This new blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, is living up to the hype in my opinion. Lot's of good stuff so far. Today they ask "what is liberty?" and provide a variety of answers based on the way people use and understand the word. They have:
"1.Freedom as Absence of Obstacles: Someone is free to the extent that no obstacles impede her ability to do as she pleases.
1a.Freedom as Absence of Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1b.Freedom as Absence of Deliberate Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one deliberately interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1c.Freedom as Absence of Wrongful Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one wrongfully interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
2.Freedom as Capacity: Someone is free to the extent that she has the power, ability, capacity, or means to do as she pleases.
3.Freedom as Autonomous Self-Control: Someone is free to the extent that she exhibits sufficient deliberative self-control, such that she is authentically the author of her actions.
4.Freedom as Non-Domination: A person is free to the extent she is not subject to another person’s or group’s arbitrary will.
5.Freedom as Moral Virtue: A person is free to the extent she has the power to recognize and act upon her moral obligations.
6.Freedom as Absence of Pressure: A person is free to the extent she feels no social pressure to do anything.
7.Freedom as Absence of Reasons: A person is free to the extent she has no grounds or reasons for making decisions."
I especially like this point in response:
"Most of the right libertarians I’ve met are hardcore revisionists (about the English language) when it comes to freedom. Most of them think the only valid conceptions of liberty are 1b or 1c above. They think other uses are confused, ideological, or demonstrably wrong."
They promise to demonstrate why this is wrong, and to make a case for liberty as capacity. I've made this point recently as well, and made a case for a sort of "liberty as capacity" argument here, where I wrote:
"All social life is about power and coercion. The exercise of the fruits of that coercion - the exercise of rights - can't be thought of as the opposite of coercion. Liberty is not the opposite of coercion, so what is it? Liberty is the arrangement of these coercions in a way that is consistent with human dignity and human potentiality."
I'm not sure if others have made this point or not, but it will be interesting to see the argument presented on Bleeding Heart Libertarians over the next couple days.
They did forget one definition from their list, though:
Monday, March 7, 2011
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Their questions on power and coercion have to be reconsidered.
ReplyDeleteAmong distant relatives, neighbours, parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins, anyone can understand use of pressure and force. Troubling career decisions can be made by family members and everybody intervenes.
But to take that to a logical conclusion with a modern day style government is troubling.
The central government is not nice guy. It's a collection of wonks who can bankrupt you with careless button-mashing on their terminal. It's a collection of ambitious prosecutors. It's a collection of SWAT teams who can shoot down overexcited young men. It's a collection of tanks, anti-air weapons, armoured cars, and helicopters. It's a collection of legislators who can nationalize an entire industry if they so wanted.
In short, it is not our mother. And we are not going to make it be nice, just by asking to appeal to its better senses.
"Please, I know you must thump your feet, legislate, declare wars, arrest businessmen, but there are nice and benevolent ways of doing these things."
"Abstract liberty, like other abstractions, is not to be found." -- Edmund Burke
ReplyDeleteNot all libertarians fetishize "liberty."
Would you really consider Edmund Burke to be a libertarian?
ReplyDeleteIn the end, does it matter what pseudo-intellectual words people use to describe themselves?
ReplyDeleteDaniel, not at all! (Although I do consider "A Vindication of Natural Society" a libertarian classic, satirical or not.)
ReplyDeleteI only thought his quote could be appropriated for my own thinking: philosopizing over what "liberty" actually is is moot. Furthermore, I consider it a fundamental misconception that all libertarians are sloganeers of "liberty" itself (Rothbard is and perhaps most libertarians are, but Posner placing primacy on "wealth-maximization" probably doesn't sit well with the former).
To me it is just a rehash of the argument about positive vs. negative liberty. I'll stick with negative liberty as a general rule - if that makes me a "right libertarian" so be it.
ReplyDeleteDaniel,
ReplyDeleteHume famously discussed the dangers of theoretical politics; though he didn't get to witness it, his argument would be that you end up with the USSR.
Prateek,
ReplyDeleteI'd *like* or *+1* your comment if I could. :)
Strangeloop, Prateek, and Gary I strongly agree on the nomenclature point. I come up as libertarian on some of these quizzes. I also think it's changed in the last couple years - people who have claaimed to be libertarians in the past are rejected as libertarians currently. Theoretical politics, conceptual groupings, etc. have limited purpose but they still have some purpose. Gary, for example - you reject theoretical politics immediately after a post where you embrace a theoretical rule based on a theoretical concept (negative rights). The whole argument that Bleeding Heart Liberal is making and that I have made in the past is that theoretical concept of "negative rights" doesn't always serve the cause of liberty well. And of course, I'd replace it with yet another theory that I think does a better job. I think the point is to take precisely a pragmatic and pluralist approach to theory, which is going to be far more robust than a theoretical rigidity.
