Experimental Philosophy of Freedom

Here’s a guess (without reading the paper).
People often think (a) individuals have no right to do wrongs and (b) limits on an individual that prevent them from doing something they have no right to do are not limitations to their freedom. Put simply, people often have the intuition that no one is free to do wrong. Thinking this means that they will think no freedoms are limited in the first case but that there are freedoms limited in the second case (where she wants to do good).
This is confused of course (both a and b above are false), but it is common. (I once had a student insist jailed criminals did not have their freedom curtailed!)
Perhaps the effect would be lessened if a definition of freedom was provided.

That’s one possibility. Here’s another.

People that you are free when you can do anything that does not initiate force against others. In the first case, the government will initiate force against Tanya for doing something many of them would want to do. In the second case, she would initiate force against the minority, something the government is stopping her from doing.

Another way to put it:

In each case people make freedom judgments according to a model of an aggressor, victim and third party. In the first case, the government is the aggressor, the minority is the victim and Tanya is the third party. In the second case, Tanya is the would-be aggressor, the minority is the victim and the government is the third party. People may think that when you stop an aggressor you haven’t reduced her freedom but when you stop someone trying to stop an aggressor, you do reduced her freedom.

Try the experiment this way - change the government into a person in both cases, say Benedict. Then ask people whether Benedict’s freedom is reduced in either case. Prediction: it will be the inverse of Tanya’s cases - they will say his freedom is reduced when he is a protector and not reduced when he is an aggressor.

I hope this helps.

Dr. Cohen, thank you for the comment. Interestingly, I proposed a similar explanation in the paper, however, it was not based on the concept of rights. The mediating role which rights play in your proposed explanation, had not yet occurred to me as possible. However, if the rights-based concept of freedom is an accurate representation of our cognitive process in this case, it would seem that our freedom would not ever be lost without a violation of our rights. Yet, I imagine that there are many cases in which a restriction is placed on an individual that does not violate any clear right but still reduces her/his freedom. Perhaps here we might imagine all the gas station owners agreeing to simultaneously raise prices so much that most people are no longer able to drive, as one possible example.
Nonetheless, I do think that it is likely we conceive of ourselves as unfree to preform immoral actions, even where there is not an external restriction on us doing so. So when we are externally stopped from preforming some action which is wrong, perhaps our freedom is less reduced because that option was already ineligible. One of the most interesting results of the study was that participants responded that (in the case where Tanya wants to hurt the disenfranchised minority but is stopped from doing so) Tanya’s freedom was significantly reduced (3.53 on a scale from 1 to 7). Thus, even the restriction of something which Tanya clearly had no right to do did reduce her freedom significantly, even if not as much as when she was stopped from doing something which was morally laudable.

Kevin, thank you for your suggestion. It is a very interesting proposal, but I am not totally sure I understand the difference you suggested between the two cases according to the three party model. My reading is that the government would either have to be the aggressor in both cases or in neither, as the government is aggressively restricting Tanya in both cases but in neither is aggressively restricting the minority (only the public’s relations with the minority, i.e. Tanya). In both cases Tanya wants to forcefully influence the minority and is stopped from doing so by a third party, the government. The difference is that in one case she wants to forcefully help them and in the other forcefully hurt them.
Unless, of course, by force/aggressor you simply mean something like hurtful action/person who will perform some hurtful action. If this is the case then it seems more likely that it is not the three party model which is influencing our cognitive processes but instead something about hurting others. My intuitions about the cases don’t change when it is Benedict rather than the government interfering with Tanya’s actions, but maybe this is an experiment which would be well worth running to get a better idea of folk intuitions.

If it is the case that the disparity in our intuitions about these two cases is dependent on the help/hurt variation, then one possible explanation is that it is caused by a moral distinction concerning Tanya’s actions (as suggested in the paper). There have been many other interesting studies done about the influence of morality on folk intuitions in some pretty surprising areas too.

If I have misunderstood the three party model, please let me know as I was not completely clear on its application to the two cases.

Thanks again

A quick thought after a quick reading of this very interesting post: doesn’t the experiment show that the subjects value freedom in a non-intrinsic way? Roughly, being free is important or valuable in so far as freedom is exercised in pursuit of valuable/morally right things. Conversely, the value and importance of freedom decreases as we use it pursue morally dubious things.

So, if my conjecture is correct, the subjects aren’t really saying that Tanya’s freedom is more diminished in the second case. Rather, they are saying that her lack of freedom in the second case is more important. Or, in other words, that the freedom she is denied is worth more than that she is denied in the first case.

So, in a sense, the subjects equivocate between quantity and value of freedom. And of course whether we can quantify freedom is itself controversial. But perhaps I ought to read the paper and find out exactly what questions were asked etc!

P.S. Of course speaking of the non-intrinsic value of freedom is very vague. Ian Carter has lots of useful distinctions between ways of valuing freedom in chapter 2 of A Measure of Freedom, and in his 1995 Ethics paper.

Dr. Rossi, thanks for the insightful comment. It seem to me that there are two distinct points you have raised.
First, you are right in being concerned that participants may have been judging freedom as non-intrinsic and concerned only with what they were now restricted from doing. I too had that concern. Because of this, I conducted a secondary study presenting participants with three variants of a scenario in which a dictator of a small country restricted all the citizens from either creating low-quality soap-operas, high-quality scholarly newspapers, or violent pornography. If your conjecture is correct in that participants were simply saying that the freedom to help a disenfranchised minority is worth more than the freedom to hurt them, then we may expect the same type of thing in this case, i.e. that the freedom to create high-quality scholarly newspapers is worth more than the freedom to create low-quality soap-operas or violent pornography. However, the results of this survey surprised even me. Participants were asked both how much the law diminished citizens freedom and subsequently asked to judge how valuable this act (creating scholarly newspapers, low-quality soap-operas, violent pornography) was. Though the responses to the value question were highly varied (participants thought creating scholarly newspapers was much more valuable than creating day-time television, or violent pornography), there was no correlation between the value of the restricted act and the extent to which freedom was lost. Given that this type of explanation failed to accurately predict the results in this second case I think it is likely that it is not responsible for the effect in the case with Tanya and the disenfranchised minority either. However, it is a very legitimate concern and one that needed to be addressed. All of this is included in the full paper.

The second point that you raised was that, more generally, perhaps participants are judging the value of certain freedom rather than the quantity lost. To this I would have to respond that the two are probably inseparable in terms of folk intuitions (and I would further suggest in terms of philosophical ones as well), which is to say: I think all attempts to talk about freedom in strictly quantitative terms will fail. Something of this sort of approach was advocated by Isiah Berlin. I address the problems with this type of approach at length in the paper.

Finally thank you for the reference to Carter’s work. It will be very interesting to read the paper and hopefully will offer some clarity into the different types of valuations of freedom for me as well.