How positive and negative freedoms shape democracy

From COVID-19 policies to reproductive rights, conversations about freedom and liberty seem to be front and center in politics and the culture wars. This week, we take a deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts and how different interpretations of them impact our ability to sustain a democracy. We also examine how bringing  the idea of freedom into political debates can obscure what's really at stake and make it difficult to come to meaningful resolution.

Democracy Works host and McCourtney Institute for Democracy Managing Director Chris Beem talks with John Christman, professor of philosophy, political science, and women's studies at Penn State and director of the Humanities Institute. He is the author of numerous articles and books in social and political philosophy, specializing in topics such as the social conception of the self, theories of justice and oppression, and the idea of freedom. He is the editor of the newly-published Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future. The book  includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy.

Additional Information

Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future

Penn State Humanities Institute

‍Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are bringing you a conversation between Chris beam, the Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and my co host here on democracy works. And John Christman who is a professor of philosophy, political science and Women's Studies at Penn State, and also the director of Penn State's Humanities Institute. John's most recent book and the subject of this conversation is positive freedom, past, present and future. John and Chris, discuss how conceptions of positive and negative freedom impact our ability to sustain a healthy democracy that balances rights and liberty. It's a fascinating conversation. And one I hope you'll be excited to dig into. Here is Chris beams discussion with John Christman.

Chris Beem
Well, John Christman thanks for joining us on democracy works, it's a pleasure to be with you. So So John, you're you're kind of an expert on on the idea of positive freedom in particular. And so that's why we wanted to, to bring you on to talk about this, we've, we've had a number of conversations in the past, where I have referenced this idea that that what is being presented is a limited understanding of freedom, and even called it a negative concept. But I don't know that that I ever really gave that enough, enough ground to be able to make be clear what it was I was talking about. And so because we're in a in a, in a moment right now, where freedom is so operative on both sides, right, you have the whole argument about wearing masks in public, or about getting a vaccination was framed around the idea of freedom. And now with, with the, you know, the draft decision around Roe v Wade being released, the argument there is again, around freedom of my you know, my bodily integrity and choices I'm making. So clearly this is this is an always an important issue, but particularly right now. So I thought it would be good for us just to try to talk through from a philosophical point of view what it is we're actually talking about when we're talking about freedom. So So I think it's fair to say that at a, you know, kind, I'm actually thinking about, you know, the kind of rock songs that you hear on the radio, when they're talking about freedom, the idea that's being presented is this absence of constraints, the ability to do what you want. But there's more to it than that. So can you maybe we just start there and talk about, you know, what freedom is and how these different concepts play out?

