Are you assuming that morality aims at humanity's goal, role, purpose, or telos generally? Or are you assuming that consequentialism requires the starting assumption that utilitarians make that we humanity aims at a goal and that goal has moral value? I would reject both of these assumptions. Further, I would say that morality is about how persons ought to be or act, not just humans, so it should encompass all possible persons/moral agents.


It would certainly be true that different entities would value choices differently and could plausibly own slightly different choices (a species with two bodies for example), but the ability to understand and make choices is really just the ability to use one's free will and rationality, which are both necessary conditions for moral agency. So this measure of value does only happen in some entities, but it happens (or can happen when it isn't being violated/restricted) in all and only all entities that are moral agents, so I'm not sure that is really a problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by relative in this context. Relative to what?

Also, I'm not sure I'd describe freedom as an attribute. It's not necessarily wrong, it's just... not terribly precise. I would say that "freedom," as I'm using it, refers to the ability to persons to understand and make their own decisions. So yes, certainly something that belongs to an entity with agency. But I'm not sure why you think that means there can't be a solution. Could you fill me in on the reasoning from one to the other?

The ability to make those choices is the measure of value that determines whether actions are right or wrong. That isn't the same as those being the "ideal choices". Is it possible I am misunderstanding how you are using the word "ideal"? I took you to mean that you thought that one's own choices were morally the best, though this is unlikely to be the cases as they don't, by themselves, often protect or violate one's ability to make one's own choices. If you meant that they were "an ideal" in the sense that they were a principle or a concept to be strived for, then I think that is probably also wrong, but perhaps less so.

Think of it this way. The ability to understand and make choices constitutes use of our rationality and our free will, which are the things that make us moral agents in the first place. It is the ability to put these things to use which I am suggesting is valuable, and I am restricting this to only over those choices that belong to us rather than those that do not on the principles that this allows for morality to be appropriately action-guiding, not result in constant conflict, and align with our intuitions somewhat. I am not having any difficultly understanding the measure of value under discussion.

Also, as to your post replying to Punshhh: Are you suggesting that the freedom to do absolutely anything is valuable? Your freedom to, for example, torture a child to death? Not just to make the choice to, but to actually do so without the police stopping you? I do not agree. Am I wrong in how I am reading this? Are you in saying that no kind of freedom can be valuable perhaps? Or just that freedom to make certain choices cannot be valuable but not making any further claims? What exactly are you suggesting here?

If protecting the ability to make such choices is the standard whereby other choices are judged as good or bad, than this type of choice is named as the ideal choice, the one which all others are measured against in relation to their capacity to enable that type

No it isn't. The whole idea of these choices being "the ideal type" is an invention of yours. It is not reflected in anything I have said. I suggest that you are interpreting all of this through the wrong lens.

This is where the inconsistency lies hidden. You want to protect freedom, because you think that it has some value. However, freedom allows for both good and bad acts, and what you really want out of personal freedom is good acts. So valuing freedom is inherently inconsistent with valuing good acts because freedom allows bad acts As a sort of compromise to "freedom" you posit a "type of freedom", which is the freedom to make one's own choices. This is a type of choice which is generally neutral, removed from good and bad. But, like I already explained, this is not a type of freedom at all. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are ascribing motives to me which I do not have.

It's a highly compromised, restricted sense of "freedom", specifically formulated so as to make it appear like there is a type of freedom, which the protection of, would be consistent with the desire for good acts. In other words, if true freedom was what your principle sought to protect, this would not be consistent with cultivating good acts, because freedom allows for bad acts. So you posit a false freedom, the freedom to make one's own choices, which is not any type of freedom at all, because it consists of a very restricted, narrow and limited, range of choices

It is a type of freedom consistent with all moral agents having the same freedom, which is surely the type that we should want in a consequentialist moral theory.

Then you state that one's own choices are neutral choices, to ensure that protecting one's own choices would not result in bad choices, in which case this ability ought not be protected. Therefore you end up with an extremely contrived sense of "freedom" which you are seeking to protect, the freedom to make choices which are neither bad nor good, i.e. choices which are morally irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

They are neither good nor bad because they are your choices to make, and the only good or bad choices are those that take that same freedom away from others or protect it.

And, if this is supposed to be a form of freedom, what kind of freedom is it really. Is it the freedom from moral principles? If we all made only this type of choice, then we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with good or bad anymore. Is this the ideal? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is the freedom to understand and make your own choices. Not the freedom from moral principles, the freedom from things that would prevent you being able to understand and make your own choices. Also you seem to be trying to find some buried ideal, but I think I have explained the moral philosophy fairly clearly. There isn't a hidden value under the hood.

