PHILOS 1B03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Negative Liberty, Positive Liberty, On Liberty
29 Mar 2017
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If liberty is only negatively conceived, then a society that had quantitatively fewer constraining factors would be more liberal than a society having more. So, e. g. , if albanian socialism restricts the freedom of religion, but had far fewer traffic laws than, e. g. great britain, the latter would, from a crudely negative conception, be less free. The embarrassment for the crude negative theory by itself it does not make qualitative discriminations about what liberties are more significant than others. If we think that various freedoms (e. g. belief, speech, association, pursuit of happiness, etc. ) should remain unconstrained then we have already made a positive liberty claim. Distinguishing between fundamental and subsidiary freedoms involves a decision about what is more or less important for the purposes of human beings. Strong evaluation: distinguishing between first and second-order desires. First-order desire: having a desire, feeling a want the fact of desire.
