Negative Concept Of Freedom Research Articles

Conceptions of Freedom in the Regulation of Junk Food and Tobacco

This paper examines the regulatory disparities between the junk food and tobacco industries in the UK, focusing on the underlying conceptions of freedom that shape public policy. While both industries contribute significantly to public health challenges, tobacco is subject to far stricter regulations. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates within the House of Commons, the paper explores the application of positive and negative freedom in discussions of junk food and tobacco. I find that the presence of addiction in tobacco discourse is used to apply a positive conception of freedom, leading to more stringent regulations. Conversely, junk food discussions emphasise individual choice, aligning with a negative conception of freedom and resulting in softer regulatory approaches. This paper argues that these differing narratives on freedom contribute to the observed regulatory differences and suggests that emphasising the addictive nature of junk food could shift regulatory perspectives.

Идея автономии в свете республиканской крити­ки современной либеральной концепций свободы

In the European philosophical tradition, there are two trends in the understanding of freedom – the negative concept of freedom, which grew out of the mechanicism of the 17th century, which formed the basis of the liberal political tradition, and the con­cept of freedom as autonomy, established in a modern form in the works of Benedict Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, and later becoming the basis of the Republican politi­cal tradition. Historically, the negative concept of freedom has assumed a dominant position, in certain periods completely replacing all alternatives. However, the appeal to the idea of freedom as a state of autonomy can become one of the significant ap­proaches to critique of the liberal understanding of freedom, way of understanding its limitations. The historical analysis of the formation of the liberal concept of freedom al­lows us to identify those features of it that prevent this conceptualization of freedom from fully comprehending all forms of external influence leading to a state of unfree­dom. These include, in particular, the limited understanding of interference in free choice, characteristic of liberalism due to the spirit of mechanicism embedded in it at the early stages of its development. This limitation in the liberal concept of freedom can be identified by referring to the Republican tradition of understanding freedom that inherited its definition of freedom from the legal tradition of Antiquity and postulates the need for the absence of not only arbitrary interference in an individual’s free choice, but also the very possibility of such an interference (something that is allowed in some forms of liberalism). At the same time, the appeal to the concept of autonomy in the form of a comparative analysis of the republican understanding of freedom and freedom as autonomy allows us to reveal the limitations of the republican understanding of free­dom, the reliance on which does not allow us to consider the external restrictions of freedom associated with the inculcation of certain values and their subsequent inter­nalization.

Fashion and desire: A Kantian critique

By probing into how desire is involved in fashion phenomena, this article illuminates Willkür in tandem with desire. It first analyzes how the higher and lower faculties of desire, spelled out by Immanuel Kant, play a role in fashion, unveiling how fashion as a form of social relations exists in concert with the higher faculty of desire, which has a close connection with Willkür. This article maintains that the arbitrary choice manifested in and through fashion is illustrative of Willkür, on the grounds that it results from a self-conscious deliberation, demonstrating the ‘reflective distance’ from our incentives. Christine M. Korsgaard’s elucidation of the relationship between ‘reflective distance’ and self-consciousness helps formulate this argument. However, this article also discusses the foibles of Korsgaard’s reading of Kant, in particular in the area of theory of action. By doing so, this article argues that reason is not the only factor with which we make choices and take actions within the bounds of which freedom is secured, and that fashion allows us to comprehend not only how the power of choice, independent from necessitation by sensible impulses, exercises its freedom, but also how personal autonomy is related to Kant’s negative concept of freedom.

REPUBLICANISM IN MODERN POLITICAL THEORY

The article discusses the main theoretical provisions of the republican tradition in modern political theory. The main attention is focused on the works of F. Pettit and Q. Skinner. The position of the republican tradition in the political theory of the second half of the twentieth century is presented and the popularity of this tradition is argued today, the theoretical background of the actualization of republican theory is highlighted. It is shown how the republican theory was updated by the Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought. The features of the republican theory, which consists of two points, are considered: the openness of the republican project to alternative political theories (projects), representatives of the republican theory focus not on political theory, but on the history of political thought, that is, they do not develop their own theoretical project, but actualize in political theory and adapt the republican tradition to modern political practices. The origins of the republican tradition in the history of Western political thought are traced, special attention is focused on the development of republican ideas during the civil war in England (1642-1651) and the political/ideological confrontation between parliamentarians and royalists, focuses on the concepts of «political body» and «king-in-parliament». The criticism of the republican understanding of liberty by T. Hobbes and the consequences of this criticism for the political theory of the Modern era is traced. It is shown how the republican understanding of freedom is supplanted by the negative concept of freedom in modern times, why the liberal theory begins to be based on the negative concept of freedom. The republican understanding of freedom as non-domonation and the relationship between the concepts of positive liberty, negative liberty and liberty as non-domination are considered. Criticism of the republican tradition of a liberal interpretation of liberty is presented. The significance of the theoretical developments of the republican tradition for modern political theory is highlighted and the fundamental difference between the republican approach and the liberal one is shown.