You have specifically designed what you call a "type of freedom", the freedom to make choices which belong to oneself, in an effort to make the value of "freedom" consistent with the value of morality. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know what you mean with the value of morality. This is what I am suggesting has moral value.

Now I would like to see you justify the value which you assign to this "type of freedom" — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I'm happy to, but I'm not moving off of this topic while you are still misunderstanding the measure of value under discussion. If you don't understand the measure of value, then I think any conversation about why it is our best candidate for a measure of value is likely to be doomed from the off.

One's own choices often aren't really good or bad. If I choose to key my own car, that isn't good or bad, it just is. These choices certainly aren't "the ideal". What is important is the ABILITY of persons to understand and make their own choices. Their freedom. That is what needs protecting. Since most choices of my own choices don't protect that freedom or violate it, they are generally fairly neutral actions.

Again, I'm very happy to discuss why I think the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices is the best measure of value we have available, but I really want to make sure you have understood what that is first. I don't want to move on if we are just going to be back here in a few posts time with you suggesting that I can't call choices that don't belong to the person making them good or something similar. That is not an implication of anything I have said, and it is not my position. Those words don't belong in my mouth, and I'll thank you to stop trying to put them in there.

There isn't two scales or value systems. The thing which makes any action good or bad is the extent to which is protects or violates the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices.

If you add one to zero, you don't get zero. You get one. Similarly, something not having intrinsic value doesn't negate the value it produces through its consequences somehow. The value of the action is in the consequences it produces (consequences which protect or violate the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. The choice being made doesn't need to be valuable for it's own sake in order to be good. It's good because it produces good consequences.

I'm happy to answer why this is the best measure of moral value (though I think it is covered in the primer), but I'd like to make sure we have pinned down the misunderstanding you seem to be having with the measure of value first.

No, the goodness and badness of an action are determined by the extent to which that action protects persons' ability to understand and make their own choices/violates persons' ability to understand and make their own choices. It isn't that only your those choices that belong to you can be good. In fact, they mostly can't since whatever choice one makes that concerns only those things that belong to them, it will presumably be permissible. It is the protection/violation of the ability to understand and make these choices that determines whether an action is good or bad.

It is the measure of moral value, the goodness or badness of this choice is precisely because of how it affects persons' ability to understand and make their own choices. Just like if the person shot a lion that was about to eat someone, it isn't that shooting lions is intrinsically valuable it is good because it protects the ability to understand and make their own decisions of the person who is about to be eaten. This isn't contradictory, it's consequentialism.

At no point am I saying that their choices are themselves morally valuable, I am saying that they can be good or bad because they produce consequences that are good or bad. And those consequences are good or bad precisely because they lead to the protection/violation of persons' ability to understand and make their own choices. Please see my above examples of different kinds of consequentialism for a clear explanation.

It's not contradictory at all. Moral objectivism vs subjectivism vs whatever else is about what kind of things moral facts are. To be a moral objectivist is to say that moral facts are objective. That doesn't mean there are any. Similarly, we can sensibly say that all facts about the length of unicorn horns are objective and that all the claims we make about unicorn horn length are intended to point at objective truth, but there aren't any unicorns, so there aren't any unicorn horns, so all of these claims are mistaken. Unicorn error theory, as it were.

That being said, I am a moral realist, I was just pointing out that moral objectivism doesn't entail moral realism.

It's been moral value all along. What is morally valuable (or rather what is the measure of moral value) is persons' ability to understand and make their own choices. It isn't about whether you value your ability to do so or not, or whether that provides some value to your life, the claim is that the extent to which that ability is violated or restricted determines the goodness or badness of the consequences of some action (and therefore the morality of that action).

No, there isn't a contradiction there at all. It's the ability to understand and make some decisions that ought to be protected, but not the ability to understand and make others. That is entirely coherent.

Again, you are getting caught up in things being valuable "to" people. What I am claiming is that the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices is the measure of moral value. The thing which makes the consequences of an action good or bad. It is not about what is valued by people, it is about what matters morally, objectively, universally, whether or not we care about it.


I'm going to draw a comparison with two other types of consequentialist theory so that it is really clear what role the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices is playing in freedom consequentialism.

