Legal Values: Freedom

Introduction

The concept of freedom is strongly ambiguous: it has many different meanings which come into complex relationships. It seems that a good point of departure for disentangling these meanings is making a distinction between freedom as a fact and freedom as a value. The former type of freedom has a purely descriptive sense: it describes, so to speak, a “metaphysical condition” of man. The basic controversy in this context is whether human beings have free will (which is the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events) or whether the only type of freedom inscribed in their “metaphysical condition” is freedom from compulsion (which consists in acting in accordance with one’s desires and beliefs and is compromised either when an agent is coerced into doing an act by some other agent or if she suffers from some mental disease, deficiency, or disturbance that makes her incapable of recognizing the significance of her act and/or controlling her conduct). This controversy,...