L3 - Liberty 1 (Berlin, MacCallum and Pettit) Flashcards
what is liberty?
liberty = freedom
space for the self to do things, space where the state can’t intervene (liberal doctrine) = basic concept
freedom can be for collectives or individual rights or something less political, more like a sensibility
- collectives: critique of colonialism, idea that a collective is controlled, idea that peoples should be freed
- individual rights: right to reproductive freedom (also a collective, a collective of individuals)
- personal sensibility, way of being: “hiking completely naked is the definition of freedom” - different sense of the word freedom
is it one thing, or a series of things?
we mean diff things with the liberty concept (e.g. listen to what Trump says is freedom)
what kinds of ways are there to think about liberalism
- Republican (Petit, Arendt)
- Liberal (akin to Berlin: Negative freedom)
- Idealist (akin to Berlin: Positive freedom)
= different conceptions of liberty
negative vs positive freedom also diff conceptions of liberty
(need to end up knowing what we are and why, need to understand and use the terms)
Berlin’s two liberties
why liberty? prescribes the limits of state activity - i.e. the legitimate scope of coercion
- acc to Berlin this is the central question of politics: why should I obey anyone else? Why should I not lie as I like? If I disobey, may I be coerced? By whom, and to what degree, and in the name of what, and for the sake of what?
- not just do I have to obey, but to whom and why and to what extent
negative liberty =
- taken implicitly, self-evidentially true
- freedom from interference
- freedom from
- liberalism: create a space for protection around yourself that the state can’t interfere
positive liberty =
- freedom as self-mastery / self-actualization
- freedom to
- I want to be a certain type of person that has nothing to do with if the state will stop you
- to be able to self develop in this way is to be free
Berlin quote
“The ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ … [The] ‘positive’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that
negative liberty
- defined as boundary space for human action: space that can’t be intervened , what happens within there is entirely up to you
- usually looks like a law
- forcefield - is defined against coercion
- there is some agent you are protecting yourself against - which must be deliberately inflicted by humans:
- you are not coerced by e.g. the wind, or a storm
negative liberty = something might try to coerce you, but you won’t be coerced because you are protected. e.g. by rights
“I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability … Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom … By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom
- e.g. goal to write text about trans rights, if you get writers block and don’t end up writing it, you still have negative liberty
- positive freedom: writers block might be seen as restriction of freedom
negative liberty - how is liberty a boundary (classic English understanding)
- an outer boundary which the state (or others) cannot enter
- what does this mean in practice?
- some rights bigger than others, e.g. human rights vs property rights
- negative conception can be big and small - not exactly fixed, but nontheless firm
- society moves, thoughts change - the question of liberty is: how large should the circle around the self be?
“It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority. Where it is to be drawn is a matter of argument, indeed of haggling”
Bottom Line: there has to be a way to protect the individual, to carve out a space free of interference. Berlin doesn’t give a formula for how to define this minimum space, except to point out that it must somehow exist
positive liberty
- linked to autonomy (self-mastery) = being the best version of yourself, the most authentic and real version
- Subject not the object
- (the state is NOT the subject in what they can and not do to you, the object (this is what negative freedom does))
- you are the subject of the concern rather than the object - threats to liberty can be external or internal
” I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them”
-> is this really so diff from negative liberty?
= depends on what you mean by “self-mastery”:
“self which dominates; and, on the other, of something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self, or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures”
what is so wrong about positive liberty
Berlin is a negative libertarian
if we don’t self-master, and concerns come from within, it means we are internally divided
- always battling our inner demons
- one version of yourself judged more rational than the other
- there is a normative ranking
Berlin thinks that once you allow for a divided self, you open the door for totalitarianism, because
- Dividing the self renders the idea of “agency” meaningless
- the version of you that makes a mistake, that kills someone, if you can convince yourself you are not the person that did what you did (it is the lesser part of me that did this) -> meaningful choice/agency, taking responsibility gets taken away, “i didn’t kill that person, it was a lesser person of me” - it bastardizes the idea of “choice”, to say a person “would have willed” something they didn’t
- it puts people into the position to know what’s best for you
“in such language it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves”
= problem of ideology, e.g. with religions often “im gonna stop you from sinning because you don’t want to sin”
positive liberty - rationalism, totalitarianism
At the root of totalitarianism is a bigger problem: rationalism, which lies at the center of the western liberal order and the enlightenment.
