Reddit reviews Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism? (Oxford Political Theory)

Well, if you want help with any of it, I am happy to discuss it in some more detail. I am aware that some of the things I mentioned (especially the conservation of liberty hypothesis) are not easilly understood when stated this abstractly. If you want any help finding anything, I can point you to resources.

That being said, the distinction you made is not between negative and positive rights, neither is it between negative and positive liberty. It is the distinction between formal and effective negative liberty, which is also a credible distinction used by some philosophers (especially P.Van Parijs, who argues that liberty should be made effective in his Real Freedom For All).

This distinction was first made by I.Berlin himself. We have noticed that negative liberty consists in the absence of interference (I am unfree to X if I a) Can't X b) because someone else or some group of people stop me. Conversely I am free to X if and only if no one makes it physically impossible for me to X). The point here is this: Unfreedom is a special kind of social inability, inability caused by others. That's because freedom is a social relationship. Freedom is not my capacity to access an alternative. It's my relationship with others with reference to that alternative (it has to do with how others influence my capacity to access it). This means that there are two kinds of factors that can restrict my access to an alternative: agent-reducible / social / political factors (interference) and agent-irreducible factors (strong passions, disabilities, natural obstacles) and only the first interpersonal obstacles restrict my freedom.

Two notes can be made on this: While I might be free to X because there are no interpersonal obstacles to my doing so, I might nevertheless still be unable to X for other reasons that aren't agent-reducible (for example: I might be free to run a marathon in the sense that no one is disposed to stop me, but nevertheless illness may have confined me to my bedroom so that I am unable to run in it, regardless). The second observation follows from the first: I might be free to do something (due to the absence of man-made obstacles) but I might still be unable to do the same thing for other reasons (due to the presence of other non-man-made obstacles), or in the phrasing of I.Berlin, I might be free to X even though I can't excercise that freedom.

What Berlin noticed immediately after observing this is that a liberty that can't be excercised has no value or worth for the person that has it. In this way of putting it, to lack the conditions for the excercise of your freedom, even when you are free, makes that freedom worthless to you. A concern for the value of freedom would imply that we not only have to ensure people are free, but that they can also excercise their freedom. In other words, someone concerned with the value of freedom (someone concerned with effective freedom) would want to remove both agent-reducible / social (such as interference) and agent-irreducible / asocial (such as natural or internal) obstacles to an alternative.

My point above was not to deny this particular distinction is meaningful but in particular to show a) that the naive distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to" is incoherent, b) that the distinction between negative and positive liberty shouldn't be conflated with that between negative and positive rights, c) that the distinction between effective and formal negative liberty should not be conflated with the distinction between positive and negative liberty and d) that the absence of material means, relative poverty, doesn't render someone's existing freedom to use those objects ineffective (non-excerciseable) and therefore worthless to them, but it directly restricts their formal negative liberty (because private ownership is also a social relationship, and therefore one's inability to use things owned by others is owed to human interference. People stop them. They aren't merely unable to use these objects due to agent-irreducible factors, they are unfree to use them due to the interference of others).