Issue 25.1

THESIS XII

A Philosophical Review

Volume 25 • Number 1

Ó October, 2019

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE:                                                                                                     

Paul Nnodim & Katherine Duval

Closing the Gap on College Accessibility:

Do Racial, Gender, and Socioeconomic Identities Still Matter?                                                                       

                                                           

Tessa Sestito

Do you Love Meat?                                                                      

Brett Belcastro

Games, Ideology, and Détournement

                                                            

Megan Walsh

Once Upon a Theory of Time at the DMV                                                          

Justin Therrien

The Incrementalism of Abolitionism                                                                 

T. J. Karis

Freedom Isn't Free                                                         

                                              

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Closing the Gap on College Accessibility:

Do Gender, Racial, and Socioeconomic Identities Still Matter?

Paul Nnodim, Ph.D. & Katherine Duval

Summary: This paper adopts a Rawlsian theoretical framework to investigate how group membership shapes the experiences of three demographics previously barred from higher education on a systemic level: women, people of color, and people without significant or adequate material means. Rawls’s idea of justice would allow the government to extend college access to underprivileged or underrepresented groups proactively, even if doing so constitutes a minimal degree of “inequity” towards specific demographics. The paper leverages the results of recent studies on diversity and equity in higher education to proffer solutions to recurrent problems in the area of college accessibility.

         

Group membership, which affects individuals’ identities to varying degrees, influences disproportionately a person’s higher education prospects. When examined under a Rawlsian system of justice, this inequality seems arbitrary. In A Theory of Justice (1971), the late Harvard professor, John Rawls, redefines society as a system of social cooperation, where equal, cooperating members or citizens share the burdens and benefits arising from the system. To arrive at such formal equality, Rawls revives the social contract theory albeit with a phenomenological undercurrent. Members of society would choose representatives who must immerse themselves in a hypothetical state or original position. In this state, the representatives put on the “veil of ignorance,” which induces in them something akin to temporary, dissociative amnesia. Suddenly, they have no clue about their particular situations. They no longer know their political affiliations, economic interests, race, gender and sexual orientation, position in society, religion, talents, psychological dispositions, and so forth. However, the representatives in the original position still have access to one significant information: they represent diverse interest groups in a functioning democratic society (e.g., The United States) and are in the original position to choose the principles of justice for their society. Rawls thinks that in this “original position” of equality, these representatives would only choose principles of justice that further their rational interest because no one knows how he or she would fare in real life. The veil of ignorance and its bracketing effects ensure that the representatives adopt an unadventurous approach towards risk and thus choose principles that allow the least undesirable conditions for the worst-off members of society. Rawls (1996) calls principles chosen in this hypothetically strict condition of equality the “two principles of justice as fairness:”

a. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal

basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

b. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions of offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and second, they are to be to the greatest benefits of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls, 1996, p. 5-6)

             

The first principle of justice guarantees an equal amount of liberty for all, while the second principle has two sections. The first section is referred to as the “fair equality of opportunity” principle, while the second section is known as the “difference principle.” Among the second principles of justice, “fair equality of opportunity” has priority over the “difference principle.” The fair equality of opportunity principle regulates political offices and job openings among other things. It ensures that all positions are accessible to all citizens. Furthermore, it authorizes the government to make sure that employers or administrators of tertiary institutions meet the requirements of fairness and equality when advertising job openings or admission offerings. In relation to college access, these two principles of justice imply that not only must each person have fair opportunity to receive higher education, regardless of social identity, but also that the institutions themselves create conditions for the attainment of diversity and equality.

For women, students of color, and students from lower socio-economic status, boundaries to opportunity are real-life phenomena. Although it is worth noting that women have made tremendous progress in not only adapting to the university culture, but excelling in that setting despite historical trends in America that discouraged women from dedicating themselves to academia. Men are steadily becoming a minority on college campuses around the country, with the U.S. Department of Education estimating that 57% of college students will be women by 2026 (Marcus, 2017). Nevertheless, recent statistics reveal that 20-25% of people of all gender identities, but particularly women and gender non-conforming students, remain victims of sexual assault on campuses (Mellins et al., 2017). It is imperative for colleges to ensure that all aspects of the college experience, and indeed all resources at their disposal, are equally accessible to students regardless of gender.

