Freedom is traditionally understood as independence of the arbitrary will of another.Such a state is contrasted with slavery.A slave is constantly subject to the will of another. By contrast a free person can do whatever he chooses as long as he does not break the law and infringe on the freedom of others. This has been described as external freedom or "negative liberty." To the layman, this is understood as: "your freedom ends where my nose begins."
There is also the sense of inner freedom which exists where free will is followed by free action. A person who does not succeed in doing what he sets out to do, because his will fails, is in a sense unfree, a slave to his passions. His will is not free because it is subject to momentary impulses which distract him from accomplishing what he had determined to do. An example would be a person who is an addict. He may want to give up his addiction but cannot and the decisions he makes are shaped by the need to feed the addiction. So freedom comes from self-control. Goethe said, "From the forces that all creatures bind, who overcomes himself his freedom finds."
Complete freedom includes the inner freedom of the will and the external freedom of the environment such that a person's plans and deliberations are not arbitrarily thwarted by either himself or some other agency.
Freedom has traditionally been linked with the idea of
responsibility. George Bernard Shaw expressed this succinctly, "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."A free person has the opportunity and burden of making choices and decisions. This also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Freedom_(philosophy)
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