Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

MattXIV — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:00:28 -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.

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Jason Ruspini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:38:21 -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.

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Pablo Stafforini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:24:35 -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."

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Austen — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:50:22 -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?

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Nicholas Weininger — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:43:19 -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.

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

Javier — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:34:06 -0000

I've spent some time thinking about this too. If coercion is to have some special normative salience, I think it will probably have something to do with the Kantian injunction never to treat persons as mere means but rather as ends in themselves. Typically, coercion will treat a person as mere means unless it is somehow justified to the person who is being coerced. But this doesn't necessarily single out coercion as special: manipulation and perhaps certain kinds of exploitation are also problematic in this regard.

At first glance at least, all of these are intentional forms of disrespect for persons as ends in themselves. The same kind of wrong is not involved when we don't work to provide someone with a larger range of choice than she would have had otherwise.

For a treatment of this issue from the Kantian perspective, I would recommend Korsgaard's "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing With Evil" and Robert Taylor's "A Kantian Defense of Self-Ownership."

Re: On Positive Freedom: Is Society Metaphysical or Man Made?

William Newman — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:30:27 -0000

And the twentieth century history of ideas is full of cases where someone showed you just can't find a solution satisfying a reasonable-sounding set of constraints. Close to the article, there's Arrow's theorem; further away, Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and the halting problem and quantum indeterminacy are high peaks in a complicated landscape that stretches quite a long way in all directions.

If one cares about reality, then it's worth carefully distinguishing whether "the fact that Joe’s does not serve oysters on the half shell is not an issue of freedom" is one aspect of a rule the writer has in mind, or instead a constraint on what not-yet-specified rule the writer would be willing to accept.

Arguing for or against individual constraints can be well and good, but as Arrow's theorem illustrates, it is quite possible to specify so many reasonable-sounding constraints that in fact no rule can satisfy the constraints, and even for the narrow technical problem of voting systems, people's informal intuitions about how many constraints can be satisfied may not be very reliable. If an author embraces enough constraints that it's not clear that they are mutually satisfiable, arguments about morality can be a form of intellectual pornography where extreme excitement might come with a drawback of conditioning the reader to unrealistic expectations.