56
Pettit identifies two main problems with freedom as non-interference. First, it does not
distinguish between what he calls “friendly coercion” and “hostile coercion.”
Some forms of
coercion that follow the “avowable interests of the interferee” (Pettit 2001, 134) are compatible
with freedom, such as when the interferee “gives another person the right to coerce them at a
certain point to do something, fearing that at that point they will lose sight of their own best
interests” (
ibid
. 75 – 76). If freedom is simply non-interference, then we lose the ability to
distinguish freedom-compatible interference from freedom-constraining interference. Second,
freedom can be violated even if interference does not occur.
Freedom can be severely
challenged by agents that have the capacity to interfere but do not actually interfere, or have
power over you but little need to exercise that power “so long as they can depend on you to make
efforts to keep them sweet, tailoring your actions to their expected wishes, and staying out of
their way if you do not” (
ibid
. 137). Consider, for example the relationship
between a child and
an abusive parent, or between an employee and a boss, or a citizen and a cop.
In all of these cases someone lives at the mercy of others. That person is
dominated by those others in the sense that even if the others don’t interfere in his
or her life, they have an arbitrary power of doing so: there are few restraints or
costs to inhibit them. If the dominated
person escapes ill treatment, that is by the
grace or favour of the powerful. The price of liberty in such a world is not eternal
vigilance but eternal discretion (
ibid
.).
While self-censorship and self-inhibition are actions that may prevent interference, they are not
the actions that ought to be identified with freedom.
Moreover, in Young’s (2007) essay “Two Concepts of Self-Determination” she links the
view of freedom as non-interference to a view of self-determination as independence. The first
concept of self-determination “equates
it with sovereign independence, where the self-
determining entity claims a right of nonintervention and noninterference” (
ibid
. 40). In this
view, freedom requires that an agent have complete control over her jurisdiction and disallows
57
any outside actors from interfering within that sphere. Such a view of freedom as independent
sovereignty could be applied to the individual person having full control within that person’s
private sphere or a nation-state having full control within its territorial boundaries. “The ideal of
self-determination, on this view, consists in an agent’s being left
alone to conduct his or her
affairs over his or her own independent sphere” (
ibid
. 46). As I have already shown above and
will not dwell on again here, claims of sovereignty run into a litany of problems and ultimately
collapse because of the inherent problems in claiming a fully independent sphere. As such,
Young develops an alternative account of self-determination, one that is rooted in Pettit’s
account of freedom as non-domination.
If we begin from the assumption that it is not possible to be sovereign over oneself – if
we take seriously the human condition of plurality in Arendt’s framework, or the extent to which
we are “encumbered” in the communitarian’s sense, or the prevalence of interdependency and
externalities in the economist’s sense – what are the implications for the libertarian’s
commitment to human freedom? My claim is that libertarians (and
anti-authoritarians more
generally) should adopt the framework of freedom and self-determination proposed by Pettit and
Young: freedom as non-domination and self-determination as relational. Allow me to briefly
explain each of these ideas.
Rather than identifying freedom with non-interference, Young (2007, 48) argues that
freedom should be understood as non-domination.
An agent dominates another when he or she has power over that other and is thus
able to interfere with the other
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
