“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Wittgenstein
I want to make some remarks on Amartya Sen’s notion of freedom, i.e. what he calls “substantive freedom.” The purpose is to demonstrate how easily his notion can be proved to be fallacious and nonsensical. Independently of the good intentions of a theory, if the logical structure of what is being uttered makes absolutely no sense, the truth is that what is happening is that nothing is being actually said. In this sense Amartya Sen thinks he is saying something important about freedom when in fact he is just uttering senseless noise.
He says of “freedom: the ability to survive rather than succumb to premature mortality. This is obviously a significant freedom, but there are many others that are also important. Indeed, the range of relevant freedoms can be very wide.” (p. 24) In few words, there are many freedoms that are not the same thing, so freedom is not equal to freedom, which of course, makes no sense. If there is freedom it must have a core meaning to which everything else converges. If not, the concept is meaningless. Here Sen says that freedom is survival, as opposed to death. Interestingly enough we are all condemn to die some way or the other, so freedom has become an impossible enterprise. Moreover, no one can predict if by chance tomorrow I am going to be stroke by a lightning bolt and die, so there must be a freedom not to be killed prematurely by lightning bolts. Otherwise, what is the difference between dying prematurely by starvation, by being murdered in the middle of the night, by an unpredictable flood, by the explosion of a gas leak in your kitchen, by slipping on the floor and breaking your neck; all of them are premature deaths (and that is assuming that we can have an intelligible meaning for the adjective "premature"). This is a reductio ad absurdum.
When talking about quality of life, (Ibid) (a notion that is linked to historical and cultural contexts, and cannot be detached from them without losing any tangible meaning) Sen uses Aristotle, and his famous ethical theory of eudaimonia (good life). Interestingly enough Aristotle never speaks about freedom, or never makes his ethical life a function of freedom. Freedom and liberty are notions developed by the later Roman republican tradition, and especially among historians and not philosophers, at least not in Ancient times. Sen’s use of Aristotle’s ethics to make a defense of individual freedom strikes us as alien. The latter Aristotelian tradition of freedom was interpreted by the late Romans, and especially in the early Modern Europe as self-government. Never as the freedom of personal fulfillment, and especially never as individual freedom that, after Locke, is tantamount of the sovereignty of the individual over his own body. Sen’s reading of Aristotle is outrageous.
Then Sen addresses the notion of market freedom (p. 26) that, somehow, is the inheritance from the Hobbesian notion of negative liberty. So far so good, until he makes the connection between this logically coherent concept with the Aristotelian idea of personal self-fulfillment that not only Hobbes, by recently Berlin, considered to be contrary to what they were talking about when uttering the word freedom. He actually goes as far as to criticize economists that have moved from this notion of development as linked to freedom and prefer talking about utilities (p.27) when in fact this move is logical; because consumption is a different act than the phenomenon we call freedom. They might be related, but they cannot be considered to be the same without making both concepts nonsense.
He also addresses the problem of dictatorship and slavery as a problem for freedom, which is completely reasonable. However these are the problem addressed by the Neo-Roman/Republican notion of freedom as absence from a relation of servitude. Sen doesn’t seem to tell the difference, nor understand why these different notions are logically incompatible. Three concepts of liberty: (a) the Hobbesian negative liberty of non interference, (b) the Aristotelian-inspired positive liberty of self mastery and, (c) the Machiavellian liberty of non domination. Logically speaking one of them is correct, or all are incorrect, but the three of them in conjunction cannot be correct without rendering all of them nonsensical. Sen is not a logician, but the field considers his opinion to be one of high standing, when in fact , in this case, is corrosive of the academic debate. He is concerned about economic development, which is one of the original concerns of economists. But he takes concepts from the fields of ethics, political science and history in a way that destroys their intelligibility; an approach that is offensive for the scholars in these respective fields.
1 comentario:
I take issue to your first argument that because Sen has a spectrum of meanings for the word freedom, his use of the word is completely meaningless.
Blue can have many shades and meanings. It encompasses many colors. Does blue have a core meaning? A core hue? You cannot say that blue always equals blue. But by your argument, since blue does not converge on a single thing, it makes no sense.
You argue that Sen says freedom is the ability to avoid premature death (such as lightning or something unpredictable), but in the exact quote you used above, he also said that it is only one kind of freedom, and there are many others. You attempt to compare death by starvation, murder, flood, and several other things. I believe you miss Sen's real argument. He believes freedom is the ability to be able to choose what happens to you. This includes being able to avoid situations that put you more at risk of unpredictable things such as lightning, floods, and murder. His story of Kadar Mia in the introduction highlights this point. The Muslim man was poor, and needed a job. For this job, he needed to walk through a dangerous Hindu part of town. Would he have preferred to work somewhere that didn't require this risk? Of course. Unfortunately, he didn't have the financial freedom to choose where he worked, so he had to risk it, and was murdered. He does not argue that freedom is the ability to control the random and unpredictable, he argues that freedom is the ability to control your circumstances to reduce the risk of these hazards in life.
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