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The conditions-of-liberty objection

To confuse liberty with its conditions dissolves the concept: the poor lack means, not liberty, and the distinction protects both.

Objects to Capability freedom

Berlin · Introduction to Four Essays on Liberty · 1969

1. Every liberty is exercised under conditions: health, money, education, even the laws of nature. Yet no one says that being unable to fly deprives us of liberty: not every inability is servitude.
2. The capabilities approach does not say this of every natural inability; but once a lack of means counts, as such, as a lack of liberty, "liberty" slides toward "power", and the difference fades between being prevented by someone and being limited by one's situation.
3. Yet that difference does all the critical work of the word: it distinguishes the prison from poverty, the censor from bad luck, and points to someone responsible where there is one.
4. What the capabilities approach is after is real, but it is a demand of justice (giving each person the means) rather than a redefinition of liberty.

Therefore Poverty robs liberty of its worth, and that is exactly why it must be fought; but fought in the name of justice, rather than by dissolving the meaning of the word liberty.