The Quality of Freedom

Vol. 14 No. 6 (June 2004), pp.410-415

THE QUALITY OF FREEDOM, by Matthew H. Kramer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 494 pp. Hardback $45.00. £30.00 ISBN 0-19-924756-0.

Reviewed by J. Mitchell Pickerill, Department of Political Science, Washington State University. mitchp@wsu.edu

Matthew Kramer’s THE QUALITY OF FREEDOM leaves little doubt that “freedom” is more than just another word for “nothing left to lose.” Kramer’s ambitious work is a worthy addition to the “negative versus positive liberty” debate spawned a half-century ago by Isaiah Berlin’s inaugural lecture at Oxford University and published essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958). The book is concerned primarily with the measurement of liberty, or what Kramer refers to as “non-normative” liberty, although it clearly engages and contributes to normative arguments in favor of a theory of negative liberty. While Kramer is primarily concerned with demonstrating that overall liberty can be systematically and rigorously measured, his argument is not based on mathematical proofs or statistical modeling. Rather, he engages directly many of the leading philosophers and political theorists in the negative and positive liberty debate and carefully constructs a logical theoretical and conceptual argument that overall liberty can be computed and evaluated. Throughout the book, Kramer augments the many logical steps he takes with hypothetical vignettes that help to illustrate the often times highly abstract principles that form his theory of non-normative (and negative) liberty.

In a brief introductory first chapter, Kramer makes some “general remarks” about the intellectual debate over positive and negative liberty. He covers some fairly simple housekeeping matters, such as his interchangeable (and unproblematic) use of the terms “freedom” and liberty” as synonyms, a convention I will likewise adopt for the purposes of this review. And since the distinction between negative and positive liberty is at the core of the book, Kramer articulates that distinction in a fairly pithy manner: “Whereas positive liberty is a matter of accomplishments, negative liberty is a matter of opportunities” (p.2).

More importantly in the first chapter, however, Kramer explains and emphasizes the distinction between two other conceptions of liberty that are at the heart of his argument – normative liberty and non-normative liberty. Although he does not use the term “empirical” and instead discusses non-normative liberty as “physical unforeclosedness,” this distinction is indeed rooted in the familiar empirical-normative, or “is-should,” dichotomy. He then establishes two basic postulates that define the necessary and sufficient conditions for particular non-normative freedoms or unfreedoms to exist.

F Postulate: A person is free to φ if and only if he is able to φ.

U Postulate: A person is unfree to φ if an only if both of the following conditions obtain: (1) he would be able to φ in the absence of the second of these conditions; and (2) irrespective of [*411] whether he actually endeavors to φ, he is directly or indirectly prevented from φ-ing by some action(s) or some disposition(s)-to-perform-some-action(s) on the part of some other person(s). (p.3)

Kramer explains, “the Greek letter ‘φ’ (which stands for any germane verb or set of verbs plus any accompanying words) can denote one’s performance of some action or one’s existence in some condition or one’s undergoing of some process” (p.3, parentheses in original). The remainder of the book both proceeds from and attempts to justify these principles.

According to Kramer, because “the doctrine of positive liberty and the doctrine of negative liberty are genuinely in competition . . . the difference between them must be investigated herein” (p.2). Thus, he follows the first chapter with a lengthy examination of modern debates over negative and positive liberty. Chapter Two is entitled “Fine Distinctions: Some Rejoinders to Quentin Skinner’s Attack on the Modern Doctrine of Negative Liberty,” and as the title suggests, is an attempt to refute the major criticisms of negative liberty by the proponents of positive liberty. Kramer targets the civic republican version of positive liberty espoused by Quentin Skinner (e.g. 1983, 1984, 1990), and to a lesser extent Philip Pettit (1997, 2001), and their critiques of negative liberty theory. Chapter Two is 135 pages long and really could be viewed as two chapters. In part one, Kramer reviews “some of the essentials of negative liberty” (p.17), the primary goal being to explain how Skinner and others have mischaracterized important facets of negative liberty. For example, Kramer takes pains to explain why desires, wants or values are irrelevant for determining whether one is free or unfree. Therefore, it is a misinterpretation of Berlin’s famous essay that “unfreedom exists exactly in so far as somebody is prevented by one or more other people from doing what she or she pleases” (p.34, emphasis added). Kramer states emphatically, “A person’s abilities and inabilities, rather than her preferences, form the boundaries of her freedom and unfreedom” (p.34). Thus manipulating a person’s desires so that she does not want to φ, does not make her unfree if she remains perfectly able to φ. He then develops arguments in this section that the state of being free or unfree is often characterized as bivalent (based on particular interpretations of Hobbes’ statements about liberty), which he contends creates a false dichotomy, because a “middle ground” does indeed exist (pp.41-53). Kramer also asserts that legal freedom is not equivalent to non-normative freedom because permission to φ does not necessarily mean someone is able to φ, and vice versa, a law against φ-ing does not by itself usually make someone physically unable to φ, a point that theorists on both sides of the normative debate have often overlooked (pp.73-75).

