Can Someone Voluntarily Give Up All Future Freedom?

Suppose an adult, neither deceived nor coerced, freely signs a contract requiring lifelong obedience to another person with no right ever to leave. Does respect for choice require society to enforce it?

In Chapter V of On Liberty, John Stuart Mill rejects that conclusion. A person who sells himself into slavery appears to exercise freedom once, but thereby gives up every future use of it; the principle of liberty cannot require society to sustain an arrangement whose point is permanent unfreedom. Mill is not denying that promises and contracts may constrain future conduct. Loans, employment and long-term cooperation create obligations because others reasonably rely on them. Ordinary contracts, however, continue to treat both parties as people who can object, bear responsibility and exit under specified conditions. A slavery contract removes one party’s standing as a chooser.

The dispute therefore concerns inalienable rights. Critics may see paternalism: if adults may shape their own lives, why may they not choose complete submission? A reply is that consent is not a pass that automatically makes every relationship legitimate. Its normative force comes from an agent who remains capable of judgement and revision. An agreement that eliminates every future possibility of withdrawal, appeal and renewed consent destroys the conditions that gave the original consent its force.

My view is that a present choice can create real and demanding obligations, but one act of consent cannot permanently erase future agency. Restricting freedom and abolishing it are not merely different degrees of the same thing. The former organises action; the latter tries to efface the person who will continue to live, judge and bear the consequences.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-association/