Understanding Freedom, Determinism, and Social Contracts

Freedom

• According to the ancients, freedom meant taking part in the discussions of the city, joining the community, accepting their laws, and demanding their rights.
• According to modern society, freedom is an individual matter, at least in principle.

Freedom: refers to non-dependence and non-interference from others. This is a negative freedom.

Freedom: refers to the commitment and loyalty to oneself. It is internal and positive.

Plurality of Liberties

• Physical: the possibility of movement.
• Privacy: the ability to exercise our political rights of participation in the political life of our communities.
• Civil: ability to exercise our civil rights.
• Thinking: ability to think what we want and to express it.
• Religious: possibility to select and exercise a religion.

Determinism

Human beings are not free; only when deciding are they apparently free.

• Build: The human being, as a physical being, is determined by physical principles.

Indeterminism

Defends the possibility of free decision. Affirms the unpredictability of human behavior.

• Physical: chance and the laws of the stars. The behavior of nature, at least at the subatomic level, cannot be predicted.

Neither are we totally free, nor are we fully conditioned. The circumstances shape us; that is, we give conditions so that we maintain ourselves.

The media appear as an instrument of mediation between the citizen's private life and the public life of the people.

Human Interaction and Social Groups

• Primary/Community: Biological races prevail and affective (marriages) or stable and common interests, beliefs, political, social, religious.
• Secondary/Association: The interests are less stable and less basic. They are personal but calculated and usually are limited to a part of interests or a geographic area (leisure club, cooperative society).

Contractualism

A political theory that explains the origin and the exercise of political power in the legal form of a contract.

With the figure of the contracts, we get:

• A commitment of individual will to all -> general will.
• A formula that guarantees equality of all individuals' political power.
• A harmonization of individual interests with a common or general interest.
• A new approach to civil liberty, which is no longer a concession of the sovereign to the subjects but the exercise of citizen status.
• A rational legitimation of power, i.e., an explanation that starts from its own rational nature rather than supernatural explanations.

Classic Contractualism

It uses the figure of the contract to explain the rational form of political power that achieves harmony between the private and public dimensions of human life.

Neocontractualism

Retrieves the figure of the contract to explain the legitimacy of political power, but does so from a new political context where:

• The rational legitimacy of power is being replaced by an emotional legitimacy where rationalism is replaced by skepticism and relativism.
• Individualism has weakened the sense of community and has lessened the need for a public reason.
• The media appear as an instrument of mediation between the citizen's private life and the public life of the people.