Essay on Liberty (Political Theory) PDF

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Essay on Liberty (Political Theory)...

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How (if at all) do economic circumstances affect an individual’s liberty? The liberty of the individual is a concept that asserts the sovereignty of the individual over his body and his actions. It’s often argued that liberty is an absolute good, and a desirable outcome of any political structure. As a result, in creating liberty of the individual in a state, the effect of economic circumstances on liberty are of special importance. One concept of liberty is expressed by John Stuart Mill, who divides the set of individual liberties into different areas. The first is the liberty of the individual to follow his conscience and to form and express his ideas and opinions – the freedom of the mind. Mill argues that silencing an opinion is bad for society – if the suppressed opinion is true, society as a whole is denied this truth. The second area is the area of individual pursuits, where Mill argues that individual liberty of action, insofar as it does not cause harm to others, brings about originality and innovation, and is good for society. [ CITATION Mil59 \l 1033 ] Mill’s conception of liberty is further addressed by Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, who acknowledge a divide between liberty as the freedom from legal or physical restraint and persecution – negative liberty – and liberty as the freedom of the individual to realize his or her own goals and become one’s own master, or positive liberty. [ CITATION Ber04 \l 1033 ] Where Berlin sees negative liberty as essential, Taylor makes the argument that negative liberty is flawed in that it takes no account of individuals’ motivations and internal constraints, and argues that positive liberty is necessary as well as negative as essential. [ CITATION Tay91 \l 1033 ] In this light, it becomes clear how economic circumstances might constrain an individual’s liberty. An individual living in poverty, barely able to meet his basic needs, faces problems in self-actualisation: Berlin describes this as ‘economic slavery’, a denial of positive liberty. The individual is deprived of the means and resources – for example, education, or in a more extreme sense food and shelter – to set and realize his personal goals.[ CITATION Ber04 \l 1033 ] It is recognized that in fulfilling one’s goals and actualizing one’s potential, the development of the mind through education and reflection is necessary [ CITATION Ber04 \l 1033 ][ CITATION Mil59 \l 1033 ]. Individuals living in poverty face the more immediate problem of survival, though, and are unable to spare effort to express their freedom positively. As such, economic circumstances constrain his positive liberty. In the case where a man is in debt and subject to restrictions on his freedoms imposed either by the repayment of the debt or the punishment incurred for failing to do so, Mill observes that the harm principle restriction applies only to the decision on whether or not to repay the debt – not to do so would cause a loss of utility to the creditor. Mill makes a distinction between the actions – he gives extravagant living as an example – which bring about this situation, and the actions that have to be taken as a result of it. Thus, to Mill, this restriction on freedom wouldn’t be a restriction at all, at least not in the negative conception expressed in On Liberty.[ CITATION Mil59 \l 1033 ] Taking only the concept of negative liberty into account, it could be argued that the individual is not affected. After all, no law is put in place that persecutes his freedoms. No external actor compels him to act or not act in a certain way. The individual is unfree only in the same sense that we are unfree to levitate ourselves – as we are subject to the laws of physics, so the economically constrained individual is subject to the laws of economics. A counter to this argument can be derived from Steiner’s point that an individual is unfree if and only if his action is rendered impossible by the action of another individual. [ CITATION Ste91 \l 1033 ] Economic forces are not laws of nature – they arise out of the self-interested actions of a community

