Negative Liberty is Positive Liberty

November 14th, 2007

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A few not-entirely-joined-up arguments now, more or less set free from dependence on my usual starting points, and occasioned by the debates about liberty over at the new Liberal Conspiracy group blog, which show every sign of being a source of profound tension, given the strains bound to develop within a group of people who define themselves as ‘liberal left’.

Why is freedom of choice a good thing? Surely it’s clear why?. People have interests, and on the basis of these they develop preferences. They should therefore be able to choose to pursue the things they need to satisfy their preferences, with minimal interference from anyone else (including of course all forms of institutionalised political/legal authority) so long as they do not harm anyone else.

So far, so libertarian. This minimal, negative liberty yields a criterion for judging whether or not a government is legitimate, i.e., does it restrict itself to protecting negative liberty or does it seek to overstep these boundaries and extend itself into furthering what is typically called ‘positive’ liberty. By positive liberty is meant the freedom to fulfil certain definite capacities one has, which implies in turn that this freedom has to be somehow supported, usually through the guaranteed provision of goods such as health and education by political institutions.

It’s worth nothing that the negative-positive distinction itself is inherently problematic when we look at the historical circumstances from which it arose. The relationship between 19th century States in industrialising nations and the ideal of a ‘free market’ was more than one of a minimal protector to an autonomous preference-satisfying mechanism. As Karl Polanyi famously argued, the classical economist’s view that a free market should exist in order for resources to be allocated with maximal efficiency requires a huge amount of ‘affirmative action’ by the State on behalf of the free market – if you like, positive discrimination against traditional trading arrangements. For the market to exist as a provider of goods based on what people choose to pay for the goods on offer, first of all those goods need to be collectively defined, and then they need to be legally defined as property which can be traded. This is why Polanyi makes so much of how the 19th century trade in land and labour required so much legal work in order to define these non-commodities as ‘commodities’ for trade. In other words, to protect the right to pursue one’s interests, the State has to provide institutions which allow these interests (1) to be defined and (2) to be matched against goods which are thought to be capable of satisfying the preferences that derive from them. The protection of negative liberty always requires the provision of positive goods, and with them, a more or less clearly defined understanding of what goods, in general, should be freely pursued. Without the historically contingent definition of land and labour as freely tradable commodities, a different style of life is brought into existence (one which Polanyi argues is riven with damaging tensions as a result).

This gets us on to a different aspect of the negative/positive liberty distinction: is individual choice as such what we really want to safeguard? Or is it a set of capacities which we believe constitute a particular, historically contingent form of life, such as that which is made possible by the kind of historical developments Polanyi describes. At the heart of this question is an objection to the idea that negative liberty can be foundational, which I want to outline here.

If you are a strict libertarian, and believe in the fundamental tenet of self-ownership, then you will probably want to affirm the former. But there is also always the problem of what we think individual choice is for. For those who believe that negative liberty is the only real freedom, the purpose of choice is to satisfy one’s preferences. In other words, choice is seen as the sole legitimate means for the individual to realise a better condition for him or herself. Choice is not therefore just the act of choosing; it is also a process of rational calculation which ends in an act of choosing, and which aims to determine and then select one amongst various competing possibilities. The basis for selecting one from many has to be its greater yield of some general good, on the basis of which comparisons between many unlike things can be made. This might be a monetary measure, such as the expected profit of several different investments, or it might be a more theoretical entity, such as ‘utility’. The rationality of a choice can therefore be publicly assessed, based on a quantitative comparison of different possibilities. To protect the autonomous exercise of the capacity for doing this is to protect negative liberty, and, on one point of view, the only basis for political legitimacy.

The problem is, however, that this is not how choice operates. The view just outlined manages to ignore completely how we assess whether a choice would be meaningful for us or not. It simply concludes that rational choice consists in a particular calculative decision procedure, and that to protect such an exercise of rationality on the part of individuals is the substance of political rationality. However, the idea that we choose and act based on an estimation of a future quantitative change in some measure of a theoretical entity such as utility can only capture a small part of how we assess possible courses of action. This is because of the temporal and narrative background of decisions. When deciding between alternatives, the significance of the options before us cannot be cashed out by an abstract comparison of the difference they will make to our ‘state’. What matters much more is whether the alternatives fit within a broader context within which I decide what counts as improving my well-being. Included within this notion of ‘well-being’ is arguably a sense of how my past actions reflect on me as a person, how I currently stand within my scale of estimation of what a worthwhile life consists in, and what the future outcomes of my actions will mean for this sense of who I am (a point supported by the work of sociologists working on the understanding of motive and ‘social accounting’).

Given my sense of how this ‘moving target’ of well-being is bearing up in my current situation, I am constrained to regard certain choices as being vitally important, others as unimportant, and still others as without meaning. For instance, suppose a friend and I are both going for a promotion at work. I have the opportunity, after the job interviews, to report a recent case of misconduct on his part to my boss. This will ensure I get the position, which carries with it a vastly higher salary, and a change of workplace so I never have to see my friend without deciding to.

The considerations here do not turn on whether I can place a utility-value on the friendship to weigh its loss against the higher salary. Nor (if we take a reflexive step) are they about putting a utility value on my damaged self image, or upon the effect on this self-image of my partner’s opinion of me once I have done the deed. The problem is, do I decide that friendship can be discounted against monetary gain? The meaning of such a decision depends on what I consider the meaning of friendship to be. If I think of it as an expedient means of positioning myself favourably within a given social context, then fair enough – I choose the salary. But then I am guilty of not really understanding the meaning of friendship, which implies that you value another person for him/herself, and not for their instrumental value to you. The choice is thus not between several different alternative utility outcomes, but between different assessments of the wider meaning of the act, which cannot be given by a form of calculative reasoning of the kind that negative liberty aims to defend. One does not choose between having a friend (utility=n) and having a higher salary (utility=n+x), one chooses between abstract measures of advantage and friendship.

This means that the final decision, which is grounded in a narrative or biographical dimension, is further grounded in values which are not defined by the individual, but which derive from the culture and history of the society s/he lives in. This, in Weber’s terms, defines a substantial form of reason for the individual. Recall that positive liberty is the freedom to fulfil certain definite capacities one has. Because the context of action is never without this social dimension, one is also never without a conception of oneself as having certain definite capacities (the capacity for friendship, for being educated, for appreciating beauty, for free thought, or whatever) which are thought constitutive of one’s well-being over time so long as they are actively nurtured and allowed expression. It’s therefore arguable that to provide these capacities with the conditions under which they can be pursued is a legitimate function of political authority. As one of the capacities we are brought up to believe is necessary to our well-being is the kind of ‘rationality’ embodied in the calculative decision procedures that the protection of negative liberty is supposed to protect, then a case can be made for this being one of the capacities we should be positively supported in pursuing. However, this means that it is just one amongst many accounts of what positive liberty consists in, and as such should enjoy no absolute privilege.

To judge whether individual choice of the ‘individual consumer in the market’ kind should be privileged over, say, the choice of a group of people to use common land for communal needs is, broadly speaking, a decision of the kind I make when I choose between the higher salary and my friendship. That choice defined what sort of person I positively want to be; the choice between consumer-style freedom and other forms of self-determination establishes what sort of society we positively want to live in. As such it itself is a political choice, and therefore requires other sorts of decision procedures than that kind protected by the measures that protect negative liberty.