Who is free and who is not?

Main subject: Civics, Social science, Political Science

Key words: liberalism, pluralism, liberty, negative freedom, positive freedom, totalitarianism

 

Main questions to be reflected:

1. What does it mean to be free in our everyday lives?
2. What are acceptable, desirable or even necessary limits to individual freedom?
3. How can freedom and supporting the principle of strong social authority be reconciled?

Teaching methods:

• individual work
• teamwork
• application of theory
• discussion
• writing
• case study

Time: 45 minutes

Teaching aids: working sheet, writing implements

 

Introductory part – context and motivation:

Freedom can be considered as the most accepted value in the modern world that almost nobody usually claims to be its open and explicit enemy. However, if most totally different or even competing and contradictory politicians, political systems and ideologies accepts ideas of freedom as desirable human value, how is it possible there are so many conflicts over the question “who is supposed to be free and how?” How is it possible that even the most horrific regimes that annihilated millions of people dared to label themselves as supporting freedom or even putting it into practice? Is freedom of modern liberalism somehow similar to the freedom of French Jacobins who did not hesitate to legitimise guillotine procedures with the help of such value (Higonnet 1998)? To understand the dilemma of liberty and its interpretation, famous concept formulated by Isaiah Berlin in the second half of the 20^th century in his Essays on Liberty[1] – where he distinguished between a negative and a positive face of freedom – might come in handy for us.

 

Main aim of this exercise:

 

The main aim of this activity is to present the phenomenon of human and political liberty as a discursively dependent and thus pluralist value whose particular interpretation must be always related to the cultural, historical and ideological context as well as to the constructivist essence of social behaviour. With the help of this exercise, students will understand the basic differences between two peculiar concepts of liberty (negative versus positive) and they will also manage to apply this scheme to individual cases both from philosophical and everyday situations. On the basis of such reasoning, one is also expected to assess the main strengths and weaknesses of Berlin´s dichotomy including both versions of liberty; furthermore, students will be able to decide which concept of liberty fits into their understanding of this value and their worldview as such. Anyway, to bring such questions into a constructivist schooling process, it is necessary to abandon the traditional concept of freedom as universal value of all individual human beings independent of particular time periods and cultural understandings (Cruz, 2021).

 

The activities exemplified here thus endeavour to explore liberty as multi-layered value that should not be interpreted merely within an over-individualist framework as a right to do anything one wants, but as a historically determined balance between total arbitrariness and oppression. The exercise aims at exploring ways to introduce and discuss acute dilemmas, e.g. how to teach about freedom of speech and the behaviour of each individual as indispensable human values without delimiting freedom in terms of its dependence on specific social and cultural backgrounds in dialogue with the actor’s own perspective.

 

Teacher’s Instructions

• For start, it is necessary to present Berlin’s theory of two concepts of liberty: a teacher can use both theirlecture or instructive educational videos such as:

Tom Richey: Positive and Negative Liberty

 

(this video is a part of the online history lectures for AP US History and AP European History by Tom Richey where the author explains the basic differentiation between two dichotomical concepts of liberty with the help of practical examples including many contextual remarks on empirical impacts such as the question of religious freedom, liberal conditions and principles of human rights as well as gender issues).

Then & Now: Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty

 

(this video is a part of the Then & Now production – i.e. the video essays about history, politics and philosophy, where the difference between two concepts of liberty is elaborated in more theoretical and sophisticated level; thus the video essay might be used for those students who are more intrigued by the topic, since this reflection of liberty also includes several critical notions about Berlin´s dichotomy with the famous Gerald MacCallum’s triadic formulation of liberty at the forefront).

Try to start the discussion about the issue of liberty by motivational questions such as:

• Is any government allowed to order obligatory vaccination for all its citizens?
• And if so, can such government still be assessed as a liberal democratic one?
• Should the mandates on wearing face masks in public and some private spaces be seen as an expression of collective communitarianism, or rather a depersonalising limitation of freedom?
• Which arguments can be deployed in debates with regard to compulsion, compliance and freedom?
• What is the role of empirical scientific evidence and debate, and how should these expert discussions, often contentious, be presented to the public

All these questions need not to be answered completely and in a written form, since they should be treated as a part of opening phase motivating students for the further “research”; hence, a teacher is supposed to choose 2–3 from these questions and let students briefly reflect on them in pairs for 2 minutes (i.e. after 2 minutes, the teacher will gather all particular remarks on the selected issues, which is expected to demonstrate variable reflections and worldviews and thus boost further interest in the topic and the discussion as well).