Language, Liberalism and the Critical Religion Challenge

AbstractIn this article I consider Cécile Laborde's response to the semantic and Protestant critiques of liberalism's approach to religion. In Section 1 I examine the complex relationship between language and religion that emerges from Laborde's response to the semantic critique. In Section 2 I argue that Laborde's response to the Protestant critique either fails on its own terms or is in tension with her response to the semantic critique. Finally, in Section 3 I critically reflect on the negative conception of freedom that underlies Laborde's response to the Protestant critique, and ask how this can be reconciled with the republican understanding of freedom that characterises Laborde's earlier work.

Steiner’s Possession

Since the resurgence of interest in political philosophy in the early 1970s debates about freedom have been central. Throughout this period Hillel Steiner has proposed and defended the pure negative conception of freedom. This work is complemented by Ian Carter’s recent writings on freedom. Carter and Steiner advance a non-normative (empirical) conception of freedom employing tools from contemporary philosophy of action and language. In this article I seek to offer a deflationary critique of the Carter/Steiner position. My purpose is not to deny the potential moral or political significance of a pure negative conception of freedom but rather to deflate the philosophical foundations claimed for such a conception. I show Steiner’s commitment to the pure negative conception of freedom is a substantive moral commitment, not the result of logical conclusions deemed from conceptual analysis.

NEGATIVE FREEDOM AND THE LIBERAL PARADOXES

In their game-theoretic formulations, the liberal paradoxes of Amartya Sen and Alan Gibbard show a tension between freedom on the one hand, and Pareto optimality and stability on the other. This article examines what happens to the liberal paradoxes if a negative conception of freedom is used. Given a game-theoretic definition of negative freedom, it is shown, first, that the liberal paradoxes disappear in this new context: there are game forms in which individuals have a minimal amount of negative freedom and which guarantee the existence of Pareto-optimal and stable outcomes. Furthermore, if a game form gives each individual a maximal amount of negative freedom, the Pareto optimality of each stable outcome of the corresponding game is guaranteed. However, many games that provide such maximal negative freedom do not contain stable outcomes. We show that the liberal paradox may reappear in the mixed extension of such games.

Emersonian Strategies: Negative Liberty, Self-Reliance, and Democratic Individuality

Emersonian political thought subjects the term "individualism," which was invented in Europe as a description of the defects of Enlightenment thought and used by Tocqueville pejoratively as a critique of American democracy, to a process of idealization that enables it to appropriate concepts that might other-wise be conceived as oppositional to it. Emersonianism inherits Locke's negative conception of freedom as freedom from restraint, but claims that negative liberty inevitably transforms itself into a form of positive liberty that nurtures communal institutions. From Emerson himself to George Kateb today, Emersonians have relied upon a methodological individualism in which they shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual and traslate moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. This methodological strategy is a literal application of the motto e pluribus unum, which expresses the idea that the American nation is formed through the union of many individuals and peoples. In the hands of the Emersonians the customary sense of this motto is reversed: they move from the many to the one, to the single individual, paring away differences in order to reach a common denominator that will allow them to make claims about all individuals. At the heart of their endeavor is the belief that the health of the nation depends on its ability to respect and protect the individuality of each of its citizens.

Freedom, Markets, and Voluntary Exchange

A capitalist market system of social exchange is justified primarily because it protects individual freedom. This system, its advocates claim, achieves the complex task of production and distribution through a process of voluntary exchanges; coordination is effectively achieved without coercion. I argue that this claim is largely unwarranted. The negative concept of freedom that underlies voluntary choice (the absence of interference by others) is unable to differentiate between instances of freedom and unfreedom. As a result, it is not possible to determine whether exchanges are voluntary or coerced. A more adequate conception of free choice (as the relevant capacities and conditions for deliberate decisions and actions) suggests that a capitalist market broadly and systematically denies the possibility of voluntary agreements. This general failure to protect individuals' freedom is examined in relation to the acquisition of property, the transfer of property, and the process of production.

On Negative and Positive Liberty

Berlin's account contains a powerful argument in support of the claim that freedom consists in the non-restriction of options. This is seen when we consider his treatment of freedom, the concept and its rival conceptions, his discussion of descriptive and evaluative aspects of judgements about freedom, his account of the relations between freedom, power and the real will, his argument for the dependency of judgements about freedom on social theories, and his views on the place of a negative conception of freedom in the liberal tradition. Berlin is right to reject positive conceptions of freedom which depend on a rationalist doctrine; but mistaken in his view that all forms of positive libertarianism necessarily involve such commitments.