In preference utilitarianism, the measure of moral value is the satisfaction of preferences and the lack of dissatisfaction of preferences. This is what is what determines the moral value of consequences, their utility. Now, if a preference utilitarian had to choose between five people losing their sight and one person losing their life, then the right thing to do (according to their theory) is whichever satisfies the most preferences/dissatisfies the least. It doesn't matter if the preference utilitarian doesn't have a preference for either one occuring, because the people who are going to lose their sight and/or life sure do, and their preferences matter morally.

In classical utilitarianism, the measure of moral value is happiness and the lack of unhappiness (or pleasure and the lack of pain if you prefer). This is what determines the moral value of consequences, their utility. Now, if a classical utilitarian had to choose between five people losing their sight and one person losing their life, then the right thing to do (according to their theory) is whichever leads to the greatest overall happiness minus unhappiness. It doesn't matter that the person in question is made neither happy or unhappy by making the decision, because the people who are going to lose their sight or lives are going to be made happy/unhappy by it, and their happiness/unhappiness matters morally.

In freedom consequentialism, the measure of moral value is the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. This is what determines the moral value of consequences. Now, if a freedom consequentialist had to choose between five people losing their sight and one person losing their life, then the right thing to do is whichever protects the most freedom (or perhaps the most important freedom? This is very much the problem that I haven't solved yet. How to weigh freedom over different things in such a way). It doesn't matter that the choice in question doesn't require protecting, because the choices of the people not to lose their sight or lives do, and their ability to understand and make their own choices matters morally.

Does that clear things up?

The position is that moral facts are objective facts. That leaves open the possibility of moral realism or moral error theory. It may be that there are no moral facts at all. I don't think this is the case, but it isn't ruled out by the claim that moral facts are objective facts.

You surely can't only be realizing that I'm an objectivist now. And less yelling into the aether and more determining what moral truths if any there are to be had.

First of all, it isn't a matter of what is of moral value "to you" it is a matter of what is of moral value. Second, I very much restricted it to only the choices that belong to the person in everything I have said up until now, including the quote you have just made. Their "own" choices.

I think the problem might be that you are thinking of things having "moral value to you" or "to me", but that isn't the case. Your choice to not be eaten by alligators has moral value. Objectively, universally. It's not a matter of who it has value to. The reason I should save you from the alligators is because it protects your choice not to be eaten by them (assuming you aren't trying to get eaten by alligators). The choice to save you from alligators doesn't itself need to be protected. It is right because it protects a choice that ought to be protected and doesn't violate other choices that ought to be protected.

I didn't say it wasn't a restriction. It is a type of freedom, specifically one restricted to only those choices that belong to a person. We can absolutely base morality on whether this type of freedom is restricted.

This is not a vicious circle at all, rather it is a misunderstanding on your part. I say that a person's ability to understand and make their own choices (which I have always maintained are the choices that belong to them) is the measure of moral value, the thing that determines whether the consequences of an action are good or bad. Actions that protect that thing are good, actions which violate it are bad. The action of saving you from alligators protects this thing (the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices, in this case yours to continue living), so it is good. That's not a contradiction, that's the difference between determining a measure of value which is used to evaluate actions and evaluating an action.

No, everything you just said is incorrect. There aren't two systems of value at all. I think you have gotten very much the wrong end of the stick again, but somehow it's an entirely different end than you had before. I'm starting to wonder what shape this stick is. Let me try to explain again.

What is of moral value is the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. The extent to which this is protected or restricted/violated determines whether some set of consequences is good or bad. For example, if I steal your car, then i have restricted your ability to understand and make choices regarding your car, which you own, so this is bad. If I save your life from an alligator, I have protected your ability to choose whether you want to live, so this is good.

When I said that only some choices are morally relevant, I meant that we only need to worry about protecting and not restricting persons' ability to understand and make their own choices, not choices that don't belong to them. For example, my ability to understand and make the choice to steal your car is not one that needs to be protected, because it is your car.

Essentially, as happiness and lack of unhappiness is to utilitarianism, the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices is to freedom consequentialism.

1: In the example given not the chooser, just a person. But it doesn't make any difference which person it is. Any one of the subjects is a fine answer here.
2: Morally good to bad. Not for anyone. Good or bad objectively.
3: The freedom is lost and/or gained by the people whose eyesight or life is preserved or lost. Again, in the example we were talking about not the chooser. Any one of the subjects is also a fine answer here.
4: I'm not sure I totally understand question four. When I say the "ability of persons to understand and make their own choices" I mean that person's choices, the choices that belongs to the person whose freedom is being discussed. It's possible that any one of the subjects is a fine answer here, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the question, so I'm not sure.

Yes, it would be reasonable to say that the choice being made has no moral value (at least, no intrinsic moral value). But it is morally important because it affects the freedom of the subjects involved.

