LIBERTY AND LICENSE -- LIFEBOAT

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Date Posted: 12:20:48 07/21/00 Fri
Author: SwimmingUpstream
Subject: LIBERTY AND LICENSE

I understand "liberty" to be action in accordance with Right Desire. I understand "license" to be action in accordance with Wrong Desire.

Therefore, as I understand the two, they are different in kind -- the genesis of each being different -- and not merely the latter representing an extension of the former (either "irrationally", or "self-destructively", or "wrongly"). Liberty is freedom -- freedom to will as one ought. License is not freedom -- its extent is the absence of the freedom to will as one ought.

Human society has for ages recognized this essential difference between the two -- intuitively, if not always critically -- when it has withheld from a child certain opportunities (wrongly termed rights) to act according to his will. He is restrained because his will is not self-disciplined enough to be AT LIBERTY from wrong desire. And it is when his will is deemed to be adequately AT LIBERTY from wrong desire that he is afforded opportunities to exercise his liberty. (The case has traditionally applied in healthy societies to mature humans who have evidenced a lack of freedom of will from wrong desire, too -- idiots, psychopaths, etc.)

But Right Desire was largely overlooked by philosophers after Aquinas -- especially overlooked by Enlightenment philosophers. As we are living largely on the philosphical inheritance we received from the Enlightenment philosophers, we have been bereft of the distinction between Right Desire and Wrong Desire -- and consequently we are diffident, if not outright incapable, of asserting the distinction as a basis for liberty. In consequence we have allowed ourselves to implement practices that allow license, thinking we are allowing liberty to be exercised.

Capitalism is one such scheme that facilitates License while braying that it is about Freedom.

In my view a key task is to create a setting that facilitates the exercise of true Liberty and that impedes the exercise of License.

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