Social Reality and Positive Freedom
I do not claim any expertise regarding the intricacies of finance. From the looks of things, I do not appear to be alone; in fact, those who profess such expertise and practice their “calling” are apparently undergoing a considerable lack of talent and concern.
The fluctuations in the markets are not a new phenomenon in American history. Notwithstanding the belief, widely held—until recently—that the disastrous downturns had been consigned to the dead past, that dead past has appeared to revive its effective life.
Too many of our people, I’m afraid, view events as occurring in a value-free context—a context in which social realities occur as but “natural” facts concerning which spiritual valuations have no part. Until we get beyond this concept and practice, we can expect little or no relief from our recurring predicament.
Some financier has said that “greed is good.” What is it good for? Quite evidently, it is good for the radical disturbance of economic and social welfare. We are pretty well agreeing that the greed of certain institutions to make a huge profit and the desire of people to have expensive homes when they cannot realistically afford them, are the root causes of our present situation.
Now, there is a perspective that sheds light on our social and economic reality, which it is profitable to consider seriously.
Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart (1985), has placed his finger on the nub of our current problem: “The tension between self‑reliant enterprise and a sense of public solidarity espoused by civic republicanism has been the most important unresolved problem in American history” (236). The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has put this even more tersely that we are driven by two basic, well-nigh irreconcilable, strands of human nature and destiny, in his words, “strength of individuality” and “harmony of community.”
Now, both self-reliant enterprise and public solidarity, or public weal, or strength of individuality and harmony of community are values. Yet values can live, in this world, in tension, even in conflict. Why do they live in tension, and how may that tension, which may not be finally relieved, be minimized, so that individuals and the society in which they are members may become more organic?
Ever since Jefferson, and his mentor John Locke, spoke of the natural rights of individuals, the doctrine of individual rights has been held as a sacred bequest. This is the basis for the exercise of individual effort, largely unfettered by social constraint, to achieve that which one believes will be of personal benefit. We have recently witnessed this in action. What, for many of us, is even more shocking, is that this exercise is all-to-often considered to be a God-given right. Max Weber, for example, his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), wrote that the material values and rewards associated with individual acquisitiveness and enterprise are given by divine sanction. That is, “getting it all,” with little or no social restraint, is God’s will and is my bequeathed divine right.
Socrates, who was an unexcelled master of irony, would have been proud of this irony. It is ironic that, in a society that to a considerable extent is secular, such an appeal to divine right should be made. The idea of divine right is a metaphysical tour de force; we really know very little, if anything, about the details of the bestowal.
In fact, the doctrine of natural rights is itself quite shaky. Forgetting for a moment, just how nature, whatever that means, managed to do this for humankind, the only thing that we do know about rights is that they are socially juristic. We do not, originally, possess rights. What we possess are natural powers—powers of physical and mental energy to act in certain ways. The rights to engage our powers in certain respects are conferred by the social order. When we understand this, and abide by its implications, we will go a long way to mitigate the tension between strength of individuality, self-reliant enterprise, and public solidarity or harmony of community.
In his “Lectures on the Ground of Political Obligation,” an important 19th century English philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, forcefully propounded this social theory of rights:
‘Natural rights,’ so far as there are such things, are themselves relative to the moral end to which perfect law is relative. A law is not good because it enforces ‘natural rights,’ but because it contributes to the realization of a certain end. We only discover what rights are natural by considering what powers must be secured to a man in order to the attainment of this end. . . . No one therefore can have a right except (1) as a member of a society, and (2) of a society in which some common good is recognized by the members of the society as their own ideal good, as that which should be for each of them [Italics mine]. The capacity for being determined by a good so recognized is what constitutes personality in the ethical sense; and for this reason there is truth in saying that only among persons, in the ethical sense, can there come to be rights . . . . The capacity, then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good as the same for himself and others, and of being determined to action by that conception, is the foundation of rights; and rights are the condition of that capacity being realized (Works, II, 347-53).
The agency in the conferral of such rights is government. The best government is not, as has been alleged, the government that does as little as possible by way of establishing communal conditions. Its function is not to stand aside and protect the “rights” of unbridled individualism. On the contrary, as Madison wrote in No. 45 of The Federalist, “. . . the public good, the welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued, and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”
The present administration, until now at least, failed to discharge its responsibility to establish conditions that promote the common good. Its commitment to the idea of natural rights that antedate the social order and its consequent view that the role of government is to protect those rights by refusal to engage in oversight and regulation of private enterprise, particularly when it turns to greed, is the valuational reason for our present financial difficulties.
Freedom—the freedom of the individual—is not negative, i.e., does not consist in the absence of government involvement in the processes of individual enterprise. Rather, this freedom, which we cherish, is positive freedom established and nourished by an activist government that assumes its legitimate responsibility to provide those rights that exist only in an organic social order. The Framers of our Constitution, notwithstanding some predilection toward Jeffersonian and Lockian views, understood this and placed the Bill of Rights (rights secured in social context) in the Constitution.
Positive freedom is a collective well-being that becomes a pre-condition of individual freedom. It is secured by an active and concerned government whose institutions and law empower individuals, collectively, to enjoy that common freedom. There are powers that belong to the state and powers that are secured by the state to individuals. These powers are “. . . necessary to the fulfilment of man’s vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion to the work of developing the perfect character in himself and others (Green, Works, II, 349).
- Prescott Johnson
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Monmouth College