Capabilities vs. Anderson's Positive Freedom- George

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One thing that stuck out to me about the first two chapters of Private Government and that I noticed in Anderson's piece on property rights was something confusing about her definition of negative vs. positive freedom. One of her big claims is that property rights can't be justified in terms of negative liberty, and so "the libertarian case for private property depends on accepting that positive liberty often rightly overrides negative liberty," (47). This is because the "correlative duty, coercively enforceable by individuals or the state, that others refrain from meddling with another's property without the owner's permission" amounts to a "massive" loss of negative liberty. When someone owns land, she is decreasing the negative liberty of everyone else in the world who no longer has access to it, but increasing her own positive liberty to dispose of the land without interference. While this is an illuminating argument, I think it reveals something counterintuitive about Anderson's division between positive and negative liberty.

She defines negative freedom as "no one interfering with your actions," whereas positive liberty is "a rich menu of options effectively accessible to you, given your resources," (45). It's hard, however, to see how these are separable in the case of private property. When Lalitha owns her land, her "menu of options" increases because her actions with respect to her property are protected from interference. Anderson's claim of net negative liberty loss is no longer as clear cut. While "the identical liberty of of seven billion others" over Lalitha's property is erased, they also gain negative liberty over their own property that they did not have before, and it's not clear how much ability they ever really had to use the land Lalitha now owns without interference (47). The Hobbesian state of nature is not really one of "perfect negative liberty," where everyone has negative liberty with respect to everything, because everyone is also subject to constant interference from others; their negative liberty is constantly being infringed upon (46). What property rights really do is increase positive liberty by increasing negative liberty with respect to a particular sphere that we call property. We therefore don't need any kind of "weighting" of positive over negative liberty to justify property rights.

This is not to say we should weigh negative liberty and positive liberty equally. In fact, I think it indicates that we don't really need to be concerned with negative liberty at all. Defining it as 'noninterference' begs the question: interference with what? In the case of property rights, it is the ability to use ones body and whatever is inside the sphere of property. But this is equally an instance of positive liberty, because it unlocks opportunities associated with that lack of interference. The same is true of any other instance of negative liberty that we deem important. If your freedom of religion is interfered with, your opportunities to practice religion are limited. If your freedom of contact is infringed upon, so are your opportunities to contract. Instead of worrying about balancing between negative and positive liberty, the question then becomes about properly balancing positive liberties between people in accordance with some principle of distributive justice, so that, for example, the opportunities available to one do not infringe on the opportunities available to another.

This view of freedom is now much closer to the idea of capabilities we saw in Taiwo. I think it is a much simpler and more intuitive way to understand 'freedom' than the traditional negative-positive dichotomy that Anderson offers. It removes the difficulty of placing different weights on different kinds of freedoms, or of moralizing about the nature of property. In a way, this fits Anderson's view, since she says that "positive liberty very often rightly overrides negative liberty." I simply take it a step further by saying that positive liberty, or capabilities, always overrides negative liberty, because the only reason we care about negative liberty is that it is connected to opportunities or capabilities.

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