Social Justice and Individual Liberty: More Friends than Foes

Can individual liberty and social justice be reconciled? While libertarians have traditionally thought that these two ideas are fundamentally opposed, I will argue that they are largely compatible. Before answering this question, we need to draw some distinctions. The concept of individual liberty can roughly be captured by the concepts of positive and negative liberty. Positive liberty means that you are free to the extent that you have the capacity or ability to take control of your own life or to fulfill your own potential. For example, rich people in first world countries have more positive liberty than poor people in the third world. In contrast, negative liberty means that you are free to the extent that other people do not interfere with your ability to control your own life. For example, you have freedom of speech if no one prevents you from speaking your mind. Both positive and negative liberty are obviously valuable and important. Being free from wrongful interference and having the effective power to lead your own life are both crucial aspects of living a good life. 1 While the term “social justice ” is often used loosely in popular discourse to mean redistribution from rich to poor or to refer to Progressive activism, here I will use “social justice ” in the technical sense of a standard for evaluating the justice of a social system as a whole. On the social justice view, a social system has work to the benefit of everyone, and especially the least well off. This approach is les