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Chapter-5

LIBERTY

Liberty is a moral and political principle. Liberty identifies the condition in

which, human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their

own free will and take responsibility for their actions. There are different

conceptions of liberty, which articulate the relationship of individuals to society

in different ways. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘freedom’ as personal

liberty, civil liberty and liberty of action, while it defines liberty as freedom from

control. Chambers Dictionary defines freedom as liberty and liberty as freedom to

do as one pleases. The concept of overall liberty appears to play an important role

both in everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy. It is only

recently, however, that philosophers have stopped concentrating exclusively on

the meaning of a particular liberty. the liberty to do or become this or that

particular thing have started asking whether we can also make sense of

descriptive claims to the effect that one person or society is freer than another.

Liberty should be maximized to the Liberal normative claims. The literal

meaningfulness of such claims depends on the possibility of gauging degrees of

overall liberty.

The first known use of the word freedom in a political context dates back to the

24th century BC, in a text describing the restoration of social and economic liberty in

Lagash, a Sumerian city-state. Urukagin, the king of Lagash, established the first known

legal code to protect citizens from the rich and powerful. Known as a great reformer,

Urukagina established laws that forbade compelling the sale of property and required the

charges against the accused to be stated before any man accused of a crime could be

punished. This is the first known example of any form of due process in the history of

humanity. The modern concept of liberty has its origins in the Greek concepts of freedom

and slavery. To be free, to the Greeks, was to not have a master, to be independent from a

master. That was the original Greek concept of freedom. It is closely linked with the

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concept of democracy, as Aristotle put it. According to Aristotle, liberty is the

characteristic of democracy. This, then, is one note of liberty which all democrats affirm

to be the principle of their state. Another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they

say, is the privilege of a freeman, since, on the other hand, not to live as a man likes is the

mark of a slave. This is the second characteristic of democracy, whence has arisen the

claim of men to be ruled by none, if possible, or, if this is impossible, to rule and be ruled

in turns; and so it contributes to the freedom based upon equality. So to the Greeks

democracy was the system of government of a free society.

Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the

condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave

according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions. There are

different conceptions of liberty, which articulate the relationship of individuals to

society in different ways, including some which relate to life under a "social

contract" or to existence in a "state of nature", and some which see the active

exercise of freedom and rights as essential to liberty.1

Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty typically consist of

the freedom of individuals from outside compulsion or coercion, also known as

negative liberty, while Social liberal conceptions of liberty emphasize

social structure and agency, or positive liberty.

In feudal societies, a "liberty" was an area of allodial land in which the rights of

the ruler, or monarch, had been waived.

The modern conceptions of democracy, whether representative democracies

or other types of democracies, are all found on the Rousseau’s idea of popular

sovereignty.

Liberalism is a political current embracing several historical and present-

day ideologies that claim defense of individual liberty as the purpose of

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government. Two main strands are apparent, although both are founded on an

individualist ideology. Economic liberalism is the right of the individual to

contract, trade and operate in a market free of constraint. Social liberalism is the

right to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or

religious matters. Both are core political issues, and highly contentious. Article

three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the

right to life, liberty, and security of person.”

5.1 Positive and Negative Liberty

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has

negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative

sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting or the fact of acting in such a way

as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While

negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is

sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as

members of given collectivities.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the

term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth

by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s. Discussions about positive and negative

liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy.

They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions

about free will. Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however,

with work on the nature of autonomy.

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct

kinds of liberty, they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single

political ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is

interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political

liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally

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claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on

the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by

contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty

understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual

or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed

by liberals.2

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom. This is only a

difference of style, and the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ can be used

interchangeably. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between

liberty and freedom, these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into

other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or

Germanic origin, where English contains both.

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the

road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next

you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from

going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions

or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this

picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the

reason you went left and then right is that you’re addicted to cigarettes and you’re

desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel

you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the

wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you’re perfectly aware that

your turning right at the crossroads means you’ll probably miss a train that was to

take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this

irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you

right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.

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This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one

hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent.

You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do.

In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can

think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you

must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own

destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be

unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a

passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from

realizing what you recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on

the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the

second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.

