The Business of Liberty is an ambitious book that aims to defend a novel account of what makes freedom valuable. It then uses that theory of liberty to shed light on issues in business ethics, business regulation, freedom of speech, and additional related topics.

Philosophical discussions about liberty often follow a particular format. First, the author defends a conception of what liberty is. For instance, one might argue that liberty consists of noninterference, nondomination, the positive ability to achieve one’s goals, self-mastery, or something else. Second, the author articulates why liberty is valuable and defends claims about what kinds of protection it ought to have, if any. For instance, one might try to settle whether people have a right to that liberty or discuss how strong that right is. Third, the author defends claims about how governments or other institutions ought to respond to that liberty. For instance, one might argue that liberty requires a liberal democratic state—or forbids the state entirely.

De Bruin wisely avoids the first question. He might in fact be comfortable, as I am, with saying that liberty refers to a variety of related things, each of which is valuable. However, he instead states that his goal is to provide an answer to the second question (what makes liberty valuable/under what conditions is it valuable?), an answer that he argues one must adopt almost regardless of which conception of liberty one defends. He argues that mere liberty, on its own, has little value unless certain conditions are met. What matters instead is that people have what he calls known freedom and acknowledged freedom.

A person has known freedom, per de Bruin, to the “extent that they have knowledge concerning their choice situation” (80), including what their choices are, what options are possible but excluded or blocked for various reasons, and what the possible outcomes of these choices are. They have acknowledged freedom when their known freedom is common knowledge and institutionalized, that is, when others acknowledge that the person is free and will act to preserve, protect, and respect that freedom. We might say that knowledge is the personal condition that makes one’s freedom valuable, whereas common acknowledgment is the social condition that makes one’s freedom valuable. Just as, say, Marxists argued in the past that material wealth is necessary to make freedom valuable, de Bruin argues that freedom requires epistemic conditions.

De Bruin’s basic argumentative strategy is to consider a wide range of popular and plausible arguments for why freedom (however it might be defined) is good or valuable but then show that these arguments fail unless we add in certain knowledge and public acknowledgment conditions. For instance, suppose one thinks that freedom is good because it enhances one’s ability to satisfy one’s desires or achieve one’s goals. De Bruin argues that freedom does so only if one knows what one can and cannot do and has a good enough sense of what results different choices might have.

To illustrate why, suppose a person has five options. I use my magic freedom-enhancing wand to triple their options to fifteen. The ten options I added are better than their previous five. However, the person remains aware only of the first five and does not know about the options I have added. Here, it seems that the person’s additional but unknown freedom does not much benefit them. Or, suppose a person has many options, but the person is in a state of radical ignorance and has no idea what these options would do. For instance, imagine the person is sick but has no medical knowledge at all. They are given access to all the drugs in the world, including drugs that would cure them, but they have no access to information about what any of the drugs do. Plausibly, the person’s freedom is not of much value. Furthermore, if others do not accept their freedom and create conditions for them to act upon it, then their freedom is not of much value.

This seems plausible enough, even without recounting de Bruin’s arguments at length here. What will be more controversial is how to apply these insights. For instance, philosophers and others enamored with behavioral economics (despite its replication crisis) have long argued what de Bruin argues: freedom is valuable only if people know what they are doing. They then try to show that in fact people do not know what they are doing. Thus, they argue, the state should feel free to regulate and nudge consumers, mandate certain choices, forbid other choices, or require agents to be better informed before they may act.

De Bruin surprisingly avoids this issue but does discuss adjacent issues. He provides a complex analysis of different forms of neuromarketing, arguing that some forms of marketing turn out to be genuine manipulation and threats to freedom, while others do not. He argues that the gold standard for contracts should be informed consent, where parties know and ensure the other parties know what the likely outcomes of the agreed contract will be.

Here, though, some puzzles arise. Even if we agree that freedom is less valuable or even not valuable in conditions of ignorance, it is unclear when this imposes obligations on others. For instance, intuitively, we might think that sellers must take care in selling to children or the mentally disabled. We might think that professions selling a product requiring specialized knowledge (such as medicine) should bear extra responsibility for informing their clients. But there might also be cases where if someone lacks knowledge, that is their problem, and we do not have any obligation to correct them. It would be helpful for de Bruin to specify when we bear personal responsibility for acquiring the knowledge we need to make our freedom valuable, when others bear that burden, and when ignorance is simply a bad thing that imposes no duties on others. Furthermore, it would be helpful to discuss whether sometimes giving consumers freedom is the very thing that makes them better consumers over time, or whether trying to protect people from their ignorance keeps them in a state of ignorance. Sometimes treating people as children makes them remain childlike.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill produces two basic kinds of arguments on behalf of freedom of speech and lifestyle. His positive argument is that, overall, and in the long run, people’s individual freedom is good for them and others. We can read de Bruin as adding qualifications to this positive argument: freedom is good for us only if we possess certain kinds of knowledge and if others acknowledge our freedom. In contrast, Mill’s negative argument is that freedom is good because unfreedom is bad—because other people impeding our freedom will predictably produce bad results. When we empower some people to control others, the people in control might be or become corrupt, selfish, or abusive, or they themselves will usually suffer from the same biases, ignorance, cognitive distortions, and errors from which they are supposed to protect others. For instance, suppose I demonstrate that consumers suffer from systematic irrationality in their choices. This weakens the positive argument for consumer choice. But the negative argument might remain intact—or become even stronger. After all, research generally finds that every bias in consumers is even worse in voters and that state regulatory agencies are staffed by cognitively flawed humans facing perverse incentives rather than omnibenevolent, omniscience angels. Accordingly, it would have been helpful if de Bruin had considered whether his arguments about the importance of knowledge strengthen the negative case for liberty, even if it would weaken the positive case.

Whereas the first four chapters of the book mostly develop a theoretical model (though de Bruin has a few interludes into issues in business ethics), the second half mostly concerns applied issues. Chapter 5 considers issues in ethical investing. Chapter 6 mostly considers issues in the ethics of oath making. Chapter 7 considers issues in the portrayal of violence in the media—in particular, the question of whether, if portraying violence predictably leads to real-life violence, the media should be censored or self-censor. Chapter 8 considers questions about the ethics of privacy.

One might expect that de Bruin, having forged a hammer in the first four chapters, will then spend the last four chapters hammering nails with that hammer. But, oddly, his arguments in the book’s second half mostly do not depend on or require his theory of freedom from the first half. Chapters 5 and 6 in particular seem to be stand-alone chapters. Chapter 7 argues, pace what some activists say, that psychological evidence does not show that people are passive when they view media violence; they instead retain self-control and are responsible for their choices. His analysis of the empirical evidence seems correct, but one can accept his argument without endorsing his theory of known freedom. Chapter 8 is more successful as an application of the theory. He argues that part of what makes privacy invasions bad is that they often reduce the known freedom people know they have. Certain privacy invasions place victims in situations of uncertainty about their option sets and the outcomes of their choices.

Much of this is interesting on its own, regardless. For instance, de Bruin shows that many arguments for socially responsible investing are flawed because they fail to acknowledge that what counts as the common good is contested or that many “sins” are things people in fact like and want, or they fail to take other people’s personal responsibility seriously.

Though The Business of Freedom is less organic than I would have preferred, it nevertheless has interesting insights into many particular topics. The book is rich with argumentation and analysis. Much of the book’s value is hard to convey in a review that focuses on the main structure and argument.