Duty defined by society and not individuals themselves is a mark of a non-free society. In free society everyone is responsible for choosing their fate and their commitments, externally imposed commitments are kind of oppression.
The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms. Some influential portion of a population agrees (organically, culturally) that certain ways of behaving are more valuable (or unacceptable) to the community, even if not every individual necessarily agrees. This can obviously result in extremely non-free societal structures, as you suggest, but community at any significant scale will always require some compromise of individual freedoms.
This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.
> The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms.
IMHO progressive sophistication of human society goes hand in hand with replacing informal relations and processes (like duty, honor, shame, charity) by formal laws and institutions (rule of law, public welfare).
There are always some necessary compromises of individual liberties, but that can be handled by formal institutios, which generally have limited scope all control mechanisms compared to informal but unchecked power of society.
I agree with the spirit of this, but there are some deeply broken aspects to this idea. First, you need to define what a society is. A large component of that definition is going to come down to some semblance of shared expectations. Those shared expectations are your duty.
At the risk of being guilty of the same hyperbole I'm criticizing: While it's true that a society saying you shouldn't murder your neighbor is ostensibly "less free" than one that allows you to determine for yourself whether or not that's a commitment you want to endorse, the resulting society is in many ways much more free in a pragmatic sense.
I think we need to have a discussion about the nature of freedom, then.
If we choose to live in a society, then in order for that society to function well, we have to all behave in a manner that allows that society to function well.
If enough people choose not to behave in a manner that allows society to function well, then it stops functioning well.
This is not oppression. Anyone can always choose to leave society and live away from others. But in order for society to function, we need to live with some constraints on our behaviour.
If that's not your definition of "freedom", what is?
> Duty defined by society and not individuals themselves is a mark of a non-free society.
No, it isn't. Many duties are defined simply by being necessary in order to have a society where people can gain wealth by specialization and trade and exercise their individual freedom in any meaningful sense. The very medium in which we are having this conversation, which enables people to exercise their individual freedom to say what they think in a way that has never existed before, wouldn't exist without such a society. Neither would a multitude of other benefits that we all take for granted but which most of the humans that have ever lived did not have and could not even conceive of.
What is the mark of a non-free society is particular individuals telling other individuals what their "duty" is and claiming that they are doing so in the name of "society", when in fact they're just doing it for their own individual benefit.
This sounds naive to the point of dystopian. What about tragedy-of-the-commons collective action problems, like pollution, natural resources (overfishing, overlogging), climate change, herd immunity?
Canada and Nordic countries rank highly in every major freedom index, yet these countries are all known for relatively high tax obligations and comprehensive environmental and climate regulation. No one serious believes all externally-imposed commitments are avoidable or oppressive.
> What about tragedy-of-the-commons collective action problems, like pollution ...
I (and OP) wrote about (informal) duties defined by society as a whole, not (explicit) laws approved and enforced by government. Laws are necessary minimum to have functioning society and can handle these kinds of problems.