In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two

concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively (Berlin 1969). The reason

for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of

something (i.e. of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others),

whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (i.e. of

control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization). In Berlin's words, we

use the negative concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question “What is

the area within which the subject a person or group of persons is or should be left

to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”,

whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer the question “What,

or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do,

or be, this rather than that?” 3

It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in terms of

the difference between factors that are external and factors that are internal to the

agent. While theorists of negative freedom are primarily interested in the degree to

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which individuals or groups suffer interference from external bodies, theorists of

positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the degree to

which individuals or groups act autonomously. Given this difference, one might be

tempted to think that a political philosopher should concentrate exclusively on

negative freedom, a concern with positive freedom being more relevant to

psychology or individual morality than to political and social institutions. This,

however, would be premature, for among the most hotly debated issues in political

philosophy are the following: Is the positive concept of freedom a political

concept? Can individuals or groups achieve positive freedom through political

action? Is it possible for the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on

their behalf? And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so? The classic texts in the

history of western political thought are divided over how these questions should be

answered: theorists in the classical liberal tradition, like Constant, Humboldt,

Spencer and Mill, are typically classed as answering ‘no’ and therefore as

defending a negative concept of political freedom; theorists that are critical of this

tradition, like Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and T.H. Green, are typically classed as

answering ‘yes’ and as defending a positive concept of political freedom.

In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as

necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case is that of

Rousseau’s theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved

through participation in the process whereby one’s community exercises collective

control over its own affairs in accordance with the ‘general will’. Put in the

simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it

is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent

that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist

applications of the concept of positive freedom. For example, it is sometimes said

that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for

individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization. The negative concept

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of freedom, on the other hand, is most commonly assumed in liberal defenses of

the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom

of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, and in arguments

against paternalist or moralist state intervention. It is also often invoked in

defenses of the right to private property, although some have contested the claim

that private property necessarily enhances negative liberty (Cohen, 1991, 1995).

The concept of overall liberty appears to play an important role both in

everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy. It is only recently,

however, that philosophers have stopped concentrating exclusively on the meaning

of a particular liberty the liberty to do or become this or that particular thing and

have started asking whether we can also make sense of descriptive claims to the

effect that one person or society is freer than another or of liberal normative claims

to the effect that liberty should be maximized or that people should enjoy equal

liberty or that they each have a right to a certain minimum level of liberty. The

literal meaningfulness of such claims depends on the possibility of gauging

degrees of overall liberty, sometimes comparatively, sometimes absolutely.

5.2 J.S.MILL on Liberty

On Liberty (1859) is a philosophical work by British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

It was a radical work to the Victorian readers of the time because it supported

individual’s moral and economic freedom from the state.

Perhaps the most memorable point made by Mill in this work, and his basis

for liberty, is that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is

sovereign”. Mill is compelled to make this assertion in opposition to what he calls

the “tyranny of the majority”, wherein through control of etiquette and morality,

society is an unelected power that can do horrific things. Mill’s work could be

considered a reaction to this social control by the majority and his advocacy of

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individual decision-making over the self. The famous Harm Principle, or the

principle of liberty, is also articulated in this work: the state or any other social

body has no right to coerce or restrict the individual unless the individual causes

harm to others, crucially, the individual’s own physical or moral harm is not

justification for constriction of their liberty. All branches of liberalism as well as

other political ideologies consider this to be one of their core principles. However,

they often disagree on what exactly constitutes harm.

On Liberty was an enormously influential work; the ideas presented in the

book have remained the basis of much liberal political thought ever since. Aside

from the popularity of the ideas themselves, the book is quite short and its themes

are easily accessible to a non-expert. It has remained in print continuously since its

initial publication. To this day, a copy of On Liberty has been passed to the

president of the British Liberals, and then Liberal Democrats, as a symbol of

office and succession from the party that Mill helped found.

Theorists disagree, however, about the importance of the notion of overall

liberty. For some libertarian and liberal egalitarian theorists, liberty is valuable as

such. Liberty is one of those goods that a liberal society ought to distribute in a

certain way among individuals. For other liberal theorists, like Ronald Dworkin

(1977) and the later Rawls (1991), freedom is not valuable as such, and all claims

about maximal or equal freedom ought to be interpreted not as literal references to

a quantitative good called ‘liberty’ but as elliptical references to the adequacy of

lists of certain particular liberties, or types of liberties, selected on the basis of

values other than liberty itself. Generally speaking, only the first group of theorists

finds the notion of overall liberty interesting.

The theoretical problems involved in measuring overall liberty include that

of how an agent’s available actions are to be individuated, counted and weighted,

and that of comparing and weighting different types of constraints on liberty. How

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are we to make sense of the claim that the number of options available to a person

has increased? Should all options count for the same in terms of degrees of liberty,

or should they be weighted according to their importance in terms of other values?

And how are we to compare the unfreedom created by the physical impossibility

of an action with, say, the unfreedom created by the difficulty or costliness or

punishability of an action? It is only by comparing these different kinds of actions

and constraints that we shall be in a position to compare individuals' overall

degrees of liberty. These problems have been addressed, with differing degrees of

optimism, not only by political philosophers but also, and increasingly, by social

choice theorists interested in finding a liberty based alternative to the standard

utilitarian or framework that has tended to dominate their discipline. 4

Plato advocates economic liberty. He thinks, besides, the philosopher king

no other class, the shoulders particularly, have right to possess private property.

