Freedom and Its Unavoidable Trade-Off

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for making freedom impossible, as they imply that no one can ever be free to perform any action whatsoever. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. I consider how trade-offs between these two dimensions are made, or not made, in familiar conceptions of freedom. While most of these conceptions avoid impossibility, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ does not. I further show why impossibility makes freedom useless as a political value.