Dueling Podcasts on “Positive Liberty” and the Welfare State

Tyler Cowen had an interesting and provocative podcast interview the other day and I responded today. To find both of them, go to the Cato Daily Podcast Archive; Tyler’s is on March 20 and mine is on March 22.

22 Responses to “Dueling Podcasts on “Positive Liberty” and the Welfare State”

  1. Kent Guida

    Great job on the podcast. It’s the definitive treatment on the positive-negative question, as far as I’m concerned.
    But Tyler’s original piece also raises a larger question — the one Tocqueville wrote about.
    Tocqueville posed the question: will people let their freedom slip away and adjust to a new form of democratic despotism because they are satisfied with increasing wealth?
    Tyler seems to be saying the question has been answered. The people choose despotism, because they think ‘positive liberty’ trumps all.
    History since Tocqueville suggests Tyler may be right, Tocqueville’s question is no longer on the table. Which makes the whole train of thought quite disturbing.

    March 23, 2007 at 3:40 pm
  2. Tom G. Palmer

    Thanks, Kent.

    A few comments …..

    1. The discussion of positive liberties and positive rights got a little bit garbled, as when my friend Anastasia asked about positive “liberties,” the question was about positive “rights.” So my answer was not as clear as I would have liked.

    2. I think that the question is still very much on the table. I’m not giving up on that one.

    March 23, 2007 at 5:05 pm
  3. Matt Zwolinski

    There seems to be a bit of discussion on this going on at Tyler’s blog (and Will Wilkinson’s too), but I’ll weigh in here.

    I think the point that Tyler was trying to make was that most people don’t view
    negative liberty as an end-in-itself. It’s a great thing, but it’s great
    for what it allows us to do, and it’s the doing that we value for its own
    sake. We like being able to read the kind of books we want to read, wear
    the kind of clothes we want to wear, etc.

    Now a lot of the critics of capitalism base their criticism on the empirical
    claim that negative liberty *won’t* get us these things. A system of
    exclusively negative liberties, they think, will lead to something like the
    enslavement of the masses by the powerful corporations. We won’t be able to
    read the kind of books we want to read because Wal-Mart will control what we
    have access to, and they’ll exercise their power to censor out books they
    don’t like. Women and minorities will have fewer options to them unless
    capitalism is reigned in by anti-discrimination law and affirmative action.
    The poor will have fewer options because they’ll be kept at the level of
    subsistence wages, etc etc.

    Now if they were actually right, that would be a big blow against the system
    of negative liberties. If negative liberty is only good for the options it
    gives us, and it doesn’t give us those options, then negative liberty isn’t
    so good after all. Or to put it another way, if my ability to do what I want
    is severely and irrevocably limited, then it doesn’t much matter to me
    whether the limitation is due to government fiat or Sam Walmart’s fiat.
    It’s positive freedom, which I’m defining provisionally as the ability to do
    what we want, that attracts us to negative liberty in the first place, and
    if people don’t think negative liberty will give it to them, then they’ll go
    someplace else to get it.

    So I think there’s a legitimate concept of positive liberty, and I think
    it’s legitimately something worth caring about. Rhetorically, it might be
    confusing to call it liberty, and I’d be happy to call it opportunity or
    something else. But philosophically, I don’t think Tyler was confused at
    all. Negative liberty and positve liberty are both legitimate concepts, referring to different things, and I think it’s pretty plausible to hold that the political guarantee of the former is only instrumentally valuable insofar as it gets people the latter.

    March 23, 2007 at 10:43 pm
  4. Tom G. Palmer

    Thanks, Matt. Very thoughtful comments, but I’m too tired right now to respond, so I’ll sleep on these and respond tomorrow. (I hope that that will make my response less foggy than it might be were I to write it tonight.)

    March 24, 2007 at 1:03 am
  5. Tom G. Palmer

    What Matt is saying, I think, is that people like some things because they can get them other things, and that they view political systems or systems of rules that way. No doubt. I think that among the benefits of liberty is material well being. If I thought that liberty would systematically lead to human suffering and degradation, I wouldn’t favor it. Ok. Matt accepts much of my point by pointing out that “Rhetorically, it might be confusing to call it liberty, and I’d be happy to call it opportunity or something else,” but I see no reason why he substitutes “rhetorically” for “conceptually” (or some other term). Why is it only a matter of rhetoric? It’s clearly not. It’s a conceptual distinction. If we like property rights because they create the framework for prosperity, does it follow that we should call the results, like longer life span, “property rights”? Would that be rhetorically confused or conceptually confused? One is cause and the other effect. That’s not a rhetorical distinction, but a conceptual one.

    Moreover, many people do consider freedom of intrinsic value, as well. I do and I’m hardly alone. We may be a minority, but we are not non-existent. Why ignore our values if the values of people who prefer another iPod are so important? And as a matter of moral argument, I do think that a good case can be made that everyone ought to consider freedom of intrinsic value, since if happiness is valued for its own sake (as Aristotle argues, if some things are valued for the sake of other things, then there must be something that is valued for itself, and he calls that happiness) and if happiness is not a mere state (e.g, want satisfaction, which is the direction Tyler seems to want to take us), but an “activity in accordance with virtue,” that is, something you do, and if such an activity requires self-directedness, and self-directedness requires freedom, then freedom would be a constituent element of happiness, which is intrinsically valuable; thus freedom would have intrinsic value. But whether Matt is convinced or not, he should not simply dismiss the desire of so many people just to be free (few of the people who died trying to get across the Iron Curtain were yearning for material benefits — most just wanted freedom), as if that were of no significance. Moreover, I think that Matt has confused rhetorical confusion with conceptual confusion, which I think characterizes Tyler’s remarks.

