Good Liberty Essay Example

The right to liberty is a basic tenet of many modern western societies. The United States constitution is written in order to ensure individual freedom. Yet words on paper only go so far. Despite the constitution ensuring people “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the society once allowed slavery, and in recent history civil rights groups had to fight a bitter battle in order to allow people of color equal rights. My own definition of liberty is two parts. It includes both internal freedom of thought, and also external freedom to determine one’s destiny. In the essay, my own definition of freedom will be developed and compared with the philosopher John Stuart Mills and activist Martin Luther King’s thoughts on liberty.
For simplicities sake, the words freedom and liberty will be used interchangeably. While freedom is a broader word, liberty is freedom, as it exists within the constraints of societies. No one in any society is completely free. Everyone is restricted by their time period, the means they were born into, and the physical and intellectual limitations that they possess. However, the goal of society should allow people to maximize their own freedoms, even at the detriment of their own health and so long as they do not interfere with the freedoms of others.
This definition of liberty originates from the society into which I was born, which has had an influence on forming my conception of freedom. Just as my own conception of liberty comes from the United State’s idea of liberty, other thinkers have been led to similar conclusions of freedom. John Stuart Mills was a philosopher whose idea of freedom parallels my own conception of external liberty. In his essay “On Liberty” he develops a pragmatic, philosophical argument as to what are the limits of liberty. Mills supports individualism (Mills, 51), and believes that people should be able to do as they want so long as they do not harm others. He believes that a person should be able to do what they want so long as he does not “make himself a nuisance to other people” (Mills, 52) Mills would likely believe that the government should not interfere with citizens using intoxicants, even if it negatively affects their health.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an activist who spent much of his career fighting for liberty for races within the US that were being discriminated against. An interesting letter that he wrote on the matter is “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It is interesting because he is writing on the matter of liberty and freedom from within a jail cell where his liberty has been denied. Yet even within the restrictions of jail, King is still free to influence others and hold true to his ideals. This is internal freedom, and despite a lack of liberty within a state, the sort that cannot be taken away and King exercises that freedom from jail.
King did not believe that freedom was something that was freely given, but rather something that needed to be fought for. In his letter, he wrote, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor’ it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In this way, liberty within societies comes at a cost. But in order for humans to become the ideal, actualized versions of their own selves, liberty is a necessary condition.