And while you're at it, define "freedom," too

I just got out of my Modern Political Thought class, which was mostly a discussion of Sir Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty," and was themed around the question, "Is a lack of money a lack of freedom?" Many in the class argued that it was not, because no one was actively preventing this hypothetical poor person from doing anything. Berlin's essay somewhat supports this definition, at least as far as his "negative liberty" goes: he defines this as freedom by either an individual human or a group of humans to do as they wish without coercion from one or more other human beings. This is opposed to something like the human inability to, for instance, fly on our own power: no active human agent is preventing us from doing this. I have several problems with this definition:
This derives partially from my natural inclination against drawing bright lines between humans and non-humans. If a human being actively prevents another human being from doing something, that is a violation of negative liberty. Okay, but what if a hypothetical Australopithecus did so? How about a chimp? There is certainly no difference here in how restricted the victim's activities are. That difference does not appear even if the restricting agent is a lesser ape, or a non-primate mammal, or a reptile, or even an arthropod, does it? If a giant lobster had me trapped in a cave and wouldn't let me out, I would consider my activites pretty damn restricted. What if it happened to be a plant? What if while I was sleeping in my house at night, some mysterious plant grew all around the outside so as to trap me on the inside? I'm restricted, right? Now what if a bacterium infected me and made it such that I couldn't walk? Same thing, right? I'm equally restricted, even though "disease" is frequently held up as the prime counter-example of an inability that is not an un-freedom. In fact, I would be equally restricted if my own genome were the culprit, if I simply had bad leg genes and was therefore lame. In fact, I am so restricted from flying: my genes simply do not permit me to fly on my own power. So there is no categorical difference here between a human agent and even a genetic agent, which means on this score inability to fly and imprisonment would rank similarly.

Where there is a difference is in how one is able to distribute responsibility. If I am imprisoned, I know exactly whom to blame; if I want to try to blame someone for my inability to fly, I don't have many options (considering I don't believe in god). Similarly, it would be very easily possible for me not to be imprisoned, but it's hard to see who or what could conceivably make me able to fly. So the argument that lack of money is not lack of freedom because no one forced me to lack money is not really an argument that freedom is not being violated. It is an argument that there is no one to blame for this violation of freedom. It is also not a convincing argument on this point for me, because someone or someones at some level in deciding how to structure the society decided not to adopt policies that would eradicate poverty. Even if the mechanism was not direct, and even if those people never knew their "victims" and did not single out those victims by name, they still made choices that ultimately resulted in poverty for those people. So there is someone to blame for poverty. Restriction on activity, a moral agent who is probably human; what more does it take to create a violation of liberty?

Now, to be fair, "liberty" can be defined to mean a direct, specific violation, one that singles out its victim knowingly and by name. But if so, it becomes a less important concept. Indeed this strikes me as a fairly broad principle in defining these "values," and I think it relates to my post on Obama's non-use of these value words. Stipulate that there are a lot of things that can happen that are bad. Now, we could decide to consider all of these things violations of the right of "freedom." Whether this is in practice doable is irrelevant for now. If we adopt this definition, then, the only test necessary for any action, and specifically public policy, is "does it violate freedom?" If something doesn't violate freedom, I can't object to it, because freedom is defined as incorporating everything bad. But say we don't like this definition. Say we decide that poverty doesn't count as un-freedom, it counts as inequality. So let's take some of the badness, siphon it off from the "freedom" concept, and incorporate it as violations of "equality." Fine. Now a lot of policies will pass the "freedom" test that did not pass it before. But those policies are just as bad as they were before. That they pass the freedom test is meaningless, or at least relatively meaningless compared to how it was before. We must also ask whether something passes the equality test. If we keep going, if we siphon off and incorporate as their own values things like "diversity," "security," "stability," "prosperity," "tradition," etc., then the simple freedom test has now become much, much less meaningful.

My point here is not that one cannot use definitions, or even that one cannot use narrow definitions, for these values. I think somewhat narrow and precise definitions can be helpful in discussing things, certainly. But it is also easy to lose track of them. If we define freedom more narrowly, then violating freedom probably becomes a worse offense; we are probably left with things like imprisonment, execution, etc., for which the state needs a damn good reason and also probably a set of procedures to prevent abuse, and which in the absence of either a damn good reason or a damn good procedure becomes inviolate. But the fact that something like poverty is then not an un-freedom becomes less meaningful. Similarly, to define "security" very very broadly, as I might allege George Bush tried to do, makes violations of security less meaningful.

And it is this quality that enables Orwellianism so much. It is perfectly reasonable to define these concepts however broadly or narrowly as we like; for the sake of clear, effective discussion, flexibility in definition is very useful. But that then enables the following kind of argument: Freedom is good, violations of freedom are bad, I have defined freedom so narrowly that policy X does not violate freedom, therefore policy X is good. Alternately, security is good, violations of security are bad, I have defined security so broadly that policy Y violates security, therefore policy Y is good. Neither really contributes to the discussion. Obama didn't use a lot of words like that. He talked a lot about "jobs." That's a nice, concrete word. Economists might be able to parse apart the exact definition of a job versus work, or whatever, but the definition of a job has fairly little elasticity, and when Obama says it, everyone knows what he means. "This policy creates jobs" is a nice concrete statement, that may be right or wrong but whose meaning is clear. I think the elasticity of jobs is so narrow that it is hard to define it outside of territory that almost everyone would agree is basically good terrain, so saying of a policy, "it creates jobs," is a definite positive. But it is also definitely not the only possible positive, and it does not preclude other negatives. That makes it hard to use it to obfuscate, other than simply lying.

And it also means that to a certain extent, arguing about whether or not such-and-such a policy constitutes an unfreedom is meaningless semantics. Is poverty an un-freedom? Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, and people disagree, usually because they define freedom differently. But does any of that change how good or bad poverty is? No. Does it change the extent to which architects of social policy are responsible for poverty? I don't see how. Does it change the extent to which we should change social policies to eradicate poverty? I really don't think so. So, how do you define freedom? It doesn't necessarily matter.