The positive liberty versus negative liberty debate gets old, and it isn’t particularly productive.
If we hold that liberty, usually referred to as individual liberty or personal liberty or negative liberty is the highest moral good, we’re simply setting ourselves up for a number of criticisms.
The first type of criticism centers around the definition of liberty. This is the positive versus negative liberty debate.
Are the security guards at the Waldorf Astoria interfering with my liberty when they remove me from the premises as a trespasser? Is my daughter interfering with my liberty when she refuses to play chess with me? Is an employer interfering with my liberty when he refuses to hire me?
All those questions could be avoided by replacing “liberty” with “individual sovereignty”; surely nobody is suggesting that I am sovereign over the Waldorf Astoria, my daughter, or the employer. And it would be unjust to advocate a liberty which comes at the cost of unjust violation of an individual’s sovereignty.
The second type of criticism precipitated by defining liberty as the highest moral good, as Jan Narverson appears to do in The Libertarian Idea, is the kind which suggests that liberalism does a better job of providing liberty.
In a certain way, they probably could, if they weren’t so horribly inept at running the government. For instance, let’s say they took Bill Gates money. All of it. He does have a net worth of $58 billion.Take that money and redistribute it all to the libertarian bloggers, and we would have a lot more effective liberty than we had before.
I don’t have the liberty to go live in Paris for a year. With the money that previously belonged to Bill Gates in my wallet, I’d have that liberty.
But we do not want that kind of liberty, because it collectivizes sovereignty. Today it’s Bill Gates money, tomorrow it’s my money, and my house, my kids, and my employment.
So stop saying “liberty” when you mean individual sovereignty. And stop framing libertarianism as a moral theory. It should be contractarian and entirely morality neutral.
