Charles Taylor on Negative Liberty

• Charles Taylor's "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty" (1985) critiques the concept of negative liberty, questioning its utility in achieving Liberalism's goal of flourishing individuals.

Positive Freedom

• Doctrines emphasize control over one's life as essential to freedom.
• Individuals are free to the extent they determine themselves and the shape of their lives.
• This view classifies freedom as an "exercise-concept," requiring active control and self-determination.

Negative Freedom

• Negative freedom relies on an "opportunity-concept," where freedom means having options and the ability to act, regardless of whether those options are exercised.
• The original Hobbesian concept exemplifies this, defining freedom as the absence of obstacles, a condition sufficient for being free.
• Negative theories don't necessarily rely on the opportunity-concept, considering the inclusion of self-realization in certain negative theories.
• Self-realization views cannot solely depend on the opportunity-concept, freedom cannot arise without realizing one's potential or confronting internal barriers.
• Overcoming these barriers is necessary to exercise freedom.
• A pure opportunity-concept of freedom is deemed impossible regarding self-realization.

Positive vs. Negative Theories

• Positive theories of freedom are essentially grounded in an exercise-concept, while the same cannot be said for negative theories.
• Positive views identify freedom with self-direction and control over one's life.
• Extreme positive freedom is framed by opponents and embraced by negative theory proponents.
• Firmly supporting the opportunity-concept is viewed as a way to rule out positive theories.
• One's position with the opportunity-concept advantages them, as it upholds a basic principle with common sense backing.
• Basic intuition views freedom as the ability to do something without obstacles, opposing the capacity being realized from within.
• Defending the crude Hobbes-Bentham concept, where freedom lacks external obstacles, is strategic because it abandons intuitions shared in post-Romantic civilization valuing self-realization.
• This fear makes them incapable of upholding liberalism and inevitably ensures defeat.
• The Hobbes-Bentham view is indefensible as a view of freedom.

External Obstacles and Freedom

• The view that freedom is the absence of external obstacles is simple and allows freedom to be to do what you want.
• Conversely, the exercise-concept of freedom requires discrimination between motivations, and those relevant to freedom involve self-awareness, self-understanding, moral discrimination, and self-control.
• One must consider internal bars to freedom and external ones obstacles, or realize that one may do what they want, but may not be free.
• With a self-realization view, the ability to do what one wants is insufficient for being free because this view puts conditions on one's motivation.
• Some considerations show that the pure Hobbesian concept struggles with motivations essential to freedom.
• Freedom, even as the absence of external obstacles, makes discriminations that view certain goals and activities significant.
• Freedom restricted by a new traffic light is less significant than a law forbidding worship due to its serious impact on liberty.
• The cause for significance goes beyond the Hobbesian scheme to which freedom is no longer about significance, one's religious belief is tied to one's moral being, versus city traffic, is trivial.

Significance

• The significance is what the judgment turns on for human life.
• Restricting ethics and religious convictions is more impactful than the trivia of traffic control.
• The Hobbesian scheme has no notion of significance.
• Albania's diabolical defense is a free country because the number of restricted acts is far smaller than Britain.
• This requires a conceptual background according to which restrictions are irrelevant altogether and others are of importance.
• Freedom is important because we are purposive beings, allowing the discrimination of freedom based on purpose.
• We make discriminations on people's motivations, with qualitative and significant freedom.

Evaluating Desires

• More significant purposes are those we want more, though the account is considered either vacuous or false.
• Strong evaluation is not only subjecting first-order desires, but second-order desires.
• Desires and purposes are qualitatively discriminated, as integrated or fragmented, noble or base, and good and bad.
• Judgments of significance are independent of strength because the craving for comfort may be overwhelming.
• The fact of strong evaluation has other consequences for notions of freedom.
• An irrational fear is an obstacle, and we feel we would be less if we could overall overcome such obstacles.
• "Hang-ups" can prevent one's career that they should find fulfilling.
• Spiteful feelings are undermining to relationships, in which one longs to long to be free of harmful feelings.
• Strong evaluation is involved in the cases of freedom or the absence of, which have cases of conflict, even cases of conflict.
• Conflict is between two desires with which there is no trouble identifying, which has no lesser freedom.
• Desire for revenge and spite have obligations incumbent on something/one it would be dishonorable to refute.
• One cannot understand emotions and desires, and in particular, one cannot make sense of their importance/repudiation unless feelings are import-attributing.
• Assessment is incorrigible in principle, and the possibility of false appreciation must be made.
• Cases with fetters are based on misappreciation and viewed as not their own, with internal vs. external obstacles.
• Spite jeopardizes relationships in spite of someone or something, and fear prevents undertaking the career they truly desire.