Free Thoughts Blog

Why begin this series on arguments for libertarianism with Robert Nozick? He’s certainly not the first person to offer a philosophical justification for libertarianism, nor is he even the most widely read.

No, the reason to start with Nozick is because his classic work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU), is where nearly everyone starts if they’re coming to libertarianism for the first time in a philosophy classroom. And, in most cases, it’s where they end, too. For in the academy, Robert Nozick simply is libertarianism—and the arguments he makes in ASU represents for many political philosophers the whole of libertarian philosophy.

Another reason to start with ASU is that it’s just such a wonderful book. Nozick writes unlike nearly every other philosopher. He’s playful and funny. And he has a wonderfully refreshing attitude toward philosophical argument. “There is room for words on subjects other than last words,” Nozick writes in the book’s preface.

Indeed, the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject. But it’s not, surely, that each philosopher thinks that he finally, thank God, has found the truth and built an impregnable fortress around it. We are all actually much more modest than that. For good reason. Having thought long and hard about the view he proposes, a philosopher has a reasonably good idea about its weak points; the places where great intellectual weight is placed upon something perhaps too fragile to bear it, the places where the unravelling of the view might begin, the unprobed assumptions he feels uneasy about.

Nozick maintains that modesty throughout ASU. And if that’s the only lesson we take from the book, it would still be worth reading. But it’s not. ASU has much to offer in its defense of liberty.

So what is Nozick’s libertarian position? It begins with natural rights. Quite literally. Here’s the first line of ASU: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).”

These rights are natural in that we have them because of what we are and not because they were given to us by someone. But just saying we have rights isn’t the same as giving an argument for why we have them. To do this, Nozick draws on Immanuel Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative, specifically its second formulation: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” Humans are by nature rational beings possessing dignity. This dignity prevents us from being used by others, and hence we have rights against such use.

Our rights function as “side-constraints,” Nozick says, limiting what others—including the state—may do to us. We can’t trade rights away for benefits. For example, we are prohibited from deciding that a little more happiness or a little more wealth (or a lot more) is sufficient grounds for violating a person’s rights. People “may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent,” Nozick writes. “Individuals are inviolable.”

From this Nozick moves to a basic principle of self-ownership. I own myself and thus have a right to do with myself as I please. You own yourself and have the same right. I don’t own you and you don’t own me. This gives each one of us rights not only to ourselves, but also to the fruits of our labor. (Nozick argues for this last point along Lockean lines.) In other words, Nozick takes our fundamental rights to be of the negative sort. These are rights to be free from certain acts by other people (assault, theft, enslavement, etc.), not rights to be provided with certain goods and services (a right to healthcare, or a right to education).

But this leads to an enormous question when it comes to politics, one Nozick helpfully points out: “So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?”

The shortest answer is “not much.” The slightly longer outline Nozick provides—before spending much of the book defending his claims—looks like this:

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.

This sets Nozick up for arguments with two groups. First, those who think this vision of the state is too small: progressives, liberal egalitarians, communitarians, socialists, conservatives, and so on. Second, those who think this vision of the state is too big: anarchists.

In my next post, I’ll turn to Nozick’s dispute with the anarchists, specifically his argument that the move from anarchy to a minimal state can occur without anyone’s rights being violated.

Is libertarianism best understood as a doctrine committed to the maximization of freedom? In my last post, I presented a moral argument against this interpretation. In brief: the goal of maximizing freedom is compatible with violating the liberty of the few, so long as their loss of freedom is sufficiently compensated by the greater freedom of the many. This stands in stark contrast to the libertarian view of freedom, in which each individual’s liberty is seen as a (nearly) inviolable constraint on the way in which other individuals or groups may legitimately pursue their goals.