John Christman
Yeah, philosophers and political theorists and leaders have been debating and discussing what freedom means and why it's valuable for ages in, in roughly the Western world, but really elsewhere as well. And so these debates are not new. And we have to distinguish arguments about what the term freedom means and how to best understand it from questions of what should people should be allowed to do with that freedom? And how to support that freedom or protect it? Those are arguably separate questions, at least at the outset. So one way to put that is when someone calls some defends a position when someone defends a position by saying it's a matter of my freedom. That doesn't end the argument, that doesn't settle the show didn't tell me anything at all. Because I have to then know, what do you mean by freedom? And why should you have that? Whatever it is, you mean by the word? So that's still an open question whether you should be able to do what you claim to be able to do. And through the ages, we can go in more detail in the history of these ideas as needed. But there have been these competed competing families of understanding the concept of freedom. And one is the one you alluded to what people have come to call negative freedom, namely, to be free, to whatever extent one ought to be free to be free, is to be unconstrained in one's actions to be able to do to sorry be and not prevented from doing what you might wish to do. And that is sometimes called a liberal conception but liberal in the broad sense of the liberal tradition libertarians would be there are left wing right polls, right that would also want to use that might want to use that understanding of the term, though they would be skeptical of free market share, disagree with libertarians on it. But the that is a relatively if you look at, you know, the history of thought about this, which is about 2000 years, that's a relatively recent way to understand what freedom is and why it's valuable. Prior to that, what and the word Liberty would be used more often, but I use those interchangeably. The way that when people argued for liberty, and this is up through the 18th century, in the framing, and the founding period of the US, when people use the language of liberty, they refer to a kind of status, to be a freeborn. Gentleman, that meant you had a kind of social independence, but you also had obligations to participate in your government, and, and ideally, in a republic, a self governing entity? Well, with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, as we understand it, now, the turn of the 19th century, there arose a different a slight variation on what people meant by saying they ought to be free. And that is this idea of being left alone. But, and being left alone period. But what that included most importantly, for the people who argued this way is to be left alone, to engage in economic exchange, both with your labor and with your resources. And that's why it became associated with a defense of capitalism, and the rise, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. And their, the government controlling that economic activity was seen as a threat to freedom, because it prevented people otherwise desirous to do so from engaging in trade and contract. But then, toward the end of the 19th century, those as those who saw the results of unregulated capitalism, the poverty, the child labor, the the long hours, thought, well, that doesn't look like freedom. To me, freedom must be something more than being left alone, it must be something like the capacity to act effectively, as an agent in society. And to do that, to be dirt poor is not to be able to do that. And there arose a family of approaches to the idea of freedom that required that said that freedom required more than just not on non constraint, it also required capacities and resources. And that is, sometimes it's a family of ideas, but that is then associated with what you referred to as positive freedom. Because the negative means it's an absence of something. Absence of constraints or interference. A positive IDEA says, freedom is the absence of constraint, but it's also a kind of social empowerment, it's a kind of capacity to engage in your life plans, as best you can. And, and their poverty is a threat to freedom, as well as government restricts,

Chris Beem
That's really helpful. So So you know, if you are going to be living in a society, there have to be constraints on freedom, right? You can't you just are going to have to say, we drive on this side of the road, right? And you can't get in your car and drive if you've had too much to drink. Right. And so, they're, there is no, I mean, in even with the most extreme positions, like safe Second Amendment, you can't go by a howitzer, right? There are limits within within society. And those, those limits are established by society. Right? So the idea that you are participating in the laws by which you constrain yourself is part or an essential part of this idea of, you know, Republican freedom or the freedom that goes back to the agents. Is that that fair to

John Christman
Very good. Very good. Let's come to that same point, from a slightly different direction. But I agree with you where you characterized it from an earliest time thinking about freedom in this negative sense of being unconstrained. People acknowledged what you started out saying namely that that kind of no one thinks that there should be a complete absence of constraints on on others actions. No one thinks that that was captured most saliently in a Famous work called on liberty by John Stuart Mill by what came to be called the harm principle, straightforward idea. Whatever you mean by freedom, whenever you think the extent of it should be, it is limited by the possibility that you may harm another enacting, if so, constraints on that action that are always legitimate.

Chris Beem
Now, that doesn't mean, the same thing applies to harming yourself.

John Christman
Right. So that's a very interesting implication of that. And secondly, going along with that, it not harming another person might be consistent with you, not maybe harming yourself, but also just not flourishing by just. And so things are prohibited by that idea that first might be surprising. Namely, if you're harming yourself, but no one else, I cannot interfere with you, as long

Chris Beem
As long as you're, you know, understood to be, you know, not mentally ill or not otherwise incapacitated, you if you want to spend your days getting high and washing, Rugrats, no one is going to stop you. Right, right. Right, or no, one should. Right. But but the but the but the question, then, of harm is still really complicated, right? Because, you know, if, if I own a factory, and I'm dumping toxins in the river, there's no individual who can point to this and say, you know, this is unacceptable, we need to put a constraint on this freedom. But if there's no but there is an argument that there is a there are public goods that do require right and so, so not only is the question of what's the legitimate constraint, always operative, but the question of what constitutes a harm and who can claim to be harmed? These are all fraught questions that force the concept of freedom back into politics.

