CIVIL LIBERTY

Civil Liberty and Modern Technology

Table of Contents

Civil Liberties1

The Meaning of Civil Liberty1

Civil Liberty and Modern Technology2

Constitutional Values for Civil Rights6

The Value of Civil Liberty7

Debate over Civil theory9

The Meaning of Civil Liberty9

The Value of Civil Liberty10

References12

Civil Liberty and Modern Technology

Civil Liberties

To say Civil Liberty is instrumentally valuable is to hold that protecting or promoting Civil Liberty tends to lead to other valuable consequences or outcomes. For instance, many argue that freedom of conscience, thought, and lifestyle are instrumentally valuable in helping to achieve scientific and social progress. Economists argue that protecting economic freedoms is important not as an end in itself but as a means to making people wealthier and happier. Many defenders of democracy hold that protecting political freedoms tends to produce better quality government.

Finally, one might hold that Civil Liberty is constitutively valuable, which means that Civil Liberty is a part or piece of some other valuable thing. So, for instance, suppose one holds that rational self-development is the best form of life. On this view, having the positive freedom (the capacity) to control one's passions and to formulate rational life plans is part of what constitutes a flourishing life. A happy life is composed of different constitutive parts: virtue, rationality, pleasure, positive freedom of a certain sort, and so on. Alternatively, one might argue that Civil Liberty is an important component of justice. A just society is a free society, and so Civil Liberty is good because justice is good.

.

The Meaning of Civil Liberty

Philosophers often separate Civil Liberty or freedom into two broad kinds, negative and positive. To call a Civil Liberty negative is not to judge it—negative liberties are not by definition worse or less valuable than positive liberties. Rather, negative Civil Liberty connotes the absence of constraints, interference, or obstacles. Positive Civil Liberty connotes the presence of something, usually a power or a capacity of some kind. If somebody ties a bird to the ground, this means it lacks the negative Civil Liberty to fly. The reason it cannot fly is because someone stops it. However, suppose the reason the bird cannot fly is that it is a penguin—a flightless bird. It does not have the positive Civil Liberty to fly. The reason it cannot fly is because it lacks the relevant capacity, not because there is an obstacle in its way.

Philosophers have offered a number of accounts of negative Civil Liberty. One straightforward definition is that Civil Liberty is the absence of any obstacles to achieving one's goals. On this view, anything—including other people, the weather, animals, laws of physics—that make it more difficult to achieve ones ends counts as an infringement on Civil Liberty. This definition, like most, allows that there is a continuum between being completely free and completely unfreeze. A person with no obstacles is freer than a person with one major obstacle, which is in turn freer than a person with two major obstacles (Carter, 1999).

Civil Liberty and Modern Technology

At a time when the public demands of its institutions and ...