- In short, one must understand in order to be free.
- Berlin thinks that rationalism lies at the heart of nationalist, communist and totalitarian ideologies. “we know what is rational better than you do, so we will coerce you in your interest”
- His point is that the belief in rationalism leads inevitably to theories of state in which we create rational laws that can then be imposed upon (questionably) rational subjects
“I cannot deny that what is right for me must, for the same reasons, be right for others who are rational like. A rational (or free) state would be a state governed by such laws as all rational men would freely accept; that is to say, such laws as they would themselves have enacted had they been asked what, as rational beings, they demanded; hence the frontiers would be such as all rational men would consider to be the right frontiers for rational beings”
- state: I know what is rational better than you do, so therefore it is for your own sake that the state restricts your life in this way
- state can coerce rational lies
- positive liberty allows someone to be the determiner of your choices
positive liberty - second route to totalitarianism
(he only briefly went over all this)
fictions of autonomy (self-mastery, positive freedom)
Berlin argues that we can never be autonomous bc social encasement:
- in so far as I live in society, everything that I do inevitable affects, and is affected, by what others do
- conceptions of yourself are always connected to others , you always define yourself vis-a-vis others, therefore you are never in control of your autonomy (you are afraid of writers block because others are writing)
- to possess attributes (e.g. being Dutch), entails being recognized as belonging to a particular group or class by other persons in my society, and that this recognition is part of the meaning of most of the terms that denote some of my most personal and permanent characteristics
Berlin argues that the pursuit of social ‘autonomy’ leads to the forfeit of freedom
- It is only the confusion of desire for liberty with this profound and universal craving for status and understanding, further confounded by being identified with the notion of self-direction, where the self to be liberated is no longer the individual but the “social whole”
Berlin: wrap-up
what would freedom actually look like?
for him it is essentially and irreducibly negative liberty
how does this translate into the social order?
- that only rights can be considered absolute (rather than power)
- rights have to be absolute, powers (self-mastery) aren’t
- only thing that can be certain is that laws have to be absolute (the forcefield, the safe space) - that there are frontiers around individuals that must be inviolable
-> individualism, protection against the state
(berlin is an absolute liberal)
- main scourge of history is the belief that there is a single solution to our human woes
- highlights of importance of different conceptions of the good next to an absolute understanding of the right
- what matters is pluralism (what negative liberty affords): . “To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity”
is negative liberty so uncomplicated?
Berlin writes that negative liberty, or ‘liberty from’ can be defined as the “absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always recognizable, frontier”
but how do we locate the frontier?
- he doesn’t say anything
common answer = harm
- but is it easy to know where harm stops and starts?
- my freedom to move my fist stops where your face starts
liberty: anti-vaxx edition: bodily integrity, can others be forced to be vaccinated to protect others, for public health concerns
MacCallum’s response
= all freedoms are freedom ‘from’ and ‘to’ -> their relation is
triadic’
- x is (is not) free from y to do (no do, become, not become) z
only real diff between negative and positive liberty is how you define the agent X
- if the agent is an individual, you get something like liberalism
- if the agent may be divided, for example between higher and lower selves, you get positive liberty
forces you to wedge positive freedom in negative freedom -> some say this is not fair, that it is biased towards positive freedom
but criticisms: “[The positive conception of liberty] cannot be made to conform to the triadic structure on which MacCallum and his followers insist. The crux of [his] argument is that the freedom of human agents consists in their having succeeded in realising an ideal of themselves. But this is not to speak of a condition in which someone is free to do or become something, as required by MacCallum’s analysis. It is to speak of a condition in which someone has succeeded in becoming something. Freedom is not being viewed as absence of constraint on action; it is being viewed as a pattern of action of a certain kind”
(only one slide, mainly makes clear how to do conceptual argumentation)
whither Berlin? - what do we take from Berlin (acc to Swift p 60)
= a prompt for good questions, way of thinking about liberty
on agency
- is the agent the empirical individual that we observe?
- or is it her rational or ‘higher’ or ‘moral’ self?
