The instability of freedom as noninterference: The case of isaiah berlin

Ethics

Volumn 121, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 693-716

  Pettit, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 81755171458     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/660694     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Pace, e.g., Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
2. Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11.
3. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
4. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
5. This contains Berlin's 1958 lecture on "Two Concepts of Liberty" but also, especially in the long introduction, a good deal of later commentary. In the text, I often distinguish between references to the lecture itself and references to the commentary.
6. The thinker in whom Berlin finds the view he rejects is not Hobbes but John Stuart Mill (ibid., 139).
7. This is strange, as Hobbes quite clearly endorses the view, while Mill is guilty, at most, of using a formulation that may seem to give it support: a formulation that refers to being in a position to do what you actually want rather than to do whatever you might come to want.
8. Pettit, Republicanism; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
9. Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002)
10. John Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
11. Quentin Skinner, "Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power," in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. C. Laborde and J. Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 83-102.
12. Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 8.
13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), chap. 21.2.
14. I ignore questions raised by Hobbes's assumption that freedom presupposes the ability to take the options over which you are free: they must be within your "strength and wit." For the record, Berlin denies that freedom presupposes ability in this way, insisting that you may be free to vote even when you are too ill to go to the polls: "Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political liberty" (Four Essays on Liberty, 122).
15. In fairness to Berlin, he argued that in order to make liberty truly valuable, it might be necessary to institute welfare measures for giving people abilities to match their political liberties. "What is freedom to those who cannot make use of it? Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?" (ibid., 124
16. see also lii). He is followed in this view of what is required for the value as distinct from the nature of freedom by Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
17. Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, Hobbes and Bramhall on Freedom and Necessity, ed. Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91.
18. Harry Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829-39.
19. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 122.
20. Given that Hobbes thinks that any form of external hindrance takes from your freedom, he does not belong to the school of thought described in the introduction. Casting him as a foil to Berlin, however, I concentrate only on the hindrance imposed by other human beings; I treat him as if he did belong to that school. Berlin defends his focus on the hindering effects of human action, quoting Rousseau's claim that "the nature of things does not madden us, only ill will does" (ibid., 122).
21. The reference to ill will strongly suggests the need for intention-as other passages also do-but Berlin goes on, confusingly, to say that when other human beings restrict us, this action oppresses us, whether it is performed "with or without the intention of doing so." I take this to be just a slip.
22. Ibid., 123.
23. Ibid., 128.
24. Ibid., xxxviii.
25. Ibid., 139.
26. Strictly, there is a problem in saying that to be free in the choice of A, it must be the case that you could have chosen the alternative, B, had you wanted to -had you preferred that option. This condition might be incapable of fulfillment because you are the sort of person who would only want to do B if it was not available; the possibility will be salient from Groucho Marx's quip that he would only want to join a club that would not accept him as a member. The problem can be overcome if what is required is that you could have chosen B had you tried to do so, where it is not required in that eventuality that you actually prefer B. For expressive convenience, I ignore this complication in the text. I am grateful to Lara Buchak for drawing the problem to my attention.
27. Ibid., xxxix.
28. Ibid., xlviii
29. see also xxxix.
30. In the original lecture, he comes close to endorsing the open-doors metaphor, despite his endorsement of Hobbes, when he denounces those who would "block every door but one," even one that opens on a "noble prospect" (127).
31. This approach is adopted by Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
32. Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
33. Matthew H. Kramer, The Quality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
34. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 155.
35. Although I shall speak in what follows of interference without qualification, it might be more appropriate and even more faithful to Berlin's point of view-though not, as it happens, his precise formulations-to take him to have only unlicensed interference in mind. Licensed or nonarbitrary interference, as I think of it, materializes on terms laid down by the interferee, as in the example of how his sailors treat Ulysses.
36. Philip Pettit, "Republican Liberty: Three Axioms, Four Theorems," in Laborde and Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory.
37. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, xxxix.
