Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom is presented as an alternative both to negative and positive conceptions of freedom. The basic idea is to conceptualize freedom as non-domination, not as non-interference or self-mastery. When compared to negative freedom, Pettit’s republican conception comprises two controversial claims: the claim that we are unfree if we are dominated without actual interference, and the claim that we are free if we face interference without domination. Because the slave is a widely accepted paradigm of the (...) unfree person, the case of a slave with a non-interfering master is often cited as providing a good argument for the first republican claim and against a negative conception of freedom. One aim of this article is to raise doubts about whether this is true. The other aim of the article is to show that the prisoner—also a paradigm of the unfree person—presents a good argument against the second republican claim and in favour of a negative conception of freedom. This is called the ‘prisoner-argument’. It will be argued that neither Pettit’s distinction between free persons and free choices nor his distinction between compromising and conditioning factors of freedom can help to rebut the charge of the prisoner-argument. (shrink)

This essay discusses a heretofore neglected dimension of one of the most important questions in the realm of political theory: which obstacles that stand in the way of our performing a certain action render us unfree to perform that action? This dimension is concerned with the issue of the causal test that a certain central kind of obstacle—i.e., subjunctive interference—has to pass in order to render us unfree. The aim of this essay is, first, to introduce this issue; and, second, (...) to offer a first analysis of the two possible positions that can be taken with respect to it. (shrink)

Freedom is one of the most important moral and political ideals. Questions concerning degrees of overall freedom are therefore of the utmost moral and political concern. To answer these questions we need to know how to measure degrees of overall freedom. This paper offers a novel defence of the partly evaluative approach to freedom measurement against a recent critique of it. According to the partly evaluative approach, the question of how free one is depends partly on the specific value of (...) the freedoms one possesses and partly on their physical extension. According to the critique, because of its reference to freedoms’ specific value, the partly evaluative approach fails to capture freedoms’ non-specific value, which is what it should capture. In this paper I argue that this critique is unfounded, by showing that even measures of more mundane things, which nevertheless, like freedom, present us with a commensuration problem, sometimes involve evaluative considerations similar to the ones that the partly evaluative approach invokes. (shrink)

Freedom is one of the central values in political and moral philosophy. A number of theorists hold that freedom should either be the only or at least one of the central distribuenda in our theories of distributive justice. Moreover, many follow Mill and hold that a concern for personal freedom should guide, and limit, how paternalist public policy can be. For the most part, theorists have focussed on a person’s freedom at one specific point in time but have failed to (...) give proper attention to freedom across time. Given that we care about personal freedom now, we have reason to care about future freedom too. But what kind of distribution of freedom across a person’s lifetime should we promote as a matter of legislation and public policy? I argue that none of the candidate principles for the distribution of freedom across time is plausible. Neither a starting gate view, nor a maximisation nor a sufficientarian view is satisfactory, because none adequately reflects our various reasons to value freedom. I show that this result presents a tough challenge for theories of distributive justice and paternalism that set great store by personal freedom. (shrink)

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (shrink)

Many political philosophers argue that interference (or vulnerability to interference) threatens a person’s agency. And they cast political freedom in opposition to interpersonal threats to agency, as non-interference (or non-subjection). I argue that this approach relies on an inapt model of agency, crucial aspects of which emerge from our relationships with other people. Such relationships involve complex patterns of vulnerability and subjection, essential to our constitution as particular kinds of agents: as owners of property, as members of families, and as (...) participants in a market for labor. We should construct a conception of freedom that targets the structures of our interpersonal relations, and the kinds of agents these relations make us. Such a conception respects the interpersonal foundations of human agency. It also allows us to draw morally significant connections between diverse species of unfreedom—between, for instance, localized domination and structural oppression. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die philosophische und psychologische Literatur zum Begriff der Dankbarkeit bis ins Jahr 2013. Geprüft werden die in beiden Wissenschaften veröffentlichten Arbeiten vor allem hinsichtlich ihrer begrifflichen Grundlagen und der ethischen Bewertung von Dankbarkeit, etwa als Pflicht, Tugend oder Supererogation. Die Analyse zeigt, dass jeweils mit einer Reihe untereinander unvereinbarer Begriffsverständnisse gearbeitet wird, sodass die Debatte von einem komplexen Netzwerk sich überschneidender und überkreuzender Begriffe geprägt ist. Der Beitrag endet mit Vorschlägen für die weitere Forschung. (...) Psychologen wird empfohlen, ihre Konzeptionen von Dankbarkeit präziser zu fassen und zu begründen sowie Bottom-up-Studien zum alltagspraktischen Begriff der Dankbarkeit durchzuführen. Philosophen sollten dagegen der in den Sozialwissenschaften durchgeführten Bottom-up-Arbeit mehr Beachtung schenken. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 228-244, May 2022. Private property rights involve coercion against non-owners in their enforcement. As critics of private property point out, this coercion involves a restriction on freedom. Sometimes, such critics suggest that collective property expands rights of access, and therefore expands freedom relative to private property. Does this follow? This paper argues no. To make this argument, I look at two particular forms of collective property: open-access commons and closed-access communes. Both (...) may give rise to potential threats to freedom. This does not mean that collective property never expands freedom relative to private property. It only means we cannot infer from the fact that collective property rules extend rights of access that collective property expands freedom. The upshot is a need to pay more attention to how different property rights work in practice. (shrink)

