L8 - deep dive liberty: Taylor and Hirschmann Flashcards
Taylor - messes up distinction between negative vs positive liberty
Taylor: Berlin is basically correct, but some fuziness
- Taylor = example good philosophy: there is some insight in X, but we lost something
distinguishing between positive and negative masks something: other powerful intuition
2 positions have become caricatures/avatars for bigger political positions -> Taylor wants to go back to the original to try and figure out the insight that is not a caricature
problem = caricatures are just extremes , there’s something wrong with this: becomes it becomes characterizied, no real debate happens: they become ever more different than they actually are, they become polarizedso that they can’t talk to each other
Taylor - positive freedom as caricature
Berlin critiques positive liberty bc it leads to totalitarianism = basically means socialism = positive liberty as boogyman of communism: idea that individual lives become ruled by the collective
But: even liberalis with positive liberal conceptions dont take it so far = lot of middle positions: republicanism (idea that self-rule is valuable) = most positive liberalists dont’ think it is tied to totalitarianism, that you can b3 forced to be free
It becomes a boogyman/ a caricature of a position, there is some insight that makes sense for the distinction, but rather than look at positive libery for wat it is, you look at it like the chariciatyre for communism
+ caricatures is problematic bc they are uneven: that of positivism stuck, positive liberals lost the battle, become seen as communists -> lost the ability to get real insigh into it
Taylor: caricature negative freedom
= idea that you just become this thing protected by a shell, that the only thing you care about is that nothing coerces you -> ignore psychological obstacles to freedom
Most negative liberals also have some idea of self-actualization, e.g. Mill: it is about self-actualization, being the best version of yourself
Boogeyman: Hobbesian Warmongering
Taylor proposes:
wants to go back to the original, figure out the insight that is not a caricature
wants to recast the distinction:
positive liberty = the exercise concept
- individuals able to exercise control over
negative liberty = opportunity concept
- to pursue their own path
-> new arguments open = Negative liberty conceptions can have both features (exercise- and opportunity-), but positive liberty conceptions are based on exercise alone (and thus cannot care about opportunity conceptions)
-> allows negative liberty supporters to eliminate any basis for defending positive liberty theories by claiming exercise is untenable, but this leads us with a “Maginot line” theory of freedom = simply the absence of external objects, which Taylor believes is indefensible
- narrow view of philosophy that gets rid of exercise = narrow liberty-conception
Taylor - defense of the Maginot Line version of negative liberty
maginot line version = defensable version of freedom that is simple and straightforward: if you don’t coerce me, i am free
- it is simple (no law stopping me = i am free)
- positive liberty leads to totalitarianism
Taylor argues against these
- The advantage of the view that freedom is the absence of external obstacles is its simplicity. It allows us to say that freedom is being able to do what you want, where what you want is unproblematically understood as what the agent can identify as his desires. . By contrast an exercise-concept of freedom requires that we discriminate among motivations”
- I act, but may wish I hadn’t -> this model of freedom doesnt’ say anything about this - [We] may hold a self-realization view of freedom, and hence believe that there are certain conditions on my motivation necessary to my being free, but also believe that there are other necessary conditions which rule out my being forcibly led towards some definition of my self-realization by external authority
- Taylor: it’s a bit extreme = yes some people might know better than me what is best for us (e.g. makes sense for people to be educated) but this does not legitimate taking all authority out of our hands
Taylor - the problem of the maginot line
But the real problem with the Maginot Line is it prevents us from making judgments based on meaningfulness.
The Maginot Line theory cannot accommodate basic judgments.
For example:
between traffic lights, which are obviously insignificant …
…. and religious freedom, which is obviously essential.
- “Even where we think of freedom as the absence of external obstacles, it is not the absence of such obstacles simpliciter … Freedom is [not] just the absence of external obstacles tout court, but the absence of external obstacle to significant action, to what is important to man. There are discriminations to be made; some restrictions are more serious than others, some are utterly trivial … What the judgment turns on is some sense of what is significant for human life. Restricting the expression of people’s religious and ethical convictions is more significant for human life … But the Hobbesian scheme has no place for the notion of significance. It will allow only for purely quantitative judgments” (149-50).
