Two Concepts of Liberty

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You
turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a
crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight
on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks.
So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation
might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and
then right is that you're addicted to cigarettes and you're desperate to get to the
tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as
your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and
then to the right. Moreover, you're perfectly aware that your turning right at the
crossroads means you'll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment
you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not
only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what
you think you ought to be doing.
This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one
can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if
no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above
story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty
as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-
determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in
your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are
not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you
yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realizing what you
recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty
is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more
about going through the right doors for the right reasons.
In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two concepts of
liberty negative and positive respectively. The reason for using these labels is that in
the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (i.e. of obstacles,
barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems
to require the presence of something (i.e. of control, self-mastery, self-determination
or self-realization).

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
If we want to start very simple, keeping our definitions to just two words each, negative liberty

means “freedom from,” while positive liberty means “capacity to.” Another way of thinking

about the difference—though again, it’s a rough one—is to see negative liberty as being about

the absence of external limits, while positive liberty is about the absence of internal limits.

Let’s look at an example. Jack’s living in New York. He’d like go to California to visit family.

Under a negative conception of liberty, Jack is free to go to California if nobody is actively

preventing him from doing so. Thus his negative freedom would be violated if his neighbor

locked Jack in the basement, or if someone stole his car.

But what if Jack’s so poor that he can’t afford a car or a plane ticket? What if Jack is sick and so

not physically up to the trip? In these instances, no person prevents Jack from going to

California, so Jack’s negative liberty remains intact. Yet he lacks the capacity to fulfill his

desire and so, from a positive liberty standpoint, he is unfree.

Sometimes we object to the use of the word “liberty” in positive liberty by arguing that the

only real liberty is the negative sort. And that may well be true. In fact, allowing both negative

and positive to claim the label of liberty can make it more difficult to argue against the state

actively trying to promote the former at the expense of the latter. After all, who wants to be put

in the position of arguing against “liberty?”

In this case, we might be better off saying that only negative liberty is really liberty, while

positive liberty ought to be renamed something like “power” or “capacity.” But accepting that

doesn’t mean we should ignore the distinction as it’s used in the literature today, or that we

shouldn’t listen to those who want to continue talking about positive liberty.

Source: https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/what-are-negative-positive-liberty-why-does-it-matter