가치다원주의에 기반한 ‘소극적 자유(negative liberty)’와 행위자의 개체성: 영화 <신성한 나무의 씨앗>에서 어머니의 행위 선택을 사례로

초록

This essay aims to reconsider the concept of ‘negative liberty,’ based on the pluralism discussed by Isaiah Berlin (2002) in his “Two Concepts of Liberty,” as a concept that captures the choice of action from the agent‘s perspective. To this end, it first examines Berlin’s discussion of ‘positive liberty,’ which carries the risk of inverting oppression into freedom, and his arguments on pluralism. Through this, it clarifies that when Berlin defined negative liberty as true liberty, it was not an exclusion of the positive liberty necessary for communal life, but rather an affirmation of pluralistic values. Second, this essay addresses the limitations of Berlin‘s attempt to overcome the risk of pluralism sliding into relativism by relying on a human nature that distinguishes between good and evil. Instead, this paper incorporates the discussion of value pluralism from a social science perspective, which posits that an agent’s life flourishes by enjoying the diverse values they create through their activities. By combining the discussion of value pluralism from behavioral economics (Van Staveren, 2001) with the discussion on the plurality of relationships an agent forms from social psychology (Deutsch, 1975), it discusses a framework of value pluralism: the value of care in intimate relationships, the value of freedom in contractual relationships, and the value of justice in relationships of solidarity. In this context, negative liberty, based on value pluralism, refers to the freedom of interdependent actors in relationships to choose prioritizing values within the spatiotemporally limited context of their lives. Finally, this theoretical model is applied to an empirical case study: an analysis of the mother’s actions in the film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, interpreted as a choice to prioritize the value of care in her relationship with her daughters. This essay is significant in that: ①it re-appropriates the concept of negative liberty by utilizing a concept of pluralism focused on the enjoyment of values; ②it provides a deeper understanding of an agent’s choices by contextualizing them; and ③it captures the individuality and subjectivity that emerge through the choices of interdependent agents, thereby overcoming the risk that the ontological perspective of interdependence might conflate the individual with the community.

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