In part two of Chapter Two, entitled “A Distinct Understanding of Liberty” (p.91), Kramer examines the civic republican version of positive liberty – in particular he takes on Skinner’s arguments “that negative liberty theorists have overlooked some crucial civic-republican insights into the connection between public virtue and negative freedom itself” (p.92). Kramer’s argument is that negative liberty theorists do indeed identify some of the [*412] virtues from civic republican thought and acknowledge that persons in a community may choose to sacrifice certain individual freedoms in order to achieve other virtues (p.96). Kramer notes that, contrary to assertions by Skinner and others, negative liberty proponents understand this perfectly well. But if a person sacrifices a particular freedom for the sake of republican virtues, the person is not necessarily unfree to exercise that freedom – she has only chosen not to do so. If, however, conditions are created that constrain people from exercising a particular freedom for the sake of republican virtues, there is more non-normative unfreedom. According to Kramer, civic republicans actually view this as a process of trade-offs involved in sacrificing particular freedoms in order to maximize overall freedom. Kramer explains it this way: “Civic republicans did not maintain that no instances of freedom will be lost in the process of securing and augmenting each person’s overall liberty; on the contrary they insisted that the process will inevitably involve the elimination of particular freedoms (or at the very least the elimination of the conjunctive exercisability of certain freedoms). Positive liberty theorists, by contrast, submit that the consummate realization of freedom for each person will involve no losses of particular freedoms—since those theorists define particular freedoms as the instances of conduct that constitute or foster the realization of some championed objective, which they characterize as true liberty” (p.118, parentheses in original). Thus, a theory of negative liberty is entirely consistent with civic republican thought and republican virtues. This then highlights a key distinction between positive and negative liberty theories: negative theories are interested in overall liberty, while positive theories are primarily (or only) interested in particular freedoms (and only those freedoms they care about).

In Chapter Three, Kramer explores “Instances of Liberty.” This chapter could have been called, “The Hard Cases,” as Kramer’s primary goal is to address specific cases, circumstances and issues that present particular problems for identifying and measuring non-normative freedom. Much of the chapter is devoted to parsing the distinction between particular freedoms and overall freedom, and the relationship between the existence of particular freedoms and the measurement of overall freedom. The first part of the chapter explores “to what does freedom pertain” (p.156)? Kramer argues that freedom pertains to people not animals, and that it includes the ability to become something and to do something – an apparent point of departure between Kramer and several other several other theorists (p.158). He also returns to the importance of focusing on overall liberty as opposed to particular liberties, and argues that whether one is free in a non-normative sense is a matter of degrees. While it is important to identify the existence of particular freedoms and unfreedoms, possession of a particular unfreedom does not necessarily mean that a person’s overall liberty is low—and vice versa. Among other issues that arise, he addresses how the probability that a current freedom will exist at some point in the future and how threats to a person’s liberty influence his measurement of overall liberty.

Chapter Four examines “Sources of [*413] Unfreedom” and represents the flip side of Chapter Three. Kramer begins by restating and re-examining the U Postulate, the primary purpose of the chapter being “the attainment of clarity, precision, and capaciousness in the elaboration of causal criteria …” for establishing the existence of unfreedom (p.277). To simplify, Kramer essentially adopts a “but for” causal test, similar to that used in evaluating causation under tort law. Thus, the specific cause of a particular unfreedom can only be established if “but for” a particular action or constraint, a person would be free to φ. Kramer takes on several aspects of causation, such as simultaneous or duplicative causation and pre-emptive causation (pp.300-309). It is not immediately apparent that all of the discussion on causation bears directly on measuring and evaluating non-normative freedom. However, Kramer does argue that the cause of one’s inability to φ may bear on whether one is truly unfree. Using himself in a hypothetical example, Kramer describes a scenario in which he throws himself off a cliff, resulting in his own paralysis. As a consequence, he is unable to walk; however, “the incapacity arising from throwing myself off the cliff should not be classified as an instance of unfreedom. It should be classified as a mere inability which I have inflicted on myself” (p.318). He also goes further back in the causal chain to argue that one might contend that but for his parents having sexual intercourse and conceiving him, he would not have lost the ability to walk and therefore they might be viewed as a cause. Kramer points out though, that his parents’ actions may have played a “but-for” role in bringing about his “loss of ability, they have not played a role in bringing about the non-existence of my ability” (p.317, emphasis in original). The last part of the chapter goes on to argue that “omissions are not sources of unfreedom” (p.342).