I mean, I think I'm being clear and using plain language whenever possible.

I think there is basically some ambiguity in the term "moral value" as it is being used here. So I'll try to be as clear about what I mean as possible:

The choice between whether one person loses their life or five lose their sight is morally important because it leads to consequences which are good and/or bad. They are good and/or bad due to the gain and/or loss of freedom (by which I mean ability of persons to understand and make their own choices) involved.

Hopefully that is nice and clear. I think it is a fairly simple concept, but I think some confusion in the discussion between myself and MU has led to it looking a lot more complicated than it is.

Yes, the person's ability to make this decision is not inherently valuable. However, the value is in the choices that belong to the people who may lose their sight/life. Again, to compare to another form of consequentialism. The decision whether to flip the switch in the trolley problem isn't valuable according to utilitarianism. The world wouldn't be missing out on any value were you not able to make that decision because no one was on the tracks in the first place. Rather, the value is in the lives of the people being saved. Likewise, the value here is not in your ability to make a decision regarding other people's freedom, it is in those people's freedom.

You seem to think that I am claiming that only choices which belong to a person have any moral content, which is not at all what I am claiming. What I am claiming is that the measure of whether consequences are good or bad is the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. In the case given here, with persons' eyes or lives on the line, the decision of which to save has a great deal of moral content/weight/import because it has consequences for the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. It isn't because the choice itself is morally valuable that we should care which option is picked, it is because of the consequences.

No I mean, the choice that belongs to the people whose eyes and lives are at stake is valuable because their eyes and lives belong to them.

At no point do I say either explicitly or implicitly that a person "only has freedom to make decisions which belong to the person". What I have said is that the measure of moral value is the ability of persons to understand and make their own choices. This ability to understand and make one's own choices, which I call freedom is to freedom consequentialism what happiness is to utilitarianism. It is thing which determines the value of consequences. There are a great many decisions we need to make which are morally important precisely because they affect the freedom of others.

Again, I have been saying that decisions which belong to other people are valuable all along. What I have been saying is not valuable is one person's ability to make choices which don't belong to them. I can see why you would disagree with me given the bizarre view which you think I have been espousing. I would suggesting reading back over some of what I have said now that isn't what I said or meant and I think you will see that some of the disagreements probably melt away.

By "value scale" do you mean any moral principles at all, or do you mean something else? Those two definitely are relevant, as both make the application of moral principles relevant. That isn't what consequentialism is and there isn't really a conflict there.

Again, the choice of the persons' whose eyesight or life is at stake is the measure of value that makes the consequences of them losing their eyesight or life against their will morally bad. The decision between one happening and the other is morally important because it leads to bad consequences, not for the person making the choice, but for other people.

I'm not quite sure where to begin with your first question. Imagine asking the same question of a utilitarian only pointing out that making the choice itself doesn't make them happy, so why should they care. What you are doing is much the same thing. The choice to continue using one's own eyes, or to continue living, are both valuable, and we are faced with a choice between protecting one or the other. Choosing between one set of consequences and another, both of which will result in some people being negatively impacted in a morally relevant way. This is not a ruse, it is exactly the kind of thing moral theories deal with.

Your second point is again, completely misunderstanding everything I have said up until this point. I do wonder whether it is intentional. First, me explaining how I was using morally relevant in a specific context and pointing out that it is not the same way you were using it in your objection is quite the opposite of equivocation. Second, and more importantly, you are conflating the measure of value and the moral decision. Again,it is as if you are claiming that a utilitarian shouldn't care about a decision (no matter how important) if it doesn't make them happy. That is beside the point. There are other people in the world. In this case, it the freedom of the people whose eyesight and/or life is in the balance that is important, but the decision is important because it leads to one of them being protected or not.

To your third point, it is completely and obviously not true that if a choice as no inherent moral value, we cannot evaluate it using moral principles. First, determining that it has no inherent moral value requires evaluation using moral principles. Second, it might have instrumental value. Third, it might have disvalue. Fourth, under most consequentialist theories, moral decisions don't themselves have inherent value, but they can still be evaluated inasmuch as they lead to consequences which have moral value (this isn't really the same as having instrumental value in terms of being able to make the decision being instrumentally valuable). Also, there is a lot of moral value at issue here, specifically value of persons to decide whether they want to continue seeing/living that we are deciding between.