The above mentioned questions are precisely of the kind that teachers are recommended to pose as a part of the ice-breaking and motivation process before a particular activity begins. However, since these questions are particularly oriented on the very current issue of the SARS‑CoV‑2 crisis, it is of course possible to focus the starting ice-breaking discussion on more general and “philosophical” questions such as:

• Would I be more free, if my society allowed me to steal and to kill others – for instance as is often the case during war?
• How could the Jacobins in revolutionary France present arguments based on liberté, égalité, fraternité as they massacred masses of people who did not agree with them?
• Would I still be free, if I decided to merge my body and mind with a computer, e.g. as a part of a global cloud hive mind? (Matwyshyn, 2019)

As in the previous case, the teacher is again supposed to use these 3 dilemmatic examples just for a fast motivation of students’ interest in the topic as well as for the practical application of the theoretical quandary concerning liberty to the more or less empirical and everyday problems (even in this case, students should be assigned 2 minutes to orally discuss these 3 dilemmas in pairs with an opportunity to briefly brainstorm answers in an open discussion that should again show significant variations in understanding liberty even in the cohesive community of students).

After both two-minute-long discussions, the teacher distributes the worksheet (see the Table I below) with several cases both from ordinary human life and historical contexts. T),he students are supposed to work in pairs and to reflect on all the presented situations (A–I i.e. to decide whether the character in each selected case is free or not and to support such decision with the own arguments. Groups of students are gradually confronted with several dilemmas in the worksheet, with these predicaments described in the written form, symbolically depicted in pictures and labelled as A–H. A variety of cases are presented from various historical periods and cultural backgrounds to demonstrate that although the question of liberty is omnipresent and appears across times and places, interpretations are dependent on a precise particular context.

Since the exercise uses the aforementioned conceptual scheme of Berlin’s dichotomy between the negative and positive notions of liberty (Berlin, 1969), students are motivated to start thinking about freedom as something not undebatable and unproblematic, which leads to constructivist and procedural discussions about liberal values.

When pairs finish their work, the teacher moderates the evaluative debate: in each case (A–I), one of the pairs of students will present their solution (whether the character is free or not and if it is so, if it fits the negative or rather positive interpretation of freedom), After explaining their argumentation, the other pairs of students are expected to provide feedback (i.e. to comment on the presented solution and if it is necessary, to come up with their own solution/interpretation).

When pairs of students present all the solutions, they are supposed to assess the main strengths and weaknesses of each of both understandings of liberty (see the Table II below). On the basis of this assessment, each student should be able to understand that the question of freedom is strongly contextually and interpretatively dependent and also clarify to themselves which principles of liberty are most valuable and which they personally prefer most.

 

Instructions on the solution: How to work with the presented students’ interpretations

Initial indications show that the empirical application of the worksheet in the Czech educational process has proved the anticipated goals to be achievable. Based on the experiences of the research team with this methodology up to now, several significant differences in interpretations of liberty might occur in the case of each presented simulated moment. As it has been suggested, the teaching material enables the framing of all presented answers within the framework of Berlin’s dichotomy, although it should be recognized that the message of this activity is not a demonstration of the theory of negative and positive freedom as such. The main goal is the development of the ability of students to think about the most frequently used social values in an interpretative way.

 

The list of situations Table I: “Who is free, in which case and how?” (A–I):

• A. What if a slave got permission from his slave master to do whatever they wanted for one day – would such a slave be free?
• B. What if I am a drug addict and decide to take another dose – am I free?
• C. Am I still free if a policeman forces me to pay a fine for speeding?
• D. What if parents do not let their child go to a party – is the child free?
• E. Am I free if my employer makes me redundant?
• F. What if the government ordered a minority population to leave their homes – would these people be free? (Jews during the Nazi Regime can be used as an example.)
• G. What if a girl dropped out of university in order to take care of her married lover’s needs – would she have decided freely?
• H. What if I were to be executed for reading a banned book – would I die as a free person? (a political text, pornography)
• I. If I am a woman suffering from the violence of my husband/partner and still do not want to leave him – am I free?

