Freedom and Extended Self

Freedom and the Extended Self
John Christman
Pennsylvania State University
ABSTRACT. Theories of social freedom all rest on assumptions about the nature of
the agents who are the subjects of that condition. Typically, such theorizing focuses
on the condition of individual agents, whether they are acting in cooperative (or
competitive) interaction with others or on their own. However, the question of
how we should understand freedom or liberty is complicated when we take seri-
ously the ways that agents can be understood to be deeply (if not essentially)
socially and diachronically structured. In the present article I try to show that
certain plausible assumptions about human agency and self-conceptions, namely
that agents exist over time and in socially structured matrices of identity, compli-
cate certain mainstream accounts of liberty. To make these points, I focus on pure
opportunity accounts of (negative) liberty. After laying out the general contours of
such an approach, I describe what I mean by the socially and temporally extended
self as the subject of social freedom. In other words, I explain how factors other
than the current state of the person described in isolation from others must be
included in a sufficiently rich account of the agent. I proceed to show that the only
way to explain how freedom can be gained or lost for such agents is to look
beyond the pure opportunity theories of liberty and to conceptualize that idea in
terms of the agent’s diachronic practical (social) identity. I also discuss why certain
theorists in the literature have resisted moves of this type and respond to those
concerns. I conclude by demonstrating that such an expanded understanding of
the subject of freedom shows how liberal political principles and institutions, in
which the protection of liberty is a central tenet, rely for their functioning and
coherence on robust democratic practices in the societies in which they operate.
KEYWORDS. Freedom, individualism, agency, social self
I. INTRODUCTION
T heories of social freedom all depend on assumptions about the

agents who are considered the subject of that condition. Stanley
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 21, no. 2(2014): 225-254.

© 2014 by Centre for Ethics, KU Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.21.2.3030698
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ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES – JUNE 2014
Benn, for example, claims that a model of freedom presupposes an agent

who has a range of powers, resources and opportunities, confronts
opportunity costs, has a set of beliefs relevant to those factors, and eval-
uates activities in ways that make possible the formation of intentions
(1988, 152f.). This is typical in that it assumes a subject who is considered
individually as a person making choices and considering options on his
or her own or in interaction (competitive or cooperative) with other sep-
arate individuals at a particular time and place.1 However, the question of
how we should understand freedom or liberty in the sense taken up in
political philosophy is complicated when we take seriously the ways that
agents can be understood as deeply, if not essentially, socially and tem-
porally structured. When we understand agency and identity as consti-
tuted by relations with others and extending over time, many common
approaches to modelling freedom must be reconsidered or redrawn. My
aim in the following pages, therefore, is to show that certain plausible
assumptions about human agency, specifically that agents exist over time
and in socially structured matrices of identity, complicate certain main-
stream accounts of social liberty.2
As is well known, conceptions of social freedom generally gravitate
toward one of two poles: positive accounts that theorize freedom as an
expression of effective and authentic agency, and negative views that see it
as a function of the absence of interference (see Carter 2012). Republican
accounts hover between the two, although one of the best developed repub-
lican views is said by its author to be essentially a negative account.3 Accord-
ing to negative views, freedom is an inverse function of impediments (inter-
ferences, restraints, and so on) to action, and the subject of such freedom is
an individual agent making choices either in coordination/cooperation with
others or alone. In all cases, however, the action being considered – pre-
vented by the interferences, etc. – is his or hers alone. This is what I call the
static-individualist conception of the agent as the subject of freedom.
However, actions often occur in clusters, composed of close relations
with others as well as in groups over time (as with plans, projects, and
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JOHN CHRISTMAN – FREEDOM AND THE EXTENDED SELF
long-term aspirations). More than mere aggregations of individual actions,

such joint endeavours have identity conditions that make essential refer-
ence to their collective nature. Such complex, socially structured action
types can be disrupted in many ways, resulting in a loss of freedom for
their participants. But the view of freedom that assumes a static indi-
vidualist understanding of agency will miss or mis-describe such losses.
This is especially true of standard negative models, which see freedom as
a matter of pure opportunity to act. Assuming a socio-temporal concep-
tion of the self as the subject of freedom will thus complicate, if not
undercut, these pure opportunity accounts of liberty.4
This is not to say that pure opportunity accounts of freedom are
incoherent or do not capture a sense of the term that picks out something
to be valued, albeit a rather amorphous and diffuse kind of value. Indeed,
at certain points I will admit that the alternative approach to freedom
I will sketch here does not capture all the ways in which a person can be
said to be free, and pure opportunity views will help to capture these
other ways in some cases.5 The arguments here point to the fact that
other phenomena that arguably count as freedom or losses of freedom
are not properly captured by these negative models. What this means is
that views that define freedom as exclusively the absence of obstacles to an
individual’s actions at a time are overly narrow.
The case for this narrowness rests on the assumption of the social
and temporal nature of agency, referring to non-individualist aspects of
the persons who are the subject of freedom as well as their diachronically
structured activities and projects that manifest it. I will proceed in section
II by first outlining the components of the major negative accounts of
freedom that are relevant to our discussion. I will not be able to spell out
any particular view in great detail, but I hope to make clear that the views
in question share a commitment to a static account of the self as the
subject of freedom.6 In section III, I will describe what I mean by the
‘extended’ self or ‘socio-temporal’ agent. I hope to illustrate how persons
sometimes act essentially as members of collectivities and so the conditions
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of success of those actions refer to elements of the person’s social space

and temporal trajectory. That is, factors other than the current state of the
person described in isolation will be essential aspects of his or her action.
Moreover, his or her identity as the agent who initiates such actions must
make essential reference to those factors. The bulk of my discussion will
focus on the social aspects of the extended self, but I hope to make clear
how temporal, diachronic factors function in this way also. In section VI,
I include some speculative remarks about the implications for a diachronic
understanding of the self as the subject of freedom.
The only way to make sense of the freedom exercised (or lost) in
such cases, I suggest, is to see freedom in relation to the practical per-
spectives of the agents, their practical identity (Section IV). Only such
reference will give an adequate account of how social (and diachronic)
agents exercise or lose freedom in these cases. While I cannot lay out fully
an alternative conception of freedom that would take proper account of
this broader conception of agency, I hope to sketch its main outlines and
defend its core elements, in particular the way that freedom relates to
agents’ practical perspectives. In Section V, I will consider why theorists
in this literature have resisted making reference to agents’ perspectives
when defining freedom, but argue that their concerns are exaggerated or
misplaced when applied to the view suggested here.
In broad terms, therefore, we see how the static individualism domi-
nant in the liberal tradition, and in particular in its understanding of social
freedom, must be replaced or augmented by more complex models of
human action and agency. In the final section (VI), I conclude by showing
how this understanding of the subject of social freedom requires a robust
role for democratic practices and institutions for the protection of liberty.
II. STANDARD NEGATIVE ACCOUNTS OF FREEDOM
Theorists such as Ian Carter, Hillel Steiner, Matthew Kramer and others
have been attempting in recent years to carefully carve out a defensible
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conception of liberty in a negative sense that, they argue, represents a

