So, some more political philosophy-related thinking out loud. G. A. Cohen, as part of his internal critique of Rawlsian principles of distributive justice, has maintained that moral obligations cannot troublingly reduce freedom because either moral obligations do not reduce freedom or they do not troublingly reduce freedom. For example, we all have a moral obligation not to murder other people. If this obligation does reduce each of us's freedom, surely it does not do so troublingly. Thus, Cohen claims, the egalitarian ethos requiring those with rare and productive talents not to seek incentives for making use of those talents, if it is a moral obligation, does not troublingly reduce freedom.
There are a number of ways of interpreting this claim. The claim could be true if all moral obligations did not reduce freedom at all. I take this to be false, since people seem to experience some moral obligations as coercive - the obligation to devote their lives to looking after sick relatives, for example. The claim could also be true if all moral obligations did reduce freedom, but did so untroublingly. I also take this to be false, since people seem to experience some moral obligations as non-coercive - the obligation not to murder, for example. I'm not going to argue further for either of those claims, since I think they're reasonably plausible, and what I'm arguing may depend on them being granted the status of assumptions.
This means that Cohen's claim can only be true if some moral obligations do not reduce freedom and all the rest do not reduce it troublingly. Presumably what distinguishes between the obligations which do not reduce freedom and those which do not reduce it troublingly is their weightiness, that is, how burdensome it is to fulfill them. Thus, the obligation to devote one's life to looking after a seriously ill relative is very burdensome, and so we think it reduces your freedom, even if we think it does not do so troublingly, i.e., that, all things considered, it is not an unreasonable thing to ask you to do. Conversely, the obligation not to murder people is not very burdensome, since it leaves you able to pursue all kinds of other projects in all kinds of other ways, and so we do not think that it reduces your freedom.
So, how burdensome an obligation is determines whether or not it reduces freedom. Burdensome obligations reduce freedom, and less burdensome ones do not. The question then becomes whether a burdensome obligation reduces freedom troublingly. Presumably a burdensome obligation does not reduce freedom troublingly if what fulfilling the obligation will provide is very important; the important goal that the obligation serves justifies the loss of freedom. A less important goal for an equally burdensome obligation though, would reduce freedom troublingly, since the goal no longer justifies the loss of freedom, and, on Cohen's logic, would no longer be a real obligation but only a putative one, one that on investigation we found out was unjustified.
Thus, on Cohen's logic, we have a doubly dichotomous account of the relationship between moral obligation and freedom. There are moral obligations we have which are not burdensome enough to threaten freedom, and a set of putative moral obligations which are burdensome enough to threaten freedom, some of which are genuine moral obligations because the goals they provide for justify the loss of freedom and some of which are not because the goals they provide for do not so justify the loss of freedom. It is implausible to think that all moral obligations which threaten freedom are equally burdensome, so different kinds of justification for different freedom-threatening moral obligations will be needed. What we need to justify the obligation to look after a sick relative for three days a week will be different from the obligation to look after a sick relative all the time.
That means that before deciding whether a putative freedom-threatening obligation is justified, we need to consider the relative weights of the goals fulfilling it provides and the burdens it imposes on the person who bears it. That means that we need to engage in moral argument before we can decide that some putative obligation is indeed an obligation. This is what Cohen wants to prevent by appealing to the claim that moral obligations either do not threaten freedom or do so untroublingly. If, though, one has to consider a putative obligation's effects on freedom before deciding whether or not it is an obligation, then this response is not adequate.
Neither is it good enough to say that it is the same obligation as to set up and sustain a basic structure - a set of political and socio-economic institutions like property rights and tax law - which abides by the Rawlsian distributive principles in question. This is because the burdens the obligations impose are not the same; the burdens, and so the content of the obligation in question, of a system of care for the sick paid for out of general taxation and provided for by professionals against a background of free career choice are different from the burdens of a system of care for the sick provided on a individual basis (this whole post may be a roundabout way of making this point). Hmm. I'm not sure whether this would also apply if the claim that there has to be a spectrum running from non-freedom reducing to acceptably freedom-reducing were withdrawn.
