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Inherent Value of Liberty
Doug den Uyl
(text of Vilnius speech)
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It
is not for the sake of good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of
civil society, and of private life." Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity.
This talk is based on the question of whether and why political liberty is of instrumental or
intrinsic value. We can ask why liberty might be of value in one's own life, but this will not be directly our concern. We
shall focus on the political and social question. In addition, we shall consider this question from the standpoint of so called
"negative liberty"-where we interact only on the basis of mutual consent without force or fraud. This is partly because this is
a gathering of libertarians, but mainly because the case is more difficult with just negative liberty as the framework of analysis.
"Positive liberty" where goods are provided in the name of what it means to live a good or quality human life, may already be
tied up with someone's notion of what is inherently valuable.
A: Reasons why political liberty is of instrumental value
- Freedom seems to produce more wealth and diversity
- Freedom leads to "happier" people in the sense that they are not oppressed or ruled by others
- Freedom produces less conflict in the form of wars, thus relieving our fear of violent death and giving peace
- Less obviously, but no less truly, freedom produces order, so that the choice is not between freedom or
order, but between different sorts of order
B: Hard to imagine a non-instrumental form of political liberty
If one is working within a framework of negative liberty and methodological individualism, it's hard to
imagine a case for anything but political liberty being an instrumental value. After all, the state or political order would
exist for the individual, not vice versa, so it would seem that we have liberty as a condition that makes possible something else,
namely the pursuit by individuals of what is valuable to them. It would seem that we could not say that the political condition
was of some value in its own right, for that would seem to violate methodological individualism on the one hand, while also possibly
making the goals of individuals subservient to the goals of the state.
C: liberty would seem to be an inherent value from an ethical perspective
- actions don't count as ethical unless free i. but saying this makes it look like the value of political freedom is for the
sake of virtue, not its own sake
- "true" freedom as a goal in some ethical systems
i. here autonomy, being governed by reason, not passion has often in philosophy been called true freedom and inherently good
ii. the problem is that at this level of freedom the political may be of little interest or consequence
- any connection between the ethical and liberty?
D: Den Uyl / Rasmussen neo-Aristotelian framework
- Human flourishing (ethical value) requires free choice
- Human beings are inherently social — ethical value occurs in this context
- There is diversity of values-indeed flourishing has no meaning apart from the individual
- Because we are both social and flourishing is diverse we need basic structural principles for living together that can
mediate between the need for universal rules and particular forms of flourishing
i. The rules have to apply across society in light of the requirements of 1-3 just mentioned
1. that is, consistent with the ethical
2. applies to society as a while (universal)
3. does not bias the order in favor of one form
of flourishing over another
- If we have to tie it to the moral without biasing it towards one form of flourishing over another, the only thing that
qualifies is liberty-true of each moral act without defining the content of that moral act
- The basic rule then is to secure the conditions for the possibility of moral conduct, though not moral conduct itself
( i ) Called metanorms
( ii ) Not talking about the conditions which encourage moral conduct, but which make that conduct possible — to
encourage is to bias
( iii ) To refrain from force or fraud and deal by consent alone is metanormative conduct-not for us moral in an
ordinary sense
Is liberty of value only when action is ethical? No!
E: 3 reasons political liberty is inherently of value
1. something is of inherent value if it is constitutive of other values
( i )if pol. Liberty is conceived analogously to rules of the game that are not themselves the object of
playing but the structural principles through which playing takes place, then those rules can be considered inherently valuable
in the sense of being valued through each act that expresses them
- e.g., one must take a stroke in golf if the club advances the ball
- the preceding is a rule that makes golf possible, but there are others not so defining (e.g., whether Titanium shafts will be allowed.)
- liberty if constutive of all acts of flourishing-indeed of human acts; no other value qualifies as defining of human acts in
this way
2) something is inherent if it defines actions proper to it
( i ) Acton quotation here again: "the American notion [is] that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or
prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the adaptation of national law to national character,
or the progress of enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; [and] that the private individual should should not feel the pressure
of public authority, and should direct his life by the influences that are within him, not around him." The Anglo-American
Tradition of Liberty
( ii ) Apart from echoing my own view, this quote suggests that the protection of liberty might be what is suitable to the
nature of government
1. If so, then if government has a proper nature and that nature is the protection of liberty then liberty would be inherent
to it and define the proper limits of government
a. Of course maybe there should be no government at all
b. What I'm pushing for here is a completely non-perfectionist politics
3) liberty as inherent to practical wisdom
( i ) our view of practical reason is that the content and character of the ends of human flourishing is given only in material
practice by concrete real individuals, not philosophers
1. ethics underdetermines action: we cannot know what to do simply by consulting philosophy
( ii ) action takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and a diversity of interests and circumstances
( iii ) the value of freedom is inherent in the need to adapt and revise
1. we cannot say that the flexibility to adapt and revise are mere means to the ends they serve because it is being able to
be flexible that must be valued as a structural principle of practical rationality itself
a. markets are an expression of this truth about practical wisdom as seen through how successful practical wisdom is.
F: The bottom line or why does some inherency matter
- The view that liberty is only instrumental to values like prosperity and security is open to the possibility that if these
could be provided without freedom, their value would remain
( i )If I can get my "benefits" without liberty-even at your expense, maybe liberty can be traded for something else
( ii ) If liberty if one good among many, it can theoretically be sacrificed or traded away if other goods are at time
considered superior
- Even if liberty is considered a primary social good, it still might be ignored or diminished if some other good was thought to be more important (e.g., equality)
- Practical wisdom require the open-endedness liberty provides. But since we cannot know the future, liberty can function as a principled and not be merely a pragmatic approach to politics. This means we can show ourselves to be persons of principle in defending liberty
- The inherent value of liberty allows us to take the moral high road. Liberty confers legitimacy.
i. If we do not have the moral case firmly behind us liberty, and thus human life itself, will only have instrumental value
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