A longstanding debate in philosophy of medicine—whether disease concepts are value-free (naturalism) or value-laden (normativism)—intersects with broader discussions about patient autonomy and the move away from paternalistic practices. An important argument supporting naturalism is the idea that value-freedom is necessary to protect patient autonomy. This paper challenges that view, arguing that autonomy does not require value-freedom. We first demonstrate that prominent theories of personal autonomy do not demand value-freedom but rather a responsible (...) way of dealing with normative judgements. Drawing on parallels to debates on values in science, we distill three strategies for managing non-epistemic values responsibly: transparency, value diversity, and prioritization of appropriate values. Applying these strategies to medicine, we illustrate how value-ladenness can align with patient autonomy when managed appropriately. (shrink)

Sabina Alkire shows how Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen's capability approach can be coherently---and practically---put to work in poverty reduction activities so that the voices and values of the poor matter. This provides economists, philosophers, theologians, and development practitioners with a way forward that addresses both theoretical and practical challenges.

The value-free ideal in science has been criticised as both unattainable and undesirable. We argue that it can be defended as a practical principle guiding scientific research even if the unattainability and undesirability of a value-free end-state are granted. If a goal is unattainable, then one can separate the desirability of accomplishing the goal from the desirability of pursuing it. We articulate a novel value-free ideal, which holds that scientists should act as if science should be (...) class='Hi'>value-free, and we argue that even if a purely value-free science is undesirable, this value-free ideal is desirable to pursue. (shrink)

This chapter examines values and scientific evidence. It argues that one way to put the ideal of value freedom is believing that a proposition has good or bad ethical consequences is not evidence for its truth. The evidence relation is a three-place one between data, hypothesis, and background knowledge, thus allowing background knowledge to link fact and value. It is also argued that there is a qualified sense in which the value-free ideal is right: judgments about (...) the moral consequences of a proposition cannot provide new information about its truth. (shrink)

The argument from inductive risk is considered to be one of the strongest challenges for value-free science. A great part of its appeal lies in the idea that even an ideal epistemic agent—the “perfect scientist” or “scientist qua scientist”—cannot escape inductive risk. In this paper, I scrutinize this ambition by stipulating an idealized Bayesian decision setting. I argue that inductive risk does not show that the “perfect scientist” must, descriptively speaking, make non-epistemic value-judgements, at least not in a (...) way that undermines the value-free ideal. However, the argument is more successful in showing that there are cases where the “perfect scientist” should, normatively speaking, use non-epistemic values. I also show that this is possible without creating problems of illegitimate prescription and wishful thinking. Thus, while inductive risk does not refute value-freedom completely, it still represents a powerful critique of value-free science. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Miller’s recent claim that 1) the ideal of value-freedom is implausible because evidence from experimental psychology reveals how scientific reasoning is val...

The issue of whether science is, or can be, value-free has been debated for more than a century. The idea of value-free science is of course as old as science itself, and so are the arguments against this idea. Plato defended it..

How is freedom valuable? And how should we go about defining freedom? In this essay, I discuss a distinction between two general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g., to freedom's contribution to well-being); the other appeals to how persons have reason to treat one another in virtue of their status as purposive beings (to the right). The analysis of these two values has many relevant implications and it is preliminary to a better (...) understanding of the relationships between freedom and justice. First, it contributes to shed light on the relationship between trust and the value of freedom, and on two attitudes towards freedom – promoting and respecting freedom. Second, it disambiguates between two versions of the claim that freedom has non-specific/content-independent value: one appeals to the good, the other to the right. And third, I show that certain implications concerning the definition of freedom follow from assuming an account of the value of freedom that exclusively appeals to the right, illustrating how the value of freedom can shape what freedom is. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the Frankfurt School conceptions of ideology critique and critical theory. It gives an account of the “positivism dispute” in 1960s Germany between Popper and the Frankfurt School. This account indicates that the “dispute” was largely framed around a misunderstanding of the implications of Popper’s position. The discussion focusses on the Frankfurt School position on the impossibility of disinterested “scientific” knowledge in the social sciences. Popper’s contribution to the dispute suggests that the doctrine of falsifiability does not necessarily (...) involve a “positivist” and scientistic fetishization of the form of natural scientific methods and that the nature of the “disinterest” implied in the demarcation of scientificity does not preclude a self-reflexive acknowledgement of values and interests. (shrink)

