My friend Jason made an interesting comment regarding my previous post: "Too much of either liberty or justice will invariably squelch the other." I'd like to explore that comment.
Admittedly, I have read little if any political theory on the philosophy of justice. But that may not be a drawback for the purposes of this blog post. Often, one's perspective on an issue is shaped by other people's ideas before one ever sits down alone to really think through the issue de novo. The standard academic approach is first to learn what other people have said or written about an idea, and then to think -- hopefully critically -- more deeply about it. Less common in academia is the approach of thinking deeply and systematically about something before preconceptions are fed into one's mind. But doesn't the latter approach potentially yield better intellectual fruit? With either approach, one ends up learning "the greats." But in the latter case, one has the additional opportunity to take an unbiased, and therefore maximally open-minded, stab at an issue before being shown the well-trodden road of orthodoxy. It is in this fresh, unbiased spirit that I approach the idea of justice, about which I am admittedly uneducated.
Back to the statement under consideration: "Too much of either liberty or justice will invariably squelch the other." Too much liberty? Too much justice? Something tells me one's exact definitions of the terms "liberty" and "justice" will have a significant bearing on the truth of that statement.
The statement seems to assume that "liberty" means freedom in the positive sense: "freedom to." I fully agree that if people have unlimited positive freedom -- freedom to do anything and everything -- chaos, and therefore injustice, is the inevitable result. So I would say that is a bad definition of liberty. Now, how about we define "liberty" in the negative sense: "freedom from." In particular, freedom from violent aggression against one's physical person or property. If we define violent aggression against a person's body or property as "crime," then liberty in the negative sense is freedom from crime. That is the libertarian definition of liberty.
Now let's up the ante. Let's define "liberty" and "justice" in terms of each other. Let's define "injustice" as a crime (violent aggression against one's body or property) for which the victim(s) are not eventually recompensed. We can now say that liberty is defined as the freedom from injustice, and justice is defined as the recompense of victims whose liberty has been violated. Liberty and justice require each other. Moreover, total liberty and total justice require each other. Under these definitions, the idea that there must not be "too much" of either liberty or justice is absurd.
I realize that my definitions above are not completely precise. The definitions themselves contain words (e.g., "recompense") that need to be defined just like liberty and justice do. But I think I succeeded in clarifying the definitions at least enough to illustrate the critical dependence of the "liberty vs. justice" issue one one's precise definitions of those two terms.
Remember: It's freedom from, not freedom to!
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Scott, you’re to be commended for confronting difficult philosophical questions without the aid of earlier scholars. If you’ll permit me to be ironic, I’d like to quote the English natural philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who forcefully claimed that “men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation, [are] as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true Science are above it.” Nevertheless, he and others also noted the value (if not inescapable necessity) in reviewing the opinions of influential thinkers. Language itself is the perpetual consequence of historical usage; therefore, our very participation in dialogue, it seems, is inextricably founded on the ideas of those who preceded us. Of course that’s just my own somewhat unassisted musing; I could be wrong!
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, your point about positive versus negative liberty is well taken. However, I’m hesitant to embrace your definition for this reason: it does not seem to me that liberty qua liberty is made more coherent by attempting to parse out a more dominant species from the whole. In my view, liberty is the freedom a body or mind has toward action. When we say that a man that is “free from” having his person or property violated is liberated, it appears that we simply are reestablishing his “freedom to” act in whatever way suits his fancy. However, should the man turn out to be a criminal, then we would seek to restrict his positive liberty by infringing upon his negative liberty.
Also, while I applaud your efforts to link justice and liberty, I believe that the theory is incomplete on this crucial point: namely, that liberty must then require just action, in the form of positive liberty, on behalf of the man that is free. In other words, if liberty is to be preserved, it is not enough simply for a man to be “free from” injustice, in an individual sense, but to ensure that he does not in turn commit injustices against others. Positive and negative liberty are intermixed. By attempting to divide them—i.e., by singling out negative liberty as more representative of true liberty—we exclude the facet that converts liberty from a purely selfish motive to one that contributes to the safety and happiness of the polity as a whole.
Moreover, I am not convinced that liberty and justice require each other, in the sense that they are mutual ingredients of one another. For instance, it is not clear to me that liberty is intrinsically connected with justice, as a matter of course. Surely a tyrant is at the same time both free from restrictions and free to do as he pleases. If his actions are not the result of liberty-as-justice, from what other source do they flow? I am more inclined to believe that the admixture of these two things becomes manifest through the codification of manmade law. Viewed abstractly, however, they seem quite independent.
Lastly, your definition of justice requires more time and consideration than I can commit at the moment. Suffice it to say, your admission that the term “recompense” only serves to extend the debate is well noted; for we then run into the difficulties of how to compensate victims who were injured in ways that cannot be addressed quantitatively or whether justice is or ought to be retaliatory, at all.
(In other news, I’ll be in California from June 24 through July 1. If you’re in the area, stop on by the ol’ homestead, and we can wax philosophic over some cheeseburgers and Cokes.)