The idea of liberty, fairly clear in itself, is today surrounded by positive

normative connotations. These positive connotations encourage advocates of

different ideologies to define it persuasively, to advance definitions, that is, that

bring the values and goals they favor within the rubric of liberty. As a result, the

concept becomes increasingly vague and unclear, misused by competing

ideologist, the concept itself threatens to lose its utility in neutral empirical

inquiry.

The task of conceptual analysis ,according to this view ,is first to purge the

concept of all normative or value connotations and then to explicate it in ways that

enable all investigators, regardless of the ideological orientation they happen to

adopt to use it in description and explanation of social and political life. Such an

approach will allow us to transcend the current confusions permeating studies in

which the concept figures and will in fact make it possible to pinpoint our

normative differences. For now all investigators will have access to the same

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conceptual system, neutral with respect to opposing ideologies, in which they can

discuss their differences about the extent to which freedom is properly prized as an

ideal of political life. Perhaps the ideological differences will not be fully resolved

,it is argued ,bit at least the factual issues that can be brought to bear on these

questions will be stated with clarity in a neutral language. In a book that has

contributed valuable insights into the concept of freedom, Felix Oppenheim states

this view. “Meaningful disagreement about the value of freedom depends,” he

contends, “on agreement on that about which one disagrees.” To achieve this goal

we must “arrive at a system of definitions acceptable to everybody because they

do not conflict with anybody’s political ideology.”

Reviewing in a recent article his own efforts to fulfill this objective, he asserts:

Thus in the case of the concept of social, political, or inter-personal

freedom, the expression we must explicate is, “With respect to B, A is free to do

x.” This expression can be defined by: “B makes it neither impossible nor

punishable for A to do x”. Not only does this definition remain close to ordinary

usage, it is also descriptive and in two ways: the defining expression consists

exclusively of descriptive terms, and it is “value-free” in the sense that it can be

applied to determinate states of affairs by anyone independently of his political

convictions.

The concerns here expressed for clarity is laudable, but I shall argue, the

approach adopted and the presuppositions it embodies are inappropriate to the

objective stated. In the ordinary language of political life and in more formal

systems of political inquiry the normative dimensions in the idea of liberty are not

attached to it as “connotations” that can be eliminated, without the normative point

of view from which the concept is formed we would have no basis for deciding

what “descriptive terms” to include or exclude in the definition. Debates about the

criteria properly governing the concept of freedom are in part debates about the

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extent to which the proposed criteria fulfill the normative point of the concept and

in part about exactly what that point is. To refuse to bring these considerations into

one’s deliberations about liberty is either to deny oneself access to the very

considerations that can inform judgment about the concept or to delude oneself

by tacitly invoking the very considerations formally eschewed.

The alternative approach pursued here does not promise to issue in a neutral

definition couched in criteria acceptable to all regardless of normative

commitments ,it does promise though , to clarify the issues underlying conceptual

disputes about liberty , and it does purport to help the investigator clarify

explicitly the considerations that move him to adopt one formulation over others.

The thesis to be advanced is that liberty is contested partly because of the

way it bridges a positivist dichotomy between descriptive and normative concepts.

Though considerations in support of this thesis will be offered throughout this

essay, we will devote the rest of this section to linguistic evidence from ordinary

discourse, which provides it with preliminary support.

5.3 Liberty is Essentially Contested Political Concept

The thesis that social and political concepts are essentially contested. That

social and political concepts are in this deep sense contested and contestable is

itself a highly controversial view, and, before we can look at the broader

implications of deep contestability for liberalism, it will be useful to consider in

greater detail just what is being claimed when a concept is said to have this

contested character.

The contestability of the concept of liberty does not constitute an

impossible problem to formulating a working definition of liberalism. We consider

the general thesis that some, if not all, of the central concepts of social and

political thought have an essentially contestable character, and look in particular at

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the application of this thesis to the concept of the ‘political’. Within the

conceptual framework of the liberal tradition, a just distribution is any that

emerges from background economic and political institutions protecting equal

liberty.

In 1956 W. B. Gallie advanced the thesis that certain political concepts,

such as that of social justice, are ‘essentially contested’. Since then, a considerable

literature on the subject has developed, some of it in support of the thesis, some of

it in opposition to it. W. E. Connolly is a leading supporter of it, and John Gray is

a leading opponent of it. However, Connolly’s advocacy of it in the second edition

of his book is significantly more moderate than that in the first (1974) edition of it.

