ABSTRACT
A baby emerges from the womb. Nothing apart from itself is moving it, but it moves nevertheless. It is self-activated, possessing what Aristotle called energeia. Some of the baby’s movements go unimpeded. It extends its legs, twists and turns. Other movements encounter obstacles. Does a case like this give us the conditions necessary to our notions of freedom and unfreedom; the conditions sufficient to those notions? Of course we use the words “free,” “freely,” and “freedom” where there is neither selfactivation nor a genuine possibility of obstacles to movement. Free-falling objects and branches swaying freely in the breeze are not self-activated; the notion of an omnipotent God excludes the possibility of effective obstacles; accounts of ghosts and creatures of science-fiction often achieve their distinctive flavor by denying or severely qualifying this possibility; a cloud-free sky, a complexion free of blemishes, does not depend literally or straightforwardly on either condition. Just because of these characteristics, the latter uses of “free” and its cognates and counterparts are sharply and strikingly different from uses concerning ourselves and higher-order animals. Such uses render uninteresting if not pointless the contrasts we draw between freedom and unfreedom in our lives. The two conditions with which I began do seem to be necessary elements in our concept of our own freedom and unfreedom. Are they jointly sufficient to that concept? A prominent account of freedom, which forms the conceptual foundation of a moral and political theory of recurrent appeal, answers this question in the affirmative. Thomas Hobbes portrayed not just human beings but all higher animals as self-activated in a very strong sense. Impulses that originate within these creatures are the necessary and (given their physical makeup and certain very general features of their environment) sufficient conditions of their movements. He contended that these creatures should be said to be free just insofar as their movements are unimpeded by forces or obstacles external to themselves, unfree just insofar as those movements are effectively impeded or prevented. Information about the two conditions is all that is needed, indeed is all that can properly be employed, in discourse about their freedom and unfreedom.