From this perspective, the situation of the slave (A) is often read as being both free and unfree at the same time, because the slave is able to do anything they want for one day, but this possibility is contingent on the will of the slave master. Students are therefore able to deduce a significant conclusion from this finding: that the question of freedom might be strongly dependent on the socio-political system, since if slavery was now legal again, can slaves even be expected to behave freely when they are out of their master’s control? Another observation was made by students in the case of the drug addict (B) who is not forced to take a dose and in that respect remains free, but many students were troubled by the idea that it is not “the real him,” but it is his physical addiction that “decides” as the controlling factor.

The fact that an individual level of freedom must be always framed within a social context that in several ways determines which social behaviour is assessed as legitimate or completely unacceptable becomes more complicated in the case of the punished driver (C) and the controlled child (D). Both of these examples refer to a situation in which a concept of liberty that at first glance might seem universal must be defined politically via the traditional and current social consensus, thus students are incentivized to consider the relation between one’s freedom and social expectations (i.e. what is the divisive border between non-acceptable forms of the suppression of one’s individuality, and on the other hand putatively desirable violent collective attitudes and behaviours necessary to maintain the stability of a social community?).

In the situations F and H featuring the example of a discriminated minority and a reader who was put to death for reading forbidden books, these cases raise a question of coherence between (more or less) democratic decision-making processes based on the idea of popular majoritarian (i.e. conformist) will as opposed to the values of liberal individualism. In both cases students should discuss whether the application of the will of the majority can be compatible with keeping all people free. Berlin’s concept of positive and negative liberty as a fundamental theoretical framework is a straight-forward way of introducing this activity. It is exactly cases like those represented in F and H which could lead to a debate over more holistic, collectivist and (in Berlin’s scheme also) positive forms of freedom. In evaluating a situation in which the actor is allowed to take part in decision-making and is aware of the consequences of a certain behaviour, students frequently come to the conclusion that any final decision – no matter how cruel – can be assessed as democratic and free, especially when it is related to Rousseau’s famous concept of democracy as “forced freedom” (Rousseau, 1999: 58).

Besides this collective and political dimension of liberty, the worksheet also features other cases that take the question of the actor’s mental capacities and thus the principle of rational agency into consideration. Such reasoning about the dependence of freedom on individual rationality with regard to the limits of rational behaviour is featured in the case of drug addict (B), as the physiological dependence on a drug is generally evaluated as an argument against the possibility to evaluating such a human being as completely free. Similar cases of this inherent tension in the interpretation of freedom can be thus found in the case of examples G and I, i.e., cases of women in an abusive or detrimental relationship. Both these women can be in fact assessed as fully free agents who completely control their decision-making processes, since there is neither an external nor internal violent obstacle preventing them from taking responsibility for their decisions and that could thus be described as a symptom of “enslavement.” Nevertheless, even in these cases the fact that the decisions of such agents (to leave university studies or not to leave a violent partner) can be considered as risky or at least with the possibility of pernicious consequences. Thus a conclusion that neither of these women are actually free might be supportable, since they both could be perceived as victims of the dominant symbols and cultural interpretations that historically assigns received kinds of behaviour to certain genders.

Table I: “Negative and Positive Liberty: Pros and Cons:

The teacher is assumed to react on their students’ solutions with the help of the below mentioned examples:

 

	pros	cons
negative liberty	It opens the space for pluralism of views   One can really do what one wants   It treats individual human beings as free agents	It does not differ between “good” and “bad” way of life (freedom of a drug addicted is to take a drug)   It does not take the context of freedom into consideration (one can be free even under the rule of a generous dictator)
positive liberty	It reflects the problem of “freedom of slaves” (i.e. what to do with the situations where people can do what they want at the moment but they do not decide about their freedom)   It distinguishes between free rational decision-making and prejudices (such as emotions, stereotypes, addictions etc.)	It does not analyse what one wants but the conditions of freedom and what one should want   It could legitimize the totalitarian way of thought neglecting an inviolability of individual sphere of human beings