If modern liberalism puts more emphasis on "positive liberties," what are the best arguments for it?

Great Debates
1

For a quick summary of negative and positive liberties, check out this video.

The background for my trying to kickstarting some defenses and cases made on behalf of positive liberty is that that kind of phrasing almost NEVER comes up in political debates and discussions. Conservatives and libertarians like to cloak themselves as being the true guardians of liberty in this nation, but they tend to HEAVILY focus on NEGATIVE liberties, not positive liberties. Examples of positive liberty?

-education paid for by society
-healthcare paid for by society
-universal income paid for by society
That last has some support on the right as well as the left, but these can be couched in attempts to INCREASE the freedoms of men, but not freedom from, freedom TO.
Liberals almost NEVER talk explicitly about promoting those sorts of positive freedoms, and I think it would be an interesting contrast from what conservatives focus on.

And how about some arguments as to why it’s a GOOD thing to want more positive liberty for more people. I want a UBI because I think it will help more people to have the FREEDOM TO move, or spend time on some trade skill, or take time off, or have an actual vacation unlike many people on hourly work where if you do not work, you don’t get paid. People in those scenarios are LESS free. They can save money and store up resources to take time off, but compared to many others on salaried work or other work who do not need to take those additional steps, and often have higher base pay to start with, they are less free.
Positive liberty CANNOT be egalitarian, there are too many potential degrees of freedom of positive liberty. A person earning millions of dollars will always have more positive freedom to do things compared to a person making minimum wage.

However, something like a UBI would definitely raise the floor of positive liberty for people. And that is what I think should be the focus of a liberal approach to advancing positive liberty. And that last is one of the key distinctions between what liberals REALLY want, and how Conservatives LIE about us.

I hear all the time from them that we want equality of outcomes. That’s bullshit. But there is a partial truth there. Liberals still want outcomes based off what someone puts into something and their innate talents, but it’s not true that we are content to let outcomes be COMPLETELY determined by those forces. We are more like than conservatives to want a floor. A floor higher than the god damn dirt, or a pit of spikes. So it’s true we care more about outcomes, but not in the sense that we want them all equal, but in the sense that we want to ensure that all people have a higher baseline ti fall back on, and in the case of a UBI, a baseline that can allow them to spring higher than they otherwise might without it.

2

Are you asking why “positive liberties” are good (answer: because we like to pretend we’re not evil), or are you arguing that a UBI would be a good thing (which I would agree with)?

3

Where’s the money going to come from?

This is why socialism is a massive failure and always will be. Nobody ever asks that question. As Margaret Thatcher so famously (and correctly) said:

It’s a nice pipe dream to say “let society pay for it”, but society has no money. The citizens do. In order for society to have money, it has to tax it away from the citizens and eventually the citizens will get fed up with it.

TANSTAAFL.

4

Taxes.

I’m not even slightly convinced this is an inevitable outcome.

5

UBI is just one of my personal hobby horse examples, but the larger thread is kind of an appeal and casting of a net for arguments about why positive liberties are a good thing and worth using government to try to foster… or not from the libertarian/conservative point of view.

And why don’t liberals every talk about this aspect of freedom? It’s almost like we’ve ceded the term to libertarian and conservative ideologues.

6

Possibly because a lot of us don’t think of it in those terms? When I think of a UBI, I don’t think of freedom; that’s a secondary or tertiary side effect. The word that comes to my mind is help. A UBI would help a lot of people in a lot of ways, many of which would feed directly back into improving society.

Of course, since the right is of the opinion that people should help only themselves, this doesn’t resonate with them much, I admit.

7

The main problem with “positive liberties” is that the term redefines services as liberties and, in doing so, dilutes the sense that specified liberties are restrictions on interferences in one’s free will.

It’s why, despite my nearly perpetual preference for the legislative priorities of the Democratic Party over those of the Republican Party, and my embrace of some political concepts that are considered radically leftish, I still acknowledge a certain resonance for the concepts of the conservative right.

There’s a certain obsession with material equality on the left that always makes me feel like I’m being put in a goddam zoo, and then told “But you get fresh straw, you’ll be fed excellent nutritious food, you’re entitled to a walking-around area and a space to sleep in, see, positive liberties!”, and ignored as far as my primary complaint which is that I don’t want to be confined to life in a cage.

Feel free to say that this is some kind of nonsensical knee-jerk reaction if you wish.

I think the important freedoms that could be expressed as “positive liberties” can be more compellingly expressed as freedoms FROM, for example —

•No person willing to work, willing to show up in a timely manner and perform those tasks they are capable of performing, may be denied their reasonable share of the gross national product simply because no one can come up with any work for them to perform.

Again, I can’t really develop a philosophical defense for why I dislike the “positive liberties” formulation so much, but I do. Liberty assumes that except for stipulated exceptions which must be spelled out and defended as reasonable, I get to do absolutely anything. Specific liberties are areas of freedom where there cannot be stipulated exceptions. Stating them doesn’t absolve those who would infringe elsewhere from having to justify any incursions by stipulationg exceptions and then providing a damn good reason.