ReplyDeleteIn the real world, of course, we have to think in terms of sets and labels to make sense of things. Taxonomy is essential to thought. All I can say is, I agree with all of you but still think there's going to be a tension with this. Tension is healthy, though - not to mention productive.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI see "negative liberty" as the practical working out of experience with the way humans have dealt with one another in polities. There isn't much theoretical about it.
I'm not clear on how that makes it not theoretical, but maybe I'm missing something. You know I'm on board with practically working things out and priveleging the usefullness of an idea or an approach. But it seems to me we still put together theoretical conceptions of things when we do that. We create, define, and set parameters of this concept of "negative rights" that seems to both fit our experience and work well for us. But it's still an abstraction we've come up with - a theory to put form and frame to our experience, that's all I'm saying.
ReplyDeleteYou know I'm generally a negative rights guy, and I've said in the past that natural rights from the perspective of casual speech is a very good thing. I just deny it as an actual description of reality.
My concerns come in when creating this theory or this idea of "negative rights" which works well for us (and I think it has worked very well for us) turns into something that constrains us from pursuing other things that work well for us. I would only start to be concerned when this theory or abstraction of negative rights begins to take on a life of its own.
Take that asteroid example with Volokh, Murphy, and DeLong recently. DeLong said it perfectly - he said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. DeLong is essentially a negative rights kind of guy. He's not the sort of guy that proposes writing economic rights or positive rights into the Constitution, etc. But he recognizes that a negative right is a useful concept - not a law of the universe or an ethical law or anything. In day to day life, of course, acting as if it were an ethical law or a law of the universe works out pretty well for us.
"...constrains us from pursuing other things that work well for us."
ReplyDeleteThey should constrain things because other things (as practical experience has shown) don't as a general rule work very well for us. We're never terribly far from the gulag, the death camps and a police state IMHO.
Of course it could be that because I'm a mountain climber that I have a different view of the social order. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. The world would be a lot better place IMHO if more people climbed mountains. :)
ReplyDeleteWell to clarify, I'm not suggesting abandoning negative rights as a general rule. Quite the opposite. To put it in DeLong/Murphy terms, I'm suggesting not to mistake general rules for universal laws and let an asteroid hit for the sake of a general rule that was developed from experience (an experience, I might add, that never had asteroid strikes in it!).
ReplyDeleteWell, not large asteroid strikes at least.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, as a general rule it looks far more like a universal law, than it does a general rule.
My kickstarter application has been sent for my little project.
>>>The central government is not nice guy.<<<
ReplyDeleteMany Libertarians like to rant about the federal government trying to get us convinced that it's the ultimate evil.
Statistically, I should be much more afraid of disease, of crazy people, and even myself than I should be of the federal government, which rarely arbitrarily goes out and kills one of its own citizens.
I don't think it's tyranny to set up laws and then tell people to obey them. It reminds me of something chomsky said:
"I was on Nixon's enemy list, for example, but it didn't amount to anything...I was up for a five-year jail sentence, which I probably would have had if it hadn't been for the Tet offensive -- I was an unindicated co-conspirator. But I wouldn't call that repression, I mean, we were openly violating what's called the law. You can't call that repression. But the point is privileged people are not subject to as much repression. We share the general privilege of society, we share the prerogatives of privilege." --From a talk at McMaster
I agree with that point. Tyranny usually comes from arbitrary laws or from laws that take away our democratic rights. You can't say a law is tyranny/repression merely because you don't agree with it.
As for the blog it seems to be just a more complicated version of libertarianism. These Libertarians are saying "yah we agree positive liberty is important, but the market provides that."
But what happens if it doesn't? And what happens if people want to get together and make rights democratically?
In this way, it seems even Keynesian economics (or post-Keynesian economics) provides the most freedom. This point was made by the blogger LK (my favorite economics blogger - and the best debunker of Libertarians next to that guy who runs the anti-Rand blog.)
