According to the definition of positive and negative liberty put forward by Stanford, positive liberty is the ability of a person to take control of his or her life, achieving whatever directives that person is after (Stanford, 2013). Negative liberty is a different side of the coin, and it involves the absence of barriers or constraints. Though these things are written in conjunction with political philosophy, they are actually concepts that can be used to understand a modern situation that has gained a tremendous amount of political traction as of late.
Over the last year, as the Affordable Healthcare Act has been implemented in pieces, some businesses and other organizations have been fighting over whether they have to provide insurance plans that provide certain forms of contraception to their employees (Lee, 2013). Hobby Lobby has been at the head of the fight, claiming that the law’s mandate to employers is a violation of the company’s religious freedom. One the other side of this situation are employees who would like to receive the full benefit of the healthcare law in order to pursue their own liberty. Using the definitions of positive and negative liberty, one can fully analyze this situation to understand it more completely.
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"Liberty in Society".
The first and most critical question is whether a person’s liberty is being infringed at all. For Hobby Lobby, the claim is that Christianity asks individuals not to participate in the taking of life, and Hobby Lobby’s owners believe that certain forms of birth control aid in taking lives. They argue that under the first amendment, they should be not be compelled to comply with this sort of law. The problem, of course, is that these individual owners have established a corporation, and they have used the corporate form to avoid tax liability in some cases and personal legal liability in others. By establishing Hobby Lobby as a corporation, they effectively separated themselves from Hobby Lobby as an entity, and in doing so, they separated the business from their own religious beliefs.
Hobby Lobby is a craft store, and as such, it cannot be liberal, conservative, religious, or non-religious. Religious freedoms are designed to protect human beings, as human beings are the ones who adhere to religious doctrine. Hobby Lobby can no more hold Christian beliefs as it can get up and play in a game of pick-up basketball. Whether or not its owners are Christian is another question, but the company itself exists outside of the religious sphere.
The owners would say that they are looking for negative liberty here. They want the removal of barriers that inhibit their ability to practice Christianity. The problem with this is that, as individual human beings, they are not required to provide contraception to women. No law compels them to assist in birth control purchasing or any other things that they might believe are akin to abortion. When they made the choice to enter into the marketplace, though, and when they made the choice to enjoy the protections of the marketplace, they chose to comply with the law. Their liberty is not currently being overrun because they do have the ability to practice their religious with barriers. They just do not have the option to do so while also running a business that takes advantage of the protections of the system.
On the other side, the workers are looking for positive liberty. They want the ability to go forward, charging after their goals. This requires, at the broadest level, the ability to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies. They are asking that the law apply to them so that they can seek out liberty in their own lives.
- Lee, T.G. (2013). Hobby Lobby asks Supreme Court to hear contraception mandate challenge, MSNBC News, retrieved from http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hobby-lobby-asks-supreme-court-hear
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003). Positive and negative liberty, retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
