Research Article

POLITICAL LIBERTY: WHO NEEDS IT?

Jason Brennan^a1

^a1 Business and Philosophy, Georgetown University

Abstract

This paper concerns the question of whether the political liberties tend to be valuable to the people who hold them. (In contrast, we might ask whether the liberties are valuable in the aggregate or are owed to people as a matter of justice, regardless of their value.) Philosophers have argued that the political liberties are needed or at least useful to lead a full, human life, to have one's social status and the social bases of self-respect secured, to make the government responsive to one's interests and generate preferred political outcomes, to participate in the process of social construction so that one can feel at home in the social world, to live autonomously as a member of society, to achieve education and enlightenment and take a broad view of the world and of others' interests, and to express oneself and one's attitudes about the political process and current states of affairs. I argue that for most people, the political liberties are not valuable for these reasons.

Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Business and Philosophy at Georgetown University. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of The Ethics of Voting (2011), the coauthor with David Schmidtz of A Brief History of Liberty (2010), and the author of a variety of articles on democratic theory, voting ethics, the epistemology of philosophy, and other issues in moral and political philosophy. He is currently working on a liberal, extra-political conception of civic virtue, as well as on a book-length project on political competence and the right to rule.