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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2022
Instead of treating freedom as a property of actions, as in the familiar negative-positive liberty framework, we should treat it as a property of persons, or more precisely of the social position that persons occupy. A liberal citizen is free by virtue of occupying two distinct and complementary social positions: that of being recognized as a responsible agent, and that of being granted a domain of nonresponsible conduct. This way of thinking improves on the positive liberty position by shifting our focus away from the metaphysical question of whether human beings “really” exercise agency and toward the practical question of when we should hold them responsible for the things that they do. It improves on the negative liberty position by providing a clear explanation of what it means for choice to be “unconstrained,” and why such choice is politically valuable.
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