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    In civil society, the citizen achieves moral freedom. — Carmelics
    Home/Virtue Ethics
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    In civil society, the citizen achieves moral freedom.

    Social ContractVirtue Ethics
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Moral freedom is obedience to a law that one has prescribed to oneself.
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    • 2.In civil society, citizens obey laws they have prescribed to themselves through the general will.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.The general will can be systematically mistaken about what genuinely serves the common good, as Rousseau himself admits when distinguishing it from the will of all.
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    • 2.Obedience to a mistaken collective law is not self-legislation in any meaningful sense, but rather subjection to aggregated error.
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    • 3.Moral freedom requires that the law one obeys actually tracks rational moral truth, not merely procedural consensus.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty shows that 'freedom as self-mastery' historically licenses coercion by those who claim to know one's 'true' will.
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    • 2.Rousseau's mechanism of being 'forced to be free' by the general will collapses the distinction between genuine autonomy and rationalized compulsion.
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    Topics

    Virtue EthicsSocial Contract

    Connections

    2 topics

    Democracy & Governance1 linkedRights & Liberty1 linked

    Related

    Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty shows that 'freedom a...In civil society, citizens obey laws they have prescribed to themselves through ...Moral freedom is obedience to a law that one has prescribed to oneself.Moral freedom requires that the law one obeys actually tracks rational moral tru...
    +3 moreShow less
    Obedience to a mistaken collective law is not self-legislation in any meaningful...Rousseau's mechanism of being 'forced to be free' by the general will collapses ...The general will can be systematically mistaken about what genuinely serves the ...

    Similar

    In civil society, citizens obey laws they have prescribed to themselve...82%Good government promotes the common good, understood as the moral, int...76%The human being can be held as a moral agent capable of achieving pers...73%Universal principles of self-government are grounded in morality, whic...73%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: rousseau
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    Rousseau makes a further claim in the same chapter of The Social Contract, namely that in conditions of civil society the citizen achieves “moral freedom,” by which he means obedience to a law that one has prescribed to oneself (for discussion see especially Neuhouser 1993). Although this latter claim is presented almost as an afterthought, it is the form of freedom most directly responsive to the challenge Rousseau had set for himself two chapters earlier, which involved finding “a form of asso
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit