2. Liberty

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-47
Author(s):  
Ian Carter
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Choice Making ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty

This chapter examines the concept of liberty. There are different rival interpretations of liberty. These interpretations can be discussed in terms of a well-known distinction: that between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is the absence of something: normally, the absence of external obstacles imposed by other human agents. Positive liberty is the presence of something: the exercise of our choice-making capacities in ways that put us in control of our own lives. Much of the recent literature on liberty has focused on a new challenge to these conceptions of liberty. The challenge comes from thinkers inspired by the neo-roman or republican idea of liberty as the antithesis of slavery. Republicans define liberty as the absence of domination. Meanwhile, some libertarians, who hold that liberty is best realized through the protection of private property and contract, have argued that liberty is always limited by the pursuit of economic equality.

Freedom and Equality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Negative Freedom ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Republican Liberty ◽  
Core Features

Freedom and equality are often viewed as conflicting values. But there are at least three conceptions of freedom-negative, positive, and republican-and three conceptions of equality-of standing, esteem, and authority. Libertarians argue that rights to negative liberty override claims to positive liberty. However, a freedom-based defense of private property rights must favor positive over negative freedom. Furthermore, a regime of full contractual alienability of rights-on the priority of negative over republican freedom-is an unstable basis for a free society. To sustain a free society over time, republican liberty must take priority over negative liberty, resulting in a kind of authority egalitarianism. Finally, the chapter discusses how the values of freedom and equality bear on the definition of property rights. The result is a qualified defense of some core features of social democratic orders.

Freedom in mass values: egocentric, humanistic, or both? Using Isaiah Berlin to understand a contemporary debate

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Gustavsson
Keyword(s):  
Negative Freedom ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Confirmatory Factor ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
The Common

Does an increasing emphasis on individual freedom in mass values erode or revitalize democratic societies? This paper offers a new approach to this debate by examining it through the lens of Isaiah Berlin, and his distinction between positive and negative freedom. I show that, contrary to the common assumption among scholars who study mass values regarding freedom, these do not consist of one dimension but two: negative and positive freedom. I also show that, while valuing negative liberty clearly leads a person to become more morally permissive and more condoning of non-compliance with legal norms, valuing positive liberty does not seem to have the same effects at all; in fact, it shows the very opposite relationship with respect to some of these attitudes. Thus, it matters what kind of freedom people value. The results rely on confirmatory factor and regression analyses on World Values Survey data from ten affluent Western countries in 2005–2006.

The Nature and Value of Liberty

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty

How do libertarians define “liberty”? Philosophers say there are two major kinds of liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty. We often use the words “liberty” or “freedom” to refer to an absence of obstacles, impediments, or constraints. Philosophers call this negative liberty....

Positive Freedom

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Physical Control ◽  
Positive Freedom ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Political Value

Freedom is widely regarded as a basic social and political value that is deeply connected to the ideals of democracy, equality, liberation, and social recognition. Many insist that freedom must include conditions that go beyond simple “negative” liberty understood as the absence of constraints; only if freedom includes other conditions such as the capability to act, mental and physical control of oneself, and social recognition by others will it deserve its place in the pantheon of basic social values. Positive Freedom is the first volume to examine the idea of positive liberty in detail and from multiple perspectives. With contributions from leading scholars in ethics and political theory, this collection includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.

scholarly journals PROPERTY IN THE MORAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 404-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Bertram
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Complex Society ◽  
Property Concepts

AbstractLiberal egalitarian political philosophers have often argued that private property is a legal convention dependent on the state and that complaints about taxation from entitlement theorists are therefore based on a conceptual mistake. But our capacity to grasp and use property concepts seems too embedded in human nature for this to be correct. This essay argues that many standard arguments that property is constitutively a legal convention fail, but that the opposition between conventionalists and natural rights theorists is outmoded. In doing this, the essay draws on recent literature in evolutionary biology and psychology. Even though modern property in a complex society involves legal conventions, those conventions should be sensitive to our natural dispositions concerning ownership.

scholarly journals Republican Elements in the Liberalism of Fear

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-2018) ◽  
pp. 209-221
Author(s):  
Samantha Ashenden ◽  
Andreas Hess
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Negative Rights ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Virtuous Life

Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear is distinct from other liberalisms; it gains its unique imprint and quality through a long and consistent engagement with, and critical discussion of, republicanism. Her account of the contemporary relevance of notions of virtues and vices, justice and injustice, the questions of rights, representation, citizenship and democracy all point to older republican influences. However, Shklar also knew that unreconstructed republicanism and republican ideas of the virtuous life were no longer applicable to modern societal and political conditions. This becomes especially clear in her discussion of Rousseau and in her study Ordinary Vices. The irreducibly pluralist and individualist nature of modern democracy have made it inconceivable that we would all agree on what the virtuous life consists in. Shklar’s emphasis on positive liberty, critically directed against Isaiah Berlin’s argument that negative rights and negative liberty are at the heart of modern liberalism; her insistence on the need for a common spirit as distilled in her study of Montesquieu; the need for equality in terms of voting and earning as stressed in American Citizenship; and finally her discussion of the changing nature of both loyalty and political obligation in her last Harvard lectures, are all indicative of the republican elements that can be detected in her barebones liberalism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Daniel Layman
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Other ◽  
Henry George ◽  
Property Theory ◽  
Moral Equality ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Power ◽  
The Common