truly neutral, empirically measurable form of that idea (Carter 1999;
Steiner 1994; Kramer 2003). Such a conception, they claim, avoids the
pitfalls of both positive notions and rival negative concepts that, for
example, see freedom as a moralized idea, or understand liberty as defined
with reference to desires, or do not give a properly restricted notion of
constraint. The motivation in general is to develop this idea squarely
within the confines of a liberal empiricism, where value neutrality and
measurability are desiderata.
The main idea of these views is that in order for the idea of freedom
to function the way it does in theoretical discourse, it should be seen as
referring purely to the absence of physical barriers to actions agents are
able to perform that were put in place by other human beings, directly or
indirectly. These theories are complex and well developed, and I will skip
over many of these complexities here. For present purposes, a paraphrase
of Kramer’s view can stand in as an exemplary case. Let me begin by
quoting him:
[…] a person is free to do x if and only if she is able to do x, and she

is unfree to do x if and only if she would be able to do so in the
absence of being directly or indirectly prevented from so doing so by
the actions or dispositions of other persons (2003, 15).
This is a view of particular freedom – to do x. Overall freedom is defined

as a function of such particular freedoms.7
Such an approach – which we can call the ‘pure opportunity’ account
of freedom – is motivated by several factors. First, it is claimed that only
this view allows freedom to be adequately measured, since only by seeing
liberty as a function of neutrally described physical barriers (put in place
by other human beings) can we make precise comparisons between dif-
ferent levels of freedom without invoking unobservable (subjective) phe-
nomena. Second, only this view shows how freedom has ‘non-specific
value’ over and above any particular valued pursuit that it makes possible.
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In so doing, therefore, purely negative views of this sort uniquely allow

us to view freedom as a concept compatible with broad liberal neutrality
about people’s specific commitments (see, for example, Carter 1999,
16-17; Steiner 1993, chapter 2).
Various considerations have been raised to show that freedom in this
sense is of general value for people, specifically because of the wide vari-
ety of goods that might be available for agents to pursue, which they may
or may not currently desire; so that increasing options for action increases
the chances that such goods can be successfully pursued. This is the non-
specific value claimed for this version of liberty by its adherents (Carter
1999, chapter 2).
I have no need to resist this conclusion here,8 namely that mere
open spaces have a diffuse and non-specific value unrelated to any
actual (or projected) desires of the agent. This take on the value of
freedom is motivated in part by a need to avoid making reference to
agents’ desires or motives in specifying the desiderata of a constraint.9
As I will discuss below, this is done to avoid concerns about Stoic
accounts of freedom according to which one can become more free by
changing oneself rather than changing the world one faces, seemingly
an absurd consequence of such views. I will claim that this consequence
is not all absurd, but before getting to that, I want to stress here that
this silence about the nature of the agent’s perspective and motives
forces these theorists to see freedom simply as a function of possible
actions (not prevented by other human beings) that an individual agent
might engage in.10
In the discussions that follow, however, I will suggest how a person’s
freedom can be affected (limited) by actions that affect not merely (and
perhaps not at all) his or her own opportunities, considered as options to
pursue single actions, but affect significant members of a group to which
he or she belongs and with which he or she identifies. In other words,
I want to show how pure opportunity accounts of freedom are inade-
quate in trying to capture the freedom of socially structured agents.
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III. THE SOCIO-TEMPORAL NATURE OF AGENCY
To say that selves should be understood or modelled as socially and dia-

chronically ‘extended’ is to say that the description under which persons
should be represented in normative social theory must include irreducible
social and temporal elements. That is, people’s identities, by which we
describe their interests for the purposes of constructing normative prin-
ciples and concepts, include reference to persons and factors other than
the agent him or herself (at a particular time). The strongest version of
such a thesis understands selves (in this context) as essentially socio-temporal,
while a weaker but still very important version sees them as contingently
or practically socio-temporal. In order to avoid various thorny metaphys-
ical issues, I will only assume the weaker version of this view here.11
Focusing on the social dimension, the claim is that in order to identify
persons as subjects of critical or normative principles, we must refer to
their relation to other persons and elements of their social surrounding
(such as their culture).12 In the present context, this merely means that to
understand human actions in a way relevant to capturing the idea of free-
dom, we must see selves as existing in relation to surrounding persons and
social factors. This is because their actions, plans, and aspirations, as well
as their very identities, are structured by those relations; so being free or
not (or to some degree) is meaningful only in reference to those relations.
The social nature of selves and actions can be illustrated by what we
can call ‘partnerships’ in a special sense of that term. Partnerships are
relations among two or more persons where each person’s deliberations
about his or her values and interests essentially involve cooperative com-
munication with the other(s). The person does not consider his or her
interests or plans as existing independently of (and then adjusted in light
of) the other’s interests, except provisionally, but rather as arising out of
such an interaction and communication.13 Long-term romantic partners
often see their desires and interests in some sectors of their lives in this
way. Other members of close-knit communities also understand their
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needs this way at times. People understand their values and motives, and
themselves, in relation to the others in the partnership.
But even in more casual connections (‘partnerships’ in a more col-
loquial sense), people coordinate their desires and actions with others, so
that their activities cannot be understood as separate movements aggre-
gated into a coordinated whole, but rather as part of that larger action
itself. Playing music in an orchestra is a typical example, although other
collective actions that follow a deeply ingrained script exemplify this as
well. Being prevented from engaging in such activities, and hence being
unfree to so engage in them, cannot be understood as being individually
prevented from acting (since the symphony could still play without an
individual viola player say and one could play one’s own viola part alone).
Rather, the prevention occurs at the level of the group, with different
contexts determining which part of the group must be functioning for
the collective activity to be successfully occurring or be prevented.14
In cultural contexts, one might be prevented from engaging in an activ-
ity even when one’s own behaviour is not at all curtailed. Traditional soci-
eties, for example, are often structured by public rituals organized around
designated community members. If these special designees are prevented
from acting, or their authority has been stripped or if they have been pub-
licly defamed, the activity embodied by those rituals has been prevented.
This is so even if I, a lowly member of the community with no special role
to play in that particular ritual, am not prevented from acting at all. I still
cannot engage in what may be a personally profound and important activ-
ity for me, but that prevention, and hence the loss of freedom it represents,
can only be understood by considering my social identity (as a community
member) and the activities and plans structured around it.
Admittedly, the conditions that are required for a social or group
identity to remain stable are highly variable, and I give no precise speci-
fication here. All I claim is that clear cases exist where oppressive policies
(or other hindrances) so undercut the ability of some members of social
groups from continuing in the practices that render those groups socially
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functional that those practices become essentially prohibited, and these

