Overall Freedom Measurement and Evaluation: a Defence of the Partly Evaluative Approach to Freedom Measurement

Freedom is one of the most important moral and political ideals. Questions concerning degrees of overall freedom are therefore of the utmost moral and political concern. To answer these questions we need to know how to measure degrees of overall freedom. This paper offers a novel defence of the part...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethical theory and moral practice
Main Author: Shnayderman, Ronen (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V [2019]
In: Ethical theory and moral practice
RelBib Classification:NCD Political ethics
VA Philosophy
ZC Politics in general
Further subjects:B Freedom's specific value
B Freedom's non-specific value
B Overall freedom
B Freedom
B Freedom measurement
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:Freedom is one of the most important moral and political ideals. Questions concerning degrees of overall freedom are therefore of the utmost moral and political concern. To answer these questions we need to know how to measure degrees of overall freedom. This paper offers a novel defence of the partly evaluative approach to freedom measurement against a recent critique of it. According to the partly evaluative approach, the question of how free one is depends partly on the specific value of the freedoms (and unfreedoms) one possesses and partly on their physical extension. According to the critique, because of its reference to freedoms' specific value, the partly evaluative approach fails to capture freedoms' non-specific value, which is what it should capture. In this paper I argue that this critique is unfounded, by showing that even measures of more mundane things, which nevertheless, like freedom, present us with a commensuration problem, sometimes involve evaluative considerations similar to the ones that the partly evaluative approach invokes.
ISSN:1572-8447
Contains:Enthalten in: Ethical theory and moral practice
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10677-019-10008-8