This award-winning work proposes a comprehensive new theory in which freedom is depicted as the absence of a wide variety of flaws, breakdowns, and restrictions that limit the potential flourishing of human beings as autonomous agents. By presenting each conflicting theory as specific to a different defect in human action, this defeasibility formulation, it is argued, accommodates the diverse intuitions that have made accounts of the concept of freedom so universally contested.
Guided by the method of wide reflective equilibrium, Swanton's coherence theory aims to preserve the broadest possible range of intuitions about freedom. Intuitions are pruned and adjusted to remove apparent conflict and are tested against an independently satisfying background theory that explains their heterogeneity in terms of their diverse relations to the intrinsic point or value of freedom for human agency.
The work contains a thorough critical overview of current theories of freedom and detailed discussion of such key concepts as restraint, rationality, interest, authenticity, perfection, flourishing, deliberation, and weakness of will.
