Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 211–29.
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First published in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–93.
The divisions in the summary are mine.
There clearly are two kinds of theories, “two families of conceptions”, of liberty: negative and positive, following Berlin. Both families contain a gamut of views within and this must be kept in mind as we tend to get fixated on the most extreme, and almost caricatural variants.
I propose to examine no more than two of these senses [of freedom]. ... The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which ... I shall call the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the ‘positive’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Liberty: Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy. [Originally a lecture delivered in 1952]
When positive theories of liberty are attacked, the target is usually some Left totalitarian theory according to which freedom resides exclusively in exercising collective control over one’s destiny in a classless society and in which men are, to use Rousseau’s words, forced to be free.
So that the social pact not be a pointless device, it tacitly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others — that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 7.
And when negative theories are attacked, it is the tough-minded version which sees freedom simply as the absence of external physical [à la Hobbes] or legal [à la Bentham] obstacles.
Both of these targets are caricatures and fail to appreciate the variety and nuance that the two families of conceptions have.
However, there is something strange that happens is such polemic. The forced-to-be-free caricature of positive freedom is what the opponents pin on positive theorists. But the absence-of-external-obstacles caricature is what negative theorists themselves embrace and espouse. Why?
Exercise- and Opportunity-Concept
The doctrines of positive freedom are exercise-concepts. That’s to say, they are concerned with a view of freedom which involves essentially the exercising of control over one’s life where one is free only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life.
The doctrines of negative freedom are, on the other hand, opportunity-concepts. That’s to say, for them, being free is a matter of what we can do, of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise these options.
However, one of the most powerful motives behind the modern defence of freedom as individual independence is the idea that each person’s form of self-realization is original to him/her, and can therefore only be worked out independently. In this view, we can fail to achieve our own self-realization through inner fears, or false consciousness, as well as because of external obstacles. This goes beyond Hobbes and Bentham. It is what drives Mill’s defense of freedom.
Given this further nuance of negative liberty, it is impossible to hold that negative freedom is only an opportunity-concept. Here, some degree of exercise is necessary for a man to he thought free. Because being in a position to exercise freedom, having the opportunity, involves removing the internal barriers, which is not possible without having to some extent realized myself. A pure opportunity-concept is impossible.
This might suggest an answer to the paradox mentioned above. Negative theorists stick to crude [Hobbesian of Benthamite] versions of the doctrine because only then can they disable the troubling of positive liberty — the fact that it is an exercise-concept. If they embrace more nuanced versions of negative liberty, for instance, like Mill’s which need some extent of exercise to be called freedom, then they are ceding the ground to positive liberty from which it might grow, they fear, to monstrous and totalitarian proportions.
The advantage of sticking to the crude version is that it seems very simple and goes well with common sense: the basic intuition being that freedom is a matter of being able to do something or other, of not having obstacles in one’s way, rather than being a capacity that we have to realize.
“It naturally seems more prudent to fight the Totalitarian Menace at this last-ditch position, digging in behind the natural frontier of this simple issue, rather than engaging the enemy on the open terrain of exercise-concepts, where one will have to fight to discriminate the good from the bad among such concepts; fight, for instance, for a view of individual self-realization against various notions of collective self-realization, of a nation, or a class. It seems easier and safer to cut all the nonsense off at the start by declaring all self-realization views to be metaphysical hog-wash. Freedom should just be tough-mindedly defined as the absence of external obstacles.”
This position, which abandon the exercise aspect of freedom, fails to defend liberalism in the form we value it. Further, this Maginot Line mentality actually ensures defeat [“as is often the case with Maginot Line mentalities!”]
Discrimination of Motivations
One advantage of this position is it’s simplicity: it allows us to say that freedom is being able to do what you want; and what you want is, well, whatever the hell you want. In contrast, if one adopt’s an exercise concept, the entire burden shifts to the kinds of things what we want and with this comes the trouble of identifying which things we might legitimately/authentically/really want and which we might want only illegitimately/inauthentically/superficially. Being able to do what one wants can no longer be accepted as a sufficient condition of being free. Instead, freedom becomes being able to do not just anything but the kinds of things you really want, that accord your real will, that fulfill the desires of your own true/higher self.
Put differently, the point is that “the subject himself cannot be the final authority on the question whether he is free; for he cannot be the final authority on the question whether his desires are authentic, whether they do or do not frustrate his purposes.”
This might make more obvious and pressing the temptation to adopt the Maginot Line mentality. “For once we admit that the agent himself is not the final authority on his own freedom, do we not open the way to totalitarian manipulation? Do we not legitimate others, supposedly wiser about his purposes than himself, redirecting his feet on the right path, perhaps even by force, and all this in the name of freedom?”
