Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom
11 comments
·October 19, 2025leobg
Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?
Nietzsche, ~1889
Isamu
I’m trying to engage with the author here and maybe I’ll read the book that this refers to, but I think the author has this backwards.
It’s that when you little to no choice we say you aren’t free. It doesn’t follow that having more choices makes you free, but it is a prerequisite. Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.
Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author.
This piece makes me uneasy, it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom. I’m wondering where this is going.
bigstrat2003
The author kind of lost me in the first few paragraphs because she bases her entire thesis on this idea that we frame freedom in terms of having many choices. But I've never heard anyone do that! As you said, people generally recognize that having choices available is a prerequisite to freedom, but they do not require it to be a large number of choices, nor associate more choices with more freedom. So the author's entire argument seemed to me to be based on a strawman.
TuringTest
Meanwhile, I've heard that very argument every time some official organisation makes a proposal to regulate the market to limit the dominance of some dominant players. Those distorting the market in their favour will oppose any regulation that reduces their power by bemoaning how it will limit consumer's choice.
TuringTest
The article says 'abundance'. The point you make that having choices is a requisite for freedom, but truth is that freedom comes from meaningful choices, not an abundance of them.
You have a myriad of artificially created choices that amount to more or less the same outcome; think of a supermarket, where all products are the same high-processed food and imported vegetables. Freedom would be having a competing family-owned local shop with proximity products.
To have meaningful choice, you cannot depend of having a single homogeneous environment providing all the choices you can make; this can come from having healthy competition, or sometimes by you creating your own choices when there were none.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.
Your example is completely orthogonal to liberty. Choices are completely orthogonal. If the serf could leave and not starve, he still wouldn't be free because they would find and drag him back and punish him. He wasn't permitted to make the choice, it being incidental that he wouldn't survive long enough to be punished for it in most circumstances.
If they had refrained from punishing serfs that leave you'd still insist there is no freedom there, I think, because of the starvation. But no one is obligated to feed you so that you can choose options that would otherwise starve you.
>Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices
For good reason. Given choices, humans inevitably pick the worst of them. And I'm not talking about those that are only bad options in hindsight.
>it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom.
There's no effort, that's called reality. Reality limits choices, and it is effortless.
raincole
Freedom isn't about the number of choices. It's about:
- Comprehensiveness: instead of pork or beef, you can choose from meat, fish, tofu or egg as your protein source.
- Non-commitment: choosing one of them doesn't prevent you from choosing another for the next meal.
- Safety: none of them shouldn't be so expensive that it hurts you financially, or poisoned it hurts you physiologically beyond its nutritional nature.
I'm not talking about meals but elections, by the way.
gausswho
An abrupt ending to a worthy if lomg setup. The final paragrpah hints at what I thought would be the meat of the article, but ultimately nneded more to demonstrate how limiting choice can lead to freedom.
In practice, we all restrain our choices in ways that we hope narrow our focus and abilities towards things that matter. It would be nice to read a piece that explores how this can be true collectively.
> It’s only in recent history that freedom has come to mean having a huge array of choices in life. Did we take a wrong turn?
Said who? This is an argument from invented opposition. I’m not sure anyone actually defines freedom as "a huge array of choices". The author seems to invent a mainstream narrative just to dismantle it(arguing against a straw man)
Abundance of choice and freedom are orthogonal. Having the right choice and being free are not.