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"This is not liberty, this is license" has always been a tyrant's excuse.
That's just ad hominem. Who gives a shit if it's a tyrant's excuse?
Is it true? Whatever the answer it, it certainly doesn't seem "objective".
The tyrant is a tyrant because he's taking away your liberty, in this case by claiming it is not liberty at all, but "license" (which is liberty that he doesn't like).
I won't claim this dynamic never happens, that would be silly, but you're not really engaging with the idea if you think it can only be invoked in this sense.
Burke, whom it would seems farcical to call a tyrant, summed up the issue pretty tightly in my opinion:
There may be some platonic ideal of some other way in which it is invoked, but in practice any time someone says "this is not liberty, it is license", it's because they don't want you to have liberty.
Burke, indeed, is explicitly saying that -- he's saying that people who don't "put moral chains upon their own behavior" (meaning the French, apparently) are not qualified for liberty.
And the fact the French he was talking about did push things so far it destroyed them and Europe doesn't move you at all?
Why would it move me? If indeed he was correct and the French weren't worthy of liberty, it does not change what liberty is. That some people, allowed liberty, will destroy themselves and others with the latitude thye have, does not make liberty into "not liberty".
Do you truly have no feeling that one's own whims can enslave oneself or is this truly just a semantic disagreement where you're unwilling to concede any moral limitation is required to be free because you see freedom as the absence of limitations?
If the latter, I enjoin you to reconsider because ultimately these words exist to describe reality, and the Rousseauan state of nature where the removal of some chains doesn't create new and more terrible ones is, as we have painfully learned, completely fictitious.
One's whims cannot enslave oneself. One who is free to indulge one's whims is truly more free than one whose responsibilities result in them being constrained to a much narrower and (to them) less desirable set of choices, and certainly more free than one whose actions are externally constrained by a paternalistic entity for their own good -- even if it really is for their own good.
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'Anything goes' has always been the rallying cry of those who want to tear down civilization. Tyrants and anarchists both love to twist language to suit their ends. Call it license or call it degeneracy, either way, it’s not freedom worth defending.
When one uses the word "freedom" in its most common, everyday meaning of "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", that's not twisting language, that's just using the most common, everyday meaning of the word. I would argue that it's actually more of a twisting of language to use the word "freedom" to mean something more philosophical, like you are doing. But in any case, this is just a semantic argument.
Is slavery to the passions coercion?
Who are you to claim everyone's equally slaved to such passions?
I feel like completely inventing claims out of thin air like this kinda defeats the purpose of this forum and is specifically against the rules. What possesses you to do that?
My question has absolutely no bearing on how widespread this phenomenon is, I'm just asking if it counts. Since you know, it's fairly well known issue that requires some clarification.
It certainly does- what are "the" passions?
If you're going with the answer of "lust and degeneracy" (which is what I believe you were implying, and what it directly says upthread) that's just "stop liking what I don't like" with the letters rearranged. While you've correctly identified every other response to that argument are [more sophisticated] "no, also fuck you"s, the argument they contain- that being "who decides, and why should the failure of others to control themselves be my problem; and the fruits of my virtue redistributed, stolen at gunpoint, to benefit those without?"- hasn't been answered.
In a sibling comment, you quote
but I am more qualified for civil liberty because I have that disposition. So your "license", that you might demand I forfeit for the salvation of others, is at the same time inherently granted to me simply by being better at this than most people are, thus claiming I don't deserve this liberty is little more than theft.
Pleasures and pains.
Then why do you take mere discussion of the phenomenon as an attack on your rights?
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