Human Freedom and Perfectibility: Rousseau's Philosophy

Freedom and Perfectibility in Rousseau's Philosophy

Freedom

In addition to basic feelings, humans possess freedom in nature. In his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau calls animals "ingenious machines," meaning that their behavior is absolutely predetermined by nature or by instinct. Animals are not moral agents because they lack the basic requirements: reason and freedom. Rather, we should regard them as amoral beings, because they cannot choose their behavior and are therefore not responsible for it.

But unlike animals, humans are free. The peculiarity of human behavior is that it can be the result of a choice, and freedom is just that. We say that humans are moral agents.

Because humans are free to choose their actions, they are responsible for them. This is the fundamental condition that must be met by any moral agent. There is no freedom without responsibility, and responsibility can be neither vice nor virtue.

Freedom has different uses:

• In its natural sense, freedom can be defined as the proper and exclusive ability of humans to be able to choose, as opposed to natural instinct, which determines the necessary form of animal behavior. This freedom is closely linked with autonomy and self-determination. I am free or autonomous because my actions can respond to my will.
• In the specifically moral sense, it is the ability to determine one's own behavior according to one's own principles, overcoming passions and instincts.
• In the social or political sense of freedom, detailed by Rousseau in his Social Contract, it refers generally to communities or towns and consists of the possibility that these communities determine their own destiny, obeying the laws of the community.

Perfectibility

Perfectibility is a feature of human nature that allows individuals to develop qualities lacking in the state of nature, such as reason and sociability, which will transform them into moral agents. However, it is also the cause of their degeneration.

At the individual level, it enables education and the acquisition of new knowledge. While an animal, after a few months, is all that it will be over its life and what the species has been over thousands of years, human beings throughout history have been changing, and likewise throughout their lives, never losing the ability to learn and change.

In summary, perfectibility is a specific and unique quality of people, as individuals and as a species, that lets them change and build capacity. In the state of nature, these capacities were only in germ. It is the foundation of progress.