So if someone’s poor and has a tax bracket of zero, and then they get a promotion with a raise, and their tax bracket goes up, they are now more coerced? That sounds crazy.

Why isn’t there a more widespread sense of the moral demerit (or impropriety) of the drug proh and all the rest of government initiation of coercion? Precisely because of the statist cultural system.

You are right that semantic revisionism has political implications. Gingrich, liberals, dictators, and many others have made use of this trick. Is that the only reason you support revisionism? If so, it’s not an interesting aspect of the moral disagreement between your vision of the future and a non-libertarian’s. Moving words around may dupe people into thinking differently, but it is not logically interesting.

Or do you disagree? Is there some justification for the revisionism other than duping people? E.g., some sense in which the proposed terminology is “cleaner” or “simpler” or “more likely to arrive at truth?” And how would you convince us of this?

I think that we are groping for how best to formulate these questions of comparative liberty. We do not even have a clear sense of the purposes to which those formulations are to be put, and so we do not have a clear sense of what makes a formulation better or worse.

Is the device we are implicitly invoking a cardinal metric, an ordering, just some principles for ordering any given dyad? If an ordering, is it an ordering over individual reforms within a regime? Over policy regimes within a polity? Over regimes across polities? Over individuals’ situations?

And then there are the purposes to which any such devices are to be put. People of different ideological sensibilities will have differing purposes, and naturally their formulations will differ accordingly. The rightness of a formulation will depend on the rightness of one’s ideological sensibilities.

Here I respond to your two paragraphs, and in each case I reproduce your paragraph in full.

Will: “I don’t really follow Klein’s first point, since I find that it is perfectly good English to say things like “Now that Chad is making a bigger salary, he is at liberty (or, more naturally, free) to travel more often.” I’m all with Dan about the misuse of language when it comes to “libertarian paternalism,” but I think he’s acting in something like the revisionist spirit of Sunstein and Thaler on this one: he thinks we’ll be better off if we stop using “liberty” in one of its perfectly ordinary, widely accepted senses. I don’t mind prescriptive semantics, but revisionist prescriptive semantics seems a waster of energy.”

Here I think it’s legit to distinguish between casual language and more formal language. For example, everyday people speak of “needing this” or “needing that”, but in economics we tend to eliminate “need” talk, to good effect. In casual language we blurt things out because our listener is familiar with the highly particular situation within which our “need” talk makes sense.

It is legit to object to people’s casual language. In fact, it is good to reduce “need” talk in your household, and similarly it may be good to avoid saying “Now that Chad is making a bigger salary, he is free to travel more often.” Instead of “is free” one could say “can afford”, for example.
You say “revisionist prescriptive semantics seems a waster of energy.” Wouldn’t this attitude mean that you are content with the culture, whether of your household or the wide culture? As for the latter, I feel that in the Anglosphere there are large, systematic tensions in semantics, particularly after since around 1890, whereby “liberalism,” “freedom,” “liberty,” “equity,” “property,” “rights,” “justice,” significantly changed or lost meaning, and we are laboring in a messy and often wrongheaded social-democratic/statist semantic. So I most certainly believe in revisionist prescriptive semantics. Karl Kraus said, “Language is the common street prostitute that I turn into a virgin.” This is what cultural change is about.

Now your second paragraph:

Will: “I think I just straightforwardly disagree with Klein’s second point, though I’m not certain I understand it. An individual’s feasible set of options can be bigger or smaller. There is an obvious, conventional sense of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in which people with more options have more freedom or greater liberty. Coercion is one way to limit the size of that set — it takes away the individual’s liberty to choose some elements of the set in an especially salient way. Coercion is such a salient and dangerous threat to the availability of our options (to our ability, our freedom, to choose) that there is a perfectly good sense of ‘liberty’ that focuses exclusively on its presence or absence. Norms against aggression and theft are very important, and so it very important that we always remain jealous of our liberty in this sense. But isn’t the point of reinforcing norms of non-coercion maintaining the openness of the alternatives that would otherwise be foreclosed by violence or the threat of violence? Robinson Crusoe strikes me as the perfect illustration of why it is that positive liberty — the size of the substantive opportunity set — is primary. He’s got total negative liberty and it’s good for bupkis.”

I don’t think you did really get my point. Enhancing positive capabilities is a large, even predominate, part of the warrant for the presumption of liberty, of course. I agree with Tyler (and Sen) on that. Loved the “bupkis”! And it concords with my “piss poor.” I’m just saying that changes in positive capabilities matter to comparative liberty only by way of the negative liberty channel.

For example, if a tornado blows down your house, or if you slip in the bathtub and break your hip, or if you catch a cold, your positive capabilities clear suffer a set back. But has your liberty level changed?
If you win the lottery, your positive capabilities clearly enjoy an augmentation. But has your liberty level changed?

