Freedom from fear

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 249-265

  Goodin, Robert E ^a   Jackson, Frank ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35348966180     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00110.x     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Pace Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 21, we here assume that those are connected questions, and what we rationally fear impinges on our freedom. Reasons are given below in our defense of probabilistic-freedom over Hobbes's actualistic-freedom.
2. Lest this be thought a straw-man argument, reflect upon the "one percent doctrine" enunciated by Vice President Dick Cheney shortly after 9/11: "if there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction - and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time - the United States must now act as if it were a certaintyö; quoted in Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Four Freedoms: Annual Message to Congress, January 6, 1941" (available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu?4free.html; accessed July 18, 2006).
4. George W. Bush, "State of the Union Address, 2005" (available at http://stockholm.usembassy.gov/newsflash/stateofunion2005.html; accessed July 28, 2006).
5. Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 118-72.
6. This is the standard "liberal" notion of "negative liberty," traceable back to Hobbes: "Liberty, or freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion ..." (Leviathan, ch. 21).
7. This is the "republican" conception of a "free-man," free from the "dominion" (discretionary power) of anyone else, that is associated with the "democratical gentlemen" against whom Hobbes was writing. See Quentin Skinner, "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty," Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 7 (1985), pp. 225-50
8. "The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty," Machiavelli & Republicanism, ed. G. Bock, Q. Skinner, and M. Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 293-309
9. and "The Third Concept of Liberty," Proceedings of the British Academy 112 (2001): 237-68.
10. See also Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
11. and A Theory of Freedom (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001).
12. This is the "decision-theoretic" conception of freedom, associated with Bentham and his progeny; Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1970; originally published 1789), chap. 4.
13. For an argument along these lines see Robert E. Goodin, "Nuclear Disarmament as a Moral Certainty," Ethics 95 (1985): 641-58.
14. John C. Harsanyi, "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality?" American Political Science Review 69 (1975): 594-606.
15. That attitude might make good sense where catastrophic losses are in view - all-out nuclear war ending life on earth, for example (Goodin, "Nuclear Disarmament"). Or it might make sense where the costs of implementing the precautions (including opportunity costs, like only a marginally higher wage lost by forgoing the alternative job in the airplane example) are low; Stephen Gardiner, "A Core Precautionary Principle," Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (2006): 33-60
16. and Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 112-13. But it makes no sense as applied to costly avoidance of possibilities that are less than catastrophic.
17. This is an important theme within republicanism, glossed by Skinner in "The Third Concept of Liberty" as follows: "The distinctive claim they defend is that mere awareness of living in dependence on the goodwill of an arbitrary ruler does serve in itself to restrict our options and thereby limit our liberty. The effect is to dispose us to make and avoid certain choices, and thus to place clear constraints on our freedom of action, even though our ruler may never interfere with our activities or even show the least sign of threatening to interfere with them. It is of course true that the form of constraint on which these writers concentrate is self-restraint. They envisage that those living in a state of dependence will reflect on their predicament and generally decide on a course of action involving some measure of self-censorship. But the same is no less true of agents who act in the fact of coercive threats."
18. After the fashion of Kenneth J. Arrow and Leonid Hurwicz, "An Optimality Criterion for Decision-Making Under Uncertainty," in Uncertainty and Expectations in Economics, ed. C. F. Carter and J. L. Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp. 1-11. If we do not know probabilities, the relative weights assigned the best and worst possible outcomes must obviously be cashed out in some terms other than that.
19. That is the Cheney "one percent doctrine" discussed above.
20. Franklin D. Roosevelt, "First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933" (available at http://www.nationalcenter.org/ FRooseveltFirstInaugural.html; accessed July 22, 2006).
21. Symbolically, Bayes' Theorem says P(A B) + [P(B A)P(A)]/P(B), where P(A) is the "prior probability" that you assign to A, P(B A) is the "conditional probability" you assign to B given A, and P(B) is the probability you assign to B.
22. We are grateful to Christian List for suggesting this model. Cascades of a rather different sort are discussed in Sunstein, Law of Fear, pp. 94-98
23. and Sushil Bikhchandani, DavidHirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, "A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades," Journal of Political Economy 100 (1992): 992-1026
24. and "Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads and Informational Cascades," Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (1998): 151-70.
25. Lehrer's model of "rational consensus" commits precisely that error. Cf. Keith Lehrer, "When Rational Disagreement Is Impossible," Nous 10 (1976): 327-32
26. Lehrer and Carl Wagner, Rational Consensus in Science and Society (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1981)
27. Robert E. Goodin, "Consensus Interruptus," Journal of Ethics 5 (2001): 121-31 and reply by Lehrer, pp. 132-36.
28. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, para. 37 (p. 35 in Oakeshott edition).
29. Robert E. Goodin, What's Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), chap. 6. Irene Khan, "Forward," in Amnesty International Report 2007 (available at thereport.amnesty.org/eng/ Homepage; accessed May 25, 2007).
30. Robert E. Goodin, Manipulatory Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).