Finally, in what is really the payoff chapter for this book, Chapter Five gets to the exercise of “Ascertaining the Extent of Everyone’s Overall Freedom.” Although Kramer briefly describes overall freedom as a ratio in Chapter Two, it is in this final chapter that he explains and justifies the formula for computing and evaluating overall freedom as “expressible as a fraction with the following numerator and denominator: the square of the range of each person’s combinations of conjunctively exercisable freedoms [F], and the range of each person’s combinations of conjunctively exercisable freedoms, plus the range of each person’s combinations of consistent unfreedoms [U].” Expressed symbolically, we obtain “the freedom-measuring fraction—which will incorporate probabilistic qualifications and qualitative weighting . . .—is F²/(F+U)” (p.359). Building on arguments by Ian Carter (1979) and Hillel Steiner (2001) regarding measurements of freedom, and criticizing the arguments of Charles Taylor (1979) and others who claim that freedom cannot be measured, the chapter then explicates each component of the formula and the “evaluative process” of non-normative liberty in more detail. The explanation for the formula is complex and difficult to summarize for the purposes of this review, but can be best understood by example. For instance, Kramer uses the following example from a vignette developed earlier in the chapter involving two [*414] hypothetical characters, Melvin and Melinda, to illustrate the need to square the numerator:

Suppose that the range of the combinations of conjunctively exercisable freedom available to Melvin can be represented as 12, and that the range of the combinations of consistent unfreedoms confronting him can be represented as 8. Suppose further that the former range for Mildred can be represented as 6 and that the latter range for her can be represented as 4. We can straightaway conclude that Melvin is twice as free overall as Mildred. By contrast, were the numerator in each of the relevant fractions not squared, our measurement of each person’s overall freedom as a ratio would lead us to the conclusion that Mildred enjoys exactly the same degree of overall freedom as Melvin. Such a conclusion would slight the primary importance of the disparity between the numerators, which obviously represents a disparity between the arrays of alternatives open to Melvin and Mildred respectively. If that discrepancy between those arrays is to be captured adequately in our calculations, the numerator in each fraction will have to be squared (370).

The remainder of the chapter then presents equally nuanced arguments about the evaluative component of freedom.

As one who is predisposed toward a generalized theory of negative liberty, and one who is a consumer of but not a contributor to this literature, I found most of this book persuasive. An important strength of the book is that it is at once simple and complex. The F and U Postulates are relatively straightforward and have intuitive appeal for identifying and measuring in an objective fashion, non-normative (or empirical) freedom. It is complex, however, in large part because any concept of liberty is laden with normative baggage. Nonetheless, Kramer is largely successful, I think, in sorting out the normative from the non-normative, and he argues convincingly that we really cannot build a persuasive normative evaluative, moral and/or prescriptive theory of social or political freedom without first establishing a solid empirical explication of the concept of freedom. And his non-normative theory for measuring and evaluating overall freedom seems to strengthen normative arguments in favor of negative liberty precisely because of the focus by positive liberty theorists on particular freedoms. A further strength of the book is that although the argument is often highly, and necessarily, abstract, Kramer skillfully uses hypotheticals and counterfactuals to illustrate his more abstract points (such as the hypothetical involving Mildred and Melvin above).

In my view the biggest weaknesses of the book are its length and perhaps some of its organization. The chapters often run more than 100 pages. In itself, this is not a major problem, but it would have made organizational sense to divide a couple of the chapters into two (e.g., see my description of Chapter Two above). Additionally, the length results in part from a fair bit of redundancy throughout the book. At times, it is no doubt important for the author to remind the reader of key arguments made earlier in the book. However, I think later chapters unnecessarily make several points too many times over, such as constant reminders that the author is primarily concerned with measuring liberty and with non-normative freedom as opposed to prescribing particular [*415] liberties and normative freedom. One effect of these redundancies, and the mammoth size of each chapter, is that it seems to take a frustratingly long time to get to the final chapter, which, as I state above, is really the payoff in this book. So although I find much of the argument in the book convincing, I think it could have been made just as convincingly (and perhaps more convincingly) in a more succinct volume. Nonetheless, the arguments in this book are persuasive, and it should be of great interest to those interested in theoretical and philosophical debates over negative and positive liberty.

REFERENCES:

Berlin, Isaiah. 1958. TWO CONCEPTS OF LIBERTY. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Carter, Ian. 1979. A MEASURE OF FREEDOM. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pettit, Philip. 2001. REPUBLICANISM: A THEORY OF FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pettit, Philip. 1997/2001. A THEORY OF FREEDOM: FROM THE PSYCHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF AGENCY. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1998. LIBERTY BEFORE LIBERALISM. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1990. “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty.” In MACHIAVELLI AND REPUBLICANISM. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin. 1984. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives.” In PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY : ESSAYS ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PHILOSOPHY. Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steiner, Hillel. 2001. “Freedom and Bivalence.” In FREEDOM, POWER AND POLITICAL MORALITY. Ian Carter and Mario Ricciardi (eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Taylor, Charles. 1979. “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty.” In THE IDEA OF FREEDOM. Alan Ryan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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