RE: Freedom Comes with Responsibilities
He gave it a great name because it is hard to realize something like this indeed especially that people don't like to be in control and they always choose to be lead by someone just because they are protected from blame.
The thing with ethics is that they are subjective, different for everybody and what someone may consider as a responsible, ethical way of living their life may not seem so ethical for someone else.
I love that, "like to think of themselves as free, but actually, they are subtly 'governed'", I think this is how most people live their lives, probably even us. In some way or another we, as humans are influenced by all the bullshit going on around us thus being free and acting on our will is never easy.
I think that we don't have any idea what we need since we're in this little box that we cannot transcend thus we cannot accept the real truth.
Thanks a lot for your comment, I love it. :D
You should check out some Zygmunt Bauman on ethics, he spent a lot of his life trying to figure out what ethics might look like in a postmodern society where individuals are (essentially) free - he basically (I think) argues that ethical behaviour is behaviour in which we always take account of 'the other' - we have care for them as our starting point for deciding whether we should engage in a course of action - thus ethical behavior will quite often be about not doing, rather than just 'doing what I like' - and this also allows for judgement, responsibility, contextual differences. He has a rather minimalist and generalist approach, but I kind of like it - something is ethical if people act out of caring for others. That makes it social, not individual.
Some people take the concept of ethics a step further and suggest we actually need to codify it in some kind of social rules - Jurgen Habermas for example.
TBH The issues of freedom and ethics were never my main interest, but I just got so far into social theory a few years back - and there they were... recurring themes!
Cheers!