Liberty. My freedom in the context of yours.

[matthewkeil]

Perfect Freedom/Utopia is Hard. <<probably shouldn't have said that>>

True liberty is me being able to be as free as I can possibly be, without encroaching on your freedom.

There are two majorly "flexible" things in that statement. You and Me. We are two individuals with beliefs that evolve over time. What may be "ok" to you today may not be "ok" to you in a few years from now. Life happens. We are also probably pretty firm in our convictions and beliefs at the moment.

I would prefer not having anyone tell me what I can, and cannot do. If I can understand why, it makes it slightly more palatable. But I find that life is easiest, and sometime hardest, when I let my principles guide my actions. It just happens naturally. If I can believe that what I am doing is causing harm to someone, and not some silly excuse for making my life more difficult, then I am more likely to abide by the rule.

The key word above, and one of the important elements of the legal process is the idea of harm. Defining harm matters because in disputes about liberty, where the bounds of my freedom have encroached on yours and vice versa, are usually settled by the idea of how one's expression of behavior has created "harm" to the other and the behavior needs to stop and/or reparations need to be paid for the behavior taking place.

If, theoretically, it is possible to define what my freedom looks like to me, like where the boundaries that shouldn't be crossed by others so that I can define what "harm" means to me. And we all then do that. We can use computers to come up with some information that can guide our leaders, and give them metrics, so we can measure their progress in reducing the "harm" that society has imposed on me.