Positive/Negative freedom

Freedom is a word that gets thrown around a lot in political debates, without people actually explaining what they mean. Indeed, many disagreements arise because people want freedom but they have different understandings of what freedom means.

Two interpretations are common:

Positive freedom, the ability to do what one wants to.

Negative freedom, the freedom from constraints, in particular freedom from other humans hindering you from doing what you want.

Which one do you think is important? Negative, positive, or something different?

 

Its not positive and negative freedom.

I do not know of any case described positive and negative freedom.

Positive freedom could only be interpreted as liberty within and under the corporate 'franchise' which has been forced upon you to place you 'under' some state jurisdiction the same way any herd animal is claimed by its owner 'simply by being born'.

You may be thinking of positive and negative 'rights'.

You first need to get your terms correct because if there even is such a things then positive freedom can only exist under the state as the state creates 'positive law', privileges, 'under' the franchise, state privileges, otherwise known as liberties that you are 'allowed' by and within the state franchise.

Positive rights, are state coded privileges, rights under the state, and negative rights are rights the state and others have no legitimate authority to prevent you from doing.....caveat: provided you do not injure or damage another of course.

Only the state has the authority to injure or damage others with impunity.

Negative rights, are having 5 wives, growing pot, refusing to bake a gay cake etc.

But thats not how it works.

In reality the state converts any negative right you can think of into a positive privilege under the state by the use relentless assaults on your rights though legislation, their courts, to force you to comply with their state religion.

Just ask any mormon and any pastry shop, all victims of state religion.

State religion always trumps your negative rights, just ask the mormons.

The right to exercise religion is a negative right which has been reserved, and reserved means outside the jurisdiction of gubmint, yet there you go gubmint stole the mormons and pastry makers rights and converted the to privileges.

Of course reserved rights are meaningless and the gubmint feeds itself by issuing your so called 'positive rights' to one group and instead of protecting the rights of everyone stomps on the rights of another group, just ask the Mormons about their negative rights.

Negative rights are understood to orginate through God, rights 'above' the state while atheists on the other hand believe in positive rights, privileges issued 'under' the state.

Positive rights could not exist without negative rights since positive rights are negative rights coded as public law by the state, and when they trample someones religion the state is now a religion that enforces 'their religious views' as law on on top of yours.

People and their justifiable negative rights are constantly under attack by the states relentless assault upon them. I'm sure not the response you expected.

You tell us which is more important

 

Are you a believer?

John 8:34 " Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin."


Do you prefer to believe in what Jesus calls 'freedom' or would you prefer to believe what His created calls 'freedom'?


Believe the Master or believe the servants?

 

they would tell you they are the masters, and since they are a huge mob and they have a supporting military and corporate police I suppose 'they' are the masters, as we are their slaves since there is nothing preventing them from killing you if you dont march lock step to their tune.

You have the right to police execution, with no trial, with no jury, law not withstanding, because rambo suspects you broke a window, Rambo on the other hand has the right to go free and continue executing unarmed people using their shoot first ask questions later policies, after all the kid might have been a criminal.

Police in Sacramento fatally fired at an unarmed black man 20 times after mistaking his mobile phone for a weapon.

Two officers shouted for a suspect to show his hands and then yelled “gun, gun, gun” moments before shooting him dead, audio from body camera footage released by Sacramento police shows.

Footage from the body cameras and an overhead helicopter does not clearly illustrate what the man, who was only holding a mobile phone, was doing in the moments before the police aimed at him on Sunday night.

Oopsie made a boo boo, but thats ok, **** happens eh.....!

I suppose the kid was supposed to destroy his 800 dollar cell phone by throwing on the cement, as if Rambo would pay for it without a costly law suit first.

You have no rights.

 

Well the word was first invented by the Greeks.

In Greek it simply means the absence of foreign domination.

 

I don't see the difference.

The freedom to do what I want IS the freedom of not being constrained by other humans.

But, with the population density and interdependence of our society today, surely the real issue is a matter of where to draw the line.

This is one of the things that divides America. We have people in Montana who have to drive their car in order to SEE another human. We have people in our cities who live with numerous other families in the same floor of a building.

The difference in realistic expectation of limits of freedom between the two is stupendous.

Just one example - guns.

In Manhattan, the prey is human.

In Montana, not so much.

 

I think the difference is great, and is the driving force in the debate between various people who claim to like freedom.

Liberal and Libertarian both derive their names from freedom (for good reason) and conservatives also place much emphasis on freedom, yet they are effectively antithetical in much of what they say.

Imagine a person who is paralysed due to an accident in the wild. According to positive freedom, he is not free. He does not have the capability to do anything, he is not free to walk or to fend for himself. According to negative freedom, he is free. Nobody imposes their will on him, he is not enslaved or owned, he just happens not to be able to do anything.