policies need not directly inhibit the actions of all or even most members
of the group in question.
While successful eradication of cultures is rare, at least in recent times
and regarding cultures large enough to function in the practical identities
of their members, attempts to do so are tragically numerous. “Kill the
Indian but save the man” was a rallying cry for the massive effort to
‘civilize’ Native Americans in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centu-
ries.15 Efforts to force the assimilation of the Catalan people in Spain, the
Roma in central Europe, the Mormons in the US, and of course the Jews,
are examples of coordinated efforts to disrupt enough of the central iden-
tifying characteristics and activities of a group to make them essentially
disappear.16 To understand how efforts to destabilize and so eradicate the
group in question function, we must grasp how the identity of each mem-
ber depends on the functioning of that group, and how that identity is
itself damaged or destroyed when the group is eradicated.
The idea here echoes Margaret Gilbert’s notion of a plural subject
(and its attendant notion, a ‘joint commitment’; Gilbert 1997; 1989).
In Gilbert’s view, plural subjects organize their activity around a commit-
ment to others oriented toward shared activities and goals, commitments
that are interdependent and mutual. Such commitments are ubiquitous
in human life, she says, as they underlie the function of languages,
social conventions, and social groups themselves. Indeed, she claims that
“[n]o possible explanation of the actual cognitive background of human
behavior and practical reasoning could be complete, or even barely ade-
quate, without appeal to plural subject concepts” (1997, 29).
The idea of shared agency that I am describing here goes one step
further than Gilbert’s account of plural subjects, or more precisely, it
describes a subset of her category. The phenomena I am here describing
does involve persons coordinating (knowingly) their aims and actions in
a form of joint commitment. They also support the use of ‘we’ language
that supports inferences of the form ‘‘we are doing x’ so ‘I have a reason
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to do/not do y’’. But the further condition I am adding is that the agent
in question identifies him or herself as a person with this group connection
and joint commitment. It is an inherent part of his or her practical iden-
tity that he or she is a plural subject in this way. In this sense, one’s
participation in the activity of such groups is not optional in the way that
conforming to social conventions and rules might be, or at least one
defects from them only at great psychic cost, involving perhaps an ‘iden-
tity crisis’ as it has been labelled.
Cultural and social identity groups are complex entities. One’s iden-
tity group may break down because, over time, certain key members of
the group are prevented from practicing the functions crucial to keeping
the group alive so to speak. Leaders, elders, teachers (of the rituals), orga-
nizers and symbolic figureheads may have to function in some manner
for the group to be said to still exist. Even if single (other) members of
the group still see themselves as inchoate (potential) members, they can-
not function as real social group members if there is no group expressing
the meaningful forms that constitute the group.
Consider, for example, a tightly knit cultural group with which a person
closely identifies, such as a Native American nation or tribe. A single indi-
vidual will seldom be specifically essential for the existence and stability of
such a group (although a tribal leader may be so visible and significant as a
group organizer and symbol of unity that his or her defection or death could
cause the group’s stability to teeter). There must, however, be a threshold
number of existing participants for the tribe to be understood as currently
functioning, although that number may be indeterminate. A member of such
a tribe might identify him or herself deeply with the group, internalizing the
evaluative schema of tribal virtues into his or her own practical identity.
Now consider that the existence or social functioning of the tribe is
threatened, as happened (or came close to happening) with any number of
Native American groups in the last three centuries. If some social forces
and policies, such as the kind of pronounced policies of eradication that
were undertaken by the US government in the nineteenth and early
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twentieth centuries, effectively destroyed the tribe and/or made the con-
tinuation of its self-defining rituals impossible, then any identifying member
of the tribe would lose the ability to pursue activities defined by their role
in a functioning cultural practice. It may well be the case that for some
single individual no physical action has been prevented, no basic movement
or behaviour has been interfered with or restricted. But without the func-
tioning of the larger group, it is impossible for him or her to continue to
participate in the public rituals and other social activities that defined the
tribe’s cultural identity, and hence his or her own identity. He or she is now
prevented from being a Crow Indian (for example). But as an individual,
he or she has not been interfered with or restrained.17
Other cases can be imagined in which outward manifestations of the
group’s identity are forbidden (language, folklore, rituals, symbols, etc.) and
other forms of collective practice are disallowed. Such cases are ubiquitous
in the ebb and flow of the social dynamics of oppression. Insofar as such
oppression should be understood as a loss of freedom, then an individual-
ized conception of (negative) liberty will not properly capture that loss. This
is because the focus of such accounts is the actions of individuals taken as
such. Even if those actions are coordinated with others or conditional upon
others’ decisions, the agents in question are seen as acting as single entities.
Cases of group or collective freedom have been discussed by defend-
ers of the pure opportunity account and it is worth touching on that
treatment. Both Ian Carter and Matthew Kramer discuss this issue and
claim that in cases where individuals have the separate ability (freedom)
to do X but do not have that ability (freedom) together, we should nev-
ertheless understand that as a function of the individual (un-)freedom of
the separate persons involved. The touch point for these discussions is
G.A. Cohen’s classic analysis of collective unfreedom, a condition in
which the number of opportunities to act in a certain way (escape a
room, for example) is fewer than the number of agents positioned to so
act. Collectively the group is unfree even if any particular individual is free
to do the act in question, provided enough others do not do so first.
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Carter argues, for example, that even if the group cannot act together
(to escape the room) but each member can act as an individual (to escape),
there is no reason to think this is not a case of individual unfreedom: each
person lacks the freedom to leave the room provided others fail to coop-
erate. Just like two people pushing a car who cannot push it by them-
selves: both engage in an action (as individuals) that can only be accom-
plished together. But this is not a case of a group having a kind of
freedom that is not a function of what each member has (see Carter 1999,
253-256; see also Cohen 1983; Kramer 2004, chapter 2). The dependence
of each person on the cooperation (solidarity, etc.) of his or her co-
members just means that for him or her the action being attempted is
difficult, due to the need for that cooperation.
Matthew Kramer discusses Carter’s response and suggests that it may
be too hasty. For all we have to do is imagine cases of joint action where
the participation of each group member (which has the effect of prevent-
ing others from succeeding in the action in question) is not difficult. In
such cases, the seeming lack of freedom cannot be explained with refer-
ence to the difficulty of the act (specifically, the difficulty of obtaining the
cooperation of others). What Kramer argues, alternatively, is that situa-
tions of this sort mean that persons are prevented from doing things
(leaving the room individually) without being responsible for others’ being conse-
quently stuck. This unfreedom is at the individual level and so does not
amount to an irreducibly collective (un-)freedom. He concludes that even
if the action is such that participation by one person is necessary for the
participation of the other (in that action, because of its joint character),
it is nevertheless the case that the freedom to participate in the action is
ascribable to each individual. “The irreducibly collective nature of the
action does not translate into the irreducibly collective nature of the free-
dom [...] to perform it” (Kramer 2004, 239).
The cases I am featuring here, however, have a significantly different
structure. The collective nature of the activity (and in a sense the agents
undertaking them) are not mere aggregations of individual actions taken by
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each participant, nor are they conditional actions requiring (causally) the
coordinated actions of others. Rather they are essentially collective or social
in nature. A person cannot be a member of a family without other relatives,
and a family is not merely a collection of related individuals, but a group
whose inter-relatedness itself constitutes the group. A religion, a culture, a
social group, and other such essentially collective entities have a similar
form. So the cases I present here have the following features: they involve
activities that cannot be accurately described without reference to some
(perhaps not fully determinate) number of persons; different participants in
the collective may play different roles in constituting it as the collective
entity it is (and these roles may or may not be interchangeable, depending
on the case), but the activities of at least some (albeit indeterminate) subset
of the group’s members is essential to group functioning; and the partici-
pants themselves deeply identify with the group and at least some of the
activities that are central to the group’s existence, such as social rituals,
religious rites, family gatherings, traditions, and so on.
Carter would analyze this case as merely the specification of the con-
tingent conditions under which any individual can enjoy a particular free-
dom: my freedom to eat dinner with my family is causally dependent on
the actions of other people, namely my mother and father and siblings
(whoever makes up my family) acting in a way that makes my particular
meal possible, specifically getting married, having children, acting like a
family and so on. But I suggest that a more adequate interpretation of the
conditions of such actions refers to the constitutive elements of the group
action itself: my membership in social groups that engage in collective
activities, groups whose existence is part of my identity, is not merely caus-
ally necessary for my engaging in some group-related activity, it is constitutive
of such activities. I can sit down with a group of people and engage in the
objectively indiscernible actions of eating with them, asking about their day,
quarrelling with the one closest to my age, and so on, but this will not
constitute ‘eating with my family’ if those people are not related to me in
the right way. Their actions (or a subset of them) are part of the identity
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conditions of my social act. It is not merely difficult for me to act without

