by Phil Parvin
Firstly, they might say that the rules of private property are inevitable, and so enforcing them is not a form of interference.
It is simply the case that Harrods, and not the shoplifter, owns the jeans. The jeans do not belong to the shoplifter. So, the security guard et al. are not interfering with the shoplifter. They are simply maintaining the status quo, which is that Harrods owns the trousers. The interference comes not from them, but from the shoplifter, who tries to take something that she does not own. We should not look on the enforcement of Harrods’s ownership rights as human interference, but rather as maintenance of the way things are.
However, the problem with this objection is it assumes that rules about private property are objective, inevitable rules, almost like the rules of physics. As a result, the constraints they place on people are seen as more like the presence of a mountain or river than as human interference. But this is clearly false. Rules of private property are not inevitable and objective. They are human creations and are enforced by humans. We, as a society, have decided to uphold a system of private property, and we have deliberately chosen to employ individuals such as security guards and judges to enforce it. We could do otherwise: Marx’s theory of communism, for example, is a model of a society without private property. When capitalist societies uphold a system of private property they thereby uphold a particular system of interference.
Secondly, they might say that freedom is rights-based. While it is true that the shoplifter has suffered human interference, still that interference was justified, because she had no right to take the jeans. Furthermore, the fact that the shoplifter has no right to take the jeans means that it is no infringement on her freedom to prevent her from doing so. Freedom, on this view, applies only to those things which one has a right to do.
There are a number of problems with this objection. Cohen’s own response is that freedom cannot apply only to those things that we have a right to do, because this argument leads to counter-intuitive conclusions. Cohen gives the example of a person who is accused of murder and, in a fair trial, is found guilty and sent to prison. Now, because the person has indeed committed murder, and has been found guilty in a fair trial, she is not entitled to be out of prison. By committing the murder, she has forfeited her right to live her life as she wants. On the rights-based definition of freedom, the imprisoned murderer has not had her freedom curtailed by being put in prison, because she has no right to be out of prison. And yet, is not imprisonment the paradigmatic example of an infringement of liberty? Indeed, the reason why imprisonment is a punishment is that it does curtail the freedom of criminals, even though they have no right to be free. Freedom cannot, then, be dependent on rights.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we introduced the distinction between positive and negative liberty.
We then considered the first distinction between positive and negative liberty and discussed some of the ways in which this distinction might be understood: as a distinction between formal and effective freedom. For negative liberty theorists, a constraint on freedom must be deliberately imposed by another human being. For positive liberty theorists, any constraint will count if it prevents the individual from acting as she chooses.
We saw how the motivating factor for those who insist on this kind of negative liberty is often a concern to reject arguments for redistributive taxation and the welfare state. Negative liberty theorists hope to show that taxation threatens negative liberty and increases only positive liberty. By refusing to recognize positive liberty as ‘real’ liberty, they therefore reject taxation on freedom-maximizing grounds.
In response to this argument, Cohen shows that a lack of money threatens even negative liberty. As a result, the question of redistributive taxation is open for debate again, even among those who prioritize negative liberty.
Key ideas
Negative liberty: The idea that the individual is free in so far as they are able to do as they please without interference from other people.
Positive liberty: The idea that the individual is free in so far as they are able to act upon their particular desires.
Coercion: A specific form of interference arising from the deliberate willed actions of other people.
Classical liberalism: A particular conception of liberalism rooted in a defence of negative liberty, individualism and free markets. Defended by thinkers like Hayek and von Mises, and often contrasted with the modern liberalism of thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse, and the egalitarian liberalism of thinkers like John Rawls, who are more sympathetic to the idea of positive liberty.
Dig deeper
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [1958], The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Pimlico, 1998), pp. 191–242.
G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
G.A. Cohen, The Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Michael Otsuka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom [1944] (London: Routledge, 2001).
G.C. MacCallum, ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, Philosophical Review 76/3 (1967), pp. 312–34.
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Adam J. Tebble, Hayek (London: Continuum Press, 2001).