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22 comments:
I always took it that a burden you accept doesn't reduce your freedom. You may feel it some sort of burden to care for your relative but if that's what you choose to do, all things - morality included - considered, you can't complain about a loss of freedom. The point being that one can't fulfil moral obligations and have all one might by ignoring them.
I think you're right that, in justifying a moral obligation we have to consider the burden on the duty-bearer, but doesn't Cohen effectively dodge that with an unspecified prereogative?
"I always took it that a burden you accept doesn't reduce your freedom. You may feel it some sort of burden to care for your relative but if that's what you choose to do, all things - morality included - considered, you can't complain about a loss of freedom."
If that's premised on the thought that nothing you freely do can reduce your freedom, with free acceptance of a moral obligation an example of something you freely do, then I disagree. A contract I freely enter into can reduce my freedom; think of a contract to enslave myself to someone else. I'm not quite sure why being bound by someone else's will should be different from being bound by your own past will, which would seem to be the difference between freedom-reducing contracts to others where there is no attempt to breach the contract and putatively freedom-reducing moral commitments. There's also the issue of whether people freely accept moral obligations. Indoctrination does not lose all its oppressive character simply by being indoctrination towards truth. But I suppose part of the burden of the argument here is to show that Cohen needs to occupy the position that you state here, since if he accepts that obligations can reduce freedom, he falls under a burden of justification of that reduction of freedom, which is precisely what he wants to avoid.
I wasn't really thinking of the fact that you freely accept the moral obligation, but the fact you freely choose to comply with it. Yes, I might wish I could have my relative cared for and not do it myself, but suppose that's impossible. Now if I choose to care for the relative I can't claim I am unfree because I am doing what, all considered, I want to do. I could have ignored my moral obligation, but I freely chose to comply.
But if you hold the 'if I do what I all things considered want, then I do not thereby lose freedom' line, threats don't reduce freedom because people threats succeed, if they do, by getting people to want to avoid them. If that's the case, no slave who remains a slave because of fear of what their master will do to them is unfree. I take it that that is a crazy position.
I'm not convinced threats do diminish freedom, but anyway that doesn't follow because one need only appeal to a moralized conception of freedom. That's not something I'd want to do though, and I suppose it would make Cohen's claim that moral obligations don't diminish freedom look worryingly trivial...
Maybe Cohen should take the unproblematic lack of freedom line, but I think we may have missed something. The moral obligation isn't, like a contract, binding only because you voluntarily enter it, but it is something you endorse, unlike the master.
"I'm not convinced threats do diminish freedom, but anyway that doesn't follow because one need only appeal to a moralized conception of freedom."
I'm not sure I see quite what you're getting at here. Your claim was that the obligation didn't reduce your freedom because all things considered, you wanted to comply with it. But that implies the claim about threats. I can't see how you could get round that using a moralised account of freedom; at best, that would settle what counted as a threat.
"The moral obligation isn't, like a contract, binding only because you voluntarily enter it, but it is something you endorse, unlike the master."
I'm not sure about this. You can endorse the claim that people in situation x ought to have obligation y, but nonetheless resent the fact that you are in situation x, since you could be put in situation x either by the acts of others or by the acts of past selves to whom you-now relates to as an other. That would seem to be create the gap between the fact of the possession of the obligation and the will to follow it which would make it possible for it to be sufficiently alien to resent it.
"You can endorse the claim that people in situation x ought to have obligation y, but nonetheless resent the fact that you are in situation x, since you could be put in situation x either by the acts of others or by the acts of past selves to whom you-now relates to as an other. That would seem to be create the gap between the fact of the possession of the obligation and the will to follow it which would make it possible for it to be sufficiently alien to resent it."
But you're not unfreely doing y, given that you're in situation x, even if you are unfreely in situation x.
So, to stick to something like Cohen's case, you may regret that there are people who are poorly off but, since there are, you feel obligated to help them, through working hard and paying high taxes. What's unfree? No one forces you to live up to this moral obligation but you choose to do so because you freely endorse it.