John Christman
That's right, let's come back to your driving example. Because that'll show if we think about that one further, that'll show that even the idea of harm itself is not enough to capture all the things we want to capture in trying to justify interferences. So if I'm in England, and I drive on the right side of the road, I'm going to harm someone, but not in the United States. The reason I have to drive on the left side of the road in England and the right side of the road, the United States is because each society came to an agreement about how to coordinate driving. There's nothing inherently harmful about driving on the left side of the road, right? Convention, it's a convention, but because it was collectively decided, then I can't, I have no right to drive on the incorrect side of the road, even if there's no one there. Right? So not only do we generally think that we can circumscribe actions that people might want to do, and not really interfere with their freedom, legitimately, by drawing the line around harm, but also drawing the line around social conventions, as long as they were legitimately and properly promulgated. Right, as long as they were developed in the right way, democratically is what we would say for sure.

Chris Beem
Alright, so this this idea of rights are kind of like a way or cordoning off some things from conversation. But this idea of not harming yourself, and the idea that you can have a right to do something. But if you don't have the means to do it, don't have the capacity to do it. What does it mean, that is not completely absent from American concept conceptions of government either or politics either, right. I mean, and I think maybe the explicit, one of the most explicit declarations of this is Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms, right? Where you have freedom from fear, but you also have freedom from what right, and the right and that's, you know, the point is that if you don't have enough to eat, if you don't have some kind of place to live, then you know, what, what sense does it make, say you're free? And so there, do you agree with that, that there is this kind of conception of, of positive freedom that is operative, even in an American context?

John Christman
Yeah. I mean, and I think, despite appearances, the General Agreement on some level of this, because although there may be people critical of the welfare state, there virtually no one who thinks there should be absolutely no proof. sanctions, or aids to people who are in desperate need of a medical attention at the emergency room. So that everyone seems to agree that some level of empowering people to act meaningfully and effectively in society is required to say with a straight face that we're protecting their freedom. And I think the way that language evolved is Roosevelt used freedom from in all of his four freedoms. There's something unfortunate about that. Because if you're trying to grab everything under this sort of negative notion, what you're free from, and if you get into conceptual contortions, it might be just more meaningful to say freedom to so freedom to be an effective self governing agent in society, if that is a better way of understanding freedom than hunger interferes with that. So does not having a meaningful employment opportunity of any sort, not having health or housing, because no meaningful, flourishing, minimally flourishing life can be led, if one lacks those things. So I think and there's debate about this, but I think that a better way of understanding freedom would include those kinds of elements of self government capacity to both individually and to some degree socially, have some say, over the conditions in which you have to live your life.

Chris Beem
Would you think it's fair to say that as our concept of freedom, moves towards a positive conception, or involves questions that engage this positive dimension of freedom, government necessarily becomes more powerful, because it has a job to do? That is more than just not doing something?

John Christman
That's right. But we have to look at the comparison, because or the comparison class, because in order for people to engage in, let's take the standard, libertarian liberal, the standard libertarian liberals understanding of what the limits of government ought to be, they think that government ought to be restrained, so that economic trade and free market capitalism. Well, we all understand that in order for complex economic markets to operate, the government has to has a lot to do. There is no such thing as a minimal state in Robert Nozick sense, but in this sense of whether there really is nothing for the government to do they have to coordinate banking, they have to coordinate currency, right? Money is a construction by governments, right? Invented, right. Yeah, that's right. There's something called the lira, which is not worth much anymore, because of a conventional change. But if you think of all the things, roads, the mail, all the things that are acquired for a complex economy to function, it becomes clear that it's an it's an illusion, to think that just the protection of maximal degrees of negative liberty with minimal government activity is the ideal. So once we get past that point, then we realize this is why I say it depends on the comparison point. To me, the comparison is already a very complex and and powerful government entity with a lot of administrative duties, then the question is what should those things do? Whom do they serve? And how do they advance the core values of the society, like freedom in this positive sense? So if you are giving if your industrial policy, or your energy policy is such that allows certain entities to flourish,

Chris Beem

You mean like corporations?

John Christman

And others that have to struggle, then that's a decision. The question of what freedom mean is not going to means is not going to settle that issue. That's a question of what the government ought to do not whether there should be less or more government. So I think we have to kind of separate this more question of more or less government from the questions of what people think we think government ought to be doing.

