That is the argument made by UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge in his Tech Central Station article, “Law and Morality in America.” My response was posted today.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/2697/libertarians-only-believe-in-bodily-pleasures/
Libertarians only believe in bodily pleasures
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This proves that simply having a pHD doesn’t prevent someone from being completely ignorant on a topic he’s commenting on. Before criticizing libertarianism, Prof. Bainbridge should gain a thorough understanding of them. Broadly put, there are three sub-categories within libertarianism:
There are also different ways in which people attempt to justify libertarianism:
Imo, a natural law defense of libertarianism — starting from the non-aggression axiom and the homesteading principle — is the strongest defense. Prof. Bainbridge would be well-served to read Walter Block’s Libertinism and Libertarianism.
Shouldn’t Objectivists have their very own category?
Or are they generally being excluded from libertarianism now?
Seems like the rational (*snicker*) thing to do anyway.
Well, Ayn Rand hated the idea of anyone calling her a libertarian. But aside from that, I’m not sure if they should be their own category. Don’t they fall under natural law? All of their ethics is supposedly derived from reason and rationality. I’d argue that Objectivists either tend to fall under minarchist or constitutionalist, but very few of them are anarcho-capitalist.
By far the strongest defense of libertarianism is economic. In, fact it the *only* existing axiomatic proof of it’s existence, benificence, and goodness. All other justifications of libertarinism (including natural law) are necessarily mystical unprovable ultimate claims of no different a nature than the claims of socialism. Society is only possible when people are freely trading with each other. All other human action is anti-social in its nature.
All other political philosophies besides libertarianism lead to the destruction of society and civilization as they are violently agressively coercive. Society and civilization only continues to exist to the extent and degree that it is libertarian, that free trade occurs. Thus, it is fruitless to argue about overall political labels of society (conservative, democratic, socialist, mixed economy, etc.) but rather focus only on the actions of individuals. In every case whatsoever, they are either freely trading with each other or they are not. Thus, much free trade has always occured, even in societies like the now defunct Societ Union, and continues today to very significant degrees. It is only the simple recognition of this fact, that society (and all of its wealth increasing benefits including peace and cooperation) is only possible to the extent that free trade exists, that stands in the way of a more univerally libertarian society.
Sorry, Mr. Heinrich, but David Friedman is not a utilitarian; he does make utilitarian/consequentiailist arguments in an attempt to convince people to embrace libertarianism (as we all do!), but he does not now claim nor, to my knowledge, never has claimed to be a utilitarian.
Conservatives would have one add “community standards” to the list of acceptable reasons for aggression against others. The libertarian list is quite short:
Aggression between any individuals or association of individuals is acceptable only if specified by a valid contract or as necessary to defend property from aggression. (Some would define aggression in such a way that these behaviors are non-aggressive, but I think this makes the definition of aggression too complicated).
Conservatives legislation of community standards is an unfinanced tax on others in that enforcement is socialized. How much would someone pay for the priviledge to live in a community in which homosexuals cannot live together or nudists cannot walk the streets? Since the number of eligible owners would go down, the price would naturally have to increase. It probably would not be worth the extra cost to most individuals when they have to bear the costs, but since conservatives can legislate such positions, the cost of bigotry is socialized, resulting in the spread of bigotry.
Of course, libertarians do not prevent lawsuits for psychic costs, so I suppose that community standards would be imposed via the court system, but at least this way jurors would be forced to think about the cost of “psychic damage”, resulting from having to witness two men hug in public; whereas, when enforcement is socialized, economic costs of legislation are usually neglected. One difference is that private behavior could not be limited because there can be no “psychic damage” from what individuals do in private.
The issue in those eleven states which had referenda wasn’t outlawing homosexuality, it was about state “recognition” of gay marriages, which means subsidy through tax breaks.
Perhaps Libertarians should try to stay out of these moral quagmires (as elegant and correct as I believe Steven’s posting to be), draw attention to the obvious problem of high taxes and government waste and corruption, and push for vastly lower taxes and much smaller government. A simple tax system would remove the gay marriage dilemma by eliminating the marriage tax break.
