Abstract

The definition of individual liberty as the absence of coercion or violence includes a circularity problem. A look at prominent representatives of classical liberalism and libertarianism reveals that this is typical of classical liberals as well as of libertarians, though the latter avoid a confusion of power and freedom. However, the respective definitions of individual liberty analysed here rest on the assumption that coercion presupposes the absence of the agreement of the coerced party. Thus they use the definiendum in a modified form as part of the definiens in order to define the definiendum. The resulting circle can be avoided by looking at coercion and freedom as representatives of the class of two-level decisions with different costs on the meta-level. While coercion means that the coerced party has to face or faces artificial costs in case of a negative meta-decision, non-coercion does not. As a conclusion we define freedom as the absence of artificial interference in the private sphere of another person that would produce artificial costs for that person if she/he opted for a negative meta-decision