No, we don”t. There may also be good reasons for holding that others are not likely to be in a better position to understand his real purposes. Those who know us intimately, and who surpass us in wisdom, are undoubtedly in a position to advise us, but no official body can possess a doctrine or a technique whereby they could know how to put us on the rails. Indeed, this is what liberalism values. Liberalism in the form that we value it considers self-realization highly. It also accepts that self-realisation can fail for internal reasons, but nonetheless believes that no valid guidance can be provided in principle by social authority. The crude version of freedom would not be able to defend this liberalism.
Still, it remains true that totalitarian theories build upon discrimination between motivations. The path from negative to positive liberty consists of two steps: the first moves us from a conception that talks of doing what we want to one that talks of doing what we really want, and the second introduces a doctrine that specifies a certain form of society in which we can do what we really want and outside of which we cannot.
The temptation is to stay put at the first step; to say that no discrimination of motivations based on some doctrine that identifies the real or true self/motivations is possible or desirable. But staying put in this first step cannot amount to in intelligible defence of an intelligible notion of freedom.
Firstly, even if one claims that freedom is the absence of external obstacles, it is not the absence of external obstacles simpliciter. That’s to say that not all external obstacles can be considered as equal obstacles. Or put differently, some obstacles are more serious and significant. Liberty is not concerned with trifles [De aninimis non curat libertas].
“Freedom is no longer just the absence of external obstacle tout court, but the absence of external obstacle to significant action, to what is important to man. There are discriminations to be made; some restrictions are more serious than others, some are utterly trivial.”
Surely, we cannot say that Tirana [the capital city of Albania] is freer than London based on the fact that there are fewer traffic lights per head in Tirana than in London. Of course this means that there are fewer external obstacles in Tirana than in London. But religion is abolished in Albania while it is freely practiced in London. [Context: Public religious practice was outlawed in Albania in 1967 under communism. The ban was officially lifted in 1990. Taylor wrote this essay for the volume The Idea of Liberty: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, published 1979.] We cannot say that because we can discriminate between what is trivial (in this case, the freedom to travel public roads whenever and however we like) and what is significant (the freedom to practice religion).
The point is that the application of even the crudest conception of negative liberty “requires a background conception of what is significant, according to which some restrictions are seen to he without relevance for freedom altogether, and others are judged as being of greater and lesser importance.”
Strong Evaluations/Import-Attributions
Of course, the negative theorist can simply add the stipulation that judgments of significance have to be made and still hold on to his central claim freedom just is the absence of external obstacles.
However, further troubles emerge when the following question is asked: on what are these judgments of significance based on? Certainly, the answer here cannot be quantitative: that the more significant purposes are those we want more.
What does wanting certain purposes more mean? If it means that those purposes are more significant, the claim is true but empty. If on the other hand it means that those purposes are more urgent or more desired, the claim is simply false because it is of the most banal experience that “the purposes we know to be more significant are not always those which we desire with the greatest urgency to encompass, nor the ones that actually always win out in cases of conflict of desires.”
Thinking of significance in this way gives rise to the fact that humans make strong evaluations; that human subjects are not only subjects of first-order desires, but of second-order desires, desires about desires. We experience some of our desires and goals as intrinsically more significant than others while some others as bad, not just comparatively but absolutely. We also desire not to be moved by spite, or some childish desire to impress at all costs. These judgments of significance are quite independent of the strength of the respective desires.
It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will. Human beings are not alone in having desires and motives, or in making choices. …[I]t seems to be peculiarly characteristic of humans, however, that they are able to form what I shall call “second-order desires”… Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are.
Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, 1971.
The point here that when a more significant desire (say, that of wanting to do well in studies) is thwarted by a less significant one (that of wanting to sleep/party), we might legitimately think that the latter is an obstacle and that we would be freer without it.
What has emerged here is that there are cases in which the obstacles to freedom are internal; and if this is so, then freedom cannot simply be interpreted as the absence of external obstacles. The fact that I am doing what I want, in the sense of following my strongest desire, is not sufficient to establish that I am free.
Clearly, the crude negative conception cannot be sustained. But can it be reconstructed such that it does not legitimate the kind of distinctions about true/real desires/motivations that positive liberty requires? “If our negative theory allows for strong evaluation, allows that some goals are really important to us, and that other desires are seen as not fully ours, then can it not retain the thesis that freedom is being able to do what I want, that is, what I can identify myself as wanting, where this means not just what I identify as my strongest desire, but what I identify as my true, authentic desire or purpose? The subject would still be the final arbiter of his being free/unfree.”
We should have sloughed off the untenable Hobbesian reductive-materialist metaphysics, according to which only external obstacles count, as though action were just movement, and there could be no internal, motivational obstacles to our deeper purposes. But we would be retaining the basic concern of the negative theory, that the subject is still the final authority as to what his freedom consists in, and cannot be second-guessed by external authority. Freedom would he modified to read: the absence of internal or external obstacle to what I truly or authentically want. But we would still be holding the Maginot Line. Or would we?
