Are we - and should we be - free to make ourselves unfree in various ways? Well, yes. It happens all the time. Robert binds himself to a life of celibacy, thereby foregoing a freedom that most people value very highly. June agrees, in offering her friend Katharine a large interest-free loan over the next two years, to forego the use of money that is properly hers during that period. Asif signs over the use of his house to the McHughs for an agreed rental for some specified period and he is no longer free to entertain guests there. And so on. It happens all the time, and we think that it's right that it should happen (those of us who do) at least partly because we assume that the freedom to make choices that subsequently limit some of our own freedoms is very important, despite the value of the specific freedoms we may forego by making the choices we do. Perhaps it's also because many of the freedom-limiting choices we make aren't irrevocable: Robert can renounce his celibacy, June will in due course recover her loan, and Asif, likewise, his house.
(I will here bypass the question, as not being relevant to the case I want to discuss, whether we should be free to enslave ourselves altogether - should be able voluntarily to give up the whole of our freedom to another once and for all. Some philosophers have thought not, others yes; but that is for another day.)
Elizabeth Farrelly, in the Age, writes: 'Cultural freedom may be our core dogma, but does it include freedom to be unfree?' She doesn't answer her own question directly; but the tendency of her article is to suggest she thinks maybe not. Her topic is the burqa, and she reviews the various reasons given in favour of allowing those who want to wear it to do so, reasons she isn't persuaded by. God isn't a good reason, because 'any number of imams' are on record as saying that God doesn't require it. Politics isn't a good reason, because... (er, I think) it's 'trad[ing] the liberties of Western dress for... political point-scoring'. And love isn't a good reason, because 'the burqa precludes proper social interaction'.
But whether one likes Farrelly's arguments or not, she never sets herself to weighing them against the value she purported to start from: namely, our freedom to choose in ways that limit some of our specific freedoms subsequently. So her column is broken-backed. I have no love for the burqa or what it does for either women or social interaction. But to cite these considerations without properly assessing the value of a person's freedom to choose - especially when that is what you yourself have supposedly started from - that is not a serious discussion.