them (under this act description), it is conceptually impossible.
Defenders of negative accounts of freedom might also try to accom-
modate a social understanding of identity and action in another way, one
to which I am much more sympathetic. Some defenders of the pure
opportunity view, such as Matthew Kramer, take seriously the way that
freedom involves ways of being as well as ways of acting. As he puts it:
“An exercise of a freedom by some person P is the actualization of any
possibility that has been open to P, whether or not the actualization
occurs through some action of hers” (Kramer 2004, 169). However, he
does not consider the forms of social existence discussed here. Insofar as
one’s social identity involves reference both to elements external to the
(physical) person and also to one’s past and future, then one can describe
losses of freedom as the prevention of being the kind of person one actu-
ally is. That is, if one defines oneself as a person with a certain cultural
profile, and the activities and public recognition of the culture that defines
that profile are suppressed, then one is not able to experience one’s estab-
lished social identity, to be the person one already is.
But as I said, insofar as opportunity theorists are willing to adopt the
language of ‘being’ in describing modes of freedom and unfreedom, then
space has been carved out for the conclusions I want to come to here.
I want to push that move specifically to make better room for the kinds
of social (and diachronic) dimensions of identity I have been discussing.
In what follows, I suggest an additional way to characterize freedom that
pays better homage to the extended nature of agency.18
IV. FREEDOM AND SOCIAL PRACTICAL IDENTITIES
So what does this understanding of the social structure of identity lead to

in a model of freedom? Answering such a question would depend on the
contours of a full account of freedom, a concept that is complex and,
I think, has various dimensions.19 In focusing on the limitations of pure
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opportunity accounts of freedom, I by no means want to imply that other

elements of agents’ capacities, deliberations and relations with others will
not also be relevant to such a full account of liberty. In any full account
of the various dimensions of freedom, however, it will be necessary to
specify the ways in which constraints (presumably put in place by the
actions of others, although that is a controversial requirement) prevent
agents from acting or being a certain type of person in ways that will
count as a reduction in their freedom.
Sticking with the aspect of liberty that has to do with constraints, we
can say the following: freedom should be understood as the absence of
obstacles that prevent the pursuit of valued ways of life. By ‘valued’ I mean
considered potentially worthwhile from the perspective of the practical
identities (and hence social self-conceptions) of the people involved. This
is not the same as ‘actually valued’ – i.e. currently desired – because many
things will be valuable from the perspective of my practical identity that
I do not currently desire. It also does not mean simply ‘possibly desired’
as Berlin suggested in his view of negative freedom (1969, xxxix; for
discussion see Arneson 1985), for that is too open-ended. There are many
desires that are (conceptually?) possible for a person to have, but will not
be within the purview of his or her practical identity. Nevertheless, this
view of constraints that ties them to pursuits considered valuable from
someone’s perspective is narrower than the view defended by pure oppor-
tunity accounts that make no reference to practical perspectives at all.
As I will explain further below, however, defining constraints relative to
agents’ practical identities will allow us to classify restrictions on group
activities of the sort I discussed in the previous section properly as limita-
tions on freedom.
I refer here to the rather vague notion of ‘ways of life’ that are ‘val-
ued from the perspective of one’s practical identity’. The former phrase
refers to projects and plans as well as the type of person one understands
oneself to be. The idea of a practical identity is used here in Christine
Korsgaard’s sense, in that such an identity reflects an evaluative perspective
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that guides judgment generally and defines one’s self-understanding and