As for classical liberalism, again, I agree more with the Chomsky view:
"The 18th-century revolutions have not been consummated. Even the texts of classical liberalism were talking about things like wage slavery, people being condemned to work under command instead of working out of their own inner need and not controlling the work process. That's at the core of classical liberalism. That's all been completely forgotten. But that ought to be revived. That's very real. That means an attack on the fundamental structure of State capitalism. I think that's in order. That's not something far off in the future. In fact, we don't even have to have fancy ideas about it. A lot of the ideas were articulated in the 18th century, even in what are the classical liberal texts and then later in at least the libertarian parts of the socialist movement and the anarchist movement. I think that is a very live topic which ought to be faced. A vision of a future society from this point of view would be one in which production, decisions over investment, etc., are under control. That means control through communities, through workplaces, through works councils in factories or universities, whatever organization it happens to be, federal structures which integrate things over a broader range. These are all entirely feasible developments, particularly for an advanced industrial society. The cultural background for them exists only in a very limited way but could be made to exist. That's a picture of a part of a future society, it's not the only one because there are a lot of other forms of hierarchy and authority which should be eliminated. The kinds of systems that have existed are state capitalist, of the kind we're familiar with, or state bureaucratic like the Soviet system with a managerial bureaucratic military elite that commands and controls the economy from the top in a totalitarian fashion. That's fortunately collapsing. Our system is not subject to any internal challenge, but it ought to be. The picture of a future society that evolves is one that you can proceed to sketch out." Chomsky, audio interview, MIT, Cambridge, 1990.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this. Listening to Libertarians, you would think these classical liberals never existed. Or when it's clear that they can't deny they had views inconsistent with Libertarian notions of "liberty" (Rousseau, Mill) they move to discredit them. But I actually have read some of the texts myself and he's correct that that is in there. This is even a view taken by some scholars and so on in political science.
"The 18th-century revolutions have not been consummated. Even the texts of classical liberalism were talking about things like wage slavery, people being condemned to work under command instead of working out of their own inner need and not controlling the work process. That's at the core of classical liberalism. That's all been completely forgotten. But that ought to be revived. That's very real. That means an attack on the fundamental structure of State capitalism. I think that's in order. That's not something far off in the future. In fact, we don't even have to have fancy ideas about it. A lot of the ideas were articulated in the 18th century, even in what are the classical liberal texts and then later in at least the libertarian parts of the socialist movement and the anarchist movement. I think that is a very live topic which ought to be faced. A vision of a future society from this point of view would be one in which production, decisions over investment, etc., are under control. That means control through communities, through workplaces, through works councils in factories or universities, whatever organization it happens to be, federal structures which integrate things over a broader range. These are all entirely feasible developments, particularly for an advanced industrial society. The cultural background for them exists only in a very limited way but could be made to exist. That's a picture of a part of a future society, it's not the only one because there are a lot of other forms of hierarchy and authority which should be eliminated. The kinds of systems that have existed are state capitalist, of the kind we're familiar with, or state bureaucratic like the Soviet system with a managerial bureaucratic military elite that commands and controls the economy from the top in a totalitarian fashion. That's fortunately collapsing. Our system is not subject to any internal challenge, but it ought to be. The picture of a future society that evolves is one that you can proceed to sketch out." Chomsky, audio interview, MIT, Cambridge, 1990.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this. Listening to Libertarians, you would think these classical liberals never existed. Or when it's clear that they can't deny they had views inconsistent with Libertarian notions of "liberty" (Rousseau, Mill) they move to discredit them. But I actually have read some of the texts myself and he's correct that that is in there. This is even a view taken by some scholars and so on in political science.
If markets "always work best" then communities could implement them, but if they find that they are lacking in areas, then they should just alter them. No liberty lost.
ReplyDeletePositive versus negative rights is a pretty much false dichotomy. Private property is just like any other law or social order that is backed up by the government. (I thought your entry on this somewhere along these lines was good.) So it itself is a form of positive liberty.
"Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.* The Common Good,"
I don't see how anyone could possibly deny this.
As for Natural rights, many liberals did believe in them, but I think they're an antiquated notion, even if they had a good starting point. Pareto does a good job demolishing them:
"Theories of 'natural law' and the 'law of nations' are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves"
Vilfredo Pareto
Anyway, you run a nice blog here. I really enjoyed your posts on property, Jefferson, and Lovecraft, as Lovecraft is my favorite horror writer. I hope you don't mind the comments. I was posting at Libertarian blogs but I don't really "fit in" at Libertarian websites exactly. But great stuff, although Lord Keynes is still the champion.
--Successfulbuild
Successfulbuild, what a coincidence that we visit the exact same blogs.
ReplyDeleteI am not trying to convince anybody that government is an ultimate evil. Think of it more as the Swiss guard outside the Vatican. Many days, he is for purely ceremonial posturing and giving a silly spectacle (elections). Many days, he is just a regular guy doing his job (administration). If you ask a small favour of him or request a minor concession, he does not hear you. And if you take too much liberty around him, he slowly lays his halberd on you in a "Watch it" kind of a way.
So no, the government is not evil. It's just silly to pretend it is a philanthropic venture. I am not asking him to be a little cooler. I am just being realistic about what his job is.
PS: Daniel Kuehn > Lord Keynes > Micky Hubens, although the latter are also cool.
Successfulbuild -
ReplyDeleteLots of good stuff in there. I think you hit the nail on the head with libertarianism. They often see opposition as a rejection of liberty itself, and fail to see it as an opposition to their narrow, often ahistorical understanding of liberty. In their defense, I think many who react against libertarianism in response to very good instincts don't actually probe the problem with libertarianism and take it for granted that libertarianism provides the purest explication of rights, liberty, etc.
