Individual liberty

Individual liberty is the freedom of people to act and develop without coercive interference, subject to how that freedom interacts with others’ rights and public authority.

Negative liberty: Freedom from interference or constraint imposed by other people or institutions. This is the core sense of liberty as protection against coercion.
Paternalism: Interference with a person’s choices justified by claims about that person’s own welfare. It tests whether protecting people from themselves can override their liberty.
Freedom of speech: The right to express opinions and communicate information without unjustified censorship or punishment. It protects public expression while raising disputes about harmful or threatening speech.
Civil liberties: Legal protections against government interference with basic individual freedoms. These rights give institutional form to liberty against state power.
John Stuart Mill: A nineteenth-century British philosopher and political economist who defended individual liberty and representative government. His essay On Liberty gives a canonical defense of limits on social and state coercion.
Positive liberty: Freedom understood as the capacity to direct one’s life and realize one’s purposes. It asks whether liberty requires more than the absence of interference.
Legal moralism: The view that conduct may be prohibited because it is considered immoral, even without harm to others. It permits restrictions that the harm principle would not ordinarily justify.
Freedom of association: The freedom to form, join, or leave groups and organizations. It extends personal choice to collective life and political organizing.
Constitutionalism: The principle that government authority is limited by law and constitutional rules. It constrains public power that could otherwise override individual freedom.
John Locke: A seventeenth-century English philosopher whose political theory grounded government in natural rights and consent. His account links personal freedom to rights that precede political authority.

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