Positive and Negative Liberty
In the essay "Do Values Conflict? A Hedgehog's Approach" (Arizona Law Review, Vol 43:2), Dworkin contends that the values of liberty and equality do not necessarily conflict. He criticizes Isaiah Berlin's conception of liberty as "flat" and proposes a new, "dynamic" conception of liberty, suggesting that one cannot say that one's liberty is infringed when one is prevented from committing murder. Thus, liberty cannot be said to have been infringed when no wrong has been done. Put in this way, liberty is only liberty to do whatever we wish so long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others.
The negative conception of liberty (represented by Isaiah Berlin) is however not satisfactory to Dworkin since it merely concerns itself with political processes (e.g. laws forbidding murder, limiting car usage etc.). In Dworkin's view liberty must be understood as entailing certain considerations of equality, since it is not possible to exercise one's freedom without a considerable amount of resources (e.g. participating in the democratic process by voting is not possible without having the food, health, time or knowledge to do so). Liberty is therefore not only a question of process, but must also contain elements of substance.
One further criticism that can be leveled from the Berlinian enterprise is that the so-called "flat" conception of liberty does not entail the liberty to murder - rather, murder (when it does occur) is only a consequence of natural liberty. When one is prevented from murdering, one's liberty is not infringed merely because one is prevented from murdering, but because (more fundamentally) one is prevented from acting at all, by being restrained, handcuffed, put into prison, etc. The fact that one is thereby prevented from murdering is, again, merely a consequence of one's liberty being infringed. Thus Dworkin's argument can be recast as a deep-level consequentialist one.
Read more about this topic: Ronald Dworkin
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