Morality, Social Policy and Berlin's Two Concepts - .political philosopher Isaiah Berlin - )

Social Research, Winter, 1999 by Robert Grant

THE sociologist Helmut Schoeck once observed that envy is so shameful that it is the only human passion to which no one who harbours it will ever admit.(1) When we feel it, therefore, we have always to disguise it as something more respectable. By a reverse application of the same principle, freedom or liberty (there seems no point in trying to distinguish between the two) is a thing that even the worst of tyrannies claims somehow to stand for. No standard political concept has been more subject to semantic abuse, not even that of democracy. The Fascists and the National Socialists at least had the good grace to make no bones about democracy, their opinion of which was like Dean Inge's of sin: they were against it, and never pretended otherwise. But everyone loves, or professes to love, freedom.

Is freedom (or liberty) then a mere Humpty-Dumpty word, meaning whatever one wants it to mean, and thus a term that we would do well to dispense with? I think not. It is well worth trying to distinguish "true" freedom both from equally respectable cognate goods, and from its less respectable impostures.

Isaiah Berlin's distinction, in "Two Concepts of Liberty," between negative and positive liberty (Berlin, 1969) may be less illuminating than it at first seems; not because those things are not distinct (they are), but because, like sausages and roses, they may well (to use Berlin's own expression) be incommensurable. Each, doubtless, is a good. We may sometimes have to choose between them. But it is not clear--at least, not prima facie--that they are sufficiently the same kind of thing to deserve their common designation as "liberty".

Possibly only the negative kind qualifies unequivocally as liberty proper (which is not to say it is always a good). It is conceivable, though not certain, that the positive kind, though no less valuable, belongs essentially to a different category of goods. Perhaps it acquired the title of liberty simply by way of an honorific, and might, though rated no less highly than now, have been called something else in an age or culture that set less of an official premium on liberty. As for negative and positive liberalism, which are not Berlinian expressions, superficially they ought to mean versions of liberalism--libertarian and left-liberal respectively (say)--which in social philosophy and policy systematically favour one kind of liberty over the other. Things are not so simple, however, because those two liberalisms also differ about which spheres of human action ought to be governed by which kind of liberty.

The libertarian seems more consistent (indiscriminate, his critics would say) in seeing laissez-faire (negative liberty) as the model for both economic and moral life. The left-liberal, on the other hand, will favour positive liberty (which usually implies state intervention) in economics and (particularly) welfare, but negative liberty, or laissez-faire, in morals. But there is, in fact, consistency here too. Not only is there a common ethical principle (hedonism) behind the left-liberal agenda, but also an underlying logic, since the consequence (to be argued later) of moral laissez-faire is people who, being incapable of autonomy or self-direction, must naturally become dependent on government. Government accordingly must be enlarged, and, under democracy, sustain itself, whether intentionally or not, with "tied" votes from both its clients and the welfare bureaucracy which caters to them. If this is the reality, or something like it, of left-liberal government (and even left-liberals seem now to concede that it may be), surely the same ought similarly to follow from the libertarian's moral premises. Does it, or not? I shall return to these questions at the end.

Berlin's notion of negative liberty is clearer than his notion of positive. One reason is surely that the first is simpler and (perhaps oddly, for something negative) more tangible, and thus easier to be clear about. (One might call it "shallower", without thereby denying its significance.) I enjoy negative liberty in a given sphere so long, and so far, as there is no wilful or deliberate human impediment to my action in that sphere. It is "negative" because it specifies, and turns on, an absence. It does not attribute any particular content (or indeed value) to my freedom, or say what I could or should be doing with it. As Bentham rightly stressed, it would be no less a freedom (in its way) if what I did with it were bad, either for me or for others.(2) The very fact that it can be abused is one reason why it cannot in practice be allowed to be limitless; the same idea, in slightly different form, was emphasized by Hobbes, to the effect that liberty, if limitless and universal, is self-cancelling, affording to each no practical protection against (or freedom from) his neighbour's incursion (i.e., freedom to invade). The purely moral permission, therefore, that, according to Hobbes, each still theoretically enjoys to do as he might wish is valueless.