As regards racial parity at institutions of higher learning, a lot more work still needs to be done. Although the enrollment gap between the races is closing, nonetheless, Asian and white students graduate and complete their programs and earn degrees at similar rates (62 percent and 63.2 percent respectively), while Hispanic students and black students graduate and complete degrees at rates of 45.8 percent and 38 percent, respectively (Tate, 2017). It is unsettling that less than half the population of students of color, on average, complete higher education programs. The effects of recruitment campaigns have little impact if retention rates across demographics are abysmal. Aside from the ethical consideration for inclusiveness and broadening opportunities in American education, racial diversity on college campuses contributes to the broader educational environment because meeting and empathizing with people of different backgrounds is an integral part of learning about our shared world. For students of color, representation and inclusion in the campus community are crucial to academic success. Colleges and universities should intensify efforts at recruiting faculty and staff of color and other minorities to represent the percentage of their student bodies that are of minority backgrounds.

Rawls’ notions of equality are also relevant to socio-economic status (SES), which can affect students’ educational paths. According to a CNBC article by Emmie Martin, students attending a public university during the 2017-2018 school year on average pay tuition that has increased by 213% since the 1987-1988 school year. In private institutions, students on average have seen a 129% increase in tuition costs. Collectively, American students are facing 1.4 trillion dollars in student loan debt, the only type of debt that cannot be forgiven (Martin, 2017). For many students today, the decision to continue with higher education hinges on the question of whether or not the economic benefits of a degree will offset the debt of student loan. Although the rising costs of tuition are now affecting most Americans, the economics of college has always been an issue for students from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Low SES students often enroll in less-selective institutions with fewer financial resources. This implies that students who are already economically disadvantaged are more likely to attend a school which will have a limited ability to help them meet their financial needs. The most selective institutions must make efforts to balance access for students from different economic backgrounds. A type of affirmative action for low SES students may help to increase admittance of these students. Such a policy shift would require prestigious, private universities to commit sincerely to creating greater economic equality in the enrollment process. These schools must make an effort to admit students from working and middle-class backgrounds, even if doing so requires the more affluent to pay a little more money in tuition or taxes. As Rawls’s difference principle warrants, tolerating some “inequality” may be necessary, if the much talked about social mobility in America is to be realized. As diversity engenders both opportunities and challenges across college campuses in America, cultural and economic identities remain at the front and center of the debate.

References

Goldin, C., Katz, L. F., & Kuziemko, I. (2006). The Homecoming of

American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap. Journal of Economic

Perspectives, American Economic Association. 20(4), 133-156.

Marcus, Jon. (2017). Why Men Are the New College Minority. The Atlantic, Atlantic Media

Company.

Martin, E. (2017). Here’s How Much More Expensive It Is For You to Go to College than It Was for Your Parents. CNBC. COM. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has-increased-from-1988-to-2018.html

Mellins, C. A. et al. (2017). Sexual Assault Incidents Among College Undergraduates:

Prevalence and Factors Associated with Risk. PLOS ONE. 2(11), 1-23. Retrieved from

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186471

Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Ed. Kelly, E. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Rawls, J. (1996). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tate, E. (2017). Graduation Rates and Race. Inside Higher Ed.

Paul Nnodim, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at MCLA; Katherine Duval is a recent MCLA graduate in English/Communications and Philosophy.

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Do You Love Meat?

Tessa Sestito

Don’t you love hamburgers?

A nice, medium-rare steak?

Perhaps a chilled glass of milk?

A girl matures,

forced into submission;

Poked and prodded,

chained and exploited,

until her body can give no more to her “farmer.”

A boy ages,

dismembered for packaging.

It wasn’t quick,

nor “humane;”

the poorly trained “farmer” misses,

causing the boy to writhe in agony and suffering.

