Liberty
The term “liberty” ought to be used, properly, for the view of political freedom which constitutionally based political systems adopt. The American system of government has a core value of liberty in its foundations. The supporting theory – essentially a moral theory, since justification of a system is a normative project – comes out of the Enlightenment spectrum of social-contractarian theories. It is the Lockean-Jeffersonian variety that is the relevant social contract theory in this instance.
An early definition of the concept of liberty, in the proper sense for this type of government, is found in Thomas Hobbes’ work entitled Leviathan. This might be politically awkward insofar as Hobbes concluded his political disquisitions in support of a monarchical system but there is no logical contradiction involved in this. Caution is needed if one tries to trace antecedents of this view in classical antiquity. The term “liberty” as discussed here is theoretically embedded, as pointed out above. The definition, to be given below, is a theoretical definition. The dictionary or lexical definition one finds in the English language may well reflect this, in one of its entries. To look for candidate concepts in other traditions, which may resonate with “liberty” as understood in this context, is tricky. Keeping this mind, we can simplify conveniently, and for the sake of explication, and try this: notice the implication in the roots of the word “liberty” of what we find in the now archaic adjective “libertine”. The meaning of this word is something along the lines of “uncontrollably licentious, giving free reign to passions and desires.” In an ancient work like Plato’s Republic, you would find the broad category of egalitarian systems attacked severely: the word “eleutheria” there means something like “license, uncontrollable exercise of passions.” It is not a coincidence that modern Greek uses this same word to mean precisely “freedom”, both in the sense of national liberation and in the sense we are discussing here as “liberty.” In the context of Plato’s writing, the word was something of a political slogan, unfurled avidly by the partisan supporters of egalitarian political systems. This indicates that, unlike in the post-Enlightenment environment, “liberty” was not to be taken as an overarching, incontrovertible value but as a theoretical element in a political and narrow ideology. A good source for the deeper view involved in this is the 3rd book of Aristotle’s Politics.
Hobbes, an erudite student and teacher of the classical texts and translator of Thucydides himself, was well aware of this theoretical backdrop when he fixed the definition of “liberty” as, roughly, the absence of obstacles to the unbridled exercise of individual desires. It is tempting to think that this way of theoretically defining the key concept will inevitably give rise to anarchical chaos as everyone may be licensed to pursue their private wishes. This is a mistake, however. Plato himself, who claimed that there is something anarchic about “democracies,” had to make separate arguments to support such a claim. The normative character of “liberty” – the notion involved, which is essentially prescriptive and, also, prohibitive in certain respects – ensures that restrictions on license are in place: the point is that equal license is to be given to all, if to any; accordingly, the extension of this free exercise of “passions” reaches only as far as it affects the equal moral claim of any one else to a similar exercise of private wishes. At least, this is the case in an organized system which, if legitimate, is theoretically the product of a social contract. While no regulatory constraints can be defended – for Hobbes at least – in the jungle, the transition from a “state of nature” to organized society means also that there is now a shift to an ordered liberty system, in which corresponding moral claims against others are available: thus, you are protected against someone else’s exercise of liberty claims to the extent precisely in which your own liberty claims are affected. A system like this can guarantee private moral claims that reach all the way to property – although Hobbes’ theory, unlike Locke’s, cannot reach that point.
The definition of liberty, then, has to do fundamentally with the free exercise of a license to pursue the objects of one’s wishes up to the point that others’ similar claims are impinged upon. Philosophically, there are clear affinities between this view and the operation of a sacred private sphere of action within which one is held inviolable both as a physical entity (body and mind) as well as with respect to his/her choices and actions. The ultimate justification or moral defense of this view takes the ultimate human value to be autonomous development. A rational individual – minimally rational, in the sense that one can give the moral law to himself or herself – ought to choose how to develop: which characters, life-patterns, career objectives, to pursue. There seems to be a close connection between this theoretical construct (a value theory, really) and the theory (both the descriptive and justificatory theories) of the free market. The individual encounters markets alone, with interferences and communities counted as secondary encumbrances: the individual enters the relevant market to develop in the sense of unfolding his or her choices – choosing what to offer in the market and what to buy as a consumer.
For most people it is unthinkable that there can be a rival theory of political freedom. Yet, there is one; someone like Plato who, as we saw, was a severe critic of egalitarian systems could indeed speak of freedom. A different sense of the word is involved, of course. This is understandable since these are theoretically embedded concepts and the corresponding theories are different. While “liberty” in our sense matches Plato’s “licentiousness” (free reign to private wishes, regardless of what those wishes may be), his concept of political freedom corresponds to what we may phrase as “freedom from the wrong content of wishes.” In a majestic essay, the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin called the two different notions of political freedom respectively “negative” (for liberty) and “positive” (for the notion we find in Plato’s views, but also in many other, including modern, political philosophic theories and ideologies.)
