Freedom as a political ideal

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 307-334

  Wall, Steven ^a  

^a BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33644686070     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052503202132     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Many writers distinguish freedom from autonomy. They hold that freedom applies to particular options, whereas autonomy refers to the way in which a person leads his life over time. See, for example, Joel Feinberg, Harm to Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 62-68. I do not deny that this distinction can serve some theoretical purposes. But, because my concern in this essay is with what a state should do to assist persons in leading free lives, I shall not insist on the distinction here.
2. I discuss each of these requirements in greater detail in Steven Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127-61.
3. There are a few things that the state can effectively do in this regard. For example, it can do its best to ensure that all children receive an adequate education. But even here there are serious limits to what the state can do. Whether a child receives the kind of education that he needs to live an autonomous life depends more on what his parents do than what his state does.
4. Here I follow Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 131-34;
5. and Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127.
6. As Berlin notes, "many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian and totalitarian creeds of our day" have been informed by a view of freedom as self-mastery (144).
7. The freedom that the state promotes may be valuable for its own sake, in addition to its contribution toward what I have been calling "the freedom that really matters"; but I shall not consider this possibility in this essay. I shall assume that the primary reason why political freedom is valuable is that it contributes to the autonomy of those who enjoy it.
8. Naturally, I believe that these three problems are especially important ones, even if they are not the only ones that confront an account of political freedom.
9. See Ronald M. Dworkin, "What Is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty," Iowa Law Review 73 (1987): 1-54.
10. I shall make no attempt in this essay to assess how important political freedom is compared to other values that the state can promote or protect, such as security, equality, or excellence.
11. These paradoxes result from the fact that there exists a range of highly plausible, but mutually inconsistent, judgments about freedom. For example, the judgment that a person who hands over his money at gunpoint does not perform a free act conflicts with the judgment that a person cannot be unfree to perform an act that he actually does. For discussion of a number of these paradoxes see Christine Swanton, Freedom: A Coherence Theory (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992).
12. See Berlin, introduction to Four Essays on Liberty, lii.
13. For discussions of freedom as noninterference, see Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty;
14. David Miller, "Constraints on Freedom," Ethics 94 (1984): 66-86;
15. and Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), chaps. 2, 4. For discussions of freedom as nondomination see
16. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chaps. 2-3;
17. and Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, chaps. 6-7.
18. A third important and influential ideal of political freedom, one that I shall not discuss here, identifies a freedom-supportive state with the state that best promotes civic participation. I criticize this radical democratic view of political freedom in detail in Steven Wall, "Radical Democracy, Personal Freedom, and the Transformative Potential of Politics," Social Philosophy and Policy 17, no. 1 (2000): 225-54.
19. But in this example will not the subsidy itself have been raised by coercive interference? Not necessarily. If we like, we can stipulate that the subsidy is raised from revenues from the state's voluntary lottery.
20. draw here on my discussion in Steven Wall, "Freedom, Interference, and Domination," Political Studies 49, no. 2 (2001): 216-30.
21. For discussion see Harry G. Frankfurt, "Coercion and Responsibility," in Ted Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973);
22. and J. P. Day, "Threats, Offers, Law, Opinion, and Liberty," American Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1977): 257-72.
23. David Miller, "Constraints on Freedom," Ethics 92, no. 4 (1983): 66-86.
24. When you talk with the police, you might say that I am interfering with you because I am trespassing on your land. This suggests that in order to identify acts of interference we need first to have specified who has rights to what. I return to this point in Section VII below.
25. See Berlin, introduction to Four Essays on Liberty, liii-liv.
26. The leading contemporary proponent of freedom as nondomination is Pettit. My discussion of domination draws on, but does not perfectly follow, his account of this concept. See Pettit, Republicanism;
27. and Pettit, A Theory of Freedom.
28. Pettit follows Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), in holding that this ideal of political freedom has deep roots in the civic republican tradition of political thought.
29. Domination can occur in the absence of interference, but might it be reducible to expected interference? The idea that it can be is defended by Jan Carter in his A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 237-45. On Carter's view, the dominated agent is unfree because there is a high probability that he will be interfered with if he acts or attempts to act in a number of ways that are open to him. But this reduction of domination to expected interference fails to explain why unpredictable interference is worse (from the standpoint of freedom) than predictable interference. Two agents who confront the same amount of expected interference might differ in their freedom if one is able to predict the interference, whereas the other is not. This is true, at least, on the view of political freedom that I shall defend below in the text, a view that understands freedom in terms of the nonobstruction of planning.
30. See Jeremy Waldron, "The Rule of Law in Contemporary Liberal Theory," Ratio Juris 2, no. 1 (1989): 79-96.
31. am assuming here that the husband does not frequently and unpredictably change the set of rules that he strictly adheres to in dominating his wife.
32. See Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, 134.
33. Pettit, A Theory of Freedom, Ibid., 134. Pettit describes arbitrary rule as rule that is "not forced to track the interferee's avowable interests and that typically reflects the interests or perceptions of the interferer." But this does not capture the other element of arbitrariness-namely, subjection to the unpredictable or capricious will of another. And this other element is, as we shall see, important to assessing political freedom.
34. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 69-70.
35. have discussed slightly different versions of these examples elsewhere. See Wall, "Freedom, Interference, and Domination," 220-24.
36. Some might be tempted to view these two governments not over time, but at particular points in time. When asked which government is worse from the standpoint of political freedom, some might interpret this as a series of questions about the two governments at different time-slices. If one does this, then at many points in time one will have to conclude that the arbitrary liberal government is a model government in terms of political freedom. Indeed, on the time-slice view, one will not be able to discriminate between arbitrary and nonarbitrary governments that engage in the same amount of interference at a given point in time. This is to miss something important. A plausible ideal of political freedom should be able to explain both why interference reduces freedom and why arbitrary interference is more freedom-reducing than nonarbitrary interference.