character. What is valuable from the perspective of a practical identity is
a broad and partially indeterminate array of action types and modes of
social existence that one can regard approvingly as worth pursuing (Kors-
gaard 1996, 101ff.).
In my view, therefore, a theory of freedom must, among other things,
define constraints as those factors preventing the activities and states of
existence that can be minimally valued from the perspective of one’s
practical identity over time. This means that constraints are characterized
with reference to the agent’s perspective. And while reference to each
person’s practical identity may seem to render the account of freedom
overly idiosyncratic, social policy that aims to provide or protect freedom
will be able to generalize over a broad range of identities. Any agent,
however they define their values, will not be able to pursue a minimally
valued way of life if they are imprisoned, prevented from working at a
tolerable job, denied a right to practice their religion, and so on. Many
standard guarantees of a democratic society will be justified according to
this view because they are necessary for any of a broad range of practical
perspectives plausibly thought to be present in a population. (In the con-
cluding section below I return to the relevance of democracy to this view
of freedom.)20
Actions, plans, and projects are ‘sanctioned’ by one’s practical iden-
tity when they could be considered a valued pursuit given the broad value
commitments that constitute that identity. Those commitments can be
described at various levels of abstraction, from ‘generally engaging in
fulfilling and socially beneficial activities’ to ‘being a good father to my
daughter’.21 But these value categories may not map on to current desires,
in that I may define myself, for instance, as a religious person and so have
reason to engage in various rituals and acts of devotion, but I may not
desire to engage in any particular acts during this period in my life (or not
any one particular act, such as going to Mass if I were a Catholic). In this
way, action types valued from one’s practical perspective constitute a
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broader category of acts than those actually desired. Having choices about
what one might desire to do is valuable since such choice allows one to
deliberate about possible actions, change one’s mind, and take responsi-
bility for the actions one in fact chooses to do.22
The core idea here is that a person’s identity grounds reasons to act,
under current conditions and under counterfactual conditions should cir-
cumstances change. The projects sanctioned by my practical identity are
those I could have reason to pursue given the person I am. If I think of
myself as a music lover, this may one day ground a reason to begin study-
ing the music of a different culture, even if under current conditions I have
no desire to do this. Options that allow me to do such things count as
elements of my freedom and barriers to such options count as a constraint.
I suggest that this approach captures the connection between free-
dom and social identities better than pure opportunity views. For insofar
as persons define themselves – structure their practical identity – with
essential reference to the stability and functioning of a social group, they
will lack freedom in the sense sketched here if that social group is sup-
pressed, undercut or destroyed. From their practical perspective, they
would not be able to enjoy a social existence that they minimally value if
such suppression were successful.
Since this makes the enumeration of restraints a function of the per-
spective of agents, this account avoids what may be seen as the trivializa-
tion of the concept of a restraint in opportunity accounts. Seeing free-
dom, as Carter does, as purely a function of the physical space one is able
to occupy with one’s array of jointly compossible actions (within physical
barriers put in place by other persons) implies that freedom is enlarged
or contracted whenever any change in my physical environment is made
at all (Carter 1999, chapter 7). The problem is that such a conception of
action-individuation yields the judgment that any of the most trivial
changes in my environment enlarges or expands my freedom insofar as
it allows more intentional physical movements for me, however inconse-
quential they are. Kramer willingly accepts this implication, and argues,
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for example, that my freedom is enhanced whenever a person is born in

the world, since this adds to the total conceivable actions now available
to me (i.e. those involving that person). He then adds ‘value multipliers’
to the calculation of how much overall freedom this new option adds,
and thereby admits it is vanishingly small (Kramer 2004, 198-199; chapter
5). But this means that floors and ceilings must be counted as constraints
in this framework, because they stop possible actions I might perform
(imagine an emergency where I have to cut through them to escape) and
were put in place by human beings. My claim is that it will not do to
count these as merely unimportant restrictions on freedom (as Kramer
presumably would), but rather as not restrictions at all. Attempting to see
freedom solely in terms of neutral counting of opportunities without ref-
erence to agents’ value perspectives is to lose sight of what makes defin-
ing and measuring freedom a crucial pursuit. What matters first are the
purposes and values that give meaning to our plans and projects, so that
the idea of freedom can be built from that vantage point, rather than
simply counting open avenues to movement.
More importantly, insofar as a person is prevented from living a life
as an X (where X refers to an identity-constituting social group), then he
or she is prevented from pursuing something valued from the perspective
of his or her practical identity. Group members of the sort we have been
discussing, whose particular actions are not curtailed but the group rituals,
expressions, languages, and activities that give those actions meaning are
restricted, lack freedom. This is the conclusion that the received views we
reviewed above are blocked from drawing.23
It should be noted, in addition, how this reference to the scope of
value framed by practical identities does not have the effect of reducing
the value of the freedom to do something to simply the value of doing it,
an implication that defenders of opportunity views warn us to avoid.24
The range of activities and ways of life sanctioned by my practical identity
is larger than those I will in fact pursue or can pursue (in combination).
The choice to move this way rather than that way in life, unobstructed
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by prohibitive barriers, is a value to me over and above the value of either

one of the particular paths in question. Things I can regard as minimally
valuable from the perspective of my identity – those activities sanctioned
by my practical identity – are represented by a range, one that may not
admit of a determinate ranking. So the freedom to pursue them is valu-
able whether or not I actually do pursue them.
I leave many details of a theory of freedom out of account here, as
my aims are limited to showing the direction that such a theory must
travel. However, I hope to have shown how taking seriously the social
nature of identity forces us to adopt a conception of freedom along
something like these lines.
V. OBJECTIONS AND A REPLY
The most common objection to any view of freedom that makes refer-
ence to the agent’s perspective is what we could call the ‘Stoic’ objection
(Berlin 1969, 135-141; Kramer 2004, 96-97). This well-known complaint
has been typically aimed at views that refer to agents’ desires, and as
I noted, my view does not depend on the desire thesis. But the form of
the criticism that would be raised here would be that it is conceptually
possible according to the view I sketch for a person to become more free
by changing his or her character rather than changing the world. People
who adapt to their circumstance by changing their practical identity, when
the constraints they previously faced remain untouched, become more
free. The paradoxical nature of this judgment alone drives many thinkers
away from this approach.
Before replying to this charge head on, let me clarify the way in
which the approach I recommend has the implication described only in
a highly circumscribed form. First, to have a practical identity that is truly
one’s own will require that such an evaluative perspective was not formed
in the wrong way. For example, I would not say that one’s practical iden-
tity is authentically one’s own if it is developed under conditions of
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constraint or strategic adaptation to circumstance. Such conditions would

