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Slaves, Prisoners, and Republican Freedom

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Abstract

Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom is presented as an alternative both to negative and positive conceptions of freedom. The basic idea is to conceptualize freedom as non-domination, not as non-interference or self-mastery. When compared to negative freedom, Pettit’s republican conception comprises two controversial claims: the claim that we are unfree if we are dominated without actual interference, and the claim that we are free if we face interference without domination. Because the slave is a widely accepted paradigm of the unfree person, the case of a slave with a non-interfering master is often cited as providing a good argument for the first republican claim and against a negative conception of freedom. One aim of this article is to raise doubts about whether this is true. The other aim of the article is to show that the prisoner—also a paradigm of the unfree person—presents a good argument against the second republican claim and in favour of a negative conception of freedom. This is called the ‘prisoner-argument’. It will be argued that neither Pettit’s distinction between free persons and free choices nor his distinction between compromising and conditioning factors of freedom can help to rebut the charge of the prisoner-argument.

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Notes

  1. I use ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ interchangeably.

  2. Cf., e.g., Hayek (1960, chap. 1), Benn and Weinstein (1971, p. 197), Connolly (1983, p. 161), Day (1987a), Miller (1983, pp. 68–69).

  3. Cf., e.g., Green (1991), Crocker (1980), Raz (1986), Van Parijs (1995). Van Parijs prefers the notion ‘real freedom’.

  4. Some might think that this conceptualization of positive liberty just is the republican conception, drawing upon thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example. But Pettit emphasizes that the republican tradition ‘with which we identify is not the sort of tradition—ultimately, the populist tradition—that hails the democratic participation of the people as one of the highest forms of the good’ (Pettit 1997, p. 8).

  5. I should remark that I will not be concerned with Pettit’s non-political conception of freedom as ‘discursive control’. In A Theory of Freedom, Pettit first argues for freedom as ‘discursive control’. However, says Pettit (2001, pp. 126–127), because it abstracts from opportunities in the environment and focuses on intrapersonal factors, liberty as discursive control is not an adequate political conception of liberty. His political conception is the republican conception: freedom as non-domination.

  6. A paradigm is not necessarily the most extreme case of something. I take a paradigm to be a prototype, a well-known and clear example. So we need not cite extreme cases such as that of a person locked in a mummy-case (cf. Steiner 2006, p. 135) as a paradigms of unfreedom.

  7. In fact, Pettit (1993) himself simply speaks of ‘resilient negative liberty’ in an earlier publication.

  8. Cf. The descriptions of slavery as denial of self-ownership in Steiner (1994, p. 231) and Cohen (1995a, p. 68). Cohen (1995b, p. 233) emphasizes that A’s not being a self-owner is a necessary but not sufficient condition for A’s being a slave: in addition, there has to be another person having the relevant ownership-rights over A. I think this is true and consistent with what I say about self-ownership and slavery. For an account of slavery that emphasizes the slave’s treatment as inferior, see Roberts-Thomson (2008).

  9. To anticipate, there is also an empirical (not conceptual) link between slavery and descriptive liberty.

  10. Carter (2008, pp. 64–65) is sceptical that this is true.

  11. When we see the promotion of liberty as non-domination as the goal of the state, this of course leads to claims about what the state should do and about which (legal) normative liberties should be left to the citizens. But this does not mean that the conception of liberty itself is normative.

  12. List (2006, p. 211) suggests that republican liberty has a built-in rule-of-law requirement.

  13. This reply was suggested by an anonymous reviewer for Res Publica.

  14. Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for Res Publica for helping me to clarify this point.

  15. I should mention one difference between first-order normative liberties and second-order normative liberties (cf. also Hart 1982, p. 169): second-order liberties are always protected by immunities, second-order claim-rights. For example, I do not have a power to waive my first-order claim-rights as long as others are also said to have a power to waive my first-order claim-rights.

  16. Interestingly, William Paley is close to being on Pettit’s side, distinguishing ‘civil’ and ‘personal’ liberty: ‘A citizen of the freest republic in the world may be imprisoned for his crimes; and though his personal freedom be restrained by bolts and fetters, so long as his confinement is the effect of a beneficial public law, his civil liberty is not invaded’ (Paley 1978, p. 443).

  17. I mean prisoners who really are in prison, not prisoners who are allowed to leave their prison for most of the time: I mean prisoners who face serious interference with most things they would like to do.

  18. In Pettit (2003), he identifies ‘option freedom’ and ‘agency freedom’ as two different phenomena, which both deserve to be described as forms of freedom. Option freedom, for Pettit, is impaired not only by any human interference, but also by natural obstacles. Still, he insists that agency freedom is of primary concern for political philosophy. But these are the (rather rare) moments where Pettit comes close to explicitly admitting that republican liberty alone cannot do.

  19. I do not want to exclude the possibility of reconstructing something like an ‘overall negative freedom’ which might be relevant for calling somebody a ‘free person’ or ‘free simpliciter’. But this conception of a free person would then be parasitic on the conception of free action (cf. Kristjánsson 1998, pp. 263–267). On the idea of an ‘overall liberty’ cf. Carter (1999). For an interesting argument for the epistemic priority of negative liberty see de Bruin (2009).

  20. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for Res Publica for pressing me to clarify how endorsing trivalence and distinguishing compromising and conditioning factors relate to each other.

  21. Kramer (2002, p. 44, p. 47; 2003, p. 3) explicitly holds a trivalent conception which results from combining a negative conception of unfreedom with a positive conception of freedom. Freedom is a synonym for ability, but unfreedom and inability are distinct because only human interference renders people unfree. I think that J.P. Day also endorses a trivalent conception when he says that freedom and unfreedom ‘presuppose power’ (Day 1987c, p. 123): I cannot be free or unfree to do things that I cannot do anyway (like jumping ten feet off the ground). Cf. Wendt (2009, pp. 28–31).

  22. To reiterate my argument, only if non-dominating interference made domination or non-domination impossible would we have an analogy to the role of natural obstacles as conditioning factors for negative liberty.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier (and shorter) version of this paper was presented at the congress of the Société de Philosophie Analytique in Geneva (2–5 September 2009). I am very grateful to Philip Pettit—who was among the attendees of my talk in Geneva—for giving me important hints on where and how to improve and extend my paper. I would also like to thank the other participants in Geneva for their comments. I am thankful to my colleagues in Hamburg, especially Thomas Schramme, Michael Oliva Córdoba, and Benjamin Buchthal, for discussing later versions of the paper with me. Finally, two anonymous reviewers for Res Publica provided me with extremely helpful comments.

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Wendt, F. Slaves, Prisoners, and Republican Freedom. Res Publica 17, 175–192 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9151-5

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