Isn’t everything anyone cares about an externality? If I am pleased by what someone else does, that is a positive externality. If I am displeased, that makes it a negative externality. If so, then pointing out their status as externalities isn’t what matters; what matters is deciding which externalities we collectively care about enough to seek recourse, and which we do not.
“negative freedom is not the ultimate value to be pursued at all costs. “
No, it is the value that enables pursuit of all other values, the value that can be shared when others are contentious.
“Its very definition and the assessment of its implementation cannot be made without any consideration for the outcomes it leads to.”
But we inhabit a sort of inversion of Rawls' initial position. We all have an idea of what our interests are, but do not share an understanding of the consequences of the various alternative policies available. From a more humble view of epistemology, liberty allows us to investigate what we think is best.
The answer in the abstract is Nozick's utopia, the thought experiment that allows any person to exit from an unsatisfactory world and create a new one, restricted only in that they cannot prevent the inhabitants from also exiting for other worlds. In the static vision of most political philosophy, that would mean that participants would converge onto something like an optimum. In a more dynamic scenario, it would mean that experimentation might continue to improve our social knowledge indefinitely. How does this apply in reality? It is easy to say that we should consider allowing more experimentation via subsidiarity or economic zones. Is it really so simple?
Liberty is often thought of in terms of a static set of principles or institutions. But can liberated persons experiment with such principles without losing liberty? If they can’t, do they really have liberty? Perhaps they can use contracts to create new social restrictions they deem worthwhile. But can they use contracts to amend or repeal their basic norms?
Isn’t everything anyone cares about an externality? If I am pleased by what someone else does, that is a positive externality. If I am displeased, that makes it a negative externality. If so, then pointing out their status as externalities isn’t what matters; what matters is deciding which externalities we collectively care about enough to seek recourse, and which we do not.
“negative freedom is not the ultimate value to be pursued at all costs. “
No, it is the value that enables pursuit of all other values, the value that can be shared when others are contentious.
“Its very definition and the assessment of its implementation cannot be made without any consideration for the outcomes it leads to.”
But we inhabit a sort of inversion of Rawls' initial position. We all have an idea of what our interests are, but do not share an understanding of the consequences of the various alternative policies available. From a more humble view of epistemology, liberty allows us to investigate what we think is best.
The answer in the abstract is Nozick's utopia, the thought experiment that allows any person to exit from an unsatisfactory world and create a new one, restricted only in that they cannot prevent the inhabitants from also exiting for other worlds. In the static vision of most political philosophy, that would mean that participants would converge onto something like an optimum. In a more dynamic scenario, it would mean that experimentation might continue to improve our social knowledge indefinitely. How does this apply in reality? It is easy to say that we should consider allowing more experimentation via subsidiarity or economic zones. Is it really so simple?
Liberty is often thought of in terms of a static set of principles or institutions. But can liberated persons experiment with such principles without losing liberty? If they can’t, do they really have liberty? Perhaps they can use contracts to create new social restrictions they deem worthwhile. But can they use contracts to amend or repeal their basic norms?