Summary Of The Massive Scope Of Liberty

The Massive Scope of Liberty The discussion about positive and negative liberty isn’t about liberty, but actually about constraint. This is because every discussion of liberty is instead a discussion about what counts as a restraint because we live in a world absolutely full of restraints. They are incredibly varied and this variety becomes positive and negative liberties downfall. In Nelsons paper “Liberty: One of Two Concepts Liberty: One Concept Too Many?” (2005) he argues that there are different types of liberty but these cannot be accurately portrayed in the very limiting definitions of positive and negative. To do this Nelson uses many different examples of liberty, both positive and negative, to describe what a diverse and varied issue

Rawls falls more into the positive liberty system of thought. Under positive liberty physical constraint is not a sufficient definition of constraint. Other considerations such as social constraints must be taken into case, this lead Rawls to create a thought experiment. You must imagine yourself in the original position behind the veil of ignorance. This means you must imagine a world in which no rules have yet been made and no constraints have been imposed yet. This is the original position. You also don’t know what social class, race, religion, ethnicity, dreams, aims or any identifying features you will come into your new world with. This is the veil of ignorance. Under these conditions you are forced to create the most equal possible rules because you cannot create a political system to suit you individually. You have no idea which individual you are going to be. Therefore no bias is created. The act of creating rules for this society means you are partaking in positive liberty. You are creating rules to increase freedom. You are giving people liberty. To do this you have had to remove all consideration of your character and life indicating that they are constraining you. Under these set of laws Rawls believes people behind the veil of ignorance have had to remove constraints in order to create the rules to give people freedom. This indicates a certain sense of negative liberty is being thought about when

Pettit concedes that two concepts is not sufficient to describe the whole range freedom can take. By adding a third concept Pettit thinks that he has solved this problem of two concepts being too limited. His third concept of liberty is the absence of mastery or the absence of domination. By arguing that domination is different from interference Pettit attempts to show that the absence of domination is neither a positive or negative liberty. To illustrate his point Pettit uses the example of a slave left to run his masters house. The master does not interfere with his slave and leaves him to get on with running the house, and so is not infringing his negative liberty. The slave is dependent on his master, as he owns the house. So he is in a state of dependency on him even though his master isn’t constraining him. This means the slave isn’t free even though he isn’t being interfered with and so negative or positive liberty doesn’t accurately describe this situation. Nelson also describes a reverse argument of someone who is free even though they are being interfered with. We live in societies where rules are imposed upon us. We still consider ourselves free within democracy though. This is because some sort of all-powerful ruler does not dominate us. This view of freedom is not positive because it requires us to be free from domination. The view isn’t negative either though because we