On Liberty and Art

One-day conference organised by Dr Malcolm Quinn This conference, organised by Quinn in collaboration with Tate Britain, was the latest in a series of engagements by Quinn with the legacy of JS Mill and the idea of an aesthetics of liberty, beginning with an address to Mill’s ‘On Liberty’in a co-authored book, then developed through a paper at the JS Mill Bicentennial conference at University College London (6th April 2006) and another at the conference ‘Liberty, Human Values and Utilitarianism,’ Yokohama National University, Japan (9th -11th September 2006). This latter paper, initially delivered at a conference that included many of the most important researchers in the field, made a decisive shift from discussion of the epistemology of Millian liberty to an address to questions of art, sensibility and aesthetics. It formed part of Quinn’s development of ideas for the ‘On Liberty and Art’ conference at Tate Britain, which has initiated a WCA research project investigating frameworks and reference points for a discourse on liberty conducted through art practice, with presentations from the artists John Russell, Dave Beech, Bob and Roberta Smith, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Amanda Beech and Roman Vasseur. Quinn’s opening address isolated the question of aesthetic liberty as a ‘sensibility of freedom’ and discussed how artists are included within a current media conversation on the crisis of liberty and free speech. Quinn also discussed the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay as exemplifying a discourse on liberty developed through art practice that directly challenged the utilitarian model of liberty as non-coercion and equal distribution developed by Mill and Bentham. Quinn also included reference to the ‘rights to art’ cited in the UN Declaration of human rights of 1948, which produce a conflation of collective/moral and personal rights that have influenced current understanding of the relationship of liberty and art

A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty" Essays

The Zwolinski 2013 "libertarianism and liberty" essays on libertarianism_org are argued to have the following problems: taking libertarianism to be a "commitment" to the view that "liberty is the highest political value" ; examining and rejecting the maximization of liberty without a libertarian theory of liberty; accepting a persuasive sense of "coercion" ; misunderstandingliberty in the work place; conflating, to varying degrees, freedom of action and freedom from aggression and justice/rights/morals; focusing on logically possible clashes instead of practically possible congruence among utility, liberty, and justice – in particular, that "rule (preference-)utilitarianism" fits "rule libertarianism" ; failing to distinguish liberty from license (and power) concerning slavery, and so-called "civil and democratic liberties" (and everything else); the idea that any coherent reference to a quantity of liberty requires precise cardinality; failing to see that the quantity of liberty has an inherently qualitative aspect; misunderstanding property as about limiting freedom; mistaking clashing Hobbesian freedom for non-clashing Lockean liberty; adopting G. A. Cohen's confusion about freedom as the libertarian conception of freedom; assuming the – illogical – epistemology of justification" ; not realizing that both allowing and prohibiting pollution "aggresses" and so "aggressions" need to be minimized; the failure of all six of its reasons for rejecting the non-aggression principle

Championing Christ in the Technical Workplace

Liberty University\u27s goal of training champions for Christ is a high and lofty goal. Liberty has put in place classes and assignments throughout a student\u27s time at Liberty that are aimed towards training them to be champions for Christ. However, many students who graduate from Liberty University are left lonely and unsure of how to go forth championing for Christ. This thesis will provide the motivation and encouragement for students to not only be champions for Christ but actually champion Christ, specifically in the technical workplace. In addition, this thesis evaluates Liberty\u27s practices and will provide changes or additions that could be made to better train champions for Christ. Ultimately, Christ has called His followers to live on mission. A saved person is a sent person and this thesis elaborates and instructs what that means for a recent graduate of Liberty University in the technical workplace

The Heterodox 'Fourth Paradigm' of Libertarianism: an Abstract Eleutherology plus Critical Rationalism

1) Introduction. 2) The key libertarian insight into property and orthodox libertarianism’s philosophical confusion. 3) Clearer distinctions for applying to what follows: abstract liberty; practical liberty; moral defences; and critical rationalism. 4) The two dominant (‘Lockean’ and ‘Hobbesian’) conceptions of interpersonal liberty. 5) A general account of libertarianism as a subset of classical liberalism and defended from a narrower view. 6) Two abstract (non-propertarian, non-normative) theories of interpersonal liberty developed and defended: ‘the absence of interpersonal initiated imposed constraints on want-satisfaction’, abbreviated to ‘no initiated imposed costs’; and ‘no imposed costs’. 7) Practical implications for both main abstract conceptions of liberty derived and compared. 8) How this positive analysis relates to morals. 9) Concluding conjectures: the main abstract theory of liberty captures the relevant interpersonal conception; the new paradigm of libertarianism solves the old one’s problems

Does the Constitution Protect Economic Liberty?

