Concept of freedom - Is it possible to measure if anyone is free to any degree? Can freedom be proven?
Week 4 Assignment
- Is it possible to measure if anyone is free to any degree? Can freedom be proven?
Freedom can hardly be measure as freedom is a controversial abstract concept which people have different interpretations over it. We do not have an absolute definition over the term “freedom” and thereby there is no absolute operationalization used to measure freedom up to these days. Still, it is commonly agreed by the sociologists that freedom is bounded by many social forces including culture, social institutions, social positions and the like; and under all these social forces, the control over choices and directions that one can enjoy is freedom. By this commonly agreed definition, it is obviously that there is no absolute freedom because of the social constraints; what’s more, the definition of freedom is always changing according to the unceasing change of social forces. Therefore, we can never measure the extremity of freedom.
Be that as it may, freedom can still be proved and measured in relative terms by comparing the indicators of political rights, economic rights, and civil liberties of different societies as they shows the controls over choices and directions that one can have under social constraints. The more control one has, the more freedom one gets in general. Let’s take China and Hong Kong as example. China has a relatively stricter norm in terms of freedom of speech when comparing to Hong Kong, hence we can say that people in China have less freedom of expression compared to those in Hong Kong. By comparison using different indicators, we may measure the relative freedom of different societies.