That leaves you with the threats problem again. Do I freely give the highwayman my money, because it is what I prefer to do, given that they are threatening me with death. My set of options can make me unfree, and what options I have are a matter of what situation I am in.
What's the problem there? The answer's yes - you do freely give the highwayman your money, since that's normally the more sensible choice. Of course you'd rather face different options, but since we never choose the options with which we're faced your reasoning seems to suggest we're never free...
"What's the problem there? The answer's yes - you do freely give the highwayman your money, since that's normally the more sensible choice. Of course you'd rather face different options"
THREATS! SLAVERY! NOT FREE! I think there may be a clash of intuitions here. Of course, there is one thing you cannot do that you could do before the highwayman threatened you; continue on your way without running the risk of being shot.
"since we never choose the options with which we're faced your reasoning seems to suggest we're never free..."
A requirement that you are not alienated from some situation is not the requirement that you chose it. It is the requirement that you are reconciled to it. I can fail to be reconciled to some situation I chose, if I chose it from amongst a set of options that I was also alienated from, or if I come to regret my choice. I can be reconciled to some situation I failed to chose, if I come to see virtues in it despite not having chosen it.
"THREATS! SLAVERY! NOT FREE!"
I think you're either:
a) Confusing the slave's status of unfreedom with freedom of action. It doesn't follow that, because he's not a free person, all the actions he does are unfree.
or
b) Assuming something being freely chosen means it's somehow justified. Take the example of someone who throws goods off a ship in a storm - he is free and responsible for this action, but we should praise rather than blame him for acting appropriately in this circumstance. It doesn't follow that people have to bear the costs for all their free actions, because some people have to act in worse circumstances than others, which is a matter of justice (not freedom).
"A requirement that you are not alienated from some situation is not the requirement that you chose it. It is the requirement that you are reconciled to it."
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. It sounds like it could be something like the endorsement I spoke of in my third comment - you're talking about reconciliation with or alienation from the situation, but that could be due to the demands it places on you.
One threatened by the highwayman faces a choice one doesn't want, one faced with a moral obligation would prefer - in a way - to be free of it, but overall endorses or is reconciled to morality and so chooses in light of it.
a) involves a taking the strange position that the very feature of every action that the slave might take against their master's will is free and yet definitional of their status as unfree. Further, it is not what I meant. Neither is b). I'm not sure what I would say about Aristotle's case, but that's beside the poin, because b) illicitly assumes that whether an act is justified or not has nothing to do with whether it is free. Whether an act is justified and whether it is free are not to separate questions, and if that is the case, then it can hardly be the case that what's going on when I claim that an act is free is really that it is justified, since at least part of what might make the second claim true is that the first is.
On being reconciled to your situation and how that is not the same as accepting an moral obligation that arises in that situation, consider the contrast between two cases where you are threatened by a highwayman. In the first, you wholeheartedly accept that you have an obligation to perserve your own life. I don't think whether you accept that obligation or not makes any difference to judgements about whether or not you are free when you hand over the money. In the second, unbeknownest to the highwayman, you actually want to give your money to them. It remains true that the highwayman would shoot you if you didn't hand over the money, but that'll never happen. This does make a difference to our judgements of whether or not you are free in this situation, I think. In the first, your acceptance of the obligation to perserve your life in no way reconciles you to your situation; in the second, your desire to give the highwayman money does. In both, nonetheless, what you all things considered prefer to do is give the highwayman the money.
I don't think I follow either part of that first paragraph. I think I do see the difference in the second, but there are two things going on - having an obligation and which way it runs. So I think we need to distinguish:
1) You have an obligation to preserve your life, you're not reconciled to the situation so unfreely give the highwayman your money.
2) You desire to preserve your life, aren't reconciled to the situation, so unfreely give the highwayman your money.
3) You desire to give the highwayman your money, so do so freely even though you 'couldn't' have done otherwise (a Frankfurt-like case)
4) You have an obligation to give the highwayman your money - does this reconcile you to the situation? Is your action free?
