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The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever

The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever they wish appear as a positive or negative freedom. If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want? It's not some neutral objective "natural" definition. When you separate freedoms into positive and negative, you get to choose how to do it to suit your agenda.

tines 2y ago
I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way. For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction. It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.
- harrall 2y ago
  Freedom from someone stopping me from owning cannabis plants (“negative”) vs. freedom to sow and plant cannabis seeds (“positive”). The distinction between negative vs. positive freedom sounds like word play to me.
- philipov 2y ago
  It doesn't have to work in every case, and it doesn't have to be simple, but nevertheless there remains significant disagreement and ambiguity that gets to be decided by the person in power. In the end, it's a false dichotomy. Consider the freedom from being infected by disease. Does your positive freedom to use a public space trump my negative freedom from you interfering with me by bringing a contagious disease to it?
- card_zero 2y ago
  The freedom from having to pay for hot dogs, duh. But I agree that some things are obstacles, and others are creative acts. But so what, I'm not going to let you or somebody called Snyder tell me that one of these is virtuous and the other is mean-spirited, because that's bullshit, and the two sides of it go together, and he's only trying to prise them apart because he's more comfortable in a world where people declare their intentions in advance so that they can be vetted for constructiveness by some overbearing authority. And you can definitely virtuously overcome obstacles, or be creatively evil.
  - philipov 2y ago
    One clarification to make - While I haven't read On Freedom, Tim Snyder is a scholar of Ukrainian (and slavic) history who is a major opponent of the far right's agenda. One of his big ideas is the different approach to time promoted by authoritarian vs liberal regimes, to try to inoculate people against the talking points of the authoritarian view. I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it. His lecture series on the Making of Modern Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Eh, I haven't visited Youtube in ten years, don't want to break a winning streak. What's that about time? Time, as a concept, you mean?
      - philipov 2y ago
        It's about our attitudes towards time, and the stories we tell about our relationship to it. For example, authoritarian regimes tend to eliminate the future from discourse - the future is not possible because we are beset by enemies and danger surrounds us. All we can do is aspire to restore some mythical past. By contrast, the one idea that ties together disparate definitions of Progressivism across history is the belief that a better future is possible. Snyder has a framework for discussing how ideologies relate to time in these sorts of ways.
zdragnar 2y ago
The point that's missing is where rights and freedoms "originate", so to speak. The US view, called out specifically in the Constitution, is that all freedoms and rights are inherent in being, and not granted by the government. As such, the government cannot give or guarantee rights, it is only capable of taking them away. The role of the Constitution and the amendments (in particular, the first ten known as the bill of rights) do NOT specify what rights people have, they specify those rights that the government may NOT curtail. Hence, the discussion of negative versus positive rights is entirely not about what rights exist, but what authority the government may or may not exercise over them. Of course, any brief look at America's history shows the government failing to abide by its own restrictions. The government we have now is significantly different from what the original authors had intended, as they were more concerned with finding a way for the disparate states to coordinate at all after the failure of the previous Articles of confederation. Now, we have an overarching federal government that renders individual states to be little more important that municipal organizations, much more in line with other countries.
- philipov 2y ago
  So when the rights of two individuals conflict, I guess you'd say the correct way to deal with it is not with a criminal charge, but for me to sue the other person? Do you think the American system would rule in favor of people who caught Covid if they sue people who went out in public without taking precautions? Do you think that's a realistic way of having one's rights made whole? How do I sue a class of individuals? Furthermore, do you really think this is a plausible way of managing disease outbreaks, which affect large populations in aggregate and not just single individuals? Systems like private insurance don't work if all the individual risks are correlated.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Even murder, except for certain circumstances, is not a crime at the federal level. Under the original framing, anything not specifically mentioned by the Constitution was delegated to the individual states to decide. It wasn't until after the civil war that the amendments to the Constitution itself applied to the individual states.
throw0101d 2y ago
> If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want? From some book reviews: > “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.” > In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.” > He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.” > So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable. * https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Problem-Is-Us/ https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Pro... > Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines. > Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future. > What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality. * https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-timothy-snyder-erasing-history-jason-stanley-book-review https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-... I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).

