Moral and Personal Positive Freedom

In this paper I review and criticise a range of existing concepts of positive freedom in contemporary political philosophy and argue in favour of the dual conceptualisation of liberty I develop in Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty, but applied on the terrain of positive freedom altogether. Echoing Raz’s and Waldron’s distinction between moral and personal autonomy, the paper makes the case for two positive freedom concepts: moral and personal. I argue that the most important aspect of positive freedom is the commitment to acting morally. All other aspects that are typically associated with positive freedom, like capacity to engage with valued activities, personal autonomy, and the provision of an enabling social environment, among others, are derivative from, and incomplete without, an understanding of freedom as acquisition of moral agency.