    Three features of Dewey’s view of individuality in this sense are most prominent: individuality is reflective, it is social, and it must be exercised in order to be enjoyed. The first point is that freedom is held to consist in the capacity and willingness on the part of a person to reflect on her or his own goals, aims and projects, and to revise them as a result of this reflection. Individuality in what we may call a weak sense is universally possessed and consists in the distinctive patterns of response to the environment that each person displays, “a distinctive way of feeling the impacts of the world and of showing a preferential bias in response to these impacts” (Individualism Old and New, LW5, 121). In the stronger sense in which it is a value for liberals, according to Dewey, individuality consists in the personal capacity for choice, “the most characteristic activity of a self” (Ethics, 2nd edition, LW7, 285). This is not a matter of arbitrarily or whimsically plumping for one option rather than another, for Dewey.  Rather, choice that is expressive of individuality in the strong sense involves intelligent criticism of options. Accordingly, we can understand why Dewey claims that “to foresee future objective alternatives and to be able by deliberation to choose one of them and thereby weigh its chances in the struggle for future existence, measures our freedom” (Human Nature and Conduct, MW14, 210). Second, freedom as individuality is social: it is thought to involve participation in shaping the social conditions that bear on individuality. As Dewey puts it in The Public and Its Problems, liberty “is that secure release and fulfilment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association” (The Public and Its Problems, LW2, 329).  Freedom in its fullest sense, then, is only possible in a canonical form of social order, in which all take part in shaping the conditions of common life. Third, this is what has been called an exercise rather than an opportunity concept of freedom. For some positive theories of liberty, including Dewey’s, it is a necessary condition of an agent’s being free that he or she should actually pursue those ends outlined by that theory as constitutive of the good – that is, he or she should exercise the opportunity: I am in possession of my liberty in this valuable sense for Dewey only if I actually act in these ways.