The “positive liberties” approach reads like the opposite: that the only liberties you have are the liberties entailed herein (followed by a list).

8

Well, “freedom from” tends to be more associated with negative liberties while “freedom to” is more associated with positive liberties. Perhaps this is just not a popular way to express modern liberal desires. I will say though that one of your examples above was over the top.

The caricature of the left is that we want people to have equal outcomes. That is the kind of crap the right says about us all the time. And I know you can find some confused lefties on the far end of the distribution that actually advocate for such things, but that is not what most liberals want. We don’t want equality of outcomes, but we DO want better outcomes for more people in society. When we look at who is doing well and thriving, it is not considered a great thing by us that the well to do are thriving while lower middle class people and poorer people are standing in place or sliding backwards in some areas. Trying to help boost people up is NOT a play to make their outcomes equal, it’s an effort to have a more broadly shared improvement of outcomes. And that project does NOT have to render people that are more well to do or on lower rungs in a god damn cage.
And btw, one of the reasons I favor a UBI over standard welfare is that it has LESS strings, and is MUCH further away from some conditional jumping through hoops in a large cage model of redistribution.

Do this, you get that.
Earn more? Get less assistance
Minimum wage higher now? Oops, now you don’t qualify for medicaid.

THAT above IS extremely paternalistic and micromanaging, but redistribution to help people does not HAVE to be that way. And it seems you have partially internalized the lies of the right on this point.

9

If one was serious about it, estate taxes. Roughly one trillion dollars a year is inherited. Heavily taxing wealth transfer between generations would improve the wealth distribution ratio as well as fully funding a UBI.

10

This right here is one of the reasons I disdain current welfare and like the idea (pending more data on real world results) of a UBI. Standard welfare is often couched in terms you laid out of “helping” the poor. But the way it’s done, and the strings even liberals put on that help renders that assistance nothing more than subsistence help.
Don’t earn enough money to afford food? Here are some food stamps on a card to help you buy food. To thrive? No, to SUBSIST.

Here is a housing subsidy to help you afford to live in a city center, what would cost 1600 dollars a month to rent for you is instead less than a hundred dollars. So now inflated housing costs are diminished, but if all that allowed someone to achieve was table stakes for not being on the streets… are we really helping them thrive, or merely subsist in the city center vs further out?

You get the idea. I want redistribution to do more than “help” people subsist, I want it to help people thrive. And positive freedom as a term encompasses the ability to thrive in a way that “helping” does not. When you say you want to help someone, it is typically used in a way to help them out of a gutter, help them get well. But I guess helping can encompass helping people thrive as well. But I rarely get the sense that is the kind of help liberals are moved to give with standard welfare.

11

Um, I’m kind of bothered that you assume that my idea of UBI would be pathetic and insufficient just because I think it would help people. I’m not sure whether to be insulted or confused.

And the term “positive freedom” means nothing to me. And I say this having seen the video you linked. It’s a vague concept that doesn’t indicate actualized policy or how to implement it and worse - it gives off a very strong ‘weasel word’ vibe. That ain’t the way the term ‘freedom’ is used, in other words.

12

Well, there it is then. I think we’ve ceded the rhetorical tool of the word freedom to the right with this outlook.

13

I don’t know if “freedom” means anything to most people other than a vague tribal signifier. I class it with other buzzwords like family, liberty, patriot, justice, equality, and values.

An educated, healthy populace is more productive than an ignorant, sick society. That’s all the arguments technocratic liberals need. You can advance bleeding heart rhetoric, but if you go down that road you undermine liberal policies like the war on drugs or American foreign policy in general.

I see right libertarians pushing this more than other people. Liberals mostly hate it IME, though I could imagine them presenting it as a way to save capitalism from leftish agitation, e.g. you can spend your UBI on extravagantly expensive healthcare, education, or rent. The efficiency gains from eliminating bureaucracy and slashing existing safety nets might make them happy, too.

14

Here is a hint, forcing some people to pay for other people’s stuff isn’t freedom.

Short answer is that most people realize that nothing is free. Positive liberties, which I disagree with quite strongly, require the government to provide things to people. That requires either lots and lots of taxes or a totally different form of government.

Slee

15

What is “fully funding a UBI” in your mind? If your figures (and my math) are correct, and you took the entire $1T inheritance pie, I think that gives you something like $3,000 per capita, for the entire year. What are people going to do with an extra $250 per month? Is that a ‘fully funded UBI’ in your eyes?

ETA: not to mention that, knowing people can’t pass on any significant amount to their heirs, most of them are just going to spend it on stuff before they die, and then your revenue stream will dry up. What then?
As for the OP’s question about the positive vs negative liberties formulation: I never much cared for it. It always struck me as a too-clever-by-half way to try to coach liberal policies in positive connotations, and it seemed to smear the Bill of Rights as “negative”. I assume it hasn’t caught on much because a lot of people feel similarly.

