Liberty Flashcards
What is compatabilism? How is Hobbes’s metaphysical view of liberty compatibilist? Who or what is the source of
our loss of liberty for Hobbes
Compatibilism: the position that says free will and determinism are compatible. One can be determined and still count as free. One can still act freely and have one’s acts explained by a series of prior causes and events. Metaphysical freedom or liberty is simply a property of bodies in motion. Inanimate objects, like rivers, can be understood as free when they are not dammed or blocked. Animate objects, including humans, can be understood as free when they are not prevented from moving or forced to move in certain ways. Hobbes’s impossibility condition: an external body must render an action impossible if you are to count as having lost your liberty.
What is human nature, natural liberty, and the state of nature for Hobbes?
We are bodies in motion, driven by passions, appetites, desires, wills, sensations, images, etc. -We have a basic conatus, an endeavor to exist. -We speak and (try to) reason, naming things and combing images in a coherent pattern. Sovereign states are in the state of nature with respect to each other. 2. Native peoples Europeans have just ‘discovered’ seem to be in the state of nature. 3. States that fall into civil war enter into the state of nature.
For Hobbes, how do we leave the state of nature? What is Leviathan? What is civil liberty?
Hobbes’s answer: we need to activate our rational powers and obey the laws of nature.-1st law: you must endeavor peace. -2nd law: you must defend yourself. -The 2nd law is basically natural liberty, but the 1st law says self-defense should be about achieving peace, not necessarily defeating a foe..Leviathan is a concpet where individuals give up liberty for safety. The Soverign State makes the laws and decides everyones morality. Every subject is author of the acts of the sovereign: hence the sovereign cannot injure any of his subjects and cannot be accused of injustice. Civil liberty is artificial liberty/right. It is the liberty left to us by the state. It ‘depends on the silence of the law.’ Whatever there is no law forbidding or commanding, one is free to do
How did Hobbes miss the reality of coercion for other classical liberals like Locke and Bentham?
Hobbes thinks to be unfree you must be disempowered from acting. If you are still choosing, you are still empowered enough to act, hence you are still free. Hobbes’s impossibility condition: an external body must render an action impossible if you are to count as having lost your liberty. Merely being coerced is not enough to render an action impossible. Again, you are still free to act if your will is coerced because your will is not itself a body.
-For Plato, Mill, Marx, and Freud how do we cause the loss of our own liberty? That is, for each thinker, just how
exactly do we interfere with ourselves?
one can be the source of their loss of liberty by alienating themselves from their authentic non-conforming desires and behaviors and so becoming inauthentically detached from their self and thus enslaved to the tyranny of conformist majority opinion. -Inauthenticity can therefore be a source of unfreedom that is intrapersonal even if it results from the pressures of others in society
For Plato, how do we obtain a just soul and a just city? What role do reason and virtue play?
A just soul is one with a harmony between reason, spirit, and appetite, where reason justly controls the others. The will sides with reason, not appetite. -A just city is one with a harmony between rulers, warriors, and workers, where the rulers justly control the other two. Virtue is excellence is happiness. That is why we should be just. It brings, through virtue, peace
-For Mill, how do we realize our natures as progressive beings? What is the harm principle?
Of course, your consciousness may not be false to your phenomenal desires, what you actually think you want, but it could be that what you think you want is not actually what you want.The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” While the law can prevent people from harming or risking harming each other, it can’t prevent them from harming themselves, but at least it gives them a chance to be authentic without being harmed by others.
-For Marx, how do we suffer ideological delusion? What is false consciousness?
You end up endorsing a false conception of your own interests, and what it would mean for you to be free, if you aren’t a member of the bourgeois class and you live in a society characterized by bourgeois ideology. -False consciousness is ideological delusion. You make yourself unfree by having the beliefs of those in a class to which you do not belong and who do not share your interests.
-For Freud, how do we become neurotic, have phobias, etc.,? What is the unconscious?
Perhaps we could render ourselves unfree by letting ourselves become subject to and overrun by our unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires. -Freud’s theory of the unconscious was, after all, about trying to allow people to gain conscious control over their unconscious neuroses and other pathologies so that they could become ‘masters in their house.’
-What does the phrase ‘normativity of human nature’ mean? Why was Hegel annoyed by classical liberalism?
Normativity: oughts, reasons, value. Not what is, but what ought to be. -Human nature: our basic being, essence, character, potential, abilities, capabilities. For the Hegelians, to be free is to act in such a way that in acting you realize the essence of your nature, you become what you are.
-For Aristotle and Arendt, how do we become free by becoming ourselves?
Aristotle and Arendt freedom is living and acting politically to the extent that that activity fulfills our essence or nature as human beings. -By becoming political we become free, which means we become what we are: human beings. -Humans realize themselves through the liberty of political action and political life.
-What is Aristotle’s view of human nature? What does he mean by function and virtue?
Aristotle says there is a part of the soul that is reason (reflection, deliberation) and a part that obeys reason (appetites, etc.). Virtue is using reason to strike the mean between extremes of desire, feeling, and action. Moderation is essential. It is virtuous to have a feeling like anger at the right time, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right purpose and in the right manner.
-What is Arendt’s view of politics? What does she mean by natality?
): In other words, action is participation in politics, deliberating and deciding how to be together. -Action discloses our identities. Action actualizes our capacity for freedom. For Arendt, freedom is about novelty and natality, newness and birth, initiation and creation. -Labor and work mostly just rearrange matter.
What does the republican tradition mean by dependence or domination? What is meant by ‘silent permission’ and
‘self-censorship
Any act you do perform will be the result both of your own will and the silent permission of your master’s will, which renders none of your actions free actions, but rather permissions.But as soon as you notice it, you will censor yourself. It will generate self-censorship. Either your will will be checked by the fact of your dependency or you will check your will based on your awareness of your dependency.
-What explains the paradox of the ‘free slave?’
): A slave who was either left alone or only did his master’s bidding, and so suffered no physical obstruction or coercion, would have to count as a free slave, on the liberal account. But isn’t this absurd? In the Roman law, it says to live in potestate, in the power of another and at their mercy, is to be unfree. If you are unfree, you don’t have the status of a liber homo, you don’t stand as free.
