How free am I? Understanding agency and rights

Agency is what you can do given your capabilities.

Rights are things people are entitled to. Rights are set through rules of obligations and prohibitions on others, enforced by an overwhelming force.

To understand how free you (and those you love) are, you must evaluate your agency and the rights you're bound to.

The Brazilian jiu-jitsu metaphor of freedom

I'm sparring with my instructor, a training partner much better than me. I try to get to a position where I can put him in a submission, but I can't – he has defenses for all my attacks. Soon, he quickly puts me in a strangle, and I tap so he lets me go.

Later on, I am sparring with a white belt student. It's now much easier to put them in a submission, and I'm entirely free of their attacks, despite their physical strength, because they're just learning the sport.

At one point, when sparring with the white belt, I noticed their foot was vulnerable to a leglock. My instinct is to attack it, but I restrain myself because it's against the rules to attack leglocks on white belts. Because white belts don't yet know how to defend simple leglocks, we only allow them at the next belt level.

My sparring session with my instructor and the white belt are examples of agency: I'm free to do and from being done things based on our relative skill levels in BJJ.

Later, my not putting the white belt in a leglock is an example of rights: their right not to be put in a leglock, because they are a white belt, is my (and others) prohibition to do so to them or any other white belts.

The above is a simple metaphor for our two types of freedom: agency and rights.

The confusion of positive and negative liberty

In moral and political philosophy, there are two contemporary (as of the 1960s) concepts commonly used when discussing liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty.

I won't bore you with details about what positive and negative liberty originally meant, or the following 50 years of study and elaboration on liberty, but I find them confusing and impractical. You can certainly look them up to learn more.

To make things even more confusing, there are two US political leanings, liberals and libertarians, that have roots and concepts closely related to the word liberty, but also confusing and even conflicting definitions.

So I now avoid the words "liberty" and "freedom" when discussing the subject. To have a precise conversation about liberty, I believe I'd have to spend an hour agreeing on definitions with my counterparts.

Despite these challenges, critical thinking and the right action toward our and others' liberty and freedom are essential to moral life. So we can't throw our hands up on thinking and acting towards liberty just because of terminology confusion.

Instead, I suggest we evaluate our agency and the rights we're bound to.

Agency, or the freedom in our ability to act

One part of what we're free to do comes from what we can do given our capabilities – our competence.

From an agency perspective, the more capable we are, the more things we're free to do. Conversely, the less capable we are, the fewer things we're free to do.

If I wanted to move to a different house down the street and had the money and time, the house was for sale, and the owner agreed to sell it to me, I would have the agency and freedom to move there.

If I didn't have the money or the time, the owner didn't want to sell the house, or I couldn't convince her to sell it to me, then I just didn't have the agency to move there.

Many of our actions involve others and, therefore, their agency. What we're free to do that impacts others from an agency perspective depends on what we're both able to do or not do with each other, given our respective capabilities.

In these cases, the result of our collective action, whether there will be a house sale, for example, depends on our agency on the matter.

Agency is just part of the equation though. Freedom also encompasses the rights that we and others possess.

Rights, entitlements we and others have

A person's right is another person's obligation or prohibition.

Every concept of right requires us to force or prevent others from acting. Rights are mutual understandings over actions one must do or not do towards others.

The difference between rights and agency is that a right is enforced by an overwhelming force. Be it the parent with the child, the company with employees, or the government with citizens, rights outline rules and enforce them.

Rights have historically been a foundational way to outline social responsibility and foster values of equality and collaboration across societies.

Every person living in Western democratic societies abides by a set of rules, obligations, and prohibitions they must perform, enforced by the government, to assign people rights.

Your freedom through rights is split into two parts: Things you have a right to and the obligations and prohibitions you're bound to given the rights of others.

The first part, you are free to do things you have a right to do when rules, obligations and prohibitions, exist for others that give you said right.

The second part, you're not free to do things constrained by rules, the obligations and prohibitions you must abide to for the rights of others.

To understand how free you are, you must also understand what rights you have and what obligations and prohibitions bind you to others' rights.

Thinking about rights can be challenging, but the absence of rights and their selective application to a select few has been a crucial way in which our freedom and that of our fellow humans has been curtailed through civilization.

Increasing our freedom

Our freedom varies as our agency and rights vary. Neither our agency nor rights are constant.

If you move to a country which language you don't speak, your agency will be curtailed. If moving to that country gives you more opportunities to work and live well, your agency will be enhanced.

Your rights, obligations, and prohibitions can also change when moving to a different country. You will have a different set of rights, obligations and prohibitions in a different country – significantly so depending on your specific situation.

How free we are, defined by our agency and the rights we're bound to, is free-flowing and changes as time passes and events happen.

To emphasize: Our agency, rights, obligations and prohibitions are contextual to our current situation.

If you want to increase your freedom, there are only two areas you can address:

• Increasing your agency.
• Increasing your rights or removing the obligations and prohibitions you're bound to.

Of the two, by far, the easiest way to increase your freedom is increasing your agency – and that's still pretty hard.

The freedom that comes from agency is increased by improving your relative competence. The more skills, time, money, contacts, influence, etc., you have relative to the agency of others you impact, the more things you're free to do from an agency perspective.

Therefore, to improve the agency of a loved one or someone you care about, you must increase their competence or somehow decrease the competence of those impacting them, such as by moving elsewhere.

Changing your rights, though, is very hard. Rights tend to be rigid and apply to large groups of people. While fighting for rights is a commendable endeavor, the most direct way to change the rights you are bound to is by moving somewhere with a different set of rights and rules.

If you live in a country where there's no freedom of speech, for example, it's a much easier endeavor for you to move to a country where there is freedom of speech than changing your country's constitutional laws.

That doesn't mean rights in a particular context don't change – they change often and due to the actions of others.

Interestingly, the best way to directly enact change in the rights affecting you is also by improving your competence. The more skills, time, money, contacts, influence, etc. you have at your disposal, the higher the impact you can have.

Trying to precisely understand the concept of liberty can be daunting, and this confusion may hinder us from remediating the liberty injustices we witness.

But understanding one's agency and the rights they're bound to can help us grasp and address this more easily.

Defining freedom in practice

Agency and rights allow us to think more clearly about the confusing concept of liberty.

So next time you're tempted to say, "I'm not free to do this," or "They lack the freedom to do that," know that those are challenging concepts to analyze.

Instead, challenge yourself to break them down:

• What is your agency and that of those around you?
• What rights do you have, and what obligations and prohibitions?
• How can you increase agency and rights by increasing competence and moving to different contexts?

There's no magic formula for increasing agency and rights – they're hard to do.

But knowing precisely what it is you're trying to do is an excellent step in the direction of achieving it.