Lecture 8 Flashcards
Taylor and Berlin’s liberties
Taylor starts with the premise that Berlin is basically correct – although the distinctions are fuzzy.
- i.e. negative is something like independence
- i.e. positive is something like autonomy
the two positions have become caricatures. - Taylor
The caricature of Positive liberty is that it leads to ”Left
Totalitarianism”, in which individuals’ lives are ruled by the collective. (Boogeyman: 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”.
Taylor and a new distinction
- 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 treatment).
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. - Negative Liberty is as an “opportunity-concept” - i.e. its fundamentally about the individual having the opportunity to
pursue their own path.
Unequal distinction - Taylor
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).
- 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.
- So what is the defense of the Maginot Line version of negative liberty?
- 1) Its simplicity. But this is a way of avoiding complex distinctions: … 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 - 2) The alternative, positive liberty, leads us down a road towards totalitarianism. He mocks this claim: [We] may hold a selfrealization 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
The real problem with the Maginot Line is it prevents us from making judgments based on meaningfulness.
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.
* 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”.
New theory according to Taylor
- 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).
- 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.
What does this have to do with freedom? - Taylor
- 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.
- Here again we see the move from the question “what is freedom?” to “what makes freedom meaningful?”. - Hirschmann
- Freedom is contextual. We need to understand how people (i.e. women) evaluate its significance – i.e. their judgments
To reclaim freedom for women we need to:
- 1) reclaim the political discourse of what is valuable.
- 2) Expose the sexism at the heart of “choice” (and thus of liberalism) due to the constructed nature of society: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
Hirschmann aslo starts with 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: 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
- How does this view of social construction implicate how we understand freedom? Hirschmann
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.
*- In our patriarchal world, even language bounds women, constraining their capacity to speak and to know.
- 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.
* 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
What do we do about this? Hirschmann
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)
- 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.
The paradox of social constructivism
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.
Hirschmann solves it for us
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: Freedom for these groups
thus requires increasing their ability to participate in the processes of construction