_Purpose_ of the article is to find out the main content and ways of embodying freedom as a value of the volunteer movement in the context of analyzing the social motivation of human behavior in general. _Theoretical basis._ The theoretical basis of the research is the philosophical and anthropological understanding of freedom as a person’s creative overcoming of obstacles to establish his or her eccentric essence. Such a vision is embedded, in particular, in Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of (...) existence, Helmuth Plessner’s philosophy of positioning in the world, and Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of rational choice of life path. _Originality__._ The importance of freedom as a value, as well as other social values, is revealed and specified through the analysis of the values of the volunteer movement. In the desire of people engaged in volunteer work to achieve freedom through other values, the content of freedom as a basis for self-reproduction of the individual, community and society is revealed. _Conclusions._ Representatives of various humanities and social sciences have distinct research interests in analyzing the values inherent in volunteers. As members of a certain society and certain communities in this society, volunteers do not act outside the economy, politics and other spheres of public life, but reveal their freedom through creative and non-standard solutions to economic, political, and other problems. At the same time, research psychologists focus attention on the personal self-realization of a person, theorists and practitioners of social work study volunteers’ desire to gain recognition from peers and other small social groups, and representatives of sociology, political science and other social sciences focus their attention on such socially significant values of volunteering as patriotism, solidarity, etc. The task of social philosophy is to justify the desire to contribute to the public good, which is common to all volunteers. Representatives of philosophical anthropology look for the best social intentions inherent in a person as a member of society in volunteering. Analysis of the values of volunteering as a motivator of human behavior provides knowledge of socially significant values inherent in every member of society to a greater or lesser extent. (shrink)

Social conceptions of freedom allow that a person can be free even when unable to act, so long as her inability is not due to the conduct of others. Yet despite permitting the conceptual possibility of freedom without ability, these accounts have not addressed whether such freedom retains any value. I argue that freedom has ability-independent value as it can be valuable even when it cannot be exercised. To explore this possibility, I adopt a (...) negative conception of freedom as my working definition and develop a typology that distinguishes between content-dependent and content-independent values of freedom, each of which can be either ability-dependent or ability-independent. I show that freedom can have ability-independent instrumental value when it causally contributes to valuable phenomena such as happiness or social progress; ability-independent constitutive value when it is conceptually necessary for valuable phenomena such as citizenship and personal autonomy; and ability-independent contributory value when a valuable phenomenon such as respect supervenes on freedom. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that only exercisable freedoms are valuable, and expand the normative landscape by introducing a new category of contributory value, which captures how freedom can be valuable even when it plays neither a causal nor a conceptual role in relation to other valuable phenomena. (shrink)

This text reflects on the theme of freedom and its relationship with values. To do this, it shows the original approach to this issue present in the thought of the current Spanish philosopher J. M. Méndez. According to the characteristic thinking of this author, freedom does not represent a value but the gateway or the very possibility of participation in any ethical value, as postulated by his _axiological liberalism_.

Those who are responsible for health policy want to know how seriously diseases, injuries, and risk factors diminish health and how significantly different policies improve health. To provide this information, health economists have attempted to measure generic—that is “overall”—health, whose value they take to be its contribution to well-being, which they measure by eliciting preferences. This book provides a philosophically sophisticated overview of generic health measurement that suggests improvements in standard methods and proposes a radical alternative. It shows how (...) to avoid relying on surveys and offers an account of fundamental evaluation that does not presuppose the assignment of values to the properties and consequences of alternatives. The book defends a naturalistic concept of health and its relations to measures such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). In examining current health-measurement systems, the book clarifies their value commitments and the objections to relying on preference surveys to assign values to health states. Relying on an interpretation of liberal political philosophy, it argues that the public value of health states should be understood in terms of the activity limits and suffering that health states impose. The book also addresses the moral conundrums that arise when policymakers attempt to employ the values of health states to estimate the health benefits of alternative policies and to adopt the most cost-effective. It concludes with a general discussion of the difficulties of combining consequentialist and nonconsequentialist moral considerations in policymaking. (shrink)

