Ok, so last night me and jerris were watching "The Daily Show", and they did a bit on GW's inaugeration speech. They put counters on the bottom of the screen, one for freedom and one for liberty. anyhow, I dont remember who won, but Jerris and I were talking, and what really is the difference between freedom and liberty?
mirriam websters online says "FREEDOM has a broad range of application from total absence of restraint to merely a sense of not being unduly hampered or frustrated," and "LIBERTY suggests release from former restraint or compulsion."
But when we use the words, do we really make a distinction between them? Can I say that a group of people have freedom without liberty? or vice versa? I mean, not using the definition of the words, but the every day connotations.
I wanted a more specific definition of freedom and liberty, so i looked around. A better definition for the word freedom might be "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action." from a different webster site. and from the same site, liberty was defined as "the power to do as one pleases."
using those definitions, the words sound a whole lot more similar... So maybe they are just synonyms after all...
anyhow, i was just curious about the words and all that, and i was bored in class, so i decided to write this. maybe next time i'll use my blog to write my notes and post them, instead of a regular post... maybe.
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2 comments:
Good thoughts,B. I have wondered about what we percieve as freedom, specially since allt his con law stuff. Bels is helping me write this. He's holding down the keyboard. You should take that cat quiz on Crytal's blog. I was the cat that looked like Bubba :) I've also been wondering about truth and justice. We use those terms so much in the law, but what are they really. They're so intangible. "I want the truth!" "You can't handle the truth!" but what really is the truth? Isn't truth based on view point? A logical truth does not encompass what a human views when he sees "truth." What do you think? ;)
I've got a couple different views on this, portions of which are brand new, inspired in part by my talking with other people about this. They, however, will neither post nor read here, so I'll play spokesman and pass along what we came up with.
Freedom is inherant, vice liberty which (brandon--a new brandon--says earned, I say given).
This Paul Hartman guy says, among other things here "Freedoms end when they encounter a contrary freedom of another person. You are free to smoke, until you encounter my freedom not to inhale your smoke. Liberty lacks that distinction: my liberty never contradicts or limits yours."
Which is almost exactly the point I was trying to explain, this just does a better job of minimizing the number of words used to convey the meaning.
here's something else.
And I'll stop there, becuase I'm sure you probably saw most of the same things I saw when I googled for 'freedom vs. liberty'
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