Definition

• 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.

Haidt’s Liberty/oppression is a psychological hypothesis, not Berlin’s two-concept taxonomy

Chapter 8 of The Righteous Mind adds Liberty/oppression as a provisional moral foundation. Its proposed core is sensitivity to domination: reactance against bullying or arbitrary constraint and the capacity of subordinates to coordinate against a would-be tyrant. The political left often expands it toward domination of vulnerable groups by social or economic power; libertarians and the right often expand it toward coercion by government. The foundation therefore predicts rival judgments about who dominates whom before it tells us what liberty legally or philosophically requires.

Do not collapse this into Berlin’s distinction. Negative liberty asks about the protected area free from interference; positive liberty asks about self-mastery or effective authorship of one’s life. Haidt is proposing a source of moral salience, closer in some respects to anti-domination and reactance, not adjudicating those concepts. A felt loss of liberty may identify a real tyrant, a legitimate reciprocal rule, or a constraint whose removal would let private power dominate instead. Test the agent, power relation, arbitrariness, reciprocity, accountability, alternatives, and risk that the remedy creates a new dominator. Liberty/oppression and reverse dominance, PDF pp. 203–209 (file not included in this release) · Provisional status and alternative foundations, Chapter 8 endnote 25, PDF p. 398 (file not included in this release) · Chapter 8 source and figure audit

Proponents

• Negative Liberty
  • theorists in the classical liberal tradition, like Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill, are typically classed as answering ‘no’ and therefore as defending a negative concept of political freedom
• Positive Liberty
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and T.H. Green, are typically classed as answering ‘yes’ and as defending a positive concept of political freedom.

Main Ideas

• It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in terms of the difference between factors that are external and factors that are internal to the agent. While theorists of negative freedom are primarily interested in the degree to which individuals or groups suffer interference from external bodies, theorists of positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously.
• Given this difference, one might be tempted to think that a political philosopher should concentrate exclusively on negative freedom, a concern with positive freedom being more relevant to psychology or individual morality than to political and social institutions.
• Is the positive concept of freedom a political concept? Can individuals or groups achieve positive freedom through political action? Is it possible for the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on their behalf? And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so?
• In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case is that of Rousseau’s theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one’s community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the ‘general will’. Put in the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom.

Criticisms

Related

References

Positive and Negative Liberty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)