A person's eyes are something that belong to them, as is a person's life. Of course neither belong to the person making the decision, though I think you may have misunderstood when you say that they therefore aren't "free to make the decision". Assuming that the people all want to keep their sight and their life, then the person making the decision is faced with a choice between protecting the freedom of some people to make one kind of choice, or protecting the freedom of some other people to make a different kind of choice, and they must decide which they should protect.

Again, I haven't said that a free choice is the right choice. I have said that only the freedom to make certain choices ought to be protected. You seem to keep getting caught on words that you insist I am using in ways that I'm just not. In this case, the person's choice between people dying and people losing their eyesight isn't something that belongs to the person making it, so them being able to make that choice is not inherently valuable. If they weren't able to make that choice (say, because no one's sight or life was in danger) then that wouldn't be a bad thing. But none of that means they can't or shouldn't make it or that such a choice is not morally relevant in the sense that you are using the term. When I was saying that someone's ability to understand and make a certain choice wasn't "morally relevant" I meant that their ability to understand and make that choice did not have inherent moral value, not that the choice did not have moral content and could not be good, bad, right, wrong. I'm fairly sure I explained this earlier.

No I don't think someone else influencing my choice makes it no longer mine.

But to your core question of how this could be an issue, let's return to the example I gave before of saving one person's life or several persons' sight. In both cases someone's freedom over those choices that belong to them will be violated, and we are seeking to choose the better option. The question is, how do we decide? How do we determine how many people's sight is worth one person's life. This is comparitively a fairly simple example, but I think it demonstrates the issue quite well. How do we well how many persons' choice to continue seeing is worth one person's choice to continue living.

A choice that belongs to someone can be thought of as a choice of what to do with something that belongs to that person, specifically their mind, body, and property.

The issue isn't with determining which freedom of an individual that individual should value over any other. The issue is with deciding how to balance different people's freedom to do different things against each other. Such as the blindness vs death example given. I really think this discussion would go smoother if you read more of the primer I wrote to begin with.

I'm not sure what you mean by finding either strength or weakness in belonging or how we would find that. Also, I'm not sure why how often people's freedom is restricted would determine the extent to which that choice belongs to them.

No, it is freedom of choice, rather than rights, as I've already explained many times. Yeah, I agree that it is very easy to resolve conflicts between choices that don't belong to someone and those that do, but this isn't the problem I outlined in the initial primer. I was concerned with how to weigh different amounts of freedom (over those choices that beong to people) against each other. For example, how many people's eyesight is worth one person's life if we are in a position to only save group or the other. This isn't resolved by what you suggest. Further, I'm not sure how you tell which choices people have a "more absolute right" to. If there was a clear and simple way of doing that, then that would go some way towards solving the problem (though it still wouldn't solve it completely as there is still the issue of how much of one (in terms of number but also in terms of duration and possibly even intensity) is worth how much of another. We might think that people have "more of a right" to live than to see, but that doesn't tell us how many of one is worth how many of the other.

I'm not being deceptive, I'm simply using a term in a way you don't seem not to approve of. Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that people aren't allowed to make any choices that don't belong to them, simply that their ability to do so does not require protection.

I'm happy to leave it there though.

Again, you are demanding more of "understanding" than I am. I am simply requiring that a person knows what choice they are making and what it means to make that choice such that they are able to apply their rationality to it, not that they understand every aspect of that choice and everything that might lead from it. Also, the fact that someone might think they understand something and be wrong isn't problematic in the sense of causing a problem for my or other moral theories. People are wrong all the time, that's not really an issue.

No, it isn't fraud if you buy someone dinner because you think they can play guitar. It might be if you buy tickets to their show and their show doesn't exist. And no, laughing at someone you've tricked also isn't restricting their freedom (specifically, when I say not restricting their freedom here, I mean the specific type of freedom I have been advocating for). This isn't a vague or ill-considered distinction, it's fairly clear.

Yes, you can restrict the meaning of freedom to a specific type of freedom within a specific context. You're just wrong on that front. It is indeed a type of freedom, and I'm not sure how I could make my language much more clear. Without wishing to be rude, it does sometimes feel as though you are intentionally misunderstanding me.

I mean, you definitely do misunderstand, but it isn't a misunderstanding that restricts your freedom in this way. You are free to continue using your device to express your views whether or not those views stem from a misunderstanding.

It is the freedom to make certain choices that I am advocating for, I don't think I have ever been less than clear about that.

I mean, yeah I am very much assuming that all moral facts are true whether or not anyone knows them, including any "rights" that people have. I feel like I explained that before, certainly in my original primer. Have you been under the impression that I was taking some position other than moral realism and objectivism?

You keep talking about true definitions, but the definitions of words aren't terribly important. If you wish to call the thing I am promoting schmeedom, then that's fine. What is at issue is the ability of moral agents to exercise the things that make them moral agents in the first place (free will and rationality) over those choices that belong to them.

In the case of deception, it's about what the person is being decieved about. Being able to "understand' one's choices is a fairly low bar to clear, but it can be affected by deception in some cases. Fraud isn't the only case but it's a simple one to explain. For example, might involve me agreeing to pay a large sum of money for a car that hasn't been driven many kilometers and is in good condition, but what is being delivered is a car that has driven a lot of kilometers and is being held together with blutack and hope. In such a case, you have not delivered on your agreement and have essentially stolen my money through fraud. If, however, you tell people that are an excellent guitar player so they will think you are cool, then you have not violated their freedom. The deception hasn't prevented them from making their own choices. Even if those choices involve you (such as whether they want to invite you to dinner). Another case might be misrepresenting a risk of something, such that a person is put at risk they didn't agree to. Or misrepresenting what might be involved in a medical procedure, such that a person has things done to them they have not consented to. Point being, there are ways you can violate freedom through deception, but most cases of simple lying will not do so.

I mean, I am not sure how to be more clear about this. I contend that a specific type of freedom should be protected, specfically that of persons over those choices that belong to them. By "morally relevant" I mean that the ability to understand and make such a choice (one that doesn't belong to you) does not have moral value. I don't mean that there is no moral content in the choice. And no, the choice to travel in the plane still wouldn't belong to you because the plane doesn't belong to you. What you do or don't have in your possession isn't at issue, what matters is what belongs to you, what choices you (for lack of a better phrase) have a right to make.

No, to have a right (a moral right anyway, which I assume is the kind we are talking about) to something is not about whether your choice is protected by legal principles. Women had a moral right to own property (assuming that people have such a right) in the same way as men before they were granted a legal right to do the same. It is very much one's moral rights I am concerned with, not their legal ones.

I am not sure what you think I have reversed. I am saying that I think the thing that rights theories ultimately protect is the type of freedom I am proposing is morally valuable. That is very much tying rights to freedom and not the other way around. I just thought that using the language of rights might be helpful as you seem to be having trouble with the language of freedom.

No, in practice we both specify what people are or ought to be free to do or be and what restrictions they ought to be free from. Both are sensible ways of discussing what is meant by "freedom" in a specific context and what kind of freedom (or definition of freedom if you prefer) is valuable and which isn't.

No, I don't think deception is a restriction on free thinking... most of the time. As I've said, there are some cases where it is, such as fraud. But most of the time, no. And, for the same reason, education is not a restriction on freedom in the way you describe. Hate speech can indeed incite violence, and it is possible that in some circumstances there is an argument for restricting it, but it does not itself violate anyone's freedom, so restricting it is (if and when it is ever appropriate) a case of doing something bad to prevent something worse from happening.

You are ascribing motives to me that are unfair. I think the "restrictions" you are suggesting, such as education, simply aren't restrictions. It isn't a matter of not thinking they are because I want restrictions to be bad. It is a matter of not thinking they are because they aren't.

I'm not totally sure what you are talking about regarding childhood, but I will attempt to answer what appears to be the core question. Specifically, I would quite happily say that there are all sorts of things that restrict a person's choices, their "freedom" if you like, but don't restrict the kind of freedom I have identified as morally relevant. For example, my lack of a private plane "restricts" my choice to take my private plane when traveling. But this isn't a choice that belongs to me, so the fact it is "restricted" in this way isn't morally relevant.

No, a right is not very different from freedom. I think, properly understood, rights are ultimately about the kind of freedom I have been discussing. To have a right to something is to have a choice of whether to do that thing, or what to do with that thing. For example, a right to life entails a right to die, a right to speak entails a right to stay silent. I'm very happy have any future discussions without the language of rights. I should say now that doing so wouldn't quite be accurate, as I would say my theory aims to protect the thing at the core of rights theories, rather than rights themselves, and there is some baggage associated with rights that isn't applicable, such as rights being trumps and each right being kind of seperate from each other one, rather than a single underlying value as I would suggest. But, bearing that in mind, we can talk about freedom consequentialism as a consequentialism of rights from now on.

In your last post you said "To "be free to act in some way" is completely meaningless if not oxymoronic. Say we name a specific type of activity, as the specified "some way", and say that the agent is free to act in this way. This means that we allow this option. But the agent being free, may choose not to act in that way, but to act in a contrary way. In that sense, "to be free to act in that specific way" is completely meaningless, because the agent is also free to act in any way."
It was this that I was taking issue with. Hence pointing out that being free to act in some specific way is a perfectly sensible thing to say, and doesn't require freedom to act in all possible contrary ways or that freedom be completely unrestrained by anything.

