Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty, and Government

[Spartacus]

Prompted by a discussion in the Right to Die thread. Carrikature thought it might be worth its own thread, so I guess I'll make it.
For context, the relevant part of my post in which I brought it up:

You've been arguing for what modern political philosophy calls negative liberty. It's an understanding of liberty I've seen invoked-- with great enthusiasm-- not only by libertarians, but by mainstream conservatives and a number of right-leaning posters here. This concept is, as you say, the government-protected right to do whatever you wish as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. And if we want to structure government such that its only or primary task is to protect negative liberty, we have no reason not to do as you say and set laws in place to enable physician-assisted suicide.

I've been arguing against negative liberty as the central principle of government, which is part of why I was surprised that more people didn't find some of my earlier posts more subversive.

And some working definitions of each term:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/li...tive-negative/

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense.

Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes.

While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

I first heard the terms invoked in the context of the Obamacare debate. Some opponents of Obamacare argued that (I know I'm oversimplifying, but if I'm distorting the argument, I'm sure someone will correct me) there could be no right to healthcare, since the government can or should only protect negative rights/liberties. (a quick google search gave me this essay, which is probably pretty close to how the argument was usually put forward).

In the Right to Die thread, Sea of Red was arguing for a right to die, apparently understanding the right as a freedom from government interference in terminally ill patients finding someone to end their life more quickly and painlessly than their disease would.

The question for discussion, assuming everyone agrees that the terms are properly defined, is whether government ought to be structured around defending only negative rights.

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[Sea of red]

It's an interesting question and one I'll have to consider more carefully.

From my point of view, government is here to give us a platform to be as free as we want, not to force us to conform to a particular variety of what people may define as freedom. If people want to join a cult that's their business, if people want to join an organized religion that's their business, if people want to go vegan that's their business, etc. But government should always remain neutral and not give particular ideologies special treatment.

As long as my choices don't infringe on anothers freedom, it's nobodies business what I'm doing.

[Teallaura]

While I accept the idea that government often does best when it does the least, I don't find this a compelling argument at all. For one thing, it seems to over-simplify the function of government. For the second, it looks at first glance to be window dressing anarchy.


But let me think about it and I'll get back to you.

[Cow Poke]

[Jaecp]

@OP

Is there a positive liberty that cannot be rephrased as a negative liberty or vice versa, I wonder? One of my mentors referred to this as "Freedom From" and "Freedom To" respectively, and he showed me how the R's and D's are often talking past each other when they speak of freedom because of this divide, but I'm not sure the conceptual framework interacts strongly with our stated political positions. My example in that other thread re-framing SL's abortion position in the language of small government conservatives was intended to be cheeky, but still... I've had great success at the doors, canvassing for candidates, by simply explaining a liberal idea that I think will help people by using conservative concepts. It's surprisingly effective. Tell your brother ;)

It's an interesting question and one I'll have to consider more carefully.

From my point of view, government is here to give us a platform to be as free as we want, not to force us to conform to a particular variety of what people may define as freedom. If people want to join a cult that's their business, if people want to join an organized religion that's their business, if people want to go vegan that's their business, etc. But government should always remain neutral and not give particular ideologies special treatment.

As long as my choices don't infringe on anothers freedom, it's nobodies business what I'm doing.

If someone want to only let one ethnicity use their gas station? The balance between these two types of freedom ultimately rests in personal agency and is best analyzed through a mostly utilitarian mindset when two freedoms are at odds with each other. Who suffers more when a business cannot refuse a customer over some incidental factor like race, religion or sexual orientation?

[Spartacus]

Is there a positive liberty that cannot be rephrased as a negative liberty or vice versa, I wonder? One of my mentors referred to this as "Freedom From" and "Freedom To" respectively, and he showed me how the R's and D's are often talking past each other when they speak of freedom because of this divide, but I'm not sure the conceptual framework interacts strongly with our stated political positions. My example in that other thread re-framing SL's abortion position in the language of small government conservatives was intended to be cheeky, but still... I've had great success at the doors, canvassing for candidates, by simply explaining a liberal idea that I think will help people by using conservative concepts. It's surprisingly effective.

I don't think you'll have much success rephrasing a right to healthcare as a freedom from disease.