For whereas in the latter he maintains that ‘definitive resolution of these

controversies is usually impossible’, in the former he wishes ‘to deny that the

definitional disputes determinedly operative in moral and political philosophy are

in principle irresolvable, and to deny that there are no criteria at all to illuminate

these contests’. Connolly claims that ‘freedom is perhaps the most... controversial

of the concepts we shall discuss’, and it is this claim which we, like Gray, intend

to dispute. The important definitions of ‘freedom’ which have been propounded in

widely different times and places are the following five.

The concept of an essentially contested concept owes its original

formulation to W. B. Gallie, who developed it in a lecture given to the Aristotelian

Society in I956.

According to Gallie, essentially contested concepts are such that their

criteria of correct application are multiple, evaluative and in no settled relation of

priority with one another. The criteria for the correct application of an essentially

contested concept embody standards of excellence as well as norms of categorial

demarcation, they are diverse, and their relative importance is as much a matter of

dispute as each of them is itself. Gallie gives as examples of such concepts those

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which are inherently liable to intractable dispute, e.g. Christian life, art and

democracy. Gallie argues that general acknowledgement of the essentially

contested character of these concepts, rather than impoverishing debate, is likely

instead to enrich intellectual life and to promote tolerance within it. As Connolly

has put it, a concept is essentially contested when it is appraisive in that the state

of affairs it describes is a valued achievement which is initially variously

describable, when the state of affairs is internally complex in that its

characterization involves references to several dimensions of meaning, and when

its criteria of application - whether shared or disputed - are themselves relatively

open, enabling parties to interpret even shared criteria differently, both across a

range of familiar cases and as new and unforeseen circumstances arise. If, then, as

we will myself later argue, the concept of politics or the political is judged to be

essentially contested, this means, first, that we cannot specify an invariant set of

necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct application. Rather, we must (as

Connolly puts it) treat politics as a cluster concept to which a broad range of

criteria apply: ‘any large set of criteria grouped together in a particular act or

practice is capable of qualifying it as practical’. Not only will politics be an

internally complex concept, then, with a broad and variable set of criteria, but each

criterion is itself complex and relatively opens, and various people jointly

employing it will weight the importance of shared criteria differently.5

Having briefly expounded Gallie’s view of essential contestability, it may

be relevant to point to a number of difficulties in his account. In the first place,

some of the criteria proposed by Gallie for identifying a concept as essentially

contested represent a partial retreat from the main thrust of his thesis that disputes

about the proper application of such concepts are rationally irresolvable. Gallie

proposes seven necessary conditions for a concept's being essentially contestable.

It must, first, be evaluative in that it appraises some kind of achievement, and,

secondly, though it must be valued as a totality, this achievement must have an

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internally complex character. Thirdly, the valued achievement which the concept

denotes must be initially variously describable, and, fourthly, the forms in which it

occurs must be relatively variable and open to modification in unpredictable ways.

Fifthly, users of an essentially contestable concept recognize that their uses of it

are in competition with other uses of the same concept. It is not with these

conditions that we have any quarrel. But Gallie’s sixth criterion, according to

which essentially contested concepts may be identified by appeal to ‘the derivation

of any such concept from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged

by all the contestant users of the concept’ fails to distinguish logically between the

present functioning of a concept and its history (including that of its original uses,

supposing them to be identifiable), and thus arguably commits a version of the

genetic fallacy. That it must be possible to recognize an essentially contested

concept simply by reference to its contemporary usages, regardless of its origins

and history, is in any case shown by Gallie’s instancing the concepts of democracy

and social justice as having such a character. (Certainly there is no exemplary

democratic state or just society which all users of these concepts would

acknowledge as such.) Admittedly, it might be agreed that no necessary fallacy

exists in Gallie’s account, in that appealing to a shared historical exemplar so as to

illuminate the social and cultural sources and history of the contest need not be to

suggest that such an historical investigation can in any way resolve the dispute, but

it still appears that Gallie is mistaken in supposing that an agreed exemplar is

always, or even typically, present in disputes of this kind. This difference between

Gallie’s account and my own, incidentally, creates room for an answer to a

common objection to the general approach exemplified in concern about

contestability. It is put in a clear form by Steiner: ‘Conceding that concepts are

open-textured and that language-users sometimes draw distinctions without

differences, we take it that we are nonetheless entitled to insist that what is to

count as a conception of concept X cannot be such as to be inconsistent with any

of the acknowledged properties of X, or unconnected with them’. The objection

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has force against Gallie’s account, in which he suggests that when men dispute

about democracy (say) they are disputing about something with a common

original exemplar, but it has no force against an account which emphasizes that the

criteria of such a concept as ‘politics’ (for example) have neither a purely analytic

nor a purely synthetic relationship to that concept. In general, we are rarely in a

position to specify definitely in advance the generic features of such a concept. As

the work of such writers as Quine and Putnam in other areas of philosophy

suggests, the analytic-synthetic distinction breaks down when we confront

concepts with multiple and variable criteria; that is, concepts especially

characteristic of political thought and practice. Gallie’s approach is vulnerable to

this objection in part because, as an immanent critique of some aspects of

analytical empiricism and linguistic philosophy, it exemplifies some of the

characteristic errors of these schools. Again, consider Gallie’s seventh criterion:

