Abstract
Freedom is one of the most important moral and political ideals. Questions concerning degrees of overall freedom are therefore of the utmost moral and political concern. To answer these questions we need to know how to measure degrees of overall freedom. This paper offers a novel defence of the partly evaluative approach to freedom measurement against a recent critique of it. According to the partly evaluative approach, the question of how free one is depends partly on the specific value of the freedoms (and unfreedoms) one possesses and partly on their physical extension. According to the critique, because of its reference to freedoms’ specific value, the partly evaluative approach fails to capture freedoms’ non-specific value, which is what it should capture. In this paper I argue that this critique is unfounded, by showing that even measures of more mundane things, which nevertheless, like freedom, present us with a commensuration problem, sometimes involve evaluative considerations similar to the ones that the partly evaluative approach invokes.
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Notes
Note that the argument is not that it is always better to have more freedom than less, either in the sense that freedom “trumps” all other values or in the sense that it is impossible to have enough of it. The argument is that, all other things being equal and up to a certain (high) level, it is better to have more freedom than less. This is important as some of the apparent objections to the thesis that freedom is non-specifically valuable are really aimed at the view that it is always better to have more freedom in either or both of these two senses (see Carter 1999: 37–41, 61–3).
I mention interests to indicate that, although this argument is commonly associated with the view that well-being consists in satisfying our preferences, it can also be accommodated by an objectivist view of well-being. For the sake of simplicity, henceforth I will mention only preferences.
To be sure, assuming that freedom’s non-specific value is a function of both some non-evaluative property, such as its physical size, and its specific value, there is a sense in which the partly evaluative approach captures not only freedom non-specific value, but also its specific value (and its physical size). But it captures freedom’s specific value (and its physical size) merely as a constituent of freedom’s non-specific value, and not as an independent factor that is then combined with freedom’s non-specific value as Carter argues (there is a sense in which when we measure how much water there is in a glass, we also measure how much hydrogen and how much oxygen there is in it. But we measure them merely as constituents of water, and not independently as factors that are then combined with water).
Note that time may nevertheless be relevant to some things that are more like cake (and atom, quark, butter and banana) than freedom. Thus, it is not uncommon to buy time-shares in apartments and that practice may affect “how much of the apartment” one is understood to own (though not its size). Now, in principle, such practice can be applied to cakes too. But, given the way in which we use cakes, this possibility is unlikely to affect “how much cake” one is understood to own.
Why do we measure food in terms of calories rather than satiety? This is probably a result of the fact that food has also non-specific value as a source of energy and non-specific disvalue as a cause of obesity, and that hunger is perceived in the western affluent world as a much less serious threat than obesity. As a matter of fact, even studies of satiety are carried out mainly in the context of fighting obesity and not hunger. They are aimed at identifying foods that are relatively poor in calories but highly filling.
By directly harmful to our health I refer to the harm that these substances cause us as a result of our direct interaction with them as, for example, when we inhale them. They can harm our health indirectly by harming the environment as when, for example, they deplete the ozone layer.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Matthew Braham, Ian Carter, Matthew Kramer, Thomas Schramme, Fabian Wendt, Stuart White, an anonymous referee, and audiences at the universities of Manchester, Minho, Osnabrück, Bayreuth, Konstanz, and Open University of Israel, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. My work on this article was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Grant: Gz. SH 838/2-1.
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Shnayderman, R. Overall Freedom Measurement and Evaluation: a Defence of the Partly Evaluative Approach to Freedom Measurement. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 715–729 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10008-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-10008-8