Liberty III: (Taylor & Hirschmann)

Liberty: A Deep Dive (Re-visited)

• What is liberty? Many Conceptions:

  • Berlin’s Negative Liberty vs. Positive Liberty

  • Pettit’s Republican liberty (somehow between negative and positive?)

  • Miller’s Negative vs. Republican vs. Idealist

  • Swift’s Formal vs. Effective

• But how do they work? What would it mean to look more closely “under the hood”?

  • Deep Dive 1: Negative vs. Positive-Deep

  • Dive 2: Inside “Republicanism”

  • Deep Dive 3: Rethinking Negative vs. Positive

• Two interventions:

  • Taylor

    • mess up

  • Hirschmann

    • feminism perspective

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?

• Taylor starts with the premise that Berlin is basically correct – although the distinctions are fuzzy.

  • -i.e. negative is something like independence

    • freedom from

  • -i.e. positive is something like autonomy

    • freedom to

• But the two positions have become caricatures. The caricature of Positive liberty is that it leads to ”Left Totalitarianism”, in which individuals’ lives are ruled by the collective. (Boogeyman: Communism).

  • positive liberty = communism

    • He argues that this is an extreme reading, and many positive liberty thinkers espouse moderate positions:

    • Republicanism (that self-rule is itself valuable)

    • Does not entail that people must be “forced to be free”.

• And the caricature of Negative liberty, which is that it is simply concerned with the lack of physical and legal obstacles, ignoring obvious psychological obstacles to freedom. (Boogeyman: Hobbesian Warmongering).

  • you become a thing protected by its shell

    • He argues that this is an extreme reading, and many negative liberty thinkers espouse moderate positions:

    • Specifically, self-realization is common to liberal theories (Mil

• The problem is that these caricatures are asymmetrical, with the balance weighted against positive liberty (the caricatures stick) and in favor of negative liberty (which escapes this simplistic treatmen

  • polarization makes it hard to talk to other positions—> no debate —> he wants to escape this and go to berlin and recast the distinction

  • both are uneven

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”

• So where does this leave us? Taylor argues the distinction needs to be recast:

  • -Positive Liberty is as an “exercise-concept” – i.e. its fundamentally about the individual being able to exercise control over their own lives.

    • how much are you abel to do something

    • one can become a self

  • -Negative Liberty is as an “opportunity-concept” - i.e. its fundamentally about the individual having the opportunity to pursue their own path.

    • im gonna do it and no ones gonna stop me

  • -“I [would put Berlin’s dichotomy] in a slightly different way. Doctrines of positive freedom are concerned with a view of freedom which involves essentially the exercising control over one’s life. On this view, one is free only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life. The concept of freedom here is an exercise-concept ... By contrast, negative theories can rely simply on an opportunity-concept, where being free is a matter of what we can do, of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise these options ... Freedom consists in there being no obstacle. It is a sufficient condition of one’s being free that nothing stand in the way” (143).

    • once you reimagine this and reconceptualize new conceptions open up

  • Here is the problem: Negative liberty conceptions can have both features (exercise- and opportunity-), but positive liberty conceptions are based on exercise alone (and thus cannot care about opportunity conceptions).

    • the problem is that negative liberty is opportunity and exercise

    • postive liberty is the pursuit of ones self actualization and just exercise

    • = says positive liberty is easy to get rid off

    • and negative liberty is rlly easy to defend

    • by doing so what gets lost?????????

  • This allows negative liberty supporters to eliminate any basis for defending positive liberty theories by claiming exercise is untenable:

  • -But this leaves us with a “Maginot Line” theory of freedom – i.e. simply the absence of external objects – which Taylor believes is indefensible.16

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?

• So what is the defense of the Maginot Line version of negative liberty?

