40 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
contrasts with the individualism of a post-modern perspective, where ethics
are seen as a matter of personal choice in the project of the creation and care
of an aesthetic personal identity (Bauman 1993; Cummings 2000).
A useful heuristic in thinking about the ethics of individualism and collec-
tivism is Berlin’s idea about ‘two concepts of liberty’. Berlin suggests that there
are two ways of thinking about liberty, the positive and negative conceptions.
The positive conception views liberty in terms of rational self-determination
or autonomy:
I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever
kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men’s [sic], acts of will. I wish
to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which
are my own, not by causes which affectme,asitwere,fromoutside.Iwishtobe...a
doer—deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external
natureorbyothermen[sic]...(Berlin2002: 178)
Such rational autonomy is often seen as the essence of the individualism
lauded in the enterprise culture. It is also consistent with a modernist view
of ethics.
The negative conception of liberty, in contrast, is purely the absence of
constraints imposed by others that allows for choice among alternatives. ‘By
being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others’ (Berlin
2002: 170). This resonates with a post-modern conception of ethics.
Berlin sees negative liberty as preferable to positive liberty (Gray 1995).
This is because he sees negative liberty as an enabling condition where peo-
ple, through self-chosen and plural lifestyles, constitute themselves as human
beings. Berlin sees the individual as defined by her self-transforming nature.
Along with the postmodernists, human nature, he argues, is not something
that awaits discovery and realization, but something invented and reinvented
through choices that are inherently plural and diverse, not common or univer-
sal. Contrast this with the rationalist view of the Enlightenment ethicists that
saw the individual as a natural object in a natural order, subject to natural laws
and understandable in behaviour and nature by reference to these laws. Berlin
rejects this monist perspective on ethics, arguing that, rather than freedom,
positive liberty is nothing more than obedience to the rational will. Whereas
choice presupposes rivalry among conflicting goods, rationality points to
just one course of action for the individual. From Aristotle to Kant, from
the good life to the ‘categorical imperative’, the rational will once oriented
towards the order of nature or the ‘form of the good’ cannot contain con-
flicting goals, desires, and rivalries among cherished goods as this betokens
unreason. Freedom, from this perspective, lies in pursuing the rational will,
an opportunity to pursue the good, the rational adoption of worthwhile ends.
If all true goods are compatible with one another, then a community of truly
free persons will be one without significant conflict of ideals or interests, but