For Kuhn, there are a number of values which provide scientists with a shared basis for theory-choice. These values include accuracy, breadth, consistency, simplicity and fruitfulness. Each of these values may be interpreted in different ways. Moreover, there may be conflict between the values in application to specific theories. In this short paper, Kuhn's idea of scientific values is extended to the value of academic freedom. The value of academic freedom may be interpreted in a number (...) of different ways. Moreover, there are other values which play a role in the functioning of our academic institutions. As with the possible conflict between scientific values, there may be conflict among the academic values. (shrink)

Mainstream addiction science is today widely marked by an antinomy between a neurologically determinist understanding of the human brain ‘hijacked’ by the biochemical allure of intoxicants and a liberal voluntarist conception of drug use as a free exercise of choice. Prominent defenders of both discourses strive, ultimately without complete success, to provide accounts that are both universal and value-neutral. This has resulted in a variety of conceptual problems and has undermined the utility of such research for those who seek (...) to therapeutically care for people presumed to suffer from addictions. This article contrasts these two contemporary discourses to two others that played vital historical roles in initiating both scientific and popular concern for addiction. These are the Puritan and civic republican discourses that dominated scholarly discussions of addiction in the early modern era. In each case, the place of values in these discussions is highlighted. By comparing them to their early modern historical antecedents, this article seeks to reflexively explore and develop more intellectually sound and therapeutically relevant alternatives to the troubled attempts at universality and value-neutrality now fettering debates in mainstream addiction science. (shrink)

The purpose of the present work is twofold. On the one hand, it attempts to provide a critical exposition of the ethical theory of Jean-Paul Sartre. On the other hand, it strives to explain, and in a limited way to defend, the central thesis of that theory, namely, that freedom is the "highest," or most important, value. ;The study begins with an extensive discussion of Sartre's theory of freedom. Sartre's arguments for the freedom of consciousness are (...) identified and presented, and a number of widespread misunderstandings of Sartre's conception of the nature of freedom are corrected. Specifically, it is argued that, contrary to prevailing opinion, Sartre distinguishes between different senses of freedom, insists that freedom is always limited, and remains substantially consistent, throughout his intellectual career, in his understanding of the nature of freedom. ;The study next takes up Sartre's theory of values. Here the well-known strain of ethical subjectivism in Sartre's thought is presented and criticized, with the main instrument of criticism being a distinction, overlooked by Sartre, between subjectivism as a meta-ethical theory about the status of moral judgments, and subjectivism as an ontological doctrine regarding the existence of moral values. ;The study concludes with an explanation and defense of the theory that freedom is the highest value. Here the presentation of Sartre's ethical theory is brought to completion through a discussion of its neglected objectivist elements, and through a development in regard to ethics of Sartre's general theory of knowledge. It is then shown that the notion of freedom as a value underlies both the subjectivist and the objectivist phases of Sartre's ethical thought, and it is suggested that these two phases can be reconciled in a conception of ethics as a dialectic of invention and discovery. This conception is defended by way of a brief discussion of its advantages over rival ethical theories, which neglect one or the other of the stages of this dialectic. (shrink)

What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom, (...) including freedom in the far future. Second, longtermists should be liberals, particularly under conditions of empirical and moral uncertainty. Third, long-term liberalism plausibly justifies some restrictions on the freedom of existing people to secure the freedom of future people, for example when mitigating climate change. At the same time, it likely avoids excessive trade-offs: for both empirical and philosophical reasons, long-term and near-term freedom show significant convergence. Throughout I also highlight important practical implications, for example on longtermist institutional action, climate change, human extinction, demography, and global catastrophic risks. (shrink)

In this chapter I turn to the question of how the value of alternatives can be incorporated in freedom rankings such that freedom’s agency value is captured. I do so in a two step approach. In the first step I identify the formal and interpretational conditions under which a freedom ranking suffers the problem of desire dependency or the impossibility of paternalism. Given that the occurrence of these problems, as I have argued in Chap. 2, (...) indicates a failure to take freedom’s agency value into account, this allows me to rule out approaches that fail to capture that value. The somewhat puzzling finding, however, is that nearly all existing freedom rankings fail to capture freedom’s agency value. That is, given a widely accepted (formal) condition, both ways to interpret the preferences invoked to identify the valuable alternatives in a set face either the problem of desire dependency or the impossibility of paternalism. In the second step I suggest a way to capture freedom’s agency value. For this purpose I define freedom’s agency value more precisely, taking it to be the value freedom has in virtue of allowing a person to reflect and deliberate upon the relative priority of her plural identities at the moment of choice. I use a procedural criterion of ‘reasonableness’ to identify the valuable alternatives in a set on the basis of a person’s identity profile. It turns out that the same condition that -as it was shown in Chap. 4 – restricts the conflict among a person’s plural identities and allows for the transitivity of her all-things-considered preference, provides a way to account for the value the availability of options has for a person’s agency without suffering the problems of desire dependency or the impossibility of paternalism. (shrink)