Do you crave nuggets with dipping sauce?

Or delectable hot wings?

Maybe a crispy eight-piece meal?

Dark and cramped,

with an overpowering odor of suffering

hanging in the air.

At his battered, feeble feet

his fellow passengers,

some with broken wings or legs

others stiff from terminal hemorrhaging,

through the unintentional holes in the crate.

He miraculously reaches the destination

to find a horrendous nightmare awaiting him.

The bodies around him are harvested.

Shackled upside-down,

with a newly broken foot curtesy of a “farmer”,

he struggles,

vomiting and defecating in fear.

Violent screams and frenzied flapping

fall on deaf ears.

Still conscious,

a new “farmer” approaches with a thin blade.

He strikes effortlessly,

slicing the throats of several victims,

still conscious.

I won’t begin to cover

your crispy bacon,

or “free-range” turkey burgers,

because you won’t be able to sleep for days.

It’s time to change this suffering.

To bring justice to such horrendous treatment.

We have the choice.

I chose to follow my moral obligations

and protest the meat industry many of us

contribute to.

How would you feel if you were caged,

exploited,

slaughtered maliciously?

What if your child

was killed for someone else’s dinner?

Do I love meat?

Yes, when it is still attached to the animal

and untouched by humans.

Tessa Sestito is a student at MCLA

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Games, Ideology, and Détournement

Brett Belcastro

Guy Debord observes a political and economic system that he names “the spectacle.” For Debord, The spectacle represents an advanced stage of capitalism which operates so automatically, at such a level of ideological and productive efficiency, that it achieves independence from the class that created it. The spectacle acts for itself, advances its own interests, and forms a totalizing political force that masks the possibility of political change by absorbing and repurposing a society’s entire media output to its own ends (1).

For Debord, the spectacle lives not just in the hours that workers expend on labor, but in the hours that they escape labor through entertainment (2). He writes extensively about new mediums of entertainment, and the emergence and market dominance of alternative digital worlds would not seem peculiar to Debord, who predicts it as a matter of course, as the “separation and reunification as separate” (3) of alienated workers who seek to escape their work and rediscover the lost community of their former world.

What Debord might not have foreseen is the importance of play to these new escapes, or that we would experience them specifically as games. Debord writes primarily from the 1960s, an era defined by the mass adoption of television throughout Europe, and while he is directly concerned with leisure, his theory primarily reflects the ideological and spectacular function of the passive television screen. But in the 21st century, the passive consumer appears to have become the active player in a narrative of their own choosing. Where Debord decries the passivity of all the information exchanged through screens as a Lacanian “mirror stage,” infantilizing its audience (4), decades of digital play seem to have revived the agency that one-way screens managed to erase.

Debord applies a dialectical approach to demonstrate that the appearance of this consumer transformation suppresses, but also actually contains, the power to create a political subject, capable of a historical consciousness. Dialectical approaches emphasize the conflicts and negations that determine a thing’s essence, treating the sides of each conflict as a unity of opposites within the whole essence. While one side of the conflict will dominate at any given time, the entertainment mediums that Debord writes about contain the ability to both suppress and express political possibility, depending on which side of the conflict is strongest.

Contemporary video games are no exception, and benefit from this dialectical approach. The video game both promises and mostly suppresses the subjectivization of its players. Unlike a film, which forms a diegetic world independent of the viewer that will continue to play even if the audience leaves the theater, few digital worlds exist beyond the player’s impact on them, responding to the player’s actions but also demanding and requiring player activity. Indeed, the worlds presented by most games are actually tightly-scripted corridors that appear wide open and continuous but are carefully limited in ways expressly hidden from the player: if the player somehow exceeds the bounds prescribed by the developer, they will not find a new route, new characters, or new story, but an empty void, producing a direct contradiction between the freedom which games demand and the constraints that they require to function. This is the very image of the consumer society as it currently exists: promise the consumer a narrative life, demand that they make meaningful choices, but tightly control them within impassable bounds, and hide this control from them.