‘the probability or plausibility of the claim that continuous competition...enables

the original exemplar’s achievement to be sustained in an optimum fashion’. Does

not the introduction of this requirement commit Gallie to a form of essentialism,

inconsistent with his main thesis, according to which there stands each essentially

contested concept (in Gellner’s words) ‘a non-contested, unambiguously defined

and fully determinate concept or exemplar’? Gallie’s evident motive in proposing

these additional and misconceived criteria for recognizing an essentially contested

concept - the desire to distinguish such concepts from concepts that are just

radically confused and incoherent, and to distinguish between general words that

denote a single ‘essentially contested’ concept and general words whose use

conceals a diversity of concepts - discloses an area of systematic ambiguity in his

account.

The uncertainty we mean is an uncertainty about what it is that is said by

Gallie to be essentially contested. To take two of Gallie’s political examples: when

there is a dispute about whether a given form of government is democratic, or

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about what a just society would look like, it is far from obvious that the disputants

must (or typically do) share a common concept of democracy and social justice

while endorsing divergent criteria for its correct application. For, as Alasdair

Maclntyre has observed,’ though two men may well share a concept and yet

disagree in some of their judgements about the objects falling under it, we cannot

say that they share or possess the same concept unless they agree in at least some

central applications of it. (Recall Wittgenstein's well-known remark: ‘If language

is to be a means of communication, there must be agreement not only in

definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements’.) In other words,

unless we share some at least of our judgements, how can we be said to possess

the same concepts? How else, indeed, can we understand what we are talking

about? Unless there is some agreement about what a democracy or a just society

looks like, we have no reason to characterize a conflict as a conceptual contest. In

our own society, however, a striking feature of disputes about democracy and

social justice is that no consensus exists as to their central applications. If it is

unclear that intractable disputes about the key terms of political discourse are

about the criteria of a shared concept, are they typically definitional disputes about

the meanings of words? If they were, then perhaps controversy in these areas

would be amenable to the kind of pacification envisaged by those operationalists

who speak of a revolution in behavioural science which has banished, or may

some day banish, these sorts of perplexing ambiguity from disciplined inquiry.

Fortunately, perhaps, for those who wish to resist such a sterilization of social

thought, disputes of the sort we are considering are quite unlike disputes in which

it is simply not recognized that a general term has more than one range of

meanings. Nor, consequently, in contrast with many genuinely linguistic disputes,

can debate about the terms of political discourse usefully be closed by recourse to

stipulative or lexical definition. Instead, we must recognize that intractable

controversy about such terms as ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘power’ and ‘democracy’

expresses disagreement that is at once conceptual and substantive” Maclntyre, ‘Is

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Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’ in B. R. Wilson, If it is

unclear that intractable disputes about the key terms of political discourse.6

Freedom or Liberty is perhaps the most greasy and controversial of the

concepts. It is the concept of such extreme and continuing controversy. The idea

of liberty, fairly clear in itself, is today surrounded by positive normative

connotations. These positive connotations encourage advocates of different

ideologies to define it influentially.To advance definitions, that is, that bring the

values and goals they favor within the rubric of freedom. As a result, the concept

becomes increasingly vague and unclear. It is misused by competing ideologists.

The concept itself threatens to lose its utility in neutral empirical inquiry.

The task of conceptual analysis, according to this view, is first to purge the

concept of all normative or value connotations and then to explicate it in ways that

enable all investigators, regardless of the ideological orientation they happen to

adopt ,to use it in description and explanation of social and political life. Such an

approach will allow us to transcend the current confusions permeating studies in

which the concept figures and will in fact make it possible to pinpoint our

normative differences. For now all investigators will have access to the same

conceptual system, neutral with respect to opposing ideologies, in which they can

discuss their differences about the extent to which freedom is properly prized as an

ideal of political life. Perhaps the ideological differences will not be fully resolved,

it is urged, but at least the factual issues that can be brought to bear on these

questions will be stated with clarity in a neutral language. In a book that has

contributed valuable insights into the concept of freedom, Felix Oppenheim states

this view. “Meaningful disagreement about the value of freedom depends”, he

contends, “On agreement on that value which one disagrees.”To achieve this goal

we must “Arrive at a system of definitions acceptable to every body because they

do not conflict with any body’s political ideology.”

