T HE P OIN T- C OUN T ERP OIN T P UBL IC AT ION FOR OC TOBER 2 7, 2 010

LAND
of the

FREE?

POINT What Guarantees Liberty?

JA S ON BRENN A N &
DAV ID S CHMIDT Z

Philosophy
alone cannot
decide the role
government
should have
in relation to
freedom

Volume 24 Issue 5

We often equate freedom with an absence of constraints, impediments, or interference. For instance, you have free speech when no one stops
you from speaking your mind. Philosophers call
this idea of liberty negative liberty.
Marxists have complained that negative liberties are worth little. Negative liberty, Marxists say,
is the freedom to be poor, to be unemployed, and
to sleep under bridges. Liberty is valuable only
if people have the financial and social means to
exercise it. Alternatively, some Marxists see liberty as the effective power, capacity, or ability to
do what one wills. We can call this conception of
liberty positive liberty. For example, a bird has the
positive liberty to fly, but human beings do not.
Many philosophers conclude that to guarantee
people will be free in the positive sense, citizens
need legal guarantees that they will be supplied
with adequate resources.
We believe both negative liberty and positive
liberty are important. It matters that citizens are
not subject to continued wrongful interference,
from each other or from the state. It also matters
that citizens have the effective means to exercise
their wills, to do as they please (provided they do
not violate other citizens rights), and to lead their
conceptions of the good life.
We think negative liberty matters in part because, historically, protecting negative liberties
has been the most important and effective way
of promoting positive liberty. Due to economic,
cultural, and scientific growth, a typical citizen
of a Western nation today enjoys far more positive liberty than a medieval king. This growth did
not occur because a government declared or legally guaranteed that it would occur. It occurred
because Western countries adopted a good set of
background institutions, among the most important being the rule of law. The rule of law provides
a framework that encourages experimentation
and entrepreneurship. Societies that protect property rights tend to achieve prosperity; societies
that do not always fail. Cultures of tolerance and
openness to change lead to more prosperity than
do closed, intolerant cultures. Overall, societies
succeed in promoting positive liberty when they
create institutional frameworksrule of law, constitutional democracy, and open marketswhere
the best shot individuals have at leading good lives
is to live and work in ways that are good for their
neighbors, partners, and customers, too. These
institutions dont guarantee progress, but nothing
does, so guarantees are beside the point.
But saying that positive liberty is a valuable

species of the genus liberty tells us nothing about

what the government should do. Settling on a
definition of liberty cannot settle a governments
proper role as protector or promoter of particular
liberties. We must instead examine historical, sociological, and economic evidence to see what actually happens when people rely on any institution,
including a government, to play a given role.
Do we want government to issue legal guarantees that we will all enjoy positive liberty? It
depends on what happens when government issues guarantees. There is a difference between
guaranteeing as rendering inevitable (as when
an economist says tripling the minimum wage
would guarantee rising unemployment) versus
guaranteeing as expressing a firm intention or issuing a legal declaration.
Clearly, guaranteeing something in the latter
sense is no real guarantee. Plenty of factors in this
world can and do disrupt, corrupt, or pervert legal
guarantees. Legal guarantees are good only when
they work. If we give government the power to
promote some valuable end, theres no guarantee
that those in power will exercise it competently,
and thus succeed in promoting that end. Theres
also no guarantee that the people in government
will use that power the intended end, rather than
for some private purposes of their own. Both of
us have heard students say, This goal of social
justice is so important that even if we need something like a kgb to achieve it, so be it. Well just
have to make sure the right people run the kgb.
But there is no such thing as making sure that the
right people run the kgb. People who gravitate
toward kgb jobs do so for reasons of their own.
Philosophers dont get to stipulate that their reasons are noble.
Despite the lack of guarantees, history may
well reveal that respecting negative liberties has
a long, successful, non-accidental track record of
making for better lives. In any case, we wont settle any debate about what negative liberty does for
people by conceptual analysis alone. We need to
investigate what happens to people when negative
liberties are reasonably secure, and what happens
when they are not.
Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy Research
at Brown University. He is the author of The Ethics of Voting
(forthcoming from Princeton University Press, 2011) and
with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (WileyBlackwell, 2010). David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor
of Philosophy and joint Professor of Economics at the
University of Arizona. He is author of Ratoional Choice and
Moral Agency (Princeton), Elements of Justice (Cambridge)
and Person, Polis, Planet (Oxford).

COUNTERPOINT Social Democracy and Freedom

Consider three meanings of freedom: Negative
Freedom (noninterference), no one interferes with
your actions; Positive Freedom (opportunity), you
have a wide menu of options accessible to you; Republican Freedom (nondomination), you dont
live under anyones arbitrary power.
These freedoms are distinct. You could have
negative freedom and positive freedom without
republican freedom: you live at the mercy of a dictator, but the dictator allows you to do what you
like and spreads his vast wealth among his subordinates, so that everyone has lots of options. You
could have negative freedom and republican freedom but little positive freedom: you are alone on a
little islandthere is no one to interfere with you,
and no one dominating you, but you have nothing
to do but eat coconuts. Finally, you could have republican freedom and positive freedom, but at the
expense of certain negative freedoms: you live in a
social democracy like Sweden, which harnesses a
vibrant market economy to a government-run system of free universal education, universal health
care, comprehensive social security, minimum
wages, and other regulations that secure everyone
from poverty and dependence on the arbitrary
will of others while generating lots of prosperity,
consumer choices, and varied job opportunities
for all. To provide this system, certain negative
freedoms have to be sacrificed: everyone has to pay
high taxes, and certain contracts, as into slavery,
servitude, and sub-poverty wages, are prohibited.
So there are trade-offs among the different
types of freedom. Which should we accept? The
conventional debate goes as follows. Libertarian
advocates of laissez-faire capitalism claim that
individuals have a right to negative freedom, nobody has a right to positive freedom (a right that
others actually supply goods and opportunities to
them), and if they enter into a contract involving
their subordination to others, this is by their free
consent and so unobjectionable. Negative freedom
trumps the other freedoms. Social democrats, on
the other hand, claim that negative freedom means
little to the desperate and impoverished, who are
driven by necessity to bargain away what few negative freedoms they have just to survive. Hence
they are forced into conditions of destitution and
servitudeconsider the 18 million debt slaves
worldwide. Nobody, say the social democrats, has
a right to a system of property and contract that
leaves so many people with so few options and
subordinate to others, having to beg for whatever
freedoms their masters are willing to grant.
While I would gladly accept the social democratic side of this conventional argument, its