I agree that there are... some cases where we might need to constrain what someone is saying. Generally threats, fraud, and incitement to violence. Quite a lot of other things, like just deception generally or hate speech, needs no constraint as it doesn't restrict others freedom. Children are an interesting case because they aren't really persons yet. It's better to think of them as the same agent as their future self and so deserving of moral protection, but not currently able to understand most of their own choices so those choices need to be protected for them by guardians. A lot of these supposed problems aren't really problems though. There are some interesting conflicts, but the more obvious ones seem to amount to someone trying to put their property or themself in a place where they have no "right" to be (eg, their car on top of my foot) and the answer seems to be "no, you can't do that".

Without getting back into why habits aren't restrictions on the will, I'm not really sure what kind of restrictions you are concerned about. A person's free will is not diminished by being locked in a cell, so being unable to change the past just doesn't seem like a concern.

I mean, it really isn't. Moral restraint might well be what people ought to show in order to stick to only their own choices, but it isn't what is being protected. What is being protected is the ability of persons (free, rational agents) to make a certain kind of choice (those that belong to them). That isn't to say that all other choices ought to be restricted. There are lots of choices that I might want to make that don't need protecting, but also don't require prohibiting.

An alternative way of thinking about the kind of freedom that freedom consequentialism seeks to protect is that it is plausibly the same thing protected by some rights theories. Would conceptualizing it as a consequentialism of rights help you?

Yes, I would agree that thinking that lots of different types of freedom should all be protected could easily lead to conflicts which might not be resolvable without reference to some other value. People tend not to do that though. Generally when we talk about different types of freedom, we are debating which one is really worth protecting or promoting. Certainly in my case I have advocated for protecting a specific type.

Again, you seem to be defining "free" in a very strange way. It seems entirely reasonable for the police for example to say of someone "you are free to leave". It is clear what this means: there are not restrictions being placed on you leaving. It doesn't require that it also be true that the person is free to go to the moon.

I defined own choices as concerning those things that belong to a person, their mind, their body, and their property. I agree that there could be some conflicts specifically with property and movement, but it isn't clear that there would be many. What conflicts in the public sphere are you concerned about? And I wouldn't insist that a moral agent is one who reasons morally, assuming that by "reasons morally" you mean something like "reasons in a morally good way".

Having free will definitely doesn't mean being free of will. I had assumed that you were familar with the term "free will", but I will clarify it for you if you like. There are a lot of ways one might define free will, and I suspect there are those who think my definition is claiming too much, but I would say that to have free will is to be able to act in ways that are caused wholly be the agent, not determined by preceding events or scripted responses, and not in-principle predictable ahead of time.

The ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices is exactly how I use "freedom". I agree that I do only want to protect certain choices, specifically persons' own choices. The choices that belong to them. I am not being inconsistent at all.

So long as people are being clear about what they mean, equivocation doesn't seem to come into it. I agree that freedom certainly has something to do with being unconstrained, but there are lots of types of freedom, lots of ways of being unconstrained from various things, that we might want to discuss. It seems that we could simply specify what we mean (which I have, numerous times) and then discuss whether that type of freedom is important or not, rather than getting hung up on linguistics.

I wouldn't say having freedom is quite the same as having a car, but I would also say that it isn't like having the quality of greenness.

No, in my examples, "free" can be used to two ways. To say that some agent is free to act in some way is using "free" to refer to the person having freedom to act in that way. To say that someone is a free, rational agent, is using "free" to mean that the agent has free will. By "freedom" I mean the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices. I offered to use a different word, but you offered "moral constraint" which is so far divorced from how either of those words are used as to be completely inappropriate.

Also, it doesn't support your position. Even on your account of freedom, which I think is not a good one, then not choosing a definition of the word would keep some options open to us, but others would be closed until we did.

I have clearly defined how I am using the word "freedom" and why I am using that word rather than another. If you think it would be more productive, we might use another word, or simply refer to the ability of free, rational, agents to understand and make their own choices. If you like, we can just use that term (the ability of free, rational agents to understand and make their own choices) in the future and move past the whole linguistic debate.

I'm not really sure what an "objective definition" would even be. The definitions of words are either explicitly stated within specific contexts (such as within a particular discipline, or even within a particular conversation) or they are determined by usage.

