Reddit reviews Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers (Cambridge))

The "freedom from Vs Freedom to" interpretation of the distinction between negative and positive liberty has been known to be nonsense since the late 60s. The absence of obstacles logically entails the accessibility of an alternative and vice versa. The interpretation here has been widely influential, for example it was accepted by Rawls in the ToJ.

The understanding of negative and positive liberty as distinct concepts can be maintained (rightly, in my view) under their interpretation as two incommensurable opportunity and excercise concepts of liberty. The first and best statement of this view can be found in the first few pages of Charles Taylor's "What's wrong with negative liberty" in philosophical papers vol. 2 (these two volumes are generally worth reading) and is also well stated in the first five pages of Skinner's A third concept of liberty (even though it should be noted that Skinner focuses on a particular subset of positive liberty as rational self-determination)

Three things should be noted:

1. This interpretation of the two concepts of liberty is what I.Berlin actually had in mind in his Two Concepts of Liberty (and is also closer to what Fromm had in mind when he first made the distinction), as it becomes apparent in the way he responds to MacCallum and in the way he rephrases (a lot more clearly) the distinction in the introduction to his Liberty (Incorporating Four Essays) and in his very brief "Final Retrospect" collected in the same volume.
   
   
2. Under this interpretation of the distinction between negative liberty as non-interference and positive liberty as self-determination (and as Berlin himself explicitly states in the aforementioned texts) the two values are not conflicting and may in fact even be understood as overlapping and entailing one another, or requiring a certain conception of each other to be excercised.
   
   
3. The negative/positive liberty distinction has nothing to do with the negative/positive rights distinction.
   
   As far as 3. is concerned it should be noted that the traditional interpretation of negative rights as requiring the absence of government action and of positive rights as requiring government action has also been found to be untenable (as legal rights that can not be legally vindicated are not legal rights, and therefore under the aforementioned interpretation all legal rights are revealed to be positive rights). This view is best stated in Cass Sunstein's "the cost of rights". The distinction between negative and positive rights may also be maintained, under the reinterpretation of positive and negative rights as entailing correlate positive and negative agency duties respectively, and on the part of other citizens, but it's not clear that this is a useful distinction in any respect. Certainly none of the judgments that the proponents of the traditional intepretation would want to make follow from it.
   
   P.S. It's straightforwardly true that if I a) am unable to enter a house because b) someone interferes with me to stop me, I am unfree, in the negative sense, to do so (there exist interpersonal obstacles which render this alternative inaccessible to me). Whether I should or shouldn't be free to enter that house is another matter entirely.