Debord, observing the emergence of these conflicts within the cinema of his time, threw himself into the conflict and attempted to grasp the contradiction between its powers of ideological suppression and its ability to meaningfully portray collective action. He directed and held speaking roles in a number of avant-garde films (5) designed to break the logic of the spectacle, forcing the audience into conflict with the screen and arousing their subjectivity. The practical political method of the Situationist movement that he helped to develop was détournement, to highlight the material conditions that produce ideological suppression by diverting or hacking the existing content of the ubiquitous spectacular media, overpowering and revealing the suppression at its core (6).

Likewise, any game that attempts to educate the political subjectivity of its players should grasp and portray its specific contradictions. What this means in practice is to draw attention to the conflict between restraint and freedom and, wherever possible, to allow the player to alter or at least criticize the very conditions that make this conflict necessary. By criticizing and détourning these ideological productions, players achieve a historical consciousness, and take the first steps in overcoming alienation and developing political agency.

Sources

(1) Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 3rd Ed. Translated & Pub. Black & Red 1977, Detroit, MI. Thesis 16.

(2) Ibid. Thesis 65.

(3) Ibid. Thesis 29.

(4) Ibid. Thesis 218.

(5) Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoUIHBSiVAY. Accessed September 6, 2019.

(6) Debord, Guy, & Wolman, Gil J, “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Situationist International Online. URL: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html.

Brett Belcastro is an alumnus of MCLA currently living in Western MA

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Once Upon a Theory of Time at the DMV

Megan Walsh

Richard: “Hey there, Franklin! How long have you been here?”

Franklin: “Oh, an eternity I think… I got here around ten and time has been crawling by every since”

Richard: “So you’re saying time has been moving slower for you than for others since you’ve arrived?”

Franklin: “Not this again...”

Richard: “You’re the one who said it”

Franklin: “It’s an expression, Rich. You know I don’t go for that B-Theory hoopla. It’s the called the B theory for a reason - its second rate.”

Richard: “Well than explain to me how you account for the need for expressions like that. Our commonsense view of the world posits meaningful cognitions to show us the reality of all points in time. We have memories of the past and can predict with high accuracy events in the future. How else do you explain that?”

Franklin: “You shouldn’t talk about our commonsense view of the world given your ideas. Still there are many ways to explain. The spotlight and Growing Block A-theorists might grant you that there is some reality to things outside the present. The growing block theorist would say that, while there is no real, existing future, things in the past do have some objective properties. Spotlight theorists would go even further and accept a certain reality for both the past and the future, though they will both be lacking the special state of the illuminated present. But for me it’s even easier; there is nothing other than the present. Those memories you mention are a current feature of your mind as it exists in the present. To remember your breakfast this morning is to create a thought from concepts that currently exist in your mind. It can’t be said that a bagel exists when you remember a bagel. When we misremember something differently than how it was, as we often do, it clearly cannot be used as proof of the reality of a past which it doesn’t even represent with any accuracy. So why should other memories? For the future, there is nothing we can point to within our conceptions that have any realness whatsoever. Events and objects in the future have yet to happen and therefore have no properties of shape, color, mass, or anything else that might make something real. And if the entire state of the future is made up of things which don’t currently exist, the state itself can’t be said to exist, as it contains nothing.”

Richard: “That’s true; neither one of us subscribes very closely to a common sense view, but perhaps that’s just an indication that we aren’t common people. I’ve always liked to think we belong to a rare breed. Either way your defense is hardly a good one. What is this special illuminating quality composed of for the Spotlight theorist? And how is the present meaningfully distinguished from the past? For the growing block theory as well, there seems to be nothing in the explanation of the instances that accounts for how significant the change from present to past seems to be for objects and events in our lives, yet you clearly feel very differently about presently being at the DMV than talking about it in the distant past.”

Franklin: “That’s because there are significant changes that occur when moving from the present to the past. An object’s spatial and intrinsic properties are only present for the object when it is in the present. The pen you are holding, for instance, occupies a location in space right now and certain properties which make it a pen; it’s mass, color, ability to write, etc. When it moves into the past, though, it loses these properties so of course we should feel differently about it.”

Richard: “Then how can you maintain that objects and events still exist in any sense if they are to be stripped of their most defining and fundamental characteristics? How can you say a pen which no longer occupies a location in space, nor any physical features, not even the properties which constitute “pen-ness,” like the ability to write, is real or existent?”

Franklin: “I don’t. Some other A-Theorists may, but my answer to this problem is simple: they don’t exist. Nothing exists outside of the present.”

Richard: “That’s a handy way of sidestepping the issue isn’t it? Very well then, let’s examine that view more closely. If nothing outside of the present exists, how can you reasonably explain a true event in the past for which there does not currently exist any evidence? How, for example, could you prove that a caveman, who really lived in a certain place long ago, but didn’t leave any trace which we can point to in the world today, was real, if you are committed to saying that there is nothing besides what we have around us now? It is true, yet there’s nothing you can point to that makes it necessarily the case.”

Franklin: “Ah, but there are existing things today which make it necessarily the case. Objects have real properties of the past within them. If a caveman sat on a boulder then that boulder today has the backwards-facing property of having been sat on by the caveman.”

Richard: “I don’t see how you can call it a real property when there is nothing concrete about it. What are these backwards-facing properties composed of, and how might we test their presence within a given object? What’s the difference between the object really having a true backwards-facing property versus a made up backwards-facing property, like if I decided to attribute the property of having been sat on by a unicorn? If it doesn't change the object itself in any measurable way, how can we say it is a real property belonging to the object itself?

Franklin: “Richard, some things can’t be boiled down any further. How can you ask why an object has the properties it does or ask me to prove it? There is no further explanation besides the descriptive observation that it is one of the fundamental pieces that make up that particular object.”

Richard: “Alright I see we must leave that point at a dissatisfied rest. I must say, I’m still very unpersuaded by your arguments, and I haven’t even gotten into the problems that arise when judged against our scientific understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity, which is one of our biggest points of disagreement.”

Franklin: “Well go ahead then, what’s your view?”

Richard: “It’s based in Einstein's finding that time can move at different rates relative to one’s own motion. If I move faster, time for me goes slower. This was measured objectively with two identical clocks, set to different tracks of motion which were shown to have experienced time in a measurably different way. So, if we know that time for me could be moving at a different pace than it is for you, we must say that my conception of what “now” is may be different as well. Since my version of now and your version of now are equally valid, we also must say that every point in time is equally real, as each point could fill the roll of “now” for someone or something moving at a different pace than us. There is no one thing which we can call the present, or, for that matter, the past or future. These sorts of concrete distinctions don’t accurately resemble the topology of time.”

Franklin: “Okay, so if you posit all time as equally real and states of past, present, and future as non-objective, how can you distinguish between objects and events around us now and those which were here years ago? How do you talk about the past at all?”

Richard: “Relationally. Clearly there is a difference between a cookie in my hand and a cookie which has been eaten. I only debate you on the shape of that difference; that it is not an objective property of the cookie, only an indication of where that cookie stands in relation to other objects and events. It does not make sense to say the cookie is ‘in the past’, but it makes perfect sense to say that the cookie in my hand was before the eaten cookie. There is still a sequence of events in a certain order.”

Franklin: “We may not see eye to eye on everything, but I’m not sure I’m willing to accept that our fundamental perception of the world is so radically different that we aren't even living in the same time. How can you claim such a thing when our very civilization rests on the synchronization of our experiences? How do you suppose we hold a conversation, if time is going at a significantly different pace for me than for you? Surely one of us would lose their place or become bored waiting for the other’s reply.”

Richard: “I never made any mention of how different one's relative pace may be from another’s. Looking around our everyday lives, I’ll admit that B-Theory seems intuitively false. However, this is only because the discrepancies between our experiences of time are so infinitesimal for the speeds of motion we can achieve. We may not be able to pick up on the differences, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.”

