The equivalent judgments thesis and the distinctiveness of republican freedom

Abstract

Lars Moen's The Republican Dilemma (2024) offers a novel and insightful contribution to the debate between liberals and republicans about the meaning of political freedom. Moen bases his criticism of republicanism on Ian Carter's Equivalent Judgments Thesis. According to this thesis, the theory of pure negative freedom and the republican theory entail equivalent comparative judgments about the freedom of people. In this paper I argue, first, that there are significant differences between the pure negative freedom theorist's assessment of individual cases and Philip Pettit's republicanism's assessment of those same cases. And I use these differences to raise doubts about the existence of a strong empirical correlation between the implications of the two views. Second, with regard to a putative equivalence in policy recommendations, I concede to Moen that there are important similarities between John Rawls’ and Pettit's recommendations. But I argue that these similarities do not support the equivalent judgments thesis because Rawls is not an advocate of the theory of pure negative freedom.