Authority of Freedom

Who has authority to reduce someone's freedom?

This may be largely dependent on the perspective of morals which is taken. In a post; Mutual Morality, I tried to outline plausible general prospects for morals. If the ideology is agreed upon that everyone in a society should follow the general moral guidelines of trying to allow maximum enjoyment for all, then it seems to follow that someone may only have authority to reduce another's freedom, if it is to increase overall enjoyment. 

Of course estimating overall enjoyment is complicated, especially since enjoyment is subjective. These complications are why there are so often disputes and arguments, basically anywhere on Earth where there are people. Societies usually have a somewhat decent concept put into place to deal with disputes, by having appointed individuals with extra authority who are supposed to have additional knowledge on pre-set moral guidelines we call laws. But Perhaps individuals could reduce disputes themselves, with more understanding of these concepts, and perhaps these concepts could be applied to circumstances where law is not applicable.

If the moral ideology is agreed upon of maximum enjoyment, complications can arise from estimating a comparison of oneself's enjoyment to another’s. Since this is all based on subjectivity, it may be best to take a default estimate of equality. If all individuals took this perspective that others enjoyment is of equal value as their own, they would avoid reducing someone else's freedom or enjoyment for their own benefit. 

This perspective of equality could also apply to scenarios of someone assuming they know better of what is best for someone else. I covered more of this idea in a post called; Freedom of Choice. As noted in that post, some scenarios exist where someone likely does know better and could have the authority to make a decision for another, such as parents over their children, or humans over animals. But how does this extend to authorities within society?

In reality, circumstances of life can be so complicated, where the effects on 1 person are very different than others and the difference of enjoyment could be significantly noticeable. If additional information and communication with those involved doesn't work to come to an agreement, authority could be given to additional 3rd party perspectives. Also, in reality, everyone does not follow these guidelines, so if someone blatantly and obviously disregards others enjoyment, this is where, ideally, societies designated authority of power could be applied. 

The next question could be; how much authority should be given to those in power? If authority is blindly given, this can lead to mass reduction of enjoyment or freedom, as can be seen by many examples of dictators in history. Keeping authority restricted to it’s scope of applicability for decision making could be 1 step to determine how much authority should be given. Not only can authority of power be given to individuals, but perhaps also authority could be taken back when deemed necessary to uphold morals of Authority of Freedom.