Chris Beem
So what's interesting about that is, you know, bring it back to where we started, you know, to say, my, you know, Freedom has been violated by You know, by some kind of constraint on vaccines or maths doesn't, doesn't get you anywhere in terms of that conversation, right? You have to have a conversation about the why behind behind the constraint, and whether or not it's legitimate, but just to say freedom doesn't doesn't do anything. And, and really, that that's the same thing on the other side with with the abortion question, right? I mean, of course, they would say yes, it's a constraint. I've, you know, you know, pro life people, you know, would say, of course, it's a constraint, but it's a necessary one, because there's a life at stake, right. And so there is, you know, this, this, we have a society that is, understands itself to be, you know, very oriented towards freedom and rights. And I was thinking, when you were talking about social conventions, and about how, you know, Singapore, you can't chew gum, right? I mean, this is, we are not that, right. But at the same time, we kind of use freedom, we wave it like a talisman, as if it just stops a conversation. And your argument is that it doesn't it can't. And in the democracy, it shouldn't. Right, right.

John Christman
Yeah. I mean, it's been called, famously an essentially contested concept. That is, it doesn't settle arguments. It's it's the concept that results from the argument on other terms. And I have to say, I love talking about the idea of freedom, I think about it as a political theorist, philosopher. But I think in most public debate, it obscures more than it illuminates. Because once you say, the reason I think this policy ought to be adopted is because it's a matter of freedom. You've just covered up your real reasons. And because just calling it a matter of freedom is the conclusion. It's not can't be a premise. And so the, what ought to be done is subtract that concept of freedom or liberty and just say, why you be allowed to do this. And why should you not to be allowed? Why is it okay to prohibit you? That's right. Right. And so questions like the question of reproductive choice, and abortion, that is, becomes a very complex array of questions of women's autonomy, right, their ability to make decisions that affect their lives in deep ways. And there's a lots of accusations that people who are against that are really not taking that autonomy seriously. And I see the power. Yes. And as you mentioned, those who would argue on the anti choice side would say, No, we believe in all that. We just think there's this other life at stake. Well, they are the question is, which is debated, but not quite as clearly enough, as you have well, how are you defining life? And let's talk about that. Right? And can we all agree on that? Or is that really a religious conviction? So these other things, and a lot of factual questions, a lot of open factual questions like the the harm that is done, when abortion is restricted the health consequences that everyone thinks or ought to think matters, just something that matters more than others? But there's lots of questions about how much and where and you know, who's affected. And so, it's important to to separate out these questions and argue over what we really are disagreeing about, and not just stuff at under the tent of freedom, because

Chris Beem
It's clear that our public debates around these questions are not productive. And part of the reasons for them not being productive is because we, we appeal to kind of automatically to freedom, but also because we, we reject the idea that we are giving laws to ourselves, we see this more as a matter of government, giving laws to people. And the ladder is is a fundamentally undemocratic way of understanding government.

John Christman
Yeah. And another way to put that point is to remind you I know you know this very well, in the 18th century, in the American context, the argument was not against the power of government, it was a power it was against the power of arbitrary government. The claim was that King George was an arbitrary ruler, he was an oppressor. So the argument

Chris Beem
And those laws were not being they were not party to the to the to the political process by which those laws were enacted.

John Christman
No taxation without representation. So it was the lack of representation that made it oppressive, and that's a very poor One thing to point out because then we it's not as if it was deep in the American tradition to be suspicious of government. It's it's a part of the tradition to be suspicious of illegitimate government. And now back to your point, that is to say, government, which is not properly democratic, and not the result of a fully participatory polity. And let me make another point that I think it's really important to put in parallel with this. I think that there is a another mode of discourse around freedom in the American context, which is extremely fruitful and powerful, it's just ignored in certain terms. And that is the other movement for freedom was not just the framers, but abolitionist slavery. Sorry, abolitionist, freedom came to mean, the escape from slavery. And if you think of it that way, then it is not merely the protection of it is certainly this, but not merely the protection of certain rights, like speech, association, religion, it is the right to be your own person, to own yourself, and not to be completely under the power of another person or entity. And we know from the period after the Civil War, mere emancipation, which means really giving someone else that freedom is not enough, because the levels of oppression and poverty and racial discrimination, segregation, and domination that took place in many decades after that showed that the freedom that was sought was incomplete. And maybe still is, but certainly was beyond emancipation. And I would like that understanding of freedom as liberation, as escape from oppression, to be part of the tradition, as well as the constitutional meaning of freedom.