Franklin: “I’m still not convinced. When I hear the sound of hoof beats I think horse, not zebra, and when I experience time as so seemingly real and objective, I have to believe it is so. Commonsense urges me too, and until I have indisputable proof, I must standby such urges.”

Richard: “Very well. I’ve just been called up. Enjoy the remainder of your eternity”

References

“Hafele–Keating Experiment - Two Atomic Clocks Flew Twice around the World, Eastward and Westward. Back at Home, They Each Showed Different Times.” The Vintage News, 15 Sept. 2016,www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/16/hafele-keating-experiment-two-atomic-clocks-flew-twice-around-world-eastward-westward-back-home-showed-different-times/.

The Privileged Present: Defending an ‘A-Theory’ of Time. fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/zimmerman/privilegedpresent.pdf.

Megan Walsh is a student at MCLA

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The Incrementalism of Abolitionism

Justin Therrien

In environmental policy today, most advocates for climate change laws demand immediate change. They prefer the abolitionist approach of having the changes and implementations happen right here, right now. Others take a different, incrementalist approach which focuses on gradual steps. Neither must have a different final goal; they may simply have different views on what is the most efficient and realistic method of advancing that goal. The view I defend here is that abolitionism is the more efficient method of the two for environmental policy and one, moreover, that ought to satisfy both incrementalists and abolitionists.

Incrementalism’s logic rests on the idea that it is unrealistic to assume that public policy can be implemented in a sweeping change; that, in essence, we will spend too much time debating and editing the bigger plan when it would be more realistic to implement smaller steps that society could more easily take. However, incrementalism leaves out a crucial factor: the order in which policies should be implemented. The incrementalist approach specifies a number of steps to the larger goal, but can be silent on how to go about choosing or prioritizing those steps. In the event that a first step is considered too harsh or simply voted down, for example, we have lost valuable time in moving toward our eventual goal. These missteps may prove very dangerous, especially in light of recent scientific evidence that we have but 11 years to make significant progress towards our ecological goals.

What is often overlooked is the incremental nature of abolitionist approaches to change. Consider the example of the abolition of slavery in Great Britain in the early to mid-1800s. Two acts were passed; one in 1807 ending slavery in Great Britain, and one in 1834 ending slavery in the British colonies in the Carribean (although ignored by some). Two intense acts of abolition in no way marked the end to the slave trade as it dwindled throughout the nineteenth century (Shapiro).  The incrementalism is apparent in the need to continue the process of eradicating slavery. Following the two acts, many people still illegally traded slaves, while certain colonies simply ignored the order. Over time, the British were able to bring these to light and completely eradicate the slave trade by the time their colonies achieved independence. In the background, Britain also slowly stopped buying products that used slave-labor (Shapiro).

It follows that abolitionism in environmental policy will also leave room for incremental change. As with the slave trade, the government will need to continue to investigate businesses and individuals trying to dodge the laws. However, the regulations would still have a greater and more efficient effect than if smaller steps were taken. Morally speaking, abolitionism also promotes a more acceptable approach it does not continue to commit or promote immoral acts (Francione). Abolitionism is clear in its goals and can more easily garner popular support, which in turn makes the process more efficient. To bridge the gap between the two approaches, legislators need to be aware that they are in practice more similar than is typically acknowledged. In the end, what will likely bridge the gap is the realization that an abolitionist policy can be enforced, militating against many inclinations to break the law.

References

Levmore, Saul. “Interest Groups and the Problem with Incrementalism.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010, doi:10.2139/ssrn.1513610.

Shapiro, Stephan. “After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807 | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.” Origins, The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, 2019, origins.osu.edu/review/after-abolition-britain-and-slave-trade-1807.

Francione, Gary L. “Peter Singer: ‘Oh My God, These Vegans…’ .” Animal Rights The Abolitionist Approach, Animal Rights The Abolitionist Approach, 21 Sept. 2015, www.abolitionistapproach.com/peter-singer-oh-my-god-these-vegans/.

