freedom

freedom to vs. freedom from

The 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin proposed the famous distinction between “positive and negative liberty,” often described as “freedom to” vs. “freedom from”. The concept behind this distinction is that liberties are often (perhaps always?) in conflict: my neighbor’s freedom to build a backyard nuclear reactor is in direct conflict with my freedom from radiation poisoning.

This intersects with the ethics of risk when your freedom to do something that provides you with definite value conflicts with my freedom from some risk that may or may not come to pass. For example, if my neighbor with the backyard nuclear reactor solves the radiation shielding problem, there is still the chance of a meltdown. The ethics of risk asks how we can balance the very real benefit in terms of free electricity (and fun!) she gets from operating her reactor with the merely hypothetical (but catastrophic) risk of turning our neighborhood into an irradiated crater.

Freedom vs. reactivity

Michelle Alexander in conversation with Lucas Johnson and Krista Tippett:

Now I understand that, as Howard Thurman put it, “If you don’t learn to listen to the sound of the genuine within you, you will forever be at the ends of strings that someone else pulls.” And that is what clicked it for me. Oh, I am not really free if I am trapped in a mode of reactivity. I am responding to agendas and actions of others. And if I am to cultivate a capacity to be free and to choose courage and compassion and speak truth, I have to cultivate a space within me that is not being pulled by others and that is not reactive.

This gets to the Buddhist concept of freedom as equanimity: of not being ruled by our attachments and cravings. While the Buddhist notion of freedom is distinct from political freedom, I appreciate how Alexander (and, it seems, Thurman) relates the two: that internal freedom is a precondition for political freedom. And on the flip-side, that even in a state of nominal political freedom there are those who would claim dominion over us through our attachments and cravings. We must liberate ourselves, and each other, from both.