[lvass]

Freedom is indeed the ability to make your own choices, but you must not understand it in a strictly technical context, more like a social/legal one. It simply isn't viable to physically prevent every action society considers you not free to take, so the restriction of freedom comes in the form of later punishment, it doesn't magically stop being restriction of freedom just because technical possibility is still there.

[marginalia_nu]

Ok, let's agree that the proposition we are discussing is this:

* Freedom is the limitation of choice.

My counter-argument is this:

Limitations on choice through potential consequences are ultimately self-imposed. To have any effect, they require me to refuse to consider the possibility of the alternative. To the extent they limit my action, it is through my choice, possibly implicit, to let them limit my actions. The option of making the choice never goes away no matter how grievous the potential consequence.

Since this is in a discussion around a post by Snowden, we can take him as an example. He did something that, according to this theory of freedom, is impossible. He wasn't free to do it, his choice was limited by potential punishment. Yet he did, the possibility of making the supposedly impossible choice was still there.

Consider a hypothetical man who has lived isolated indoors all life playing video games, never gone to school, never watched TV, nobody told him about any consequences. One day at the age of 25 he finally discovers a door to the outside and goes through and thinks "oh man, this is like GTA!" and goes around punching the elderly, stealing things, breaking all manner of laws as he has been taught is how you get points. Eventually the strange man is caught and sent to prison, but until that point, was he more free than we are? He was subject to the same laws and social consequences as we are, but they weren't able to limit his choices because of his ignorance. Clearly it can't be the laws themselves that limit choices if this is the case.

It appears to me there is something strange about the given definition of freedom. It lends itself to producing paradoxes, where people who aren't free are capable of being simultaneously free, and the same sources of limitation successfully limit some people but not others based on what attitude they have toward them. This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete.

[lvass]

>* Freedom is the limitation of choice

Assuming you meant the literal opposite, I can agree there's a bit of nuance but it's true in the "spirit of the law" sense. I really don't understand why you're still trying to take it so literally.

>This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete

Words aren't perfect nor immutable, no definition is complete, but it's relatively easy to see what it's trying to say. It does not follow an absolute implication that punishment is not a restriction of freedom. There are less ambiguous definitions but this one is acceptable and beautifully simple.

If it were code it'd be a single-liner that works for 99.9% of users. But the "best" implementation works for 99.91%, is slow, 200 lines, no one understands and inexplicably broke for someone.

[marginalia_nu]

If we are to investigate whether freedom is desirable, don't we owe it to ourselves to find out what freedom is first, find out if we are free, if we even can be free? Otherwise we can debate in circles about different meanings of the word and ultimately get nowhere.

I don't think the poetic appeal of the definition is useful if the definition itself lends itself to contradictions.

[darkerside]

I'm pretty sure everyone understands what you are saying, but I don't think you've demonstrated that you understand what you are arguing against. Just an observation.