> all people inherently born free
All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.
All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.
Sure there is! You are not prevented from grabbing a stick and defending yourself by some artifice. You might lose. Or win. And you are free to make that choice.
In CA if someone comes at me with a baseball bat and I have two sticks tied together with a short piece of rope to defend myself I can end-up in jail. I once asked a police officer friend (LAPD Commander, actually) what I could legally carry in Los Angeles to defend myself and not get into trouble. He said "your best pair of running shoes".
The whole thing is preposterous. What ends-up happening is that lots of people secretly conceal-carry because they don't want to be victims. They do the math and conclude they rather go to jail than be dead. Truly sad.
> Sure there is! You are not prevented from grabbing a stick and defending yourself by some artifice. You might lose. Or win. And you are free to make that choice.
> In CA if someone comes at me with a baseball bat and I have two sticks tied together with a short piece of rope to defend myself I can end-up in jail. I once asked a police officer friend (LAPD Commander, actually) what I could legally carry in Los Angeles to defend myself and not get into trouble. He said "your best pair of running shoes".
This is actually very sound advice and what you get told in every reasonable self-defense class. Carrying a weapon around is really more about satisfying some sense of self importance/illusion ("I could heroically defend myself, if I get attacked") than actual self defense. I remember doing that when I was 16 and feeling very tough, I've grown out of it.
> The whole thing is preposterous. What ends-up happening is that lots of people secretly conceal-carry because they don't want to be victims. They do the math and conclude they rather go to jail than be dead. Truly sad.
I was attacked by a thief with a knife when I was in my 20’s. This shit is real. Don’t generalize it to ascribe some kind of a Hollywood fantasy/caricature and intent.
Not every society allows it's members to be free.
Well humans don't live in traditional Darwinian nature, our brains have evolved beyond that. A key distinction between humans and animals is our ability to think and imagine. Freedom, at it's root, is based on the idea that people have an inherent right to "think" and believe.
If "thought" is an intrinsic right, then it follows that freedom to think should be protected. It further follows that to protect thought, we need to protect speech, religion, certain aspects of privacy (i.e., you can't freely think if you're constantly being watched). A whole moral code can be built from the basic concept of the right to think.