November 19, 2002
Libertarianism IV: Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud
Faith and community are slogans for most politicians, but they are real to most people. They have little place in libertarianism. That's not completely true -- many libertarians have a faith in spontaneous order that borders on mystical; it is almost literally the god in the machine that will bring peace and prosperity to social arrangements if only the state will diminish far enough. But faith in a God who judges the wicked and the just is alien and offensive to most libertarians. This is probably because it implies a conscious external authority. Far better to be ruled by markets and community norms (though not really -- more on this below) than by someone who refers to himself as a Lord or a King (and in upper-case, at that).
It is important at this point to distinguish between people who are libertarian and those who appear libertarian because of the Nolan Chart, or because it suits their contrarian temperament, and between those who practice a faith and those who conveniently claim it when it suits them. After all, Bill Maher calls himself a libertarian, while Bill Clinton calls himself a Christian. I'll limit myself in what follows to those who consciously and accurately reflect in word or deed the applicable creed.
Now most libertarians have a friend who is both a libertarian and a believing Jew or Christian. For some this allows the pretense that libertarianism isn't nearly exclusively an atheistic following. It is readily apparent, however, that faith has little role to play in either the belief, behavior, or work of influential libertarians, i.e., scholars, politicians (such as they are), activists, and thinkers.
A good libertarian will respond that faith has no role in libertarianism because the essence of this creed is that people should be free to make their own personal decisions in all spheres, so long as they don't infringe on the corresponding liberty of others. Thus libertarianism has nothing to say about faith any more than it has something to say about what you eat for dinner -- it's your choice. But imagine that virtually all active libertarians were anorexic, and largely disdainful of the eaters. They wouldn't suggest any laws to keep these people from doing their thing, but they probably wouldn't come across as very sympathetic either. In other words, there are important costs, borne of this unnecessary fusion of libertarianism and atheism, to the libertarian cause.
The first results from a frequent inability to distinguish between belief and behavior. If a Christian politician calls for vigorous enforcement of anti-pornography laws, for example, the prevailing view among libertarians is that he is not only wrong to infringe on liberty, but also silly for thinking pornography is an evil thing. They would view its prohibition as terrible in itself, not because doing so creates a precedent for prohibiting other forms of commerce and expression. There is a significant difference between these positions.
A thought experiment: imagine that there are two societies with open borders. The first has complete economic and social liberty, but faith and community norms are so strong that nobody produces or desires to use pornography, or narcotics, or even profanity, and virtually everyone attends church on a regular basis. Imagine that the second has less regulation of economic and social activity than the U.S. today, but considerably more than the first society. On the other hand, its members are completely tolerant of free sexual expression, all forms of speech, and drug use. In which society would you choose to live?
My hunch is that most libertarians would prefer the second society. Theirs is not just a political libertarianism (i.e., this is how rights and government should be arranged), but a cultural libertarianism (i.e., people shouldn't be upset by behaviors that don't violate the rights of others). Furthermore, a considerable minority of libertarians probably view these so-called vices as positive goods, whereas the rare Christian or Jewish (by faith) libertarian views them as significant negatives that must be tolerated for the sake of liberty.
The libertarian intolerance of intolerance thus leads to the second negative consequence of fusing libertarianism and atheism -- it leaves libertarians shy about saying what should guide behavior, and distrustful of those who do. Libertarians are very fond of pointing out that a (if not the) primary directive in a free society is to refrain from violating the rights of others. This is all well and good, but a society will not thrive on non-intervention alone. The libertarian society more than others, in fact, depends on self-discipline, an impulse for charity, and serious attention to moral education of one's children, among other disciplines.
These are important elements in the libertarian society, but libertarians are profoundly uncomfortable at judging bad behavior as such. That's for conservatives after all, and hey, aren't they the ones who get all uptight about porn? Live and let live, that's our motto, baby.
Libertarians in the area of morality are like corporations in the area of business ethics. Nobody believes them when they talk about the rules that should govern the game, because they are rarely willing to condemn bad behavior that is technically within the rules. Like corporate America, libertarians will begin to have moral authority when they are the first to condemn poor behavior.
The problem, of course, is that libertarians might be hard-pressed to admit that things like divorce, or making pornography, or propping one's children in front of the idiot box for hours on end, or failing to respect one's parents, etc., are examples of bad behavior. It is an even greater stretch to expect them to condemn it.
I think this reluctance to pronounce moral opprobrium on bad behavior results from a fear that behaviors labeled as immoral tend to be regulated by the state. The libertarian response to this reality seems to be to pretend that such behaviors really aren't so bad after all, or at least not nearly so bad as theft by taxation.
