The slave of the kind master
Philip Pettit, after the republican tradition · Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government · 1997
Imagine a slave who has fallen to a master of even, benevolent temper: never a brutal order, never a punishment; he lets him live, work, and love as he pleases. No interference, then, from one end of his life to the other. His neighbor is a poor citizen, protected by the law. If liberty is nothing but the absence of hindrance, the well-treated slave is as free as the citizen, perhaps freer.
Is the slave of the kind master free?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Negative libertyattacks the position
If liberty is mere non-interference, the gentle master's slave is free; even the defender of negative liberty hesitates to grant it.
- By hypothesis, the kind master never interferes: by the criterion of non-interference, his slave is fully free.
- Yet the defender of negative liberty himself hesitates to count this slave as a free man: servitude is precisely what the status of a free man is meant to rule out.
- What the slave lacks is not the absence of present hindrance but protection against arbitrary power, that is, power uncontrolled and uncontestable: his liberty depends on a mood, not on a right.
Therefore Actual non-interference is not enough to define liberty: a definition must be able to say why the kind master's slave is not free.