1. Actions and Forbearances For Locke, the question of whether human beings are free is the question of whether human beings are free with respect to their actions and forbearances . As he puts it: [T]he Idea of Liberty , is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E1–4 II.xxi.8: 237) In order to understand Locke’s conception of freedom, then, we need to understand his conception of action and forbearance. There are three main accounts of Locke’s theory of action. According to what we might call the “Doing” theory of action, actions are things that we do (actively), as contrasted to things that merely happen to us (passively). If someone pushes my arm up, then my arm rises, but, one might say, I did not raise it. That my arm rose is something that happened to me, not something I did .…