When an individual is not legally constrained from acting, he or she has negative liberty.
When an individual has the means to act upon this liberty, he or she has positive liberty.
If the individual lacks the means to act he or she does not have positive liberty. Without positive liberty, then, negative liberty is useless.
In order for negative liberty to be meaningful, then, the individual requires positive liberty. They are therefore not mutually exclusive categories, but complementary.
If no other recourse is available, the only body capable of providing positive liberty is the state.
Therefore in order to ensure that its citizens’ negative liberties are meaningful, the state must intervene to provide positive liberty.
In order to do so, the state must therefore remove some negative liberties. Otherwise, all individuals may have the same amount of negative liberty in theory, but in practice some individuals will have more positive liberty than others, to whom their negative liberty means little.
The positive liberty proponent will point out that if a man has no food, his right to life is meaningless as he will surely die. If a man is sick and cannot afford health care (lacks the means to get healthcare, to act to get healthy, if you will) he will die and his negative liberties are meaningless. And so on and so forth.
And so & so forth" is the exact problem of positive liberty, imo, which always brings the question of “When does it end?”.
Positive liberty seems to constantly displace responsibility for actions of the individual on to another, and that to another, similar to how what can be justified under positive liberty can seemingly have no end in sight, as those who hold positive liberty true may displace power upon either others or themselves, are holding the “potential” for what “could” or what “ought” to be as greater than concern for restraint (or negative liberty).
Noble intentions, tyranny of good intentions, vangaurdism, etc. make political reality the nightmare it already is, & anti-intellectualism & almost nihilistic attitudes perpetuated by the state (even so far for one to believe that positive liberty is inherently “good” because it is labeled “positive” & is perceived to be “more than 0”, and negative seems to imply “less than 0”, which I’ve sadly come across in offline debates), do little to address or question basic premises of positive liberty itself, with positive liberty becoming a “mainstream” concept by consent, apathy, or ignorance.
I find it fairly ironic, actually, that many believers in positive liberty purport to be altruistic, when the truly selfless thing would be to accept responsibility & not shift it unto others, & to cease the desire for power over others due to an idealistic belief in what “ought” to be and not belief in what “is”.
The truly disgusting thing is that no matter what argument one proposes to the positive liberty believer, like a snake, they slither their logic around inconveniences by appeals to authority, or appeals to 'fate", collectivist notions of reality (i.e. “that’s just the way it is”, “do our best to get by”, “we cant help everyone at the same time”, etc.), or even into interventionist territory, of which similar rationalizations are found.
Positive Liberty (& positive rights) is Positively Poisonous.
Then he had better acquire it, eh? Or does he think he has the right to enslave someone to provide for his needs? All negative liberty is, is the right to take an action unhindered by others, including to appropriate resources for one’s survival (again, which no one has any pre-existing right to.) Natural constraints, “sadly”, don’t justify enslaving others. Such a misfortune that nature gets in the way…
At least one valid point is made; that (negative) liberty doesn’t mean very much without the means to utilize it. Thus, it can be a valid organizing principle of a society to provide for its less fortunate members. This is similar to what the mutualists and social anarchists call the principle of mutuality or reciprocity. However, this cannot conflict with the right to liberty. I’ll explain:
The distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty matches up rather well with the Aristotelian liberal distinction between political autonomy and social autonomy (see GAP’s paper on autonomy). Political autonomy is freedom from physical coercion or force. Social autonomy is more complex; it is the freedom from social influences not involving aggression that would cause an individual to deviate from his natural end (this would include states such as extreme poverty, and institutionalized racism, sexism, or collectivism). There is a third dimension to autonomy, personal autonomy, but it isn’t relevant to the discussion at hand. Political autonomy is the most important factor, as the use of aggression against a person is the most direct violation of their self-direction. Social autonomy, while also constitutive of self-direction, is more subtle and less pressing; a person can still be self-directed in all but the most extreme cases of social heteronomy, while the same cannot be said of political heteronomy. Thus, there is no way that one can justify removing one person’s political autonomy for the sake of another’s social autonomy.
Thus, while it is true that a person cannot flourish without social autonomy (positive liberties), this cannot be provided at the expense of political autonomy.
That’s entirely subjective though. How much means, if they are being utilized as well as possible etc have hundreds if not thousands of permutations and variables.
