Freedom Without Trimmings: The Perils of Trivalence

According to Matthew Kramer, a person is free to do something if she is able to do it, whereas she is unfree to do something if someone else is preventing her from doing it. Thus, on Kramer’s conception of freedom, it is possible to be neither free nor unfree to do something. This chapter highlights some counterintuitive implications of this trivalent conception, and criticizes Kramer’s attempt to avoid such implica- tions by means of a remedial tweaking of the formula for measuring freedom. It then defends bivalent conceptions against Kramer’s claim that they imply infinite degrees of freedom (or unfreedom). Finally, the chapter critically examines Kramer’s claim that the extent of a person’s overall freedom is partly a function of the value of her particular freedoms. Although the value of a particular freedom is itself trivalent (valuable, disvaluable, or neither valuable nor disvaluable), Kramer here rejects tri- valence in favor of bivalence, considering each freedom to be either valuable or not valuable. He thereby avoids a paradox that is generated by the trivalent evaluative approach to measuring freedom. However, his attempt to formulate an artificially bivalent evaluative approach generates conceptual problems of its own. The perils of trivalence outlined in this chapter can be avoided by adopting a more austere, biva- lent, non-evaluative conception of freedom.