(seen at Caterina.net)

Can you force people to be free?

It is an old conundrum. The philosopher Bernard Williams, in an article published in the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, shortly before his death this year, puts the hypothetical case of the happy slave. If a slave wants none of the things that his servitude prevents him from having, is he free? And if he is persuaded by his “liberators” that he does want those things, has he then been made free or has he simply been made into a slave by his liberators?

Suicide bombers present the same puzzle. Suicide is voluntary, and implies freedom of choice. But it is hard to understand the actions of suicide bombers without some notion of indoctrination, and if the suicide bombers were indoctrinated then they did not choose freely. Similarly, the instinctive American response to people who demand to live in a theocracy is that those people are not choosing freely—that a genuinely free person would never willingly exchange his lot to live under the thumb of an autocratic priesthood.

(quote originally from this article)