The author defends the proposition that the Court in Lochner v. New York was right to protect the liberty of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment. He does not defend its use of the Due Process Clause to reach its result. As he explains, the Court should have been applying the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Nor does he contend that the Court was correct in its conclusion that the maximum‐hours law under consideration was an unconstitutional restriction on the liberty of contract. Although the statute may well have been unconstitutional, the author does not take the time to evaluate that claim. Instead, this article focuses on whether the Constitution of the United States protects economic liberty. To clarify the issue, the author begins by defining “economic liberty” as the right to acquire, use, and possess private property and the right to enter into private contracts of one’s choosing. If the Constitution protects these rights, then the Constitution does protect economic liberty. The evidence that the Constitution protects rights of private property and contract is overwhelming

An Empirical Inquiry into the Nature of Welfarism

Economists typically evaluate policies based on how such policies affect individuals’ utilities. We follow this approach by taking a welfarist view of the USA’s espoused policy of promoting liberty in other parts of the world. However, we take a nuanced view by investigating the type of welfare that the USA promotes. On one hand, we identify a direct value of liberty in the sense that basic human rights like freedom of speech, freedom to express one’s religious beliefs, and freedom to form associations improve welfare. In this case, liberty is directly consumed. We argue that this improvement in welfare comes simply from giving people greater levels of freedom and is independent of the existence of other inputs. On the other hand, we identify an indirect value of liberty because liberty is indirectly consumed insofar as it is an input in an economy’s production function and therefore affects welfare through its effect on an economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. However, unlike the direct effect mentioned above, we argue that liberty alone cannot produce this indirect effect and therefore needs complementary inputs like investments in physical and human capital. We identify foreign aid as a source of information for investigating a donor’s direct and indirect values of liberty. In our empirical work, our identification strategy exploits the aforementioned difference in the characteristics of the direct and indirect values of liberty to test whether the USA's foreign aid allocation is motivated by a direct value or and/or an indirect value for liberty. As a test of validity, we apply our methodology to the aid allocation of donors who, we believe, are different from the USA. These are Arab donors and Scandinavian countries (i.e., Sweden, Norway, and Denmark). We also include the UK.donor, foreign aid, liberty, welfarism

Two Concepts of Liberty: An Analysis of Berlin's Seminal Essay

Sir Isaiah Berlin, in his 1958 essay and inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty," expands on the ideals of liberty that were synthesized and inculcated by earlier political philosophers. The essay initiates and details an outline of an idealized liberty with two distinct branches: positive and negative. Although the essay is a bit controversial, producing such detractors as Charles Taylor, this seminal piece has staying power and can only be enhanced, not nullified.philosophy;economics;berlin;isaiah;liberty;political

Some Critical Comments on Long 2013: "Why Libertarians Believe There is Only One Right"

This essay explains various significant errors, imprecisions, and omissions concerning libertarianism in Long 2013. The “right not to be aggressed against” is not, as such, the libertarian right because the ‘right to liberty’ must be that right (although not being aggressed against can charitably be interpreted as equivalent). There are non-libertarian rights, but they don’t override the right to liberty. Unsupported assumptions are inevitable because justifications are impossible. Rights should not be “defined” but, rather, morally and metaphysically theorised—with criticism permanently invited. Moral and legal permissibility need to be clearly distinguished. The conceptions of “aggression” and “force” are normative and confused. It is possible to advocate the right to liberty on no grounds whatsoever and also to conjecture that liberty (deontologically) and welfare (consequentially) are systematically compatible in practice for theoretical and causal reasons. The rejection of positive rights is “privileging” and not “conceptual”. Libertarian property needs to be derived from an explicit, non-normative, theory of libertarian liberty. Long 2013’s overall account is “mysterious” and “one-sided”

