Liberty, Equality, and Justice as Three Demands

A state requires everyone above a certain income to contribute a portion of it, and uses the proceeds to fund schooling for children whose families could not otherwise pay.

Three objections can be made to that arrangement and they have nothing to do with each other. The first is that people are being made to hand over money they earned, under threat, for purposes they did not choose. The second is that the scheme leaves untouched the far larger advantages that wealthy children have, so it does not achieve what it claims. The third is that the burden falls on the wrong people or that the benefit reaches the wrong ones.

These are complaints in the names of liberty, equality, and justice. Getting clear on what each is demanding, and on why satisfying one can mean failing another, is what this article does.

Liberty in two senses

Isaiah Berlin drew the distinction in an essay of 1958 called "Two Concepts of Liberty", later collected in Four Essays on Liberty in 1969, and it has organised the discussion ever since.

The negative sense answers the question of how far someone is left alone. Its measure is the number and importance of the doors standing open, and it is silent on whether the person has any means of walking through them. A person with no money is not, on this account, made unfree by their poverty, since nobody is stopping them buying anything. Whether that is a virtue of the account or its central defect is one of the standing disputes in the subject.

The positive sense answers a different question, about who is in charge. Its natural examples are addiction, indoctrination, and desperation, where nobody is interfering and yet the person is not really running their own life. And it makes room for something the negative sense cannot express, namely that being governed by a body you have a share in is a kind of freedom even though you are subject to its rules.

Berlin's argument was that the second concept is dangerous, and the shape of the worry is worth setting out because it is often reduced to a slogan. If freedom is self-mastery, there must be a self that does the mastering and a self that gets mastered. Divide the person into a rational or higher self and a merely appetitive one, and it becomes possible to say that a person's real self wants something other than what they say they want. From there it is a short step to the claim that coercing someone can free them, since it aligns them with what they would have wanted had they been thinking clearly. Regimes that imprisoned people while describing it as liberation were not making an obvious verbal error, and Berlin's point was that the concept had been available to them.

One concept or two

The distinction has been attacked at its foundation. Gerald MacCallum argued in 1967 that there is a single concept of freedom with three slots in it: an agent is free from some constraint to do or become something. Every intelligible claim about freedom fills all three, and what look like two concepts are disagreements about how to fill the slots.

The point is a good one and it does real work. Someone who says the poor are unfree and someone who says they are not are usually not disagreeing about the meaning of freedom. They are disagreeing about what counts as a constraint, which is a substantive dispute about which obstacles are the kind that matter, and stating it as a dispute over which concept is the real one obscures what is actually at issue.

What MacCallum's analysis does not do is remove the disagreement. It relocates it, which is progress, and the question of whether lacking the means to do something is a constraint on doing it remains exactly as difficult after the relocation as before.

Equality and the emptiest true principle in philosophy

The definition has to be given in two parts because the word covers two things that come apart. Equal standing is a claim about how people are to be regarded: as equals, none of them counting for more than another when their interests are weighed. An even distribution is a claim about outcomes, and it is possible to insist on the first while denying that the second follows.

The principle goes back to Aristotle's discussion of justice in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, and almost nobody denies it. It is also very nearly empty on its own, and understanding why is worth more than any number of arguments about it.

The principle says to treat like cases alike. It does not say which likenesses are relevant. A legal system that denies certain people the vote is not violating it, provided it denies the vote to all of them consistently, because on that system's account of relevance those people differ in a relevant respect. Every serious dispute about equality is a dispute about which differences count, and formal equality is silent on precisely that question. It rules out arbitrariness and caprice, which is not nothing, and it settles nothing anyone was arguing about.

That is why the interesting work happens one level down, in the arguments about which differences between people can justify treating them differently: effort, need, contribution, choice, birth, and so on. The next article is about those arguments.

Justice as the third demand

Justice is not a third name for equality. An equal distribution can be unjust, if some people worked and others did not and everyone receives the same. An unequal distribution can be just, if the inequality tracks something that matters. Egalitarian answers are one family of answers to the distributive question rather than the question itself, and treating the two as interchangeable makes the actual arguments impossible to state.

Nor is justice a third name for liberty, though one influential tradition comes close to saying so. On that view a distribution is just when it arose from voluntary transactions between people entitled to what they held, whatever the resulting pattern looks like. The advanced tier examines it. Notice only that it makes justice a matter of how a distribution came about rather than of what it looks like, and that the two tests can disagree about the same distribution.

Where they collide

The three demands are not variations on one idea and they conflict in specific, identifiable ways.

Redistribution requires coercion. Money is not moved from one person to another by request, and any state that equalises anything is interfering with people who would rather it did not. Every egalitarian programme costs negative liberty, and the only question is how much and whether it is worth it.

Equality can be pursued at the expense of positive liberty as well, wherever a scheme decides on people's behalf what they need. A state that provides a uniform benefit in kind rather than money has equalised something at the cost of some people's control over their own lives, which is a real loss and not a rhetorical one.

Formal equality can entrench substantive inequality. A rule applied identically to everyone falls very differently on people whose situations differ, and a policy of perfect consistency is compatible with an outcome no one would defend.

And negative liberty is not distributed equally by leaving people alone. The person who owns land and the person who owns nothing both face no interference, and one of them has vastly more open doors. Non-interference is not the same as being equally free, and much of the argument between the political traditions turns on this observation and what to do about it.

Next

This article has said that the interesting question is which differences between people justify treating them differently, and has not answered it. The next article takes up the candidates.