We exercise social power over others in myriad ways. We make offers, draw up contracts, manipulate, induce weakness of the will, coerce, engage in physical force, rationally persuade, selectively divulge information, lie, enchant, coax, convince, … In each of these cases, we (sometimes unintentionally) get others to act in ways that serve our interests. Which such exercises of power are morally permissible? Which ones aren’t? An intuitively appealing way to answer this question is, with Ripstein and Kant, to point to the role of freedom: exercises of social power are presumptively wrong when (and only when) they restrict people’s freedom. But this raises a further question: How do we identify when such exercises of power are instances of unfreedom? Ripstein, in defending Kant, draws a crucial distinction between actions that subject others’ wills to our choices (and are therefore presumptively impermissible) and actions that merely affect the contexts in which others act (and are therefore presumptively permissible). In this paper, I query that distinction, and argue that it relies on a moralized conception of freedom, such that exercises of social power make people unfree only if they violate an antecedent moral right. If this is true, then Kant’s (and Ripstein’s) project must fail: the overall aim of the project is to ground a system of public and private rights in an independent notion of freedom as nondomination, but it turns out, on closer reflection, that freedom is itself defined in terms of those very rights. We therefore lack an independent grip on what concept or concepts serve to delimit our rights under an equal system of freedom. In making the argument, I also draw several contrasts to Philip Pettit’s conception of republican freedom.