Justin Therrien is an alumnus of MCLA

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Freedom Isn't Free

T. J. Karis

“Freedom” is a surprisingly challenging word to define. In the “land of the free, home of the brave”, it should be impossible for anyone to misunderstand the term. Yet liberty is a far more elusive concept than it first appears, even for Americans. Freedom is, after all, a small word with a very big meaning, and that meaning is not always consistent between two given persons. The quintessential and most pervasive definition of freedom, although not always articulated in such detail, is “the ability to do as one pleases, unconstrained by internal or external influence, to the extent that it does not interfere with the freedom of others”. Here I will argue that freedom also requires certain things to maintain itself and maybe even to exist at all, both of the free individual and of the social structures within which the individual exists.

To say that freedom requires something more than the absence of constraints, internal or external, is first and foremost to cite the necessity of both positive and negative liberty. As the two are explained in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively. The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (i.e. of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (i.e. of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization). In Berlin's words, we use the negative concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question “What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”, whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer the question “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (Carter)

Clearly, both positive and negative liberty are necessary for a person to be free. Where the usual definition that I provided in my introduction is focused solely on negative liberty, the remainder of this essay will focus on certain positive liberties that are crucial to real freedom.

First, as Richard Schmitt noted in his essay Socialist Freedom, one’s desires must be under the control of one’s rational faculties. Bad influences need not come from outside, he explains: “A drunkard, on the other hand, also does what he wants but is not free because he cannot stop drinking. Wishes are often conflicted; one satisfies them but would prefer to resist them. Being unable to resist, one acts on these desires; one is not free but rather subservient to desires that will not be refused” (56). So, what one pleases must not be harmful to that same person. One must know precisely whatever it is that one truly wants, which is often complicated.

Further still, to be authentically free, one must not only seek one’s true desires but also be a seeker of the truth; without a relentless pursuit of objective fact, one will be swayed too easily by falsehoods and ultimately led astray. If one does not perpetually seek a more precise understanding of reality, how could one ever hope to be free? A laissez-faire attitude towards knowledge can only lead to enslavement by the fashions of the day, without ever bothering to question why things are the way they are. As a result, one would not be able to make meaningful changes when necessary – or for that matter, even realize that changes might be necessary in the first place. Additionally, once one’s beliefs have been set in stone, a lack of concern for the truth would make these beliefs unlikely to change, even if they are later proven to be founded upon inaccurate premises.

The truth seeker must then be willing to change his or her mind in light of superior reason. Without this willingness to accept one’s own errors and correct one’s beliefs to reflect the highest possible levels of knowledge and reason, one becomes imprisoned by habits which are only reinforced further over time. One thus loses the capacity to question one’s own ideologies and morality. This leads to enslavement of the free-thinking mind by itself, which can only end in self-destruction. So well-known is this fact that it has become a cliché of sorts, taking many different forms. David Foster Wallace, for example, in his infamous “This is Water” speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, noted that “the mind is a great servant, but a terrible master”. Once we have lost control of our ability to escape preconceptions and convictions that no longer serve us or have been proven untenable, we have lost a critical freedom.

Yet this does not mean that we should be willing to give up our long-held ideas and ideals too easily. We must know who we are and what we believe, and maintain these identities firmly – so long as we understand why we believe what we do. Although entrapment in erroneous conviction is dangerous, it is equally perilous to remain indifferent and passive, allowing the most popular opinions of the day to supplant our own. Perhaps this is best explained by another cliché: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”. In other words, a strong sense of identity is not just important in relation to truth-seeking, but also because it keeps one from absentminded conformity. Schmitt addressed this, as well:

Conformists whose identities are not clearly delineated are inclined to be passive, without firm opinions or values, incapable of useful thinking, corruptible, full of distrust for self and other, lonely, and willing to do almost anything to assuage that loneliness. Due to these incapacities they allow the media, opinion makers, experts, the majority to shape their opinions for them because they have difficulties thinking for themselves. Being easily swayed by threats, they allow their employers or the government to determine their actions. By and by, they surrender their actual freedom. As a consequence, the word “freedom” means no more to them than that; if they did want to show some independence of thought or actions, no one would stand in their way. Then freedom comes to mean no more than freedom of choice, just in case one ever was inclined to make any independent choices. That is Berlin’s conception of freedom; the freedom of the conformists, of persons with indistinct and poorly developed self-identities. This freedom of choice, in one of its most bizarre permutations, degenerates into the consumer’s freedom to choose between many different brands of toothpaste. But freedom that is no more than freedom of choice is – using the language of de Tocqueville and, earlier, of Rousseau – the freedom of slaves (63).

