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48 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi48 and id is 1 raw text is: J Value Inquiry (2014) 48:1-16 DOI 10.1007/s10790-013-9399-4 Positive Freedom as Exercise of Rational Ability: A Kantian Defense of Positive Liberty Nobel Ang Published online: 9 November 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 1 Introduction In this paper, the concept of positive liberty will be defended against a prominent criticism that has been leveled at it in recent years. The criticism is that, like negative liberty, positive liberty can ultimately be explicated in terms of the absence of constraint. As such, the argument goes, accounts of positive liberty do not employ a separate concept of liberty, and can be explained in terms of negative liberty. In this paper, attention will be drawn to an equivocation committed by proponents of this criticism. It will then be shown how this equivocation obscures the robust nature of positive liberty as a concept that is qualitatively different from and incommensurable with its negative counterpart. A Kantian account of positive freedom will then be outlined. Through this account, the robustness of the positive concept of liberty will be demonstrated. In order to set forth such an account, we will look at selected passages in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, as well as work done by Barbara Herman on Kantian moral motivation. Through setting forth this account, it will be shown that the very phenomena which critics of positive liberty take to be constraints on freedom in Kant are in fact necessary conditions for the meaningful exercise of freedom. By showing this, it will become clear that freedom on positive accounts of liberty cannot adequately be explicated in terms of the absence of constraint, and that, far from being reducible to a form of negative liberty, positive liberty is very much a robust analytic concept. N. Ang (E) Department of Philosophy and English, Idaho State University, 921 S 8th Ave, Stop 8056, Pocatello, ID 83209-8056, USA e-mail: angchin@isu.edu; siegfried23@hotmail.com I Springer

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