This essay explores the features in virtue of which games are valuable or worthwhile to play. The difficulty view of games holds that the goodness of games lies in their difficulty: by making activities more complex or making them require greater effort, they structure easier activities into more difficult, therefore more worthwhile, activities. I argue that a further source of the value of games is that they provide players with an experience of freedom, which they provide both as (...) paradigmatically unnecessary activities and by offering opportunities for relatively unconstrained choice inside the ‘lusory’ world that players inhabit. (shrink)

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller draws a striking connection between aesthetic value and individual and political freedom, claiming that, ‘it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom’. However, contemporary ways of thinking about freedom and aesthetic value make it difficult to see what the connection could be. Through a careful reconstruction of the Letters, we argue that Schiller’s theory of aesthetic value serves as the (...) key to understanding not only his view of aesthetic engagement, but also his distinctive account of individual and political freedom. In Part I, we develop a reconstruction of Schiller's view that aesthetic value is the only path to individual freedom and in Part II we analyze how Schiller connects aesthetic value to political freedom. In the end, we show that Schiller defends a non-hedonic, action-oriented, communitarian theory of aesthetic value and a theory of freedom that makes the aesthetic not just supererogatory but fundamental for any fully autonomous life. Although we have lost touch with this way of thinking about aesthetic value and freedom, we submit that it is illuminating for contemporary thinking about both. (shrink)

Sennett (1999) and Pawl & Timpe (2009; 2013) attempt to show how we can praise heavenly agents for things they inevitably do in heaven by appealing to the notion of derivative freedom. Matheson (2017) has criticized this use of derivative freedom. In this essay I show why Matheson's argument is inconclusive but also how the basic point may be strengthened to undermine the use Sennett and Pawl & Timpe make of derivative freedom. I then show why Matheson (...) is mistaken to claim that the value of free choice depends on an agent retaining the ability to change their mind; in so doing I demonstrate that some choices which result in fixed outcomes - a feature of the choices leading to impeccability - can indeed be valuable even if they cannot be undone. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on (...) class='Hi'>freedom and foreknowledge, the problem of evil, the badness of death, the meaning of life, and the allure of immortality. This volume gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work, and it also includes a new piece by Fischer in which he offers a systematic reflection on and defense of the motivations that have shaped his theorizing about moral responsibility. Freedom, Responsibility, and Value will be of interest to scholars and students working on a variety of issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This seventeen issue of DIALOGO [2023] is dedicated to the multi-theme `Freedom, Human Rights, Global Crises, Solidarity & Values ` - addressing several actual issues with a central focus on human rights, seen in our society nowadays concerning globalization amid global crises that occurred in the latest years, and beyond towards a holistic approach of private vs universal values. Finally, DIALOGO collates several articles relating to the empirical measurement of religion and health—an increasingly important area of research. We start (...) our endeavor with the inquiry, “What can we do to preserve human rights and values amid social changes?”. (shrink)

It is important for liberals to make sense of claims about degrees of overall freedom because freedom is a fundamental value for liberals. Freedom is a fundamental value for liberals because liberals assume freedom to have non-specific value, or value as such. Freedom has non-specific value not only if it has intrinsic value but also if it has non-specific instrumental value or non-specific constitutive value. Assertions or assumptions (...) of freedom’s non-specific instrumental or constitutive value are made by many representatives of the liberal tradition, including J. S. Mill, Hobhouse and Hayek. (shrink)

