Abstract
The previous chapter explained what it means to say that a person is legally free to do something. Some questions pertaining to the nature of legal freedom were side-stepped by referring to the distinction between the things a person is legally free to do and his overall level of legal freedom. A few assumptions concerning the measurement of overall legal freedom were already made, in particular with respect to the role of ‘empty rights’, i.e., admissible but infeasible actions. In this chapter and the next the problem of how to assess aggregate levels of legal freedom will be taken up more systematically. I shall formulate some conditions under which different social situations can be compared in terms of the amount of legal freedom an individual enjoys in them.1 In the next chapter I shall turn to the question of how to base an assessment of society’s overall level of legal freedom on individual freedom judgements.
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© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Van Hees, M. (2000). Freedom of Choice. In: Legal Reductionism and Freedom. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9453-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9453-5_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0285-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-9453-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive