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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

I’m trying to engage with the author here and maybe I’ll read the book that this refers to, but I think the author has this backwards.

It’s that when you little to no choice we say you aren’t free. It doesn’t follow that having more choices makes you free, but it is a prerequisite. Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.

Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author.

This piece makes me uneasy, it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom. I’m wondering where this is going.

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The article says 'abundance'. The point you make that having choices is a requisite for freedom, but truth is that freedom comes from meaningful choices, not an abundance of them.

You have a myriad of artificially created choices that amount to more or less the same outcome; think of a supermarket, where all products are the same high-processed food and imported vegetables. Freedom would be having a competing family-owned local shop with proximity products.

To have meaningful choice, you cannot depend of having a single homogeneous environment providing all the choices you can make; this can come from having healthy competition, or sometimes by you creating your own choices when there were none.

There are absolutely ways in which limiting our choices increases overall freedom: specifically, when our choices harm others, or take away their freedoms. Indeed, this is what laws that create a safe and healthy society based in rule of law are.

Removing our freedom—or ability to choose—to kill others, take them as slaves, take away their stuff*, etc, is an increase in overall freedom of the society, especially as that removal is expanded to everyone in the society, no matter how wealthy or powerful they are.

* With impunity, through laws and enforcement thereof; being able to physically prevent us from doing such things en masse is a different kind of question.

The author kind of lost me in the first few paragraphs because she bases her entire thesis on this idea that we frame freedom in terms of having many choices. But I've never heard anyone do that! As you said, people generally recognize that having choices available is a prerequisite to freedom, but they do not require it to be a large number of choices, nor associate more choices with more freedom. So the author's entire argument seemed to me to be based on a strawman.

Meanwhile, I've heard that very argument every time some official organisation makes a proposal to regulate the market to limit the dominance of some dominant players. Those distorting the market in their favour will oppose any regulation that reduces their power by bemoaning how it will limit consumer's choice.

I think all of you are getting hung up on quantity versus quality.

Past a very low threshold, it’s the quality of the choices that matter not the quantity. And I don’t mean workmanship or value, but the cost/benefit ratio of the choice.

I mean I certainly agree, but I never said otherwise. I am simply saying that the author is arguing against a viewpoint I've never actually seen expressed.

>Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.

Your example is completely orthogonal to liberty. Choices are completely orthogonal. If the serf could leave and not starve, he still wouldn't be free because they would find and drag him back and punish him. He wasn't permitted to make the choice, it being incidental that he wouldn't survive long enough to be punished for it in most circumstances.

If they had refrained from punishing serfs that leave you'd still insist there is no freedom there, I think, because of the starvation. But no one is obligated to feed you so that you can choose options that would otherwise starve you.

>Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices

For good reason. Given choices, humans inevitably pick the worst of them. And I'm not talking about those that are only bad options in hindsight.

>it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom.

There's no effort, that's called reality. Reality limits choices, and it is effortless.

We have the choice to be free for a time and then beaten or killed? no?

I suspect the appeal of Jane Austin is characters making the most of their limited choices. I don’t think anyone reading her can ignore the vast set of rules the characters have hooked themselves and each other to. It’s integral to the story. It’s small rebellions that make the characters feel alive.

Yeah, technically we’re always free to do whatever we want. Other people are the issue, not our ability to choose.

> Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author.

Even sort of bing a libertarian, objectively speaking, yes, I think other people will make bad decisions with their choices.

I find this argument interesting, because I think it’s a plea to rationality. people who consider themselves good/rational are humble enough not to paint the rest of humanity with such a broad brushstroke. But I think it’s wrong, I think it serves more as an emotional plea than a rational one.

So yes, I think the author probably thinks that too many choices will lead people to make bad choices, and in fact not only do I agree with the author but I would guess many? Most? People would be happy to apply this to themselves.

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