O SPG perguntou o que quer dizer liberalismo. eis uma aproximação do Dicionário de Filosofia de Stanford.
Liberty
‘By definition’, Maurice Cranston rightly pointed out, ‘a liberal is a man who believes in liberty’ (Cranston, 459). In two different ways, liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value. First, liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in ‘a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions...as they think fit...without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man’ (Locke, 1960 [1689]: 287). Mill too argued that ‘[T]he burthen of proof is supposed to ith those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition.... The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom...’(Mill, 1991 [1859]: 472). This might be called the Fundamental Liberal Principle (Gaus, 1996: 162-166): freedom is normatively basic, and so the onus of justification is on those who would limit freedom. It follows from this that political authority and law must be justified, as they limit the liberty of citizens. Consequently, a central question of liberal political theory is whether political authority can be justified, and if so, how. It is for this reason that social contract theory, as developed Thomas Hobbes (1948 [1651]), John Locke (1960 [1689]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1973 [1762]) and Immanuel Kant (1965 [1797]), is usually viewed as liberal even though the actual political prescriptions of, say, Hobbes and Rousseau, have distinctly illiberal features. Insofar as they take as their starting point a state of nature in which humans are free and equal, and so argue that any limitation of this freedom and equality stands in need of justification (i.e., by the social contract), the contractual tradition expresses the Fundamental Liberal Principle.
The Fundamental Liberal Principle holds that restrictions on liberty must be justified, and because he accepts this, we can understand Hobbes as espousing a liberal political theory. But Hobbes is at best a qualified liberal, for he also argues that drastic limitations on liberty can be justified. Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke not only advocate the Fundamental Liberal Principle, but also maintain that justified limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls's first principle of justice: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all’ (Rawls, 1971: 302).
Negative and Positive Liberty
Liberals disagree, however, about the concept of liberty, and as a result the liberal ideal of protecting individual liberty can lead to very different conceptions of the task of government. As is well-known, Isaiah Berlin has advocated a negative conception of liberty:
I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind...it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by other human beings (Berlin, 1969: 122).
For Berlin and those who follow him, then, the heart of liberty is the absence of coercion by others; consequently, the liberal state's commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. However, despite the powerful case for negative liberty, many liberals have been attracted to more ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty. Although Rousseau (1973 [1762]) seemed to advocate a positive conception of liberty, according to which one was free when one acted according to one's true will (the general will), the positive conception was best developed by the British neo-Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Green and Bernard Bosanquet (1923). Green acknowledged that ‘...it must be of course admitted that every usage of the term [i.e., freedom] to express anything but a social and political relation of one man to other involves a metaphor...It always implies...some exemption from compulsion by another...(1986 [1895]: 229). Nevertheless, Green went on to claim that a person can be unfree if he is subject to an impulse or craving that cannot be controlled. Such a person, Green argued, is ‘...in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own’ (1986 [1895]: 228). Just as a slave is not doing what he really wants to do, one who is, say, an alcoholic is being led by a craving to look for satisfaction where it cannot, ultimately, be found.
For Green, a person is free only if she is self-directed or autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her own. Such a person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom and does not ignore her long-term interests for short term pleasures. This ideal of freedom as autonomy has its roots not only in Rousseau's and Kant's political theory, but in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism, as witnessed by the work of S.I. Benn (1988), Gerald Dworkin (1988), and Joseph Raz (1986).
A continuing problem for liberal theory is whether these two conceptions of freedom can somehow co-exist (Benn, 1988) or whether they are, as Berlin argued, fundamentally at odds. The worry about positive freedom is that it seems to lay the basis for justifying paternalistic interferences on the grounds that they are freedom-enhancing. A paternalist imposes on a person for his own good, and typically this imposition would appear to limit that person's freedom. The paternalist stops him from drinking or taking drugs. But if drinking and so on hinders a person from acting autonomously, then this imposition may actually increase his freedom, since it increases his long-term propensity to act autonomously (Young, 1986). Thus, in Rousseau's chilling words, it seems that one can be ‘forced to be free’ (1973 [1762]: 177).
In any event, those who emphasise positive freedom and autonomy are apt to take a much more expansive view of the job of the liberal state. Benn, for instance, endorses ‘rights to the conditions for autonomy’ --- ‘the rights to such conditions would presumably include the Universal Declaration rights to education, to leisure, and to participate in the cultural life of the community...’ (1988: 251-52; but cf. Spector, 1992). This sort of welfarist-participatory state is precisely that which many advocates of negative liberty see as a threat to freedom. Thus argues Jan Narveson:
The trouble with the enthusiast for ‘positive liberty’ is that to bring about the no doubt excellent goals he professes, he is willing to violate negative liberty. [And]...‘positive liberty’ might as well be replaced by ‘welfare’ or some such term. If we think people's liberty important, we should think it important enough not to violate it for the sake of promoting any such goal, even if it be called ‘liberty’ (1988: 33).
