Abstract

ABSTRACT Both classical and modern liberals tend to treat freedom of choice as if it is intrinsically valuable—regardless of what is chosen. They fear that treating freedom as, instead, instrumental only to good choices might open the door to paternalism if a polity were to decide that people were making bad choices. A middle course would be to treat freedom as independently valuable. On the one hand, the independent value of freedom does not treat all choices as good as long as they are freely made. On the other hand, it does not reduce the value of freedom to the known, or predictable, good ends to which a free action may be conducive. Following from Hayek’s acknowledgement that we are often ignorant of what the future may hold, freedom may have value because it will allow us to make decisions whose positive consequences cannot now be predicted.