The fundamental freedoms, of speech, conscience, privacy, and religion are now an essential part of contemporary society, set down in our most basic laws and regularly invoked in our political and cultural debates. These freedoms are vital in securing the spaces and opportunities within which people can pursue their own lives in their own ways. Independence of Mind takes this accepted thought further by exploring the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly co ... More

The fundamental freedoms, of speech, conscience, privacy, and religion are now an essential part of contemporary society, set down in our most basic laws and regularly invoked in our political and cultural debates. These freedoms are vital in securing the spaces and opportunities within which people can pursue their own lives in their own ways. Independence of Mind takes this accepted thought further by exploring the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe, and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable; and freedom of religion allows groups of us to endorse certain beliefs as articles of faith, free from the demands of rational scrutiny. This is the first book to undertake a comprehensive philosophical examination of the moral grounding of these fundamental freedoms. It analyses what makes them matter to us in the ways that they do, and the true significance of their entrenchment in law.