The Stakes of Spinoza’s Language: A Moderate Necessitarian Understanding of \u27Ethics\u27 and Spinoza’s Conception of Freedom as Both Positive and Negative Liberty

This paper explores different readings of Spinoza\u27s Ethics with a specific focus on Spinoza\u27s understanding of the relationship between infinite and finite modes in his constructed universe. These different readings suggest that Spinoza\u27s conception of human freedom can be read both as examples of positive liberty and negative liberty

Reconstructing Liberty

It is commonly and rightly understood in this country that our constitutional system ensures, or seeks to ensure, that individuals are accorded the greatest degree of personal, political, social, and economic liberty possible, consistent with a like amount of liberty given to others, the duty and right of the community to establish the conditions for a moral and secure collective life, and the responsibility of the state to provide for the common defense of the community against outside aggression. Our distinctive cultural and constitutional commitment to individual liberty places very real restraints on what our elected representatives can do, even when they are acting in what all of us, or most of us, would consider our collective best interest. For example, we cannot outlaw marches by the Ku Klux Klan, or the burning of flags by political extremists, or the anti-Semitic, racist, or hateful speech of incendiary and potentially dangerous bigoted zealots. Nor can we simply outlaw those practices of religious sects that may have deleterious effects on the members, such as the refusal of certain Amish sects in the Eastern United States to allow their children to receive a public education past the eighth grade, the explicit exclusion (until recently) of blacks from positions of influence in the Mormon Church, or the continuing exclusion of women from positions of power, prestige, and influence in our dominant, mainstream, Protestant, Catholic, and Judaic faiths. We may believe correctly that a full civic education for every individual is not only desirable for its own sake but is an absolute prerequisite for meaningful participation in our shared political life. We may believe that racist speech is antithetical to the racial tolerance necessary to our continued existence as a pluralistic society, that flag-burning communicates no message worth hearing, and that women and blacks are entitled to the opportunity to aspire to positions of full participation and responsibility in religious life. Nevertheless, we are precluded from legislating in a way that would put the weight of the law behind these values because to do so ostensibly would do great violence to something we hold even more dear: the right and responsibility of the individual to think, speak, and act autonomously in matters of religious, political, and social life-to reach one\u27s convictions on one\u27s own and for oneself, unfettered by the moral dictates of the state, even where those dictates are benign and wise. In constitutional discourse, this complex aspiration is often captured by the phrase ordered liberty. The first thing to note about this aspiration of ordered liberty is that it is a relatively modern and distinctively liberal interpretation of our constitutional heritage. Thus, although Justice Cardozo coined the phrase ordered liberty in the 1930s, our modern understanding of ordered liberty protected by the Constitution came to full fruition with the liberty-expanding cases of the liberal Warren Court era. Quite possibly it received its most definitive formulation in the 1960s case Poe v. Ullman. To paraphrase a bit, our modern understanding of ordered liberty implies that the state may not interfere with the personal or individual decisions that are most fundamental to a free life or with those liberties the protection of which is what prompts individuals -- or would prompt individuals if given the explicit option -- to enter civic society in the first place. The driving idea behind this notion of ordered liberty is that the protection of those liberties by the state against its own tendency to intrude in the name of some shared political end is of a higher order or of greater importance to civic life than any other conceivable and temporal state goal. Which particular liberties we view as fundamental and hence requiring this constitutional protection against even wise and benign state regulation is, of course, a subject of deep and profound disagreement. There is, however, a remarkably broad consensus in our contemporary legal culture and in our national community generally about the quite modern and quite liberal idea or aspiration of ordered liberty: that there are some liberties, whatever they may be, so essential to an autonomous life that they must be kept free of state control. In my comments, I will be largely critical of this understanding of ordered liberty, which I occasionally will call the modern or liberal interpretation of our constitutional heritage. I want to make two objections to this concept of liberty, one political and one historical. The political objection is that the modern conception of ordered liberty is a largely empty promise for women. My claim, very briefly, will be that even the ideal expressed by this conception of ordered liberty-to say nothing of the actual practices it protects is skewed against women in a significant manner. The historical objection is that the liberal conception of liberty is also a cramped, inaccurate understanding of our constitutional history. I will conclude by arguing that we could fundamentally reconceive liberty in a more generous and explicitly feminist way without doing violence to either liberalism or to the document we have inherited