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Reviewing in a recent article his own efforts to fulfill this objective, he asserts:

Thus, in the case of the concept of social, political or inter personal

freedom, the expression we must explicate is, “With respect to B, A is free to do

x.” This expression can be defined by: “B makes it neither impossible nor

punishable for A to do x.” Not only does this definition remain close to ordinary

usage it is also descriptive, and in two ways: the defining expression consists

exclusively of descriptive terms, and it is “value –free “in the sense that it can be

applied to determinate states of affairs by anyone independently of his political

convictions.

The thesis to be advanced is that ‘freedom’ is contested because of the way

it bridges a positivist dichotomy between “descriptive “and “normative” concepts.

To capture the grammar of ‘free’ tacitly accepted in ordinary discourse.

Indeed, in my judgment many of the positive conceptions of liberty which

philosophers have defended in the past should be construed, not as definitions, but

as principles of justice constituting criteria for assessing claims to liberty.

Consider, for example, the conception of liberty as rational self-mastery. Only

confusion results from identifying liberty with this value. But it is possible, even

credible, to equate rational self-mastery with a goal or end of liberty. Thus we

have the principle of justice, that everyone has a prima facie right to achieve

rational direction over his life, and this principle can be used, along with others, in

resolving disputes concerning the legitimate distribution of liberty. Conceptions of

liberty in terms of opportunity should be treated similarly. And, of course, we need

to insure that persons are not subject to arbitrary or purposeless restraints, but

again the best way to do this consists, not of defining liberty in such a way that

only rational restraints can be said to abridge it, but of embodying in principles of

justice prohibitions against unfair or pointless infringements upon liberty.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice contains the most thorough and insightful

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contemporary inquiry into the relation between liberty and justice, so it would be

appropriate for me to conclude by commenting briefly on the concept of liberty

Rawls employs in this work. He correctly observes that: (a) the general description

of liberty must always specify who is free (or not free) from this or that constraint

(or set of constraints) to do (or not to do) so and so; (b) things like poverty,

ignorance, and lack of means diminish the worth of liberty, not liberty itself; (c)

disagreements relating to the values of different liberties can only be settled by a

theory of justice. But Rawls mistakenly believes that legal duties and prohibitions

as well as coercive influences arising from public opinion and social pressure

deserve to be counted among the constraints which do limit one’s liberty. As we

have argued, only certain kinds of laws are properly deemed infringements upon

social freedom, while public opinion and social pressure can undermine a person’s

will or resolve, but not his liberty, to act. Rawls’s conception of liberty needs to be

qualified in much the same way Benn’s and Weinstein’s early definitions did.

5.4 First Definition

‘Liberty consists in doing what one desires.’7 This is the opinion of the man

in the street. The following example shows that it is false. A is B’s slave, and B

brainwashes A into desiring to be B’s slave. Then, by this definition, A is free. But

A cannot, logically, be both free and a slave. This disproof rests on the familiar

and powerful logical principle that a proposition which implies a contradiction is

false. It is much used in mathematical demonstrations.

5.5 Second Definition

A is free if and only if A is not ‘a slave to his passions’8 or in ‘human

bondage’.9 On this view, the paradigm of the unfree man is the alcoholic. For with

him the worst part of his nature (his passions) control the best part of it (his

reason). But A is free if and only if A’s reason and will control A’s passions. This

definition is false because liberty is a moral right, and A’s moral rights must,

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logically, be held against B, who has the corresponding moral obligation. Liberty

is therefore an interpersonal or interorganizational concept and not an

intrapersonal or intraorganizational one.

5.6 Third and Fourth Definitions

Connolly considers the following problem in the definition of ‘liberty’ as

‘the absence of coercion’. Namely, does ‘B coerces A’ mean (Third Definition) ‘B

prevents A from doing X’, where ‘prevents A from doing X’ means ‘makes A

unable to do X’? Or does ‘B coerces A’ mean, as Bentham10

maintains (Fourth

Definition), ‘B restrains A from doing X’, where ‘restrains’ means ‘intentionally

prevents’? Connolly thinks that the question, which of these definitions is true, is

essentially contestable. But in fact it is clear that the Third Definition is false and

that the Fourth Definition is true.

