August 2017 – The Ought

Freedom is Freedom is Freedom: Gerald MacCallum’s Singular Concept of Liberty

In a previous post, I discussed Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty (or freedom). Here I will discuss Gerald MacCallum’s objection to it.

MacCallum doesn’t think that negative and positive liberty are two distinct concepts. Rather, he thinks that there is only one concept and that it’s a mistake to characterize liberty, as Berlin does, as either one of two “dyadic relations” – “freedom from” (negative liberty) and “freedom to” (positive liberty).

MacCallum says that freedom is always a “triadic relation” in which someone is free from some constraint to do (or not do) something. All discussions of freedom, he argues, can be fit into the following format: “X is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z,” where “x ranges over agents, y ranges over such ‘preventing conditions’ as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.”

So, MacCallum preserves the structure of Berlin’s negative liberty as the freedom from interference, but he applies it to positive liberty as well. All obstacles to a person’s liberty, according to MacCallum, are simply constraints – internal or external – on his capacity to act according to his wishes.

On one hand, this view seems to successfully collapse Berlin’s distinct notions of positive and negative liberty into one concept. If anything that hinders liberty can be conceptualized as a constraint, whether it is internal or external, then there is no useful distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Under MacCallum’s formulation, it doesn’t matter whether an individual’s actions are interfered with by another agent or by his or her own inner psychological capacities. Both are instances in which the individual’s liberty is constrained by something.

On the other hand, it’s possible to view Berlin’s distinction as consistent with MacCallum’s formulation. Although MacCallum suggests that Berlin sees negative and positive liberty as mutually exclusive, Berlin’s distinction doesn’t eliminate the possibility of common ground between the two conceptions. Negative and positive liberty can be seen as different aspects of an overarching concept of liberty, but aspects that are, nonetheless, incommensurable. In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, George Crowder notes that instead of sharing a single essence, as MacCallum’s formulation seems to imply, negative and positive liberty could be seen as belonging to a family of concepts with an underlying commonality.

And even if all impediments to liberty can be viewed simply as constraints, this doesn’t rule out a conceptual distinction between internal and external constraints.

Imagine a man who wants to leave his home, drive to the grocery store, and buy some tomatoes. He can’t leave, though, because he’s been taken hostage by a masked gunman. Now imagine another man with the same desire for tomatoes who can’t fulfill it because he can’t remember how to get to the store. Under MacCallum’s formulation of liberty, there is very little difference between the ways in which these two men are unfree. They’re both subject to some constraint on their capacity to act in accordance with their wishes. And it doesn’t seem to matter that one man’s constraint is a limitation within his head and the other man’s constraint is a gun to his.

Still, the two constraints do appear to differ in at least one important way.

Even if the men are constrained to the same extent, and thus are unfree to the same extent, the man taken captive has been violated by another person. He feels like he’s been wronged – because he has been. The man whose memory has failed him hasn’t been wronged in any meaningful way – unless you believe in some notion of cosmic injustice – and he’s unlikely to feel otherwise. There’s something different, something worse, about being blocked by another person from doing what you want to do.

It is therefore at the disjuncture between the experiential aspects of internal and external constraints, and between the ways in which the idea of being wronged applies to each, where a wedge can be driven between the two types of constraints.

MacCallum may be right that all obstacles to liberty can be conceptualized as constraints, but Berlin is right that not all liberty is the same.

This post was adapted from my bioethics master’s thesis: “The Moral Significance of Non-Autonomous Refusals of Medical Treatment.”

The Liberty Bell’s Crack: Isaiah Berlin and Two Concepts of Liberty

Which Liberty?

It’s hard to find someone who is against liberty, but it’s easy to find disagreement about what the term “liberty” means.

Imagine a conspiracy theorist who is convinced that government agents are blasting mind-controlling waves into his apartment. To keep the government out of his head, he lines his walls, floor, and ceiling with aluminum foil. To be safe, he also lines his baseball cap with the foil and watches television from inside a foil-lined refrigerator box placed strategically in the center of his living room, as far away from the windows as possible. Is this man free?

In one sense, yes. No one is stopping him from protecting himself from non-existent waves by lining his home and himself with kitchen packaging. In another sense, no. The man’s behavior is exceptionally irrational. He is so divorced from reality that he can’t recognize and act in his true interests.