I also don't think either R's or D's think very seriously about negative liberty arguments: they invoke them when it suits them to do so ("get the government out of my bedroom" is a negative liberty argument from the Left, arguments for more robust public education and public healthcare systems are positive liberty arguments), but no one has really built up a complete policy platform around negative liberty-- except perhaps libertarians.

[Carrikature]

I'm going to be pulling heavily from this work by Stephen Puryear summarizing Schopenhauer. Though it's intended to discuss animal rights, the method of approach involves establishing rights and claims before getting into how that applies to animals.

We'll start by establishing a concept of harm:

Source: ibid

A more helpful line of thought developed by Schopenhauer rests on the idea that to wrong someone is fundamentally to encroach on the territory of that individual’s will...We may therefore say that on his view, A thwarts the will of B, and thus wrongs B, not only when A harms or manipulates B’s mind or body, but also when A takes or damages B’s property or in some way diminishes B’s honor...What Schopenhauer appears to be getting at in these remarks is that impeding the will of another wrongs that individual just in case it is motivated by something like a desire to elevate one’s own aims or interests above those of the other, to affirm one’s own will over that of the other.

© Copyright Original Source

Which we turn into the concept of 'right' or liberty:

Source: ibid

This in turn leads to the idea of a right as the ability to do something, or to take or use something, without wronging anyone. Thus, a person can be said to have a right to breathe air, to be on public lands, to admire the starlit sky, and so forth, because none of these actions would wrong anyone...his basic sense of a right corresponds to what Hohfeld (1919) calls a privilege and others more appropriately call a liberty.

© Copyright Original Source

Then we'll add two more pieces, negative claims:

Source: ibid

To have a right in this sense is just to be capable of being wronged, as when we say, for instance, that a person has a right to humane treatment, because to treat her otherwise would be to wrong her. These rights correspond roughly to what, following Hohfeld, we now call claims. More precisely, they are negative claims, since they concern not the provision but the withholding of something, namely, the interference of another.

© Copyright Original Source

and positive claims:

Source: ibid

...positive claims are those which arise because one or more moral agents enter into an agreement with the right-holder...This right is a claim because it expresses what A cannot do, or rather cannot fail to do, without wronging B. But since it is a right to the provision of something positive (i.e., the good or service) rather than to the absence of something positive (i.e., interference), the right is positive. B’s right is therefore a positive claim.

© Copyright Original Source

I'm not in full agreement with the entire work, but I think these concepts are very solid. You're left with liberty (do anything that harms no one else), negative claims (actions that, if not performed, harm others), and positive claims (not doing what you said you would do harms others). I think the main focus of government should be to protect liberty and codify claims. I think the US government holds to this fairly well already.

Under this conception, the positive vs negative liberty dichotomy is nearly incoherent. A 'right to healthcare' wouldn't stem from liberty at all, but from your approach to negative claims. "Failing to render aid" or "duty to rescue" are already codified, but it's hard to see how healthcare wouldn't also apply. In fact, dialysis clinics can have an extremely arduous process to reject patients specifically because of the life-threatening nature of the services they provide. A 'right to die', though, would preserve suicide (assisted or otherwise) under liberty. The assistant is not causing harm as long as their will is not being imposed over the will of the one choosing to die (i.e., you can't coerce someone into suicide).

I did say the dichotomy was nearly incoherent. I think it works better in a discussion of what qualifies as a negative claim. Do I have to provide you education? Or internet access? Cell phones? Does "I don't want to pay for it" qualify as a reasonable objection? Whose will, if anyone's, is taking priority when it comes down to you paying for another to have a service?

[Carrikature]

If someone want to only let one ethnicity use their gas station? The balance between these two types of freedom ultimately rests in personal agency and is best analyzed through a mostly utilitarian mindset when two freedoms are at odds with each other. Who suffers more when a business cannot refuse a customer over some incidental factor like race, religion or sexual orientation?

My wife and I were discussing this recently. It's an open question how much harm, if any, is produced by refusing service to an individual. I come down on the side of 'none' provided alternate providers are available, but it depends on the service. If you're the only mechanic in town, you get to suck it up and serve everyone. Are there a dozen bakers? Do what you want. Hospitals and emergency care services don't get that luxury period. Dialysis and hospice is the same way. A general practitioner could conceivably limit patients, but again that would depend on availability.