(Note I'm aware there are more possible distinctions, e.g. between actually having an obligation and merely believing you have, but these are the two factors that seem relevant here)
4) tells us nothing about whether you are reconciled to the situation, I think, which I think is what I should say, since I want to force a distinction between whether you accept an obligation and whether you are reconciled to the situation in which that obligation presses on you. I should also say that I am assuming that you are not alienated from your desire to give the highwayman money; in cases like the ones Cohen uses against Dworkin on the expensive tastes issue, I think I would say act on the preference means you are less free.
On the stuff about a) and b), the point I was trying to make about a) is that it would be very odd if we were to hold that no more of a slave's acts were unfree than those of a slaveowner, for example, and yet hold that a slaveowner was a free person whereas a slave was not. What makes a slave unfree is that they are constantly coerced by their master; this is what makes their acts unfree and deprives them of the status of being a free person. It would be strange if they acted freely lots of the time, but nonetheless were not a free person because someone else threatened them all the time. The point about b) was that judgements about whether something is all things considered justified are partly dependent on judgements about freedom. Hence, judgements about whether something is all things considered justified will include judgements about freedom. But that's not what I am doing anyway. I am perfectly happy with the thought that there are justified losses of freedom; that's what a moral obligation which reduces your freedom does. Your tack, on the other hand, seems to make judgements about freedom totally empty; if you hold that as long as we do what, given the set of options available to us, we want, then absent paralysis, I fail to see how we could ever be unfree (which also looks like a collapse of the idea of ability and freedom).
On a), "it would be very odd if we were to hold that no more of a slave's acts were unfree than those of a slaveowner, for example, and yet hold that a slaveowner was a free person whereas a slave was not". It seems you're committing something like the fallacy of composition. The free status of a person is not simply a product of their number of free actions, and I see no problem in saying that the uninterferred with slave is an unfree person though every act they do is free.
On b), "Your tack, on the other hand, seems to make judgements about freedom totally empty; if you hold that as long as we do what, given the set of options available to us, we want, then absent paralysis, I fail to see how we could ever be unfree (which also looks like a collapse of the idea of ability and freedom)." Do you think it's impossible to act other than how you want?
I'm using want in something like a Frankfurtian second-order desire type sense, rather than an economist's revealed preference, how you actually act is how you want sense. Thus, quite obviously, cases like akrasia or an uncontrollable phobia could be examples of unfreedom.
As to the difference between freedom and ability, I'm not sure it is all that deep. I wouldn't say I'm free to run a four minute mile, after all. I think it's more helpful to speak, if that's what you want, simply of /political/ freedom, which stipulatively can only be limited by other people.
As for the main point...
"I want to force a distinction between whether you accept an obligation and whether you are reconciled to the situation in which that obligation presses on you."
Ok, that sounds possible, so it seems the situation we've reached is one where moral obligations can be untroubling provided you're reconciled to the situation. Does this raise problems for Cohen, or can he simply say people should be so reconciled?
"in cases like the ones Cohen uses against Dworkin on the expensive tastes issue, I think I would say act on the preference means you are less free."
What does Cohen say? Presumably he thinks it's a free action, so why shouldn't you bear the costs? Or is his point about it not being the taste but expense of the good you dislike similar to yours about being reconciled to the situation?
On the fallacy of composition thing, I take it the usual case is like one of a plane, which has the property of being able to fly, whilst none of its parts individually do. What the fallacy presumably involves doing is failing to notice that the parts variously have properties which are neccessary but not sufficient for having the second-order property of being able to fly; a motor provides thrust, wings provide differential air-pressure above and below them when air flows over them, and so on. The analogy with a unfree person all of whose acts were free would presumably be that those acts all had properties which were neccessary but not sufficient for being unfree.
