I tend to think that you don’t need to adopt any particular position on free will to observe that people in North Korea lack freedom from government intervention in their lives, access to communication and information, a genuine plurality of viable life choices and other objectively identifiable things humans value.
Well, yes, it is hard to argue about NK vs West. But let’s try to control for the “non-liberty” confounders, such as income, wealth, social status, etc. Say, we take some upper middle-class person from Iran, Russia or China. It is quite likely that, when comparing their life with that of a Westerner of similar means, they would not immediately state that the Western person has more “objectively identifiable things humans value”. Obviously the sets of these valuable things are different, and the priorities different people assign to them would be different, but I am not sure that there is a universal measure everyone would agree upon as “more liberty”.
A universal measure for anything is a big demand. Mostly we get by with some sort of somewhat-fuzzy “reasonable person” standard, which obviously we can’t fully explicate in neurological terms either yet, but which is much more achievable.
Liberty isn’t a one-dimensional quality either, since for example you might have a country with little real freedom of the press but lots of freedom to own guns, or vice versa.
What you would have to do to develop a measure with significant intersubjective validity is to ask a whole bunch of relevantly educated people what things they consider important freedoms and what incentives they would need to be offered to give them up, to figure out how they weight the various freedoms. This is quite do-able, and in fact we do very similar things when we do QALY analysis of medical interventions to find out how much people value a year of life without sight compared to a year of life with sight (or whatever).
Fundamentally it’s not different to figuring out people’s utility functions, except we are restricting the domain of questioning to liberty issues.
Well, yes, it is hard to argue about NK vs West. But let’s try to control for the “non-liberty” confounders, such as income, wealth, social status, etc. Say, we take some upper middle-class person from Iran, Russia or China. It is quite likely that, when comparing their life with that of a Westerner of similar means, they would not immediately state that the Western person has more “objectively identifiable things humans value”. Obviously the sets of these valuable things are different, and the priorities different people assign to them would be different, but I am not sure that there is a universal measure everyone would agree upon as “more liberty”.
A universal measure for anything is a big demand. Mostly we get by with some sort of somewhat-fuzzy “reasonable person” standard, which obviously we can’t fully explicate in neurological terms either yet, but which is much more achievable.
Liberty isn’t a one-dimensional quality either, since for example you might have a country with little real freedom of the press but lots of freedom to own guns, or vice versa.
What you would have to do to develop a measure with significant intersubjective validity is to ask a whole bunch of relevantly educated people what things they consider important freedoms and what incentives they would need to be offered to give them up, to figure out how they weight the various freedoms. This is quite do-able, and in fact we do very similar things when we do QALY analysis of medical interventions to find out how much people value a year of life without sight compared to a year of life with sight (or whatever).
Fundamentally it’s not different to figuring out people’s utility functions, except we are restricting the domain of questioning to liberty issues.