When applied on an individual level it is true that the value of freedom does not imply morality (which should be obvious from the definition; freedom seems to clearly imply that there is a possibility for people to abuse it). But the rest of your response seems to be a strawman of my argument.
Objective morality is the foundation of collective freedom. Don’t steal. Don’t murder. Don’t coerce. Don’t assault. Don’t lie. Don’t trespass. Don’t rape. Initiation of harm is called violence.
Yes, we are obviously clear on all of these things. The rest of your response seems pretty triggered so I won’t go through and address the whole thing. Suffice it to say that I generally agree with you, but I do think you could reword your response to sound less arrogant.
If you would be a bit more charitable/pay more attention to what I was saying instead of just looking for an opportunity to say your next response, you would find that my definition of freedom in no way contradicts your views on morality.
- We were talking about the definition of freedom. (You criticized the definition used by free software activists such as RMS, I responded that their definition of freedom was fine while I agreed with you that their methods are sometimes undermining that value and other important values.) Your long (and frankly condescendingly written) response seems to primarily take issue with the fact that my definition of freedom was not a full definition of morality or the more specific concept of “collective freedom” (which you try to specify even more to “collective freedom from violence”). While I again think that is a great value, it is distinct from the basic concept of freedom. This feels like objecting to the definition of a ball as “a spherical object” only to claim that it is a “a spherical object used to play football/soccer”—I certainly don’t object to a football/soccorball a kind of ball, but that doesn’t make the general definition wrong. In fact, I’m glad that you are advocating for that broader perspective of freedom in a time when many people focus too much on individual freedom and don’t notice that maximizing individual/short term freedom can ultimately harm freedom of groups/in the long term.
- My definition does not preclude your definition, in fact the condition of “collective freedom” is a result of optimizing for freedom over a group (collective)—my definition includes yours. I.e. reducing restriction of individual action is not increasing freedom overall when the increased individual freedom of reduces (or in cases like murder, completely removes) the freedom of another. One thing that my definition also captures that yours does not (that I personally think is valuable) is a freedom integrated across time (rather than across groups as you definition restricts you to). For example, learning a useful skill (maybe how to program Emacs) can increase freedom over time as you gain the capability to build and do things you otherwise couldn’t. On the other hand, addictions (even when they somehow don’t manage to have negative effects on anyone but you (highly improbable irl lol) diminish freedom as your life is increasingly dictated by the addiction rather than your will. Tl;dr: the aspect you emphasized is valuable, but not the only valuable conceptualization of freedom.
Without collective freedom, you have tyranny, so you can’t possibly get FOSS, but you can still get OSS. Because we are living in tyranny, what we have is OSS. We can’t possibly have FOSS in the current human condition. Free in FOSS requires collective freedom. Free as in collective freedom. FOSS = “Collectively free” and open source software. Collective freedom is a prerequisite for a lot of things.
- I would argue that there is a continuum running from tyranny (collective oppression) to collective freedom. While our world in aggregate is far from the ideal of collective freedom, it is not uniformly pinned to the opposite extreme. To say that there is no free software (which can also be considered on a continuum) and that we collectively live “in tyranny” seems to be an exaggeration and ignores the fact that many live under far greater oppression than the wrong, but relatively likely mild things that users of this forum have experienced.
I didn’t make up this definition of freedom. I learned it from teachers who learned scientific definition of freedom and morality from earlier teachers. I’m here to make a very precise “scientific” prediction.
- Don’t worry I don’t think that your definition is fake at all. I would maybe call it a collective negative deontological definition of freedom. Freedom is collectively not harming others (with harm of course being defined however you define it). But I would caution that this is not the definition of freedom. It is one of many. And honestly, you can make most any reasonable framework agree with “common sense” morality fairly easily by tinkering with the values. I would still argue that definitions are models—yours is workable in practice, but many others are as well. Technical definitions of concepts like freedom are only really useful to the extent that they inform and enlighten us. It can be fun, but ultimately I think a definitive definition for these things is practically irrelevant.
- Random note (and I don’t mean this in a bad way) but this is a philosophical definition, not a scientific one. Note, I don’t mean this in a bad way—philosophical is not worse than science, rather it is just the name for rigorous thought/investigation about ideas while science is rigorous thought/ideas about the physical world.
Until at least 51% of people converge on universal equal rights based on good understanding of objective morality, we won’t have collective freedom, and thus we won’t have FOSS. FOSS requires a specific collective condition. … Sadly, we won’t have collective freedom anytime soon. It’s very possible that hell will rule on earth until we become extinct. Welcome to hell.
- To end, I would just say, while I do completely understand the sense of hopelessness about these things, I’ve personally found that even when the world is stupid and people seem to always make bad decisions collectively, it doesn’t preclude all good things. While we won’t have an ideal society, that doesn’t stop all the good from existing. Sure, the whole world won’t be on board so at some level even the best things will always be linked to some extent with the failings of the world, there are still generally good things that we can enjoy and nurture in hopes of sharing that goodness with those around us.
Anyway, I hope you have a good day, am glad you care about making the world better, and hope that you can help some of the people/world around you to be a bit better.