In this post, I want to present a different kind of argument against this “maximizing” interpretation of libertarianism. Not only is the goal of maximizing freedom an immoral one, for the reasons I have already articulated. It is, arguably, an incoherent one. When we think about it in a casual way, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we know what it means to maximize freedom. But this is an illusion that can be quickly dispelled by pursuing a few lines of thought more deeply.

We can begin by noticing that the idea of maximizing freedom will only make sense if we are able to compare different people, situations, or social systems in terms of the amount of freedom they have or allow, and to say whether one has more or less than another. Is this something we are able to do?

It’s easy to think of a few simple cases where we seem to be. Consider the abolition of slavery in the United States. Prior to abolition, slaves lacked (among other important freedoms) the freedom to control the own labor. After abolition, they possessed this freedom to a much greater degree. If anything could make a country more free, surely the liberation of some 12 percent of the population from the bonds of slavery is it. The United States without slavery certainly wasn’t maximizing freedom, but it at least came closer than it did with slavery.

This seems like an easy and obvious case. And it would be an easy an obvious one if all that the abolition of slavery involved was the granting of new freedoms for some members of the population. If the freedom of all non-slaves was unaffected by abolition, and the freedom of slaves was unambiguously increased, then we could confidently conclude that the freedom of society (i.e. the sum total of the freedom of all individuals in society) had increased.

This is not, however, what abolition actually did. Abolition did, of course, increase the freedom of slaves. But it also diminished the freedom of certain non-slaves. Specifically, it diminished the freedom of slave-owners.

This sounds like a shocking claim. But it shouldn’t be. If we understand freedom in the way that most libertarians do – if we understand it, as Rothbard did, as the “absence of molestation by other persons” – then it is actually quite obvious. Prior to abolition, slave-owners were able to do certain things to their slaves without fear of interference by other persons. They could force their slaves to work, physically restrain them, beat them, and so on, all without the law doing anything to stop them. After abolition, they could no longer engage in these activities without fear of legal intervention. Before abolition, the law allowed them to do certain things. After abolition, it didn’t. Their freedom had been reduced.

Now, obviously, I think it is a good thing that their freedom had been reduced in this way. The activities that slaveowners were no longer allowed to engage in were ones that violated the moral rights of their slaves. A just society will not allow its members this freedom, any more than it allows its members the freedom to kill each other, or steal from each other. But from the fact that the exercise of these freedoms is unjust it does not follow that they are not really freedom after all. If I could snap my fingers and make it the case that you were able to do whatever you wanted, just or not, without interference from others, you would be more free as a result. If I snapped my fingers again and thereby magically prohibited you from doing anything unjust, you would be less free. Freedom is one thing; justice is another. And very often what justice requires, in the case of slavery and in many other cases, is that certain freedoms be curtailed so that others might be enhanced.

I will explore the theme of conflicting freedoms in more detail in my next post. For now, the important thing to note is that if the abolition of slavery increased some people’s freedom, and reduced the freedom of others, then determining the net effect on freedom becomes considerably more difficult. For now we must determine whether the gains in freedom were greater than the losses. And it is just not at all clear how we are supposed to do that. Presumably, we would have to add up the freedoms gained by the slaves, subtract from that the freedoms lost by the slaveowners, and see if what we’re left with is a positive number. But how, precisely, is this to be done? What is the “unit” of freedom on which our operations of addition and subtraction are to be performed?

This last question is especially important, and challenging. To make it clearer, consider the following example from the philosopher Will Kymlicka’s critique of libertarianism. Suppose we want to compare the freedom of people in London with that of people in pre-1989 communist Albania. People in London have freedoms like the right to vote, the right to practice their religion, and other civil and democratic liberties. People in Albania, let us say, lack these freedoms. “On the other hand, Albania does not have many traffic lights, and those people who own cars face few if any legal restrictions on where or how they drive” (143). Kymlicka’s sense, which I share and I expect most of you do too, is that Albania’s lack of traffic regulations does not compensate for its lack of basic civil liberties. It is, on the whole, a less free society than London. But the question is: can we account for this judgment simply in terms of a quantitative judgment about the amount of freedom in Albania as compared to London?

