1101GIR Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: The Soup Dragons, Negative Liberty, Positive Liberty
4 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
L2. Freedom
What is it to be free?
• 'The Soup Dragons: I'm Free':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksi3HZ4glek&feature=related
• 'Braveheart: They Will Never Take Our Freedom':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gt_eln1mUU
Positive (Freedom To)
Negative (Freedom From)
• Braveheart: Freedom as sacrifice
for a cause for the common good
• Freedom to do something yourself
• Understood collectively
rather than individually
• Freedom through obligation and
opportunity
• "I'm free, to do what I want, any old
time" (The Soup Dragons: I'm Free)
• Absence of constraint
• Absence of rules and
regulations
• Lack of confinement
• Absence of responsibility
• Freedom to do without
confinement by others
• Explained differently in the ancient world
• E.g. 'Free Man's Slave'
• Phenomenology
• Reflecting on our lives and how things relate to us
A Quick History of Freedom
• Ancient Greece
• "Man is a political animal" (Aristotle)
• Politics is fundamental to the individual identity
• Freedom is citizenship
• Citizenship is 'ruling and being ruled in turn'
• Freedom as obligation
• Being a member of a free community, requires some individual sacrifices
• Freedom is experienced collectively
• Don't concern non-interference
• Republican Tradition
• Continued emphasis on the political foundations of freedom
• Liberty is living in a free community
• Free communities need virtuous citizens if they are to survive
• Our (liberal) thinking about liberty forgets this insight and insists that liberty is individual
freedom from community and obligation
Negative Liberty
• Says that freedom is not being interfered with by others
• The absence of restraint
• The opposite of freedom, coercion, implies the deliberate interference of human beings
• E.g. We don't argue that we are coerced or restrained because we cannot fly like birds.
• This is something we are not able to do, rather than not free to do.
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