Is Freedom a Privilege or a Right? by Dr. Aida Morden, PhD

At an Amnesty International conference several years ago, a speaker was asked this question, ‘Is Freedom a privilege or a right? The speaker posed for two long uneasy minutes until the audience of more than 30 people from different parts of the world began to get listless and two people stood up and walked out.

Then the speaker said, ‘Forgive me. I was caught unprepared. After years of speaking about human rights all over the world, I lost track of my speeches. I have forgotten the meanings of freedom, privilege and right. No, this is not entirely true, may I correct myself. I just assumed that everyone knows and accepts that freedom is a right; that freedom is an inherent and universal right.

But then, human relationships have become more complicated that concepts, words have lost their universal meanings, or [have] become blurred. So may I answer that general question by putting it into context. Within the context of my speech regarding human rights, freedom is a right. It is a right of all individuals. For example, freedom of speech, which is the topic of my paper today, is a universal right because everyone is entitled to speak, to say something.

But our right, is of course, limited by the right of the others. So for example in a forum, the process of expressing the rights of the individuals are defined, impliedly or explicitly. So we have the rules and procedures on how we express our freedom of speech. If the structure and the processes, the system, as some people describe, of the forum is ‘democratic’ then the freedom of speech is ensured, giving everyone the equal chance to speak, because equality or equal rights is an implied given in a democratic forum.

One important thing is this, that we should remember always, freedom is not just ‘doing what you want to do, saying what you want to say.’ Freedom carries responsibility, responsibility towards other people most specifically. One cannot continue on speaking for half an hour in a two-hour forum while the others also would like to say something. He or she will be given equal chance as the others, which means, all the others will speak for say, 3 minutes. So your right to speak is limited by the others’ right to speak in a forum. But if you were given a chance to speak for more than 3 minutes by the forum organizer, then your freedom of speech to speak for more than 3 minutes becomes a privilege, because the others are not given this privilege.

In this forum, for instance, I was given the privilege to talk for 20 minutes to give my speech and on this occasion, I used my freedom to talk about my paper without fear of being prosecuted. So our freedom is very much integrated with the system, the society that we live. If some people are given more privileges and the others are being curtailed of the freedom, then we may say it is not democratic and we become uneasy because we are not being treated equally.

I must also stress that democracy and rights are integral parts of the process called freedom. When our freedom is curtailed, it is curtailed by an undemocratic system and this system thinks that freedom is not a right of all human beings but a privilege to be given to select individuals.

So many people die fighting for their freedom and most of these people are the economically deprived, the underclass, our women, our children, our men who take up arms against a despotic government.

To summarise my confusing and seemingly incoherent response, may I say that there are freedoms that are inherent and universal and these are negotiated through your rights, that is, your freedom to speak rests on your right to speak, your freedom to live a quality of life rests on your right to life, liberty and property.

Today, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognizes our inherent freedoms as expressed through our universal rights. Meanwhile, the extent of your freedom (for example how long and what type of speech you can deliver) will be and could be a privilege given by the structure and process of the political landscape you are in at a particular time.’

Freedom and The individual

Scott Hughes, a Philosophy commentator, aptly connects the practice of freedom with political and legal aspects. He begins by stating that freedom begins with the principle of self-control or self-ownership. ‘In a free society,’ he asserts, each and every person has legal control (or “ownership”) of their own body and mind. As such, the concept of freedom refers to a certain type of political empowerment. It refers specifically to equal empowerment. In other words, a free society is one with an equal distribution of legal rights and in which each and every person has as much legal rights as possible. Because freedom entails political equality, freedom can only logically entail as much legal rights as compatible with the same legal rights in others. In a free society, any one person cannot have so many legal rights that all other people could not logically have the same amount of legal rights.

Basically, according to Hughes, a free person has the legal allowance to do whatever he or she wants insofar as he or she does not offensively harm or coerce other people against those other people’s wills. The limitation is a logical requirement because Freedom obviously can not include the legal right to limit other people’s freedom because that would be illogical.