For compare the following two cases. Case (a). On finishing his work, a

businessman, B, locks his premises and goes home. He thereby unintentionally

locks in his secretary, A, who is working late, a fact which B, has forgotten. A

cannot communicate with the outside world and so has to spend the night in her

office, which causes discomfort and inconvenience to her and anxiety to her

family about her absence. On returning to work the following morning, B is aghast

when he discovers the consequences of his forgetfulness. He apologizes to A,

assures her that his action was quite unintentional and the result of forgetfulness,

and offers her in compensation two days’ holiday with pay. A is mollified, accepts

B’s apology and offer of compensation, and the affair is closed. Case (b). On

going home, B intentionally locks A in his place of business because he considers

that she has been slacking and he wants to force her to dispose of her arrears of

work. On returning to work in the morning, B explains to A what he has done and

why. A is furiously indignant, tells B that he has no right to treat her in this high-

handed way, and informs him that she will report her detention both to the police

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and to her union, so that it can sue B for damages on her behalf. The utterly

different conduct of both A and B in the two cases shows that they are as distinct

as chalk and cheese. What is the essential difference? Precisely that in Case (a),

B’s unintentional action merely prevents A from leaving the premises and does not

violate her moral and legal right to liberty, whereas in Case (b), B’s intentional

action restrains A from leaving the premises and does violate her moral and legal

right to liberty.

5.7 Fifth Definition

‘Obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty’;11

e.g. A

abstains freely from alcoholic drinks if and only if A obeys a rule so to abstain

which A has imposed on A. So generally, A does X freely if and only if A does X

autonomously.

That which is autonomous is either an individual (as in the above example),

or, more usually, an organization, e.g. the slogan ‘a free church in a free state’.

The most important ‘opposite’ of autonomy is heteronomy. A does X

heteronomously if and only if A does X in obedience to a rule which B has

imposed upon A. But A does X anomously if A does X neither autonomously nor

heteronomously. ‘Autonomous’ and ‘heteronomous’ are therefore contraries and

not contradictories. (‘Restrained’ and ‘unrestrained’, however, are

contradictories.) A does X aheteronomously if and only if A does X either

autonomously or anomously. The paradigm of the heteronomous organization is

the colony, which does not make its own rules (laws), but has them made for it by

the colonial power of which it is a dependency. It is the ‘negative’ word

‘heteronomy’, not the ‘positive’ word ‘autonomy’, which wears the trousers.

(Similarly, with liberty, the ‘negative’ word ‘restrained’, not the ‘positive’ word

‘free’, is the trouser-word; and, with justice, the ‘negative’ expression ‘unjust

treatment’, not the ‘positive’ expression ‘just treatment, is the trouser expression.)

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To elucidate the notion of heteronomy it is necessary to explain its relations

to control, government and coercion (restraint).

Control (direction) is a binary relation, the terms (subjects and objects) of

which are individual persons or organizations of persons. Control, like coercion, is

necessarily intentional. Indeed, one reason why coercion is necessarily intentional

is that coercion (restraint) is a species of control.

The important species and sub-species of control are obtained by dividing it

as follows. (1) Political control v. (2) non-political control. Political control is

government (rule). A subject of government is a government and an object of

government is either a citizen or an organization of citizens, e.g. a trade union. An

example of non-political control is parental control of children. Government is

either (1.1) coercive or (1.2) non-coercive. Non-coercive government is

government by e.g. advice, persuasion or warning. Coercive government is either

(1.1.1) coercive by law or (1.1.2) coercive not by law. Coercive government not

by law is government by e.g. decree, manipulation or incarceration. An object of

coercive government by law is heteronomous. A heteronomous object is unfree

(restrained) because the threat which backs the sort of law which we are

considering here prevents its object from doing some complex (conjunctive)

action, e.g. if murder is a capital offence, then a citizen is unable both to take a

fellow-citizen’s life and to keep his own life. A crucial difference between

coercive government and non-coercive government is that the former involves the

exercise of power whereas the latter does not.

Is the Fifth Definition true? There is truth in it, namely, that if A does X

autonomously, then A does X freely. However, objection may be made to this as

follows. Consider, e.g., Case (c). A imposes on A a rule to abstain from alcoholic

drinks and backs it with a resolution to pay? 100 to charity whenever he breaks it.

The objection is raised that this abridges A’s liberty, because A’s resolution makes

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A unable both to break his rule and to keep (all of) his money. But the reply is that

the objection is false. For when A breaks his rule, he can simply disregard his

resolution, and so can both break his rule and keep (all of) his money. There is a

crucial difference here between Case (c) and Case (d). R (Rex, a political

authority) imposes on A and on all A’s fellow citizens a rule to abstain from

alcoholic drinks and backs it with a threat to fine any citizen? 100 whenever he

breaks it. If R’s threat is effective (as R's threats usually are) then A and A’s

fellow-citizens cannot both break R’s rule and keep (all of) their money. This is

why heteronomy abridges liberty whereas autonomy does not do so.

But there is also falsity in the Fifth Definition. For it is not true that, if A

does X freely, then A does X autonomously, i.e. it is false that A cannot do X

freely and anautonomously. For A can do X freely and anomously. And when A

does X does X anautonomously, since ‘anomous’ and ‘autonomous’ are contraries.

