Liberty and Its Circumstances: A Functional Approach

Abstract

What is liberty? There are by now a number of familiar answers to this question. One such answer is that liberty consists in the absence of interference, in not being constrained against one’s will. Another is that liberty consists in self-mastery in the exercise of moral or political self-determination. A third is that liberty consists in the absence of arbitrary rule, in not being vulnerable to the whim of others. These answers can be seen as alternatives, among which you take your pick, refuting the others as somehow mistaken or wrong. This is reinforced, I believe, by the fact that definitions of freedom get to be associated with different ideological positions. Noninterference is “liberal” freedom,1 the absence of arbitrary rule is “republican” freedom, and the exercise of self-mastery or self-determination is perhaps “communitarian”, or “socialist.” Both the definitions, to put this starkly, and the ideological associations are, of course, simplistic and cover up a lot of variety. Unpacking that variety is not my concern here.2 Instead I will slightly shift focus and discuss the role played by the concept of liberty in our social and political theorizing. A general claim I wish to make is that the social world is too complex for any single one of these accounts to fill the part we seem to want “freedom” to play.KeywordsCivil ConditionBlind PersonArbitrary RuleNegative LibertyPositive LibertyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.