Relation to others· Power and justice
Capability freedom
Axis: Political liberty — What is it to be politically free?
To be free is not merely to be unhindered, it is to have the real means to act: without health, education or resources, a purely formal liberty stays a dead letter. Liberty is measured by the effective capabilities to be and to do.
Movements 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Marxisminferable
Formal rights (to vote, to contract, to own) leave economic compulsion intact: the worker "free" to sell his labor power is just as free to starve if he refuses. Marxism therefore holds political emancipation to be real but insufficient, and sets against it a concrete freedom, the effective capacity for self-realization, which presupposes abolishing the rule of economic necessity and alienation. Freedom is not a legal status but a material condition to be won: the free development of each becomes possible only where that of all is too, which subordinates political liberty to the transformation of the relations of production.
Marx, 1844 Manuscripts; Capital, III
Philosophers 1
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Marxinferable
Formal liberty is worthless without the material conditions to exercise it: true emancipation requires overcoming alienation and the realm of necessity, so that the free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all. A positive, real freedom, an effective capacity to act.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Capital, III; The Communist Manifesto
Argument
- With equal rights, two people do not have the same real possibilities: the right to start a business, to study, or to travel opens nothing to those who lack money, health, or education.
- What we prize in liberty are the lives it makes possible: a right its holder cannot take up may keep its value in principle, but by itself it opens no life.
- A purely formal definition must nonetheless declare these two people equally free: as a measure of freedom, it is blind to what gives freedom its value.
- The relevant measure is therefore the range of : not resources themselves, but what each person, with them and given their situation, can actually choose to be and to do.
Therefore A free society is one that widens what its members can really be and do, health, education, and resources included.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- 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.
- The 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.
- 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.
- 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.
See the page- DescriptiveFreedom on paper
The law forbids no one to travel, study, or start a business, yet without money, health or connections none of it is within reach. Is the penniless person unfree, or merely unable? And does calling poverty a lack of freedom sharpen the idea of liberty, or dissolve it?
rights on paper