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Abortion-rights groups are up in arms about the unwillingness of some North Carolina pharmacists to sell morning-after pills or even birth-control pills. The pharmacists in question say they do not believe the products to be consistent with their moral views, and will refer customers elsewhere to obtain them. But the activists claim that the pharmacists, in exercising their freedom, are violating the “freedom of choice” of those wanting abortifacients or contraceptives

This is true. However, the NC pharmacists need to understand the company has the same freedom to let them go for not fulfilling their job requirements. Not that I agree with the activists though.

"Advocates of a state-run lottery in North Carolina argue that people should have the freedom to gamble if they please. Because the proposed lottery is a government monopoly, however, many North Carolinians who believe gambling to be immoral would be forced to associate themselves with it, and to see their elected officials promoting it. Moreover, parents of school-aged children who disagree with gambling would be forced to pay a high price – giving up thousands of dollars in annual tax subsidy for public schools and paying either private-school tuition or home-schooling costs – in order to avoid becoming a direct beneficiary of gambling."

So let's see... I don't want to be indirectly associated with the proceeds of a practice I don't agree with, because I don't want to have to pay for educating my children (that I freely chose to bring into this world) in a private school. Therefore, I would rather take the freedom to buy a lottery ticket away from someone else so I don't benefit from gambling which is what my religious beliefs tell me is immoral.

You tell me which part of this equation more accurately defines what freedom is.

I didn't think it was well-thought out at all. Frankly, it doesn't take enough space to expand on its ideas, and what ideas are expressed are done so without grounds for taking them to be true.

From these and other examples, it becomes obvious that many political actors do not really think “freedom” is a neutral term.

Why ought one believe that freedom is a neutral term? In what sense is it neutral? I interpret such "neutrality" to mean that Freedom in itself is empty of content, being neither good nor bad. In such a case, nobody should care about freedom as such, since it isn't a good in-itself, but simply an instrumental good. This seems to undermine the author's attempt to say that everybody deserves freedom.

...the principle of freedom isn’t really all that hard to define and enforce. You have the right to think, say, do, or not do anything you like without being forcibly restrained or punished. I do, too – and my freedom extends to judging you according to what you say or do, and deciding whether I want to have anything to do with you as a result.

J.S. Mill takes this idea to an even further extreme, claiming that social pressure itself is coercive and should to be eliminated as one responds to other coercive measures--that is, with coercion in kind.

And I would say that the article's idea of freedom is rather foreign to American politics. Both Abraham Lincoln and Orestes Brownson declared in the 1800s that "you cannot have a right to do a wrong." And in Christian theology the first freedom is the freedom to become a child of God by becoming free from the slavery to sin. Surely not a neutral idea, there.

This article only strenghtens my conviction that contemporary relativism finds its seeds in Lockean political theory.

NC *Ping*

NC Ping