WIP: John Lawless

“Negative Liberty’s Instability” -John Lawless

Three conceptions of liberty have dominated Anglophone political philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, positive, negative, and republican. Though the negative conception (on which a person’s freedom varies indirectly with the probability that another person will interfere in their activities) has been dominant, I will argue that it is unstable between positive liberty and negative liberty. That is because this negative conception has features that are mutually inconsistent; abandoning one leads to the positive conception, and abandoning the other leads to the negative conception. So the negative conception should drop out of the picture altogether.