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Negative Liberty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Michael Levin
Michael Levin
Affiliation:
Philosophy, City College of New York
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Extract

Philosophers have articulated six notions of human freedom. Four are metaphysical. According to one, a man acts freely when he is doing what he wants to; according to the second, he acts freely when he is not being compelled by outside forces; according to the third, he acts freely when the prior state of the universe was not a sufficient cause of what he is doing; according to the fourth, he acts freely when he, not any preceding event, is the cause of what he is doing. The third and fourth theories may be called “indeterministic freedom” and “the agency theory,” named only to be rejected. I reject indeterminism out of agreement with a long tradition which holds that (a) there is no reason to think that human actions are ever undetermined, and (b) an undetermined human action would not be “free” in any sense in which we desire our actions to be free and believe that they are in fact free. To appreciate (b), reflect that agents should control and be accountable for “free” actions. Now, we control an event by assembling or obstructing its sufficient conditions; merefore, an event without sufficient conditions, a random event which just happens, would lie beyond human control and, hence, the sphere of human freedom. Similarly, a man is no more responsible for what happens independently of his choices – and an event without sufficient conditions cannot have a choice as a sufficient condition – than he is responsible for the behavior of a roulette wheel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1984 , pp. 84 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1984

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References

1 Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter VII.

2 Philosophy of Action (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979).

3 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress, Jan. 6, 1941.

4 “Liberty: Negative or Positive?,” Harvard Journal of Lam and Public Policy, 1978, 1, pp. 63–86:

5 See my: “A Hobbesian Minimal State,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Fall 1982, 11 (4).

6 Ewing, David, “Do It My Way or You're Fired” (Wiley, 1983), p. 13.Google Scholar For more on this topic, see my “Do Employees ‘Own’ Their Jobs?,” Fortune, Feb. 7, 1983, and “Rights to Public Employment,” prepared for the Office of Personnel Management's “Conference on Risk-Taking and Earning Rewards in Federal Employment,” June 1983.

7 Payne v. Westen and Atlantic Railroad Co. (13 Lca, 507) The American Reports, Vol. XLIX, 1884, 673.

8 Bunzel, John speaks of “the right to be free of discrimination” in “Rescuing Equality,” in Kurtz, P., ed., Sidney Hook (Prometheus, 1983), p. 179.Google Scholar This is also the phrase used by Rep. Emmanuel Cellar in the Congressional debates on the Civil Rights Act in 1964; see Legislative History of Titles VII and XI of the Civil Rights Act, E.E.O.C, Washington, 1964, p. 328.

Even adamant critics of quotas, like Bunzel, prefer to base their opposition on the fictitious right to be free of discrimination or the even more fictitious right of the best-qualified for a job. In my view, no effective case will be mounted against quotas until they are recognized as violating liberty.

9 Greenawalt, Kent tries in Discrimination and Reverse Discrimination, Borzoi Books in Law and American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar, but his argument consists in asserting every few pages that civil rights legislation and quotas are good things.

10 See my statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Congressional Record, Feb. 2, 1982; also my extended presentation in Legislative History of the 1982 Voting Rights Act. Thinking the example of the fire might be contrived, I checked it with a Justice Department Lawyer, who told me “We get cases like that all the time.”