In reality, I don't think those who provide services discriminately are going to last that long anyway. Besides that, it's far easier to codify "equal to all or not at all" (with a few exceptions) than to make an attempt at categorization.

[Jaecp]

I don't think you'll have much success rephrasing a right to healthcare as a freedom from disease.

Not in that case, --and I meant that more as a rhetorical exercise than to claim that it would be effective-- but I've had success using the language of fiscal responsibility while talking about infrastructure spending, among other things, by talking about reduced repair costs and increased revenue from doing so. Heck, I even got my Libertarian Evangelical friend to consider supporting Washington's same sex marriage vote because it would increase revenue without raising taxes. None of my work has been for federal level positions so I've never really had to do much more than remind the voter that the city council position, or whatever, has nothing to do with the ACA. That's actually a pretty common issue I've found is that people so very often do not have the slightest idea about the difference between federal and state legislators. It's fuzzy, but it's been useful, and I'm ok with that from a practical standpoint even if I can't always use the same tool.

I also don't think either R's or D's think very seriously about negative liberty arguments: they invoke them when it suits them to do so ("get the government out of my bedroom" is a negative liberty argument from the Left, arguments for more robust public education and public healthcare systems are positive liberty arguments), but no one has really built up a complete policy platform around negative liberty-- except perhaps libertarians.

As a group, no. I suppose the strongest claim I would test is that underlying factors in the groups have it so that there is this split where one finds more of one than the other on the respective sides. Republican politics, overall, has been about other people not interfering in what you want to do while Democratic politics has largely been about people being able to do things they previously couldn't. Although if we start talking about anything pre 1950 I think we should switch to Conservative and Liberal instead of R and D.

As to your specific example of negative from the left, I wonder about its origin. Which talking points came first?

[Jaecp]

My wife and I were discussing this recently. It's an open question how much harm, if any, is produced by refusing service to an individual. I come down on the side of 'none' provided alternate providers are available, but it depends on the service. If you're the only mechanic in town, you get to suck it up and serve everyone. Are there a dozen bakers? Do what you want. Hospitals and emergency care services don't get that luxury period. Dialysis and hospice is the same way. A general practitioner could conceivably limit patients, but again that would depend on availability.

In reality, I don't think those who provide services discriminately are going to last that long anyway. Besides that, it's far easier to codify "equal to all or not at all" (with a few exceptions) than to make an attempt at categorization.

Then we are on the exact same page then ;)

[Starlight]

It's an open question how much harm, if any, is produced by refusing service to an individual. I come down on the side of 'none' provided alternate providers are available, but it depends on the service.

You're thinking about the wrong kind of harm. The customer having to go to the next bakery, flower shop, whatnot costs them 5 minutes and that harm is negligible. The harm that's relevant in such cases is the cumulative toll it takes on their psychology as they come to see themselves as a second-class citizen as widespread social discrimination against them is ground into them via people refusing to serve them. Refusing to serve blacks was a way of keeping blacks down, of rubbing them noses in the dirt of their own alleged inferiority. With gay people it has had the same function, and the person after hearing people demean them and experiencing discrimination can come to say to themselves "maybe I am an awful person like they say", "maybe I don't deserve service like a normal human being", "maybe I am a second-class citizen", "maybe I don't deserve to live", "maybe I should just go kill myself like they tell me to". People shrug off or laugh at a couple of instances of social discrimination, but overall people are sensitive to what their society thinks of them (only psychopaths are not), and if you expose minority groups to too much discrimination it has tragic consequences. That's the motivation for laws that force businesses to serve everyone without prejudice, and that's the motivation for hate-speech laws - to protect the lives and psychological well-being of minority groups that society is inclined to express prejudice toward.

[Starlight]

I've never seen liberty/freedom as a particularly useful lens to try and view politics through. For one thing there are so many competing freedoms that any analysis of any interesting case is almost instantly flooded with competing claims to freedom from different sources.

