Liberty and Licence

 The term Liberty is regarded morally good and frequently used in writings and speeches of political leaders in good sense and its opposites terms like oppression, imprisonment, slavery are regarded as undesirable and morally bad. In its simplest sense, liberty means to  do as one wishes or act as one chooses.

So liberty means absence of restrictions. However, few people are prepared to support the removal of all restrictions upon individual. 

     R. H. Tawney, " The freedom of the pike is death to the minnows."

When liberty is interpreted as the absence or removal of all restrictions or restraints on the action of individual it is always disregard of the interest of other individuals.In that case, one mans liberty would become another's constraint or oppression.

Removal of all restrictions on the individuals on the individual's liberty become 'Licence'. It means abuse of freedom. It is the point at which freedom becomes 'excessive' So we can use liberty in positive sense because it has some restrains to secure other's liberty and it become license (in negative sense) when it become oppressive and morally corrupt. 

There is ideological controversy about the point at which liberty starts to become licence. Many school of thought talk about it. Some thinkers wants minimum restrains , other's wants more restrictions on individual's liberty. However socialist and liberals both attracted to 'libertarianism' in late twentieth century. Freedom must be regulated in such a way that none shall use is freedom to destroy the freedom of others.

Right wing libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Milton Friedman see freedom in essentially economic terms and advocate the greatest possible freedom of choice in the marketplace. They focus on employer's ability to set wages, work condition ad decision to employ in workplace. On the other hand,socialists have regarded such behavior as licence, on the grounds that freedom of employer means oppression for his or her workers. Fundamentalist socialists may go so far as to portray all forms of private property as licence they inevitably lead to the exploitation of the poor or propertyless.

In short, liberty means acting according to or within one's rights, whereas licence means to act beyond one's rights. Only thinkers who distinguishing liberty and licence was J. S Mill. He believed that individual freedom was the basis for moral self - development and enjoy the greatest possible realm of liberty. 

In On Liberty (1859) Mill proposed a clear distinction between 'self - regarding' actions and 'other - regarding' actions. Individual should exercise sovereign control over his or her own body or life. The only justification for restricting individual freedom is to prevent 'harm to others'.