Hello everyone,
I am currently taking an interest in the concept of freedom and especially questions regarding the subject of freedom. MacCallums paper *Negative and Positive Freedom* has been a good starting point. He writes: '"x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z," x ranges over agents, y ranges over such "preventing conditions" as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.'. He claims that disagreements about freedom comedown to disagreements regarding one of the variables in question. He also states that whether you are justified in using a certain view of what a person is (the x-variable) when discussing freedom depends on how strong your arguments are for the helpfulness of that view for discussions of freedom. He writes: "These expansions or contractions of the criteria for identification of persons may seem unwarranted to us. Whether they are so, however, depends upon the strength of the arguments offered in support of the helpfulness of regarding persons in these ways while discussing freedom.". I am not convinced that helpfulness is the only criteria here.

I've also been reading Tim Grays book *Freedom* which discusses different conceptions of freedom based on MacCallums triadic freedom concept. Here we get different views on what the x-variable is but rarely longer discussions of why that should be so in any other way than that it fits in with that conception of freedom.

What I have found is that while there is certainly some discussion about the x-variable it seems often to be just a given or a very small part of the discussion. I have also tried to do some searches in databases like google scholar to try to find papers focusing more on this debate but haven't had great success. So to my question - do you know of any books or articles that either exclusively or to a large extent focuses on the x-variable or who is free? My interest is both in works trying to make a good account of the person in this context and also discussions of what justifies different accounts here.

Br.
Filosofen