Positive Liberty: An Essay in Normative Political Philosophy / Edition 1

by L.H. Crocker

Overview

Liberty is perhaps the most praised of all social ideals. Rare is the modern political movement which has not inscribed "liberty," "freedom," "liber­ ation," or "emancipation" prominently on its banners. Rarer still is the political leader who has spoken out against liberty, though, of course, some have condemned "license. " While there is overwhelming agreement on the value of liberty, however, there is a great deal of disagreement on what liberty is. It is this fact that explains how it is possible for the most violently opposed of political parties to pay homage to the "same" ideal. From among the many ways liberty is understood, this essay will be concerned with only two. The first takes liberty to be the absence of human interference with the individual's actions. This is the way liberty has been understood by the Anglo-American "liberal" tradition from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century to l. S. Mill in the nineteenth to such contemporary, and very dissimilar, political philosophers as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. The "absence of interference" school is far from monolithic in its understanding of liberty, but it is united in its opposition to a rival account on which liberty is not taken to be the absence of human interference but rather the presence of diverse pos­ sibilities or opportunities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789024722914
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	06/30/1980
Series:	Melbourne International Philosophy Series , #7
Edition description:	1980
Pages:	147
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

I. Introduction.- 1. Berlin’s Distinction.- 2. MacCallum on Positive and Negative Liberty.- 3. The Strategy of the Argument.- II. The Freedom to do a Particular Thing: The Objective Side.- 4. Restraint and Incapacity.- 5. Coercion.- 6. Coercion and the Wage Agreement.- 7. The Probability of Doing—.- III. The Freedom to do a Particular Thing: The Subjective Side.- 8. Belief and Information.- 9. Psychological Barriers, Autonomy, and Freedom.- 10. The Desire to Do—.- IV. Personal Freedom.- 11. Berlin’s Five Factors.- 12. The Number and Variety of Alternatives.- 13. The Probability of the Alternatives.- 14. The Value of the Alternatives.- V. Social Liberty.- 15. The Characterization.- 16. Outlines of a Positive Libertarian Social Program.- 17. A Positive Approach to Speech.- 18. Redistribution.- 19. Left and Right Libertarianism.- VI. Criticisms of Positive Liberty.- 20. That Positive Liberty Extends the Notion to Meaninglessness.- 21. Liberty and its Conditions of Exercise.- 22. Liberty and the Conditions that Give it Worth.- 23. “Liberty” in Ordinary Language.- 24. The Special Evils of Restraint and Coercion.- 25. Human Rights, Coercion, and Non-Aid.- VII. The Value of Liberty.- 26. The Consequences of Liberty.- 27. Intrinsic Value Defined.- 28. The Intrinsic Value of Autonomy and Liberty.- 29. Value and the Structure of Positive Liberty.- 30. An Egalitarian Argument for Positive Liberty.- VIII. The Costs and Limits of Liberty.- 31. Decision Costs.- 32. Personal Costs and Paternalism.- 33. Social Costs.- 34. Individual Decision and Collective Decision.- Notes.