How would such a quantitative judgment be made? Should we count up the individual, particular action-tokens that are forbidden in Albania and compare them with the action-tokens that are forbidden in London? If we discovered that, over the course of a year, red lights produce 18,623,545 instances of people being prevented from acting in the way they desire to act, whereas denial of the right to vote produces only 42,658 such instances, would that be sufficient to demonstrate that the red-lights are more freedom-restricting than the denial of political liberty? Or should we be counting not individual action-tokens but more general action-types, i.e. “the right to vote” versus “the right to drive through intersections as one wishes”? And whether we choose types or tokens, just how are we supposed to individuate actions in order to add them up? Is the right to marry the person of your choice one action? Or a shorthand way of describing an enormously large number of discrete actions?

However we decide to count up actions, the whole exercise seems largely to miss the point. For it assumes that what we care about when we care about liberty is (merely) the total number of actions allowed or prohibited. But why think that all freedoms are of equal value? Why should the freedom, say, to be governed by one’s own conscience in matters of religious belief count for no more than the freedom to count the blades of grass on one’s lawn? Why believe that all that matters in assessing the freedom of a country is the numerical quantity of freedom allowed, and not the substantive quality of that freedom?

Libertarians are right to believe that freedom matters. They might even be right to believe that it is the highest political value. But it is a mistake to think that these ideas, however true they might be, can be fleshed out in terms of a commitment to maximizing freedom. Morally, a commitment to maximizing freedom is inconsistent with libertarianism’s proper concern for individual rights. And conceptually, it is based on the incorrect assumption that freedom is the sort of thing that can usefully be measured, compared, added, and subtracted. In certain easy cases this may be possible. But the possibility that certain cherished freedoms can be gained only at the expense of other freedoms makes generalized comparison in terms of freedom alone difficult, if not impossible.

This insight has important implications for libertarianism in general, but especially for a correct understanding of the relationship between liberty and property. And so it is to this topic that I will turn in my next post.

What is the relationship between libertarianism and liberty? In my last post, I began to explore this question, and suggested that one popular answer—that libertarianism seeks to maximize liberty—is flawed. In this post, I will explain in greater detail why.

As I noted in my last post, the maximizing view is one that is more often attributed to libertarianism by its critics than by its sophisticated advocates. It holds that in choosing between two policies or institutional structures, we ought to choose that which yields the greatest amount of liberty, and that libertarian political institutions are justified because they yield the maximum amount of liberty.

There are several serious problems with this view. The first is one that is common to all maximizing views—most notably, classical utilitarianism. In classical utilitarianism, of course, the goal is to maximize utility rather than liberty. But the most serious objections to utilitarianism as a political morality really have nothing to do with the nature of the maximand. They have to do, instead, with the idea that morality should aim at the unconstrained maximization of some aggregate, interpersonal good.

What utilitarianism seeks to maximize is not the happiness of any particular person but of the aggregate of happiness across persons: the sum of my happiness, plus yours, plus hers, and so on. But maximizing aggregate happiness is compatible with leaving some people destitute. It is even, more disturbingly, compatible with making some people destitute. So long as the misery of the few is sufficiently compensated by the happiness of the many, the treatment of fate of any particular individual is of no decisive relevance for the utilitarian. It is for this reason that philosophers as distinct as John Rawls and Robert Nozick have both objected that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the separateness of persons.

The view that justice consists in maximizing liberty is subject to precisely the same objection. Insofar as it is aggregate liberty that is to be maximized, this view will countenance the sacrifice of some persons’ freedom for the benefit of others, so long as the net result is positive. Rather than freedom serving as a constraint on the ways in which others may permissibly act, freedom on this view serves as a goal to be maximized without any real constraint.

