Freedom and Liberty

Negative Liberty

In the most minimal sense of liberty, one is free if one is not physically restrained. Thomas Hobbes emphasized this conception in his Leviathan, while recently Hillel Steiner has argued that one is free unless some other individual makes an action impossible. An armed robber may threaten death, but in this very limited sense, one is still free to refuse to surrender her wallet. The robber's gun makes the surrender of the wallet less desirable, but one is free, in some sense, to refuse. But virtually all theorists of freedom would agree that physical restraint limits freedom. We may take absolute physical restraint as one end point in what it means to be free. In a way, this minimalist conception of freedom lacks interest—we all hope for a richer freedom for ourselves.

A slightly more robust sense of liberty asserts that one is free unless one is “subject to the arbitrary will of another.” For many authors in the libertarian tradition, the direct coercion of one person by another is the paradigmatic violation of one's freedom. The master, for example, can dispose of the slave, so the slave is subject to the arbitrary will of his master. This slightly broader conception of freedom would regard the victim of a robbery as lacking freedom. In this view, the key criterion of freedom is absence of coercion, the paradigmatic case of which arises when one person directly forces another to perform a certain action or prevents a person from acting in a certain way. The coercion can also be by a group of people against another person.

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