Promoting positive liberty

Hi, I’m Geoff Pynn, and I teach philosophy at Elgin Community College. In this video, I’m going to talk about two different ways of thinking about liberty. Liberalism is the political philosophy that says the protection and promotion of liberty is the primary function of the state. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill held that the only justifiable use of coercive state power was to prevent harm to others. Since your liberty doesn’t, generally, include the freedom to harm others, such coercion doesn’t infringe your liberty. But what is liberty? One way of thinking of it is as freedom from coercion. If nobody is compelling you to do anything you don’t want to do, or forcibly restraining you from doing something you do want to do, philosophers say you have negative liberty. But just because no one’s stopping you from doing something doesn’t mean you can do it. You can be free from coercion, without being free to act as you want. No one forces an alcoholic to drink, for example, but because they lack a certain kind of control over their actions, they aren’t free to stop when they’ve had too much to drink. Suppose you fall under the sway of a cult leader who bamboozles you into handing over all of your earnings. They’re not literally forcing you to do anything. Still, you’re trapped in a cult, you aren’t free to make rational decisions about your money. Or maybe you want to start a bakery. You love baking, there’s a market for your bread, and the bakery would provide a stable economic foundation for you and your family. But no one will lend you the capital you need. No one’s telling you that you aren’t allowed to start a bakery. But given your situation, you aren’t free to do so. What you lack in these cases a lot us call positive liberty. It’s harder to define than negative liberty. It involves self-control, rationality, and ability to set the course of your own life. If you have positive liberty, you can pursue your own goals and advance your own interests through rational deliberation and action. Most modern liberals think the state should promote positive liberty. But that’s often at odds with protecting negative liberty. For example, the goal of promoting positive liberty is likely to lead to coercive interventions the Harm Principle couldn’t hope to justify. For example, the Principle explicitly disqualifies paternalism: coercion for your own good. But from the point of view of positive liberty, paternalistic laws make perfect sense. Promoting positive liberty might require knowing what’s really in people’s interests, maybe even better than they do themselves. You may resent how a certain restriction on your freedom infringes on your negative liberty. But that restriction might, in the long run lead you to acquire more positive liberty. The idea that you can increase someone’s freedom in ways they may not understand might open the door to something nastier than paternalism. Isaiah Berlin, whose essay on two kinds of liberty is credited for naming the distinction between negative and positive liberty, warned that promoting positive liberty could lead to tyranny and oppression. After all, tyrants always claim to act for their subjects’ own good. As Berlin put it, they “bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of [their subjects’] `real’ selves.” That’s one reason why, historically, one of liberalism’s big ideas was that, in general, no one can know your interests better than you. A state focused on positive liberty might easily become a tyranny with a happy face. Democracy might be the best and safest way to identify people’s real interests for the sake of promoting positive liberty Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought an ideal democratic vote would reveal the common good (what he called the general will). You don’t have to agree with this to think that a democratic process has the best chance of pointing us toward the truth about what’s really in our best interests. But once we’ve discerned people’s real interests, you might wonder why liberty should be the only one worth promoting. Why privilege liberty above safety, community, health, or prosperity? Concern for positive liberty seems to push liberalism, inexorably, into something far more expansive than the limited government justified by the Harm Principle. If promoting positive liberty justifies coercion, democracy might risk seriously hurting the interests of minorities -- particularly if the majority’s opinions are influenced by prejudice, ignorance, or fear. To protect minority interests in a democracy, certain forms of coercion have to remain out of bounds, even if the majority wants to impose them. A liberal democracy that neglects negative liberty likely won’t remain either liberal or democratic. What do you think?