Freedom, Capitalism and Religion
Progressive Essays and Thinking on Capitalism and Freedom and Religion
Freedom Essays-Theoretical
Theoretical Essays on Freedom
The question of what liberty is and what it should include is not simply a historical question about what people thought in the past. It is part of an ongoing discussion in a liberal society. There is, however, a view that liberty is a static quality, whose rights and contours can be known in advance across cultures and time.
These essays contest that understanding of liberty showing that the understanding of what's protected by liberty and what's not, is contingent on the values and understandings of cultures.
These essays tackle that problem in particular by showing that there are are always various limits that need be placed on liberty and those limits are defined by other values such as notions of responsibility, the public good, and conceptions of self. 
What Color Tie Do You Vote For?: Or “Is Economic Freedom Part of Liberty”? A Critique of Milton Friedman's conception of freedom in Capitalism and Freedom.
Milton Friedman, who recently died, made popular the view that “economic freedom is by definition part of freedom”. This view has become widely accepted among conservative and libertarian think tanks in the last decades of the twentieth century such as The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. This essay argues that Friedman’s formulation, while rhetorically brilliant and seemingly self-evident, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of freedom. Friedman assumes in a free society the bulk of individual choices are left up to the market, and government is simply the umpire of the game. This essay by contrast argues that Friedman's formulation misconstrues the nature of freedom. For the very question of freedom is where to place the boundary between markets and government in the first place, i.e., determining the rules of the game versus moves within the game itself. Friedman tried inappropriately to make this question irrelevant to the nature of liberty. But liberty should include the very decision on where to place the boundary of markets and governments.
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Liberty is Not Freedom: How Notions of Public Good Constrain Liberty In John Locke and the Early Liberty Tradition.
Many people still have the mistaken notion that liberty means absolute freedom. They assume that “to be free” is to do “what one wants”. But in the modern liberty tradition, as it developed originally in Britain, where it principally started, and as it came to be appropriated in the American colonies before the Revolution, liberty did not mean total freedom, or the ability to do whatever one wanted with no constraints. On the contrary, liberty referred to the ability to exercise one’s will, within a set of known constraints and limitations set by legitimate law, which was the outcome of government. The paradox, then, is that the individual only gains real liberty by giving up freedom and becoming subject to the rules of society, designed to protect the public good.
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Who’s At The Corporate Table? Democracy, Stakeholder Theory and the Definition of Corporate Social Responsibility
Many people today believe that corporations should be socially responsible. This has led to a new practice called “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). This essay explores several different models corporate social responsibility (CSR) and argues that each have different implications for the practitioner of CSR. The three models are 1) the classic model of the shareholder 2) the new theory of the “stakeholder” and the model of 3) those not at the table.
Why Can't My Daughter Drive a Tank? Reflections on the Meaning of Liberty and Freedom in a Civil Society
When my daughter turned sixteen and got her driving license, I joked about buying her a tank as her first car so I would not have to worry about her saftety. But of course California law prohibits civilians from diving tanks. This essay discusses the example of the tank, the SUV, and the Hummer, to understand how liberty functions in a free society. Liberty does not mean "do what I like." But what then does liberty mean? This essay argues that the concept of liberty has no predictive values for determine what types of actions should be prohibited or allowed in society. Instead, liberty is a framework for decision making, but has no value in shaping the outcomes of decisions. Values and judgements beyond liberty enter in to determine what types of actions are considered unlawful.
Why “Market Liberals” Are Not “The True Liberals” or Who Really Inherits the Liberty Tradition Anyway?
Some republicans and libertarians are fond of claiming that they are the true liberals of modernity. F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and members of various think tanks such as the founders of the Cato Institute, Edward Crane and Boaz, all claim that their views about liberty and government are more consistent with what they regard as classical conceptions of liberty than those who traditionally called themselves liberals and now call themselves progressives. The attempt by Hayek, Friedman, Crane and others to appropriate the term “liberal” is, therefore, not just semantics. It is a part of a strategy to say what the liberty tradition means and to claim that 1) one particular interpretation of that tradition is the correct one and 2) that they are the true heirs of the liberty tradition. So while progressives might not care about keeping the term “liberal” per se and might be complacent about letting republicans, conservatives and libertarian’s appropriate the term for themselves, we should care a great deal more about their claim to be the only true interpreters of the liberty tradition. That is a much more serious and dangerous claim, a claim that is justifying a radical refashioning of our modern social life, our understanding of freedom and the interpretation of the American constitution. It is this latter claim that this essay is intended to critique.
Liberty and the Public Good: Endorsing Suicide and Slavery as Part of a Free Society.
My modest proposal is this: that if we really embrace a utilitarian view of liberty, we should change our laws to permit suicide and slavery. Specifically, we should immediately acknowledge that a society that is truly free in this sense allows people to take their own lives, sell themselves into slavery, and therefore allows others to purchase and traffic in slaves, under certain conditions. This sounds on the surface contradictory. How can a free society endorse slavery. But we shall see that if liberty is really founded on utility, then slavery and suicide should be embraced. Moreover, I have a specific proposal about which group of people would make the best class of slaves.
