Why an Abundance of Choice Is Not the Same as Freedom
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The article 'Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom' on Aeon.co sparks a discussion on the relationship between freedom and choice, with commenters offering diverse perspectives on the topic.
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In practice, we all restrain our choices in ways that we hope narrow our focus and abilities towards things that matter. It would be nice to read a piece that explores how this can be true collectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
It’s that when you little to no choice we say you aren’t free. It doesn’t follow that having more choices makes you free, but it is a prerequisite. Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.
Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author.
This piece makes me uneasy, it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom. I’m wondering where this is going.
Past a very low threshold, it’s the quality of the choices that matter not the quantity. And I don’t mean workmanship or value, but the cost/benefit ratio of the choice.
Your example is completely orthogonal to liberty. Choices are completely orthogonal. If the serf could leave and not starve, he still wouldn't be free because they would find and drag him back and punish him. He wasn't permitted to make the choice, it being incidental that he wouldn't survive long enough to be punished for it in most circumstances.
If they had refrained from punishing serfs that leave you'd still insist there is no freedom there, I think, because of the starvation. But no one is obligated to feed you so that you can choose options that would otherwise starve you.
>Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices
For good reason. Given choices, humans inevitably pick the worst of them. And I'm not talking about those that are only bad options in hindsight.
>it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom.
There's no effort, that's called reality. Reality limits choices, and it is effortless.
Removing our freedom—or ability to choose—to kill others, take them as slaves, take away their stuff*, etc, is an increase in overall freedom of the society, especially as that removal is expanded to everyone in the society, no matter how wealthy or powerful they are.
* With impunity, through laws and enforcement thereof; being able to physically prevent us from doing such things en masse is a different kind of question.
Even sort of bing a libertarian, objectively speaking, yes, I think other people will make bad decisions with their choices.
I find this argument interesting, because I think it’s a plea to rationality. people who consider themselves good/rational are humble enough not to paint the rest of humanity with such a broad brushstroke. But I think it’s wrong, I think it serves more as an emotional plea than a rational one.
So yes, I think the author probably thinks that too many choices will lead people to make bad choices, and in fact not only do I agree with the author but I would guess many? Most? People would be happy to apply this to themselves.
You have a myriad of artificially created choices that amount to more or less the same outcome; think of a supermarket, where all products are the same high-processed food and imported vegetables. Freedom would be having a competing family-owned local shop with proximity products.
To have meaningful choice, you cannot depend of having a single homogeneous environment providing all the choices you can make; this can come from having healthy competition, or sometimes by you creating your own choices when there were none.
Said who? This is an argument from invented opposition. I’m not sure anyone actually defines freedom as "a huge array of choices". The author seems to invent a mainstream narrative just to dismantle it(arguing against a straw man)
Abundance of choice and freedom are orthogonal. Having the right choice and being free are not.
I guess you have in mind something like: all the pointless churn of making the latest video doorbells and smart watches could instead be dedicated to giving me and you some time off work. So, UBI? Maybe. But this is obstructed by voters, or by practicalities.
And an evergreen one is the single differentiating feature. Like color. How many kitchenaid appliances have been sold in a faddish color only to be replaced by white or black or red a handful of years later? Those things were tanks. Still are to an extent.
I want one but not for that much.
Also being poor is expensive.
Evidence of a fact is different from the fact.
> Said who? This is an argument from invented opposition. I’m not sure anyone actually defines freedom as "a huge array of choices".
This is an argument about who "defined freedom as ..." and I pointed out who did.
It's the inversion of something which is correct.
If you don't have any choice or are limited to a small number of bad options, that's not freedom. Freedom requires choice.
But choice is necessary, not sufficient. Having a thousand frivolous choices that are all bad and still not the ones you ought to have is not it either.
- Comprehensiveness: instead of pork or beef, you can choose from meat, fish, tofu or egg as your protein source.
- Non-commitment: choosing one of them doesn't prevent you from choosing another for the next meal.