So how should our politics look? Imagine two people who have been injured through no fault of their own, one through a natural accident and one through the action of a third party. Is one more eligible to receive aid than the other?

 

Those are Hippy concepts.

Hippies want to be free of work, free of responsibility, parasitic scabs on society.

 

One should distinguish between the terms "freedom" and "liberty." Speaking generally, Freedom usually means to be free from something, whereas Liberty usually means to be free to do something, although both refer to the quality or state of being free. Jefferson's use of the terms almost always reflected those meanings.
Jeffersonian Perspective: Freedom, Liberty, Rights

You need to make up your mind if you want to discuss this from a political pov or philosophical as from a political pov once again I remind you that your terminology is incorrect for a political discussion, since freedom is part of organic law in most countries.

 

Easy - there's freedom to and freedom from.

 

Negative freedom is realistic. Positive freedom? Not so much. Historically speaking negative freedom is probably what is meant by "freedom" politically because many past societies were oppressed in many ways.

Being able to do what one wants seems unrealistic because it is very restricted. Example: If I want to be a real tree that is not possible. So positive freedom depends on how one defines it.

 

My bad, here I thought it was life LIBERTY and the pursuit of happiness, I guess I will have to change it to life FREEDOM and the pursuit of happiness.



This thread is junk because the OP failed to address if it was philosophical or political and is interchanging between them at the same time and has created a word salad mess and others are for whatever reason ignoring the fact that its a mess and continuing the error.

 

They taught us in public school that taxes are a necessary evil, and freedom is the ability to do what you should do, the ability to choose wisely.

 

what you just described is obligations, not freedom, nor liberty.

Obligations are a complimentary function of rights.

With most 'rights' which can be as simple as borrowing my pen there are associated 'obligations', that you should give it back.

 

It is effectively impossible to remove all suffering from the world, but that doesn't mean it's useless to attempt to relieve a little suffering if one can. The fact that we can't reach it doesn't mean we can't work towards it.

Yes, you can't be a tree, and if you really wanted to be a tree, wouldn't your freedom to be a tree be the most important to you, even if you don't actually have that freedom?

 

Seems to me the concepts were quite present in a range of philosophies, not limited to and not originating among hippies.

 

Who does not have the power to pretend to be a tree? I am talking about actually being one. Not possible. There are many limits on positive freedom as you describe.

 

I believe the OP is coming from the standpoint that governments do determine much about societies' freedom.

 

I'm not so interested in where the term first came from, how should we use the concept today? Is a hardship worse or more worth alleviating if it originates in foreign domination?

Let's say someone got trapped in a cave by a natural disaster, and someone else was trapped in a cave by someone wanting to imprison them, is the latter more deserving of our help?

The idea of negative freedom seems to say yes, the idea of positive freedom seems to say no.

 

I'm not sure from this post where you fall. Do you agree?

Negative freedom would suggest that any and all taxes are a lack of freedom and that's the end of the debate. Taxes would only be justified if they alleviate someone else's lack of negative freedom, i.e. oppression, theft, etc. (this is effectively the source of the libertarian night watchman state).

Positive freedom would suggest that taxes are justified in alleviating others' positive freedom. For instance, a person who requires medical attention but is to poor to afford it would be considered unfree, and taxes may be used to alleviate this state (this is effectively the source of the liberal well fare state).

I'm overstating the dichotomy a little here, more goes into it, but I think it's an interesting angle.

 

The topic is one of political philosophy. The terminology is dubious, there's often going to be people who interpret some of the words differently, that's why I picked two well defined concepts, negative and positive freedom instead of liberty/freedom or directly libertarian/liberal.

 

I also only talk about actually being one, not just pretending to be one.

You don't seem to address my point. I said the fact that something is not possible doesn't mean it's worthless to work towards it (like with the easing of suffering). You're right in that perfect positive freedom is impossible, but I don't see why the discussion should end there.

There will be limitations to our pursuit of positive freedom. People can't be trees, we may have insufficient funds to try to address all the problems of the world. However, we can still conclude that that is the best use of the possibilities that we do have.

 

When you are playing at amateur philosophy, you always first have to worry about language and words. Rule #1 in Modern Philosophy.

If you skip that step then you are simply in the realm of Sophistry and bull-sh!t.

You should know this. You have studied Philosophy also.

 

Yup, they're hippy.

Naturally there were some early ancient Hippies in ancient Greece as well.

In your case in this matter you are mis-defining "freedom" with irresponsibility.

That's just a rhetorical, bullsh!t, nonsense topic.

 

I agree, this entire thread is an examination of the fact that people seem to not agree what freedom means, yet use the meanings interchangeably. Indeed, I make no argument about the concept of freedom itself, when I talk about the concept of freedom (rather than the word freedom), I make sure to specify if I talk about positive or negative freedoms (phrases which are well established and more specifically defined).