Jonny Thomson

A bullied child will rarely tell you that something happened at school. Because it might technically be true. Nobody touched them. They took the long way home, ate lunch in the toilet, and laughed along with a joke they knew was about them.

The philosopher Philip Pettit argued that is exactly what unfreedom looks like. In his 2014 book Just Freedom, Pettit argues that we’ve defined freedom too thinly, as simply being left alone, when the older idea is that freedom means not living at the mercy of somebody else’s will.

Pettit calls the opposite domination, and his example is Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, whose husband indulges her yet still keeps her under his thumb. Domination doesn’t need anyone to force someone. It means you when you know someone has power over you and so that you have to keep them sweet. A kind master is still a master.

Imagine a boy called Sam. On a good week the bully leaves him alone, and everyone says it’s over. But Sam’s whole week is still arranged around another boy’s mood: which corridor, which bench, which version of himself is less at risk. Nothing happened, and Sam still wasn’t free. The same is true of any office, family, or social group when you have to bend to accommodate someone else.

So Pettit offers what he calls the eyeball test. Free people can look others in the eye. The eyeball test is a better measure of bullying than counting incidents, because it measures what just how much fear and anxiety someone else might cause us.