have to be attached to the view such that a person’s identity is truly his
or her own only if developed in ways he or she could control or endorse.
So manipulation of persons’ desires by oppressive forces in society would
not count as an increase in their freedom in my account.25
Moreover, alteration of one’s practical identity is much more psycho-
logically complex than simply shifting preferences. One essentially changes
who one is, practically speaking. If I define myself as a Native American
and the practices of my nation or tribe are suppressed then I am unfree
in my view. To adapt to this condition and render these restrictions irrel-
evant to my freedom, I would have to restructure my entire self-concep-
tion to not only stop thinking of myself as a Native American, but also
stop judging things according to the virtues, evaluative impulses, and ways
of seeing the world that my previous identity provided for me. This is a
radical form of self-alteration and one whereby I truly become a new
person in this sense. Such cases are rare and psychologically difficult, if
not traumatic, so will not provide the kinds of easy counterexamples this
objection typically depends upon.
As Arneson noted, however, an air of paradox remains even if the
condition we are referring to makes reference to an authentically formed
practical identity. For as he says, if slaves consider their circumstances
and are indifferent to their chains, they are no less slaves, even if the
character that grounds their indifference is ‘home grown’ (authentic;
Arneson 1985). This is sometimes discussed as a problem of adaptive
preference formation; but independent of whether the relation one has
to restrictions is the result of adaptation, it is claimed that there is an air
of paradox to the view that a constraint does not count as limiting my
freedom merely because I do not value the actions it constrains. If I have
no interest in practicing Hinduism, for example, and even have no clear
idea of what it involves, then restrictions on the practice of Hinduism
seem not to limit my liberty, according to the approach I am taking here.
The restrictions on that religious practice do not prevent options that get
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valued from my practical perspective and so do not count as part of my

freedom. But does that make sense?
The answer may be yes, that they do not count as restrictions for me,
but such an affirmative response is greatly qualified. For while the option
to practice this particular religion may not be valued from my practical
perspective, it is clearly a value to me to be able to practice a religion I may
come to be curious about. But this range of potential curiosity is not limitless,
as it would not encompass religious practices that might involve harm or
destruction. So the restriction on Hinduism does limit my freedom of
religion, but the restriction on some ancient practice involving the sacri-
fice of virgins does not.
Recall what I noted earlier about the level of abstraction at which
values constituting one’s identity may be expressed: one’s core practical
commitments may contain the value of exploring the deeper meanings
in the world, or being open to what I can understand to be the ‘sacred’,
as well as more concrete connections to this or that tradition or religion.
One’s freedom should be defined relative to options sanctioned by the
most abstract values that define one’s self-conception, so that barriers
to the practice of a particular religion will count as a freedom restriction
though not relative to the value of that religion (if one is not currently
a believer), but it will count relative to those more abstract commit-
ments. Further, even if such restrictions do not technically limit my free-
dom (if there is no self-defining value sanctioning activities prevented by
it), it will count as a restriction on the freedom of those who do value
that activity.
Also Arneson’s (and others’) use of the reference to a ‘slave’ may
simply beg the question, since a slave is by definition unfree. In that case,
saying ‘a happy slave is no less a slave’ is a tautology, but that is because
the category ‘slave’ is already understood as involving a loss of freedom.
However, if the question is truly open whether a given situation must be
understood as ‘enslaved’ or not, we need an independent account of
constraints to classify the situation as free or unfree. My claim is that
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unless we make reference to pursuits and ways of life valued in some way,
our accounting method for restraints will be unacceptably capacious.26
In my view, therefore, only those ‘options’ that have a place in the
broad value structure of agents’ practical identities count as comprising
freedom. And as I observed above, at the level of social policy it may well
be necessary to generalize over people’s values and practical identities to
protect those freedoms that all members of society value having. And
more importantly, such an account of options and restraints has the sig-
nificant advantage over pure opportunity views that restraints are multi-
plied to the point of triviality.
These are much discussed controversies and I have no illusions that
what I have said here will settle them. Indeed, I agree with Arneson at
the end of his analysis of these disputes that the notion of freedom is
irreducibly plural and our intuitions about characterizing constraints sim-
ply clash (Arneson 1985, 448). And as I noted, the pure opportunity
model of freedom certainly is a coherent idea that refers to something of
general (non-specific) value for agents. My only claim is such a view of
liberty should not be seen as exhaustive of that notion and that social
group identities are part of a kind of freedom (and threats to the loss of
that freedom) that are not best captured by talk of pure opportunities for
individuals to act. A better way to characterize freedom to capture these
phenomena is one that makes reference to practical identities, despite the
concerns that such reference sparks for some.
VI. TEMPORAL EXTENSIONS OF THE SELF
My main emphasis here has been the ‘extended’ agent in the social sense,
but I also observed that parallel consideration can be adduced to apply
to the temporal extendedness of agents. I can only be suggestive here,
but one might consider, first, the way that intentions often involve plans,
in Michael Bratman’s sense, in that they are clusters of actions organized
around a long term goal or set of goals (Bratman 2007, chapter 2). One’s
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practical identity can be said to ground the value of pursuing such plans
for a person. The pursuit extends into the future (and past perhaps if
one is in mid-plan) and the defeating conditions preventing one from
successfully completing the plan may not involve any single discrete
action being prevented. A plan may be such that it can be prevented
when a subset of central actions in the plan’s make-up is prevented and
cannot be replaced. My lack of freedom to complete my longer term
aspirations may thus involve the disruption of an indeterminate number
and kind of piecemeal actions that are crucial for me to be able to say
I am continuing in my plan.
Consider the plan to pursue a vocation, such as becoming a philoso-
phy professor. As one finishes one’s university studies, one might begin
the long process that might result in being in this professional situation.
This involves personal processes and psychological steps required to
develop the skills and dispositions required of the vocation, but it also
requires social and institutional factors falling into place: exams being
offered, the right kind of guidance from professors, financial resources
being made available, information provided, and so on. Many of these
factors could be denied one or be provided in a problematic way, say by
a malevolent advisor or an unjust system of post-graduate financing.
No single factor like this, we could imagine, is necessary to frustrate one’s
plan, but a confluence of such factors may well do so, and some of these
factors are of human origin. If enough of such elements are put in the
way of the person, he or she will be frustrated in his or her plan to pur-
sue this vocation, and since human action is involved in the frustration
of the plan, we could say he or she is unfree to do so. But that unfreedom
must be understood as undercutting a temporally extended process of
agency, not the blocking of individualized acts. Hence, freedom and the
lack of freedom must be attached to action plans and projects extended
through time as part of a diachronic picture of agency.
Also, one might ask whether things in the past could affect my free-
dom now (and in the future). If one considers agents as temporally
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extended entities, united perhaps by a type of narrative unity, as some