The man’s story highlights two dominant notions of liberty (or freedom, a term which is normally used interchangeably with liberty) that have occupied philosophers and others for centuries: negative liberty and positive liberty. He enjoys negative liberty because there is no external interference with his actions, but he lacks positive liberty because he lacks rational control over his own desires and actions.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin drew perhaps the most explicit distinction between positive and negative liberty in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” But Berlin didn’t merely articulate the distinction between these two conceptions. He exposed a tension between them, arguing that positive liberty often perverts the concept of liberty so much that it doesn’t resemble liberty at all.

Negative Liberty

Negative liberty, according to Berlin, is “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.” The central obstacle to negative liberty is coercion, and a measurement of someone’s negative liberty is the degree to which he or she is free from coercion: “If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum requirement, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.”

Berlin is clear, however, that for interference with an individual’s activities to be coercion, the source of the interference must be human. He maintains that “[people] lack political liberty or freedom only if [they] are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings” and that “mere incapacity to obtain a goal is not lack of political freedom.”

Because negative liberty requires only that someone be free from coercion by other humans, it relies on a minimalist conception of human agency. There is no requirement that he possess certain internal capacities or values for him to be entitled to non-interference by others. Negative liberty presumes an entitlement to non-interference, and it imposes an obligation on everyone to refrain from obstructing others’ actions.

It is negative liberty, and the concomitant notion that one’s right to non-interference doesn’t depend upon the possession of other capacities, goals, or values, that the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill defends in his book On Liberty:

His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Positive Liberty

Liberty in the positive sense, according to Berlin, is the freedom accompanied by being one’s own master. It represents freedom from “nature” or one’s “own ‘unbridled’ passions.” It involves, among other things, the “higher,” rational self achieving mastery over the lower self, the self that is dominated by irrational desires and impulses.

This idea of an individual having two selves, a rational, ideal self and an empirical self, is fundamental to positive liberty. Regarding the two selves that are inherent to this notion of liberty, Berlin says the following:

This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self, or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature.

As you can see, fundamental to this version of liberty is a higher form of agency than that required by negative liberty. Positive liberty requires certain essential capacities or conditions, which may vary according to the particular form of positive liberty being endorsed, that are, by definition, required for an individual to be considered free. The common assumption underlying this line of thought, according to Berlin, is “that the rational ends of our ‘true’ natures must coincide, or be made to coincide, however violently our poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate, empirical selves may cry out against this process. Freedom is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong.”

The Relationship Between Postive and Negative Liberty

The danger of the notion of positive liberty, according to Berlin, is that it divides the individual into two selves: the true, or rational, self and the empirical self, which is subject to the irrational passions and desires that need to be controlled or contained. Once this metaphorical bifurcation of the self has occurred, he argues, the door is open to the infringement upon people’s empirical wishes and desires in the name of their ‘true’ selves – or their own freedom:

What, at most, this entails is that they would not resist me if they were rational and as wise as I and understood their interests as I do. But I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent rational will, or their true purpose – and this entity, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account. Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their real selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfillment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true,’ albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self.

In Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism, George Crowder calls Berlin’s argument the “inversion thesis” because the idea is that the notion of positive liberty allows the concept of liberty to be inverted into its very opposite. Coercion can be justified under the rubric of positive liberty because it is purported to be more consistent with liberty than the individual’s actual wishes. Crowder points out that there is a strong undercurrent in Berlin’s thesis that the logic of positive liberty ought to make us suspicious because the idea itself exposes it to the potential for authoritarian corruption.

Berlin is not wholeheartedly against coercion for a person’s own good, however. He’s more worried about the imposition of certain philosophical ideals on someone in the name of his own freedom. The positively unfree person, with his “poor earthly body and foolish mind” might expressly reject what he is being coerced to do, but since his empirical body is not truly free, he is not really being coerced. Instead, his higher self has willed it, “not indeed consciously, not as he seems in everyday life, but in his role as a rational self which his empirical self may not know.”

What Berlin is criticizing is the view that the tension between someone’s expressed desires and a specific conception of his own good can be relieved by opining that coercion is permissible because, in the coerced person’s current empirical configuration, he is not free anyway. This is a distortion of what freedom is, according to Berlin. “Enough manipulation with the definition of man,” he says, “and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes.” As John Christman put it, for Berlin, “to label as ‘freedom’ the mastery of the ‘lower’ desires by the higher capacities of morality and virtue, not to mention by the supposedly superior wisdom of a general will, marked a treacherous tilt toward the justification of centralized power under the guise of moral superiority.”

Berlin’s ideas are not without their critics. In two follow-up posts, I discuss Gerald McCallum’s view that the distinction between positive and negative liberty can be collapsed and John Christman’s argument that positive liberty doesn’t necessarily open the door for authoritarianism.

