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Dallin H. Oaks

Oaks promotes his distinction between Freedom and Agency.

Notes

I generally like Oaks's style of discourse. I think he tends to be very logical, methodical, and structured. As a prophet, he has clearly been willing to revisit the importance of family and the Constitution in ways that have been unsettlingly missing from the discourse of his two predecessors. Some of my favorite talks are from Oaks. That said, I am concerned that his attempt to split Freedom and Agency is not entirely coherent and leads people to assert that despotism is no bad thing because our agency is under no threat. If the distinction were practically useful, and coherent, then I would find it worth adopting, but it does not seem to be any of those things.

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