Liberty and rights practice questions.

A commentator argues that citizens who face no legal barrier to voting but cannot reach any polling station are not yet free, because freedom means actually directing one's own life. This reasoning is closest to

• Hobbes' account, on which liberty is the absence of external impediments to motion
• Berlin's negative conception, on which freedom is measured by the absence of interference
• Berlin's positive conception, on which freedom is a matter of self-direction
• Mill's harm principle, which permits interference only to prevent harm to others

Answer: Berlin's positive conception, on which freedom is a matter of self-direction

The commentator measures freedom by the question 'who is master of me?', which is the guiding question of the positive concept, rather than by 'how far am I interfered with?'. Berlin himself does not count a bare incapacity as political unfreedom; what makes this reasoning positive is that it ties being free to actually directing one's own life.

A legislature bans a dangerous sport in which only consenting adult participants are at risk, giving as its reason that participants damage themselves. Judged by the principle Mill defends in On Liberty, the ban is

• illegitimate, because the conduct is self-regarding and harms no unconsenting party
• legitimate, because the state may prevent harm to anyone, including the agent herself
• legitimate, because widespread moral disapproval of a practice is itself a harm
• legitimate, because Mill allows coercion where a person would permanently alienate her freedom by contract

Answer: illegitimate, because the conduct is self-regarding and harms no unconsenting party

Mill restricts coercion to other-regarding conduct, so a risk borne voluntarily by competent adults lies outside its reach. His one narrow exception concerns a contract by which a person signs her freedom away for good, such as selling oneself into slavery, and a participant who may withdraw at any time is not in that position.

In On Liberty Mill defends free expression even of opinions he takes to be false. Which reason does he give for that defence?

• Restriction becomes acceptable once a competent authority has established that the opinion is false
• Suppression is wrong because rights are natural and precede any political arrangement
• An opinion should be protected whenever the speaker sincerely believes it to be true
• A true belief never contested by objections is held as dead dogma rather than as living truth

Answer: A true belief never contested by objections is held as dead dogma rather than as living truth

Mill's defence is epistemic: contestation is what keeps a true belief understood rather than merely professed, which is why false opinions earn protection alongside suppressed truths. The natural-rights reason belongs to Locke's tradition, not to Mill's utilitarian argument.

A right to be provided with emergency medical care has a different structure from a right not to be assaulted. The difference is that the first

• is a legal right, whereas the second is a moral right that no legislature can create
• imposes on others a duty to supply a good, not merely a duty to refrain from acting
• is claimable only by citizens, whereas the second protects everyone present in the territory
• may be overridden in emergencies, whereas the second holds without any exception

Answer: imposes on others a duty to supply a good, not merely a duty to refrain from acting

The contrast is between positive rights, which correlate with duties of provision, and negative rights, which correlate with duties of forbearance; it is a difference in the duty generated, not in whether the right is legal or moral.

Which criticism of natural rights is associated with Jeremy Bentham?

• Rights are trumps that individuals may play against appeals to the general welfare
• The rights of man protect the isolated, self-interested individual and leave real subjection intact
• Rights are the creatures of law, so rights said to exist before law are rhetorical fiction
• Rights operate as side constraints that may not be traded off against better outcomes

Answer: Rights are the creatures of law, so rights said to exist before law are rhetorical fiction

Bentham's objection is that a right without a corresponding legal duty is empty talk, which is why he treats imprescriptible natural rights as rhetoric. The complaint about the egoistic individual is Marx's, while the trumps and side-constraints formulations belong to Dworkin and Nozick.

Pettit argues that a servant whose master is kind and never interferes is nonetheless unfree, because the master retains the power to interfere at will. On this republican account, freedom is

• the absence of domination, understood as anyone's capacity to interfere arbitrarily
• the absence of interference, whether or not anyone has the power to interfere in the future
• the presence of the resources needed to act on one's choices
• self-mastery, in which reason governs the appetites within the person

Answer: the absence of domination, understood as anyone's capacity to interfere arbitrarily

The account is a third position beside Berlin's pair: it is about the standing of the agent, not about how much interference actually occurs. It explains why the servant must watch what she says and why a benevolent despotism is criticised on grounds of freedom rather than of welfare.