16

See, the real problem is the people who see it as some people paying for other people’s stuff rather than society paying for society’s stuff.

If I tax Bill to pay for Bob’s medical care, you can choose to see it primarily as Bob getting the benefit of care, or you can choose to see it primarily as society (including Bill) getting the benefit of Bob’s increased health and hence all the positive contributions Bob makes. Both benefits exist, but which you think is primary is, IMO, just an ideological stance.

And the people who choose to see the former? Well, they have the freedom to do that.

17

I am afraid I can’t help you to find ways to frame positive liberties as a good thing, because in general they aren’t.

One way to help understand why is to look at what happens when we frame, for example, religious liberty as a positive right. I wish to exercise my religion, but I cannot afford a church. So society, in order that I can exercise my positive right to religious freedom, has to subsidize me in setting up a church. Do you want to spend your money on my church? Why not - it’s my right to exercise my religion.

Or free speech. I want to advocate for the re-election of Trump, but I don’t have enough money. Society must therefore give me the money, or else I cannot exercise my right.

As long as a right is negative, we can agree to disagree on things. You don’t like my religion, so you don’t donate any money to it. You don’t agree with my speech, so you don’t donate to my PAC or buy my newspaper or watch my videos. No harm done to either side. Once it becomes a positive right, we can no longer agree to disagree - I have to support your side whether I agree with it or not.

One of the basic rights of man is to be able to say to the government, or to the rest of society, “this is none of your business”. As long as it is a negative right we are talking about, that right can be defended. Once it becomes a positive right, I no longer say “this is none of your business”. I say “you have to give me money and attention and time whether you like it or not.”

It is not possible to live and let live when positive rights are at stake.

Regards,
Shodan

18

Whenever I see someone talking about “modern liberalism” I immediately assume that whatever they mean will bear no relation to what the next person thinks it means. Personally I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean - I’ve yet to find two liberals (a group into which I loosely place myself) who agree on an entire platform of ideals or policies even if there is some approximate overlap. Thus “modern liberalism” tends to become a strawman even if the discussion is carried out with the best of intentions.

I also don’t find discussing “positive liberties” useful. I don’t want universal education and healthcare because they’re “positive liberties” or “human rights” or some such abstract concept. I want them because I believe they are the most efficient way to provide such services to the widest number of people in order to obtain the greatest societal and economic benefit with the least amount of detriment to individuals. A society producing healthy and well-educated people is one which will have a thriving and valuable workforce, which will benefit both the workers and the companies they work for.

I can similarly see the benefit in a UBI but will admit that I have not fully considered the pros and cons of one enough to commit to a position on it. I do, however, think it’s pointless and counterproductive to worry about whether or not it constitutes a form of “freedom”. Consider the outcomes (intended and unintended) instead.

19

If Bill saw it as a net benefit to pay for Bob’s medical care, he would probably just do it, without the government or their guns needing to intervene. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that the Bobs of the world see the benefit much more directly than the Bills of the world. I self-identify with Bill.

20

The really, really big problem with the concept of “positive liberty” is that it doesn’t have any inherent upper bound. This is not a problem that “negative liberty” has - if you’re promising to not establish a state religion, then you simply don’t establish a state religion and you’re done. This does not apply to positive liberties - the amount of money required for people to feel completely unlimited by it is way, WAY more than the national average income - because the average person still feels constrained by money problems.

This is not to say I’m inherently opposed to helping people; I’m a liberal, and like to pretend in public that I’m not an asshole. However, I secretly AM an asshole, and honestly don’t care about anyone but myself and my clan. So I prefer to view this from a ‘benefit to society’ perspective rather than a ‘give everybody a money bin so they can freely swim in it’ perspective. A UBI is an obviously good idea, because poor/homeless/desperate people are bad for society’s morale, and because our current systems for funding the poor are too complicated with most of those complications having unwanted unanticipated side effects (like how the poor are discouraged from getting a job that bumps them off welfare and thus reduces their income). And also I think it would be fun to give it to everyone, even Trump, just so that the wealthy can be aware that they’re part of the same community as everyone else. But before we can do this, we need also look into the things that make living in our society so expensive to start with, and try to fix them. Basic housing provided for free has been shown to improve society and reduce costs, to the point of paying for itself; let’s do that. A well-designed UHC system that makes the entire populace the insurance pool and which minimizes the middlemen and the leeches that stand between patient and their medical care would also be an improvement; let’s do that. And then once the costs of housing and healthcare have been dealt with, we can talk UBI, again with the idea of improving society (and not with the idea of giving everybody a pony).

It occurs to me that one of the major differences between liberal conservatives is that conservatives see themselves as individuals scrambling for position, and liberals see themselves as members of a society working together. Thus the focus on “freedom” for conservatives; they want to have room to maneuver and establish their dominance as they try to carve out a position for themselves. Liberals, on the other hand, assume the path to success is to figure out ways to elevate society as a whole, and they’ll rise along with it. “Freedom” doesn’t mesh well with that, because society is not a thing to distance yourself from.