In his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, Green argued that a human being is not determined by will of their strongest motive (like pain or pleasure, or self-interest); rather they determine their will. For Green, ‘the determination of will by reason … constitutes moral freedom or autonomy’.41 Rational capacity of human beings makes them obey what is to be obeyed. Green seems to revise the classical notion of human psychology based on will and motive and argues that freedom lies in ‘conformity of will to reason’. Thus, primacy of rational capacity of the human being to do what is to be done is the basic issue for Green in realizing moral freedom.
Freedom becomes a positive power to do what is to be done. Freedom, Green says, ‘is positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying and that, too, something we do or enjoy ‘in common with others.’42 What does Green mean by: (i) ‘positive power or capacity’, (ii) ‘something worth doing’, and (iii) ‘in common with others’? Positive power or capacity is based on human self-decided action or action based on rational capacity. Something worth doing is something that contributes to our own moral development along with that of others. In common with others is our power to do a common or social good. Defining freedom in such a way, Green makes a clear connection between liberty and moral purpose, which J. S. Mill also did. But it was Green who was the first to employ the term positive freedom to describe this connection.43 And by doing so, he also paid his due to the idealist position where freedom is identification of oneself with the divine spirit. The true good of individual and that of the others have to be realized ‘in common with others.
Positive freedom is then opposite of what negative freedom means. Negative freedom consists in the satisfaction of one’s desire, acting as per one’s own choice as one is left alone. Freedom is not being left alone to do what one likes, since all depends on what one likes to do. Freedom, as Barker would say, is not negative absence of restraint, as beauty is not the absence of ugliness. Thus, for Green, freedom is not absence of restraint but as a process of self-development. This is a different from the negative idea of liberty held by classical liberals like Hobbes and utilitarianism.
The implication is that the state has to be a partner in this moral development and as such it would be called upon to remove obstacles coming in this process. Green maintains that obstacles like ignorance, lack of education and poverty are hindrances to the moral development of the human personality. It is the duty of the state to remove these hindrances and provide external conditions of self-perfection. After Mill, Green added further logic for the welfare state.
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