Factbites
 Where results make sense
About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   PR   |   Contact us  

Topic: Negative liberty


Related Topics

In the News (Mon 16 Nov 09)

  
  Positive and Negative Liberty (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints.
To promote negative freedom is to promote the existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is sovereign, and within which she can pursue her own projects subject only to the constraint that she respect the spheres of others.
Positive liberty consists, they say, in exactly this growth of the individual: the free individual is one that develops, determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously and from within.
plato.stanford.edu /entries/liberty-positive-negative   (6624 words)

  
 Partisan Review
These liberties were no longer granted the status of inalienable natural rights that had marked their secular canonization in the political theories of the founding fathers of liberal democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As a political corollary of the third concept of liberty, the claim is that a free or pluralist society should move beyond nondiscrimination toward the recognition that freedom for the individual requires that the State and the culture positively support the freedom of choice of persons in their sexual self-identification.
According to the second pattern, with the concept of positive liberty, the focus shifts away from preserving the wall of separation between the public and private domain toward a concern with the free development of the group which is identified as the bearer of historical self-consciousness.
www.bu.edu /partisanreview/archive/2001/4/sidorsky.html   (10495 words)

  
 Negative Liberty - Political Freedom   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
Political nature of liberties: The political nature of liberty can simply be referred to as ‘freedom from,’ or not being prevented from acting on one’s own accord by the state or any governmental body.
The most important aspect of negative liberty is that an individual's public and private acts are free from government control.
, Rousseau’s goal is to preserve a form of negative liberty (the natural liberty of man, including the ideas of dignity of being, and the rights and duties of humanity) in as pure a form as possible through a social compact or contract.
www.msu.edu /course/iah/231a/snapshot.afs/rauscher/Political.htm   (456 words)

  
 Why Libertarianism Is Mistaken
Consequently, "liberty" should be seen as a normative term such that if A has the liberty to do if then not only is no one prohibiting him from doing it, but it is also morally permissible that he do it.
That is, "liberty" is, and should be maintained as, a value-neutral term which merely states that there arc limitations, without any judgment as to their propriety.
Consequently, the protection of individual liberty cannot be the purpose of (or consequence of) negative rights since the determination that someone had the liberty to do X depends upon the determination that he has the right to do it.
www.stpt.usf.edu /hhl/papers/Libertar.htm   (5849 words)

  
 PlanetPapers - Positive And Negative Liberty
Negative liberty is a natural right of each person and it is not provided by any kind of authority whatsoever.
Through negative liberty the individual can isolate himself for a certain period of time from the rest of the society and the society is unable of contesting his decision.
The distinction between positive and negative liberty is wholly invalid in that freedom from something (negative liberty) and freedom to (positve liberty) are the same.
www.planetpapers.com /Assets/4272.php   (1058 words)

  
 The Quality of Freedom
The book is concerned primarily with the measurement of liberty, or what Kramer refers to as “non-normative” liberty, although it clearly engages and contributes to normative arguments in favor of a theory of negative liberty.
And since the distinction between negative and positive liberty is at the core of the book, Kramer articulates that distinction in a fairly pithy manner: “Whereas positive liberty is a matter of accomplishments, negative liberty is a matter of opportunities” (p.2).
According to Kramer, because “the doctrine of positive liberty and the doctrine of negative liberty are genuinely in competition.
www.bsos.umd.edu /gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/kramer604.htm   (2357 words)

  
 Isiah Berlin: "Two Concepts of Liberty"
Berlin: these are not the same (the first is negative liberty, the second is utilitarianism), and it might turn out that repression fosters (b) just as much or better than freedom (as James Stephen argued).
Negative liberty is not incompatible with autocracy “or at any rate with the absence of self-government”:  You can have a dictatorship where the dictator allows his subjects great private spheres, and conversely a democracy where every area of life is up for public legislation.
Pluralism, with the measure of “negative” liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of “positive” self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.
spruce.flint.umich.edu /~simoncu/368/berlin.htm   (937 words)

  
 What is liberty   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
It is often said that there are two types of liberty, positive liberty and negative liberty, or, roughly, 'freedom to...' and 'freedom from...' This, I believe, is a false and meaningless dichotomy.
Liberty is a word that does not describe two things; it describes one singular thing, one single state of being.
Capitalist 'liberty' restricts and suppresses the free unfettered self-development of the individual, the free autonomous self-management of one's own affairs and the freedom that comes with removing fear, state-violence and war from the world.
struggle.ws /wsm/ws/2005/85/liberty.html   (740 words)

  
 AtheistParents.org :: View topic - Positive and Negative Liberty
Negative Liberty is the idea that everyone should be free to do however he pleases.
"Negative liberty," by contrast, seems to start with a baseline state wherein everything is considered a right, and from that point restrictions may or may not be applied.
Negative liberty says that there is no correct way to do things, that all ways are equally viable.
www.atheistparents.org /forum/viewtopic.php?t=10446   (966 words)

