ABSTRACT

The behavior of the other robots would not appear to be a circumstance that was relevantly different from the rest of the environment. The language of social freedom presupposes a view of human agents as free and responsible for their actions. Freedom under capitalism is unequally distributed, since freedom depends not only on the absence of legal restrictions, force, and fraud, but also on having the effective opportunity to pursue courses of action. Moreover, since conditions of work under capitalism are such as to deny most employees the effective opportunity to perform many actions important to them, the average degree of freedom is small—indeed possibly smaller than under systems that impose many more legal restrictions on human action. The final suggestion is that any obstacle for which human agents are in some way or other causally responsible should be regarded as a constraint on freedom.