Numerous philosophers and economists have argued that the extent of one’s freedom depends in part on how diverse one’s options are. However, such efforts have met resistance from political philosophers who regard diversity-sensitive measures of freedom as objectionably value-laden. I present a new way of incorporating diversity considerations in the measure of freedom that is scrupulously value-neutral. It is also quite successful in capturing common intuitions about freedom and diversity: in particular, it is sensitive (...) to the degree of dissimilarity between extremal and non-extremal options. (shrink)

The concept of value is so wide that could be considered as synonymous with human life and existence. The human being is engaged in the evaluations of being by doing every act. Life is a value that even its ascetic denial is a kind of valuation. When the human being enters the world, in fact he enters a pre-valued world and many values weighed upon him. To what extent is man capable of emancipating from pre-existing values and to (...) what extent can he succeed in creating value? The complex world today is very similar to the mythical world in which the blind and deaf valuing forces have overwhelmed and conquered human choices. It is here that human choices show a confusing and algebraic procedure, and freedom is as s chain that human being wrap around himself. (shrink)

Academic freedom seems to be under assault from all political angles. Opposed sides invoke academic freedom when it serves their purposes but ignore it when doing so serves the purposes of attacking their political enemies. Most at risk in the midst of these on-going battles is the future of the university as a space for free inquiry, debate, criticism, and the extension of human knowledge in all fields of intellectual inquiry. As a step towards safeguarding the future of (...) the university as a space for open inquiry, the meaning and value of academic freedom needs to be clarified. While it is often (and understandably) identified with the constitutional right to free speech, it is in fact different in significant respects. Academic freedom is both a broad principle of free inquiry and argument upon which the university as an intellectual institution rests and a narrow collective agreement right. In both dimensions it is subject to limitations to which the right to free speech is not subject (curricular decisions, for example, must pass the test of relevance to the subject matter, while there are no constraints on introducing extraneous material into public political debates). Since all academics’ professional lives depend upon the institutional commitment to academic freedom, those who would undermine it in favour of their political priorities contradict themselves and raise questions about their fitness for the vocation of teacher-researcher. (shrink)

In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a (...) focus on freedom’s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capability approach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ​. (shrink)

"This book on freedom of speech and expression starts with an inter-cultural history of this valued right through the ages and then recalls the benefits for which we rightly value it. But what about speech that frustrates these benefits? Supporters of the benefits of free speech have reason to exercise voluntary self-restraint on speech which frustrates the benefits. They should also cultivate a second remedy: the art, illustrated in chapter 1, and called by Gandhi the art of 'opening (...) ears', by other kinds of speech and conduct. Such voluntary methods are to be preferred to legal constraints. But legal constraint is sometimes necessary. In the 21st century, social media funding based on manipulation of personal speech data requires skilful legislation and enforcement in favour of social media that protect our freedoms"--. (shrink)

This paper aims to draw attention to an important but underappreciated aspect of the instrumental value of freedom: its diagnostic value. This is the value freedom has insofar as it makes it possible for us to discover ourselves and improve ourselves in our capacity to make value judgements. Diagnostic value, I argue, has an important role to play in explaining the value we attach to freedom. Accordingly, this paper is aimed at (...) elucidating this concept, examining its relevance to our lives, and defending an account of how to measure the diagnostic value of opportunities and sets of opportunities. (shrink)

The keeping of captive animals in zoos and aquariums has long been controversial. Many take freedom to be a crucial part of animal welfare and, on these grounds, criticise all forms of animal captivity as harmful to animal welfare, regardless of their provisions. Here, we analyse what it might mean for freedom to matter to welfare, distinguishing between the role of freedom as an intrinsic good, valued for its own sake and an instrumental good, its value (...) arising from the increased ability to provide other important resources. Too often, this debate is conducted through trading intuitions about what matters for animals. We argue for the need for the collection of comparative welfare data about wild and captive animals in order to settle the issue. Discovering more about the links between freedom and animal welfare will then allow for more empirically informed ethical decisions regarding captive animals. (shrink)

Spontaneous freedom, the freedom of unplanned and unscripted activity enjoyed by “free spirits,” is central to everyday talk about “freedom.” Yet the freedom of spontaneity is absent from contemporary moral philosophers’ theories of freedom. This article begins to remedy the philosophical neglect of spontaneous freedom. I offer an account of the nature of spontaneous freedom and make a case for its value. I go on to show how an understanding of spontaneous (...) class='Hi'>freedom clarifies the free will debate by helping to make sense of the libertarian claim that compatibilist varieties of freedom do not allow for genuine novelty and creativity. (shrink)