The problem is that freedom doesn't seem to be like the property of being able to fly. There are not degrees of being able to fly, or at least not very many at all, whereas freedom seems to run along a spectrum; serfs are more free than slaves; members of medieval guilds are more free than serfs; I am more free than a member of a medieval guild; Bill Gates is more free than me; etc. If that's the case, freedom as a status is not just an on-off property. If it's not just an on-off property, though, then properties which are not sufficient to make the judgement about the on-off property - the kinds of property the fallacy of composition makes a mistake about - may well be sufficient to make other kinds of judgements about freedom: that a serf is freer than a slave, for example. If they are sufficient to make other judgements about freedom, then I see no reason to think that they cannot be used to support judgements about individual acts.
On the expensive taste stuff, I was thinking of the expensive tastes you wish you didn't have stuff. And I'm not quite sure what Frankfurt's second-order preference means, but don't worry about that. I'm also not sure what Cohen would say in response to all this either, whether he would just make the move that we should be reconciled to the situation. But it does seem that he can't just automatically make the freedom/moral obligations move he makes now, precisely because people can not be reconciled to situations in which genuine moral obligations arise. He'd have to say something about why we ought to be reconciled to it, and that might well get him into some issues about the circumstances of justice and worrying degrees of fact-sensitivity. Er, I suppose I could ask him. Thanks for this; it's been helpful.
Not at all, it's been helpful/interesting for me too.
The fallacy of composition is to attribute to the whole properties of the parts, or vice versa. For example, to assume a crowd of large people is a large crowd or two odd numbers added will make an odd number.
Obviously the slave isn't made up of his actions, so it may not literally be a fallacy of composition, but I think there's something similar. I always understood Skinner as making a deliberate move from the modern idea that freedom is a property of actions to reviving the republican idea that it's a status of persons. As such, it need not in any way be a reflection of the freedom of their actions.
You could say the slave's acts are (derivatively) unfree because he's unfree, but I believe someone like Skinner could say the slave is an unfree person even if his every action is a free one (because they could be interferred with but aren't).
I'm not sure how that relates to the point about freedom not being an on-off concept. Status may well be (you're your own master or a slave), but what you're free to do is I suppose a matter of degree. In any case, I don't see how the overall judgement sheds much light on the properties of parts. Using your example, that the whole plane flies doesn't tell me anything about any specific part does it? Not even that it has "properties which are neccessary but not sufficient for having the second-order property of being able to fly" (surely the part could be non-necessary and practically anything could be, redundantly, part of a plane)
"In any case, I don't see how the overall judgement sheds much light on the properties of parts. Using your example, that the whole plane flies doesn't tell me anything about any specific part does it? Not even that it has "properties which are neccessary but not sufficient for having the second-order property of being able to fly" (surely the part could be non-necessary and practically anything could be, redundantly, part of a plane)"
But it does tell you that at least some of the parts have that kind of property, I think. So, analogously, having the status of being unfree tells you that at least some of the parts of the person who has that status - whatever those parts are; actions could be - have that kind of property. I'm sure there's a fallacy of 'if no one member of a set x must possess property y, then no member of set x must possess property y' too, you know.
"if no one member of a set x must possess property y, then no member of set x must possess property y"
I don't say it follows that because no member of set x has to possess y then none of them do; all I say is it's possible - think again of the large crowd, no member of which need be large and possibly no member of which is large.
The crowd analogy doesn't work I think, because the property isn't the same for the parts and the whole: a crowd is large when there are many people in it, and a person is large when they are either tall or broad or both tall and broad. Persons cannot have many people in them, and crowds cannot be tall or broad or tall and broad. There, the fallacy of composition relies on homonyms - large and large are the same word, but do not mean the same thing - but I don't think that freedom as a property of acts and freedom as a property of persons are homonyms in the same way.
I don't think large has two senses here at all, both crowds and people are large in the same sense (i.e. being bigger than the average member of their type, or something). It's true that there are different things making them large, but that's precisely the point - that the whole can possess properties not possessed of its parts (or vice versa). If you want some different examples consider 'multi-coloured' or 'even' (a sum total can be even if made entirely of odd numbers).
Conversely, I do think you're dealing with homonyms in the case of freedom. Freedom as the status of a person simply isn't a case of adding up how many of their actions are free.
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