(See above.) Suppose, e.g., Case (e), that A abstains from alcoholic drinks neither

in obedience to a rule imposed on A by A nor in obedience to a rule imposed on A

by B (e.g. by R). Then-provided that A is not constrained to abstain in some other

way, such as by being forcibly deprived of alcoholic drinks-A abstains freely. The

Fifth Definition is therefore false.

It is generally believed, on eminent authority, that there are two concepts of

liberty, the negative concept (unrestraint), and the positive concept (autonomy).

However, we have just seen that it is not so. We think that the cause of the false

belief that there are two concepts of liberty (or, better, that there are two meanings

of ‘free’) is as follows. It is noticed that autonomous organizations and individuals

are called ‘free’, e.g. ‘the Irish Free State’. From this it is inferred erroneously that

one meaning of ‘free’ is ‘autonomous’. But this is wrong. For the unique, true

definition of the meaning of ‘free’ is, as Bentham says, ‘unrestrained’ (the Fourth

Definition, above). Autonomous organizations and individuals are called ‘free’

because they are, necessarily, aheteronomous (=unrestrained by threats which

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back rules imposed on them by others). This is because ‘autonomous’ and

‘heteronomous’ are contraries. (See above.) An analogy will clarify the point. A

notices that persons who are under 18 are called ‘minors’. From this A infers

erroneously that ‘minor’ means ‘person who is under 18’. But this is wrong. For

the true definition of the meaning of ‘minor’ is ‘person who is under age’.14

Persons who are under 18 are called ‘minors’ because they are, contingently,

under age. This is because the law has fixed the age of minority at under 18. The

falsity of A’s belief can be seen very clearly from the fact that it entails the

following paradox: the effect of reducing the age of minority from under 21 to

under 18 was to change the meaning of the name ‘minor’ from ‘person who is

under 21’ to ‘person who is under 18’. But this is obviously untrue since what the

change in the law changed was the age of minority, not the meaning of the name

‘minor’.

There is another interesting connection, of a factual and not a conceptual

kind, between autonomy and freedom. Certain liberties, notably those of

expression, assembly and association, are in fact necessary conditions for the

attainment of autonomy. Thus, a colony is most unlikely to achieve independence

from a colonial power unless the colony’s citizens are free to campaign for

independence by speaking and writing for independence, by holding mass

meetings to demand independence, and by forming a political party to work for

independence. But the converse is not true. Autonomy is not in fact a necessary or

indeed a sufficient condition of liberty, e.g. Indian citizens do not have more

liberty under the Republic than they had when India was a Dominion of the British

Commonwealth.

Finally, a word on the relationship of autonomy to democracy. ‘Self-

government’ means either ‘autonomy (independence)’ or ‘democracy

(representative government)’. These are logically distinct. But there is, again, an

interesting factual connection between them. Namely that movement for

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independence tend to be accompanied by movements for representative

government. For if a colony has representative government, then those citizens

who desire independence can organize an independence party, some members of

which will (with luck) be elected to the colony’s legislature, and some of these

will (with more luck) become ministers. This will greatly strengthen the hand of

those citizens who desire independence. But the converse is not true. Movements

for representative government do not tend to be accompanied by movements for

independence. This is because movements for democracy occur in independent

countries as well as in dependent ones.

In the expression ‘essentially contestable’ the word ‘contestable’ means

‘can be contested’, not ‘ought to be contested’. In this respect ‘contestable’ is like

‘visible’ and unlike ‘desirable’. The modifier ‘essentially’ means ‘necessarily. But

we have seen in this essay that it is false that all definitions of ‘free’ are

necessarily contestable. For it has been shown that one (and only one) definition of

‘free’, namely the Fourth Definition (Bentham’s), is incontestably true. Our

disputes about freedom are in fact more important and intense because we share

certain ides about the criteria of freedom and the point of discourse about it.

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References:

1. Maurice Cranston, ‘Liberalism’, in Paul Edwards, ed., Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1972), Vol. 4 p. 458.

2. Sir Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (New York, 1958)

3. Ibid.,

4. J.S. Mill, On Liberty, ch. V.

5. W.E. Connoly, Tersm of Political Discourse, pp. 9-14.

6. L. Wittgensetein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd

edn. (Oxford : Basil

NBlackwell, 1958), Part 1, Section 242.

7. C.L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 72-73.

8. Plato, Republic, 430-448.

9. Spinoza, Ethics, IV, V.

10. D.G. Long, Bentham on Liberty (Toronto : University of Toronto Press,

1977), pp. 54-55

11. Rousseau, Social Contract, I, viii. Cf. Kant, Foundations of the

Metaphysics of Morals, III, I.