David: I don’t think Rothbard, Hoppe and Block should be labeled as merely natural rights activists. From what I have read they are consequentialists as well. For instance, Block has written a variety of articles on the consequences of having government owned and operated roads. Hoppe wrote an entire book on the consequences of democracy and Rothbard wrote an enormous amount of material on the consequences of all kinds of government.
What I want to know is where the boundary exists between definitions for acceptable vs. unacceptable use of force to protect property/civility.
I suppose that the process of answering the above question (an artistic pursuit IMO) engenders the root of human-made laws for emerging libertarian societies (e.g. a Constitution).
Also my opinion: Once an existing Constitution is amended more than a half-dozen times, the whole thing should be re-drafted from within another Constitutional Congress.
Nudge, nudge.
Van, that is why we have juries.
If the social standard is lethal self defense only under “immediate” threat of death or “great” bodily injury, rather than just because someone looked scary, then that is what the jury will look for in the trial of the survivor.
If the social standard is lower, say, “he took a shot at me so I shot back”, then the jury will look at events that way.
The only reason we have libraries of laws, which no one person can ever know in their entirety, is because politicians are always looking for something to “do” to justify their existence. Not because there is any need for such minutia of control and division.
One problem with having a constitutional convention in the United States, is that we’d never be able to get such a “liberal” (in the Austrian sense) constitution. There is no way no how that the 1st through 10th amendments would ever make it with the public school graduates doing the ratification voting.
rtr,
An economic (praxeological) defense of libertarianism is indeed very strong, but only to a certain extent. Ok, we can show that high taxes, inflation, and State-borrowing leads to a steady process of decivilization. We can show that banning any consentual trade is harmful. That doesn’t convince someone who says “So what?” This is, I believe, where natural law comes in. Natural law answers the question of why we should care that all kinds of State-intervention lead to disaster. You are wrong in saying that natural rights are a bunch of mythical hocus pocus. Hoppe provides a praxeological argument for why no-one can consistently argue for any political ethic other than that of the non-aggression axiom and homesteading principle.
Steven Kane,
You’re right: Rothbard, Block, and Hoppe all make consequentialist arguments. However, they do not solely rely on those arguments. I think that most, if not all, defenders of natural rights will spend some time discussing the consequences of violating natural rights. The ultimate goal is not to be as narrow and focused on natural rights as possible, but rather to convince as many people of libertarianism as is possible: that is, to do one’s best to cause a shift in the political spectrum from extreme Statist tendencies towards extreme Libertarian tendencies.
Curt,
Those are some interesting points, thanks.
This makes me think that those “smart kids” (in Lew’s link to the USA Today article) might end up not being smart enough to do anything in business but parrot the indoctrinated fallacies that their public-school professors pass down. I know, I know: “What else is new?”
How can we get to these young minds to show them the less-traveled path? Can we teach the art of subverting the status quo without coming across as so many “hedonistic” libertarians?
Here’s a thought: if natural law is so indelible, perhaps libertarian proponents need never mention it at all.
David:
I have corresponded with market anarchists on another forum that was started by Robert Murphy on anti-state.com. I guess a lot of them are what Rothbard would call the “modal libertarians.” In any event, I found out that a lot of them are not convinced of natural rights arguments at all, and the favorite book around there seems to be David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom.
Anyways, I disagree with your statement that natural rights are the strongest argument against the state. Perhaps for you and I they are the strongest and most important, but when debating others, this is most often not the case for a couple of reasons. First of all, a lot of times the person you are arguing with will reject natural rights altogether, or at least your version of it. Or they will tell you that you may be correct in “theory,” but they reject the end result(that a state should not exist) and they say it is just impractical.
Therefore, most of the time when I am arguing with someone who believes in the state, I do not use natural rights. My main tool in attempting to refute arguments for the state is undermining the arguments from an economically logical perspective. These arguments seem more “real” to people in my experience.
In fact, yesterday is a good case in point. I was arguing with a guy on another forum who said that it was a good thing that the government subsidizes bio-medical research. I could have made a natural rights argument against his belief (expalining that it is immoral to expropriate private property to fund these projects), but I doubt this would have much effect in changing his mind. Instead, I employed the argument that the government cannot rationally allocate scarce resources, that more bio-medical research is not necessarily always better, and that the free market is the only entity that can rationally decide how much bio-medical research society really needs. I’m not sure if he was 100% convinced, but he didn’t have anything to retort with at that point.
