The sort of freedom should Public Policy seek to Achieve
In today’s society, freedom is among the crucial traits acting as a core pillar of western democracy. Freedom is made of several layers, and it is viewed as the capability to think and be able to represent a conceptual state of freedom. In order to understand the sort of freedom the public policy seek to achieve, this article will first reject Berlin’s argument that negative freedom is what public policy should aim for. An argument that valid freedoms are crucial for public policy to acknowledge and that redistribution of income to achieve these resources does not necessarily undermine freedoms in society will be provided. From there, the article will provide internal constraints, namely through the positives of acknowledging the higher and lower self, and the extent to which public policy should be involved. The article will be concluded by repudiating the extent of positive freedoms concerning import attributing desires, and thus show the extent to which positive freedom should be aimed for by policymakers.
Berlin argued strongly for negative liberty in his Four Essays on Liberty, but a useful tool to understand negative freedom is John Rawls’s veil of ignorance. Let us take two societies, one based on Berlin’s negative liberty, Society B, and one formed from behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Society R. In society B, there are no positive freedoms. In this instance, there is no free healthcare. Child X is born into society B, from a low-income family, with epilepsy, which is only treatable if the family of X can afford the medicine, which they cannot. X is thus limited in the opportunities she has access to later in life. In society, R, X is born into a society with free healthcare because from behind the veil, one would likely support a society with free healthcare in case they be born into a family with mitigating circumstances. Hence, in this society, R, X can access the medicine that cures her epilepsy, and thus she will have equal opportunities later in life like those who never had epilepsy. It is logical to see that in society, R, X has greater freedom than if she were born into society B because the access to healthcare has removed the inhibition caused by her epilepsy. Formalized, this argument takes the shape of MacCallum’s formula where:
‘x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z.’
In society B the constraint (Y) on child X is her epilepsy, and so her freedom is consequently inhibited. This scenario could be seen as a question of effective versus formal freedom and seems to suggest that while to an extent legal freedoms are inherently necessary for society, there does need to be effective freedom for society to function justly and optimally.
It is essential to know that the previous argument is not one for free healthcare, but instead one for possible redistribution of resources to allow effective freedoms like healthcare. Phillipe Van Parijs argues that members of a free society can do what they wish to do ‘with what they legitimately own,’ suggesting an animosity towards redistribution. Still, a belief in private property does not necessarily disagree with belief in positive freedoms. Firstly, although redistribution lowers the effective freedom of those taxed, it has a net increase effect with regards to total freedom in the system. So on, some grounds can be justified. Although this can naturally have a domino effect in which it creates an entirely equal society when the logic is used reservedly, it can provide the essential positive freedoms of those who lack any, while only minutely reducing the critical freedoms in those taxed.
Alternatively, if Kant’s view was taken that rationality is integral to freedom as autonomy, and that rationally enacted moral acts lead to justice, and that it is just to redistribute resources, we conclude that through acting out your freedoms we are naturally inclined to promote redistribution of resources. Hence it seems as though political freedom and redistribution to obtain positive freedoms can work together.
The core of examining internal constraint is based on the theory of the higher and lower self. Selves take two central bodies of thought: first is Kant’s view on the higher self as being perfectly logical, and the lower self as being nonsensical. The second thought is the Romantic view, originating from Rousseau, and is anchored on morality levels and, more importantly, on self-realization. The interest of public policy concerning freedom as autonomy is the extent to which it is justifiable to interfere with an individual’s life to bring individuals as close to their higher selves as possible.
Berlin stressed that government obstruction with the reasonable hypotheses of oneself could prompt an extremist express; the rationale behind this was his relationship of valuable opportunity with monism, that is that there is one lot of sound convictions that individuals ought to stick to, thus one route for individuals to live their lives. What he disregards anyway is that the state could bolster the many shifting manners by which individuals need to live their own lives, while as yet giving balanced “opportunity restricting” merchandise, for example, traffic lights. Moreover, regardless of whether the state thinks people are acting unreasonably, it isn’t the state’s place to constrain its populace: undoubtedly, a genuinely ‘pluralistic liberal state’ ought to have the option to oblige different cultural perspectives without advocating for itself in a brutal way
Rousseau’s conception of self-realization takes on a slightly different line of attack. Becoming a progressively good and self-ruling being could lead to some envisaging state policy revolved around creating absolute moral laws. After all, if the state thinks it can elevate an individual to their higher self, it should have every right to interfere with that individual’s life. The primary contention to deter perusers of this dread is that self-sufficiency can mean just permitting people to help have an independent mind, as opposed to the Orwellian thought of the state thinking for them. For this situation, any endeavor using open arrangement to build singular self-governance, through instruction, for instance, will expand opportunity.
The second contention revolves around desire levels. Public policy should recognize that there are varying levels of desire concerning freedom and be moderate in the manner in which they approach these wants. The longing to worship your own God, for example, is a high level of desire, and so any limitations of that freedom should not exist. The craving to graffiti, however, is generally seen as a low-level desire, and limiting people of this freedom seems to be acceptable in the broader context. Canadian rationalist Charles Taylor makes this thought one stride further. He discusses ‘import ascribing wants,’ wants which are lower request and are to some degree natural to the character, a model he gives being silly dread. Along these lines, Taylor accepts that an ‘inside chained man isn’t free,’ meaning that he is not fully self-realized, however, interfering with internal constraints of this nature to be a step too far in public policy.
Conclusion
From the discussion above, freedom remains a critical trait acting as a core pillar of democracy. Freedom is made up of several layers. The article provided an understanding of what sort of freedom the public policy seeks to achieve using Berlin’s argument on public policy.
References
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GONG, Q., & LI, X. D. (2018). Two Views of Negative Freedom. Journal of Soochow University (Philosophy & Social Science Edition), (1), 1.
Meckl, M. (2016). Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: “Two Concepts of Liberty” 50 Years Later. The European Legacy, 21(4), 437-438.
Moreau, S. R. (2016). Discrimination and Freedom. Available at SSRN 2835489.
STOKER, G., PETERS, B., & Pierre, J. (2017). The relevance of political science. Theory and methods in political science, 321.