Three liberties are no liberty at all

 In this blog post, I want to partially echo Zac and Frank in their discussion of the three types of liberty Anderson identifies.

Anderson lays out compelling examples as to why incomplete possession of the forms of liberty results in a circumstance that doesn’t seem to resemble ‘genuine’ freedom. This seems to imply that the state of actual human freedom is, at least partially, defined by the possession of all three forms of liberty. That is, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a free person to possess positive, negative, and republican liberty. Thus, it seems there are, or may be, other considerations that allow a person to attain a state of freedom—or will allow us to determine tradeoffs between each of the three types of liberty.

However, it seems we run into a problem. Liberty seems to be a value that must supersede many other values, but perhaps not all of them. For example, economic utility cannot supersede liberty because that could allow for the possibility of slavery to be justified if it could be proved to be efficient. However, could these subordinate values be used to help weigh the different forms of liberty? That is, could efficiency be used to determine whether or not to increase positive, negative, or republican freedom (and at the expense of which of the others)?

This seems to be a dubious approach. For, if we are appealing to values that cannot supersede liberty as a whole, why should the values supersede liberty in its constituent parts? It seems more compelling that values that supersede liberty themselves should be candidates for determining the weighting of the liberties. But, then, what values supersede liberty? Equality might be seen as one of these; but equality of what? Opportunities? Formal rights? Ability to use one’s means? However, if this higher-order value or set of values is established, why are we to be principally concerned with liberty in the first place? Anderson’s argument would be made stronger, it seems, by appealing to these higher-order values.

But therein lies the problem. If there are higher-order values than liberty, the distinction between the three forms of liberty seems irrelevant since Anderson’s argument seems like it could be strengthened by appealing to a different set of values. If there aren’t higher-order values than liberty, it is unclear how one can go about weighing the three different forms of liberty. If all of them are need, in what proportion? How can that be decided if not by appeal to external factors? So, it seems that Anderson’s argument is either in search of a higher class of values or a more unified conception of liberty.

Personally, I find the appeals to positive and republican liberty a strong rebuttal to more negative-liberty based accounts of freedom like libertarianism. However, I am unsure of how the proportion of the three liberties can be determined, if at all. It seems like one must pursue are more unified conception of freedom that can draw upon appeals to all three of these without needing to specify a particular division of them or underlying distinction. 

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