At this point, I’m not sure that any particular way of arguing for libertarianism is “better” than the other–it seems to depend strongly upon who you are arguing with, and what they consider the important factors to be.
Also, if you run into somebody who refuses to be rational, is there *any* argument that would persuade them?
If you run into someone who refuses to be rational (rather, who refuses to consider argumentation), then they are probably someone who is going to initiate aggression against you. Thus, the appropriate response is to retaliate to any initiation of aggression.
I agree that different arguments will convince different people, which is why they’re all important. I suppose what I’m saying is that the only argument that is necessary from a moral pov is that of natural rights. It is simply wrong to do certain things, such as initiating aggression against others.
i think i’ve uncovered that it is the “natural rights” argument that turns me off about rothbard, and from many in the libertarians-at-large circle (also, not unlike objectivists and “ayn randroids”).
“natural rights” seems to me as silly as “moral clarity” from the neo-conservatives. everything in the universe is relative. morality is a construction of man. i agree with nietzsche that people must valuate their own values; who was then followed up by alot of postmodernists. but as borges, baudrillard, and godel have pointed out, the “objective universe” seems to be the set of most connected relative information. so i am content to rely on scientific models and likewise economic / praxeological models.
i think this is as rational as rational can get.
“shared morality” / “necessary illusions” are the danger of society and leo straussian / machiavelli manipulation. we can have a society of individuals without externally imposed conformity. i believe this is what karl popper intended as his “open society”.
-z
Zuzu, if everything is relative, then the only way that liberty can exist is if the style of use of your property is your choice.
In a totally relativistic situation, since it is wrong for me to force my relatively different view on someone else, because mine is “wrong” relative to what their world view is, then we’re right back to respecting private property rights.
The only way to justify the initiation of force against others is to assert a prior claim. That claim can be “Revealed Truth” like the rabid fundamentalists say it is, or something as traditional as simple “Might Makes Right”.
Objective, relative, whatever. Liberty still gives the greatest good to the greatest number of people because it allows voluntary interaction to flourish.
curt-
i think i’m just supporting consequentialism according to hayek.
relatively speaking, the private property model works more efficiently than collective property and central planning given the complexity of localized (individual) knowledge.
also, as hayek (and popper) have said, ideology should extend from science; science should not try to shore up ideology.
initiation of force (the BigDeal(tm) for “natural law” people, it seems to me) can be discussed amorally. offhand i’m thinking that if government is the exercise of a monopoly of force, then force must be subject to an economy as well. the benefit of defending yourself and what you ascribe value will infer a cost of learning how to shoot a gun, or practice martial arts, etc.
for me, the issue boils down to the asymtotic danger of monopoly (which i think is half of what hayek was getting at comparing the problems of government power vs. corporate power in ‘road to serfdom’). i guess that makes me an anarcho-capitalist. property is control (and more permanent property a gift of social law, according to thomas jefferson).
i currently consider the free markets model to most efficiently compute the decentralized knowledge of mitigating scarcity (economy) for all individuals, relative to all other models i am aware of (communism, socialism, corporativism, feudalism, etc.)
however, maybe someday quantum computers will find a way to overcome godel’s incompleteness theorem (or the turing machine halting problem as they say in computer science circles), and they will successfully dictate the terms of our elimination of scarcity. that’s a bit of a mindjob if all of your best choices are what a computer tells you to do; a bit of a free-will/fate paradox (which is a silly argument from a quantum multiverse perspective anyway). but my point is there could come a day where free markets and price system are emperically second to another form of economic organization, and it would be foolishly suicidal to live by attached dogma to one specific fashion of organization forever.
i favor liberty because it is currently emperically the most sensible way of life, not because it is somehow inherently or objectively “True”.
-z
Societal contract. (??)
Social contract libertarianism is analogous to contractarianism, put forward by Jan Narveson at Against Politics.