If it is true that defining behavior as bad inevitably leads to its regulation, then libertarians are in a quandary, because I think civil, productive, happy society depends on the recognition by a large majority of its population that some behaviors are bad, and their practitioners worthy of ostracism. If the libertarian position is that people cannot be trusted to hold these beliefs without yielding to the temptation to use government to enforce them on others, then it faces two seemingly intractable problems.
The first is that it places itself in the unwinnable situation of needing to convince various pluralities that behaviors like the aforementioned really aren't so bad, and thus unworthy of government intervention. The second is that in doing so it ends up advocating a society that will ultimately reject its suggested system of government, because a society filled with people who have few community norms beyond those of a college libertarian club is likely to disintegrate to the point that it falls prey to internal or external tyrants. Ayn Rand aside, selfish, godless people do not a good society make.
Note: As you might have noticed in the comments sections, there are several smart people with their own webpages who have responded to this collection of essays. They are worth reading. In a future post I'll take up some of their challenges.
Posted by Woodlief on November 19, 2002 at 07:47 AM
I have greatly enjoyed your essays on Libertarianism. You have articulated well, much of what I couldn't quite put my finger on, most of what I do not care for about libertarianism.
I have always had a streak of libertarianism, probably because I was a ward of the State of MD until I was 18, but I have always had a problem with the lack of authority that underlies most of theory that I am familiar with. Just because a person does not believe/practice a religious faith doesn't mean that that faith's moral code does not have something to contribute to the community, not matter the community's size. Having a predominately Baptist upbringing, I continue to have a strong sense of what is morally right & wrong even though I have not practiced in over 10 years.
I would like to suggest that maybe you review the concepts of hedonism & utilitarianism with regards to the concept of Libertarianism.
Regards,
Posted by: Thoth at November 19, 2002 10:09 AM
While I don't believe you meant to suggest this Tony, I feel compelled to point out that it isn't only religious libertarians who have moral codes and beliefs about civil society that go beyond non-intervention.
We all know libertarians who fit your description, and whose lifestyle does not help our cause. Many of them are wonderful people, kind and generous, and I'm pleased to be associated with them even though it may make winning certain battles more difficult in the long run.
Posted by: Amy at November 19, 2002 11:22 AM
Amy,
Good point -- I trapped myself by trying to address religion and community norms, and ended up revealing my own biased assumption that good behavior (beyond non-intervention -- child-rearing, charitable giving, taking care of the less fortunate, etc.) more often than not comes from people of genuine faith (as opposed to claimed faith). But of course people of faith don't have a monopoly on that market. Thanks for pointing that out.
Posted by: Tony at November 19, 2002 1:34 PM
Excellent essay Tony. As all four have been, but I liked this one best.
I posted in support of you, and expanded a little. It's a bit long for a comment, so I put the link here. Another post re: libertarianism here.
Posted by: Jeff Brokaw at November 19, 2002 2:15 PM
Tony, great essay. From now on, though, I will only post comments here, and not read the other comments. I think I my B/P may have gotten up to stroke level this weekend. I say again, keep up the good work.
Posted by: Llana at November 19, 2002 6:28 PM
Re Tony's IVth instalment, it seems to me that there's more at work in libertarianism than particular libertarians' relativistic or libertine reluctance to pass judgment against "lifestyles" and practices they oppose. There's a fundamental philosophical issue at stake, and libertarians sense it: If activity X is *bad,* then why should people be free to do it? At the risk of convicting myself of the simplistic binary thinking of which Julian accuses me (a little on that later), the answer can only be (a) because this bad activity, overall, produces something valuable; or (a1) forbidding this bad activity (and perhaps others like it, and perhaps throwing the whole arena of personal--or economic--conduct open to the vagaries of "democratic" politics) would produce worse consequences than banning the activity; or else (b) we have a right to do whatever we want, even if it's bad.
Now (a)-type options require actually knowing something about the world ("social science," in a broad sense), since otherwise the effects of banning and not banning the activity would be unknown. Most libertarians know only philosophy and versions of economics that don't tell them very much about the *real*, non-"model" world, esp. the world of politics; and what they think they know about the real world, esp. that of politics (e.g., public-choice theory), is usually misleading at best.
The ignorance of libertarians about the real world rules out any careful approach to arguing for (a) or (a1) (not that careless approaches aren't often attempted). And (b)-type options contain a conundrum that laymen are usually better equipped to detect than professional philosophers: why should one have a *right* to do what is *wrong*? Why should other people be free, as a matter of principle (that's what makes this b rather than a), to do what I perceive to be so horrible that it *should never be done in principle*?
(I wrote an unpublished paper on this that I guess I'll stick into a forthcoming issue of Critical Review once I'm sufficiently tired of the "there *must* be something wrong with this argument" referee reports I receive on it from the specialist political-philosophy journals!)