37. I shall not attempt to anticipate every possible reply that proponents of these ideals could make to my archetypal governments. By discussing (what I consider to be) the strongest reply that is available to such proponents, I hope to cast some doubt on the plausibility of these ideals. This will fall short of a decisive refutation, but it should provide some motivation for the search for an alternative, and I hope better, ideal of political freedom.
38. See Berlin, introduction to Four Essays on Liberty, xlv-xlvi.
39. Pettit argues for a wide range of public policies by appealing to the value or enjoyment of nondomination. In his eyes, a freedom-supportive state should be in the business of doing most of what a state might reasonably do. See Pettit, Republicanism, chap. 5.
40. Practical activity terminates in intentional action, but not all intentional action is well described in terms of forming plans and carrying them out. For a more detailed discussion of practical activity, see Christine Swanton, Freedom: A Coherence Theory, 49-60.
41. See Michael E. Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
42. Could one live an autonomous life without any plans? I doubt it. One might resolve never to commit oneself to any future course of action, preferring instead to always "live in the present." But this would itself be a kind of plan. Even if one could somehow avoid making plans altogether, I suspect that one's life would be so lacking in narrative structure that it would be wrong to call it autonomous. This is one reason why I characterized autonomy (see Section II above) in terms of the manner in which, and circumstances under which, we form complex intentions and sustain commitments.
43. Recall here the assumption in Section II above that freedom is best understood in terms of personal autonomy. On alternative understandings of freedom the point in the text might not be plausible. For example, if freedom were best understood in terms of the satisfaction of desire, then such laws would plausibly reduce freedom.
44. I thank Keith Lehrer and James Stacey Taylor for helping me to see the force of this objection.
45. For some defense, see Wall, Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint, 127-61.
46. This is not to say that they are objectionable only when they obstruct planning. Freedom is just one value. Interference and domination may be bad for reasons other than the role that they play in reducing freedom.
47. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
48. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960);
49. and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 206-13.
50. Perhaps no such metric is possible. The best we may be able to do is to make reasonable rough-and-ready judgments about what state actions (or what kinds of governments) cause more obstruction to planning than others.
51. I am assuming here that I have justly acquired the land and have (legitimate) property rights in it.
52. It is true that some institutional structures that are not plausibly freedom-supportive nonetheless might do well in terms of the nonobstruction of plans. Feudal societies provided stable and predictable environments for those who lived in them, but they did not provide their members with a wide range of options. According to the ideal of political freedom that I am proposing, a freedom-supportive state is one that sustains a planning-friendly environment while providing its members with a wide range of opportunities.
53. In his groundbreaking paper "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 1-44, Ronald Coase argues that so long as transaction costs are negligible and property rights are well-defined, economic agents will bargain their way to an efficient outcome, irrespective of the initial assignment of property rights. Assuming this theorem to be correct, it would have some bearing on the claims advanced here. Coase's argument suggests that in specifying property rights one important consideration is to do so in a manner that will minimize transaction costs between different agents. This, in turn, will enable them to coordinate their activities and pursue their plans more efficiently.
54. But, it may be asked, what if I live in a political society that does not have a system of property rights that is reasonable in this sense? Then freedom as the nonobstruction of planning will direct the state to reform its system of property law so that it becomes reasonable. There are numerous complications raised by this, however, that I shall pass over here.
55. Alternatively, if my plans include the option to go foxhunting, and my government prohibits this option, do I become freer simply by abandoning the plan that includes this option? This is the classic problem of the contented slave.
56. See Elster's discussion of character planning in Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 117-19.
57. See the discussion in Richard Arneson, "Freedom and Desire," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 3 (1985): 425-48.
58. This condition raises a number of difficult questions: How should options be individuated? What counts as a sufficiently wide range of options? What constitutes "access" to an option? And what functions does the state have in ensuring that this condition is met? I shall not attempt to provide answers to these questions here, but a few remarks are necessary to prevent misunderstanding. For the most part, valuable options can be provided by civil society. State action is not needed to create them. However, without state action, some citizens may find themselves in a situation in which they lack the resources needed to have access to these options. Does this show that the freedom-supportive state must also be (at least to some extent) a welfare state? Perhaps, but perhaps not. It is possible that civil society, through charitable and intermediate associations, could ensure that all citizens have adequate access to the options that they need in order to be politically free. But whether such welfare provision would be sufficient and whether it would increase or diminish interference and domination relative to state welfare provision are matters that cannot be pursued here.
59. It is logically possible, even if it is something that would scarcely ever happen, that a state might prohibit an option-such as the option to eat glass-that none of its citizens would ever have any need for in pursuing their plans. On the account of political freedom that I am defending, it would not be possible to account for why this would be a reduction in freedom-if it is indeed a reduction in freedom! I leave it to the reader to consider whether this is a troubling objection to this ideal.
60. In this case I am like the slave who has a liberal master. I am free to pursue my plans, but I stand under the shadow of a dominating presence that may intervene at any time to obstruct them.
61. This requires an important qualification. To the extent that freedom as the nonobstruction of planning rests on the ideal of personal autonomy, and to the extent that this ideal itself is a perfectionist ideal, then the freedom-supportive state, as I have characterized it, is perfectionist. The point in the text is that the freedom-supportive state need not favor some plans over others because of their intrinsic value or their contribution to human flourishing.