This paper presents a measure of the freedom inherent in choice situations, that specifically aims to capture the scope for control, separating this aspect of choice from idiosyncratic tastes.  The model is related to models of preference for flexibility (Kreps 1979, Dekel Lipman Rustichini 2001) but differs in several ways.  Particularly, the ranking is incomplete, and always ranks situations of no choice below situations with positive choice.  The paper attempts to steer a middle path between preference-based and non preference-based measures of freedom.  I argue that while a measure of freedom should not be dependent on idiosyncratic preferences, it should depend on certain broad value judgments.  I present a specific partial ranking, called the grading order, and show that it is the coarsest order satisfying a certain set of axioms.  I also show that choice situation x is preferred to choice situation y according to the grading order if and only if there is an argument from an intuitive set of axioms that x is better than y.  I consider two applications.  In the first application, voting, I show that the freedom measure presented here coincides with Banzhaf power.  In the second application, I show that more information always leads to more freedom of choice, so that the model captures a commonly held belief.