Liberty
‘By definition’, Maurice Cranston rightly pointed out, ‘a liberal is a man who believes in liberty’ (Cranston, 459). In two different ways, liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value. First, liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in ‘a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions...as they think fit...without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man’ (Locke, 1960 [1689]: 287). Mill too argued that ‘[T]he burthen of proof is supposed to ith those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition.... The a priori assumption is in favour of freedom...’(Mill, 1991 [1859]: 472). This might be called the Fundamental Liberal Principle (Gaus, 1996: 162-166): freedom is normatively basic, and so the onus of justification is on those who would limit freedom. It follows from this that political authority and law must be justified, as they limit the liberty of citizens. Consequently, a central question of liberal political theory is whether political authority can be justified, and if so, how. It is for this reason that social contract theory, as developed Thomas Hobbes (1948 [1651]), John Locke (1960 [1689]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1973 [1762]) and Immanuel Kant (1965 [1797]), is usually viewed as liberal even though the actual political prescriptions of, say, Hobbes and Rousseau, have distinctly illiberal features. Insofar as they take as their starting point a state of nature in which humans are free and equal, and so argue that any limitation of this freedom and equality stands in need of justification (i.e., by the social contract), the contractual tradition expresses the Fundamental Liberal Principle.
The Fundamental Liberal Principle holds that restrictions on liberty must be justified, and because he accepts this, we can understand Hobbes as espousing a liberal political theory. But Hobbes is at best a qualified liberal, for he also argues that drastic limitations on liberty can be justified. Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke not only advocate the Fundamental Liberal Principle, but also maintain that justified limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls's first principle of justice: ‘Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all’ (Rawls, 1971: 302).
Negative and Positive Liberty
Liberals disagree, however, about the concept of liberty, and as a result the liberal ideal of protecting individual liberty can lead to very different conceptions of the task of government. As is well-known, Isaiah Berlin has advocated a negative conception of liberty:
I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind...it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by other human beings (Berlin, 1969: 122).
For Berlin and those who follow him, then, the heart of liberty is the absence of coercion by others; consequently, the liberal state's commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. However, despite the powerful case for negative liberty, many liberals have been attracted to more ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty. Although Rousseau (1973 [1762]) seemed to advocate a positive conception of liberty, according to which one was free when one acted according to one's true will (the general will), the positive conception was best developed by the British neo-Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Green and Bernard Bosanquet (1923). Green acknowledged that ‘...it must be of course admitted that every usage of the term [i.e., freedom] to express anything but a social and political relation of one man to other involves a metaphor...It always implies...some exemption from compulsion by another...(1986 [1895]: 229). Nevertheless, Green went on to claim that a person can be unfree if he is subject to an impulse or craving that cannot be controlled. Such a person, Green argued, is ‘...in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own’ (1986 [1895]: 228). Just as a slave is not doing what he really wants to do, one who is, say, an alcoholic is being led by a craving to look for satisfaction where it cannot, ultimately, be found.
For Green, a person is free only if she is self-directed or autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her own. Such a person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom and does not ignore her long-term interests for short term pleasures. This ideal of freedom as autonomy has its roots not only in Rousseau's and Kant's political theory, but in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism, as witnessed by the work of S.I. Benn (1988), Gerald Dworkin (1988), and Joseph Raz (1986).
A continuing problem for liberal theory is whether these two conceptions of freedom can somehow co-exist (Benn, 1988) or whether they are, as Berlin argued, fundamentally at odds. The worry about positive freedom is that it seems to lay the basis for justifying paternalistic interferences on the grounds that they are freedom-enhancing. A paternalist imposes on a person for his own good, and typically this imposition would appear to limit that person's freedom. The paternalist stops him from drinking or taking drugs. But if drinking and so on hinders a person from acting autonomously, then this imposition may actually increase his freedom, since it increases his long-term propensity to act autonomously (Young, 1986). Thus, in Rousseau's chilling words, it seems that one can be ‘forced to be free’ (1973 [1762]: 177).
In any event, those who emphasise positive freedom and autonomy are apt to take a much more expansive view of the job of the liberal state. Benn, for instance, endorses ‘rights to the conditions for autonomy’ --- ‘the rights to such conditions would presumably include the Universal Declaration rights to education, to leisure, and to participate in the cultural life of the community...’ (1988: 251-52; but cf. Spector, 1992). This sort of welfarist-participatory state is precisely that which many advocates of negative liberty see as a threat to freedom. Thus argues Jan Narveson:
The trouble with the enthusiast for ‘positive liberty’ is that to bring about the no doubt excellent goals he professes, he is willing to violate negative liberty. [And]...‘positive liberty’ might as well be replaced by ‘welfare’ or some such term. If we think people's liberty important, we should think it important enough not to violate it for the sake of promoting any such goal, even if it be called ‘liberty’ (1988: 33).
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