of people in the market. As such, the individual is, in fact, unfree in the negative sense. It is the actions of his fellow men that have rendered him unable to carry out certain actions. Another counter-argument to the thesis that economic circumstances restrict freedom is the idea that where negative liberty means the ability to act according to one’s wishes, if the individual is able to, through a spirit of ascetism, constrain his wishes only to those actions which are within his means, then his economic straits wouldn’t restrain his freedom at all. Berlin rejects this argument as a case of “sour grapes”, and points out that feeling free and being free are different: this, to him, is a case of restrictions on freedom [ CITATION Ber04 \l 1033 ]. Indeed, whether or not an individual, at a particular moment, wishes to carry out the action or not is irrelevant to his freedom, as long as the option remains open to him. Otherwise, this would result in the absurd situation of the “fortress of the self” as follows: suppose there is a man who wants A, B and C, but can only have A and B. His preferences change so that he only wants A, and his situation so that he can only have A: according to the above argument, he would have become more free, not less! That economic conditions affect both positive and negative liberty has thus been argued. Waldron (1991) further brings up the special circumstance of homeless people. This group, Waldron argues, face unique constraints on their freedom as a result of their lack of a home: in a community with private property rights, the homeless are permitted (outside of a private property owner’s charity) to be in only public spaces: they have no property of their own. But homeless people in these public spaces are also subject to laws governing these spaces, many of which are specifically targeted at them. Waldron points out that the purpose of homes and the purpose of public spaces are fundamentally different. Every activity that the individual is free to do has to be done somewhere – either somewhere public or somewhere private. Private activities like sleeping and urinating can be done in the individual’s private space – the home. But for a homeless person, this space does not exist – all activities must take place in the public areas. Because there are only public areas for the homeless, any constraints on activities in public areas directly constrain the freedom of the homeless. For example, if a law is passed that prohibits sleeping in public areas, the homeless are effectively denied the right to sleep. They are not permitted in private areas, and they are not allowed to sleep in areas which are not private. The case of homeless people brought up by Waldron highlights an extreme case of how economic circumstances affect the positive and negative liberties of the individual. Another area where economic circumstances might affect liberty are in the areas of punishment and reward. The argument goes as follows: economic gain and loss are motivators for rational individuals, assuming their motivations can be simplified to those of personal utility through consumption. Then they would desire economic gain, and avoid economic losses. The greater the economic reward or loss for a certain action, the greater the incentive for the person to carry out that action. Thus, threats and rewards can diminish personal liberty. In the same way that a person in a state which restricts free speech is unfree to air his opinion in that he will face imprisonment, a person who is threatened with an enormous fine for doing an action faces the same sort of constraint on freedom. Less intuitively, this argument can be extended to rewards as well: the potential loss of utility in a threat equated with the potential gain of utility in a reward. However, in his discussion of the issue, Steiner (1991) doesn’t accept that threats and rewards can be constraining of freedom. His reasoning is that where under the status quo, the individual might want or be obliged to perform an action A, an intervention would change the situation to the individual

wanting or being obliged to perform not-A. But the individual remains free to perform A – nothing in the intervention actually prevents him from doing so. Yet the previous example of state-imposed punishment also seems to be subject to the threatreward scenario. It’s rarely the case that the state prevents those freedoms it seeks to curtail from being expressed – rather, the state deters the expression of, say, freedom of speech with tough sedition, blasphemy or hate speech laws which punish that sort of speech with strict fines. Steiner’s line of argument would seem to imply that an individual in such a society would remain free to break those laws and face the punishment – after all, the laws do not make it impossible for the individual to commit the action. Furthermore, while there is certainly a fundamental difference in the liberty afforded by incarceration as opposed to fines, corporal punishment or other forms of disincentive, Steiner’s definition of negative liberty would allow only those punishments which physically prevent the act from being committed to be considered restrictions of liberty. This is an interpretation which Mill would surely take issue with: indeed, the very existence of the law, to Mill, curtails freedom. In resolving this, we have to look at the reasoning behind Steiner’s approach. Steiner builds on Berlin’s (2004) point that an individual is free to carry out an action even if he does not want to do it, that the wishes of the individual have no bearing on his liberty. The thrust of Berlin’s argument is aimed towards countering the fortress of the self, and is adapted here to answer the problem of threat and reward. Economic circumstances are closely linked to liberty. They may exist as threat or incentive, or they may pose a problem for either positive or negative concepts of liberty. Either way, it is clear that the poorer an individual is, the less free he is....