  • magiont line: defensive version of freedom thats rlly simple

  • basic freedom

• 1) Its simplicity. But this is a way of avoiding complex distinctions:

  • freedom is when no one can stop you from doing it

    • -“It naturally seems more prudent to fight the Totalitarian Menace at this last-ditch position, digging in behind the natural frontier of this simple issue, rather than engaging the enemy on the open terrain of exercise-concepts, where one will have to fight to discriminate the good from the bad among such concepts ... The advantage of the view that freedom is the absence of external obstacles is its simplicity. It allows us to say that freedom is being able to do what you want, where what you want is unproblematically understood as what the agent can identify as his desires. By contrast an exercise-concept of freedom requires that we discriminate among motivations” (144-6).

      • it allows us to avoid anything difficult

      • in the berlin model of agency (i act) even if you acted you wished you had not.

• 2) The alternative, positive liberty, leads us down a road towards totalitarianism. He mocks this claim:

  • -“Once we admit that the agent himself is not the final authority on his own freedom, do we not open the way to totalitarian manipulation? Do we not legitimate others, supposedly wiser about his purposes than himself, redirecting his feet on the right path, perhaps even by force, and all this in the name of freedom? ... [No, of course we don’t]... [We] may hold a self-realization view of freedom, and hence believe that there are certain conditions on my motivation necessary to my being free, but also believe that there are other necessary conditions which rule out my being forcibly led towards some definition of my self-realization by external authority ... This is a widely held view in liberal society” (147-8).20

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”

• But the real problem with the Maginot Line is it prevents us from making judgments based on meaningfulness.

  • -The Maginot Line theory cannot accommodate basic judgments. For example:

  • -between traffic lights, which are obviously insignificant ...

  • -.... and religious freedom, which is obviously essential.

    • britain (more democratic) has more traffic lights than albania (less democratic) (restricts freedom) , so why is quanitatively speaking is britain more “free”

    • now something abt religious freedom its more important

    • preceding question: what matters abt liberty?

• -“Even where we think of freedom as the absence of external obstacles, it is not the absence of such obstacles simpliciter ... Freedom is [not] just the absence of external obstacles tout court, but the absence of external obstacle to significant action, to what is important to man. There are discriminations to be made; some restrictions are more serious than others, some are utterly trivial ... What the judgment turns on is some sense of what is significant for human life. Restricting the expression of people’s religious and ethical convictions is more significant for human life ... But the Hobbesian scheme has no place for the notion of significance. It will allow only for purely quantitative judgments” (149-50).

  • all liberties are equal but some matter more

• -Punchline: if we cared only about quantitative measures of freedom Albania is more free than Britain (150-151).25

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?

• So we need a theory of freedom that takes seriously judgment and meaningfulness – in particular how we come to judge certain kinds of freedoms as more important than others.

• •For this, we need a more complicated understanding of what undergirds our thoughts and fears, and specifically how our own desires can hold us back. For example:

  • -fears (when they take us away from our ends – i.e. a fear of public speaking)

  • -stubbornesses (being too quick to rage).

  • -“When we reflect on this kind of significance, we come up against what I have called elsewhere the fact of strong evaluation, the fact that we human subjects are not only subjects of first-order desires, but of second-order desires, desires about desires. We experience our desires and purposes as qualitatively discriminated, as higher or lower, noble or base, integrated or fragmented, significant or trivial, good and bad ... some passing comfort is less important than the fulfillment of our lifetime vocation” (152).

    • you have udgments

• The problem with the Maginot Line theory is that it

  • ...... rejects that obstacles can be internal – which leaves us no way to distinguish the meaningfulness of different freedoms.

  • So, the only way to preserve the Maginot Line would be to suggest that a person could never be wrong about their desires, i.e. not allow for second guessing. But obviously we can be in error about our emotions and desires – this is why we feel shame at some beliefs, or push them away as irrational.

  • The only way forward is to accept that certain desires and feelings are “import-attributing”.

  • = taylor says we have a debate but its not rlly abt neg and pos. Its abt concepts inside and its blinding us to this bigger issue/

  • He says its abt excersize and opportunity

  • we only allow for quantitative vs qualitative and instead things can be import attributing

Charles Taylor: What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”

• So what does this have to do with freedom?

• To make freedom meaningful there has to be a way to incorporate second-order desires into our conception:

  • -“Our attributes of freedom make sense against a background sense of more and less significant purposes, for the question of freedom/unfreedom is bound up with the frustration/fulfillment of our purposes” (160-161).

