Negative Liberty's Ethical Core — Epoche C1
The question Berlin asked, and the answer he did not give Isaiah Berlin's negative liberty is the answer to one specific question, posed in his 1958 inaugural lecture at Oxford and printed in Four Essays on Liberty : what is the area within which a person is or should be left to act without interference by other persons? Its counterpart, positive liberty, answers a different question — who or what controls what I do or become — and the two are distinct because a society could give a wide answer to the first while giving an authoritarian answer to the second, or the reverse. This essay defends the claim of its earlier version, that negative liberty is not the ethically unburdened and neutral principle it is often taken to be. But it must begin by correcting the target, because the position being attacked is not Berlin's. Berlin held that liberty is one value among several, that the several conflict, and that no formula ranks them. He wrote that everything is what it is, and that liberty is liberty and not equality or fairness or justice — which is a demand that the concepts be kept apart, not a claim that liberty outranks them. He also wrote, in the same essay, that offering political rights or safeguards against the state to people who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed and diseased is to mock their condition. That is not the sentence of a man who thinks a formal sphere of non-interference is self-sufficient. The neutrality thesis belongs to later liberal doctrines of state neutrality among conceptions of the good, and to a certain libertarian formalism; attributing it to Berlin makes the essay's argument easier and less interesting than it should be. What follows shows the non-neutrality by a harder route: by demonstrating that the concept cannot even be applied to a case without a prior moral commitment. What negative liberty excludes, and the cost of the exclusion Berlin's definition contains a restriction that does all the work. Coercion, for him, means the deliberate interference of other human beings within an area in which I could otherwise act; mere inability is not unfreedom. I am not unfree because I cannot jump ten feet in the air. This restriction is what allows negative liberty to be a political concept rather than a synonym for power, and it is also where its neutrality dissolves. G. A. Cohen's argument is the decisive one, and it proceeds entirely within Berlin's own definition rather than against it. Consider a person who lacks the money for a loaf of bread. The usual line is that she suffers an inability, not an unfreedom: nobody is stopping her. But observe what happens if she takes the loaf. The shopkeeper physically prevents her; if he fails, a police officer removes her; if she resists, a court commits her. Every step is deliberate interference by other human beings within an area in which she could otherwise act — which is precisely Berlin's criterion, satisfied to the letter. Lack of money is not a lack of ability like the inability to jump; it is a lack of permission, and permission is enforced by people. The only way to deny that this is unfreedom is to say that the interference is legitimate, because the loaf is the shopkeeper's. That reply is correct and it is fatal to the neutrality thesis, because it means that the extent of a person's negative liberty cannot be computed from the facts of who is stopped from doing what. It can be computed only after a theory of legitimate holdings has been supplied, and a theory of legitimate holdings is a substantive moral doctrine. Two societies with identical patterns of physical interference will be described as having different distributions of negative liberty depending on which property regime is presupposed. This is a stronger result than the original version of this essay claimed. Its claim was that negative liberty rests on an unstated commitment to individual dignity; the demonstrable claim is that its very extension is indeterminate until a theory of rights fixes it. One concept with three variables Gerald MacCallum gave the formal statement of why this is not an accident. He argued that there are not two concepts of liberty but one, and that every claim about freedom has a triadic form: some agent $x$ is free from some constraint $y$ to do or become some thing $z$. Berlin's negative liberty is what you get by taking $x$ to be the individual as she actually is, $y$ to be deliberate human interference, and leaving $z$ open. Positive liberty is what you get by taking $x$ to be the rational or authentic self, $y$ to include ignorance, addiction or poverty, and specifying $z$ as self-mastery. Neither is a different concept; they are different fillings of the same three slots. The consequence is exactly the one the essay wanted. Each filling is a normative choice, and none of them can be read off the world. Whether a compulsion counts as a constraint depends on a view about which parts of a person are the person; whether an economic barrier counts depends, as Cohen showed, on a view about property. A theory that fixes the variables one way and then presents itself as merely formal has hidden its commitments in its notation. Berlin's actual ethical ground Since the essay set out to locate an ethical core in Berlin, it is worth identifying the right one, because the two candidates the original proposed do not fit. The first was individual dignity and inviolability. Berlin does invoke a frontier beyond which authority may not go, and he speaks of the area of personal relations as something not to be violated; but he does not derive liberty from a doctrine of the person, and he was consistently sceptical of such derivations. The second candidate was a latent teleology: that protecting non-interference is oriented towards human flourishing. This one should be withdrawn, because it attributes to Berlin the move he devoted the lecture to attacking — the grounding of political arrangements in a single overarching good, which