Power to the people: freedom as non-domination, disabling constraints and the eyeball test

Abstract

While there has been a large focus on what it means to be unfree in the neo-Roman republican literature, what it means to be non-free has received much less attention. Prima facie, this should not be surprising. After all, we tend to hold a special place in our normative theorising for the kinds of constraints that come about via the intentional actions of other agents rather than those that come about via the indirect, aggregate action of independently motivated social actors. However, as I argue in this article, if republicans advocate ‘structural egalitarianism’ as Pettit claims, then there are certain disabling constraints – constraints derived solely from being non-free in a choice – that deserve closer attention. Indeed, I claim that in failing to fully appreciate the importance of non-freedom, Pettit’s ‘eyeball test’ – the yardstick for republican justice – leaves in place certain disabling constraints to action which render some citizens structurally unequal vis-à-vis others.

Keywords:

• freedom as non-domination
• structural egalitarianism
• power to
• ability and ableness
• Philip Pettit

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Mark Haugaard, Dr Jonathan G. Heaney, and to all those who attended the 2014 PSAI Political Theory Specialist Group on ‘Power and Freedom’ at UCD, for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments. Any errors of interpretation, analysis and so on are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I will use the terms ‘arbitrary’ and ‘uncontrolled’ interchangeably throughout the rest of this article.

2. For Pettit’s brief account of why not being non-free might be important, see (2012, pp. 36–43, 2014, pp. 37–38).

3. Following most writers, I will use the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ here interchangeably.

4. To call an invasive hindrance quasi-intentional, for Pettit (2005), means that it comes about via the negligence of some other agent or agency.

5. For the distinction between a non-interfering master and a non-mastering interferer, see Pettit (1997, p. 23).

6. It is worth pointing out that republicans are not concerned with your freedom from domination in all areas of life. Rather, freedom as non-domination is to be sought across a particular domain of fundamental freedoms, or basic liberties; see Pettit (2008). This domain requirement freedom we can also see, for example, in Rawls’s first principle in his A Theory of Justice (1971).

7. It is worth pointing out that there are subtle differences between Skinner’s and Pettit’s account of domination; see Pettit (2002). However, this difference need not affect the point being made here.

8. For more on the Roman jurisprudential notion of power as potestas, see Skinner (1998, pp. 40–41)

9. It is now something of an orthodox view in the literature on social and political power to draw the distinction between power over and power to, which, to my knowledge, was first fully articulated by Pitkin (1972). Whether power can be understood in more ways than this is the subject of great debate for those writing on social and political power. See, for instance, Haugaard (2010) and Allen (1998).

10. For another version of the non-interference model, see Carter (1999).

11. The notion of a disabling constraint can also be found in the work of Young (1990, ch. 2).

12. The distinction between formal and effective freedom is an important one. We can realise an individual’s negative liberty in, say, freedom as non-interference, in a purely formal sense, by ensuring that individual is merely free from interference in a certain choice. However, if we are concerned with making this freedom effective, we will want to ensure that there are limited non-intentional disabling constraints to his freedom in this choice. For more on this distinction, see Pettit (1997, pp. 76–77). In the context of Kramer’s writings, see his distinction between non-normative freedom and normative freedom (2003, ch. 2).

13. Morriss (2012) sums up this intuitive difference nicely when he writes: ‘the difference between lacking the power to act and lacking the freedom to act is (very roughly) that lack of power injures (for you cannot do things) whilst lack of freedom insults (you cannot do things because of a constraint which demeans you)’ (2012, p. 16).

14. Although some restrictions have been lifted, in the case of Saudi Arabia it seems that there are still certain restrictions on women cycling bikes in public. See Ramdani (2013).

15. See Rawls (1977).

16. Thanks to Cillian McBride for pressing me on this point.

17. Section 37.1 of the Employment Equality Act, (1998) states the following: ‘A religious, educational or medical institution which is under the direction or control of a body established for religious purposes or whose objectives include the provision of services in an environment which promotes certain religious values shall not be taken to discriminate against a person for the purposes of this Part or Part II if – (a) it gives more favourable treatment, on the religion ground, to an employee or a prospective employee over that person where it is reasonable to do so in order to maintain the religious ethos of the institution or (b) it takes action which is reasonably necessary to prevent an employee or a prospective employee from undermining the religious ethos of the institution, For some general background on this piece of legislation and a republican critique, see Daly and Hickey (2011).

18. Possibly the most famous example of this use of power is the 1982 dismissal of Eileen Flynn from a secondary school in New Ross, Co. Wexford. As she was pregnant with a child by an unmarried man, the school deemed her to be in conflict with its Catholic ethos. The Irish courts ultimately vindicated the right of the school to terminate her contract in this case.

19. This also affects the lives of parents and children in these schools. Daly (2014) describes the treatment of non-Catholic teachers and children as an urgent human rights issue.

20. For more on the Dublin housing crisis, see Holland (2014) and the recent survey conducted by Nabco (2014)

21. The work in this area by Focus Ireland is worthy of mention here.

22. See Holland (2015).

23. In his more recent writings, Pettit replaces the idea of structural equality with the term expressive equality; see Pettit (2012, p. 78). Some recent writers have started to argue what it might mean to be structurally equal, in a republican sense, with other citizens; see, for instance, Garrau and Laborde (2015), Schuppert (2015), Krause (2013) and Thompson (2013). In a non-republican context, Young argues for a similar idea of structural equality when she writes: ‘[s]tructural injustice … exists when social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation to develop their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them’ (2013, p. 52).

24. Notice that the argument for the reasonable accommodation of culture does not derive from the idea that culture provides citizens with a ‘context of choice’ (Raz 1994; Kymlicka 1996, ch. 5), or on an account of the proper relation to self (Taylor 1994; Honneth 1996). Rather, the recognition of different cultures is tied to eradicating structural domination. However, as it is focused on citizens’ non-domination, distinguishing what we owe to citizens from what we owe to non-citizens is still required; see Kymlicka (1996, pp. 26–33). For a discussion on what non-domination might imply for non-citizens, see the collection of essays in Honohan and Hovdal Moan (2014).

25. On the first point, see Giddens (1984) account of structuration and Lukes (1974) third dimension of power. The preference I have for Bourdieu’s account over Giddens stems from the fact that Bourdieu gives more weight to the effect that structural constraint has on the body. He also explains the actual mechanism by which social actors internalise structural constraint more comprehensively than Lukes’ 3D power.

26. Or as Bourdieu puts it: [s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor (Bourdieu 1977, p. 72).

27. Research by the Sutton Trust (2015) shows that one-third of parliamentary candidates attended private schools compared to just 7% of the overall adult population. At present, only 23% of the members of the House of Commons are women.

28. See Childs (2004a) for more on this.

29. Lacking the requisite emotional capital may also be a problem, see Heaney (2011, p. 271).

30. Bourdieu describes this as symbolic violence: ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (1992, p. 167). Importantly, this exercise of symbolic violence is not agent (coercion) specific. Rather, it is an indirect (structural) form of constraint.

31. Thank you to Eoin Daly for pointing out this quotation to me.