theorists suggest, and some events in one’s past that are central to this
diachronic structure are systematically denied or distorted such that you
cannot publicly acknowledge that they happened, we might want to say
that you are unfree to be (become) the type of person who can publicly
confirm that part of your past, that part of you (Schechtman 1996; Dav-
enport 2012). Suppressed accounts of sexual abuse or other kinds of
victimization might be examples. If everyone in one’s surrounding social
sphere denies (or does not admit) that these events occurred, and they
are central to your narratively structured identity, then one is rendered
unable to be the person who is acknowledged to have experienced such
events, unable, that is, to be the person you feel yourself to be.
Is this an instance of a lack of freedom? Theorists in the Hegelian
tradition who link recognition of one’s subject status with social freedom
might insist that it is, and the story I just told fits with that judgment.
Though one can come to this conclusion only if one accepts the follow-
ing theses about freedom (which at least some traditional theorists accept
in some form): (i) freedom can involve ‘beings’ or ‘becomings’ as well as
actions; (ii) being publicly acknowledged as being a certain kind of person
is required for such a becoming; (iii) certain persons or social conditions
prevent the public acknowledgement of past events that form a necessary
part of that identity (of becoming that kind of person). If so, one is ren-
dered unfree when a central aspect of one’s past is denied or suppressed.27
Combining the diachronic with the social dimensions of identity, we
come to instances in which past experiences of a people, which form a cen-
tral part of their collective identity, are denied or suppressed.28 In the US
South, for example, certain acts of violence that mark central elements of
the collective memory of African Americans were for a long time denied,
suppressed and downplayed. During that period, we might want to say that
a key element in the freedom of those African Americans to be (among
many other things) the bearers of that history as part of their identity was
being denied, and perhaps thereby denying them an element of freedom.
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These last remarks are merely speculative and gloss over numerous
details and complexities. Suffice to say that seeing agents as diachronically
extended into the past and the future at least complicates the standard
picture of freedom as the opportunity to engage in discrete actions as a
single individual.
VII. CONCLUSION
The points raised in this article are meant more as an instigation than a
finalized theory. The instigation is for theorists of freedom to adjust their
views to take into account the ways that agents and agency are extended
both laterally (in social connection with others) and longitudinally (over
time). Taking seriously the ways that our practical perspective includes
essential reference to both the past and the future as well as other persons
and social conditions implies moving beyond the static individualism of
the received liberal picture of freedom.
Such an instigation may be unsatisfying to those who await the dev-
ilish details that views like this always have to include. In earlier sections,
I attempted to touch on some of those details when I replied to some
standard objections to views like this one. But admittedly, the sketch is
still just that, and stands in need of much shading and filling in.
One area of under-description that I will mention in closing is how
the social connections central to people’s practical identities are to be
determined and, moreover, what social groups get protection on the basis
of threats to the freedom of their members along the lines spelled out
here. This question relates to the vast literature on liberal multiculturalism,
which deals with similar issues.29 In my view, such answers will come only
when the structural requirements of a robust egalitarian democracy are set
out. Identity groups who claim the kind of status I mention here – ones
in which their members pursue their particular ways of life in ways condi-
tional on the existence and functioning of the larger culture or group – will
need particular modes of representation to protect their particular and
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unique interests. I leave open the precise procedure that will be needed to
determine such groups, and add this comment as almost an afterthought.
But it is one that is crucial for the approach to the meaning of social free-
dom I sketch here to be put into institutional form. If such procedures for
determining group representation can be worked out and defended, this
would once again show that core liberal principles such as the protection
of individual liberty depend fundamentally on the successful design and
functioning of the democracy in which those principles operate.30
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NOTES
1. One work that focuses specifically on the nature of the agent to whom freedom is
ascribed is Hirschmann 2009.
2. As is typical in this literature, I use the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ interchangeably. Also,
by ‘social’ freedom I mean the kind of freedom (so-called) that is of relevance to the critical
evaluation of social practices and political institutions.
3. I refer to the work of Philip Pettit (1997). The other well-developed account of republi-
can freedom is that of Quentin Skinner (1998), who also categorizes his conception as a negative
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one. I do not discuss republicanism in this contribution (except in passing), although I think
considerations analogous to those I discuss would apply to this as well.
4. This challenge to the central liberal conception of freedom will sound similar to the
critiques discussed by Kymlicka under the rubric of the ‘social self’ (Kymlicka 1989). But my focus
is specifically on models of freedom per se and not liberalism in general, and the critiques devel-
oped here are not the same as those Kymlicka considered. There is, however, some overlap in
the discussion.
5. It is my view that any full account of freedom will contain positive and negative elements.
The former refer to conditions of effective and authentic agency, including basic capacities and
powers to deliberate authentically and act. The latter refer to the absence of obstacles (internal
and external) preventing valued pursuits and ways of being, possibly including lack of domination
by others. In this way, the conditions featured in positive, negative, and republican accounts of
freedom will all be relevant to such a complete view. In the present contribution, however,
I mainly want to pose a challenge to negative accounts.
6. As will be clear in what follows, by ‘static’ I do not mean unchanging or frozen in time.
Rather I mean that models of freedom focus on agents making choices at a particular time
with a settled set of powers, preferences and options, where the past and the future are not con-
stitutive of their choice situation and hence the question of their freedom. See Section IV for
elaboration.
7. In Kramer’s case, such a function includes value qualifiers that measure freedom in part
according to the importance of such freedoms to the agent (2003, 425-470).
8. However, see Christman (2012a) for discussion of this issue.
9. This is what Richard Arneson calls the ‘desire thesis’ (1985).
10. The condition that preventing conditions must have their origin in human behaviour is
widely adopted, although in some of its forms it is enormously capacious. Kramer, for example,
claims that however remote and indirect is the connection to human behaviour, such a connection
suffices to categorize a preventing condition as a restraint on freedom (2004, 309-342).
11. This is not only for convenience, it is unclear that any static set of social and temporal
relations can be said to essentially characterize persons. For further discussion, see Christman
(2009, chapter 2).
12. This was called the ‘social self thesis’ by Will Kymlicka, who attributes it to Charles
Taylor. See Kymlicka (1989, chapter 5).
13. Such a process of interest generation through cooperative deliberation is often featured
as the key element deliberative democracy (see, for examle, Cohen 2002, 76-79). The dynamic
described here, however, involves the postulation of an identity relation among members of the
partnership that may be missing in democratic practices.
14. The phenomenon I describe here of group-based freedom parallels literature on group
agency and collective autonomy. See, for example, List and Pettit (2011). David Copp, for instance,
argues that the fact that we generally attribute blame to groups where it is inappropriate to attri-
bute blame to any individual member of the group shows that groups are genuine agents over
and above their members (2007). The claim I make here is narrower, in that I argue simply that
a group member whose practical identity depends on the functioning and stability of the larger
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group suffers a lack of freedom when that larger group is destabilized, even if that member’s
individual opportunities to act (qua individual) are not restrained. This claim does not depend on
the assumption that the larger group is itself an agent worthy of praise, blame, rights or recogni-
tion, although it is certainly consistent with that.
15. The quote is generally attributed to Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the US Training
and Industrial School founded to ‘Americanize’ Native youth. For discussion, see Churchill (2004).
16. In the case of the Jews under the Nazis, of course, the effort was also to annihilate each
Jewish person.
17. For a discussion of just this kind of phenomenon involving the Crow Indians, see Lear
(2008). For a general discussion of cultural disruption, see Sztompka (2000).
18. I should mention that Kramer also comes to a parallel conclusion (through a quite dif-
ferent route) when he says that proper consideration of collective (un-)freedom forces us to add
value qualifiers to the measure of overall freedom for individuals (2004, chapter 5).
19. One of those dimensions includes, I would claim, ‘positive’ elements. For discussion of
that concept, see Christman (2012b).
20. Defenders of republican accounts of freedom insist that the conditions relevant to a
person’s inability to pursue valued ways of life emanate from the position of domination that
others occupy relative to them, such that these other persons are in a position to interfere arbi-
trarily with such pursuits (see, for example, Pettit 1997). However, defenders of this view may
resist equating constraints to agents’ values for reasons similar to those discussed below in Sec-
tion V.
21. Korsgaard argues that we are all committed to the most abstract identity of ‘being a
member of the kingdom of ends’ and such an identity grounds fundamental moral duties. I take
no position on this Kantian claim, remaining agnostic about whether identities might stop at more
particular levels of description.
22. For an argument for the value of choice that refers to its capacity to ground responsibil-
ity, see Hurka (1987). For a general discussion, see Carter (1999, 58-59).
23. This approach gives meaning to the traditional rallying cry ‘no one is free when others
are oppressed’. However, in my account some group members can still be free if others are
oppressed if a significant enough number of (the right kinds of) people are free to carry out the
group-defining practices of the collectivity even while some of their compatriots in the group are
constrained from so doing. Nevertheless, the thrust of this slogan is captured by the view of
freedom outlined here where individuals cannot be free if others in their group whose activities
help constitute their identities are not.
24. Several writers make this particular charge. See, for example, Carter (1999, section 2.3).
25. I attempt to develop this reply in “What is Wrong with Positive Liberty?” (2012a) as
well as in earlier work (1991). The details of any of these views might be subject to criticism (see,
for example, Carter’s critique in Carter 1999, 155-156), but some such conception of authentic
practical identity can, I think, be sketched to fill in this condition and avoid the most straightfor-
ward form of the objection we are discussing.
26. I accept that an implication of this view may be that measurements of freedom cannot
be as fine grained as we might wish under a perspectival account of constraints of the sort I sketch
— 253 —
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here. Of course, this conclusion may rankle those who ground their views squarely on the desid-
eratum that freedom should be measurable (Carter and Kramer). But the question of whether the
kind of freedom that is a fundamental value in a society can be precisely measured is still an open
one. As Berlin observed, for example, such measurements may turn out to be incomplete and
imperfect at best. See Berlin 199, 130 n. 1.
27. I attempt to fill out the details of this admittedly sketchy argument in “Telling Our Own
Stories: Narrative Selves and Oppressive Circumstance” (forthcoming).
28. For a literary presentation of this sort of phenomenon, see Milan Kundera’s novel The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
29. Again, see Kymlicka (1989). For discussion of such procedures, see Young (2009);
Habermas (1994). For critical discussion, see Barry (2001). I discuss this issue in Christman (2009,
chapter 9; 2001).
30. This conclusion mirrors the conclusion of many theorists, although their path to it may
be different. See, for example, Habermas (1996), J. Cohen (1997), and Young (2009).
— 254 —
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Freedom and Extended Self

