When Freedom Becomes Permission – The Hidden Loss of Self-Sovereignty
Modern legal systems often speak of freedom, self-determination, and personal responsibility. The citizen is described as mature and legally competent. He can enter contracts, work, pay taxes, own property, vote, accept liability, take on debt, and be punished for his actions. In these areas, the state treats him as an adult, responsible, and accountable.
Yet the moment the same person wants to make decisions about his own body, health, property, consciousness, way of life, religious conviction, or personal risk, the situation often changes. Suddenly, freedom is no longer self-evident. It becomes tied to conditions: permits, licenses, medical approval, tax visibility, moral expectations, institutional recognition, or administrative control.
This tension is described by the concept of conditionalized sovereignty. It refers to a modern form of freedom that remains intact on paper but increasingly becomes permission in practice. The citizen is formally free, yet the concrete exercise of that freedom often depends on whether a system, authority, institution, physician, court, or administration recognizes it.
The central idea is simple: modern law often treats the citizen as fully responsible when duties are imposed, but only conditionally sovereign when real self-determination is claimed.
He is mature enough to pay taxes, bear punishment, fulfill contracts, obey rules, and be held legally accountable. But when he wants to decide over his body, medical treatment, property, states of consciousness, personal lifestyle, or private risks, his maturity is often reduced or questioned.
This asymmetry lies at the heart of the problem.
A clear example is property. A person may legally own land. Yet what he can actually do with it often depends on permission. He may not be allowed to build, renovate, rent, divide, sell, farm, or economically use the land without prior approval from the state or administration. Ownership remains formally recognized, but its practical meaning is narrowed. Property is not abolished, but it is transformed into a form of conditional use authorization.
The same pattern appears in relation to the body. Modern legal systems generally recognize bodily autonomy. But this autonomy is often accepted only when it remains within medically, legally, or socially approved boundaries. A person may consent to treatment, but his refusal of treatment, his choice of non-standard therapy, or his personal relationship to illness, risk, pain, and death can quickly become subject to pressure.
Yet bodily autonomy is only real if it includes not only the right to accept approved treatment, but also the right to refuse it. If a person is free only to agree, but not truly free to refuse, then autonomy has been reduced to cooperation.
The issue becomes even clearer in the field of consciousness. Many legal systems protect thought, belief, religion, and conscience. But the conditions through which consciousness is altered, expanded, influenced, or explored are often heavily restricted. This raises an important question: Does freedom protect only what a person thinks, or also his relationship to the conditions through which thinking, perception, and consciousness are shaped?
When a person makes decisions about his inner states, awareness, perception, mental experience, or spiritual practice, this touches one of the deepest areas of self-determination. Nevertheless, these areas are often not viewed primarily through the lens of mental freedom, but through the lens of risk, control, normalization, or medical management.
The paper also shows that the same action can be judged very differently depending on its institutional context. A substance, practice, or altered state may be prohibited when pursued individually, but permitted when embedded in religion, medicine, research, or therapy. In such cases, the decisive issue is no longer only the action itself, but whether it is mediated through a recognized institution.
This leads to a striking result: individual autonomy alone is often not treated as a sufficient source of legal legitimacy. Only when an action is routed through religion, medicine, science, administration, or professional authority does it become acceptable.
This creates the permission-based citizen: a citizen whose freedom is no longer assumed as his own original authority, but activated through recognized systems.
The paper does not reject regulation as such. It does not argue that the state may never intervene. Protection is clearly necessary where there is violence, fraud, coercion, exploitation, danger to others, infectious risk, abuse, environmental damage, or lack of informed consent. The decisive point is different: the farther a restriction moves away from concrete harm to others, the stronger the state’s justification must become.
For this purpose, the paper develops the Sovereignty-Restriction Test. This test asks several key questions.
What image of the human being does a regulation assume? Is the person treated as a free subject, or mainly as a risk, patient, taxpayer, worker, or administrative unit?
Does the action primarily concern the individual himself, or does it concretely harm other people?
Is there real harm involved, or only moral disapproval, tradition, fear, habit, or historically inherited prejudice?
Does the state have to justify the restriction, or is the citizen forced to explain why he should be allowed to be free?
Is the measure truly necessary and proportionate?
Is the citizen treated as equally mature in matters of self-determination as he is in matters of duty, debt, liability, and punishment?
This test helps reveal when regulation is justified and when it begins to transform freedom into permission.
Another important issue is historical bias. Many legal categories appear neutral today, although they may have emerged from moral panic, religious disapproval, cultural taboo, medical stigma, political fear, or inherited social prejudice. The fact that a restriction is old, familiar, or legally codified does not automatically mean that it is still justified.
For this reason, the paper demands a renewed burden of justification. If a rule is shaped by inherited prejudice, moral judgment, or old fear, its legitimacy cannot simply be assumed. It must be examined again in light of concrete harm, proportionality, and public justification.
At the deepest level, the paper asks a powerful question:
Why may the state treat the citizen as fully responsible when he must pay, obey, work, comply, or be punished — but only conditionally mature when he wants to decide over himself?
The answer proposed by the paper is symmetry. If a person is adult enough to carry legal duties, he must also be presumed adult enough to make decisions in self-regarding areas of life. Restrictions may sometimes be necessary, but they require strong justification. Not mere morality. Not tradition. Not administrative convenience. Not fiscal interest. Not inherited fear. Only concrete, reasonable, proportionate, publicly justifiable harm prevention.
The final message can be summarized as follows:
Freedom must not remain only a beautiful word in legal theory. It must exist in practice. If the state cannot demonstrate concrete harm to others, self-determination must not be transformed into a system of permission.
You can find the full scientific article in the
International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Elias Rubenstein (2026): Conditionalized Sovereignty: The Permission-Based Citizen and the Asymmetry of Legal Maturity
https://www.ijfmr.com/research-paper.php?id=79690
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.79690