A bullied child will often tell you that nothing happened at school, because technically this can be true. Nobody might have touched them, and yet they took the long way home. They ate their lunch in the toilet, and they had to laugh along at a joke they knew was about them. The philosopher Philip Pettit argued that this is exactly what unfreedom looks like. In his 2014 book Just Freedom, Pettit argued that we've defined freedom too thinly as simply being left alone. But there is an older idea where freedom means not living at the mercy of somebody else's will. Pettit says that the opposite is domination, and his example is Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, where the husband keeps his wife under his thumb even though he indulges her every whim. Because domination doesn't have to mean when you force somebody, it's when you know that somebody has power over you, and so you have to keep them sweet. A kind master is still a master. Imagine a boy at school called Sam. On a good week, his bully leaves him alone. And so everybody thinks it's over. But Sam's week is arranged around another boy's mood. Which corridor can he walk down? Which bench can he sit on? Which version of himself can he be that is less at risk? Nothing happens to him. And yet Sam is still not free. The same is true of any office, or family, or social group where people have to bend over backwards to accommodate somebody else. And so Pettit offers what he calls the 'eyeball test', because free people can look each other in the eye. The eyeball test is a better measure of bullying than counting any incidents, because it measures just how much fear and anxiety somebody else might be causing you and other people. — TikTok di @philosophyminis