Ignorance, incompetence and the concept of liberty

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 428-446

  Garnett, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 36148999876     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00289.x     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Thanks to Jennifer Whiting and to Arthur Ripstein for help in developing the ideas presented in this paper; thanks also to Keith Dowding for providing extensive and valuable comments on an earlier draft.
2. See, especially: L. Crocker, Positive Liberty (London: Nijhoff, 1980); S. I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); H. Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); I. Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and M. Kramer, The Quality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3. I. Berlin, 'Two concepts of liberty', Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 130.
4. W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 144.
5. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 291-2.
6. See also Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, pp. 141-8; and R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 169-73.
7. One may also require some significant number of valuable freedoms of assembly. If so, this shows that objections to the 'neutral counting' conception of completely general liberty - e.g. that levelled by Charles Taylor in his 'What's wrong with negative liberty', Liberty, ed. D. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 141-62 - apply also to the somewhat general liberties.
8. K. Dowding M. van Hees The construction of rights American Political Science Review, 97 (2003 281 93 Steiner Individual liberty Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 75 (1974-5 33 50.
9. S. I. Benn W. L. Weinstein Being free to act, and being a free man Mind, 80 (1971 190 211.
10. J. P. Day Threats, offers, law, opinion and liberty American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977 257 72 Miller Constraints on freedom Ethics, 94 (1983 66 86
11. As regards the first (must constraints always be external to the agent?), it should be noted that negative libertarians have the luxury of theoretical flexibility. Indeed, despite a traditional deep-seated suspicion of internal constraints, most contemporary negative libertarians allow that ignorance and incompetence (as well as phobias and compulsions) may present obstacles to liberty, so long as their presence is attributable in the right way to other agents. See e.g. Kristjánsson, Social Freedom, p. 100; and Carter, A Measure of Freedom, p. 222.
12. P. Pattanaik Y. Xu On ranking opportunity sets in terms of freedom of choice Recherches Economiques de Louvain, 56 (1990 389 90 Sugden Opportunity as a space for individuality: its value and the impossibility of measuring it Ethics, 113 (2003 783 809.
13. Carter, Measure of Freedom, pp. 175-89.
14. Ibid., pp. 169-218; Steiner, An Essay on Rights, pp. 42-54. Kramer has also addressed these problems, offering various improvements on Carter's account. As many of these are solutions to problems with that account which I do not raise here, I shall not discuss Kramer's view in detail.
15. O. O'Neill The most extensive liberty Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 80 (1980 45 59 Ayer Negation Journal of Philosophy, 49 (1952 813.
16. Carter, Measure of Freedom, p. 185.
17. Ibid., p. 186. Kramer, The Quality of Freedom, p. 381, makes a similar response, claiming that 'the optimal size for each [unit of measurement] will vary in accordance with the purposes of our analyses'.
18. A complication arises concerning liberties that are completely or near-completely specific in one dimension while being incompletely specific in another. Consider, for instance, my liberty to be in Hyde Park at exactly 9:07.32.004 on some day. Do I have this liberty? Yes, since were I to try to be in Hyde Park at that exact moment, I could easily succeed, simply by being there from, say, nine until ten o'clock. Yet possession of this precise temporal liberty is dependent upon the liberty's imprecise physical specification - were my required physical location specified as precisely, I would not have the competence to be in that exact place at that exact time. Yet in virtue of being at liberty to be in Hyde Park from nine until ten, it follows that I am also at liberty to be there at an indefinitely large number of more precise times. From this it follows that I have an indefinitely large number of liberties, and so an indefinitely large amount of aggregative liberty. (Cf. Steiner, Essay on Rights, pp. 50-1). The solution is to treat liberties as conjunctive sets of compossible actions. While I have the liberty to be in Hyde Park at 9:07.32.004, I do not have the liberty to be in Hyde Park only at 9:07.32.004. The closest I have to this, if I leap through the gate and out again, is (say) the liberty to be in the park from 9:07.31 until 9:07.34. Hence my liberty to be in Hyde Park at exactly 9:07.32.004 is a liberty available to me only as part of a plan that involves being in the park for at least a three second period. So when we aggregate, we must aggregate plans. This will ensure that even in these cases there will be a finite number of most specific liberties available to an agent.
19. A. Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 105-21.
20. Carter, Measure of Freedom, pp. 175-83. The only exception is for redescriptions based on what he, following Goldman, calls 'causal generation' - Carter allows that scoring a goal and relieving the fans describe relevantly different actions, but denies that scoring a goal and winning the match (an instance of 'conventional generation') describe relevantly different actions.
21. Cf. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957).
22. Kramer, Quality of Freedom, p. 416.
23. Carter, Measure of Freedom, p. 188.
24. H. Steiner, 'How Free: Computing Personal Liberty', Of Liberty, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 74. See also Carter, Measure of Freedom, pp. 182, 190-1; and Kramer, Quality of Freedom, p. 359.
25. Steiner, Essay on Rights, p. 44.
26. Carter, Measure of Freedom, p. 173; Kramer, Quality of Freedom, p. 359.
27. Kristjánsson, Social Freedom, p. 11.
28. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 16-17.
29. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 123.
30. T. Hobbes, 'Of liberty and necessity', English Works, ed. W. Molesworth (London, 1840), vol. 4, pp. 273-4, emphasis added. Needless to say, however, that Hobbes did not accept a fully agential account as I have characterized the notion in this article; he did not recognize internal constraints as obstacles relevant to liberty (instead he saw them as affecting one's power).
31. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 237-8.
32. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 159.
33. Berlin, 'Two concepts of liberty', p. 125.
34. Kristjánsson, Social Freedom, p. 129.
35. Benn, A Theory of Freedom, p. 133.
36. Negative libertarians may of course allow that certain consequences of this reduction in options - such as a reduction in utility - are politically relevant. This is fine, but the claim about the options themselves is controversial enough. It is also interesting to note that utility is not a distinctively political concept: political theorists could insist on dealing only with political utility, i.e. utility brought about by the actions of other agents, but they do not. I do not see why 'political liberty' is any more appealing.