Fact-check
1 Which of the following philosophers advocate negative liberty?
A Isaiah Berlin
B Friedrich von Hayek
C John Locke
D All of the above
2 Why is negative liberty so called?
A To signify that it is a bad thing
B To signify that it requires the absence of something
C To signify that its advocates are pessimistic
D To signify that it is the opposite of liberty
3 What sort of state is associated with a belief in negative liberty?
A The welfare state
B The nanny state
C The minimal state
D The totalitarian state
4 What sorts of policies are associated with a belief in negative liberty?
A A free market with minimal intervention
B Redistributive taxation
C The abolition of private property
D Extensive public services
5 According to Hayek, coercion is the opposite of freedom. What is coercion?
A Any interference
B Interference by another human being
C Deliberate interference by another human being
D Deliberate interference by an evil human being
6 According to Cohen, why does being poor limit your negative freedom?
A Because being poor makes you subject to deliberate interference
B Because the rules of private property are made by humans
C Because freedom cannot be based on rights
D All of the above
7 According to a rights-based conception of freedom, when is your freedom limited?
A If you are prevented from doing something that you have a right to do
B If you are prevented from doing something that you are right to want to do
C If you are prevented from doing something that is the right thing to do
D All of the above
8 Which of the following is the third concept of liberty, according to Pettit?
A Freedom as non-interference
B Freedom as non-coercion
C Freedom as non-domination
D Freedom as self-mastery
9 Why was Isaiah Berlin suspicious of positive liberty?
A Because it can be used to justify totalitarianism
B Because it can be used to justify libertarianism
C Because it can be used to justify liberalism
D All of the abo
ve
10 Which of the following would not usually be considered as a limit on negative freedom?
A Being trapped in a room by accident
B Being trapped in a room by a landslide
C Being trapped in a room by one’s fear of leaving
D All of the above
2
Freedom (2): Positive freedom
In the previous chapter, we introduced the distinction between positive and negative liberty and discussed one way of understanding it: as a distinction between formal and effective freedom. In this chapter, we will discuss two further ways of distinguishing between positive and negative liberty.
Remember, Berlin distinguished between positive and negative liberty so as to defend negative liberty, and reject positive liberty. Berlin thought positive liberty was dangerous: it justified coercion and could lead to totalitarianism, the opposite of genuine (negative) liberty. We will evaluate this claim as we go along.
Freedom as doing whatever one wants vs. freedom as being in control of one’s desires
In the previous chapter we characterized the distinction between positive and negative liberty as between formal and effective freedom. A second, related, characterization is of negative liberty as the freedom to do whatever one happens to want at any particular time, and positive liberty as being in control of one’s desires.
On this understanding, negative liberty means that an individual is free if and only if she is doing what she actually wants to do at that time. It is negative in the sense that it retains the idea of an absence of interference in people’s choices. It is not the business of the state or anyone else to second-guess the individual: it does not matter whether the thing she wants to do is good for her, or morally acceptable, or whether it is compatible with what she wanted to do yesterday. If she wants to do it, it is a constraint on her freedom to prevent her from doing so. This means, of course, that freedom may or may not be a good thing in its effects: people may make bad decisions, or decisions which they come to regret.
‘The “positive” sense of the word “liberty” derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. 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.’
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [1958], The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1998), pp. 191–242, at p. 203.
But is freedom simply about having the ability to do whatever you want to do? Many defenders of a more positive account of liberty do not think so. For example, we may at certain points make choices on the basis of weakness of will or irrational fears or whims. We might act out of anger, or our choices may be influenced by addiction or some other psychological compulsion. In all these cases, our ‘choices’ may be grounded in desires which are temporary or irrational.
Perhaps we are not acting freely when we act on the basis of such desires. Various thinkers have suggested that what matters from the point of view of freedom is not simply being able to do whatever we want, but rather being in control of what we want: being masters of our own lives. Thus liberals like John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Joseph Raz share with many Marxists, socialists and feminists the idea that freedom is about possessing autonomy. Defenders of autonomy suggest that if we act in response to a momentary impulse or an addiction, we are unfree – even if we are not suffering from interference from another person. So, for example, if you want to give up smoking but have a cigarette, or if you are trying to eat healthily but eat too much chocolate cake, you are not acting freely. Your addiction and your appetite have constrained you.
One way of understanding this distinction, then, is as a disagreement about where a constraint must come from if it is to count as a constraint on liberty. Defenders of negative liberty argue that a constraint on liberty must be external: it must come from outside the person. In other words, someone else must be constraining you if your liberty is to be undermined. For defenders of positive liberty, however, the constraint can come from inside the person concerned. That is to say, freedom can be limited by your own desires, emotions, or physical or psychological state.