  
 POSITIVE LIBERTY   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
Positive liberty means free from internal restraints, such as greed, lust ignorance, etc. Here expresses the rationality of the true soul that is uncovered when internal restraints are removed.
NEGATIVE LIBERTY (Ockham, Hobbes, Lock, J.S. mill, Libertarian Party.) Negative liberty means freedom from external restraints, which are embodied in unnecessary laws, etc. As J. Bentham states: "Every law is an infraction of liberty." Laws are only conventional and convenient, and should be kept to the bare minimum involving murder, physical assault, theft, and fraud.
The motto for negative liberty is one can do what one pleases (within a minimal legal framework).
www.class.uidaho.edu /ngier/liberty.htm   (264 words)

  
 Blair's 'negative liberty' - all negative and no liberty | Manifesto Club
Negative liberty has traditionally been seen as ‘freedom from’ the state – the greatest source of authority in society – preserving for the individual an inviolable sphere where the government may not tread.
Freedom from anti-social behaviour is also central to Blair’s conception of liberty, as 'every member of the community in which it happens, has their human rights broken'.
In the past, the Labour Party’s version of positive liberty was equality of outcome, where it was seen as heralding a just society and the realisation of the Good Life.
www.manifestoclub.com /node/64   (882 words)

  
 [No title]
Negative liberty is a less ambitious notion of freedom. Put simply it is an absence of coercion.
Negative liberty relies on the notion that people should not coerce or be coerced.
Positive liberty is closer to being a sort of ‘mastery of destiny’.
albertspeer.tripod.com /files/Liberty._Positive___Negative.doc   (1177 words)

  
 Odd Thoughts » Liberalism
Positive liberty … refers to the ability to act to fulfill one’s own potential, as opposed to negative liberty, which refers to freedom from the interference of others in one’s affairs.
Positive liberty is often described as freedom to achieve certain ends, while negative liberty is described as freedom from external coercion.
Certainly maximizing individual liberty must be a goal of government but it is not the only goal and the difficulties seem to arise when small coercions provide big benefits in other areas.
www.oddthoughts.ca /2005/11/liberalism   (913 words)

  
 Philosophy of Law: Lecture Notes: University of West Georgia - Robert Lane, Ph.D.   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
In “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), Berlin described two different ways of conceiving of political liberty or freedom (note that he did not think that these are the only two such concepts).
E.g., many of the liberties secured in the Constitution seem to be negative liberties.
The freedoms enumerated herein are negative: they guarantee that no laws will be made that will prevent a citizen from (among other things) worshipping, speaking, and assembling peacefully.
www.westga.edu /~rlane/law/lecture15_freedom1.html   (1651 words)

  
 Liberty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liberty is generally considered a concept of political philosophy and identifies the condition in which an individual has the ability to act according to his or her own will.
Still, the Roman citizen enjoyed a combination of positive liberty (the right to freely enter contracts, the right to a legal marriage) and negative liberty (the right to a trial, a right to appeal and the right to not be tortured).
Many of the liberties enjoyed under Roman law endured through the Middle Ages, but were enjoyed solely by the nobility, never by the common man. The idea of unalienable and universal liberties had to wait until the Age of Enlightenment.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Liberty   (2177 words)

  
 Republicanism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This idea of negative liberty Berlin associates especially with the classic English political philosophers Hobbes, Bentham, and J. Mill, and it is today probably the dominant conception of liberty, particularly among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers.
Given the rhetorical prominence of liberty in the classical republican writings, it follows from their holding a negative conception of freedom that they cannot have been advancing a perfectionist political philosophy, as the civic humanists claim.
For the most part, they stem from the observation that the widespread enjoyment of republican liberty is most likely to be maximized in a community where the citizens are committed to that ideal, and each is willing to do his or her part in realizing it.
plato.stanford.edu /entries/republicanism   (7326 words)

  
 jaded: Liberty and Obligation in the State (politics)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
Negative freedom is explained as the elimination of restraints upon the individual.
In this way, Locke was insuring that the liberty of an individual would not be encroached upon by government by empowering him/her with the legitimate authority to create or destroy that government.
Rousseau believes that liberty is the ultimate goal, but feels that the only way to achieve that goal is through the political obligation owed to the state by it's citizens.
www.econ.nyu.edu /user/nizxa/jaded/liberty.htm   (1941 words)

  
 Political Philosophy Primer
According to one theory of liberty, namely "negative" liberty, one can be politically free without having free-will.
GENERAL DEFINITION OF LIBERTY Liberty is the action of a personal agent in the absence of restraints or obstacles that might lie in the path of that agent’s desired goals.
While the principle of negative liberty could not support any welfare programs at all, the principle of utility gives solid justification of the modern welfare state.
www.class.uidaho.edu /ngier/103/polphil.htm   (1995 words)