Is the fact that the past can't be changed self-evident? Even if it were, what does that have to do with anything?

I agree that saying some types of impossibility are not relevant to freedom is similar to saying that only some types of freedom are morally relevant, in the sense that both are reasonable things to have a discussion about.

To "have" something doesn't just mean to have it as a property. I have a red car, but a red car isn't a property of me. Also, even if I have a property, then the conditions that allow me to have that property do not have to be inherent in me. For example, I might have the property of iridescence, but only under specific lighting. The lighting conditions would be a restriction on my having that property, but they aren't a part of me.

You keep getting caught on the idea that "freedom" must mean freedom from all restrictions to do anything. It certainly can mean that, but it's a word, it can mean lots of things. For example, when I talk about a free, rational agent, I don't mean an agent who has complete freedom, or even an agent who has much freedom at all. In that case "free" refers to the agent having free will, which is different from freedom (one doesn't lose any free will if they are chained up and kept in a box, but they certainly lose a lot of freedom).

I don't start with a concept of freedom that is less than ideal. I start with one that is compatible with all free, rational agents being capable of being entirely free, which seems far more ideal than.

This supposed contradiction seems to be predicated on you not allowing people to use words differently from how you want them to be used.

Yeah, that doesn't work.
First, we don't "start" with the idea of freedom being without any restriction or constraint. We "start" with a lot of different understandings of what people are free or should be free to do or be, and what they should be free from, and we make sense of that so we can have a sensible conversation.
Second, constraints and restrictions are not properly understood as only the properties of an agent's environment. One could make a freedom claim that people ought to be free from their habits. I wouldn't agree, but that would certainly be a "constraint" (in the sense that it is what you are claiming the person should be free from) that would not be a part of the person's environment, but of them.
Third, there is absolutely not any requirement for constraints to be a part of the agent in order for them to have a type of freedom. I'm not sure where you have got that assumption, but it clearly isn't true. It is entirely coherent to say that my freedom of movement is constrained by being kidnapped and locked in a the boot of a car.
Fourth, I haven't really made an appeal to authority, though I'll admit one might be inferred from what I said. I certainly don't mean to say that just because there is a large literature discussing something, that thing is worthy of discussion. However, it may be a literature you could benefit from examining, because I think you are mistaken about the issues you are raising regarding types of freedom.

Talking of "kinds" of freedom is not oxymoronic at all. There is a huge literature on different types of freedom, and I think we can reasonably understand different freedom claims using Gerald Maccaullm's triadic relationship, that some agent X is free from some constraint Y to do or become some thing Z. When people talk about "freedom" they very often mean different things from one another, and specifying what kind you mean is very helpful in avoiding talking at cross purposes to one another. You seem to require that "freedom" only be used to refer to freedom of people from any constraints to do anything, but that is by no means the only sensible way the word can be used. Further, the discussion of how the word ought to be used is far less interesting than the moral discussion of what has value, what are responsibilities are, and how we ought to solve moral dilemmas.

I'm not really clear on what you are trying to solve. You haven't shown at all that protecting the kind of freedom that I am discussing is incompatible with consequentialism and the kind of freedom you think is incompatible with consequentialism isn't the kind I'm trying to protect. I don't think there is a problem there.

I don't think that's a problem. I don't think we need to protect your freedom to go and stab people in the throat. In fact, I think we should restrict your ability to do that. That is very much a feature not a bug.

I mean, I would also be happy to say that I am protecting freedom to make certain types of choices, if that would be more agreeable to you linguistically.

I agree that it is moral reasoning that is being used to determine what kind of freedom we should protect and what we shouldn't, though I'm not sure that is quite what you mean when you say "moral principles". Even if it were, it still wouldn't follow that what I'm suggesting we protect is moral restraint.

Also can I take it from you not answering that you didn't read the initial primer? Because that would really help to clear a lot of this up.

Again, I haven't said that such an action would be not free or not rational.

What I am suggesting ought to be protected is not moral restraint, and you have again moved from "we don't need to protect people's choice to take others' choices away from them" to "we should only protect the choice to do what is right". These are not the same.

What I am protecting is not the developing of good habits or the curtailing of freedom in a "good way". It is the protection of a specific type of freedom.

Also no, that wouldn't show that freedom "transcends moral principles".

Did you read the primer that I included in the initial post?

I mean, that's true if by "freedom" you mean the freedom to do anything at all. I am not interested in protecting that. I am interested in protecting free, rational, agents ability to understand and make their own choices. "Freedom" seems an appropriate word for this, but if you don't think so, feel free to suggest another.