Negative and positive liberty

From Free Talk Live

(Redirected from Liberty)

This article is featured which means the community believes it is the best of the best.
See more featured articles.

FDR's freedom from want is a positive liberty.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the term liberty. One school of thought treats the term as an indication of freedom from control or authority; liberty to them is being able to do anything with out violating the ability of another to engage in any activity they want to. This may be referred to as absolute liberty or, using the standard definition, negative liberty. Strictly, absolute liberty can be defined as the absence of aggression, that is the initiation or threat of the use of force against a man's body and/or legitimate property.

The second school of thought thinks of liberty as the ability to achieve all that is possible. This changes the nature of how a government committed to guaranteeing liberty has to behave; this causes a strong clash between absolute and positive liberty. An example of a positive liberty is the so called right to healthcare; one can quickly realize that this so called right contradicts the absolute liberty of another because they must be taxed against their will to contribute to a socialized health care system or a hospital must be forced to accept patients who are unable to pay. This requires that a government use force against its citizens, infringing on absolute liberty to guarantee the positive liberty of another to use the health care system.

Clearly, positive liberty leads to slavery and legal plunder, also known as government enterprise and taxation. Libertarians support absolute liberties, while socialists tend to favor positive. Social liberals try to blend both, but as they contradict each other, this fails.

However, it is arguably possible and necessary, for libertarians to espouse positive liberty in some cases. For instance, children arguably have a right to care from their parents. This could be avoided, however, by arguing that by bringing a child into the world you become party to an implicit contract between you and the child to take care of the child, or that just by being a child does not give you special obligations from others. The United States Constitution also contains some positive liberties such as the right to jury trial.

The original differentiation between positive and negative liberties was drawn by the Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, who believed that negative liberty was the highest.

[edit]