Lecture 3 Flashcards
What is liberty?
o Freedom can be for collectives
o Our individual rights
o Or something less political, more like a sensibility
o Is it one thing? Or a series of things
o Liberty and freedom get used interchangeably in this class
Berlin’s 2 liberties
o 2 concepts of Liberty 1958
o Why Liberty? Because it prescribes the limits of state activity (i.e. legitimate scope of coercion)
o According to Berlin, this is the central question of politics: “’Why should I (or anyone else) obey anyone else?’ ‘Why should I not live as I like?’ ‘Must I obey?’ ‘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?’’
o Two conception a shorthand
Negative liberty = freedom form interference (freedom from)
Positive liberty = freedom as self mastery (freedom to)
Negative liberty
o 1) Negative liberty; it is defined as a boundary space for human action.
o 2) Is defined against coercion …..
o 3) ….. Which must be deliberately inflicted by humans
Boundary of liberty negative liberty
1) Outer boundary which the state or others cannot enter
2) Not exactly fixed, but nonetheless firm
3) The question of liberty is how large should the circle around the self be?
Bottom line negative liberty
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 is must somehow exist.
Positive liberty
o Positive liberty; 1) linked to autonomy (self mastery). 2) the subject not the object. 3) Threats to liberty can be external or internal. o Is this really so different from negative liberty? That depends on your definition of self mastery.
Divided self - positive liberty
Berlin thinks that once you allow for a divided self, you open the door for totalitarianism because; 1) dividing the self renders the idea of agency meaningless. 2) and it bastardizes the idea of choice to say a person would have willed something they didn’t. 3) It puts people into the position to know what is best for you.
Totalitarianism
o At the root of totalitarianism is a bigger problem, rationalism. This 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. His point is that the belief in rationalism leads inevitably to theories of state in which we create rational laws that can be imposed upon rational subjects.
o Second route to totalitarianism; fictions of autonomy. 1) Berlin argues that we can never be autonomous because of social encasement. 2) the pursuit of social autonomy leads to the forfeit of freedom.
Berlin wrap up
o For Berlin, freedom looks like negative liberty. This translates to the social order, only rights can be considered absolute and there are frontiers around individuals that are inviolable. This leads to individualism (pluralism) that is protected against state and the main scourge of history is the belief that somewhere there is a single solution to our human woes. The only thing that matters is pluralism, which negative liberty affords.
Maccallum response to Berlin
- Gerald Maccallum’s influential article “negative and positive freedom” 1967
- In fact, all freedoms are both from and to. Instead, their relationship is triadic. (x is free (is not) free from y to do (no do, become, not become) z). In this model, the only real difference between negative and positive liberty is how you define the agent (x). if the agent is an individual, you get something like liberalism and if it is divided then you get positive liberty.
Miller’s response to Maccalum
- According to Miller, this takes away the core essence of the conceptual distinction. “Yet we may still wonder whether MacCallum’s formula is really neutral … or whether it is not specifically tailored to the liberal family of ideas … The three traditions appear to embody very different basic assumptions about human beings and what gives meaning to their lives” (13).
Skinner’s response to Miller
- Skinner agrees that Maccallum weighs the scales = “[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” (246).
Effective vs formal freedom
- Effective vs formal freedom. Formal freedom (lack of state law preventing you from acting) vs effective freedom (having the means to actually act as one would wish)
o Swift “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?” (61
Freedom of autonomy vs freedom as executing the will
- Freedom of autonomy vs freedom as executing the will. Autonomy, is there a true or authentic self?
o 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).
Freedom as political participation vs freedom from law
o Participation is becoming free by making our own laws (republican tradition) while contra law is that you become free once the law ends and thus leaves us alone (liberal tradition). According to republican tradition 1) law promotes freedom (liberals can accept this too, negative liberty) and 2) it is through law that we rule ourselves (strictly republican logic, akin to freedom as autonomy). In its core, this logic is democratic in nature, the conception of liberty it produces is frequently called non domination.
