Comments on: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

By: Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle » Blog Archive » Positively Heretical?

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle » Blog Archive » Positively Heretical? — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:19:05 +0000

[...] point, though I’m not certain I understand it. An individual’s feasible set of options can be bigger or smaller. There is an obvious, conventional sense of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in [...]

By: MattXIV

MattXIV — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:00:28 +0000

I think the problem is that negative liberty isn’t just about choice. For example, if someone were to punch me in the face unprovoked in such a manner that it was momentarily painful but had no lasting consequences, he didn’t limit my choices in any way. Negative liberty specifies protection against a harm, not a restriction of choice. An action that causes harm may restrict choice too – breaking someone’s arm does them both harm and restricts their choices. In Kelly’s example of the 5 minute mile and the weights, the weight policy reduces both possitive and negative liberty. Positive, because the subject can no longer run a five minute mile, negative, because it is implied that somebody would harm the subject in a sufficiently grevious way to deter them from running unencumbered if not obeyed.

By: MattXIV

MattXIV — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:00:00 +0000

By: Jason Ruspini

Jason Ruspini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:38:21 +0000

Aside from Objectivists, no-one uses the word “metaphysical” to mean “natural”. Any intelligent, well-read person can see that Rand used this word mainly as an empty signal that she was attempting a philosophical thought. Another example is her misuse of “existential” in place of the more simple and correct “existing”. In both cases it is simply bad, amateurish writing.. and take it from someone who knows.

By: Jason Ruspini

Jason Ruspini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:38:00 +0000

By: Pablo Stafforini

Pablo Stafforini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:24:35 +0000

Ah, liberty. As Bentham put it:

“Liberty therefore not being more fit than other words in some of the instances in which it has been used, and not so fit in others, the less the use that is made of it the better. I would no more use the word liberty in my conversation when I could get another that would answer the purpose, than I would brandy in my diet, if my physician did not order me: both cloud the understanding and inflame the passions.”

By: Pablo Stafforini

Pablo Stafforini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:24:00 +0000

Ah, liberty. As Bentham put it:

By: Austen

Austen — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:50:22 +0000

I think we’d all do well to let go this idea – long pedigree though it has in western thought – which seems implicit in Kelley’s discussion as well as yours, that nature and human action are somehow opposed, that nature is something it makes sense to talk about being “liberated from”. Planetary systems are more tractable than judicial systems because they’re less mind-dependent, less response-dependent, and therefore less dynamic and complex from our vantage point as partial determiners of judicial systems. But neither system is less natural than the other. A social constraint is a species of natural constraint. We’re embodied minds: to be socially constrained is to be physically constrained. What we need here – in lieu of this wooly man vs. nature talk – are distinctions between various levels and types of control we enjoy over different natural systems, plus distinctions between what’s it like to participate in and/or observe different types of systems. Not sure how this bears on the questions about coercion, but it probably bears.

If you’re saying, “perhaps it is better to see people as fully part of nature,” you’ve got to be off-base, or at best, not approaching the issue in the clearest way. ~Perhaps~? Should we be entertaining the possibility that people aren’t fully natural?

By: Austen

Austen — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:50:00 +0000

By: Nicholas Weininger

Nicholas Weininger — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:43:19 +0000

What if we view things not in terms of freedom but in terms of justice? Then it seems to me it’s easy to see the special normative salience of coercion, and as Javier suggests, it’s rooted in the axiom that justice requires we treat persons as ends in themselves.

First of all, I take justice to mean the fulfillment of legitimate expectations; an injustice is done to you if and only if someone else has violated a legitimate expectation you had of them. So that incorporates the man-made/fact-of-reality distinction (we can’t legitimately expect anything from reality; its facts in and of themselves have no bearing on justice) but sharpens it to say: what can we legitimately expect of other people?

And here’s where the power of Kant is clear. We can’t legitimately expect of other people that they act in such a way as to provide us with the largest possible range of choice– because to do so would be to treat them as means to our ends! But we can expect that they not coerce us, i.e. that they not treat us as means to their ends either.