Liberty: Negative Freedom

Gerard McCallum Junior: freedom always a triadic relation:

X IS/IS NOT FREE FROM Y TO DO/NOT DO BECOME/NOT BECOME Z.

NEGATIVE LIBERTY

Berlin: negative liberty designates the area within which the subject can act unobstructed.

X, an agent, is free from Y, human interference, to Z, do whatever he otherwise could do.

Z: APPLIES TO ALL POSSIBLE ACTIONS.  Taylor: an OPPORUNITY CONCEPT, as freedom does not require action. This deal with the problem of the contented slave, and and adaptive preferences.

The contstraint must be intended human action. This removes the problem of trivialising talk of freedom - e.g. I am constrained by my inability to breathe underwater.

Problems for Negative Liberty:

1. Individualistic/Atomistic.

2. Too quantitative -- crude and mechanistic. Taylor: human freedom measurable in the same way that we might measure the freedom of a lever! We need to think of freedom qualitatively too.

3. Does…