Overall freedom and constraint

Ian Carter argues against what he calls the 'specific freedom thesis', whic h claims that in asking whether our society or any individual is free, all we need or can intelligibly concern ourselves with is their freedom to do t his or that specific thing. Carter claims that issues of overall freedom ar e politically and morally important and that, in valuing freedom as such, l iberals should be committed to a measure of freedom overall. This paper arg ues against Carter's further claim that rejection of the specific freedom t hesis requires rejection of morally based determinations of degrees of over all freedom. using a concept of freedom as a capacity to pursue one's inter ests, it is argued that the value of freedom overall is not reducible to th e value of specific freedom, and that conditions of action can be determine d as constraints only within the context of their impact on freedom overall . Taking the case of coercive proposals, it is argued that we must evaluate the morality of the circumstances in which conditional proposals are made if we are to weigh the opportunities and constraints contained in the propo sal to determine whether its recipient suffers a loss of overall freedom. W e must therefore appeal to values other than that of liberty itself to dete rmine degrees of liberty overall, which we require in turn to determine whe ther threats or offers are coercive.