Comments on: Positive and negative liberty and rights

By: terry

terry — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:28:42 +0000

Whew. Forgive my rant above. Carry on with your fine blog.

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:03:38 +0000

For God’s sake, people. Everyone on this site is better read, better educated and, frankly smarter than I am, so why has no one pointed out the error in this sentence: “But I am left scratching my head, nonetheless, because I teach J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin every semester – for two semester’s now.” The misused apostrophe is one of my pet peeves. If you can teach philosophy, you can understand when to use—and not to use—this little scratch of a punctuation mark.

By: albert j

albert j — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:02:46 +0000

G. MacCallum has the best work on this: “Positive and Negative Freedom”(?) from Phil Review, 1967. He argues that the distinction itself is bunk. Freedom or liberty is always a triadic relation. (1) agent is free (2) from some constraint to (3) do something. Classifying that relation as positive or negative does nothing to add to the analysis. The important question is what restrictions on what activities are morally permissible / problematic.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 02:16:48 +0000

Micha, Here’s what I think is confused about the Berlin quote. Everyone will worry about the locus of control even if, like libertarians, they are really only concerned with the extent of control. Because they want to guarantee that the extent not be curtained in future. It is possible to be a proponent of negative liberty, and mind despotism – even despotism that does not interfere with negative liberty – simply because you worry what the despot will do tomorrow, not because you have some lurking commitment to positive liberty. So I think Berlin’s example is more complicating than clarifying.

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:30:33 +0000

Bob, I actually agree with you. I don’t believe in abstract morality; if anything, morality is either socially constructed or ingrained in us as intuitions that give us an evolutionary advantage. Without an eye in the sky, it’s difficult to see where morality comes from other than ourselves. Regardless, that is not the point here. It “makes sense,” i.e. it is coherent to say that morality exists outside of government and society. It may be incorrect, but it’s a defensible position. Unless you’re a logical positivist or something.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:09:49 +0000

“and one of us murders other for whatever reason, would this murder be wrong” Umm, Hobbesian kinda guy here. In the most extreme isolation, “wrong” in terms of “immoral” is not the word I would use. Pretty deep question, with Cain being the problem, and Moses being the solution. Why was the Law given unto Israel, anyway? We form societies to have morality, even if very abstract societies (myself and Rawls, myself and God). There really ain’t much personal morality.

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:54:23 +0000

Bob, Sure, rights make sense outside of government. If you and I are trapped on a deserted island together and one of us murders other for whatever reason, would this murder be wrong, even though no government has jurisdiction over this island and there are no laws governing it? If so, if murder is wrong in the absence of government, and one believes this is so because “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” then it does make sense to say that rights exist outside of government. At least it made sense to Jefferson, who wrote, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:45:41 +0000

“the property rights that people enjoy over themselves and stuff are purely negative since , “there”, bystanders have a permission but not (an enforceable) duty to enforce the laws of nature.” Does it make sense then to call this a “right”? Is the wall-side of the bed a “right” in my partnership? Can there be a “contract” between my partner and myself without a government to enforce it? Do the words “property” or “right” in “property rights” make any sense outside of a government?

By: Micha Ghertner

Micha Ghertner — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:40:13 +0000

Regarding Berlin’s quote, it’s not confusing at all. Libertarians are not fundamentally concerned with the form that government takes; rather, they are fundamentally concerned with the amount of liberty that government permits. One can easily imagine a tyrannical democracy in which a 51% majority votes to violate the liberty of the 49% minority, and compare this to an absolute monarchy in which the king is pretty lazy and takes a relatively laissez faire approach to governance. Of course, there might be good historical and practical reasons for believing that democracy is more likely to result in greater liberty than monarchy, but this is incidental, not fundamental, to libertarianism.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:33:04 +0000

Doesn’t “positive liberty” have to do with the necessity of living in community with others? That is to say, I can only realize my desires as mediated and negotiated with the desires of others. That may be a bummer, but it is also a condition of agency in the first place. On the other hand, “negative liberty” is exclusive; it amounts to the claim that my desires can only be enjoyed if they are my property, if they are “truly” my own. So the tangle created by the distinction between the two “liberties” is really the flip sides of the same coin: I can only realize my desires through exercising my agency in community with others, but, in order to have desires to realize, I must be capable of determining them myself. But then I can constitutively determine my desires only through mediation with the desires of others, such that those other desires must afford me my capacity for self-determination. It’s an analytic, not a substantive, distinction; it’s a mark of human doubleness.

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:28:14 +0000

I realize this is anal, but Mill did believe in rights, officially. He just didn’t believe in them as a starting point.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:05:17 +0000

Aargh… ultralong comment just got eaten … Telegraphic rehash to enable me to go and have a drink: Anyway: agree that +/- liberty distinction hasn’t much 2 do with the +/- rights distinction. Disagree that +/- rights distinction doesn’t have sense , though agree that no actually legally enforceable rights are purely negative. But in a Lockean state of nature (assuming that to be coherent) the property rights that people enjoy over themselves and stuff are purely negative since , “there”, bystanders have a permission but not (an enforceable) duty to enforce the laws of nature.

By: alkali

alkali — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 22:00:29 +0000

There’s a guy named Jhering whose book Geist des römischen Rechts explains all this stuff. It came out about a hundred years ago.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:25:50 +0000

Spent two hours today googling “positive negative rights”, read much material on both sides of the question as to whether “positive rights” exist. The libertarians like Bainbridge were consistently saying that “negative rights” existed. (Existence not a predicate, maybe “should be codified” is better) And I come here and get totally re-confused. I expect I might agree as I don’t like “rights” as things that can be abstracted from empirical situations. We have the “right” to free speech because the 1st amendment says so. I will read it again later.

By: SloLernr

SloLernr — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:24:39 +0000

But in the same essay from which you quote, “Two concepts of liberty,” Berlin refers to positive rights, apparently as having the meaning of rights to participate in the political process, as a useful means to the end of achieving negative liberty.

Few governments, it has been observed, have found much difficulty in causing their subjects to generate any will that the government wanted. The triumph of despotism is to force the slaves to declare themselves free. It may need no force; the slaves may proclaim their freedom quite sincerely: but they are none the less slaves. Perhaps the chief calue for liberals of political—‘positive’—rights, of participating in the government, is as a means for protecting what they hold to be an ultimate value, namely individual—‘negative’—liberty.