  
 Negative liberty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One might ask, "How is men's desire for liberty to be reconciled with the need for authority?" Its answer by various thinkers provides a fault line for understanding their view on liberty but also a cluster of intersecting concepts such as authority, equality, and justice.
Hobbes, who took a rather negative view of human nature, argued that a strong authority was needed to curb men's intrinsically wild, savage, and corrupt impulses.
Liberterian thinker Tibor Machan defends negative liberty as "required for moral choice and, thus, for human flourishing," claiming that it "is secured when the rights of individual members of a human community to life, to voluntary action (or to liberty of conduct), and to property are universally respected, observed, and defended."
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Negative_liberty   (719 words)

  
 Douglas den Uyl on the Inherent Value of Liberty
This is partly because this is a gathering of libertarians, but mainly because the case is more difficult with just negative liberty as the framework of analysis.
If one is working within a framework of negative liberty and methodological individualism, it's hard to imagine a case for anything but political liberty being an instrumental value.
Liberty is conceived analogously to rules of the game that are not themselves the object of playing but the structural principles through which playing takes place, then those rules can be considered inherently valuable in the sense of being valued through each act that expresses them
www.isil.org /resources/fnn/2003summer/doug-den-uyl.html   (1292 words)

  
 Liberty in Action 2
Last week, I showed how negative and positive liberty could work together to help create a full set of liberties for people living in a particular state.
Positive liberties are ways that the state can actively help people reach their goals.
However, taxation is a limitation on negative liberty because the state takes wealth that you could otherwise use in whatever way you chose.
philosophy.suite101.com /article.cfm/liberty_in_action_2   (428 words)

  
 Positive & Negative Liberties in Three Dimensions
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is often credited with originating the idea of negative freedom and of "civil society" (as opposed to "political society"), which is then that sphere of action free of government control in which citizens actually exercise their negative freedom.
Hobbes, however, was an absolutist who honored nothing in the way of "positive" political liberties and who saw the sphere of civil society and negative freedom as granted and allowed entirely at the discretion of the monarch.
The problem with "welfare rights" as positive "liberties" is that, while they might enable the beneficiary to do what he wants, they must be applied by the threat or the use of force against the freedom and/or property of others.
www.friesian.com /quiz.htm   (6448 words)

  
 OpinionEditorials.com — Positively Negative - Liberty
So negativity properly channelled (no mud, lots of fear) is a tremendously powerful force.
Logic in the face of such strong emotion is simply ignored, misunderstood, or comes in a distant second or thid place to some perceived clear and present danger.
Lady Liberty is a pro-freedom activist currently residing in the Midwest with her two cats and many, many books.
www.opinioneditorials.com /guestcontributors/lliberty_20041115.html   (1378 words)

  
 The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty’’—absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action—as against “positive liberty; which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power or mastery over himself or his environment.
’s concept of negative liberty seems similar to the thesis of the present volume: that liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual’s person and property.
the fate of personal liberty during the reign of unfettered economic individualism—about the condition of the injured majority, principally in the towns, whose children were destroyed in mines or mills, while their parents lived in poverty, disease, and ignorance, a situation in which the enjoyment by the poor and the weak of legal rights.
www.mises.org /rothbard/ethics/twentyseven.asp   (1250 words)

  
 Berlin on the RPF
But even negative liberty, solely in terms of freedom of coercion—
just how big our circle of negative liberty should be.
Berlin contrasts negative liberty with positive liberty, which “derives from
www.rightsphilosophyforum.org /Berlin.html   (817 words)

  
 Rating Agencies Liberty Outlook Negative | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
Liberty Media's total debt was $11 billion on Sept. 30, according to Standard and Poor's.
Fitch also downgraded Liberty' Media's issuer default and senior unsecured ratings to "BB" from "BB+," based on expected debt for QVC and uncertainty on the long-term plans for Liberty Media.
Shares of Liberty Media fell 30 cents to close at $21.57 on the Nasdaq.
www.chron.com /disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4421626.html   (276 words)

  
 FROM THE U
The central focus of the course will be on liberty, especially on the question of whether the preservation of some sort of liberty rights has or ought to have priority over other social values.
’s concept with the popular concept of positive liberty that measures liberty by the number of available options one has.
        Historically, the advocates of liberty as Rational Autonomy typically assumed a Rationalist epistemology (e.g., Rousseau and Kant) and the advocates of liberty as negative freedom typically assumed an Empiricist epistemology (e.g., Locke and Hume).
faculty.washington.edu /wtalbott/phil410/trintro.htm   (1637 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)

Factbites
  About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   Press   |   Contact us  
Copyright © 2005-2007 www.factbites.com Usage implies agreement with terms.