But more importantly, freedom is only one aspect of well-being, and I think it was C.S. Lewis who rightly noted that many of the worst political ideas in history have come as a result of seizing on one particular good thing and raising it to the status of the ultimate "good" and sacrificing all other "good"s on its altar. We need to realize that if we develop any framework that analyses freedom and only freedom and evaluates everything in the light of freedom, then there will be situations where every single other hypothetical good is sacrificed for the sake of freedom. We would be saying that any amount of loss of other kinds of well-being, any amount of pain, any amount of suffering, would be fine, so long as there were more freedom. This is why libertarianism is evil, because it uses freedom as the sole lens through which to try and build a political philosophy and as a result that philosophy leads to a great deal of suffering for a great many people because the philosophy doesn't take an interest in that suffering or bother to measure it because it is solely concerned with freedom alone (and it doesn't even succeed at maximizing freedom anyway, because it ignores the fact that real world needs - e.g. for food, shelter, clothing, healthcare - can leave people with "no choice" but to try and satisfy those needs).

So, by all means, I agree with should think about freedom as a real and valid aspect of well-being, and think about whose freedoms are affected and how in any given situation, but privileging it above all else is dangerous. Generally I think trying to distinguish between "positive" and "negative" freedom is splitting pointless hairs over definitions, but by all means carry on. I don't think the OP definition of the two are very clear though.

[Joel]

Another convenient way to refer to positive liberty (the "possibility of acting") is that it means possessing means.

One argument against enforcing positive liberty is that universal positive rights don't exist. Supposing they did leads one into contradictions. E.g. if everyone has the right to be provided with a car, that implies that someone not receiving a car is having their rights (positive liberty) violated. By whom? If everyone is to be a recipient, then there's no one left to be the giver. What is meant in practice is that some people will be provided with positive liberty at the expense of other people's positive (and negative) liberty.

Also note that we can't just say "Let's have both!" (positive and negative liberty enforced). They are in conflict with each other. To enforce a provision of positive liberty for some person(s) implies acting against the negative (as well as positive) liberty of someone else. In every case, you must choose one over the other.

[Joel]

But more importantly, freedom is only one aspect of well-being, and I think it was C.S. Lewis who rightly noted that many of the worst political ideas in history have come as a result of seizing on one particular good thing and raising it to the status of the ultimate "good" and sacrificing all other "good"s on its altar. We need to realize that if we develop any framework that analyses freedom and only freedom and evaluates everything in the light of freedom, then there will be situations where every single other hypothetical good is sacrificed for the sake of freedom. We would be saying that any amount of loss of other kinds of well-being, any amount of pain, any amount of suffering, would be fine, so long as there were more freedom. This is why libertarianism is evil, because it uses freedom as the sole lens through which to try and build a political philosophy and as a result that philosophy leads to a great deal of suffering for a great many people because the philosophy doesn't take an interest in that suffering or bother to measure it because it is solely concerned with freedom alone (and it doesn't even succeed at maximizing freedom anyway, because it ignores the fact that real world needs - e.g. for food, shelter, clothing, healthcare - can leave people with "no choice" but to try and satisfy those needs).

This is a misunderstanding of libertarianism. It's not about valuing freedom more than anything else. It's about asking how/when can the use of force against a fellow human being be justified. There are more things to life than that question, of course. So your answers don't indicate what you think are the highest values in human life. They only indicate your values regarding this particular question.

And it's no use complaining that one's political philosophy is focused entirely on this question, because this is the question of political philosophy. If we aren't going to use any force against any fellow human being, then there is no state. The state consists of the use of force against fellow human beings. So the question of what makes a good state is the question of what uses of force are or can be good.

[Starlight]

It's about asking how/when can the use of force against a fellow human being be justified.

It strikes me as a particularly unhelpful question to be asking. "Force" is a pretty vague idea, and the situations in which some sort of force might be justifiable are so many and so varied that it doesn't seem a helpful category to use, and finally there seems to be very little motivation for wanting to ask that particular question.

If we aren't going to use any force against any fellow human being, then there is no state.

I conceive of a democratic state as a voluntary association of individuals who agree that it makes sense for both efficiency and the well-being and happiness of all to centralize some planning and decisions regarding infrastructure and care of the needy, and where everyone jointly has a say about how things are done. Your conception of a state as inherently based on force does not resonate with me, and I think is stemming from the inherent vagueness in the unhelpful word "force".