 For Berlin and those who follow him, then, the heart of liberty is the absence of coercion by other agents; consequently, the liberal state’s commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. So understood, negative liberty is a matter of which options are left to our discretion, or more precisely, which options are foreclosed by the actions of others, and with what warrant, and this is so regardless of whether we exercise such options (Taylor, 1979).