Take the lottery case. My point is that it is misguided to just look at what the lottery winning could buy and call that an augmentation in “positive liberty.” Rather, the winner’s liberty has been augmented only in the sense that the restrictions imposed on him (drug proh, occ licensing, gun control, taxes, whatever) are less important to him by virtue of his new wealth. That’s what I mean by positive capabilities (wealth) mattering to comparative liberty only through the channel existing within our formulations of (negative) liberty and its “comparative statics”.

Notice that in this lottery example, it may not go all in one direction. If the guy gets bumped up to a higher tax bracket, or now considers luxury items or ambitions for which certain restrictions applies – restrictions that previously didn’t matter much to him—then coerciveness of those particular restrictions may go up for him. But, clearly, we probably want a formulation that says that, on net, your liberty level goes up when you win the lottery.

But the main point here is that this formulation does not entail anything called “positive liberty.” Perhaps we could speak of the “importance channel,” where effects could be positive or negative (for example, when a tornado blows down your house, perhaps housing codes become more coercive for you). It is all nestled within mere liberty. Increases in wealth reduce the coerciveness of restrictions, but I think it is misguided and nefarious to suggest something like wealth = some kind of liberty.

Incidentally, the issue of the “importance channel” might relate to “step-coercion.” The minimum wage does not coercive workers (it only coerces employers); but we might say that it step-coerces workers, because of a certain importance that the coercion against employers has for (certain) workers and would-be workers. The concept of importance seems to be working in both types of concepts.

But I want to step back and make one point about the warrant for the presumption of liberty. Adam Smith (TMS, 326-27) identified four sources of moral approval of an action. Four sources, not one. You, Will, write of “the point of reinforcing norms of non-coercion” but you should write of “one of the points”.

Positive capabilities would seem to correspond to Smith’s fourth source. But Smith’s third source is a sense of propriety, something rather “inherent” in or “intrinsic” to the action. Coercing does have a demerit by way of the third source, apart from the fourth source. Let’s not forget that.

Of course, one can expand “positive capabilities” (or “consequences”) so as to include moral reactions, moral consequences, thereby, in a way, bringing everything into the fourth source. Thus, because of the min wage, I am incapable of living in a United States without a min wage, an incapability which I think sucks, and that is a negative consequence. If one goes this route, “capabilities” and “consequences” become all-inclusive and hence perhaps lose meaning.

Why isn’t there a more widespread sense of the moral demerit (or impropriety) of the drug proh and all the rest of government initiation of coercion? Precisely because of the statist cultural systems. Not enough people see drug proh or the min wage as coercion. Your and Tyler’s calling capabilities “positive liberty” may not be helping that situation—though I realize, of course, that having you and Tyler find a broader audience and cultural prominence is a good thing, and might redeem your engaging in that otherwise cheesy practice.

-Dan Klein, Professor of Economics, George Mason U.

I’ll respond procedurally, though this may be unsatisfying.

You may be right that the right of free border passage is so critical it should supercede the crazy whims of voters or the flawed judgement of scientific policymakers.

But the list of Really Important Rights needs to be created in a democratic way.

In the meantime, you would still be right to get angry and argue your case, as an input to the democratic process.

At the end of the day, I am proposing a pluralist, democratic model of ethics because I am just one person, and individual people do not have complete knowledge of what’s right. (but we know what we think is right!!!) In other words, the method is the morality. Argument, and feeling really convinced or not really convinced I am right, are part of the method.

You seem to be very sure about what is right, which is fine. That is your right

I am not sure this made any sense. But I think I believe it anyway.

In fairness, in common parlance “liberty” can refer exclusively to “freedom from arbitrary or despoitc control” as in Webster’s first definition or “free to do or be as specified” as in Webster’s ninth definition and the two uses aren’t necessarily interchangeable. So neither side is really incorrect in their use of the term, they are just using the term to mean different things. (Perfectly permissible in English!)

Why this makes a big difference to anyone, I confess not to understand.

If “inequality” here were replaced with “immigration”, the liberal reluctance to satisfy those for whom the issue is most salient would be obvious. And I’d share that reluctance.

I.e., empiricism. Forget about your idea of what are a person’s most important capabilities. What capabilities do people actually want? You can find this out with a survey.

Now, surveys and raw empiricism have limitations. Like, I might not tell you I care very much about voting (let’s say I am lazy and don’t vote anyway) but that doesn’t mean it’s truly unimportant. We can reason that if people lose the right to vote, that will probably suck badly.

But we can’t reason about the whole thing. We just can’t figure what’s important from a blank slate perspective.

So I think we should be pretty agnostic/bottom-up/empirical about defining the “most important things.”

This is why I think happiness/money are actually pretty good proxies for the most important things to people. Liberty too. They all help people get “whatever they want.” We should not blindly optimize these, but they should play a role in the conversation.

For example, should we care about inequality per se? We can help answer this question by asking poor people (or finding out some other way) how much it hurts their happiness to know about all the richer people in the world. If it doesn’t matter at all to them, that is interesting! It should make us less willing to pursue equality as an end in itself. If it matters a lot, also interesting.

Reason is generally just an imperfect proxy for empiricism. We can’t empirically determine all the answers but we should make use of that option.

A clear case of examinationitis, I think.