Resting as it does on the principle of freedom, today’s global economic system is in need of a global economic ethos of responsibility so as to assure its social and ecological sustainability. Not all ideas of freedom, however, are equally amenable to conceptions of cosmopolitan responsibilities. This article examines how quantitative versus qualitative notions of freedom respectively respond to this challenge. Simply put, quantitative models hinder the integration of responsibility into models of economic rationality whereas qualitative conceptions advance it. As (...) a consequence, efforts to promote a humanistic paradigm of economics and management fare better when oriented at a qualitative idea of freedom. Cast along the lines of a qualitative conception of freedom, corporate responsibility more readily takes on a cosmopolitan dimension apt to meet the needs of the current age of globality. (shrink)

This paper aims to draw attention to an important but underappreciated aspect of the instrumental value of freedom: its diagnostic value. This is the value freedom has insofar as it makes it possible for us to discover ourselves and improve ourselves in our capacity to make value judgements. Diagnostic value, I argue, has an important role to play in explaining the value we attach to freedom. Accordingly, this paper is aimed at elucidating this concept, examining its relevance to our lives, (...) and defending an account of how to measure the diagnostic value of opportunities and sets of opportunities. (shrink)

This thesis is an attempt to constructively interpret and critically evaluate the liberal doctrine that we may not limit a person’s liberty for her own good, and to discuss its implications and alternatives in some concrete areas of public health policy. The thesis starts theoretical and goes ever more practical. The first paper is devoted to positive interpretation of anti-paternalism with special focus on the reason component – personal good. A novel generic definition of paternalism is proposed, intended to capture, (...) in a generous fashion, the object of traditional liberal resistance to paternalism – the invocation of personal good reasons for limiting of or interfering with a person’s liberty. In the second paper, the normative aspect of this resistance is given a somewhat technical interpretation in terms of invalidation of reasons – the blocking of reasons from influencing the moral status of actions according to their strength. It is then argued that normative anti-paternalism so understood is unreasonable, on three grounds: 1) Since the doctrine only applies to sufficiently voluntary action, voluntariness determines validity of reasons, which is unwarranted and leads to wrong answers to moral questions. 2) Since voluntariness comes in degrees, a threshold must be set where personal good reasons are invalidated, leading to peculiar jumps in the justifiability of actions. 3) Anti-paternalism imposes an untenable and unhelpful distinction between the value of respecting choices that are sufficiently voluntary and choices that are not. The third paper adds to this critique the fourth argument that none of the action types typically proposed to specify the action component of paternalism is such that performing an action of that type out of benevolence is essentially morally problematic. The fourth paper ignores the critique in the second and third papers and proposes, in an anti-paternalistic spirit, a series of rules for the justification of option-restricting policies aimed at groups where some members consent to the policy and some do not. Such policies present the liberal with a dilemma where the value of not restricting people’s options without their consent conflicts with the value of allowing people to shape their lives according to their own wishes. The fifth paper applies the understanding of anti-paternalism developed in the earlier papers to product safety regulation, as an example of a public health policy area. The sixth paper explores in more detail a specific public health policy, namely that of mandatory alcohol interlocks in all cars, proposed by the former Swedish government and supported by the Swedish National Road Administration. The policy is evaluated for cost-effectiveness, for possible diffusion of individual responsibility, and for paternalistic treatment of drivers. The seventh paper argues for a liberal policy in the area of dissemination of information about uncertain threats to public health. The argument against paternalism is based on common sense consequentialist considerations, avoiding any appeal to the normative anti-paternalism rejected earlier in the thesis. (shrink)

