Measuring republican freedom

Republican and so-called independence conceptions of freedom stand out from other conceptions by embedding strong modal conditions on what it takes for a person to count as being free to do something. For this reason, the extent of one’s freedom, conceived under republican/independentist lights, cannot be measured by any of the measures of freedom that have been developed so far in the literature on freedom, since these do not register the requisite modal constraints. In this paper I propose a measure of freedom that does capture the requisite modal concerns. I do so by relying on work in the semantics of counterfactuals to define a measure of how modally robustly available an option is to an individual