Punchline: if we cared only about quantitative measures of freedom Albania is more free than Britain (150-151).
not all liberties are equal, not all have the same meaningfullness -> preceding wuestion of what matters about liberty, what makes it meaningful
Taylor - what makes freedom meaningful
So we need a theory of freedom that takes seriously judgment and meaningfulness – in particular how we come to judge certain kinds of freedoms as more important than others.
For this, we need a more complicated understanding of what undergirds our thoughts and fears, and specifically how our own desires can hold us back.
= internal things determine what is meaningful to us
For example:
- fears (when they take us away from our ends – i.e. a fear of public speaking)
- stubbornesses (being too quick to rage).
“When we reflect on this kind of significance, we come up against what I have called elsewhere the fact of strong evaluation, the fact that we human subjects are not only subjects of first-order desires, but of second-order desires, desires about desires. We experience our desires and purposes as qualitatively discriminated, as higher or lower, noble or base, integrated or fragmented, significant or trivial, good and bad … some passing comfort is less important than the fulfillment of our lifetime vocation” (152).
- Second and first order desires are qualitatively discriminated as higher and lower
The problem with the Maginot Line theory is that it …
… rejects that obstacles can be internal – which leaves us no way to distinguish the meaningfulness of different freedoms.
So, the only way to preserve the Maginot Line would be to suggest that a person could never be wrong about their desires, i.e. not allow for second guessing. But obviously we can be in error about our emotions and desires – this is why we feel shame at some beliefs, or push them away as irrational.
The only way forward is to accept that certain desires and feelings are “import-attributing”.
-> when looking at freedoms, we need to look at them qualitatively/meaningful rather than quantitatively
need to incorporate second-order desires into our conception
“Our attributes of freedom make sense against a background sense of more and less significant purposes, for the question of freedom/unfreedom is bound up with the frustration/fulfillment of our purposes” (160-161).
To do so, we need to escape the language of freedom as simply an opportunity-concept.
Summary:
Taylor shows us how not only positive liberty is necessary, but that negative liberty doesn’t make sense without it.
Hirschmann - towards a feminist theory of freedom = the issue
Hirschmann builds on Taylor
Also reconceptualizes Berlin ideas:
Date rape => wants abortion => clinics keep referring her bc she’s too long pregnant or high risk => chose to keep baby bc couldn’t manage cost and logistics => can we say she has freely chosen her role as mother?’
Hirschmann argues western political philosophy doesn’t offer a way to answer this question
freedom is contextual: we need to understand how people/women evaluate its significance (i.e. their judgments)
= focus on what makes freedom meaningful
- my evaluation of freedom depends on my evaluation of other things, e.g. a strong valuation of privacy might result in a context in which claims for husbands’ ‘freedom’ to discipline their wives makes sense, whereas valuation of women’s bodily security might result in a different context in which a counterclaim for governmental interference in the family is justified to protect women’s ‘freedom’ from bodily harm
- freedom can’t be separated from context
- freedoms are always qualitative, not quantitative
Should we have privacy of the home? A place where the state can’t come = competing freedoms: privacy comes with cost that some things happen in the home that aren’t punishable bc the state can’t intervene
e.g. disciplining children not obviously wrong -> should gov be allowed to set cameras in your house? = more diff than female bodily integrity
Even in the easy cases you are comparing qualitatively different cases, not quantitatively
Hirschmann - how to reclaim freedom for women?
1) reclaim the political discourse of what is valuable.
2) Expose the sexism at the heart of “choice” (and thus of liberalism) due to the constructed nature of society:
“The task for feminist theorists is to stake out an overtly political territory of values – such as choice, bodily integrity, professional development, and/or nurturing relationships – that would allow theorists to point out the ways in which patriarchal practices and customs deny women access to the resources they need to satisfy these values. In this, women’s experiences provide a powerful basis for highlighting the frequent sexism of liberal theory, precisely because these experiences often lie at the crossroads of Enlightenment ideology of agency and choice with modern practices of sexism” (48).