Less fortunate code for lazy? Incapable? Handicapped? Ignorant?
Social ideology geared towards helping “victims” rarely fail to find sufficient or adequately disadvantaged targets.
No, not necessarily. Liberty is a necessary pre-condition of flourishing, but it by no means guarantees it. Virtue and various external goods are also constitutive of flourishing.
That is a valid concern. I think that the best solutions are mutual aid societies, of the type that Long talks about here.
I tried. It caused massive brain hemorrhaging. I am definitely becoming dumber and less able to focus with time. Seriously, sometimes you guys write stuff that I can’t understand no matter how many times I re-read it. Writing for quasi-retarded laymen like myself would do a lot for liberty.
My view is the opposite way of reconciling the two: negative liberty is the context for positive liberty. Without negative liberty, you cannot have positive liberty. Without being free from aggression or coercion in the pursuit of my goals, I cannot possibly even remotely achieve those goals (I.E. negative liberty by itself does not gaurantee happiness or one’s goals, it only provides freedom to pursue happiness or one’s goals). All the things associated with possitive liberty are possible as purely contractual phenemonen in the context of negative liberty. Positive liberty is what happens when one uses their negative liberty in a positive way.
The clarify: there are numerous different takes on positive liberty. The 1st take is that it’s an unchosen positive obligation, otherwise generally known as “positive rights” (which may as well be substituted with the term “positive benefits for the masses”), which inherently violates a consistantly applied negative liberty. But in this view, everyone is inherently entitled to (insert arbitrary positive benefit here). All libertarians have to reject this position by default because no contract can coercively be enforced onto 3rd parties of people who did not consent and are logistically incapable of consenting to the particular contract (this is part of why both state social contracts and corporate status are illegitimate). This usually devolves into libertarians championing negative rights vs. left-statists championing positive rights.
However, the 2nd take is that in the context of negative liberty, I.E. the freedom from imposition and aggression by others, inherently grants the freedom to pursue positive benefits, mutual aid or mutual self-interest in that context. This freedom to pursue positive benefits for yourself and others given condition of consistant negative liberty, in turn, is what sets up a contractual basis for “positive liberty”. So liberty is both positive and negative in a sense. It prohibits decision-making power over you by others and justifies your own decision-making power over yourself. In this context, a libertarian can consistantly advocate concepts such as mutual aid and cooperative management. This usually devolves into vulgar libertarians denying the reconciliation vs. left-libertarians defending such a reconciliation.
The three main points of the reconciliation are that (1) negative liberty, by itself, does not absolutely gaurantee survival, happiness or flourishing and (2) yet without negative liberty, one cannot freely or adequately pursue survival, happiness or flourishing and (3) hence, positive liberty, insofar as it is restricted to the context of negative liberty, is the basis out of which we can establish methods of cooperation to better foster survival, happiness or flourishing. However, on a personal note, I’m not entirely satisfied by the invokation of the concept of happiness when something more along the lines of “self-actualization” or “personal growth or progression” is what is really meant.
This is such an overcomplicated explication of a very basic premise in my opinion. The idea of negative rights/liberties can essentially boiled down to this:
No man may encumber upon another that which would necessarily be his own responsibility without explicit agreement.
That’s it. Anything other than that, that is positive rights/liberties, are anathema to our liberty. I suppose you could go further to define what one’s own responsibilities are, however that would be a different subject.
I also disagree with the idea that positive rights are those which have been agreed upon, because definitionally negative, in this case, means being free from force, which positive is not.
What BP is doing is giving negative rights their necessary context. Without that context, one is lead to deviations like an absolutist acontextual conception of property rights or bundling libertarianism with values that are incompatible towards itself.
Perhaps, but I have come to be of the mind recently that we as libertarians have a tendency to obfuscate the issue of liberty unneccesarily in order to “cover all bases.” While I agree that in academic writing it is prudent, when speaking with many who are new to the discipline, we serve to confuse and muddle the issue with our own complexity.
I am one who happens to like the keep it simple stupid maxim, especially when it comes to the more basic of problems. Address other issues as they arise, succinctly and clearly. If the issues have been addressed in a scholarly work then we can give the gist as well as a reference to the book so any inquisitors can get the basics and if they wish, delve further.
I think this would go a long way into getting more people excited about liberty.