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Freedom and Extended Self

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Freedom and the Extended Self

KEYWORDS. Freedom, individualism, agency, social self

T heories of social freedom all depend on assumptions about the

ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 21, no. 2(2014): 225-254.

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Benn, for example, claims that a model of freedom presupposes an agent

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long-term aspirations). More than mere aggregations of individual actions,

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of success of those actions refer to elements of the person’s social space

II. STANDARD NEGATIVE ACCOUNTS OF FREEDOM

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conception of liberty in a negative sense that, they argue, represents a

[…] a person is free to do x if and only if she is able to do x, and she

This is a view of particular freedom – to do x. Overall freedom is defined

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In so doing, therefore, purely negative views of this sort uniquely allow

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III. THE SOCIO-TEMPORAL NATURE OF AGENCY

To say that selves should be understood or modelled as socially and dia-

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functional that those practices become essentially prohibited, and these

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conditions of my social act. It is not merely difficult for me to act without

IV. FREEDOM AND SOCIAL PRACTICAL IDENTITIES

So what does this understanding of the social structure of identity lead to

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opportunity accounts of freedom, I by no means want to imply that other

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that guides judgment generally and defines one’s self-understanding and

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for example, that my freedom is enhanced whenever a person is born in

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by prohibitive barriers, is a value to me over and above the value of either

V. OBJECTIONS AND A REPLY

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constraint or strategic adaptation to circumstance. Such conditions would

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valued from my practical perspective and so do not count as part of my

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VI. TEMPORAL EXTENSIONS OF THE SELF

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extended entities, united perhaps by a type of narrative unity, as some

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Cohen, Joshua. 2002. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In Deliberative Democracy.

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