Freedom

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FREEDOM

The concept of freedom or liberty is complex, with political, ethical, and psychological dimensions. In the context of modern science, technology, and ethics, freedom exhibits all of the ambiguity of human experience. The promise of modern science and technology is that the increases in knowledge and the power they afford will expand human freedom in an unqualified sense. But in opposition to this original and continuing justification are questions about the extent to which science and technology may also limit or qualify freedom. Moreover, the professional ethical requirement for the free and informed consent of human participants in scientific research situates the complexities of freedom in the heart of science itself. The issue of "free and informed consent" is a key locus for the discussion of freedom in science and technology.

Human Freedom versus Deterministic Science

The philosophical concept of freedom may be seen in opposition to that of determinism. The determinist holds that there is no freedom. For a hard determinist, all events in nature are strictly determined. As such, the idea of freedom is incompatible with that of the causal determination of all natural events. What is sometimes called soft determinism or compatibilism modifies the hard position by maintaining that freedom is compatible with the determination of natural events. A compatibilist holds that all events in nature are causally determined but that human beings can initiate new series of events and have responsibility for the outcomes of their actions. Thus, moral ideas of praise and blame make sense if people are able to act according to some causality arising from their will or for reasons of their own choosing.

Finally, it should be noted that with the development of quantum mechanics some thinkers allow for indeterminacy at the atomic level. This may allow for a notion of freedom in the sense that an action is not caused, but it may not be able to account for personal responsibility if the action is not determined in some way by the person.

Whether or not human beings are in fact free, most people think and act as if they are. Such acts of freedom have been conceptualized in two basic ways: negative and positive.

Negative Freedom

Negative freedom may be taken as an absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of one's desires or wishes. The view of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is representative of this approach. This form of freedom depends upon the existence of favorable external circumstances for the attainment of a human goal. It can thus be considered a freedom of self-realization. One peculiar implication of this approach is that a person who wishes to be in a prison cell may be said to be free. Nor does it require that there be alternatives from which to choose. If there is only one course of action available, but that is what an individual wishes, then such a person may be said to be free. It also seems to allow for animals to be described as free. A further point is that the obstacles to human desires include physical and social ones. Thus, if persons are physically constrained or constrained by fear, they may not be said to be free to act. If, on the contrary, they are coerced to act in a certain way, they are not considered to be free nor responsible for their actions.

According to this conception, modern science and technology may be construed as eliminating any number of obstacles that have historically restrained human action. Therefore, those taking engineering approaches to science and technology tend to see modern technical methods as enhancing human freedom. With modern methods of communication and travel, for example, time and space seem to shrink in their significance. Many elderly people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been able to act without the encumbrances of the maladies of old age that have plagued human beings for millennia. This form of freedom is a freedom from such things as disease, hunger, and fear.

Modern technologies, however, may also be seen as introducing new obstacles to human action. The automobile provides for transportation over great distances, but millions of cars on the roads produce traffic jams that obstruct a person's desire to move. The roadways also block a person's desire to walk if the destination is across a multilane highway. The very complexity of modern technological societies may represent an obstacle to human action. With all of the information that is available through the various media, many persons feel overwhelmed by information overload. Greater knowledge is thought to increase one's freedom to act, but it becomes difficult to act rationally in such an environment. Indeed, the self may become fragmented as it interacts with the technological environment.

This seems to be an outcome that is contrary to the self-realization that is characteristic of the notion of negative freedom. A further problem with the notion of negative freedom is that modern science and technology may be used to manipulate human desires, and so in a sense persons are coerced to act. Thus, propaganda techniques are used to mold consumer desires. Indeed, it has become possible to manipulate human desires pharmacologically. This possibility has been the theme of dystopias such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Huxley imagined a society in which a drug called "soma" could be taken that would make a person content in any environment. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) depicted a cruder reconditioning of human desires. Many thinkers in the humanistic tradition would not consider human beings to be free if there are no obstacles to the fulfillment of a person's desires, but the desires one has result from technical manipulation. It is appropriate from this perspective that B. F. Skinner should have written Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). The practical application of his behaviorism would make human freedom into an illusion because behaviorism holds that all human behaviors are molded by the environment. The control of nature, as C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) pointed out The Abolition of Man, easily leads to the control of some human beings by others.

Positive Freedom

The positive notion of freedom requires that individuals be able not only to act on their desires but also to choose from among the many desires they have to act upon. Such a view of freedom constitutes a theory of self-perfection. According to this conception, some desires may be more worthy than others given a standard of human life that is considered good. Only persons who have acquired virtue or a self-consciousness of their humanity may be said to be free. Contrary to the common view that people have greater freedom to act if they have more choices, in this case ideas of virtue or moral duty may lead individuals to restrict their pursuit of certain desires. Rather than simply doing what one wants, one does what one thinks one ought to do.

Moreover, one may have a desire for freedom itself that requires the subordination of one's physical inclinations. This is an example of second order desire, that is, the desire for certain kinds of desires. Here, freedom is an end to be pursued in itself rather than a means to the pursuit of other ends. A peculiar aspect of the positive notion of freedom is that it seems to require a degree of self-denial, at least the denial of the drives of the lower self for the sake of higher drives or interests. It may be that this is necessary for the fulfillment of the higher self. A certain independence of the self from the social and physical environment is also necessary for the pursuit of this form of freedom. As such, positive freedom does not depend upon external circumstances.