missing a key insight: even the justification of private property and competitive markets presupposes the priority of positive freedom and non-domination over negative freedom. Consider a world
of perfect negative freedom: nobody is entitled to
or does interfere with anyone elses freedom of action. Under such conditions, the world would be
an unregulated commons. Everyone would be free
to use whatever they like.
The liberty-based argument for private property observes that in such a system of anarchist communism everyone would be poor because people
would deplete the commons. Forests would be
razed; fisheries destroyed; game hunted to extinction. No one would want to invest their labor in
farming or other productive pursuits, because the
product of their labor would be seized by others.
However, if we allowed private property, then individuals could appropriate parcels from the commons. Out of self-interest, they would conserve
the resources they own and invest in productive
activities in the confidence that they would be able
to reap rewards from this. Allow markets to arise,
and everyone can get richer by making mutually
beneficial voluntary trades with others. Everyone
gains from having private property and markets.
This is an excellent argument. But note what it
implies. To grant Sarah private property in some
parcel p, the lawthe governmentmust take
away the negative freedom of 6.7 billion people to
use p. What could justify this massive restriction
of negative liberty? The vastly greater opportunities or positive freedom everyone enjoys through
the higher productivity of a society with private
property and markets. The argument for private
property already presupposes that opportunity
positive freedomoften overrides negative freedom.
Considerations of nondomination also override
negative freedom. Thats why capitalist countries,
unlike feudal ones, declare contracts into slavery
and serfdom void and illegal. Once we recognize
that the general case for private property and capitalist (non-feudal) contracts is based on the priority of positive freedom and nondomination over
negative freedom, nothing stops us from configuring property rights (for example, to social security) and contractual limitations so as to abolish
domination and maximize positive freedom for
all. The same logic that justifies private property
and markets justifies social democracy.

EL IZ A BE TH
A NDER SON

The nature
of freedom
entails the
importance
of social
democracy
and the
welfare state

The author is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John

Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Womens
Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She
writes extensively in moral and political philosophy and
the philosophy of the social sciences.
October 27, 2010

KEEP UP THE CONVERSATION BY VISITING OUR BLOG, ALL THINGS CONSIDER, AT

CONSIDERONLINE.ORG
OUR PUBLICATION

FIVE THINGS About Our Freedom

19th-century British philosopher John
Stuart Mill famously championed the right
of individual liberty and was one of the
founding theorists of political liberalism.
Go figure: Mills liberalism is actually
a precursor to both modern American
conservatism and liberalism.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
controls 90% of the Italian tv market, which
doesnt look so good for freedom of the press
in Italy. Time Magazine

The fcc and corporations like Google and

Verizon are locked in a struggle over net
neutrality. The results will determine how
content can be freely disseminated and
accessed on the Internet. Engadget
Shelving the principle of free trade, the
House of Representatives recently approved
a bill placing tariffs on Chinese imports in
response to Chinas failure to revalue its
currency. Washington Times

Consider is a non-partisan, non-profit

publication operated by students at
the University of Michigan. Considers
purpose is to provide an open forum
for discussion of significant issues of
campus, community, national and
world interest.

CONSIDER@CONSIDERONLINE.ORG
We encourage reader participation
through submissions and letters.
Articles should be approximately 850
words in length; letters no more than
250 words.
Consider Magazine
1429 Hill Street
Ann Arbor, Mich. 48104

NEXT WEEKS ISSUE Can the Tea Party Win?

STAFF

CONSIDER IS SPONSORED BY

Editor-in-Chief
Zachary Berlin

University of Michigan Hillel

The Michigan Student Assembly
The Frances Willson Thompson Library
University of MichiganFlint
The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

Managing Editors
Aaron Bekemeyer & Lexie Tourek

WUZZLE

Editors-at-Large
Daniel Strauss & David Friedman
Associate Editors
Tanya Rogovyk, Debbie Sherman,
Lauren Opatowski
Business Manager
Daniel Neumann

courtesy of wuzzlesandpuzzles.com

Business Development
Charlie ONeill & David Braid

Ask us about free advertising

for student groups at
consider@consideronline.org

Webmaster
Elton Li
Public Relations Director
Olivia Aguilar
Public Relations
Daniel Katz & Pauline Knighton
Chief Design Editor
Benjamin English
Art Director
Meirav Gebler
Illustration
Jill Brandwein, Dan Connors,
Laura Gillmore, Rose Jaffe

VOLUME 24 ISSUE 5

Edited by Aaron Bekemeyer, cover illustration by Jill Brandwein

Advisors
Michael Brooks, John Chamberlin,
Robert L. Houbeck, Jr., Greg Merritt,
Carrie Landrum