Some philosophical attacks on freedom are thought-provoking. For example, if freedom comes from God, and God is omniscient, He already knows what will happen in the future. This line of thinking leads to the notion of predestination. If our future is predestined, human freedom is a deception. Freedom and predestination are unreconcilable concepts.
A different philosophical attack claims that, since the universe is governed by laws of cause and effect, the future is already deterministically decided. That is, all decisions we make are predetermined by physical laws. So, according to disbelievers of freedom, predestination or predetermination make freedom an illusion.
A third theoretical attack on the idea of human freedom argues that our idea of freedom, is nothing more than an arbitrary product of our environment and upbringing. These arguments, and others, have been used by detractors of freedom to undermine our responsibilities and to justify taking away our freedoms. As George Bernard Shaw put it: “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
In 1958 political theorist Isaiah Berlin complicated the question of freedom even further with his lecture “Two Concepts of Freedom.” Berlin made a distinction between negative and positive freedoms. In Berlin’s analysis negative freedom is understood as freedom ‘from’ interference by others, and positive freedom, or freedom ‘to’, is understood as freedom to act.
The politics of freedom ‘to’ are exemplified by Marxists views in which being free -in the ‘to’ sense- implies that individuals are not responsible for deciding what is best for them and the state must decide on their behalf. This justifies the use of oppression and coercion by the state to achieve a desired distribution of society’s output. So, for Marxists, freedom comes from the government.
Yet, nothing comes from nothing, and as free persons we have the opportunity of making decisions and bearing the consequences of our choices. Freedom is a mystery, but it is not an illusion. Freedom comes from our choices.