- or is it a collective or group, such as a nation or class
on constraint:
- is it only intentional or deliberate interference by others?
- can one be made unfree by one’s own desires (such as desire for a cigarette)?
- does poverty restrict freedom? (e.g. what does it matter if a state allows you to go to x, and you don’t have the money, does it matter that the state allows you to?)
on goals:
- is somebody unfree just when they are prevented from doing what they want to do? (negative liberty)
- or what they might want to do?
- or from whatever would amount to true self-realization for them? (positive liberty)
effective vs formal freedom
(problem of poverty often in this langauge)
formal = lack of state law preventing you from acting
effective freedom = having the means to actual act as one would wish
“The difference between having the power or capacity to act in a certain way and the mere absence of interfering. The fact that nobody is preventing you from doing something does not necessarily mean that you can actually do it. Are you free to do it – because nobody is stopping you? Or unfree – because you are not able to do it?” (Swift p60)
liberty as autonomy vs as executing the will
- autonomy = freedom as the deeper fulfillment of oneself
- executing the will = as far as you will something, you can do it and you do it, you are free (negative freedom)
autonomy: is there a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self?
Swift: “Freedom as autonomy is more controversial than freedom as effective power or capacity to act. Why? Because it involves the thought that a person could be doing what she wants to do but, because her wants don’t satisfy some further condition – the condition that would make those wants autonomous – she is not really free” (65-6)
e.g. education increases freedom as autonomy:
- education increases life opportunities (effective freedom)
- education increases ability to think critically and thus make better life choices (freedom as autonomy)
freedom as political participation vs freedom from law
(aka freedom through politics vs freedom from politics)
participation = we become free by making our own laws = the Republican tradition
(the more active you are in the making of the laws, the freer you are)
- laws promote freedom (liberals can accept this too, negative liberty)
- it is through law that we rule ourselves (a strictly republican logic, akin to ‘freedom as autonomy’)
- e.g. referenda = republican idea
contra la = we become free where the law ends (and thus leaves us alone) = the Liberal tradition
(likes democracy: participate once in a few years and then do whatever you want)
this logic is at its core ‘democratic’ in nature. the conception of liberty it produces is frequently called NON-DOMINATION
- freedom from being dominated -> fits with democratic institutions (even if they interfere with you = so it is a diff value)
- [In a democracy] even those who are outvoted – and so are forced to comply with laws they do not themselves favour – are free in the sense that they are equal members of a self-governing collective rather than subject to law dictated by others. This is freedom as non-domination” (70-71).
Republicanism (Pettit)
arbitrary sway = the reason you are dominated is because you are under the arbitrary power of some actor
- Being unfree does not consist in being restrained; on the contrary, the restraint of a fair system of law – a non-arbitrary regime – does not make you unfree. Being unfree consists rather in being subject to arbitrary sway
- being under non-arbitrary laws, even if they constrain your behavior, you are still free
- laws don’t restrict society, rather it is a recognition that we live in a small society where everyone has freedoms
= critique negative freedom
e.g. the happy slave = liberal definition unfree, acc to Pettit he lives in a big house, doesn’t have to do anything, BUT he is under arbitrary control -> not free
(same works with living in a dictatorship)
-> Pettit comes with second type of liberty (not negative or positive), but rather liberty as non-domination =
- “Domination, as I understand it here, is exemplified by the relationship of master to slave or master to servant. Such a relationship means, at the limit, that the dominating party can interfere on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated: can interfere, in particular, on the basis of an interest of an opinion that need not be shared by the person affected … Domination can occur without interference, because it requires only that someone have the capacity to interfere arbitrarily in your affairs; no one need actually interfere” (p22-23)
domination involves:
- they have the capacity to interfere
- on an arbitrary basis
- in certain choices that the other is in a position to make
you might be pretty happy but how you live and still be seen as unfree
freedom and redistribution - how do we justify redistribution and support liberty at the same time?
Swift: 5 positions
- redistribution is OK bc we have a limited claim to property
- Justified redistributive taxation does not infringe the freedom of those who are taxed because their claims to the property in question cannot be established in the first place (73) - Redistribution can be justified on other grounds
- in short: policy X may reduce freedom, but it aids in other values (like justice, utility, etc.) - redistribution is justified due to the increase in overall effective freedom
- “Redistribution reduces the effective freedom of those who are taxed, but is justified because it makes for more effective freedom overall” (78).