Another way of putting this (and the way that Berlin put it) is to think of the individual as constituted by two selves: a higher and a lower self. The lower self is the self that has base desires, whims and addictions and suffers from weakness of will. It is your lower self that wants the cigarette or the chocolate cake. The higher self is the self that forms long-term, considered plans, that considers the long-term benefits and harms of a particular course of action and, in evaluating them, decides which are more important. It is your higher self that wants to give up smoking and to eat healthily. If we are thinking in these terms, we will say that an individual lacks positive liberty, or autonomy, when her lower self rules her higher self: if, when the two disagree, the lower self wins.
Does this form of positive liberty justify coercion? Remember, even negative liberty requires some kind of coercion: each individual’s freedom must be protected by a state capable of compelling all members of society to observe basic laws. But, Berlin argued, positive liberty goes further. Imagine that you are trying to give up smoking, and that you have told a friend that you have this firm desire. That friend might be justified in refusing to give you a cigarette when you want one, or throwing away any that you buy. She could justify this, moreover, in the name of your freedom. Because you have told her that you want to give up smoking, she may help you to be free when she forces you to carry out your wish: she ignores your fleeting need for a cigarette, putting it down to weakness of will, and respects instead your longer-term, autonomous, considered desire to give up. Your friend could – to use Rousseau’s famous phrase – force you to be free.
‘[I]n order that the social pact not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment – which alone can give force to all others – that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free…’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762], (London: Penguin Classics, 1968), p. 64.
Berlin thought that positive liberty could therefore be used to justify the notion that the individual may be less able to know what is in their interests than some other person or institution. At its most benign, this idea can justify paternalism: the idea that the state is sometimes justified in passing laws which force people to do things for their own good, such as wearing seatbelts in cars or motorcycle helmets. At its most extreme, it can lead to totalitarianism: it can justify political rulers denouncing the expressed wishes of the people as irrational or ignorant, as merely the wishes of their lower selves. Hence, it is anti-democratic: it can justify the state ignoring the views of the people, oppressing them, and mistreating them, all the while claiming that they are doing so in order to make them free.
As we have suggested, many modern liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls have defended a notion of freedom as autonomy. Some, indeed, have embraced an even more radical notion: that freedom is not just about satisfying the desires that people do in fact have, but is rather about satisfying the desires they ought to have. On this account of positive liberty, you are free only if you are acting in a particular sort of way, for example on the basis of true facts rather than ignorance or lies. Furthermore, we might sometimes ‘choose’ to do things which are contrary to our genuine best interests as a result of the fact that our choices are socially constructed: they may be influenced, or even determined, by society in ways that may or may not be explicit. The social construction of preferences is a particular concern for feminists, Marxists and other radical political thinkers. The basic idea is that in order for people to be free, they need to make their choices in a context i
n which principles of freedom and equality prevail. The man who ‘chooses’ to work two jobs in order to pay his rent is not free: his choice is forced upon him by his economic circumstances. Similarly, the woman who chooses to undergo cosmetic surgery, or to wear painful high heels, in order to comply with sexist beauty norms, is arguably not choosing freely at all: her choice to do these things is shaped by unjust social and cultural factors beyond her control. In these and many other cases, some argue, the fact that our choices are shaped by forces beyond our control means that we cannot act freely in circumstances which encourage us to make decisions which are harmful or demeaning or against our wider interests in some way. In other words, we cannot be said to have autonomy when our choices are shaped so profoundly by unjust circumstances beyond our control: we may choose to do what we want, but we are never really in charge of what we want.
‘[S]ocial construction […] goes much deeper than surface socialization: the construction of social behaviors and rules takes on a life of its own, and becomes constitutive not only of what women are allowed to do, but of what they are allowed to be.’
Nancy Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 79.
It is possible, but not necessary, that such a view could justify the kind of coercion that Berlin was concerned about. For it suggests that freedom can only be exercised in a just society which works for the genuine best interests of its members. Many Marxists argue that people can only be free when they are able to make choices free from the dominating influence of the wider capitalist system. Hence, what is needed is not negative liberty embodied in constitutional rights and a minimal state, but genuine positive liberty brought about by radical social and political change. Similarly, many feminists argue that women can only be free in a society in which there is genuine equality between men and women. Consequently, feminism tends to call not for minimal states and negative liberty, but rather for the radical overhaul of sexist social norms and, hence, the unfair pressures experienced by women to ‘choose’ certain kinds of life over others (e.g. Radcliffe Richards 1980).