Freedom is among the central values in political philosophy. Freedom also features heavily in normative arguments in ethics, politics, and law. Yet different sides often invoke freedom to establish very different conclusions. Some argue that freedom imposes strict constraints on state power. For example, when promoting public health, there is a limit on how far the state can interfere with individual freedom. Others, in contrast, argue that freedom is not just a constraint but also an important goal of state power (...) and collective action. Good public health policy, for example, promotes people’s freedom. Of course, different arguments often draw on different theories of freedom. So, to evaluate such arguments, we need to analyze these different theories and their implications and assess their plausibility. -/- The broadly liberal tradition views freedom as being about external options. Such theories typically start with an account of when someone has a specific freedom or unfreedom to do something. For example, some argue that only a narrow set of interpersonal interferences count as constraints on freedom. Others argue that a far broader set of factors, including ill health and natural constraints, can reduce one’s freedom. -/- Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship has increasingly recognized that to use liberal freedom in normative arguments, one must move beyond specific freedom and unfreedom. Most laws and policies both subtract and add specific freedoms. What matters is how a person’s freedom is affected overall. Philosophers and economists have thus engaged in intricate debates about how to measure overall freedom. Moreover, policies and law affect not only one person at one point in time but also multiple persons across time. So, liberal freedom-based arguments also require distributive criteria for intertemporal and interpersonal distributions of freedom. -/- In the early 21st century, republicanism has developed into a prominent alternative to liberal theories. Republicans argue that being a free person is not just, or not even primarily, about liberal option-freedom. Freedom requires being free from dominating power. Republicans and liberals have engaged in a lively debate on who offers the better theory. In developing the republican ideal, republicans also engage in intramural debates. For example, is domination primarily an interpersonal or structural phenomenon? And what economic institutions does republicanism imply? -/- Theorizing around freedom has become richer and moved from narrower questions regarding specific freedom and unfreedom to overall freedom and to republican theories of nondomination. But recent theorizing also seeks to extend its focus and scope. Historically, theorizing started with the freedom of able-bodied male citizens within nation states. Recent theorizing shifts the focus to include issues around gender, disability, freedom at the international level, and the freedom of nonhuman animals and future generations. Beyond fascinating implications of existing theories, a more inclusive focus is likely to also yield important lessons on how current theories can be improved. (shrink)

This thesis concerns the measurement of freedom, and its value. Specifically, I am concerned with three overarching questions. First, can we measure the extent of an individual’s freedom? It had better be that we can, otherwise much ordinary and intuitive talk that we would like to vindicate – say, about free persons being freer than slaves – will turn out to be false or meaningless. Second, in what ways is freedom valuable, and how is this value measured? It matters, for (...) example, whether freedom is valuable only insofar as it enables us to pursue specific ends we happen to value for independent reasons, or whether it is also valuable in itself. In the latter case, but not the former, more freedom will always be better. Likewise, it’s important to get clarity on what ends, exactly, freedom is especially instrumentally valuable in promoting, since this goes to how much we should care about it. And finally, the liberal political tradition asserts that there is a special sphere of personal choices within which individuals should be free to do as they please, for reasons over and above the value of freedom itself. Now, can we measure the extent to which states and individuals respect individual liberties, and can we weigh the importance of respecting liberty against competing values like social welfare? To answer these questions, I follow the axiomatic tradition of social choice theory, and I develop several novel measures of freedom – including the first measure of freedom ever proposed that is sensitive to how modally robustly our options are available – a novel approach to measuring the diversity of an opportunity set, and I develop an account of the value of freedom according to which an important part of why freedom matters is that it enables us to improve our preferences through learning, and I construct ways of measuring the value of freedom along this dimension of value. Finally, in later chapters, I provide a representation result for a measure of illiberalism, i.e. of the degree to which states fail to respect the rights of their citizens, and I extend this result to provide a characterization of moral theories that express concern for respecting the rights of others. The final chapter closes by discussing how this concern may be weighed against concerns for social welfare. (shrink)

Do non-human animals have an interest in sociopolitical freedom? Cochrane has recently taken up this important yet largely neglected quest ion. He argues that animal freedom is not a relevant moral concern in itself, because animals have a merely instrumental but not an intrinsic interest in freedom (Cochrane 2009a, 2012). This paper will argue that even if animals have a merely instrumental interest in freedom, animal freedom should nonetheless be an important goal for our relationships with animals. Drawing on recent (...) work on the value of freedom, it will be argued that freedom is non-specifically instrumentally valuable. Accordingly, freedom is a means to other goods, but often it is not possible to identify those goods in advance or aim for them directly. Some of the reasons that make freedom non-specifically valuable for human relationships, it will be argued, also apply to relationships between humans and animals. Amongst other implications, it will be shown how this argument provides a response to those who fear that stricter animal protection policies might undermine people’s freedom: A concern for freedom actually requires stricter protection policies rather than speak against them. (shrink)

Many philosophers conceive of freedom as non-interference. Such conceptions unify two core commitments. First, they associate freedom with non-constraint. And second, they take seriously a distinction between the interpersonal and the non-personal. As a result, they focus our attention exclusively on constraints attributable to other people’s choices – that is, on interference. I argue that these commitments manifest two distinct concerns: first, for a wide range of options; and second, for other people’s respect. However, construing freedom as non-interference unifies these (...) concerns in a way that does justice to neither. In particular, it focuses our attention on phenomena that are at best tangential, and at worst hostile, to our interest in respect. If we wish to preserve the distinctive significance of the interpersonal, we would be better served by a conception of freedom that focuses immediately on what I call "the social conditions of respect.". (shrink)