Enabling or constraining?

The two famous concepts of liberty, negative and positive liberty, were introduced by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in the late 50’s. We can also talk about them as different types of rights. Negative rights can be thought of as rights that impose negative duties on others (i. e. duties not to interfere with someone else’s right to pursue a certain goal). Positive rights on the other hand, impose positive duties on others, a duty to provide something. Whereas someone’s negative rights can always be respected by others (simply by not interfering), respecting someone’s positive rights is a sometimes more complicated matter. For example, we may not always be able to provide what someone wants because we do not have enough resources to cater to everyone’s needs. It also means that in some cases, someone’s positive rights – entitlements – may inflict upon others a limitation of their negative rights, since it means interference with their rights to use their own resources in the ways they see fit.

As we have established, in a university setting there are often rules and regulations in place to tell us what we are obliged to do as academic teachers in certain situations that may arise. In the reflection task in part 2 of this section, we encouraged you think about reasons for the directive(s) you identified as relevant for you and why they could be important for certain groups at your institution. In the case that you find on the next page, certain rules and regulations (formulated in the curriculum) are perceived of as troublesome and hindering for a student, but may simultaneously be considered as appropriate ways of securing a certain level of quality, fairness, or validity in the assessment. At the same time, there may be other regulations in place that override these formal rules, for example regulations that enable disadvantaged students to go through with their university education, where academic teachers are told to make exceptions from the aforementioned rules. Both these types of regulations may enable certain individuals to pursue their goals, but impose limitations on others.

Finally, there may be situations where these rules and regulations don’t apply or where the boundaries are fuzzy. This means we will need to make an individual choice, which may or may not impose difficulties for ourselves or for others. In the case below, we encourage you to think about how far you are willing to go in order to help someone – a student – pursue their goals when it means more work for us, i e inflicting upon our own negative freedom, in particular in a case where there might not (necessarily) exist clear rules or regulations in place to tell us what we are obliged to do.

 

References

Carter, I (2018). Positive and Negative Liberty. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.)The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/liberty-positive-negative/