A normative doctrine in which freedom is the sole value cannot be a ground-world doctrine; at most it is a sort of metadoctrinal normative theory dealing with the relationship between a person and 'er ideals or lack thereof. A normative doctrine in which freedom is the sole value just knows no ground-world ideals. But what if freedom is not the only value and the system of disciplinary thought concerned pluralistic? Traditional ideologies or doctrines teach that in such a case freedom has to be balanced against the other values recognized. However, those doctrines never managed to differentiate doctrinal and metadoctrinal (or even metaphysical) considerations, and often not normative and social or legal, nonnormative considerations either. From the metadoctrinal perspective of personhood, the idea of balancing freedom against other values is definitely fallacious. It is only on the doctrinal level that it makes sense to let freedom be part of the evaluative calculus. In other words, extrinsic freedom with its purely rights-theoretical basis cannot be weighed against anything; intrinsic freedom, on the other hand, whether ultimate or not, can indeed be made part of any consequentialist or other calculus.

Traditional pluralists who do not distinguish between the doctrinal and the metadoctrinal, like to construe a conflict between freedom and two other values in particular -- or rather, one value and one disvalue. Firstly, there is the so-called 'conflict between freedom and the prevention of harm', and secondly, there is the so-called 'conflict between freedom and equality'. By construing these conflicts as purely doctrinal ones, pluralist ideologues or theorists give themselves the greatest freedom possible to choose what suits them best. When they prefer totalitarianism of the sexual-monotheist brand, they will argue that more individual freedom does too much harm to society as a whole; when they prefer totalitarianism of the socioeconomic brand, they will argue that more individual freedom is detrimental to equality in the material sense. And, of course, when they prefer liberty above all, they will argue that both the increase of harm and the decrease of equality are negligible compared with the benefits of liberty.

The criterion of harm was originally introduced to confine the power and influence of the state to the area of public interest, that is, to keep it out of the sphere of the purely private. Against this view that individual freedom in the private domain is not harmful to anybody, it has later been objected that also purely private acts or practises could be 'harmful' to society as a whole. The purported 'harm' concerned would then not be direct, bodily harm like murder or injury but some kind of 'indirect' or 'spiritual harm'. (This concept of harm stands to bodily harm as structural violence stands to bodily violence.) Deviation from the established, 'moral' conceptions of a society would endanger that society and be a potential harm to it. On this construction any kind of individual freedom could be 'injurious' (like any kind of communal or collective system could be blamed for its 'structural violence').

When an ideologue of the above persuasion speaks of "fundamental values which all people in a society have to share", one would expect that 'e liked to get rid of all religious and other ideological minorities in the first place --a standpoint which, altho immoral, would be courageous in a society that demands respect for religious minorities--, but somehow 'er most beloved victims are minorities and ex-minorities in matters of sexuality and family-planning instead. 'E will not point out that certain religious and political ideologies are harmful to society, or that a cinema, television and computer game cult of violence and disrespectfulness is, even when the harm concerned in these instances might be truly indirect in that it does contribute to murder, rape and other forms of bodily harm in stages. When the phrase indirect harm is not in any way related to bodily harm, but is used to denote spiritual or societal 'harm', it evidently serves as a mere deus ex machina. It then merely provides a contrived solution to the problem of how to associate everything that is believed to be bad in terms of some doxastic value with bodily harm, such as killing and injuring. This is done according to an age-old recipe: take a word which has a negative evaluative meaning for everyone (such as harm or violence) and 'mix' this word with something that has completely different conceptual contents, while exploiting the negative connotation of the word to the utmost. To top it all, add an extra adjective (such as spiritual or structural) now and then to make clear what the actual denotation of the phrase thus concocted is supposed to be.

Now, freedom from harm, that is bodily harm, may indeed be a fundamental value shared by almost everyone. To the extent that it is, people may not even recognize it as a value. But other values, or doxastic values, are controversial, for example, because they are blatantly exclusivistic. To call such values "fundamental", and to say that doing something that does not agree with those doxastic values does 'harm' to society, is a question of ideological strategy, not of morality. Fundamental in this interideological context is solely extrinsic liberty. And no-one's doxastic values, even not those of a majority of people, can interfere with an individual's liberty in the sense of the right to personhood.

While harm is the disvalue with which freedom has been confronted, equality is the value. As the argument runs, the ideal of freedom would always disagree with the ideal of equality in some way. If one allowed people freely to choose what they wanted, their free choices would upset any ideal, egalitarian pattern for society as a whole -- it has been said. But the opposition construed between freedom and equality is largely based on a confusion, firstly, of the different kinds of freedom, and secondly, of the different ontological spheres, namely the normative sphere and the factual-modal sphere to which social rules and laws belong.

When speaking of "extrinsic" and "intrinsic freedom", we associate these concepts with normative principles, while already having presupposed 'freedom' in some metaphysical, modal sense. That is, we take it that the people we are talking about can choose to act morally or immorally. This is the sort of freedom people have, because they are not mere bodies of which the behavior is wholly predetermined. (It only makes sense to assume that their behavior is partially free and partially predetermined.) If denominational and other normative doctrines are to be of any significance at all to people, then people must be free in this sense. To say that they should be free in this sense is superfluous, if not nonsensical. Should equality conflict with freedom, it is therefore not this metaphysical freedom it conflicts with.

In a social or legal sense freedom is the absence of a (mandatory) social rule or law forbidding certain actions, or even the presence of a permissive social rule or law explicitly allowing certain actions. But the principle of freedom in a social or legal sense is a factual-modal principle, not a normative one; or if so, then contingently so. An act may be right but illegal (when one does not have the legal freedom to do it); and it may be wrong but legal (when one has the legal freedom, or even duty, to do it). (And whether or not something is forbidden by the state or community, people normally still have the 'metaphysical freedom' to do what they want to do.) The question of whether acts which are (morally) wrong should always be forbidden we will not deal with here, but this question can be asked precisely because of the distinct character of the normative, doctrinal sphere on the one hand and the social or legal sphere on the other.

Equality with respect to societal patterns or the distribution of goods is something to strive for on the basis of the prescriptive reading of the norm of interpersonal equality. There can be no direct conflict between this normative ideal and the ideal of social and legal freedom. It is one's metaphysical freedom and this very social and legal freedom which one should employ to further the ideal of equality. Every act which leads to an inequality or greater inequality of distribution is, then, prima facie wrong and ought to be abstained from. Also in the event that it is legal to act wrongly in this respect, this still does not take away one's moral responsibility to act rightly in this respect. The conflict construed by some between equality and freedom is therefore primarily due to mixing up normative, doctrinal considerations with social or legal, nonnormative and with metadoctrinal considerations. This does not mean that the intrinsic ideal of personal freedom could not disagree with the intrinsic ideal of interpersonal equality, but if this is the case, the conflict is one between well-being or minimization of unhappiness and equality. This conflict is one between derivative, neutral-inclusive doctrinal values. It does not serve clarity to label this conflict as one between (a principle of) equality and (a principle of) freedom, because this rendering is both too restrictive and too liberal. It is too restrictive in that well-being and the absence of suffering are much more than a question of being free to choose. And it is too liberal in that the concept of freedom is also used in metadoctrinal, metaphysical, social and legal thought.