I kinda does answer the question. If there isn't any "wilderness" to live in, because it's all owned by people, then the question is pointless.
I live in Australia, where we actually do face this question. There are Aboriginal people living on their ancestral lands in the outback. They have dramatically shorter lifespans and worse health conditions. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that colonialist administrations have messed with their ability to live on their land. But the government now faces a choice:
- do we let them live out in the bush on their ancestral lands, where they have these measurably worse lives by all the standards we use to measure such things, or
- do we remove them from their lands and try to improve their life choices so they live better (in all the standards we measure such things).
This question basically comes down to: if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, but the cost of that freedom is a dramatic reduction in their health, life expectancy, education, and quality of life, should we let them?
We haven't really worked out an answer yet, but it is increasingly looking like the right one is actually "no".
So, to answer your question "if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, are they free?", the answer that we're discovering is: "maybe, it depends on whether they can support themselves and their children to an acceptable standard doing that, and there needs to be government inspectors who decide whether that's the case"
I think your answer here means that "freedom" is essentially a useless word in political discussions. Your definition is radically different than mine.
It's the same freedom we're talking about in the War Against Drugs. The freedom to kill yourself with narcotics is not something that governments are comfortable granting their citizens.
it isn't. It's a restriction on freedom imposed by governments because allowing people to kill themselves with narcotics is not a freedom that governments are comfortable with.
I live in Australia, where we actually do face this question. There are Aboriginal people living on their ancestral lands in the outback. They have dramatically shorter lifespans and worse health conditions. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that colonialist administrations have messed with their ability to live on their land. But the government now faces a choice:
- do we let them live out in the bush on their ancestral lands, where they have these measurably worse lives by all the standards we use to measure such things, or - do we remove them from their lands and try to improve their life choices so they live better (in all the standards we measure such things).
This question basically comes down to: if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, but the cost of that freedom is a dramatic reduction in their health, life expectancy, education, and quality of life, should we let them?
We haven't really worked out an answer yet, but it is increasingly looking like the right one is actually "no".
So, to answer your question "if a person wants to live free in the wilderness, are they free?", the answer that we're discovering is: "maybe, it depends on whether they can support themselves and their children to an acceptable standard doing that, and there needs to be government inspectors who decide whether that's the case"