tines 2y ago

I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way. For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction. It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.

harrall 2y ago
Freedom from someone stopping me from owning cannabis plants (“negative”) vs. freedom to sow and plant cannabis seeds (“positive”). The distinction between negative vs. positive freedom sounds like word play to me.
philipov 2y ago
It doesn't have to work in every case, and it doesn't have to be simple, but nevertheless there remains significant disagreement and ambiguity that gets to be decided by the person in power. In the end, it's a false dichotomy. Consider the freedom from being infected by disease. Does your positive freedom to use a public space trump my negative freedom from you interfering with me by bringing a contagious disease to it?
card_zero 2y ago
The freedom from having to pay for hot dogs, duh. But I agree that some things are obstacles, and others are creative acts. But so what, I'm not going to let you or somebody called Snyder tell me that one of these is virtuous and the other is mean-spirited, because that's bullshit, and the two sides of it go together, and he's only trying to prise them apart because he's more comfortable in a world where people declare their intentions in advance so that they can be vetted for constructiveness by some overbearing authority. And you can definitely virtuously overcome obstacles, or be creatively evil.
- philipov 2y ago
  One clarification to make - While I haven't read On Freedom, Tim Snyder is a scholar of Ukrainian (and slavic) history who is a major opponent of the far right's agenda. One of his big ideas is the different approach to time promoted by authoritarian vs liberal regimes, to try to inoculate people against the talking points of the authoritarian view. I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it. His lecture series on the Making of Modern Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Eh, I haven't visited Youtube in ten years, don't want to break a winning streak. What's that about time? Time, as a concept, you mean?
    - philipov 2y ago
      It's about our attitudes towards time, and the stories we tell about our relationship to it. For example, authoritarian regimes tend to eliminate the future from discourse - the future is not possible because we are beset by enemies and danger surrounds us. All we can do is aspire to restore some mythical past. By contrast, the one idea that ties together disparate definitions of Progressivism across history is the belief that a better future is possible. Snyder has a framework for discussing how ideologies relate to time in these sorts of ways.

zdragnar 2y ago

The point that's missing is where rights and freedoms "originate", so to speak. The US view, called out specifically in the Constitution, is that all freedoms and rights are inherent in being, and not granted by the government. As such, the government cannot give or guarantee rights, it is only capable of taking them away. The role of the Constitution and the amendments (in particular, the first ten known as the bill of rights) do NOT specify what rights people have, they specify those rights that the government may NOT curtail. Hence, the discussion of negative versus positive rights is entirely not about what rights exist, but what authority the government may or may not exercise over them. Of course, any brief look at America's history shows the government failing to abide by its own restrictions. The government we have now is significantly different from what the original authors had intended, as they were more concerned with finding a way for the disparate states to coordinate at all after the failure of the previous Articles of confederation. Now, we have an overarching federal government that renders individual states to be little more important that municipal organizations, much more in line with other countries.

philipov 2y ago
So when the rights of two individuals conflict, I guess you'd say the correct way to deal with it is not with a criminal charge, but for me to sue the other person? Do you think the American system would rule in favor of people who caught Covid if they sue people who went out in public without taking precautions? Do you think that's a realistic way of having one's rights made whole? How do I sue a class of individuals? Furthermore, do you really think this is a plausible way of managing disease outbreaks, which affect large populations in aggregate and not just single individuals? Systems like private insurance don't work if all the individual risks are correlated.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Even murder, except for certain circumstances, is not a crime at the federal level. Under the original framing, anything not specifically mentioned by the Constitution was delegated to the individual states to decide. It wasn't until after the civil war that the amendments to the Constitution itself applied to the individual states.

throw0101d 2y ago

> If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want? From some book reviews: > “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.” > In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.” > He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.” > So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable. * https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Problem-Is-Us/ https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Pro... > Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines. > Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future. > What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality. * https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-timothy-snyder-erasing-history-jason-stanley-book-review https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-... I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).