Opening page…
If you're happy in a cage, are you free?
A preference can be sincerely expressed and still have been shaped by confinement.
Your answer
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A little context
Someone you know stays in a job or a town that everyone else can see is too small for them, and tells you, sincerely, that they're happy. You believe them. You also wonder whether they would say the same if the door had ever really been open.
Nearby questions
- The oracle you can't refuseAn oracle exists that always gives the wisest possible answer to any decision — which city, which job, whom to marry. It has never once been wrong. How much of your life do you hand it?
- Do you have free will?Your genes, your upbringing and the laws of nature were all in place before you chose anything. The choice still felt like yours.
- Can you know what's right and still not do it?Socrates held that nobody does wrong knowingly, so anyone who does must not really know. Everyone who has broken a promise to themselves has doubts.
- If you've done nothing wrong, should you mind being watched?The argument sounds airtight until you picture every message, search and place you've been, laid out for the people who know you.
- Predicted before you choseIf a system can predict what you will choose before you know it yourself, is the choice still yours?