One suspicion on why you might like Lord Keynes better than me (although of course, I have to side with Prateek on this one!) - I'm actually a fairly market oriented guy for the most part. Ontologically speaking I cannot accept a lot of the libertarian line on property rights and liberty. Property rights (and rights in general, really) are far more artificial than we like to let on. Practically speaking, with a few important qualification nothing works better than market capitalism. This is what I feel like doesn't always get received by people in my posts - the fact that property rights are fundamentally artificial doesn't mean they're not useful or extremely important. The point is only that you don't take this useful, workable fiction and pretend that it's a universal law. The classical liberals also produced a modern theory of constitutional democratic republicanism because self-governance in cases where the general rule of property rights don't serve us well was entirely consistent with classical liberalism, although it's been banished from libertarianism. The decision rested with the established constitution and the people, not some proto-libertarian logician. Most/many classical liberals, in that sense, would not have thought what Prateek says - that elections are "silly spectacles".
If classical liberals appreciated capitalism more or understood more of modern day economics...
ReplyDeleteor perhaps if classical liberals had lived today to see the exciting progress of business in the 20th century...
maybe they would agree with me? In the 20th century, we have seen Rockefeller smash down oil prices, Walton turn working class people into decadent kings with cheap goods, Gates provide us with a pervasive, standardized OS, and Ford allow automobiles to congest our roads.
Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. PC vs. Mac is not a divisive difference. People can have both!
But wait? You can have only one healthcare law? And not please all sides possible? And end up alienating one side? My goodness, they are tearing each other apart over this issue!
Politics is a zero sum game. Legislations divide people and nobody gets everything.
Yes, elections are silly spectacles. Classical liberals could have benefitted from a little cynicism. All their talk about equality, community, small government, big government, solidarity, society...it's all garbage. Capitalism allows us to have everything whether or not public policy tends towards equality or inequality or towards big government or small government. Those things are immaterial, purely eyewash.
Well I think classical liberals did have a very deep appreciation of the benefits, the "non-zero-sumness", and the progressive nature of markets. That's largely the point of the liberal tradition, is it not?
ReplyDeleteAs for politics being zero-sum... I'm not sure I understand why it has to be any more than why markets have to be. Does a public option mean we can't have private insurance? Is it not possible to experiment and vary policies across the states? I'm not sure I'm getting what's so zero-sum about it except for the fact that a single law is passed.
Response to P1: Well, to be honest, among those purely philosophical writers on liberty, such as Isaiah Berlin, we don't see as much mention of markets, capitalism,.etc. Individual freedom, life, liberty, property, blah blah blah.
ReplyDeleteIf a liberal says that an honest democratic government could solve problems of society, he fails to consider that the problems have already been solved or are being solved by entrepreneurs who don't have to wait for legislations. See James Tooley's A Beautiful Tree, on how some super-low cost private schools have completely destroyed *more expensive* and more inefficient public schools.
Response to P2: Around here in India, the central government prepares school syllabi. What is or what is not taught to students becomes ferocious debate. Should we have chauvinistic texts exalting the Vedic past of India? Or should we be unpatriotic and tell everybody that Vedic people used to be one of the most deeply amoral peoples ever known, who often even forced cultures into retrogression?
On the other hand, we live in a world with a free market for ideas, where any schoolchild could go to the bookshop and read the excellent wealth of books that explain what it was all really like.
In that respect, the earlier debate becomes completely...pointless?
re: "If a liberal says that an honest democratic government could solve problems of society, he fails to consider that the problems have already been solved or are being solved by entrepreneurs who don't have to wait for legislations. See James Tooley's A Beautiful Tree, on how some super-low cost private schools have completely destroyed *more expensive* and more inefficient public schools."
ReplyDeleteI disagree with both points - that a liberal with faith in democratic problem-solving ignores entrepreneurial progress and the most specific point of the example you use - I'd like to talk about it in a longer post tomorrow, though.
*more specific point
ReplyDeleteInteresting thread and thoughts all round. I left some comments on David Sobel's excellent "Property Rights and Moral Seriousness" post (that, incidentally, Daniel also linked to the other day). One of these ended:
ReplyDelete"Of course, perhaps all ideologies break down in ugly ways at the margin. However, that just reinforces my belief that a deontological/absolutist approach is the wrong way to go."
I guess that puts me firmly in the same corner as Brad De Long and Daniel on this subject... although that much might have been obvious from our previous discussions here. I've written here before about a "fixation with (government) coercion", which dramatically conflates the necessary with the sufficient, as far as I am concerned.
PS - Gary, the world certainly does look different standing on top of a mountain :)
http://xkcd.com/154/