Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

100 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
Let us start from the clearest concept in Berlin — his notion of
negative freedom — which Berlin (1969, 122) defines as follows: “I am
normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men
interferes with my activity”. The opposite of having negative freedom is
being coerced — the deliberate interference of other persons in an area
of my life in which I could, without the interference, act freely. Negative
freedom thus corresponds to freedom as non-interference, and Berlin
speaks approvingly of this kind of freedom: “[…] non-interference,
which is the opposite of coercion, is good as such, although it is not
the only good. This is the ‘negative’ conception of liberty in its classical
form” (1969, 128).
On positive freedom, there is much less clarity in Berlin’s work.
Berlin first introduces positive freedom as the freedom to be one’s own
master:
I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I
wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious
purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were,
from outside. I wish to be a somebody, not nobody, a doer — deciding,
not being decided for; self-directed and not acted upon by external nature
or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of
playing a human role, that is, conceiving goals and policies of my own
and realizing them. (Berlin 1969, 131)
Berlin argues that the metaphor of self-mastery historically developed
into the idea that a person has two selves, a dominant self which is
identified with reason and a ‘higher nature’, and a ‘heteronomous self’
which follows desires and passions and needs to be disciplined. Berlin
continues that the first self, the ‘real self’, may become seen as wider
than the individual,
as a social whole of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a
race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the
yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which,
by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’ single will upon its recalcitrant
‘members’ achieves its own, and therefore their ‘higher freedom’. (Berlin
1969, 132)
Put differently, men are “coerced in the name of some goal (let us
say, justice or public health) which they would if they were more
enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or