Chris Beem

All right, well, that's really interesting. And it does raise a lot of, you know, recollections in my head about the way king would argue, for example, but that I mean, but it's interesting to me, because there you have a group of people, not individuals, but a group of people who understand themselves to be illegitimately constrained, you know, visa vie the rest of the society. And, and, you know, that's still operative, right? I mean, the people in Flint, Michigan, who don't have clean water are the people in, in, in rural West Virginia, who were, you know, given opioids or whatever, there are arguments that are collective as opposed to individual and, and it is, likewise part of our, you know, American tradition, that the way you address that is by organizing, right by coming together and making those claims.

John Christman
It's  common to think that freedom, liberty is fundamentally an individual idea, that it attaches to individuals as such, but it becomes clear, especially if we think of freedom, as a kind of liberation, as the goal of liberation struggles, that people are members of groups, both by choice or by design or, or by social imposition, whether there are racialized groups, whether there are marginalized groups, whether they are men and women or non binary people, they are put into groups. And as such, the fight against oppression, the liberation struggles that attempts to achieve a meaningful degree of freedom for them has to be a group struggle. And this, you know, was a topic of a lot of very interesting discussion in the post colonial and remains a very interesting discussion of post colonial period, because of the requirement that it was not enough to just throw off the yoke of the Empire, but one had to govern oneself collectively, and through democratic structures that represented a people. And so with these social movement from from anti colonial struggles to civil rights and women's rights and liberation, what became clear is that the exercise of freedom required collective action, because people were members of groups and were treated badly unfairly, were denied freedoms because of memberships and that those groups so that was, is still the natural exercise of freedom. Because we're social beings. I mean, we start out as individuals, but we're all members of, of groups. It's

Chris Beem
Also the way, the mechanism by which we give laws to ourselves is by organizing, by mobilizing. And by getting more people on your side when they're on the other side. So when you when you're talking about this, I mean, how do you think, you know, people should approach this conversation differently? What is it about, you know, say somebody, well, this is my freedom, then then how does? How should that conversation proceed from there?

John Christman
Yeah, if I could intervene in every one of those conversations, I would be rude. And so we Okay, let's stop. First, what do you mean by freedom? If that's what you mean by what's so important about it? Why is it valuable? why should other people grant you that freedom? And is the claim you're making on the basis of that kind of freedom consistent with the value you just pointed out? Many times, it's not. So the, if someone says, refusing to wear a mask as a matter of my freedom, I asked what how do you define your freedom? I'm not sure how to define it something like maybe the capacity to govern my own body, I care about my own body. Why is that important? Because I have to live a self governing life, I'm an autonomous person, I need to be treated as that kind of autonomy with respect. Well, okay. But if you are endangering someone else in their capacity to lead a self governing healthy life, you're violating the very thing that motivates your, your argument, right? And now that mean itself, we got to talk about whether it's how harmful within all money Sure, but you can't just say it's a matter of freedom that just covers up that whole much more interesting. Dialogue located

Chris Beem
And much more difficult conversation. Right. But But But your point is that, you know, it is it is intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest, to just say, these are my freedoms, these are my rights, conversation over

John Christman
To call some one side in a complex war. Freedom Fighters is just a label that says, I'm on their side, it doesn't tell you anything about what they're fighting for with it. Right.Chris Beem

Yeah. Right. So I mean, so yeah, I mean, there's, there's in a democratic society, that's, that's how you do it, whether, you know, whether it's really the only mechanism, or at least the most, most salient mechanism that's available to you, right. Yeah. All right. I just really, really fascinating conversation. I mean, I just think the idea of, you know, stepping, accepting the idea, the the value of freedom and, and, and then stepping back from that, I think there's a lot of conversations in the in the US, that would be, you know, better served by your model. So, so, so, John Christman thanks very much for coming by in giving us your thoughts.

John Christman
Thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation.

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