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Soc Choice Welfare (2004) 22: 175185DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0281-3Felix E. OppenheimUniversity of Massachusetts at Amherst, 41 Arnold Road Amherst,
MA 01002-9757 USA (e-mail: [email protected])Abstract. After dening social freedom and unfreedom in descriptive terms, I
shall explore the possibility of measuring specic social freedoms and
unfreedoms in terms of their various parameters, and show why these magnitudes cannot be aggregated into a measure of overall social freedom. Finally, I shall deal with value attitudes toward social freedom of agents
generally and of proponents of liberalism in particular.Social freedom is the concept philosophers, political scientists, and also
economists are often concerned with - often without realizing it - when
dealing with the subject of liberty. I shall dene social freedom in descriptive
terms, to enable individuals and groups with divergent political and moral
views to agree on what it is they disagree about on the normative level. For
the same reason, I shall propose descriptive criteria for the measurement of
specic social freedoms and unfreedoms. Finally I shall ask under what
conditions agents value their own social freedoms and what kinds of social
freedoms are valuable to liberals.1 Problems of denition1.1 Social freedomI shall dene social freedom in terms of social unfreedom.1 The expression
to be dened is: with respect to (wrt from here on) P (a holder of power), R
(a respondent) is unfree to do X. This deniendum brings out that social1 The following denitions are based on those given in a previous article (Oppenheim
1995, p. 404).Social freedom: Denition, measurability, valuation176 F. E. Oppenheimunfreedom (and freedom as well) is not a thing, nor being unfree a
property. We are dealing with a three-term relation between an actor or kind
of actor P, another actor R (not anonymous preventing conditions (Mac-
Callum 1967, p. 314)), and Rs actual or potential action X. The proposed
denition of this relational expression is: ... if and only if P makes it either
impossible or punishable for R to do X; i.e., were R to attempt X, some action
of P would cause Rs attempt to fail, or were R to do X, P would punish R for
having done X. I shall deal with these two categories of unfreedom later.Social freedom can now be dened as follows: Wrt P, R...