Suchergebnisse

In typical analyses of the concept of freedom (or liberty), it is assumed that this idea applies to stable political contexts, within which free persons enjoy publicly recognized citizenship. However, freedom as a fundamental political ideal ought also be understood as an aspiration for those who do not enjoy such status and may not seek it, as long as other provisions and protections can be afforded (refugees, migrant workers, etc.). This paper re-analyzes the concept as it might apply in such contexts and a model of basic positive liberty is proposed, one which attempts to capture the privileges of those already considered free as well as those aspiring to that status.

Abstract
There are numerous ways to conceptualize autonomy and to account for its value. Of particular poignancy is the question of whether autonomy has value for those people and cultures that apparently reject liberal principles, otherwise considered. The answer one gives to that question has implications for whether autonomy-based liberalism can or should be seen as a perfectionist political philosophy. I consider these issues by looking again at Joseph Raz's influential account of autonomy and its relation to his liberal perfectionism. I defend a proceduralist, non-perfectionist account of autonomy that, I argue, improves on Raz's original view but in ways that are in keeping with its general spirit.

Philosophical treatments of core value concepts often abstract from the troubled history and fractured present of the societies to which those concepts are meant to apply. In the case of the political tradition of liberal democratic thought, stretching from the social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up through contemporary writers, the notion of individual freedom or liberty is central. However, often that idea, and the assumption of its foundational value for persons, is specified from the perspective of those who enjoy it rather than those struggling to attain it. Moreover, the social spaces that theories of justice that locate freedom as a central value have continue to bracket out of existence the patterns of enslavement, oppression and domination that mark all social spaces. This article attempts a reappraisal of certain dominant understandings of the idea of freedom in both historical and contemporary philosophical discourse in light of this alteration of perspective. Specifically, the current practices of coercive labor, trafficking, irregular labor migration, and other forms of "marginal" social lives are brought into focus in order to guide this reappraisal. The article argues that if we assess these conditions as modes of unfreedom then we must utilize an account of freedom that diverges significantly from those dominant notions. A sketch of this alternative, positive, conception of freedom is then offered.

Abstract
Many of those critical of traditional liberalism have focused on the notion of freedom at the center of that approach, namely the (negative) idea of liberty as the absence of interferences with action. Building a plausible and normatively acceptable positive alternative, however, has faced numerous criticisms and challenges. In this paper I discuss what such critics of liberalism sec; as the; limitations of the traditional negative notion and sketch the core components of a positive alternative. Specifically I suggest that the dimensions of liberty should contain the positive elements of capabilities and agent authenticity. After laying out the core of these ideas I briefly defend them against standard objections. In doing so, I argue that such a positive notion is necessary to capture the dominance of the language of freedom in contexts of resistance and struggle in the actual, non-ideal, world.

Abstract
In numerous accounts of both autonomy and freedom, social or relational elements have been offered as conceptual requirements in addition to purely procedural conditions. In addition, it is claimed that social recognition of the normative authority or self-trust of the agent is conceptually required for autonomy. In this paper I argue that in cases where people find themselves completely dislocated from the social and cultural homes that had provided them with the language in which to formulate and express their values, it is clear that social recognition of the sort defended in relational models is causally but not conceptually required for agency to be (re-)established. This is shown by noting that often victims of human tracking or smuggling find themselves in foreign settings where it is quite up for grabs where and how they will attempt to reconstruct a life narrative which they can generally embrace. Therefore, seeing social recognition as conceptually required for autonomous agency or freedom would ignore the variability in the ways that such recognition must be expressed.

In this article, I respond to Eric Nelson's claim (in "Liberty: One Concept Too Many?") that the most prominent versions of a positive concept of freedom all reduce to negative notions. I argue that in his otherwise scholarly and well-argued article, Nelson confuses a conceptual dispute with a normative one based on moral or political principle. Further, I point out that the traditional critique of positive conceptions of liberty, which rests on skepticism about perfectionist conceptions of political value, is lost if we see the debate in the way Nelson lays it out. When these issues are disentangled, I suggest that there is indeed conceptual space for uniquely "positive" conceptions of freedom, and I suggest that the idea of "autonomy" can be taken for such a notion and indeed represents a value worth taking seriously in current discussions of justice.