38. Ibid., 139.
39. Ibid., xxxviii.
40. Carter, Measure of Freedom, and Kramer, Quality of Freedom. They will argue that where adaptation is required for being able to take a particular option-and also, to anticipate, where ingratiation is required for that result-the agent loses out in overall freedom, not being in a position to choose the option-without-adaptation or the option-without-ingratiation.
41. The observation may soften the difficulty of living with the conclusion of Berlin's argument-that one can make oneself free in a given choice by adaptation or ingratiation-but it does not remove it; the intuition remains that one cannot achieve freedom in that given choice just by adapting preferences or just by ingratiating yourself with an obstructive agent. For a general comment on the limitations of this overall-freedom line,
42. see Pettit, "Republican Liberty."
43. Philip Pettit, "Capability and Freedom: A Defence of Sen," Economics and Philosophy 17 (2001): 1-20.
44. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, xxxix.
45. It may be enough, according to Berlin, that you enjoy noninterference in the nearest possible world or worlds in which you choose the other option, B. Or it may be required that there is a larger range of possible Y-worlds where noninterference is absent. These might be defined in a context-sensitive way but certainly cannot include all possible worlds in which you choose B. The fact that you would attract interference in the remote possible world where B would bring about the end of all sentient life, e.g., hardly shows that you are actually unfree in choosing between A and B. I abstract from this issue here, as I abstract from the related issue of whether it is necessary, not just that you are actually not interfered with in choosing A, but that you would not be interfered with in a range of other possible A-worlds: worlds that differ in intuitively irrelevant ways from the actual world. On issues about the relation between noninterference and freedom and about how contemporobust noninterference must be in order to constitute freedom
46. see Pettit, "Capability and Freedom"
47. Christian List, "The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen," Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 1-23
48. "Republican Freedom and the Rule of Law," Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5 (2006): 201-20.
49. These issues are parallel to issues in epistemology about the relation between true belief and knowledge.
50. See, e.g., Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
51. That the ideals are distinct does not rule out the possibility, however, that interference- with-frustration is worse, worse even in freedom terms, that interference-withoutfrustration.
52. Jeremy Waldron, "Pettit's Molecule," in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, ed. G. Brennan, R. E. Goodin, F. Jackson, and M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 143-60. But see also the previous footnote.
53. Robert E. Goodin and Frank Jackson, "Freedom from Fear," Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2007): 249-65.
54. Philip Pettit, "Freedom and Probability: A Comment on Goodin and Jackson," Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008): 206-20.
55. The hypothetical probability P(Int if x) should be understood, not as a conditional probability, but in one of the alternative modes consistent with causal decision theory: e.g., as the probability of the truth of the appropriate subjunctive conditional.
56. See James M. Joyce, The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The conditional probability P(Int/x)-the probability of interference, given x- may be low for evidential rather than objective or causal reasons: say, because your taking x would be good evidence that I am friendly and unlikely to interfere.
57. What if you were close to certain that I would not be put off by any line you took in the choice between A and B, or in any other choice of that kind? What if you were so sure of my favorable attitude toward you that you had no fear of alienating me and triggering interference? Would there still be a sense in which your choice was subject to my will? The right response to this query is that you could not think of me as such a mechanically predetermined entity-and certainly could not manifest that view-while ontinuing to see and treat me as an agent. Suppose that you are disposed to hold me esponsible as an agent for whatever I turn out to do in a given choice that affects your nterests, so that you will feel gratitude or resentment at the decision I take. You must then think of me, before the decision is made, as being in a position to take one or another course, depending on my will. And that attitude rules out the sort of certainty envisaged here. For such a viewpoint
58. see the work of a contemporary and colleague of Berlin's: Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Ot er Essays (London: Methuen, 1962).
