BIVALENT SOCIAL FREEDOM: A DEFENCE

When I am unable to drive due to a road blockade, there seems to be a morally relevant difference between a case in which the road is blocked by some workers (involved, say, in road works or a strike) and a case in which the road is blocked by a naturally occuring landslide. Many social and political philosophers have tried to capture this pre-theoretical judgment at a more abstract level through the formulation of a concept of freedom that refers specifically to the social or interpersonal relation of prevention, a concept they have attempted to refine in a way that will prove plausible, logically consistent, and fruitful as a building block in the construction of explicative and normative theories. To this end, they make a distinction between unfreedoms and mere inabilities: one is unfree when one’s inability is brought about by others (in the above example, the workers) but merely unable when one’s inability is brought about by oneself or nature (in the above example, the landslide). The nature of this distinction is open to interpretation, because saying that others brought about an inability might mean that the inability is causally or morally attributable to their conduct. The ‘causality view’ holds that I am unfree to drive because the workers are causally responsible for the blockade, whereas the ‘responsibility view’ holds that to determine whether I am unfree, we should ask whether the workers are morally responsible for the blockade. Each view has some strengths and some weaknesses. I aim to capture their strengths and avoid their weaknesses by suggesting a novel interpretation of moral responsibility as answerability, according to which we are answerable for all of our actions in virtue of the fact that our actions reflect our evaluative judgments. This interpretation allows for a plausible resolution of the disagreement between the causality and responsibility views.