This has troubling implications for a variety of policy issues, such as (for example) questions involving the preventative detention of potentially dangerous individuals. On the maximizing view, there is no principled objection to imprisoning an innocent person X merely on the grounds that X is deemed likely to commit some offense in the future. Such preventative detention restricts X’s liberty, of course, but if it prevents X from acting in ways that would have restricted the liberty of sufficiently many other people (by killing them, or stealing from them, etc.), then, on this view, it is justifiable.

A defender of the maximizing view might argue that such trade-offs are unlikely to be beneficial in the real world as opposed to the world of philosophical thought experiments. And there is undoubtedly some truth to this response. I will simply note, however, that it is precisely the same response that a utilitarian might make to the charges of injustice we have leveled against his theory. And so whatever reasons we have for finding the response inadequate in that context (and I think we have plenty), apply here as well.

There is, however, a distinct line of response that is open to the proponent of maximizing freedom but not open to the proponent of maximizing utility. And that is to claim that the problem of unjust trade-offs does not arise for the maximizer of liberty because liberty, unlike utility, admits of a maximum conceivable limit. This seems to have been Murray Rothbard’s critique of Herbert Spencer’s “law of equal freedom,” which held that “every man has the freedom to do all he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” For Rothbard (following Clara Dixon Davidson), this formulation is redundant, since “if every man has the freedom to do all that he wills, it follows from this very premise that no man’s freedom has been infringed or invaded. The whole second clause of the law after ‘wills’ is redundant and unnecessary” (Power and Market, p. 266).

If Rothbard is right, libertarianism is immune to the kind of criticism we have leveled against utilitarianism. Libertarianism leaves every person free to do all that he wills. We thus need not worry that maximizing freedom will require unjustly sacrificing the freedom of some for the sake of greater freedom for others. And that is because it is conceptually impossible to give any individual more freedom than libertarianism already allows them.

Unfortunately, however, Rothbard is not right. Libertarianism does not hold that people are morally free to do all that they will. The freedom of all individuals is sharply curtailed by the rights of others. If I try to punch you in the nose, or trespass on your property, you may justly interfere with my doing so.

Libertarianism does, of course, hold that people are free to do all that they will provided they do not violate the rights of others. But this is a much less impressive claim. This claim does not render libertarianism immune to the objection we are considering, since it leaves open the possibility that freedom could be increased by abridging the rights of some and thus giving greater freedom to everyone else. Moreover, this version of the claim is entirely vacuous. Any theory leaves individuals free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t violate the rights of others—as those rights are specified by the theory.

So much for the idea that libertarianism is or ought to be about maximizing liberty. Or, almost so much. I have argued in this post that maximizing freedom is a morally unattractive goal, insofar as it licenses the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the many. But there is an even more fundamental problem. The goal of maximizing freedom is not only unattractive, it is incoherent. Or so I will argue in my next post.

Anyone who takes libertarianism seriously, either as an advocate or a critic, will before too long find themselves grappling with the question of how that doctrine should be defined and understood. What is it that one commits oneself to, precisely, when one identifies as a libertarian? What beliefs or values are essential to the view, and which are contingent and dispensable?

Now, it might seem as though this question has a rather simple and obvious answer. After all, what else could define a commitment to “libertarianism” other than a belief in liberty? Other political ideologies pay  lip service to freedom, and perhaps even hold it as one legitimate value among others to be balanced in the great political calculus. But what sets libertarians apart is their belief that liberty is the highest political value. 

As simple as this story may be, however, I think that there are good philosophical reasons for rejecting it. In this and in the next few posts, I’ll explain why.

Part of the problem, of course, is that it’s not exactly clear just what holding liberty to be one’s highest political value is supposed to mean. Like many other descriptions of libertarianism, it’s a good slogan, but a poor philosophical formula. There are numerous ways in which it might be interpreted, and many of those interpretations are mutually incompatible and yield contradictory guidance. And none of them are internally satisfying.