Whether from a lack of concern about the truth, or want of a clear identity, conformism is dangerous at best and lethal at worst. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for anybody to argue that one can be a free conformist. It is a contradiction in terms.

Some may now be starting to wonder: what if there is no such thing as free will at all? Why struggle for freedom if our very lives are already pre-programmed from the beginning? Of course, any discussion of the meaning of freedom is inherently a rejection of determinism. As William James once noted someplace: if you don’t believe in free will, why bother presenting an argument? Freedom of the will is sometimes referred to as a ‘necessary fiction’ – and while no one can ever really be certain whether it is fictitious, for this paper I will assume that it is not. Persons obstinately convinced of predetermination should not bother to continue reading this essay. (Unless that is their destiny, of course.) Although I am sure that many compelling arguments could be made on either side, this is simply not the place for such a debate. It is not in the cards.

Others still, having accepted the notion of free will, may wish to argue that freedom does not require any social structure whatsoever, or even that in fact the absence of social structure is a prerequisite of true freedom. On a very superficial level, it seems almost axiomatic that any social institution, which are controlling by their very nature, would preclude freedom. Yet without some degree of structure, there can be no society. In fact, social structures, taken collectively, are what define the word “society”. However ideal it may appear at first, (and certainly it seems an appealing concept when one is being repressed by an institution – or even while stuck in line at the RMV), a large human collective without any organizational structure or institutions, i.e. a “state” of some sort, will invariably collapse. Before long, power will be taken by brute force by whomever is quickest and harshest. This is such a simple train of logic that I will not bother to endeavor explaining this any further. Let us agree for now that freedom will require a society with some degree of government.

Nonetheless, this government need not be authoritarian and strict – nor need it hold much power over the governed. In fact, I would argue that for freedom to flourish, the governed and government ought to be one and the same, to the greatest degree practicable. Freedom demands that the social structures which the individual exists within be organized horizontally. Power corrupts; power must be divided equally and balanced carefully and should only exist at all where it absolutely must. And regardless of how well power is balanced and freedom is promoted, every citizen is no less obligated to test the limits of their freedom regularly, in speech and in action. Otherwise liberty will rapidly and naturally decay. Says Schmitt,

Freedom requires of us that we not only have the ability to choose but that we make choices. We must defend freedom of speech by speaking, and freedom of thought by thinking. The first defense of democracy is the exercise of one’s democratic rights and that means to participate as fully as one can in the public discussions about policy, in the governance of one’s workplace, one’s neighborhood, city, state, and nation (64).

Through active participation, it is far less likely that freedom will be furtively dismantled by the unscrupulous and power-hungry.

Lastly, taking the wider view, we cannot help but conclude that in any society which concerns itself with freedom, everyone must be free in order for anyone to be free. This is made clear even from the most ordinary definitions of freedom. Take, for example, the simplistic definition provided by John Stuart Mill, “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs.” By attempting to deprive another of their liberty, we lose that freedom “which deserves the name”. Slave owners in fear of slave revolt were just as enslaved as those they oppressed. Oppressors oppress themselves, too. Freedom only for some, by definition, means freedom for none. And thus the existence of freedom entails a never-ending fight for it – for ourselves, and for everybody else, too.

References

Carter, Ian, "Positive and Negative Liberty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition)

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Schmitt, Richard. "Socialist Freedom." Toward a New Socialism, edited by Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, Lexington Books, 2007, pp. 53-74.

T. J. Karis is a student at MCLA

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