- Safety: none of them shouldn't be so expensive that it hurts you financially, or poisoned it hurts you physiologically beyond its nutritional nature.
I'm not talking about meals but elections, by the way.
A 'free market' means freedom from monopolistic and rent-seeking practices (according to a Marxist). Yet we have a different capitalist take on what a 'free market' is, which is more like a choice between Pepsi, Coca Cola and own-brand cola, with plain old tap water not on the menu.
1. Freedom TO or
2. Freedom FROM?
Both are valid in discussions of freedom, but I find the west tends to focus considerably more on #1 than #2.
And then we're back to "you should have the freedom to do anything that doesn't harm someone else" and people get to argue forever about what counts as harm.
Positive rights of course directly imply slavery so it makes sense people wish to frame them as negative rights.
I think you're probably a better person than this.
All rights that a person possesses implies obligations that everyone else must meet. For example, if I have the right to not be assaulted, that implies the obligation of others to not assault me. The difference between a negative and positive right is that the obligation for a negative right is inaction, but for a positive right it's action.
If you're forced to act in a specific way, you're robbed of your agency and ownership of yourself. What else would you call that?
But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.
I'm actually more interested in your argument for why they are mutually exclusive concepts.
This is the difference between what I might call philosophical, or perhaps semantic, and practical discussions.
We can define slavery to mean anything we want, up to and including being born. Every human has to eat and breathe to survive, does that mean they're slaves in that way? Sure? Maybe? Who cares.
The practical discussion is how we want to live our actual lives and structure our actual systems of power.
When people talk about "positive rights" (and really, all rights) they are aspirational. Merely creating a law does not change reality. We can create all the laws we want saying that people should not be murdered, but people will in fact, still be murdered, even though it is now against the law.
Similarly we can create a law saying that people should have healthcare access or food, but people will still be unable to see a doctor or get food when they need it. Neither of those laws imply putting anyone into slavery.
At a practical level, human life is better when we band together in larger and larger groups and contribute to the common welfare, however you want to phrase that.
We can, of course, quibble over the size and type of those contributions and how we use them, thats how society should work, but it is incredible bad faith to accuse people who want to use those contributions for, say, healthcare access, of wanting to enslave people.
Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive. Implying rights don't exist because people violate them doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant.
Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?
Now of course most people who hold these beliefs haven't given it any thought beyond "I want people to be safe happy and healthy". But those who have, realise coercive violence is a base requirement and are fine with it, but obviously won't frame their beliefs in that way.
"Freedom from..." is generally used to form phrases like "Freedom from hunger", "Freedom from homelessness", "Freedom from being thrown in the back of an unmarked black van by unmarked people wearing masks". I don't know what version of America you've experienced, but the one I know absolutely does not focus on this notion of "freedom from".
People tend to think that when you get the government involved with something you are passionate about, that passion will now influence the government. Still, the reality is that you're handing control over that passion to the government.
This is how a "Christian America" would play out. Whatever beliefs are held by those in power would be written into law, despite the actual opinions of America's Christians. The government would declare itself an authority over Christianity and would start telling churches how to operate.
This was already partially true in red states before marriage equality (and probably still true today, to some extent). Progressive churches that believed same-sex marriages were holy in the eyes of God were told by the state that they could not perform same sex marriages - in some cases, even barring a pure non-binding ceremony as a form of "attempted marital fraud".
If you are an American Christian and you care about your right to worship freely without government interference, you should cherish secularism. Enforcing the Bible as a matter of law means that interpretations of the Bible you disagree with will be enforced against you. Requiring prayer in schools will lead to vicious fights between teachers and parents over which prayers are the "correct" ones. Literally any piece of scripture you write into law will become controversial even amongst Christians. But still, people insist that their freedom would somehow be enhanced.
And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a Christian America would turn non-Christians, especially Muslims and Jews, into a lower class of citizens.
It is unfortunate that he current powers controlling all branches of our government are primarily interested in taking rights away, and that those who voted for it think that this is freedom.
