Sinduja, thank you for your comments. You touched on a lot of different things, but I want to address two of the main ones. First, you followed up John Wehrle's comment on the issue of the relationship between rights and freedom. My position on this is something like this: we understand ourselves as free to do things we don't have the explicit right to do, and thus, it seems that, if we really want to discuss freedom and folk intuitions, it might not be helpful to limit the discussion of freedom to just those things which we have the right to do. The second point to which I want to respond is about your idea that there is some sort of cultural relativity to this idea of rights and morality. I fully agree with you. I address this in the conclusion of my paper as well. I think one of the problems with folk intuitions about freedom is that they are going to be relative to what is moral for a given individual or culture. In this sense, the folk understanding of freedom may not be very functional if we imagine a situation in which a group of diverse individuals try to come to an agreement about the how much a certain law will diminish citizens' freedom. However, there is also some strength in this understanding of freedom-as-relative in that it allows for a flexibility which many other more rigid theories of freedom have lacked (and suffered for). I think what is most important here, is not to determine whether folk intuitions of freedom do or do not create a tenable/coherent theory of freedom, but instead to understand how the folk actually understand freedom. This understanding may give more weight to one or another philosophical theory of freedom, and at the very least will allow us to recognize when and where we are diverging from folk intuitions in further philosophical discussions about freedom.

Jussi, the concern that people are responding to these surveys in a way that doesn't truly reflect their typical use of 'freedom' is a good one to bring up. While, the surveys were clearly anonymous, there is certainly still the chance that people are responding in the way they think they should, rather than according to how they actually judge the reduction of freedom. Part of this problem seems to be natural to experimental study of intuitions which involves morality. Interestingly though, participants in this survey had no problem saying that the law did in fact diminish Tanya's freedom. Even in the case in which Tanya wanted to hurt the minority but was stopped from doing so, her freedom was reduced just over 3.5, halfway on a 7 point scale (1 was labeled, "not at all" diminished, and seven was labeled "completely" diminished). It was simply the case that when Tanya was stopped from helping the minority her freedom was judged to be much more reduced. Thank you for bringing up the point; it is a good one to discuss especially in experiments involving difficult moral situations. However, there is a similar, more general, worry that peoples' judgments were influenced by a value judgment of some part of the situation, rather than simply a judgment of freedom. One particular worry was that participants may have thought a law which restricted Tanya from helping a minority was simply a bad law, and therefore diminished freedom more. I conducted another study, (included in the paper and mentioned in response to Dr. Weinberg's comments) in which there was law enacted simply because of an irrational fear on the part of a dictator's wife. Participants were asked to judge whether or not this law was a good law, and then subsequently were given one of two situations, one in which a woman named Katya was restricted from a morally good action and one in which she was restricted from a morally bad action. While participants overwhelmingly judged the law to be a bad law, the difference in terms of the loss of freedom in the two cases was still statically significant. Given that this type of bias could not explain the survey results, I suggest that perhaps it really is something about the morality of the restricted action which is creating the difference in judgments of freedom.

Dr. Weinberg, thank you for your comments. I think your proposal about there being other laws already restricting certain immoral actions is really interesting and definitely could be influencing peoples' judgments. Fortunately, this proposal can be easily tested. If we imagine a case in which something which has no law restricting it, but is still considered morally wrong, then do the judgments of freedom differ from those in the first survey when that action is restricted? I conducted another study, (included in the paper) in which there was law enacted simply because of an irrational fear on the part of a dictator's wife. The law subsequently restricted an action which a woman named Katya was going to perform (in one variant it was a morally wrong one, and in the other it wasn't). In this case, there was no law previously restricting either action, in fact both actions had been going on for a long time and while the dictator knew about them, he didn't care enough to stop them. Participants still judged Katya's freedom to be much less diminished when she was stopped from doing the immoral action. Given that the proposal in this case could not explain the results, I propose another explanation which you mentioned in your second comment (in response to Brandon's). Specifically, participants in the surveys did not consider Tanya or Katya to be free, in the first place, to perform morally wrong actions. As to the idea of continuing to use the term "concept" I think it is an accurate critique. Do you know of a better term to describe the cognitive processes which determine how we use a particular idea? We often talk about intuitions but isn't there some understanding of the idea of 'freedom' which makes it applicable in certain situations and not in others? What should we call this latent understanding? Thank you again for your comments and suggestions.