The value of negative security

In this section I will analyse the concept of negative security. Like my analysis of positive security, I’m interested in how negative security is related to other values. My claim will be that negative security is intimately related to the values of negative liberty and safety from harm.

An individual is negatively secure when they are not subject to harms or immediate threats of harm against their life, person or property.

What is valuable about a state of affairs which is absent of these harms or threats?

On the face of it, the question seems obvious. No one wants to be killed, attacked or stolen from. This would either end, or seriously impact on, our capacity to live a decent existence, to pursue the things that are meaningful to us. Yet it will be worth examining further exactly what is valuable about a state of affairs in which negative security exists.

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This is because further values underpin our intuitions about negative security and recognising these values will help to provide a more comprehensive picture of what is valuable about negative security. What are these further values? I will argue that two values are intimately connected to negative security—negative liberty and safety from harm.

Our sense of what is valuable about negative security is guided by our intuitions about liberty and personal freedom. The ability to act freely and to freely pursue our life goals presupposes some level of negative security in the form of protection from harms and threats. In this sense, negative security is intimately connected to negative liberty.

Negative liberty is the freedom from impositions which restrict our liberty—death, imprisonment, coercion or assault, for instance. Berlin, who first introduced the negative sense of liberty writes, “by being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others” (1979, p. 123). Many of these harms are also encompassed by negative security—

and there is some level of cross-over between the absence of harms to our negative security and negative liberty. For instance, harms such as death, bodily assault or certain forms of coercion pertain to both.

Yet negative liberty and negative security are importantly not synonymous concepts. I may be negatively unfree (i.e. subject to liberty restrictions) yet possess negative security—as in a case where I am incarcerated away from others, but not subject to bodily threats, for instance. Or consider the case of coercive laws—such laws are liberty restricting and pose threats to our negative freedom, but they don’t infringe our negative security. If such laws licensed serious incursions against our persons or property, they may begin to pose a threat to our negative security, but while all laws are liberty restricting, not all laws curtail negative security.

The line between negative liberty and negative security is subtle, yet still intelligible. The point I want to raise here is that the values are sufficiently close that much of what we value about security links to what we value about negative liberty—

the freedom from obstacles to our liberty. Personal freedom requires a degree of negative security—to be free is to be able to pursue our projects and life goals without interference, and this presupposes negative security in the form of protection from harms and threats to our life, person or property.

Negative security is also intimately connected to the value of being safe from harm.

I have argued that safety and negative security are importantly different concepts (because the latter captures the absence of threats to our material possessions). Yet some

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of what we value about negative security is connected to what we value about our personal safety. One of the problems of insecure contexts (and perhaps the main thing we fear about them) is the threat of violence and suffering. Violence is unwelcome because it involves physical and psychological harm. Harm is not only painful, it can otherwise be a serious obstacle to our interests and the pursuit of our life goals. It is for this reason, amongst others, that harm is dis-valuable. A state of negative security is therefore valuable, because it is absent of these harms to our person and material wealth in the present and threats of these harms in the foreseeable future: at least where this can be assured to a reasonable degree.³⁹

Related to this is the harm of fearing insecurity. The fear we feel about our personal safety, future wellbeing and material possessions can be seriously debilitating.⁴⁰ And this phenomenological dimension of how we respond to insecure contexts must be recognised as a form of harm which arises from how we relate to insecure contexts. This is to say it is not only the actual harm constitutive of violent attempts against us, or our property, that is problematic about insecure contexts. It is the fear and anxiety that we feel towards potential attempts that is partly constitutive of what is problematic about insecure contexts.⁴¹

Negative security relates to fear in the following way. To be immediately secure from threats to our person or possessions provides us with one reason to not be afraid. I would justifiably be fearful of an immediate threat to my person—say if someone were to begin to attack me, or if a war raged around me. The negation of these things would contribute to me not being fearful of immediate harm and foreseeable threats. Yet this is

39 There is an important sense in which we can never be completely free from the threat of harm. Even in states we deem to possess a high level of security, there is the possibility that we may suffer harm. What we seek is a reasonable level of security, and a reasonable guarantee that we will not suffer such threats. One of the things that must be factored into this judgement of reasonableness is the potential for unwelcome value conflicts. We may, of course, ensure a greater level of security by curtailing other important values such as privacy or liberty. We may preventatively incarcerate those we deem to pose a threat to our security, or search their property without their consent, for instance. Yet these sorts of measures are problematic because they compromise values such as liberty or privacy. And arriving at a reasonable level of security will have to balance these sorts of conflicts between security and other values. For an account of the need to balance the sometimes conflicting values of security and liberty see Waldron (2010, pp. 20-47).

40 The feeling of fear is an aspect of the subjective dimension of security, as noted above, I will not explore the distinction between objective and subjective security in any depth.

41 Of course, this fear may be rational, or it may not. It would be irrational to live in a constant state of heightened fear of a meteor strike, given the low probability of such a strike occurring. Yet it would not be unreasonable to fear attacks in a context in which such attacks are a daily occurrence. It would be less reasonable to fear attack in a quiet and peaceful rural village, than it would on the Gaza Strip—it would be completely rational to fear for our wellbeing and that of those around us within such belligerent surroundings. This is not to suggest that the actual phenomenon of feeling fear directly tracks the mathematic probability of our suffering harm. Though it is to say that fear is at least partly influenced by the contexts we find ourselves in, and our perceptions about the probability of harm within such contexts.

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not the only way in which fear operates. Fear is a future-oriented mental state. I do not only feel fear in response to my immediate situation but I feel fear at potential threats which may arise in the future, or even fear the uncertainty about threats. It is here we see the relation between negative and positive security. Negative security provides a reason to not be fearful about present threats, but if we are to be assured and without fear about our future wellbeing, the rules, norms and procedures of positive security support this.

In this section I have argued that negative security is intimately related to negative liberty and safety from harm (bodily harm, material harm and the immediate fear of these threats).