• To do so, we need to escape the language of freedom as simply an opportunity-concept.

• Summary:

  • -Taylor shows us how not only positive liberty is necessary, but that negative liberty doesn’t make sense without it.

  • critique of berlin abt first and second desires. sometimes you must uncover the meaning an look both ways. something abt negative liberty on its own doesnt mean anything abt positive

  • = when someone gives you a conceptualization ask what is it rlly saying what is underneath the concept?

  • = concepts meant to be dichotomous (ps and neg) depend on one another

    • making a defense of neg liberty means you are baking on some type of connection of positive liberty

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

• Nancy J. Hirschmann (1956- )•She begins with an example, which asks the question of freedom:-“The March 15, 1992, issue of the New York Times ran an article about a twenty-three-year-old unemployed single mother in West Virginia who became pregnant as a result of date rape. Due to federal policy, she had trouble locating an abortion clinic, but finally found one four hours away in Charleston. They told her she was seventeen weeks pregnant and they performed abortions only until sixteen weeks, and so they referred her to a clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio, that would perform an abortion up to nineteen and a half weeks for a cost of $850. When she went there a week and half later, however, she was told she was actually twenty-one weeks pregnant, and so the second clinic referred her to a clinic in Dayton, Ohio, that would perform the abortion for $1,675. She refinanced her car, sold her VCR, borrowed money, and went to Dayton. That clinic said that she was a high-risk patient because of an earlier Caesarean delivery, that she would have to go to Wichita, Kansas, and that it would cost $2,500. At this point, she decided that she no longer could manage the cost and logistics. Being opposed to adoption, she decided to have the baby and to try and love it the same way that she lover her other child. Can we say that this woman has freely chosen her role as mother?”

  • reconceptualizes berlin as it relates to feminism

  • does the problem from freedom not emerge from choice of the preceding thing (the fact she didn’t choose to get pregnant)

  • interference has a diff element because w pregnancy theres a clock that can time out

  • formally: theres no law stopping her from having the baby

  • informally: theres many things stopping her

  • formal (the law stopping you) vs effective freedom (act as you wish)

• She argues that western political philosophy offers us no way of answering this question.

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

• Why do we have no answer to this? Hirschmann provides several arguments:

  • -Freedom is contextual. We need to understand how people (i.e. women) evaluate its significance – i.e. their judgments:

  • -“Determining the meaning of freedom is in part a matter of determining the context in which claims of unfreedom are made, such that my evaluation of freedom will depend on my evaluations of other things. For instance, a strong valuation of privacy might result in a context in which claims for husbands’ ‘freedom’ to discipline their wives makes sense, whereas valuation of women’s bodily security might result in a different context in which a counterclaim for governmental interference in the family is justified to protect women’s ‘freedom’ from bodily harm” (47-8).

    • here point is freedom isnt binary of quantitively, they weigh against each other

    • freedoms are qualitative not quantitative

  • -Here again we see the move from the question “what is freedom?” to “what makes freedom meaningful?”.

• So, to reclaim freedom for women, we must:

  • -1) reclaim the political discourse of what is valuable.

    • women lgbtq example

  • -2) Expose the sexism at the heart of “choice” (and thus of liberalism) due to the constructed nature of society:

    • its not they dont consent to things , its that they wouldn’t have consented to it if the structure wasnt that way

    • theres a social constructiveness of society

  • -“The task for feminist theorists is to stake out an overtly political territory of values – such as choice, bodily integrity, professional development, and/or nurturing relationships – that would allow theorists to point out the ways in which patriarchal practices and customs deny women access to the resources they need to satisfy these values. In this, women’s experiences provide a powerful basis for highlighting the frequent sexism of liberal theory, precisely because these experiences often lie at the crossroads of Enlightenment ideology of agency and choice with modern practices of sexism”

    • theres things that are obviously sexist

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

• goes back to berlin

• She also starts with Berlin, but takes something different:

  • -She wants to keep the internal/external divide (i.e. that negative liberty protects you from outside forces, and positive liberty protects you from inside forces)

  • -We need to start with this division in order to understand why we must transcend it.

