I got back from a walk along Oakham Canal the other day to be greeted by an irate Lucius meowing to be let in. Which made me think that Isaiah Berlin was wrong.
The point is that Lucius is free to enter the house any time; I had one of Mr Newton's inventions installed recently. But Lucius is unaware of this.
Hence Berlin (pdf). Lucius has negative freedom; no-one stops him coming or going. But he doesn't have positive freedom; his ignorance of the power of the catflap means he is not the master of his own fate.
And this is where Berlin went wrong. Expanding Lucius's positive freedom is not a matter of forcing him to be free, or of imposing a notion of a 'higher self' upon him, or a road to tyranny. It's merely a matter of making him more aware of his options.
A similar thing is true for humans. A commenter on my previous post objected to my claim that working in the City was my only option, on the grounds that I could have worked in famine relief instead. Maybe. But I was unaware of this at the time; my peers weren't doing it, nobody suggested that I should; and relief agencies didn't ask. Just as Lucius doesn't realize the option of using the catflap existed, so I didn't realize I had a range of job opportunities. In both cases, our positive freedom would have been enhanced by a greater awareness of our options.
Herein lies one - I stress one; it's not the only one - cause of inequality of opportunity. People from poor backgrounds, like me, either aren't aware of their opportunities, or don't feel 'Oxford is for the likes of us' or just aren't confident enough to pursue such paths, whereas kids from richer homes aren't so constrained by mind-forg'd manacles.
Insofar as inequality of positive liberty arises from this cause, the solution is not tyranny but enhancing those opportunities - through better careers advice, raising aspirations or role models.
Now, I can imagine rightists objecting that options exist whether we realize it or not. There's a distinction between formal freedom and subjective, felt, freedom; Lucius and the poor have the former but not the latter. But if you believe that value is only subjective - as classical liberals do in another context - then surely it is only subjective, felt, freedom that matters?
* In fact, the distinction between positive and negative freedom is confused. It's better to think of freedom as 'freedom from Y to do X'. Adam Swift's Political Philosophy is illuminating here.
Another thing: Lucius has since used the catflap, in a way that is economically interesting. I might blog on this later.