59. Pettit, Republicanism, chap. 2.
60. Inevitably, this presentation of freedom as nondomination is not as cautious as it might be. Two points of caution, in particular, should be registered. One is that you do not depend on the will of another in the relevant sense just in virtue of your options being dependent on what they, perhaps in ignorance of your existence, choose to do
61. in that case, you do not depend on their will as to what you should do: they may have no wishes about what you should do. And another is that you do not depend on the will of others just in virtue of the fact that a majority in your society might coalesce and take against you
62. short of coalescing or incorporating, they do not constitute an existent agency that dominates you, and the possibility of such a development testifies only to possible, not actual, domination.
63. Indeed, the varieties of domination are even richer than this suggests. I may interfere with you, as explained earlier, by removing or replacing an option, by denying you information about the options, or by undermining your capacity to reason properly about them. But this means that I may have the power to interfere with you in a given choice, should my will incline that way-i.e., I may dominate you-not just in virtue of superior resources, intuitively understood, but even in virtue of your believing that I have such resources. If you do believe that I have those resources, then I will have the power to deceive you in the choice: say, by making a bluff threat to stop you doing one or another option. All of this illustrates Hobbes's remark that "reputation of power is power."
64. See Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 10.5.
65. Richard Price, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 26.
66. Algernon Sidney, Discourses concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), 17.
67. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters (New York: Da Capo, 1971), 2:249-250.
68. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (New York: Whitston, 1982).
69. Imagine, then, that you face a choice between options A and B. By Berlin's lights it must be the case that you avoid interference both in the A-scenario-the world where you choose A-and in the B-scenario. By republican lights, you should avoid interference in the corresponding four scenarios, described as A-F, A-H, B-F, and B-H. But this description of the positions raises a natural question parallel to one raised in an earlier footnote on Berlin. How encompassing should the A-F scenario be-and the A-H, B-F, and B-H scenarios? At a minimum, it might reduce to a singleton-the nearest possible world, as we say, in which A-F holds; and I have written, implicitly, as if this is the way to think: it fits with the standard reading of the counterfactual conditional. At a maximum, it might encompass all those possible worlds where A-F holds true, including outlandishly unlikely worlds where, say, a more powerful, extragalactic species invades earth. On the most plausible understanding, however, it should probably be taken to refer us to a range of possible worlds, salient on the basis of a background, contextually sensitive understanding, where you choose A and others are friendly. I cannot discuss the question further in this context.
70. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, lx.
71. Ibid., 123.
72. I abstract from the question of whether, according to Berlin, establishing this minimal area, and thereby enabling each person to be free, also requires providing for the value of that freedom in the sense discussed in an earlier footnote: i.e., also requires giving people the wherewithal to enjoy the exercise of choice in that area. I assume that at least an updated version of the republican ideal of the free person, mentioned later in this section, would require such support.
73. C. H. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Ideal at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3.
74. Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
75. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 123.
76. Ibid., lx.
77. Philip Pettit, "The Basic Liberties," in Essays on H. L. A. Hart, ed. M. Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 201-224.
78. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, lxi.
79. Ibid., 161
80. see also lxii.
81. Ibid., 165.
82. Ibid., 161.
83. Ibid., lx.
84. Ibid., 155.
85. Perhaps this is what Berlin himself registered in saying that the "connection between democracy and individual liberty is a good deal more tenuous than it seemed to many advocates of both" (ibid., 130-31).
86. Ibid., lvi.
87. Douglas C. Long, Bentham on Liberty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 54.
88. Philip Pettit, "Law and Liberty," in Law and Republicanism, ed. S. Besson and J. L. Marti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39-59.
89. Benjamin Constant, Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
90. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1973).
91. See also Philip Pettit, "Two Republican Traditions," in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, ed. A. Niederbeger and P. Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
92. Jean-Fabien Spitz, La liberte ́ politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).
93. Frank Lovett and Philip Pettit, "Neo-Republicanism: A Normative and Institutional Research Program," Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 11-29
94. Philip Pettit, "A Republican Law of Peoples," in "Republicanism and International Relations," ed. Duncan Bell, special issue, European Journal of Political Theory 9 (2010): 70-94. For a recent articulation of the republican theory of democracy
95. see Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).