According to John Locke, all people are morally equal self-owners. This commitment introduces a tension at the heart of Locke’s property theory. Since all people own themselves and, consequently, their labor, individuals have the moral power to acquire private property from the common world. But the use of this moral power threatens to generate concentrations of economic power capable of subjecting some people to others’ wills, in violation of equal moral standing. The thesis of this book is that four largely forgotten nineteenth-century Lockeans developed two distinct, internally consistent, and mutually incompatible resolutions to this tension within Lockean property theory. In one camp, Thomas Hodgskin and Lysander Spooner—the libertarian radicals—argued that although we each hold an equal negative liberty to claim pieces of the world, there is no positive common right to the world. Consequently, the demands of moral equality can be satisfied under conditions of enormous economic inequalities. In the other camp, John Bray and Henry George—the egalitarian radicals—argued that since all people are morally equal, each of us has a positive right to share the world with everyone else. Consequently, the demands of moral equality cannot be met except under substantially (though not totally) egalitarian economic conditions. It is important to work through the argumentative successes and failures of these relatively unknown thinkers in order to understand how contemporary arguments about equality and property developed and, consequently, how we might apply them to contemporary problems.

Emersonian Strategies: Negative Liberty, Self-Reliance, and Democratic Individuality

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-479
Author(s):  
Cyrus R. K. Patell
Keyword(s):  
Common Denominator ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Communal Institutions

Emersonian political thought subjects the term "individualism," which was invented in Europe as a description of the defects of Enlightenment thought and used by Tocqueville pejoratively as a critique of American democracy, to a process of idealization that enables it to appropriate concepts that might other-wise be conceived as oppositional to it. Emersonianism inherits Locke's negative conception of freedom as freedom from restraint, but claims that negative liberty inevitably transforms itself into a form of positive liberty that nurtures communal institutions. From Emerson himself to George Kateb today, Emersonians have relied upon a methodological individualism in which they shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual and traslate moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. This methodological strategy is a literal application of the motto e pluribus unum, which expresses the idea that the American nation is formed through the union of many individuals and peoples. In the hands of the Emersonians the customary sense of this motto is reversed: they move from the many to the one, to the single individual, paring away differences in order to reach a common denominator that will allow them to make claims about all individuals. At the heart of their endeavor is the belief that the health of the nation depends on its ability to respect and protect the individuality of each of its citizens.

Smith, Rousseau and the True Spirit of a Republican

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Life ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the meaning of Adam Smith’s claim that Jean-Jacques Rousseau embodied ‘the true spirit of a republican carried a little too far’, ultimately concluding that Smith was not referring to Rousseau’s ‘republican’ or ‘positive’ conception of liberty but rather to his claim that commerce is invariably corrupt and corrupting. It also explores these thinkers’ conceptions of liberty, arguing that their views are nearly diametrically opposed, but not (only) in the way that is generally assumed. On the level of politics, as is well known, Smith advocated negative liberty while Rousseau advocated positive liberty. Yet on the level of the individual Smith regarded a kind of positive liberty—namely, self-command—as a necessary component of a moral life, while Rousseau regarded negative liberty as a supreme good for those who are sufficiently free of destructive passions that they will refrain from abusing it.

Liberty

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Carter
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Negative Freedom ◽  
Positive Freedom ◽  
Freedom Of Contract ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Definition Of

The definition of “liberty” (or “freedom”—most political and social philosophers use these terms interchangeably) is a highly contested matter. Under what conditions is a person free to do something? What kinds of obstacles would make a person unfree to leave the country or to attend church or to get a job? Is liberty simply a matter of having the opportunity to do something, or is it achieved only through effective action of certain kinds? Is liberty a property of individuals, or can it also be applied to collectivities? Under what conditions can an individual’s overall level of freedom be said to “increase”? The starting point for much of the discussion about the nature of freedom is usually the distinction, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, between “negative” and “positive” freedom. Theorists of negative freedom, who tend to be political liberals, hold freedom to be the absence of obstacles of various kinds, and they often limit their attention to obstacles that they hold to be “external” to the agent, or, more commonly, to obstacles that are created by other human agents. Theorists of positive freedom, on the other hand, see constraints on freedom where negative theorists deny their existence—for example, in the presence of internal factors that damage the agent’s capacity to be autonomous. For them, freedom is a matter of being in control of one’s life and determining one’s own fate. Only when such agential limitations are overcome, they hold, can an agent achieve self-mastery or self-realization. Also important for theorists of liberty is the relation between the freedom of one person and the power of another. Is the power of agent A over agent B only contingently related to the unfreedom of agent B? Or should freedom itself be defined as the absence of subjection to the power of others? The latter response is given by republican theorists of freedom, who claim to have traced a third way between negative and positive conceptions of liberty. A number of liberal theorists of freedom, who instead see freedom and power as contingently related, have resisted this republican claim and have continued to uphold the negative conception. Understanding the nature of liberty, and of its relation to coercive or dominating power, is also important for debates about distributive justice: Is liberty best guaranteed, or most fairly distributed, where the state limits its activities to the enforcement of private property rights and freedom of contract? Or is there a sense in which a government’s redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor enhances the freedom of the poor? Must egalitarians appeal to a positive notion of freedom in support of such enforced redistribution, or might the libertarians be mistaken in seeing egalitarianism and negative liberty as incompatible ideals? Yet another important area of enquiry concerns the measurement of freedom—whether of an individual or of a group. How, if at all, can the various single freedoms of individuals be aggregated, so as to produce overall comparisons of freedom, to the effect that one individual or group is “freer” than another?

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