Published on 10 July 2024, last updated on 13 July 2024

With regard to freedom, there’s a variety of subjects to think about as such that freedom should be secured from government so that citizens can act freely without oppression. Another is the exercise of one’s freedom and its relationship with other people in the same community. Government has their authority to coordinate different interests among different people, which could be interpreted to resolve the conflict of the citizenry.

It is often seen that discussions on freedom go to the extreme edge. When someone was asked not to do a certain behaviour or action, they may claim that it is their right to take the action, but it sometimes feels that saying it one’s own right doesn’t always justify the act. Assume that most people claim their behaviours as their rights even if that harms others, it can be, in other words, regarded that it is one’s right to harm others. Also, one sometimes asks, if it is free, whether one can do everything we want.

One can argue that just because freedom should be preserved doesn’t mean that people should be freely behave whatever they want. The debates around regulation are complicated ones. Some people in a society, those who are more liberal and human rights activists in particular, argue the importance of freedom, that is what I agree with, but in some cases it is dubious that we can prioritise freedom held by people to be exercised in all the cases. People often think of extreme cases that are extremely free or not free at all, but it is a matter that to what degree freedom is ensured. To what extent freedom is tolerated depends on how people create their own culture. The benefit of freedom is to be able to choose the ways in which one acts. If not allowed, one is not able to choose their preferrable way of behaving. It is likely to cause anxiety in the minds of people and distortion in society. It is basically a balance between to what degree we prioritise the freedom of people and to what degree we restrict the freedom of people due to the effect that one’s exercise of freedom causes. Although many support the deployment of human rights concept in societies, to what degree freedom should be exercised among citizens needs to be discussed since the exercise of one’s right can influence others in the same community.

If one is in power, it may be harder for them to allow others to have freedom as it may affect negatively the advantages of those who are powerful. Contrarily, the importance of freedom is easier to understand by imagining the situation that one is not able to behave freely. While learning lesson from the past history of oppression on freedom, people with liberal thoughts has been expanding the human rights culture with some countries moving towards democracy. The culture of human rights and respecting freedom are a progress which has been cultivated from the previous generations.

In talking about freedom, the topic of the rights of individuals are often associated in discussion. Claiming the rights is to claim being able to choose the exercise of power, that is to say that they can choose if they exercise it or not at the moment. The empowered individual has power to some degree. Regarding the rights of people, the United States is known for the unique history. Historically saying, it is described that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”(1). The United States has been focusing on the rights and its protection. They have the famous Bill of rights, to explain it concisely, “The Bill of Rights, drafted by Madison, was passed by the new Congress in 1789 and ratified in December 1791. Its ten articles, incorporated as the first ten amendments to the Constitution, explicitly protect a range of fundamental individual freedoms”(2). The history of these rights-related background in the US contributed to their current culture of the emphasis on the rights.

Footnotes

(1) Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.13. This is what Thomas Jefferson wrote.

(2) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. 2008. The Federalist Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxiii.