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How Free: Computing Personal Liberty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Hillel Steiner
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Extract

Judgments about the extent to which an individual is free are easily among the more intractable of the various raw materials which present themselves for philosophical processing. On the one hand, few of us have any qualms about making statements to the effect that Blue is more free than Red. Explicitly or otherwise, such claims are the commonplaces of most history textbooks and of much that passes before us in the news media. And yet, good evidence for the presence of a philosophical puzzle here is to be found in the familiar hesitation we experience when we first reflect on the grounds for such claims. Is it really the case that the average Russian is less free than an Englishman in a dole queue? Are we quite certain that a dirt farmer in the Appalachians enjoys greater personal liberty than the inmate of a well-appointed modern prison? Were citizens of classical Athens more free, or less free, than their counterparts in today's welfare states?

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 15: Of Liberty , March 1983 , pp. 73 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983

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References

1 An (imperfect) analogy to this kind of objection is that which takes exception to the capacity of a ruler to measure length, on the grounds that it is scaled in inches rather than centimetres.

2 The example is taken from D'Arcy, Eric, Human Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 3.Google Scholar

3 Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, 130.Google Scholar

4 Feinberg, Joel, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 18–19.Google Scholar

5 Taylor, Charles, ‘What's Wrong with Negative Liberty’, The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, Ryan, Alan (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 183.Google Scholar

6 In addition to Berlin's seminal contribution on this subject, one might consult: Day, J. P., ‘On Liberty and the Real Will’, Philosophy XLV (1970), 177–192CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Threats, Offers, Law, Opinion and Liberty’, American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), 257–271Google Scholar; Oppenheim, Felix E., Dimensions of Freedom (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Political Concepts: A Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), Ch. 3 and 5; Steiner, Hille, ‘Individual Liberty’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXXV (1974–1975), 33–50.Google Scholar

7 It would be tautologous inasmuch as it would be asserting that ‘This autonomous self restrains the doing of Z by this (same) autonomous self—an assertion the contradiction of which is unintelligible, since ‘autonomous’ means ‘self-restraining’ or ‘self-governing’. But it is more likely that the statement is meaning-less, since there is no clear sense in which autonomous selves—as distinct from acting persons—can be said to do acts or to be restrained from doing them.

8 Cf. Steiner, , ‘Individual Liberty’, 44–50.Google Scholar

9 Similarly, we might morally discount Yellow's being more generous than Pink, if Yellow is a thief who impoverished Pink. Cf. Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 194–195.Google Scholar

10 The only independent variables here are TOL (TGL), COL (CGL) and NO (NG). Hence only these are open to normative appraisal. Of these, the first two reflect distributive states-of-affairs and may, therefore, be subject to the same norm. While the third variable is also subject to normative appraisal, it is doubtful that the same norm can be applied to it.

11 This is not, however, to say that no comparative moral significance attaches to CGL/COL—and hence to LAO/LAG—when TOL/TGL is morally unacceptable. Orange's military imperialism does not excuse Supergreen's despotism.

12 Indeed, few of us have any independent intuitions about societies 'entitlements to liberty—independent, that is, of our views as to individual persons' entitlements.

13 Berlin, , Four Essays, 124.Google Scholar Interestingly, there is a momentary intimation of this same idea in Marx who writes: ‘But does not freedom of the press exist in the land of censorship? … True, in the land of censorship the state has no freedom of the press, but one organ of the state has it, viz. the government…Does not the censor exercise daily an unconditional freedom of the press, if not directly, then indirectly?'; ‘Debates on Freedom of the Press (1842)’, Karl Marx/Frederick Engles Collected Works, Vol. 1 (London: 1975), 155.I am grateful to G. A. Cohen for drawing this passage to my attention and, more generally, for an extended series of searching criticisms which compelled the systematization of the arguments advanced in this paper.