- Josh
There is one thing I would be interested to hear posters weigh in on: When you believe in a certain moral code, what should your relationship be to others in society who do not? People who support the enforcement of morality through law, as the author of this article does, seem to view personal morality as insufficient. The line of reasoning seems to go something like this: you believe that adultery (or anything else) is a sin. Therefore, you don’t cheat on your spouse. But simply living this moral code in your own life is not enough. If you truly believe that adultery is a sin, you must actively try to prevent others from engaging in it, because to do less is tantamount to approval of immoral behavior. And since the force of government is very effective in making people do what you want them to do, it follows that you should persuade the government to use the force of law to compel people to follow your moral code. Mr. Blanchette noted that “Society does and should exert pressures on the individual to conform to a moral and cultural code.” For many people, it is logical to use governmental force to exert this pressure, since it is seen as more effective than passive approaches like persuasion. What are the alternatives to this? This may seem like an odd question, but my impression is that people see libertarians as passive when it comes to morality, seeing immoral behavior but not wanting to “do anything” about it, and they cannot separate inaction from approval.
Lisa:
Libertarianism is not a theory of ethics or morals. It is a normative theory of law. What is moral and immoral is much different than what is just and unjust.
See Walter Block’s “Libertarianism and Libertinism:”
http://mises.org/journals/jls/11_1/11_1_6.pdf
Lisa:
Libertarianism is not a theory of ethics or morals. It is a normative theory of law. What is moral and immoral is much different than what is just and unjust.
See Walter Block’s “Libertarianism and Libertinism:”
http://mises.org/journals/jls/11_1/11_1_6.pdf
it follows that you should persuade the government to use the force of law to compel people to follow your moral code.
my impression is that libertarians understand the boundary of effective government reach into the lives of people. even if you want government to impose morality on its citizens, it can only do so badly and ultimately ineffectively. (emperically, it *doesn’t* follow that…)
those who think government can compel people to follow their moral code probably unconsciously believe the power flows top-down rather than scale-free, and consequently that government posesses omnipotent control over its citizens and residents. this is the same fallacy behind socialism/communism/collectivism. (and personally why i think neo-conservativism faith-based moral values are as dangerous to america as bolshevism was in russia. oh wait, “bolshevism” actually directly translates to “majority”… like the george w. bush’s “mandate from the majority”. go watch the bbc documentary ‘the power of nightmares’, yes.)
-z
Personal morality is not the same thing as societal morality. The moral code the individual chooses to live by is chosen by the individual. By attempting to deny other people the right to choose their moral code, one is either granting others the right to force their moral code onto himself, or assuming the position that one’s moral code is so superior that it justifies the use of force, and that all men do not have equal rights.
Another point already raised is that government wouldn’t do a good job of enforcing any particular moral code. If anything, the peer pressure of societal norms is stronger and more effective than using the force of government in this area.
That last point also implies that certain codes of morality are “better” for society than others, and that without government force, these better codes of morality would naturally arise in society. This might be something akin to natural law, I suppose.
Personal morality is not the same thing as societal morality.
here seems to be the crux of the issue. if social morality exists at all, almost by definition of society it must be an emergent property of the interaction of individual moralities and cannot be contained in any individual or vanguard (part) within the whole.
like something along the lines of holons or russell’s paradox, the fallacy both economic and “moral” squarely resides in the theory of information that any part of a system could possibly contain all of the information of the whole. we must respect the nature of scale, and perhaps first seek to understand the immediate levels above (society) and below (genetics) our shared perspective before possibly mastering them.
(for popular media, production i.g.’s ‘stand alone complex’, particularly the second season (2nd gig), interrelates these concepts quite effectively.)
That last point also implies that certain codes of morality are “better” for society than others, and that without government force, these better codes of morality would naturally arise in society. This might be something akin to natural law, I suppose.
now this i find a much more acceptable starting point for a notion of natural law; something along the lines of richard dawkin’s memes where the successful ideas outbreed the unsuccessful ones. what makes this “natural” makes it dynamic, evolutionary and scale-free (relative), and something that people do not need to waste their effort trying to centrally codify (objective) — which seems to be my problem with the traditional notion of “natural law”.
-z
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