Two All-or-Nothing Theories of Freedom

Abstract

I begin with an amende honorable. In a paper published in 1975¹ I made rather a point of saying that I regard freedom as a matter of degree, rather than a yes-no affair. This seemed very obvious; but I wasn’t aware of it having been said, and I felt it needed saying. In fact, it had been said, a few years before, quite unambiguously, by Dan O’Connor: ‘Freedom is not an all-or-nothing property but a matter of degree.’² With shameless immodesty I am going to call this rather trivial-sounding principle to which we both subscribe the ‘O’Connor-Watkins principle’.