To see this, let’s look at one popular and superficially plausible interpretation. What it means to hold liberty as the highest political value, on this view, is to hold that liberty ought to be maximized. That is, in choosing between any two sets of institutions, or between any two public policies, we ought to choose the one that yields the greatest amount of freedom. On this measure, libertarians agree that free markets score better than socialism, and so are united in supporting the former over the latter. On the other hand, libertarians disagree among themselves over whether an anarchist society would really be more free than one governed by a minimal state, and so there is no single libertarian position regarding which of these two systems is preferable to the other.

That this view of libertarianism is easier to find represented among the critics of libertarianism than among its sophisticated defenders should be telling. I am unable to think of a single libertarian philosopher who defends a position like the one I am describing. But it was, for instance, the view of libertarianism at the core of Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch’s recent and popular critique of libertarianism and the workplace. For them, libertarians’ (presumed) commitment to maximizing freedom was inconsistent with the tremendous amount of control that libertarianism seems to allow employers over the daily lives of their employees - regulating what they wear, what they say, how many bathroom breaks they are allowed to take, and so on. If libertarianism really means maximizing freedom, they argued, then shouldn’t the freedom of employees matter just as much as the freedom of employers?

The standard libertarian response to such criticisms, of course, is to point out that employment relationships are voluntary, and so whatever restrictions employers impose upon their employees do not actually count as a violation of their freedom in the relevant sense. Personally, I don’t find this response to be all that persuasive. For starters, it simply assumes that what libertarians believe ought to be the case actually is the case - viz., that employment relationships are entirely voluntary. But this ignores the myriad ways in which coercion infests our present system, often to the benefit of employers and to the detriment of laborers. Second, the argument assumes that whatever is voluntarily agreed to cannot be a restriction on freedom. But this is either wrong or at least a very strange way of using the word “freedom.” Suppose I ask you to lock me up in your dungeon and throw away the key, perhaps in exchange for your writing a check to my child who I would otherwise be unable to support. However unimpeachable the contract may be on procedural terms, I am, once locked away in your dungeon, less free than I was when I was, well, free. Libertarians might be right in thinking that there is nothing morally wrong with the lack of freedom I now endure. But to infer from this that it must not be a lack of freedom after all is an abuse of language and logic.

The fundamental problem with this line of argument is its reliance on what philosophers call a “moralized” conception of liberty. Rather than understanding liberty as the absence of interference per se (or the absence of human-caused interference – add on whatever qualifications you like), moralized conceptions define liberty as the absence of unjust interference. So nothing counts as a violation of liberty unless it’s also unjust. This gets the “right” libertarian answer in the case of employee-employer relations – the liberty of employees is not violated because restrictions on their behavior are the product of a voluntary contract and hence not unjust. But it gets us the wrong answer in the dungeon case above. It also, I think, gets us the wrong answer in cases of criminal punishment. If, as many libertarians assume, violent criminals voluntarily forfeit their rights to liberty when they commit their criminal acts, then punishing them by imprisonment might not be unjust. But, surely, this does not mean that the criminal is, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, perfectly free when the policemen handcuff him, throw him in their police car, and lock him away in a cell.

Freedom and Justice are both important values, and ones to which libertarians do and should give their allegiance. But we should resist the temptation to suppose that they are the same value. That they are not the same entails that it is possible, in principle at least, that they may in certain circumstances come into conflict. This is a possibility that I will explore in a future post.

I have always thought of myself as a philosopher first, and a libertarian second. In my more self-congratulatory moments, I tell myself that this is because my highest commitment is to the truth, wherever it may lead, regardless of political program. To be honest, though, I think it largely comes down to personality. The fact is, being in a room full of people who all agree with each other—especially about politics—makes me profoundly uncomfortable. And that discomfort makes me start to question things. Put me in a room full of socialists, and I will start arguing for the virtues of a free market. But transport me to a room full of libertarians and, well…

And that’s why I’m here, blogging for Libertarianism.org. It’s not to be a cheerleader for libertarianism, though I think that doctrine gives us plenty cause for cheer. It’s to raise uncomfortable questions, explore challenges, and poke and prod the weak points in the ideological armor we all sometimes get a little too comfortable in.