This post was adapted from my bioethics master’s thesis: “The Moral Significance of Non-Autonomous Refusals of Medical Treatment.”

G.E. Moore and the Naturalistic Fallacy

Justifying Moral Values

Think about your most firmly held moral values. Now imagine that you have to justify them to the most inquisitive five-year-old conceivable.

If you believe, for example, that causing harm is wrong, why? Or if you think that maximizing happiness or pleasure is the right thing to do, what do you suppose makes it right? What makes fairness, respect, generosity, and truthfulness good? What does good (or bad or right or wrong) even mean?

You might see these questions as just the naïve ramblings of a moral novice, but can you answer them? Can they even be answered?

It’s hard to justify our moral values at the most basic level, and criticism of attempts to do so is not new.

In a previous post, I discussed David Hume’s view that what people ought morally to do can’t be inferred from factual, non-moral observations about the world. Hume’s view suggests that the foundations of our moral judgments rest on something other than logical deductions from non-moral states of affairs; for Hume, moral sentiments, rather than rationality, are what guide our moral judgments and actions.

The philosopher G.E. Moore, writing in the early 20th century, advances a similar – though not identical – criticism of the grounding of moral claims in non-moral observations, which Moore refers to as natural properties. In his book Principia Ethica, first published in 1903, Moore focuses on the nature of the fundamental moral concept good and how attempts to define it are confused. By good, Moore isn’t talking about whether anything in particular should be considered good but how the concept itself is to be defined.

The Naturalistic Fallacy and Defining Good

So, how should good be defined?

There is no shortage of possible definitions. Good is naturalness. Good is normalness. Good is virtuousness. Good is happiness. Good is pleasure. Good is fulfillment of duty.

Every single one of these is wrong, according to Moore, because good can’t be defined. And defining it in terms of natural properties, such as pleasure or happiness, is to commit what Moore calls the “naturalistic fallacy.”

It’s important to note that Moore isn’t saying that things that are pleasurable or natural or normal aren’t good or can’t be good. Many of them are good. He’s just saying that the property of goodness can’t be the same thing as pleasure, naturalness, normalness, or any other natural property, so any attempt to define it as such (e.g. “pleasure alone is good) is fallacious.

Trying to define good is like trying to define yellow. You can’t thoroughly explain it to anyone who doesn’t already know what it is. You can describe its physical equivalent, Moore says. “But a moment’s reflection is sufficient to shew that those light-vibrations are not themselves what we mean by yellow. They are not what we perceive …The most we are entitled to say of those vibrations is that they are what corresponds in space to the yellow which we actually perceive.”

Now think about the concept good. How do you explain it to someone who doesn’t already know what it means? You can’t, according to Moore because good, like yellow, is such a simple notion that it can’t be defined without referencing itself. Other things such as pleasure can contain the property good, but good can’t be reduced to pleasure or some other natural property. Good is simply good.

Moore contrasts good and yellow – simple concepts that can’t be broken down any further – with complex concepts, which can be. You can define a horse, for example, by listing its many different properties and qualities – it has four legs, hooved feet, and so on. But once you reduce it to its simplest terms, Moore says, those simple terms cannot be explained to anyone who doesn’t already know them. “They are simply something which you think of or perceive, and to any one who cannot think of or perceive or perceive them, you can never, by any definition, make their nature known.”

Like the simplest properties of a horse, good can’t be reduced to anything else, and trying to do so is a mistake. (Although Moore focuses on good, the basic idea – that moral properties can’t be reduced to natural properties – appears to apply to other moral properties, such as right, but Moore believed that the good was the ultimate end of ethical inquiry).

The Open Question Argument

To support his idea that good can’t merely be equated with natural properties, Moore proposes a thought experiment which has come to be known as the “open question argument”:

The hypothesis that disagreement about the meaning of good is disagreement with regard to the correct analysis of a given whole, may be most plainly seen to be incorrect by consideration of the fact that, whatever definition may be offered, it may always be asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good.

For example, you may say that good means simply to promote the most overall happiness, and you may apply that definition to a particular question, such as whether it’s good to tax rich people at a much higher rate than poor people. And if you conclude that is indeed good, then you are thinking that it is one of those things that promotes the most overall happiness.

As plausible as your account may seem to you, the question “Is it good to promote the most overall happiness?” is still just as intelligible as the question “Is it good to tax rich people at a much higher rate?” It’s an open question. It can’t be settled in the same way that other definitional questions (e.g., “Is a bachelor married?) can. The notion that promoting the most overall happiness is alone what good means can always be doubted, “and the mere fact that we understand very well what is meant by doubting it, shews clearly that we have two different notions before our minds.”

