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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (77477)	7/31/2008 8:42:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543140

To me, if the law is discriminatory, the people against whom it discriminates have a lesser degree of freedom within our society Liberty and freedom typically mean lack of government control or restriction over you and lack of abuse of you. Changing the idea to "getting as much from the government as everyone else is HIGHLY problematic in my opinion, and if we are to do so, than we need to come up with a new word for the original meaning (at least if your going to grab both words rather than just one). Some have tried to define freedom as your ability to do what you want, not a lack of restriction on you, but rather your total ability (in other words if your stronger, faster, richer, and/or more charismatic, you have more freedom). Even though I don't like that definition much, in a sense it might be said that you have more "freedom of action", which is why I have started to use "liberty" more. (Also because "freedom can mean independence", one area can break free of the country that formerly ruled it without having much liberty after it breaks away. Of course liberty has its own alternative uses, such as leave from a ship or "taking liberties" by overstepping bounds of propriety, or by dishonestly representing something) But if your going to take "liberty" and take it to mean "equal treatment", then your starting to sound like Humpty Dumpty - "When I use a word. It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less." Some people do use "rights" even "natural rights" to mean "positive rights" that are demands like "a right to health care", but "positive liberty" is a less common concept, and positive liberty is a sort of vague concept (even compared to relatively unspecific things like "liberty", or "fair treatment"), that means something like the ability to achieve, and the ability to do things (sometimes limited just to political participation, or at least engagement with society, sometimes not). It is so far different than the normal concept of liberty, that I don't think it should use that word at all, but at least if it is going to use the word, the full phrase "positive liberty" should be used, to avoid confusion. Even "positive liberty" doesn't have any particular connection to equal treatment. Less than equal treatment might reduce you "positive liberty", but so would being sick, being poor, being stupid, being socially clumsy, or perhaps just being apathetic. I used the Humpty Dumpty quote above because the way you seem to use the term doesn't even fit with this alternative vision, but really does seem to be your own thing.