From Non-Interference to Provision of Necessary Resources and Just Conditions: Freedom, Responsibility, and Humility in the work of Dorothy Roberts and M. Shawn Copeland

This paper argues that the most productive conceptions of freedom result in both humility—that is, an awareness of our lack of certainty and lack of universal knowledge—and a call to responsibility. This can be seen especially in the work of Dorothy Roberts and M. Shawn Copeland, both of whom understand freedom as necessitating resources and conditions that make choice possible and illuminate freedom as something lived and carried out in bodies, not just a concept touted in the abstract. Whereas some understandings of freedom, especially negative freedoms that consist mainly of non-interference, yield virtually no sense of responsibility, Roberts and Copeland’s understandings of freedom imply a responsibility akin to that described by Iris Marion Young, that is, the social connection model of responsibility that calls on persons of privilege to recognize the ways they have contributed to the perpetuation of injustice and continue to do so.