By and large many issues in America today are due to have abandoned Christian norms on both ends of the political spectrum.
i put much less priority on "not interfering" than you, perhaps because i'm a priviledged white anglo middle class dude, or perhaps because i believe different things about the world than you. such as: there's always interfering, it cannot be escaped, it can only be shaped.
I may have incredible freedoms inside a market, but I have little to no freedom from markets (or capitalism) I have no practical freedom between different economic systems. Capital has eaten it all. I detest being essentially forced to participate in a system I don't believe in where the alternative (living in the woods alone) isn't really an alternative at all. It's Moloch or the wilderness.
Generally speaking, what all other definitions boil down to is Sam and Hanna wanting to make a consensual transaction, and some third party who has nothing to do with said transition interfering "for the greater good" or whatever. Which is nonsense, it's the complete opposite of freedom.
This is also the position of Adam Smith and, for that matter, everybody except for the monopolists and their sycophants.
I think the latter are sometimes referred to as the Chicago School and someone should really buy that place out to split it up and sell it for parts. I bet they have some nice buildings that are worth way more than any of their theories.
> Yet we have a different capitalist take on what a 'free market' is, which is more like a choice between Pepsi, Coca Cola and own-brand cola, with plain old tap water not on the menu.
Let's not ignore the third thing here. There are actual economists who will make arguments like "monopolies are efficient because of economies of scale" -- all empirical evidence to the contrary -- and presumably actually believe them. But there are also, you know, monopolies, and government officials in their pockets, who say things like that knowing that they're full of crap because that mendacity has been lucrative for them.
And maybe we need to start putting those people out on their butts or into a prison cell.
"A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, [long list of other functions of government,] engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which [something about welfare]—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist."
Obviously he didn't like regulation at all, and was probably struggling to decide how much of it to tolerate, but that doesn't mean he wanted monopolies.
Probably nobody wants monopolies except for monopolies; the question is what do you do about them? And the Chicago School answer is something like, have more free trade and fewer regulations so that markets are more competitive.
The problem with this is that it isn't robust against selective implementation.
We get "free trade" where international corporations get access to US capital markets in order to fund the creation of vertically integrated global supply chains that offshore jobs and consolidate the global economy into a small number of companies and countries, but we don't get "free trade" where US consumers can feasibly use a foreign bank or payment processor if the US ones have consolidated and captured the regulators, or where foreign doctors have a practical path to immigrate to the US and practice medicine.
We get "fewer regulations" where giant corporations successfully lobby to get rid of laws that are inconvenient to giant corporations (like Glass–Steagall), but not "fewer regulations" where there are still a zillion regulations that impact small companies more than large ones and make it more difficult to start a new business or compete with existing incumbents. I mean, why is DMCA 1201 still on the books? Its nominal purpose was a fraud from day one and the only thing anybody really uses it for in practice is to lock out competitors.
You thereby accumulate a bunch of consolidated markets that you need to promptly smash into tiny pieces with the antitrust hammer or you're in a losing battle against time where they lobby to accumulate even more rules that benefit the incumbents faster than anybody else can accomplish getting rid of them.
And I know I'm criticizing the implementation rather than the theory here, i.e. Scalia rather than Friedman again, but for a theory to be good it's kind of important that it be amenable to practical implementation.
But for that you need the theory to actually specify -- in bright letters on the front page, not in a footnote somewhere -- that the most important part is that the regulations you get rid of first are the ones that limit competition, not the ones that defend against consolidated incumbents. Because otherwise the consolidated incumbents will point to your theory to argue for doing the opposite, which is what happened.
A free market in that sense is one in which (more or less) anyone can sell (more or less) anything at (more or less) any price. Historically, the freedom to do this was impeded by laws and/or arbitrary rule making, even if today monopolies, monopsonies and rent-seeking are a bigger problem in many markets.
By the way, it doesn't matter how many choices you have - if you can't chose the one you want, you don't have any freedom at all.
It's not all-or-nothing. I'd rather have a choice instead of none.