In the end, of course, I’m still a libertarian—though perhaps a libertarian of a somewhat unorthodox sort. I think that there are weaknesses in many standard libertarian arguments. And I think that a failure to recognize those weaknesses leads many libertarians to blunder when presenting their position to outsiders, or defending it against objections. But I think that the weaknesses can be overcome; or, when they can’t, that the strengths of the view are sufficient to compensate for them.

I suspect most readers of this blog probably feel the same. Still, until and unless we’ve gone through the hard intellectual work of thinking through the weak spots in your position, we can’t really know this to be true. It might be true, but even true opinions, as John Stuart Mill warned us, “if…not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed…will be held as dead dogma, not [as] living truth.”  And truth thus held, he notes, “is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.”

As a philosopher, I don’t think that’s any way for a rational being to live. But, you may ask, so what? Not everyone is a philosopher (thank God). Some people just want to figure out the truth so that they can get on with the important practical business of getting things done—of creating wealth, being a good citizen, and maybe moving our society a little bit farther down the path toward freedom. Does Mill’s point have any practical significance?

I believe that it does. For even if all you want to do is nudge public policy in the direction of freedom, you cannot begin to do that unless you actually know what freedom is, and that is a question which brings you right back to philosophy. For instance, is the protection of intellectual property a way of securing freedom (as is, we libertarians believe, the protection of property in tangible goods)? Or is it itself a violation of freedom? To answer this question requires not just understanding the concept of freedom, but its relation to the concept of property both in external objects and in one’s self. A philosophical understanding of these concepts might not be sufficient to resolve the challenge of intellectual property, but it is surely necessary. (Hey, necessary and sufficient conditions—that’s more philosophy!)

“Balderdash,” you say! If talk about freedom requires so much philosophy, then so much the worse for the concept of freedom. Libertarians can, and should perhaps, just be pragmatic. Forget about philosophy; let’s just do what works.

But not even this quintessentially American pragmatism allows us to escape philosophy’s probing questions. For we cannot know what works unless we know what it means to “work.” A policy “works,” presumably, if it gets us the right results. But what results are right? Economic growth? Increased happiness? More freedom? (whoops, back to that difficult concept again!) To know what works requires, at the very least, that we decide which outcomes are worth pursuing and what means are legitimate for pursuing them. It requires, in other words, that we think philosophically about morality and politics.

So that’s what I’m going to be doing in my future posts here. I invite you to think critically with me about some of the foundational concepts of our shared worldview. In some of my next few posts, I’ll talk about freedom, about self-ownership, and about free exchange. In discussing these issues, I’ll draw on the resources of philosophy, but also on the rich resources of the libertarian intellectual tradition—a tradition that Libertarianism.org in general and George H. Smith’s wonderful posts in particular are doing so much to keep alive. I hope you’ll join me.

A significant amount of debate between libertarian and non-libertarian political thinkers has to do with the distinction between negative and positive liberty. These two technical terms within political philosophy play a large role in determining the limits of permissible state action, as well as establishing just what the state exists to do in the first place.

Which means libertarians and non-libertarians interested in political ideas—and keen to having meaningful conversations about them—will benefit from understanding these two sorts of liberty.

If we want to start very simple, keeping our definitions to just two words each, negative liberty means “freedom from,” while positive liberty means “capacity to.”

Another way of thinking about the difference—though again, it’s a rough one—is to see negative liberty as being about the absence of external limits, while positive liberty is about the absence of internal limits.