    I hope that that’s clear.

    March 25, 2007 at 12:42 am
  6. Kent Guida

    “Nor do I think that a genuine love of freedom is ever quickened by the prospect of material rewards; indeed, that prospect is often dubious, anyhow as regards the immediate future. True, in the long run freedom always brings to those who know how to retain it comfort and well-being, and often great prospertiy. Nevertheless, for the moment it sometimes tells against amenities of this nature, and there are times, indeed, when despotism can best ensure a brief enjoyment of them. In fact, those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long.”
    Tocqueville, describing pre-revolutionary France, in The Old Regime, 3.4

    Would anybody write that today?

    March 25, 2007 at 11:45 am
  7. Tom G. Palmer

    Kent,

    I wish I had! It summarizes precisely what I believe. Indeed, the great friends of freedom often suffer terribly for their cause. Libertarians under tyrannical regimes are not doing what they do because they think that they are likely to benefit personally — far from it.

    March 25, 2007 at 3:04 pm
  9. Kent Guida

    Doesn’t that suggest that if Tyler is right about what people think — they like wealth and the opportunities it brings, but are relatively indifferent to freedom — the prospects for freedom in the long run are not good.

    If this was Tocqueville’s observation of his own era and his reading of French history, and if Tyler is only extending and updating Tocqueville’s thought, based on Tyler’s observations of our own time, I don’t see a clear counter-argument.

    We may agree with Tocqueville that freedom is more important than wealth (and not just because it produces wealth), but the number of people who think that may be practically zero. And perhaps it is also the case that promoting freedom based on its ability to produce wealth is destined to achieve only the kind of successes that Tyler points to.

    I’m inclined to agree with Tocqueville and Tyler that if what people really crave is wealth and opportunity, we’re screwed. And I am hard-pressed to find evidence that it’s NOT what they crave.

    March 26, 2007 at 11:28 am
  10. Matt Zwolinski

    Thanks, Tom, for the thoughtful response.

    I agree with much of the substance of what you say, and think that lingering disagreements might be simply the result of the infelicity with which I originally stataed my position.

    To clarify, I did not mean to claim that most people do, or should, value negative liberty only for the material prosperity or tangible “stuff” it brings. I *do* think that most people value negative liberty for the opportunities it brings, but that is a very different matter. I think most people value negative freedom because it gives them positive freedom – the ability to do things they want to do. Your refraining from interfering in my reading books that I like is valuable insofar as it makes it more likely that I’ll be able to read books that I like.

    But if, for some bizzare reason, a world where negative liberties were the only ones protected by the state turned out to be one where I had *fewer* of these opportunities rather than more, that would be a good reason to question the value of such a state. I agree with Tom that self-directedness is something most people regard as intrinsically valuable, and I’ll agree that self-directedness requires freedom from interference. But that’s not the only thing it requires. So libertarians have some work to do in showing that a regime which focuses exclusively on protecting claims to non-interference will also be one in which people will be able to live self-directed lives. IOW, we need to show that negative liberty will give us, or is compatible with, positive liberty.

    That’s not to deny that negative liberty might be intrinsically valuable as well as instrumentally valuable. And it’s not to deny that it would be a good thing to convince more people to see this intrinsic value. Mainly, it’s a claim about how to go about “selling” negative liberty to a culture that, on the whole, *doesn’t* view it as an intrinsic value, or at least as a very important one, or one that they’re willing to consistently hold.

    If I’m right that most people care about negative liberty because of the positive liberty it brings them, and if I’m right that most people who are skeptical about negative liberty are so because they *don’t* believe it will get them positive liberty (they think that a libertarian regime will lead to their options being limited — Wal-Mart will control their lives, they will have to work harder to keep up in a competitive economy, people will be unable to maintain traditional ways of life, etc. ad nauseum), then a very good way to make the case for negative liberty is by showing how these beliefs are false — i.e. by showing how negative liberty will in fact lead to *more* positive liberty.

    Is this a conceptual confusion? I don’t think so. Tyler and I both realize that there is a conceptual distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. So there’s no confusion there. Where Tom and I disagree, I guess, is that I think, and Tom doesn’t, that both of these concepts have enough in common with our core concept of ‘liberty’ that they can be correctly identified as different types of that more general kind. I’m willing to grant that as a rhetorical matter, using the term positive liberty might be ineffective if it leads people to mistakenly conclude that there are no important differences between positive and negative liberty. But that would be a mistake in people’s understanding of the concepts, not a confusion inherent in the concepts themselves.

    Anyway, I hope that makes my view sound a bit less bad. I almost hated myself when you dropped that line about people dying to escape the Iron Curtain! But I don’t think they were mistaken or confused at all. They just, for obvious and unfortunate reasons, didn’t need to be “sold” the value of negative liberty in the way that most contemporary inhabitants of the first-world do.

    March 27, 2007 at 11:43 pm