Another distinction is that negative liberty is concerned not with what we do, but with what we can do. Berlin stated “Freedom is the opportunity to act, not
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action itself” (Ibid., p.xlii, as quoted in Arguments for Freedom, p.14). Positive liberty, on the other hand, is concerned not with what we can do but with what we have the capacity to do.
All children in England can go to university. But many children do not have the opportunity or capacity to do this. It is positive freedom that supports the laws that state children have to go to school, learn and take exams and it is this that gives them the opportunity to go to university. Negative liberty, with it’s emphasis on allowing people to be as free from laws as possible does not, theoretically, support these laws.
The third distinction that Berlin suggests is that historically, positive liberty is more open to abuse than negative liberty. “The second {positive liberty} has, much more frequently, been seen, for better and for worse, for what it was; there has been no lack of emphasis, in the last hundred years, upon its more disastrous implications.” (Berlin (1969), p.xlvii; as quoted in Arguments for Freedom, p.25).
Examples of this abuse have been seen in various political situations such as communism in Russia, limited democracy in South Africa, and dictatorship in Uganda and more recently Iraq. They have also been seen in religious situations such as Islam where it is fairly common; ‘heavy shepherding’ in some Christian denominations where the leadership decides all matters for the congregation; and cults.
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(b) Explain Berlin’s notion of a ‘final solution’, and why he thinks that no
final solution is possible.
Berlin’s emotively named ‘final solution’ refers to the idea that it is possible to harmonise all the different goals that human beings have so that all of these goals can be realised, in introducing this part of his lecture, Berlin says “But somewhere, we shall be told and in some way, it must be possible for all these values to live together, for unless this is so, the universe is not a cosmos, not a harmony;” (Berlin, op. cit., p.168).
Some philosophers had thought that this was possible. One such was Rousseau who believed that everybody would have ‘the general will’ and this could then happen. Unfortunately, this involved the removal by one means or another of all who did not agree with the general will. Berlin does not believe that this final solution is possible and gives two reasons for this.
He considers whether there is an a priori assurance that this will take place. The obvious answer to this is no, since if it were yes, we would surely be following it. Because there is no such guarantee, Berlin goes on to say “we must fall back on the ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge.” (Ibid., p.168-9, as quoted in Arguments for Freedom, p. 29).
Berlin goes on to say that history, instead of supporting this idea, supports the opposite. It shows that man has always been faced with choices leading to
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equally good ends. It has always been faced with claims that are equally total. To choose one or another of these choices or claims means sacrificing others – in other words there is no one perfect answer.
So Berlin argues that no final solution is possible because there is no a priori guarantee of it being possible, and all the historical evidence shows that this is not possible. He states that the result of this is that “The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition” (Ibid., p.168-9 as quoted in Arguments for Freedom, p. 30).
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Bibliography
Arguments for Freedom