The positive notion of freedom is especially significant in ethical reflections on the impact of science and technology on the quality of human existence. The concern here is whether human existence is degraded by the rationalization of the world associated with modern science and technology. If all of human existence, including human beings themselves, is subject to rational control, then there may be no room for the dignity of persons; in such a scenario, persons will have been reduced to objects of manipulation and control. If technical methods are applied to political action, for example, this tends to transform what has traditionally been considered the "art of the possible" into a matter of technical necessity. Technical rationality is a rationality directed to the efficient determination of means to achieving some end. This form of rationality tends to become the dominant form of rationality in a highly developed technological society in which the only worthy ends that are recognized are those that can be pursued by the technical means available.

Positive freedom, however, seems to require a broader form of rationality that takes into consideration the choice of humanly worthy ends. In the debate concerning human cloning, for example, the President's Council on Bioethics placed special emphasis on "human dignity" by calling one of its reports, Human Cloning and Human Dignity (2002). Furthermore, Francis Fukuyama (2003) has described a posthuman future resulting from the genetic manipulation of human beings. If modern science and technology lead to the evolution of a posthuman era, of what value is human freedom?

Dialectical Freedom

Beyond the negative and positive accounts of freedom is a dialectical one, with roots in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818–1883), among others. According to this account, human freedom is to be understood precisely as an opposition to some obstacle. As such, freedom depends on the existence of some resistance against which we struggle. If humanity were to succeed in eliminating all obstacles to the fulfillment of its wishes as per the view of negative freedom, it would also eliminate human freedom. The dialectical approach to freedom recognizes that the obstacles human beings confront take both physical and social forms. As one obstacle is overcome, however, new ones arise, so that human freedom can be seen as developing over time as humans confront new obstacles.

From a dialectical perspective, freedom must be coordinated with the environment in which humans exercise their freedom. The first and historically most fundamental form of freedom in this scenario occurred when human beings struggled against nature. Nature provided both the means of pursuing human desires through the use of tools as well as obstacles to their use. This form of freedom was superseded by a stage in which human beings developed social institutions, which can be seen as "second nature." Social institutions provided protection from the forces of nature but also introduced new human-made obstacles. After the development of this new environment, the desire for freedom had to be directed against social institutions. The dialectical character of this view of freedom can be seen in that the liberty gained with respect to one environment gives rise to new necessities that must be overcome by creating a new form of freedom. In turn, the new form of freedom is also relevant to a new milieu.

The sociologist Karl Mannheim distinguishes a third stage, that of planning. In this stage, the totality of social institutions and other techniques are organized into a systematic whole. For Mannheim, democratic planning is the last stage in the development of human freedom, whereby human beings take conscious control over the social process. Jacques Ellul (1976) depicted this third stage as the stage of technique, which involves a new technological determination of the human person by the systematic application of techniques to human beings. He thus called for a struggle against the technological environment, especially in its ideological aspect.

The Ethics of Freedom in the Scientific and Technological World

In all of its forms—negative, positive, and dialectical—freedom is closely associated with notions of moral autonomy and political democracy. The ideals of moral autonomy and democratic politics depend on persons and citizens not being wholly determined by external forces, able to pursue personal perfection and the public good, in dialectical engagement with others and the world around them. In the contemporary technoscientific milieu, the others and the world exhibit strongly scientific and technological characteristics.

One area in which this is particularly pronounced is in research on human subjects. Especially since World War II both the scientific community and society at large have increasingly stipulated that scientific research on human subjects be limited by requiring free and informed consent of any such subjects. Participants in scientific research must not be constrained to participate either by force (as in Nazi Germany) or by ignorance (as in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study [1932–1972] in the United States); they must be able to see their participation as positive aspects of their own lives; and they will inevitably struggle against the obstacles of disease and perhaps their own lack of understanding in the process. The commitment to such freedom, which respects limitations in science, even when it also limits scientific progress, makes science more human.

In the larger technoscientific world there are further reflections of such efforts to respect freedom in the emergence of individual and collective ethical responses to the artificial environment produced by modern science and technology and the cultural aspirations to use science and technology to transform the world. Thus, Hans Jonas (1984) has called for an ethic of responsibility that posits an ethical imperative to maintain the existence of human beings. This marks a sharp contrast with those who have called for a posthuman age. Further examples include Ellul (1976), who developed an ethic of non-power to counter the technical impulse to augment human power. And, more recently, Bill McKibben has sought limits to the effort to perfect human beings in his 2003 book, Enough. All of these observers are concerned with establishing some humanly significant limits to the technological remaking of the world. They recognize that within a dialectical account of freedom, while the reality of human freedom depends upon the overcoming of limits, it also depends upon the recognition of limits. If the technological project has become an attempt to eliminate all limits, it may very well eliminate freedom as well.

DARYL J. WENNEMANN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics