The equivalent judgments thesis and the distinctiveness of republican freedom

Lars Moen's The Republican Dilemma (2024) offers a novel and insightful contribution to the debate between liberals and republicans about the meaning of political freedom. Moen bases his criticism of republicanism on Ian Carter's Equivalent Judgments Thesis . According to this thesis, the theory of pure negative freedom and the republican theory entail equivalent comparative judgments about the freedom of people. In this paper I argue, first, that there are significant differences between the pure negative freedom theorist's assessment of individual cases and Philip Pettit's republicanism's assessment of those same cases. And I use these differences to raise doubts about the existence of a strong empirical correlation between the implications of the two views. Second, with regard to a putative equivalence in policy recommendations , I concede to Moen that there are important similarities between John Rawls’ and Pettit's recommendations. But I argue that these similarities do not support the equivalent judgments thesis because Rawls is not an advocate of the theory of pure negative freedom.