Moore applies a similar line of reasoning to the idea that good is a meaningless concept that merely stands in for natural properties. For instance, if whatever is called good seems to always be pleasant, you might suppose that good and pleasant are the same thing. You might think that the statement “Pleasure is the good” isn’t referring to two distinct things, pleasure and goodness, but only to one – pleasure. Moore points out the flaw in this: “But whoever will attentively consider with himself what is actually before his mind when he asks the question ‘Is pleasure (or whatever it may be) after all good?’ can easily satisfy himself that he is not merely wondering whether pleasure is pleasant.”

Everyone, Moore says, understands that the question “Is this good?” can be distinguished from questions about whether things are pleasurable, or desired, or whatever else has been proposed as the definition of good. So, it only makes sense that good is a distinct concept and not merely one of these natural properties.

How to Deal with the Five-Year-Old

If Moore is right that our moral concepts are real but can’t be reduced to natural, empirically verifiable things in the world, then it would, in fact, be naïve of the probing five-year-old to expect that moral values can be explained in the same way that a horse can be explained to be a horse. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that our moral notions are baseless. Moore’s view is that our morality is intuitive and that moral truth is self-evident. So, when the five-year-old metaethicist asks why something is good, the answer is that it just is. And when he asks what makes it so, the answer is the property goodness. It might seem like these answers are dismissive, but remember Moore wrote a whole book working these same answers out.

Of course, some philosophers have given alternative interpretations of Moore’s thesis that morality can’t be demonstrated in natural terms. Rather than claiming that moral truths exist exist and are self-evident, like Moore does, these skeptics, called moral anti-realists, take the impossibility of inferring moral truths from non-moral truths as evidence that there is no objective morality. Try explaining this to a five-year-old: Morality is a sham!

If you want to give the kid what he’s likely asking for, you can try to justify your values according to readily available natural concepts. You can take the route of the moral naturalists and deny that the naturalistic fallacy is even a fallacy. You can embrace their view that moral truths exist and are natural facts just like anything else discoverable by science.

But first you have to get past Moore and Hume.

The “Forgotten” Bioethicist

In the bioethics field, praise is heaped upon Beauchamp and Childress (B and C)for their guiding text, “The Principles of Biomedical Ethics.” They assuredly reap rewards by adding revisions to this book – however so minor.

Before I furthered my bioethics training, I encountered another ethicist W.D. Ross. I thoroughly enjoyed his book, “The Right and the Good” for its insights and attempts to generate a complete ethical theory. It was the most robust work I had encountered through my readings.

Ross was a Scottish philosopher who died in 1971. He is well-regarded in the academic institutions which makes it sensible that B and C encountered his seminal text. He attempted to make a sound ethical theory. That is, one that could assist in almost every ethical problem encountered.

“Fidelity; reparation; gratitude; non-maleficence; justice; beneficence; and self-improvement”

These are the derived “principles” that Ross used to create his ethical guidance.

B and C, clearly looked to these principles for guidance. Even directly pulling “justice” and “beneficence” from him for their book.

He even addresses the critical element called “moral residue”. This is an instance in which the principles have taken you to their limit, where you leave doing the best you can. It is an essential action that you took but it leaves you dissatisfied. Ross openly admits that life functions like this.

Leaning too heavily on the “perfect” action would cripple many people’s decision making. Prescriptive ethics can be pleasant and neat at times. Yet, there is an absence in them too. Are they “true” moral dilemmas if they can be resolved in a quick formula? Life can certainly function as a serious of simple events. When it gets difficult, that is when the more robust systems work. That is where true ethics lives.

The most significant feature is the limit and humility found in Ross’s text. He acknowledges our innate inability to morally fail. He doesn’t seek to coddle our damaged ego after we fail. He acknowledges life’s messy and imprecise nature; compared to the approach of B and C, which is used to inform bioethics and the entire field of human subject research ethics, it clarifies the difficulty of doing our moral duties. Even that we may struggle morally and ethical resolution may never happen.

I am convinced that these ethical complications make for our most stimulating works of fiction since they don’t provide a simple solution. A classic example is “Sofie’s Choice” where she is told to choose between one of her children. The other is fated to a certain death. She chooses but never recovers from knowing the choice she made. Afterwards, her conscience is torn asunder for the remainder of her life.

There is only real takeaway is that ethics shines best when it digs into the nuance. When it says, we can’t provide panacea. You will struggle with your choices…….and that is expected.