Positive Freedom
The other view of political freedom, adumbrated above, requires evaluation of content – what the object of the individual wishes is – for deciding whether freedom truly obtains. A consequence of this is that only those who, objectively, have the ability to make the right decisions have inhering to their moral agency moral claims – rights. One enslaved to ignorance, evil, destructive desires is not free – he or she is not free from the wrong things and, hence, is not, properly speaking, politically free either. Why should political and contentful freedom belong together, as this view claims? One kind of theory that advances this position takes a holistic view of truths: political and ethical matters are not inseparable from any of the other areas of knowledge (including knowledge about how things work.) It is possible, however, to take this “positive” view of freedom without having a holistic philosophy and simply as a matter of rejecting the view of “liberty” which Isaiah Berlin called “negative.” (Berlin did not mean this as a critical term: the political freedom view that advocates liberty is negative in the sense that it does NOT matter what one puts as content inside desires or wishes – one has a presumptive moral claim, a right, to pursuing those aims privately.)
Relativism is clearly antithetical to the positive view. Who is to decide how the content of wishes is to be evaluated, so that those with the wrong kind of wish or wrong target of desire are to be found dispossessed of political rights? The position of Enlightenment advocates of liberty, including the American Founders, was not relativistic. The point was not that objective truths are not ultimately available. This applies also in the sensitive area of moral truths – which is the relevant sphere anyway. The theory of liberty is that, regardless of the prospect of making objectively attestable errors, the individual has an inherent moral claim, a right, to be the author of his or her own choices. Truth enforced does not improve the individual. A darker underpinning in the theory is, however, discernible: it is also part of underlying theories that the human animal is basically an organic machine drawn appetitively to what advances prospects of survival and, if possible, happiness. The source of moral claims – hence, ultimately, of political rights – is to be understood within this primordial-nature game: the template for rights or moral claims rises out of the basic claim to “self-preservation” as the theories of social contract put it. Thus, a quarrel here, between the positive and negative views, also concerns, literally, what the place of humans is within the totality of things. When we put things in this way, we see again that Relativism is not supposed to play a role. Regardless of whether there are moral truths or not, the first and decisive moral claim is to self-preservation. Now, one could attack this vire itself on relativistic grounds: why should we accept this moral principle about self-preservation if all moral matters depend on arbitrary opinion? Because the theory seems rooted in how natural things work, there is an impression that this view is insulated from relativistic attacks. This is not tha case, however, because naturalism as the proper approach to moral theory is itself open to attack by relativistic means.
The relativistic view of morality that is fashionable today, at least in spontaneous speech, makes it harder, if not impossible, to defend the positive view of liberty. If it is hopeless to speak of objective truths in moral matters, then what sense are we to make of the demand to evaluate the content of private wishes? Remember that the theory of positive political freedom accords moral claims, rights, only to those who have the requisite abilities to make the right choices. It is possible, theoretically, to grant that any fixing of “right” is arbitrary and still make this arbitrary yardstick political relevant by denying rights to those who do not meet the set standard.
This old division between alternative and rival view of political freedom is exacerbated in the contemporary global environment because theocratic ideologies – inspired by Bible or Quaran – cannot but choose the positive view. This would not be like Plato’s – since the standards are not considered discoverable by unassisted human reason. Yet, it is a positive view in the sense that moral claims – and hence whatever is to be allowed as political rights – must pass a test of congruence with the standards provided by the religion and its historically established or dominant tradition. In the West, Protestantism loosened this bond between moral claims and content of character and made separation of Church from State theoretically defensible and socially palatable. The moral individual who, privately, is “face to face” with God is sensible (a view anticipated by Augustine.) This contrasts with the view that has individual salvation as being integrated with the destiny of a sinful human community – the “Ekklesia” or Assembly (i.e. Church). Islam has not undergone anything parallel to the Protestant Reformation. While theocratic demands arising within Christianity seem helplessly anachronistic, this is not obviously so in the case of Islamist fundamentalism – the enduring case of Saudi Arabia as a theocracy and the source of Sunni faith is a testament to this.
, Two Theories of Political Freedom www.ozeldersin.com bitirme tezi,ödev,proje dönem ödevi