• Why? Because the internal/external division begins to fall apart when you take seriously the ways in which the outside world is socially constructed:

  • -“[We must start] by challenging the naturalist basis to freedom altogether. In claiming that freedom discourse falsely universalizes a highly particularistic notion of humanity – white economically privileged men – I invoke the notion of ‘social construction’, the idea that human beings and their world are in no sense given or natural but the product of historical configurations of relationships. The desires and preferences we have, our beliefs and values, our way of defining the world are all shaped by the particular constellation of personal and institutional social relationships that constitute our individual and collective histories. Even the most intimate and supposedly ‘internal’ aspects of our being, such as our sexuality, must be understood in terms of the historical relations and actions that have imported meaning to our bodies. Context is what makes meaning possible, and meaning makes ‘reality’” (51-2)

    • external factors —> internal ones.

      • If the whole world says to be sexist you will be

    • and it can work the other way as well internal—> external

      • women also didnt believe they should be allowed to vote. they internalized there inferiority

  • .-So, in this case, it is our patriarchical world that determines how we define freedom, and what it is about freedom that we consider to be meaningful.52

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

• How does this view of social construction implicate how we understand freedom?

  • -In our patriarchal world, even language bounds women, constraining their capacity to speak and to know.

    • language is patriachical

    • ex: guys come over here vs girls come over here

      • guys is primary

  • -If the patriarchal structure of the existing world ultimately constrains women’s freedom, this casts doubt on any meaningful aspect of the idea of freedom itself.

    • are women even in control meaning, if you cannot even control langauge?

• This challenges both dimensions of the internal/external divides:

  • -It forces us to radically expand what negative liberty means, because the type of external boundaries women face are also constitutive of who she is.

  • -It would also make us doubt positive liberty, as the things we consider to be “internal barriers” are actually externally generated.

  • In short: it is a critique of liberalism more broadly, and its inability to account for gender domination

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom”

• So what do we do about this? If the patriarchy is everything, must it all be blown up?

  • -1) One answer would seemingly be yes – freedom for women would require the end of the patriarchy:

    • -“On this reading, then, it would seem that for women to be free, the external forces of patriarchy must be eliminated. All "inner" forces of will, desire, and preference as well as fear, compulsion, and revulsion would be seen as the products of patriarchal social forces over which women have little or no control” (53-4).

      • maybe the best solution is to expand negative liberty, and make a boundary around a person but you still havent changed anything

      • what if theres no formal means to protect women

  • 2) Another answer is that if patriarchy is everything, it may also be unavoidable (and thus the best solution is to expand the negative liberty model) and at least protect the space around individual women.

  • -3) But this doesn’t solve anything, because if the patriarchy is everything how can we even have a meaningful notion of freedom and agency in the first place?

• Conclusion: social constructivism presents a kind of paradox.62

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

• She argues that feminism needs a two-pronged attack.

  • -1) to accept that social constructivism destroys conventional meanings of freedom (and subjectivity), but ...

  • -2) ... not surrender agency, or the potential for women to create their own forms of agency.

    -To do this, they must reclaim their ability to take part in the construction of society itself:

  • -“Thus feminist freedom requires a double vision: while understanding that everyone "always, already" participates in the Foucaultian "field" of social construction, feminists concerned with freedom also want to acknowledge that some groups of people systematically and structurally have more power to do the constructing than do others ... Freedom for these groups thus requires increasing their ability to participate in the processes of construction” (57).

• Her answer is they need to create counter publics for relationship between women to develop outside of men.

• Thus individual- and group- freedom must develop together – merging aspects of negative/positive freedom

• •Female emancipation requires a contextual form of agency (within a community) – this allows them to be free:

  • -“[A feminist theory of freedom] involves a notion of self deeply situated in relationship; it involves recognition of the ways our powers and abilities have come from and been made possible by particular relationships and contexts” (63-4).69

    • we need to reconstruct soceity

    • doesnt the responsibility go to women?