No, we can’t. For if we adopt this middle position between the crude negative conception and the positive conception, we rule out in principle that the subject can ever be wrong about what he truly wants for the simple reason that the subject is the final arbiter of his being free/unfree. “And how can he never, in principle, be wrong, unless there is nothing to be right or wrong about in this matter?”
This ultimately is the thesis that the negative theorist has to defend: that the subject is the final arbiter of his being free/unfree, and that insofar as he is the final arbiter, he can never in principle be wrong because if he could, he would not be the final arbiter.
For the crude negative theorist, our feelings are merely brute facts: they are simply facts about how we are affected in a certain way and there is nothing further that can be said about them as to whether they are potentially veridical or illusory, authentic or inauthentic. The difference in significance of certain actions/thoughts/feelings would simply be a matter of raw feel.
But there is no such thing as a raw feel. Sure there is the raw feel of pain when the dentist jabs into my tooth, or the raw feel of crawling unease when someone runs his fingernail along the blackboard. But there is no such raw feel of, for instance, shame or fear because these emotions involve our experiencing a situation as bearing a certain import/significance for us, i.e. as shameful and dangerous. Shame and fear can be inappropriate or irrational. We can, in other words, be in error in feeling shame or fear.
“When I am convinced that some career, or an expedition in the Andes, or a love relationship, is of fundamental importance to me (to recur to the above examples), it cannot be just because of the throbs, élans or tremors I feel; I must also have some sense that these are of great significance for me, meet important, long-lasting needs, represent a fulfilment of something central to me, will bring me closer to what I really am, or something of the sort.”
Thus, our emotional life is made up of what might be called import-attributing desires and feelings which might be mistaken. In cases where we want to repudiate them, for instance when I am afraid for no good reason, we certainly are mistaken in feeling fear.
Now consider the case in which there are two conflicting desires, that of wanting to do well in studies and the other of wanting to party all the time, one of which, the latter, hopefully, I repudiate and feel as thought it is not truly mine. What is it to feel that a desire is not truly mine?
To feel that a desire is not truly mine is precisely to think of it as mistaken, irrational, or inappropriate; that the import or the good it supposedly gives us a sense of is not a genuine import or good. The desire to party, party, and party is a fetter because the pleasure it gives is not genuine, does not last, is not healthy, and so on. Losing it, I lose nothing, because its loss deprives me of no genuine good or pleasure or satisfaction.
“It would appear from this that to see our desires as brute gives us no clue as to why some of them are repudiable. On the contrary it is precisely their not being brute” — their having some/a significance or the fact the we attribute importance to them — “which can explain this.”
If this is admitted, then the possibility of error, of false appreciation, is admitted as well. “How can we exclude in principle that there may be other false appreciations which the agent does not detect? That he may be profoundly in error, that is, have a very distorted sense of his fundamental purposes? Who can say that such people cannot exist?” Consider Charles Manson and Andreas Baader — two men with a very distorted sense of our fundamental purposes. Given such extreme cases, we cannot discount the possibility that the rest of mankind can suffer to a lesser degree from the same disabilities.
The point of all this for liberty is that man’s freedom can be hemmed in by internal, motivational obstacles, in addition to external ones. This is because attributions of freedom make sense against a background sense
of more and less significant purposes which, we have seen, can be frustrated by our own desires where these are sufficiently based on misappreciation such that we consider them as not really ours, and experience them as fetters.
“[I]n the meaningful sense of ‘free’, that for which we value it, in the sense of being able to act on one’s important purposes, the internally fettered man is not free.”
If one still wants to stick to the crude definition, one will also have to admit that the man with a highly distorted view of his fundamental purpose — a Manson or Baader — is as free as the person who does not have internal fetters. A Manson who has overcome his last remaining compunction against sending his minions to kill on caprice would, on the crude account, be freer than when he had those compunctions. Would the crude theorist sympathise with this kind of freedom? I think not.
“Once we see that we make distinctions of degree and significance in freedoms depending on the significance of the purpose fettered/enabled, how can we deny that it makes a difference to the degree of freedom not only whether one of my basic purposes is frustrated by my own desires but also whether I have grievously misidentified this purpose? …[We cannot. And this being so,] the crude negative view of freedom, the Hobbesian definition, is untenable. Freedom cannot just be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of the word.”
In all these three formulations of the issue — opportunity- versus exercise-concept; whether freedom requires that we discriminate among motivations; whether it allows of second-guessing the subject — the extreme negative view shows up as wrong. The idea of holding the Maginot Line before this Hobbesian concept is misguided not only because it involves abandoning some of the most inspiring terrain of liberalism, which is concerned with individual self-realization, but also because the line turns out to be untenable.
Clueless Political Scientist 