Academic freedom is often regarded as an absolute value of higher education institutions. Traditionally, its value is related to such topics as tenure, and the need for academic work to be free from undue political influence and other pressures that can challenge time-consuming research processes. However, when an analysis of student freedom begins with arguments about free research and free speech, undergirded as they generally are by liberal political philosophy, other considerations, related to broader views of (...) freedom, can slip through the cracks. In this essay, I want to take a step back from typical discussions of academic freedom, to take a broader perspective, before considering how freedom relates to student experience. The first part of this essay explores diverse elaborations and defences of freedom: How it is upheld in the liberal philosophy of Kant, the critical pedagogy of Freire, existentialism, and the capabilities approach to development. Exploring the often contrasting insights and implications of these views, I then connect relevant theoretical understandings derived from them to an exploration of the experience of freedom and of students. This essay thus considers how student freedom, and student academic freedom, are more precarious concepts than typically assumed. (shrink)

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives (...) matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. (shrink)

Freedom of self-expression is an elusive value. In ordinary political discourse, the value of self-expression seems obvious. But it is surprisingly difficult to specify freedom of self-expression without collapsing it into the value of freedom in general. And reducing freedom of self-expression to a special case of freedom of speech yields a Procrustean and underinclusive account. This paper develops a novel account of freedom of self-expression which avoids both pitfalls. First, I (...) show that the ubiquity of self-expression as a phenomenon is compatible with the normative distinctiveness of freedom of self-expression as a value. Second, I show that freedom of self-expression requires, at minimum, freedom from content-based limitations on the exercise of personal style. Third, I ground the moral significance of freedom of self-expression in two distinct interests: in autonomy of self-definition, and in opportunities for recognition. Ultimately, freedom of self-expression emerges as a distinct and coherent moral and political value. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the relationship between value pluralism and freedom of association. I offer a brief account of value pluralism and argue that value pluralism provides the most complete explanation of the moral and practical experience of human beings. I then provide an elaboration of the nature and place of freedom of association in a political community comprised (primarily) of value pluralists. I claim that value pluralists would agree to consider (...) class='Hi'>freedom of association in its most capacious sense to include the reciprocal freedom of contract in voluntary transactional associations and in voluntary purposive associations of almost any sort (excluding those which use force or fraud), and value pluralists would place a rebuttable priority on preserving voluntary freedom of association as a responsibility of the political community. (shrink)

This thesis concerns the measurement of freedom, and its value. Specifically, I am concerned with three overarching questions. First, can we measure the extent of an individual’s freedom? It had better be that we can, otherwise much ordinary and intuitive talk that we would like to vindicate – say, about free persons being freer than slaves – will turn out to be false or meaningless. Second, in what ways is freedom valuable, and how is this (...) class='Hi'>value measured? It matters, for example, whether freedom is valuable only insofar as it enables us to pursue specific ends we happen to value for independent reasons, or whether it is also valuable in itself. In the latter case, but not the former, more freedom will always (other things being equal) be better. Likewise, it’s important to get clarity on what ends, exactly, freedom is especially instrumentally valuable in promoting, since this goes to how much we should care about it. And finally, the liberal political tradition asserts that there is a special sphere of personal choices within which individuals should be free to do as they please, for reasons over and above the value of freedom itself. Now, can we measure the extent to which states and individuals respect individual liberties, and can we weigh the importance of respecting liberty against competing values like social welfare? To answer these questions, I follow the axiomatic tradition of social choice theory, and I develop several novel measures of freedom – including the first measure of freedom ever proposed that is sensitive to how modally robustly our options are available – a novel approach to measuring the diversity of an opportunity set, and I develop an account of the value of freedom according to which an important part of why freedom matters is that it enables us to improve our preferences through learning, and I construct ways of measuring the value of freedom along this dimension of value. Finally, in later chapters, I provide a representation result for a measure of illiberalism, i.e. of the degree to which states fail to respect the rights of their citizens, and I extend this result to provide a characterization of moral theories that express concern for respecting the rights of others. The final chapter closes by discussing how this concern may be weighed against concerns for social welfare. (shrink)