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| − | "In re- cognizing that freedom is always both freedom from something and freedom to do or become something, one is provided with a means of making sense out of interminable and poorly defined controversies concerning, for example, when a person really is free, why freedom is important, and on what its importance depends." | + | "In recognizing that freedom is always both freedom from something and freedom to do or become something, one is provided with a means of making sense out of interminable and poorly defined controversies concerning, for example, when a person really is free, why freedom is important, and on what its importance depends." |
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| | "Taking the format 'x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z', x ranges over agents, y ranges over such 'preventing conditions' as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance." | | "Taking the format 'x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z', x ranges over agents, y ranges over such 'preventing conditions' as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance." |
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| | what they want to do, or what they 'really' want to do, or what they would want to do if ... The idea would be to promote seeing the removal of ignorance and passion, or at least the control of their effects, as the removal or control of something preventing a person from doing as he wishes, really wishes, or would wish, and so forth, and thus, plausibly, an increase of that person's freedom. | | what they want to do, or what they 'really' want to do, or what they would want to do if ... The idea would be to promote seeing the removal of ignorance and passion, or at least the control of their effects, as the removal or control of something preventing a person from doing as he wishes, really wishes, or would wish, and so forth, and thus, plausibly, an increase of that person's freedom. |
| − | Arguments concerning the 'true' identity of the person in question and what can restrict such a person's freedom are of course important here and should be pushed further than the above discussion suggests. For the present, however, one need observe only that they are met again when one presses for specification of the full range of what, on interpretation (2), Smith is made free to do. Apparently, he is made free to do as he wishes, really wishes, or would wish if . . . But, quite obviously, there is also something that he is prima facie not free to do; otherwise, there would be no point in declaring that he was being made free by means ofrestraint. One may discover how this difficulty is met by looking again to the arguments by which the claimer seeks to establish that something which at first appears to be a restraint is not actually a restraint at all. Two main lines may be found here: (a) that the activities being 'restrained' are so unimportant or minor (relative, perhaps, to what is gained) that they are not worth counting, or (b) that the activities are such that no one could ever want (or really want, and so forth) to engage in them. If the activities in question are so unimportant as to be negligible, the restraints that prevent one from engaging in them may be also 'not worthy ofconsideration'; if, on the other hand, the activities are ones that no one would conceivably freely choose to engage in, then it might indeed be thought 'idle' to consider | + | Arguments concerning the 'true' identity of the person in question and what can restrict such a person's freedom are of course important here and should be pushed further than the above discussion suggests. For the present, however, one need observe only that they are met again when one presses for specification of the full range of what, on interpretation ( |
| − | our inability to do them as a restriction upon our freedom. Admittedly, the persons actually making the principal claim under consideration may have been confused, may not have seen all these alternatives ofinterpretation, and so forth. The intention here is not to say what such persons did mean when uttering the claims, but only more or less plausibly what they might have meant. The interpretations provide the main lines for the latter. They also provide a clear picture of what needs to be done in order to assess the worth ofthe claims in
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| − | Negative and Positive Freedom 121
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| − | each case; for, ofcourse, no pretence is being made here that such arguments are always or even very often ultimately convincing.
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| − | Interpretation (2) clearly provides the most difficult and interesting problems. One may analyse and discuss these problems by considering them to be raised by attempts to answer the following four questions:
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| − | (a) What is to count as an interference with the freedom of persons?
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| − | (b) What is to count as an action that persons might reasonably be said to be either free or not free to perform? (c) What is to count as a legitimate interference with the
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| − | freedom of persons?
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| − | (d') What actions are persons best left free to do?
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| − | As was mentioned above, there is a tendency to telescope (c) into (a), and to telescope (d') into (b). It was also noted that (c) and (d') are not distinct questions: they are logically related in so far as criteria of legitimacy are connected to beliefs about what is best or most desirable. (a) and (b) are also closely related in that an answer to one will affect what can reasonably be considered an answer to the other. The use of these questions as guides in the analysis and understanding of discussions of freedom should not, therefore, be expected to produce always a neat ordering of the discussion. But it will help further to delimit the alternatives of reasonable inter- pretation.
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| − | 6
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| − | In the end, then, discussions of the freedom of agents can be fully intelligible and rationally assessed only after the specifica- tion of each term of this triadic relation has been made or at least understood. The principal claim made here has been that insistence upon this single 'concept' offreedom puts us in a position to see the interesting and important ranges of issues separating the philosophers who write about freedom in such different ways, and the ideologies that treat freedom so differently. These issues are obscured, if not hidden, when we
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| − | 122 Gerald C. MacCallwn, J,:
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| − | suppose that the important thing is that the fascists, com- munists, and socialist~ on the one side, for example, have a different concept of freedom from that of the 'libertarians' on the other. These issues are also hidden, ofcourse, by the facile assumption that the adherents on one side or the other are never smcere.
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