose evil. Meanwhile the issue raised is how theory can reconcile freedom with convention. We are radically free to depart from norms and to think and act as we choose, but when we do, with what must we conform?

That question scales up to politics as the issue of individual obligations to the state. The classic problem in either case has been the genesis, grounding, evaluation and justification of the norms. If freedom is radical, convention is necessary because there is no natural law. Philosophy then has no luxury to appeal to anything beyond the moral inventiveness of humans. No moral theory yet has comprehensively solved the problems of grounding and evaluating convention. Radical freedom makes these problems more acute.

If freedom is radical, then freedom as a right, a gift of God or state, a destiny, etc., are moral constructs invented by us. Some may be no more than figures of moral speech. But they are conventional, with operative meanings. Freedom can mean whatever philosophy argues, when used as a moral term. But radical freedom is not the freedom moral arguments refer to.

For instance, freedom as "our destiny" (Rorty 1989) presumes we are not free, yearning for specific freedom(s) humanity has not achieved. Radical freedom is primeval, non-contingent, natural, always first and here and now. If freedom is axiomatic, what can "destiny" add? Tomorrow-ness? Legacy concepts stand in new light and when re-examined, some may fail. "Freedom is our destiny" refers to freedoms we invent — to overcome constraints we have invented to begin with. It's propaganda. 
Dispatching half of Rorty in a single paragraph. I am awesome.

Meanwhile it is not a valid objection to radical freedom to argue, "people might be free in the radical sense described, but that is not what we normally mean by freedom." That statement is true, but it only says, "that's not the same rat we've always kept in the moral theory lab." The 21st century philosopher smiles. "That's the point. Normal-meaning rats are not obsolete. But this is a paradigm rat."

The new paradigm is freedom first, as the natural condition of human beings. Constraints on natural freedom are conventions and thus we must justify them. Traditional freedoms are conventions too: limits upon conventional constraints.

This view of ethics is elegant and simple and needs no metaphysics. Nature contains no ought. Metaphysical objections might be made against natural freedom, but the metaphysics must be proven first.

Valid objections can take this form, however: there could be sufficient reasons (perhaps even moral reasons) not to make freedom an axiom. Another valid objection might show that the axiom cannot consist in the characteristics described — ie., the features constituting radical freedom are impossible. Such ideas might be pursued — but not here.

Finally, the most lethal objection possible is to prove that a sufficient, comprehensive, universal moral theory cannot be built, if freedom is taken as an axiom.

Go ahead. Make my day.


3. The Freedom Paradox

As some clever wag will put it, sooner or later: even if nature does not morally enslave us, that does not make us morally free.

That is correct: we are free to make (or not make) ethics, and we do. That is the empirical core of the theory of radical freedom.

Every human community "does ethics" and this has occurred for tens of thousands of years. Empirically the only variance is local form. The crucial question for meta-ethics is how this happens voluntarily, absent any moral command in nature beyond ourselves.

Currently it is cutting-edge to think we are "moral animals," that perhaps there is a "moral neurology" involved, or that some basic moral behavior(s) may be encoded in DNA. Probably there is some truth to these theories, but the equally empirical observation that moral systems vary over time and place suggests the evolutionary scenario does not completely describe the moral process — or else our ethics would all be the same.

First we must admit we are totally free to create the local forms to satisfy our apparently universal urge to "do ethics."

If nature neither prescribes nor constrains human thinking, freedom is our natural state. At first, this point seems only academic and appears to shift our view of freedom very little. Natural freedom (as theory) has traditional precedents (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, arguably some of J. S. Mill) and is not earth-shaking new. But as the first axiom in meta-ethics, it reaches far beyond the political ken of its progenitors. It entails complete artificiality of all moral notions. Every moral concept and prescription must be invented. If the logical necessity of convention is established, contradictory theories fail.

But the artificiality of ethics necessitates that a radically free species, presumably lacking any intrinsic motivation to make itself unfree, has spontaneously generated "moral constraint" right along with the trait that makes it free. An entire species of thinking being, free because thought is free, consistently and persistently and everywhere invents its own un-freedom.

On the surface, this is an outright paradox. Some critics may object to the theory of radical freedom on grounds that this paradox is its first result.

Among all possible moans, groans, howls and hoots of derision from philosophers whose world-famous theories might be damaged by radical freedom, and among the many potential objections to freedom as an axiom, this paradox stands out starkest, demanding an answer.