When we talk about freedom, we’re rarely talking about a total, uninhibited freedom. There are two general reasons for this. We firstly recognise that reality places limits upon what we can and can’t do. We also recognise that our desires don’t always agree with this fact. These two recognitions mean that we, somewhat unintuitively, sometimes think about freedom as involving the conscious recognition and control of our desires. There are limits to this, of course, but the sort of freedom that we take as an ethical ideal can not be characterised as the immediate fulfilment of all our desires. Working out how and why freedom relates to its limitations is of obvious interest to philosophers. Plato took our soul to be divided into three parts: the spirited, the appetitive (this being desire), and the rational. The ethical life (lived by the free citizen in the polis) was one in which the rational part of the soul restrained and directed the other two parts. Kant took duty to be the central rule of ethical life. This might seem difficult to reconcile with freedom he believed that that duty needed to be determined through the free operation of an individual’s reason: You lay down your own law. Acting freely, then, requires taking responsibility for determining your ends and duties.

If acting freely requires a person to take responsibility, then we should think about what taking responsibility means and who can be responsible. I have strong intuitions about what these conditions might be, and I imagine that at least some of these intuitions are shared. Starting with the general question, “What does it mean to be responsible for your freedom?”, is helpful. That the question arises at all indicates that there’s a great deal of cross-pollination between living freely and living ethically. This could be a historical accident, but we can only start from where we are. Questions about the relationship between moral responsibility and rational agency have been central to ethics since Locke (1623-1704). A prominent position in these debates has been that responsibility requires a persistent identity to be assigned. Many arguments in twentieth century moral philosophy turned on how to identify this persistence and whether bodily integrity or psychological continuity should be taken as the key marker. I’d like to focus on this question of persistence and think about how it relates to freedom. That’s perhaps misleading, I’m going to sidestep the question of persistence and its constitutive conditions just slightly. I’m also going to suggest that we change up some of our terms. Doing this helps to draw attention to different aspects of the debate. Is an integrated personality necessary to act freely?

I think that we do take an integrated personality to be central to our concept of freedom. To show this, and to show why these terms can be helpful, I need to clarify just what an integrated personality is. One way to do this is to start from the other end and ask: What does an unintegrated personality look like? What might having one mean for acting freely? An extreme answer to the first question is given by the TV show Severance, a show that’s no stranger to some of the debates mentioned above. In Severance, some characters work for Lumon, a corporation that performs a ‘severance’ procedure on its employees. The employees who go through this procedure are left with split memories. They do not remember their life outside of work when at work, and do not remember their life at work when outside of work. The show treats these characters as having separate identities, referred to as ‘innies’ and ‘outies’, and I’ll follow suit for the sake of discussion.

These characters certainly don’t seem to be free. The innies, in particular, live narrow lives and have little hope. Their existence is a perpetual Wednesday afternoon. We can find attempts to act freely and ethically. Severance likes to play with the pseudo-religious aspects of corporate culture, one way that it does this is by taking familiar wellness drivel and transforming into a series of systematic religious catechisms¹. This is forced on the innies, but some of them do manage to find an interpretative framework in it and this framework seems to give them a way of thinking about their situation in a way that bears some resemblance to the way I’ve characterised free agency as giving your life a rational direction. This is a pretty poor freedom, though, these catechisms act as an opiate, rather than addressing the conditions that create the unfreedom of the innies. We might expect that the lives of the outies are better, or at least more free. There is a temptation, after all, to accept the proffered corporate framing: the severance procedure allows for a pretty thorough work/life balance given that you never recall the day’s labours. Light-touch anti-capitalism is the theme du jour, though, so Severance is at pains to demonstrate that the characters who choose to go through with the procedure are compelled to do so. We all understand that we are compelled to work by economic necessity, but going through a severance procedure would likely be uncomfortable for many of us. Severance makes the decision to go through with this procedure legible by providing additional biographical details. The characters who choose it might desire disassociation due to a personal tragedy, for example. The show really does emphasise the social discomfort with the procedure, protesters and political debates serve to demonstrate a generalised disapproval of Lumon. There shouldn’t be anything unintuitive, then, about claiming that the severed characters (both the innies and the outies) can be meaningfully described as unfree. The difficulty is in trying to show that this unfreedom can be related to the structure of their personality.

We can show that there is a relationship, but I think that the sense in which it is related is not as strong as we might hope. Whether an unintegrated personality leads to unfreedom is conditioned by the circumstances that cause the disintegration. That isn’t to say that the unfreedom is caused solely by these conditions, and that the personality effects are purely epiphenomenal. There’s something about an unintegrated personality that prevents us from acting freely, most of the time. More importantly, the presence of such a personality seems a reliable indicator that an individual might not be entirely free. Think about why Severance’s central plot conceit is effective. It works for the same reason that any metaphor works, it amplifies a recognisable aspect of our life. When I am at work, I am not fully myself and my ends are not my own. I need to cut off those parts of me that are not relevant to the ends that the boss has determined for me. How do we distinguish this sort of suppression of desires, etc. from the sort that is necessary to act freely? I think that the answer lies partly (though not wholly) in whose ends you are trying to achieve, and how you relate those ends to an understanding of your identity. Why not just claim that it’s when you serve your own ends? Well, a parent doesn’t act unfreely in raising their child, even though they (should) be serving the ends of the child, not their own. And it would be circular to claim that the parent, in this case, freely chooses to serve another’s ends and that makes the difference. What does seem to make a difference is whether the parent understands themselves as a parent, in a way that is important to their identity.

I’m not entirely happy with this formulation, but I think that it is broadly correct. I find the formulation dissatisfying for a few reasons. Firstly, identity seems a shaky and individualist foundation on which to build a theory of freedom. We make serious demands on others in the name of freedom, so it is reasonable to suspect that grounding those demands in our identity mightn’t always work out. In practise and theory this is likely to work itself out as a balancing act, some identities are just difficult to fit into a free society. In the best case, this would mean that a constant negotiation would be taking place that could allow us to determine what we can demand of others and what can be demanded of us. This requires ethical and intellectual effort, though, and I’m not entirely convinced that our institutions are up to it – I am confident that people are up to it. Another reason for dissatisfaction is that our identities are partly (maybe entirely) determined by our social context. This leaves open the potential for people to identify into conditions that we might consider unfree, just like we see with those innies in Severance who take the Lumon scripture seriously. The problem, again, is that freedom under this identity conception might fail to serve as a guiding normative concept.

The question for me is this: If freedom defined in this way fails as a guiding concept, does that mean that it’s one that we should hang onto? It’s probably worth it, I haven’t seen many better options and it does raise some potential ways to move forward (for example, expanding the range o identities that are available to people). It clearly isn’t enough, though.