and irrationality? Second, some things are trivial – is your freedom to watch inane
daytime television as valuable as your freedom to study challenging poetry? The
difficulty with MacCallum’s concept is not so much that it is wrong, but that it is
uninformative, or even banal. Even if the triadic framework can be applied to all
instances of freedom, the most interesting political questions are about the nature
of the agent who is free or unfree, the source of that agent’s (un)freedom, and what
it is that the agent is free or not free to do. For this reason, despite MacCallum’s
attempt to transcend the distinction, Berlin’s two concepts of liberty remain
important.Unfreedom versus inability
Human physiology combined with the laws of gravity make it impossible for human
beings to fly unaided. Does that mean that human beings are not free – as distinct
from unable – to fly? This is an important political question because some social
conditions are attributed to inability rather than unfreedom. David Miller provides
a useful scheme for distinguishing unfreedom and inability. He asks us to imagine
a room, the door to which can only be opened from the outside, and to consider
six ways in which you might be trapped in the room (Miller, 1983: 70–1):- Person Y, knowing you are in the room, pushes the door shut. For Miller this
is an unproblematic case of unfreedom, as you are prevented from leaving by
the deliberate act of another agent. - Person Y, not knowing you are inside, pushes the door shut. This case is more
problematic, but still a case of unfreedom – Y does not intend to imprison you,
but he is negligent, and so you are unfree. - The wind blows the door shut. Y is supposed to check the room at 7 p.m. each
evening, but fails to do so on this evening. You are unfree to leave from 7 p.m. - The wind blows the door shut. At 6.30 p.m. you call to a passer-by X to unlock
the door, but X, who knows Y’s duties, is busy and pays no attention. In this
case X is causally, but not morally, responsible for your confinement from 6.30
p.m. to 7 p.m. - Y, whose job it is to check rooms, comes to your room, and looks around it.
You have concealed yourself in a cupboard and Y closes the door without having
seen you. In contrast to the second scenario Y here took all reasonable precautions
and so this cannot be described as a situation in which you are unfree, even
though you are unable to leave. - The wind blows the door shut. There is no one assigned to check rooms, and
no passer-by within earshot. This situation is, for Miller, unproblematic – the
cause of your imprisonment is entirely the result of natural causes, thus you are
unable to leave but not unfree to leave.
It is clear that for Miller – and for many other political theorists – freedom is
interpersonal: not only must unfreedom be attributed to the actions of other agents,
but personal responsibility also plays a role. If you are simply unable to do something
then this cannot be described as a case of unfreedom unless that inability can be
sourced to other people. When we move away from the highly artificial example
38 Part 1 Classical ideas