Having only one choice is equal to having no choice.
Having only two choices isn't notably better, especially if both options are equally bad.
This is getting pointlessly non-specific. The world rarely has two equally bad choices and that description absolutely does not apply to american elections.
I used to work adjacent to car financing. One of the "tricks" used in car negotiating is the "fake choice": "oh, you want to pay less for the car? Well. I can give you X OR Y for FREE!". Now you spend time thinking if you want X or Y, forgetting thay they are worth $200, and what you really want is $1000 less on the car.
Be careful with the "choice" you think you are making
Left unspecified-- do you mean as measured scientifically? Or do you simply mean that a person perceives that this choice won't prevent them from choosing differently for their next meal?
https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
This article on the other hand seems to say that people have equated choice with political or economic or philosophical freedom and, furthermore, that this equivalence is a false one. It’s a deeper and more difficult argument to make. I think “The Paradox of Choice” makes a lot of sense but this article leaves me unconvinced. For example I’m not understanding the argument this piece makes about the abortion debate. Abortion rights proponents are not arguing that the right to choose abortion is an empty promise. They’re arguing that women need to have real choices so they can in fact choose abortion if they wish. The arguments this piece makes to suggest choice does not promote freedom seem to me to support the opposite conclusion: that choice is an essential component of liberty and freedom.
- is an abundance of choice not freedom, or is freedom not strictly speaking “good”
- is there a freedom to be able to have a life on rails? Maybe 50 years ago you grow up in a small town with a coal mine, and you get married to someone from that town and work in that mine for the rest of your life. That choice or lifestyle is not available to a lot of people anymore.
- non-compatible choices —- some people say about work from home is always good, because each person has a choice, some can work from home, some in the office, but these choices just aren’t compatible. Having a work from home policy generally means that people who want to work in the office don’t get the experience they were hoping for.
- super markets. consolidation means there’s only a few brands of supermarkets left. But those super markets have more choice than ever before - but they also tend to have a pretty narrow selection of raw ingredients / produce. What is freedom here?
* the loss of special experiences. My city had a great authentic Thai restaurant. It was great! I could go whenever I wanted, but when I actually went to Thailand, I was a bit disappointed that nothing really felt new there.
* the loss of human connection. I think the world was a better place when Tv during the day sucked. We’ve fundamentally lost the need to rely on each other for entertainment, and I think this has impacts in community formation, friendship and dating.
* Adaptation to self vs self-adaptation. When there was less choices you had to change yourself to appreciate new things. Now one can probably almost precisely do the opposite, only find the things that match who you currently are.
Talking about freedom in terms of a selection of products in a marketplace seems very shallow.
However, I still think that, in general, more freedom of choice is only a good thing.
> Is there any real difference between the scores of toothpastes or breakfast cereals in contemporary supermarkets?
That depends. Do you have a preference for one flavor of toothpaste or cereal over another? Do you have dental issues that require a toothpaste with whitening effects, or without fluoride, or with baking soda? In a cereal, do you value health concerns over taste, or vice versa? If so, then yes, there is a real difference between different choices in these cases. Making one choice over another can have a direct impact on quality of life, if often a minor one. And this is what makes freedom of choice so important for me: it’s the freedom to strive to improve quality of life—synonymous with the pursuit of happiness.
Of course, as the article briefly touches on, freedom of choice isn’t the only kind of freedom, and arguably isn’t the most important one, either. I think this is the point the author was trying to make, but she doesn’t go into much detail. Freedom from oppression is a prerequisite for freedom of choice, and freedom from suffering is (on paper) the ultimate goal of it. Therein lies the debate: when does increased freedom of choice impede on these other two freedoms? Which should be prioritized in these cases? The line is different for everyone. I would’ve liked to see the article add more nuance to the discussion.
When people decry that nobody else will pay them to be an artist or to follow their passions they’re really decrying that they’re unwilling or unable to follow their passions without either giving up something or without offering enough back to other people to justify their use of their resources. Reality doesn’t give a shit whether or not you’re free, neither does the guy that built your house or grew your food, or the nurse that wipes your ass when you get sick.