- agency vs sexism: we value agency, but overlook how structural conditions generate the terms that structure our agency
= idea that there is a social constructive process in society that shapes meaningfulness
Hirschmann about social construction
She also starts with Berlin, but takes something different:
- She wants to keep the internal/external divide (i.e. that negative liberty protects you from outside forces, and positive liberty protects you from inside forces)
- We need to start with this division in order to understand why we must transcend it.
Why? Because the internal/external division begins to fall apart when you take seriously the ways in which the outside world is socially constructed:
- “the idea that human beings and their world are in no sense given or natural but the product of historical configurations of relationships. The desires and preferences we have, our beliefs and values, our way of defining the world are all shaped by the particular constellation of personal and institutional social relationships that constitute our individual and collective histories. Even the most intimate and supposedly ‘internal’ aspects of our being, such as our sexuality, must be understood in terms of the historical relations and actions that have imported meaning to our bodies. Context is what makes meaning possible, and meaning makes ‘reality’” (51-2).
- the division between external and internal is meaningless: external impediments return internally and vice versa
- Law that women can’t vote reinforces the feeling women can’t vote (sensibility)
So, in this case, it is our patriarchical world that determines how we define freedom, and what it is about freedom that we consider to be meaningful.
Hirschmann - social construction and freedom
How does this view of social construction implicate how we understand freedom?
In our patriarchal world, even language bounds women, constraining their capacity to speak and to know.
If the patriarchal structure of the existing world ultimately constrains women’s freedom, this casts doubt on any meaningful aspect of the idea of freedom itself.
This challenges both dimensions of the internal/external divides:
- It forces us to radically expand what negative liberty means, because the type of external boundaries women face are also constitutive of who she is.
- It would also make us doubt positive liberty, as the things we consider to be “internal barriers” are actually externally generated.
- In short: it is a critique of liberalism more broadly, and its inability to account for gender domination.
Women Feeling inferior generates social norms that they are inferior, but norms of inferiority also make women feel inferior
they are linked
Hirschmann - how do we fix it?
if the patriarchy is everything, must it all be blown up?
1) One answer would seemingly be yes – freedom for women would require the end of the patriarchy:
“On this reading, then, it would seem that for women to be free, the external forces of patriarchy must be eliminated. All “inner” forces of will, desire, and preference as well as fear, compulsion, and revulsion would be seen as the products of patriarchal social forces over which women have little or no control” (53-4).
- it’s really difficult to blow up: patriarchy is a way of thinking, there is no target, it is in everything
2) Another answer is that if patriarchy is everything, it may also be unavoidable (and thus the best solution is to expand the negative liberty model) and at least protect the space around individual women.
3) But this doesn’t solve anything, because if the patriarchy is everything how can we even have a meaningful notion of freedom and agency in the first place?
Conclusion: social constructivism presents a kind of paradox.
-> there is no solution, maybe there is no formal means to protect womens interests
Hirschmann - feminism needs a two-pronged attack:
1) to accept that social constructivism destroys conventional meanings of freedom (and subjectivity), but …
2) … not surrender agency, or the potential for women to create their own forms of agency.
To do this, they must reclaim their ability to take part in the construction of society itself:
“Thus feminist freedom requires a double vision: while understanding that everyone “always, already” participates in the Foucaultian “field” of social construction, feminists concerned with freedom also want to acknowledge that some groups of people systematically and structurally have more power to do the constructing than do others … Freedom for these groups thus requires increasing their ability to participate in the processes of construction” (57).
Her answer is they need to create counter publics for relationship between women to develop outside of men:
Thus individual- and group- freedom must develop together – merging aspects of negative/positive freedom
- Female emancipation requires a contextual form of agency (within a community) – this allows them to be free:
- “[A feminist theory of freedom] involves a notion of self deeply situated in relationship; it involves recognition of the ways our powers and abilities have come from and been made possible by particular relationships and contexts” (63-4).
= women need their own social construction, to take things back, must act among themselves