Let’s look at an example. Jack’s living in New York. He’d like go to California to visit family. Under a negative conception of liberty, Jack is free to go to California if nobody is actively preventing him from doing so. Thus his negative freedom would be violated if his neighbor locked Jack in the basement, or if someone stole his car.

But what if Jack’s so poor that he can’t afford a car or a plane ticket? What if Jack is sick and so not physically up to the trip? In these instances, no person prevents Jack from going to California, so Jack’s negative liberty remains intact. Yet he lacks the capacity to fulfill his desire and so, from a positive liberty standpoint, he is unfree.

Within the context of political philosophy—within the context of what the state is permitted to do and what it ought to do—a government protects Jack’s negative liberty by preventing the neighbor from locking Jack up and preventing the thief from stealing Jack’s car. If the state is unable to prevent these specific acts, it may punish the perpetrators, thus (we hope) reducing the likelihood of other, similar liberties violations. In addition to—or instead of—punishing violations, the state might force the violator to compensate Jack, striving to make him whole.

On the other hand, a state tasked with directly promoting Jack’s positive liberty might tax its citizens in order to buy Jack the car he couldn’t otherwise afford. Or it might use that revenue to pay for the medical care Jack needs to get back on his feet so he can travel. A positive liberty focused state would take active steps to assure Jack isn’t just free to pursue his desires, but also has the resources to attain them.

Typically, libertarians believe the state should only concern itself with negative liberty and should never undertake to actively promote positive liberty. In part this is because we recognize that, in order to give some people the resources they need to get what they want, it must take those resources from others. The money Jack uses to buy a car or pay his medical bills is money someone else now doesn’t have to pay for his or her own car or medical bills. (In a sense, this means the state has stolen a car from one person in order to give it to another, a violation of the victim’s negative liberty.) If the state tries to avoid this by, for instance, forcing the doctor to give Jack medical care for free, it has violated the doctor’s negative liberty to use his time as he sees fit.

Beyond this, libertarians often argue that a state aiming at positive liberty will not only result in less negative liberty, but in less positive liberty as well. By allowing people to keep the products of their own labor, for example, we grow the economy, meaning more resources for everyone to pursue their desires. States that put positive liberty above negative liberty simply end up poorer. This means, we libertarians argue, if you really care about the positive liberty of the poor, you’ll setup a government that does nothing but protect negative liberty.

Sometimes, however, libertarians take these arguments to mean that positive liberty either doesn’t exist or that it’s not something we should care about. I don’t think that’s quite right, though. While we should always recognize a bright line between positive and negative liberty when we’re talking about the role of the state, we should also recognize how important positive liberty is for all of us.

I do the work I do because I believe it’s important and because I love it. (I still sometimes find it difficult to believe that I get paid to run and write for Libertarianism.org.) But I also do it, of course, because it brings me the positive liberty to attain other things I value, such as food and shelter (and a car and medical care) for my family and lots (and lots) of books I’ll probably never find the time to read.

If negative liberty were all that mattered in any context, we’d have no reason to prefer a world of wealth to one of poverty if no one was stopping us—in either world—from doing anything we wanted.

Sometimes we object to the use of the word “liberty” in positive liberty by arguing that the only real liberty is the negative sort. And that may well be true. In fact, allowing both negative and positive to claim the label of liberty can make it more difficult to argue against the state actively trying to promote the former at the expense of the latter. After all, who wants to be put in the position of arguing against “liberty?”

In this case, we might be better off saying that only negative liberty is really liberty, while positive liberty ought to be renamed something like “power” or “capacity.” But accepting that doesn’t mean we should ignore the distinction as it’s used in the literature today, or that we shouldn’t listen to those who want to continue talking about positive liberty.

In closing, as is always the case with any philosophical dispute, a short summary neglects many of the sides and much of the nuance. So if you’re interested in learning more about negative and positive liberty and the various ways philosophers have sought to distinguish—or unify!—them, you can’t find a better place to start than the always-wonderful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the topic.