- He thinks that looking at freedom quantitatively is a bad idea, but we can still support logics that enhance important effective freedoms (versus formal ones). - all of this is ideological artifice
- “Private property rights and market relations encourage people to misconceive their real interests and hence render them heteronomous and unfree” (80)
- goes into Marxism - redistribution can be defended on positive freedom grounds
- “Freedom=autonomy, autonomy=rationality, rationality=morality, morality=justice, justice=redistribution, therefore the person who recognizes her duty to redistribute her resources is herself freer than the person who doesn’t recognize that duty” (81).
- Here we come back to positive freedom – the idea that we are actually being free when we are being obedient to a higher moral law.
how might one save positive liberty from totalitarianism?
Swift makes 7 claims:
- start small: we all agree with education and critical thought = we all think we are more in control, more autonomous if we can think critically
- “promoting people’s autonomy can involve just providing information and helping them think for themselves” - we can recognize barriers to autonomy without justifying intervention
- to recognize that there can be internal obstacles to freedom is not to say that anybody other than the agent herself is the best judge on when they exist
- MOST IMPORTANT POINT: one can believe in autonomy and still think that the state can’t interfere in a person’s quest to become autonomous - positive freedom does not REQUIRE a commitment to rationality
- to recognize that there can be internal obstacles to freedom is not to identify freedom with rationality
- autonomy may be totally discrete from rationality: we might be held back by desires, which have nothing to do with rationality (see next flashcard)
- what is the better version of yourself does not have to be rational - rationality needn’t be universal
- to identify freedom with rationality is not to claim that the same thing is rational for every person
- every person is unique -> even if we are beholden to our lesser selves, that doesn’t mean that ther is a one-sized fits all approach such that the state can legitimately dominate us - rationality needn’t be monolithic
- to identify freedom with rationality is not to claim that there is a single thing that is rational for any individual
- freedom consists in each of us pursuing our rational pathways, with none of them being right/wrong in any broader sense
- say it is rational for you now to bulk bc you want to be a boxer, but you find out you don’t like boxing, so rational to lose weight - even if rationality is universal/monolithic, this doesn’t justify interference
- to identify what would be rational for a person doesn’t necessarily justify interfering with their irrational action
- and here is the main point; even if it was clear what was rational for a person to pursue, this doesn’t mean it’s legitimate for the state to force people to pursue it
- e.g. friend thinking of interfering with a friend doing drugs - even if we restrict freedom, this can be justified (for the sake of something else, not freedom)
- “interference aimed at getting people to act rationally might be justified while acknowledging that it does involve a restriction on freedom and without claiming that it is justified on freedom grounds”
- this point is that there are many ways we can restrict freedom, incl. on behalf of freedom
6+7: whether or not interference is justified
- positive freedom does not require a commitment to rationality
Swift roots this in the thinking of Taylor and Frankfurt
“[There are] ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ desires. First-order desires are desires for things like a comfortable bed, or being an explorer, doing well in exams, or going out drinking. These desires, as we all know, can conflict. A good way of thinking about such conflicts is the idea that we also have second-order desires, which are desires about our first-order desires: they are desires to have or not have other desires … Another way of putting a similar point is to talk, as Taylor does, about ‘strong evaluation’. We do not just have ‘brute’ desires that we assess solely in terms of their strength or force. We are also capable of evaluating our desires, of judging them more or les worthy or appropriate, of identifying with or disavowing them. This, perhaps, is something that distinguishes us from other animals. Unlike theirs, our desires are not simply less or more intense than one another. We can reflect on them – identify with some, repudiate others – and it is this capacity to discriminate between desires that allows us to regard some as constraints on, or obstacles to, our freedom, which is achieved when we act on our ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ ones. To think that desires can be obstacles to freedom, then, we don’t need to posit freedom as rationality. We need only the idea that less significant desires can get in the way of the realization of more significant ones” (88).
- first order desire = i want to eat icecream
- second order desire = desire about the desire = fact that never materializes but is part of the self = e.g. I want to be a person that wants to eat carrots rather than ice
