A Theory of Freedom. by Stanley I. BennReview by: Douglas N. HusakNoûs, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 400-402Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215970 .

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addition. The defense of moral rules as having objective and universal status is impressive and refreshing. Even when Gert is at his most ambitious, analyzing eleven important concepts in the scope of less than six pages (pp. 172-177), what he has to say is plausible and helpful.

Nevertheless, as one should expect in such a complex and ambitious work, there are many aspects of the analyses and development of the system open to critique. I would expect critics to put pressure on many of Gert's claims about what impartial rational persons could or could not advocate. For example, all that is needed to weakly justify violating a rule is that some impartial rational person could advocate that this kind of violation be publicly allowed (p. 111). Gert addresses the question of how we describe the kind of violation? (cf. which maxim does it fall under?) through a discussion of morally relevant features (pp. 141-146), but it seems to me there are additional problems special to Gert's account. According to Gert, rational people can disagree widely on their relative weighings of evils. If we are free to balance almost any amount of suffering or loss of pleasure against a loss of freedom (or vice-versa), it would seem that only ingenuity is required to show that almost any violation of a rule can be weakly justified.

Another point worthy of investigation is whether Gert is able to claim that it is always rational to act morally. He holds that the mere fact that an act is in accordance with a rule does not provide a reason for doing an act that would otherwise be irrational (pp. 41-42). If the rule is a moral rule, however, then Gert claims that concern about whether my act might erode support for the rule or have a deleterious effect on my character should give me adequate reason to act in accordance with it even when it involves harm to me and does not benefit anyone (p. 42). But suppose I am about to die and I know that no one will discover my violation. It seems to me that if I follow the rule nevertheless, I am acting morally but, under Gert's analysis, irrationally.

Gert intends that his book be useful to a wider audience than professional philosophers and their students. I have some doubts about this. Gert's style is dry and difficult, occasionally "preachy," and the analyses are often complex. The references that he does make to other moral theories presuppose familiarity with those theories. I have no qualms, however, in recommending Morality to philosophers. In my judgment it deserves ranking with Baier's and Rawls' works.

Stanley I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press), xiv + 338 pp., $49.50 (cloth) and $17.95 (paper).

DOUGLAS N. HUSAK

Rutgers University

The most notable feature of Benn's A Theory of Freedom is its breadth. Benn is critical of narrow accounts that fail to be informative about what is most interesting about freedom: why the interference with "the free action of a free agent" should constitute a prima facie breach of a moral principle. In order to illuminate this issue, the analysis of

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BENN'S A THEORY OF FREEDOM 401

freedom must develop its relationships to a wide range of concepts in moral and political philosophy. Thus Benn writes at length about values, rationality, the consistency of moral theory, autonomy, privacy, community, rights, objectivity, liberalism, and a host of other topics. The precise connections between these various concepts and the central issues of freedom is not always made clear, nor do the chapters proceed in a sequence that reveals the development of a single theme. Yet each discussion represents an important, informed and well-argued perspective on the several issues addressed. The result is a broad examination of moral and political philosophy with the concept of freedom at its core.

According to Benn's analysis, actions are unfree when their practical impossibility is attributable to the actions or inactions of persons who can be held answerable for the restriction. These restrictions are objectionable because they violate a principle of noninterference that derives from the "conceptual linking of natural and moral personality" associated with the Kantian requirement of respect for persons. Benn purports to derive three additional principles from this Kantian foundation: a principle of equal consideration of interests, a principle of respect for (what Benn calls) autarchy, and a principle of privacy.

Benn rejects accounts that analyze freedom as the absence of impediments to doing what one desires. According to Benn, a rule that heretics will be burned renders unfree both orthodox believers and heretics, notwithstanding the absence of a desire in the orthodox believer to breach the rule. To abridge an agent's freedom is to interfere with the range of his possible choices, and not necessarily with the choices he desires to make. On Benn's analysis, desires are unnecessary for the explanation of rational action; epistemic action commitments follow directly from beliefs, and rationality is to be explained largely in terms of acting in accordance with these commitments. Perhaps the introduction of desires into the analysis of freedom confuses the value of freedom with the condition of being free. Arguably, however, reference must be made to desires at some stage in the analysis, for an interference with an action the agent desires to perform may represent a more serious wrong than an interference with an action the agent has no inclination to perform.

Perhaps Benn's most original contribution is his examination of the rational agent whose actions are entitled to protection by a principle of noninterference. Decision makers who satisfy the minimal conditions of cognitive and practical rationality are said to be autarchic or self-directing. Agents who fall short of this idea are characterized by impulsion. Benn reserves the concept of autonomy to describe agents who exceed the conditions of autarchy and approximate an excellence of character by which one lives "according to a law that one prescribes to oneself." Armed with these useful distinctions, Benn develops a basis for differentiating between the rights and immunities to which persons may be entitled. The nonautarchic individual, for example, may be an appropriate subject of paternalistic protection that would be unjustifiable if applied more generally. Distinct sets of rights and immunities do not violate a principle of noninterference because that principle does not categorically proscribe interference, but only functions as a rule of procedure in justificatory discourse, placing a burden of justification on the interferer. What is to qualify as a justification might vary depending upon which of the three above conditions accurately describes the agent in question.

Philosophers familiar with Benn's previous work will recognize his profound and influential thoughts on the topic of privacy. Benn repeats his now familiar defense of

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privacy as grounded in respect for persons. Even covert observation is objectionable inasmuch as it "alters the agent's conditions of action" and insults the agent "by deliberately falsifying his self-perception." What is new is the connection between this idea and the overall theory of which it is a part.

A more substantive theory would have emerged had Benn attempted to identify the considerations that satisfy the burden of justification that is placed upon those who would interfere with freedom. He resists any simple generalization for determining when freedom prevails in a competition with other moral and political values. Thus Benn rejects the supposition that individual rights always "trump" aggregative welfare interests, and he is noncommittal, for example, about whether and under what circumstances the public interest in law enforcement overrides the personal interest in privacy. The only clear constraint is that a purported justification cannot succeed unless it is grounded in reasons that anyone to whom the justification is addressed is bound to accept as reasons. Beyond this minimal constraint, Benn has little practical advice about how his theory might bear on the resolution of contemporary substantive debates involving freedom.

This book should not be recommended to anyone but an advanced philosopher. It is somewhat dry and abstract, contains few examples to illustrate the application of its principles, and is almost entirely devoid of connections between philosophy and history or the social sciences. Yet A Theory of Freedom deserves a wide audience among moral and political philosophers for whom the above features will not be seen as shortcomings.

Anthony Winterbourne, The Ideal and the Real. An Outline of Kant's Theory of Space, Time and Mathematical Construction, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 1988, xi + 137 pp; $23.20.

HARALD PILOT

University of Heidelberg

In order to reveal the historical roots of Kant's thesis that space and time are transcen- dentally ideal but empirically real, Winterbourne takes as his point of departure the famous correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke (who was writing under the instructions of Newton (1)). Then he analyses the arguments for that thesis in the Transcendental Aesthetic, compares them with the famous argument from incongruent counterparts in the Prolegomena, and supports his account by further reflections on the Antinomy of Reason. On this basis he explicates Kant's concept of a schema as a rule for construction (98). This explication allows an understanding of mathematical construction and of the role of incongruent counterparts within Kant's theory of space.

According to Winterbourne, Newton's theory of absolute space and time has a metaphysical and an epistemological aspect. Metaphysically, absolute space and time play the roles of Kant's ideas of reason (16); epistemologically, they explain-via

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