You either have to be the change you want to see or stop whining that other people won’t adjust their lives to conform to the way you want them to be, without subjecting yourself to any discomfort beyond jeering from the sidelines. It’s really easy to imagine a world in which you’re free to benefit from everybody else’s lack thereof, children do it all the time.
Anyway, "consumer freedom" as we know it is a facade, with a handful of conglomerates owning most of the brands you know, a few large investment funds owning the conglomerates, and a few factories in Asia supplying many of the parts and products that nominally Western brands sell. The choices aren't meaningful and the costs are higher because we try to maintain this appearance of choice (hence, Temu).
And if you think I'm whatever cultural archetype you hate that keeps things this way, just know that my life sucks too and I'm giving up a lot to just try to make it better for other people instead of moseying along hating what I do and how powerless I am. But pretty quickly you realize people hate that even more than they hate their own suffering, nothing you do will ever be good enough for them because they just want to be miserable and make it someone else's fault - if they take any responsibility for it, they have to admit that it's not going to just change for them.
Nothing is actually stopping you from making your own music, nobody has to listen to it though, unless you make them. But it's your only choice if you don't like the music you have already. Just get ready for people to tell you they don't like it.
But, as you say, that's not because people don't want choice. It's because the choice was often between "safe and decent and expensive" and "unhealthy or dangerous but cheap" and sometimes even "unhealthy or dangerous and also expensive." The choice wasn't meaningful.
I live in an apartment, but I've got a few food plants on my deck. People do what they can within a broken system driven by the profit motive (read: exploitation), but it IS a system and it IS broken, and that's something that no amount of advocating for "consumer choice" or "working hard" within the broken system will change. And you bet your ass that I'd love to see what we have get replaced with one with fewer "choices", where the remainder are actually good ones.
Maybe stop complaining yourself and make that happen. As for me, I'm getting ready to harvest my sweet potatoes and draw a few storyboards. Hopefully one day the world will catch up to the fact that I don't actually have to do the former because we produce more than enough industrially, and that people who can do the latter are a badge of honor for our objective prosperity, and not a burden.
> "But an emphasis on choice as a form of liberation has occasioned serious resentments in different sectors and geographies, where it can seem a direct threat to other, more communal values and needs." I think this quote sums it up nicely. Personal liberation is not a threat to mutually beneficial communal values. If you need to force people to behave as part of your community, then it should be voluntary. One should be able to choose to pursue any form of freedom or community they'd like. If you want freedom to be "an act of pure imagination" and live a communal lifestyle, you should have the choice.
The one thing that truly made a difference for my own personal satisfaction was in realizing that inaction and despairing about society because of my own problems were a defense mechanism to justify what might happen if I tried to actually make things better, and either failed or became something I moralized against. Who gives a shit that there's too much cereal? What's actually making people unhappy is not enough of something else, or something missing in their lives that they can't find. Ultimately you either choose to do nothing or to try to make things better, and accept that inaction is itself a choice.
It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it.
If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.
Perhaps the contemporary fight back against 'woke' is really about the important and empowering choices in life being denied to too many?
You see that in our political discourse. Debates over things like gay marriage, immigration or abortion are encouraged because they don't cost the oligarchy any money. Discussion about things like income inequality that may reduce the power and wealth of the upper class is discouraged.
That's okay because those choices are their own. I think most people would rather make their own choices and live with the consequences than have the ability to choose taken from them even if that'd mean being forced into something that would be better for them than alternatives. Personally, I don't equate an abundance of choice with freedom, but a lack of choice or unnecessary constraints on avilable choices aren't going to make people more free either.
Having a lot of choices is often a strong indicator that you also have freedom.
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?
Nietzsche, ~1889
“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (or The Fear of Freedom in another translation)
The first freedom of course is freedom from fear (e.g. from fear of being snatched from the street just because you are brown and speak with an accent)
"Privacy choices"
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