Faced with this conundrum, libertarians tend to fall back on (c): the behavior in question isn't really bad. (I.e., unlike in [a], it turns out that the activity in question isn't bad after all--so nothing to worry about.) An analogy: libertarians used to believe, and some still do, that libertarianism required a non-interventionist foreign policy. And inasmuch as it's undoubtedly true that "war is the health of the state," they were right--we won't have a tax-free, state-free society as long as we insist on wanting military security, sometimes purchased via warfare. So what does the libertarian do about this? Either (a) accept that a particular intervention (e.g., war with Iraq) could, in principle, produce good effects that would counterbalance the bad ones, such that the only way to oppose that intervention would be to acquire detailed empirical knowledge about why that principle doesn't apply in the case at hand; or (b) maintain that "states," like individuals (supposedly), have the "right" to do as they please, so no intervention is ever justified. Or, dissatisfied with these options, the libertarian might be tempted to turn toward (c): Saddam isn't so bad, he doesn't really have proto-nuke capacity, it's all a lie engineered by the CIA. I think this is analogous to libertarians insisting that the personal behavior libertarianism would allow cannot possibly be harmful.
When people start insisting that the empirical world (whether the effect of drug use or the weapons programs of Iraq) *must* be a certain way, a priori, even though such questions are by nature a posteriori, then you have a pretty good sign that something deeper in the person's ideology is forcing him to shove the real world into a Procrustean bed.
of course what I've said doesn't address Tony's point about religion. If I believe religion X is the right religion for everyone, and that infidels will burn in hell forever, and maybe that I'm commanded (normatively or divinely) to convert or wipe out infidels for that reason, why should liberalism/libertarianism forbid me from doing that? Either (a) because the effects might be dire--religious warfare on the order of 16th- & 17th-c. Europe; or the religion might be wrong and so the wrong way of life would be imposed on everyone; or else (b) everyone has a right to be religiously free--or else (c) who cares about religion, it's unimportant if not laughable?...
Liberalism, of which libertarianism/classical liberalism is a primitive version (one that failed to see that private property rights do not exhaust the philosophical impetus toward equal freedom that is the driving force behind liberalism), was born out of the same kind of violent religious struggle we now face, and the two routes open to the first liberals remain open to them, and to libertarians, now: consequentialist (the route taken by the French politiques) and deontological, roughly speaking (the route taken by the German mystics). (And then there's the alternative of religious intolerance, which is meta-ethically far easier to justify than either a-like or b-like versions of liberalism.) "We liberals" (including libertarians) are still dealing with our two-mindedness about these issues, which has merely been extended beyond religion to economics and everything else over the last 3 centuries.
As far as there being some subtle middle ground between consequentialism and nonconsequentialism, I'll believe it when I see it. But in the meantime, it seems to me that a social contract theory clearly privileges individual consent, hence individual freedom--unless it's a hypothetical contract (like Rawls's), where consent plays no actual role and individual freedom emerges not as a premise, but as a consequence of faulty reasoning on the part of the imagined contractors (who assume they'd rather want to be free to roast in hell by pursuing the wrong religion than be coerced into pursuing the right one). Even when you have the hypothetical contractors imagine the consequentially best outcomes, unless individual freedom isn't simply being privileged as a premise of the exercise, *the contractors' opinion* about the consequences, as opposed to the *true* consequences, of various social contracts that the contractors might conclude should be of no interest. All that should count is what contract people *should* conclude, so as to produce some good consequence (peace? salvation?), so we're back to consequentialism.
There is no philosopher's stone. But there are philosophers willing to devote their lives to not facing up squarely to the choices imposed on us to the extent that we have free will.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Friedman at November 20, 2002 8:37 AM
I think these posts and Jeff Friedman's response would be better titled: "What's Wrong With a Particular Kind of Atheistic, Hedonistic, Uncritically-Libertarian Libertarianism." I like both Jeff and Tony, but they're both picking fights - I think - with a kind of libertarian, but not libertarianism in general.
I do find it strange for political theorist Jeff Friedman to criticize libertarians for being ignorant of the real world.
Incidentally, if you want to read his article "What's Wrong with Libertarianism", click on the link, or visit Tom Palmer's website where you can see his article, and Tom's (mostly correct, I think) response.
Posted by: DC at November 20, 2002 10:01 AM
geez, dc, that's a nice ad hominem after your vague rejoinder. Vague: exactly what sort of libertarianism has escaped the net of Tony's and my criticisms? if the answer is consequentialist libertarianism, then I'd like to know what the consequentialist argument is that guarantees that libertarianism will always produce the best outcomes. Ad hominem: because I'm a political theorist, I must know nothing about the real world? I got my graduate degrees in history and political science depts. where I actually did learn about the real world (of politics, anyway). but please understand that when I say libs tend to know little about the real world, it's not a criticism of them. they do the best they can, like everyone else. they tend to study philosophy & econ b/c that's what previous libertarians who've inspired them have tended to write about. I would've done the same thing, but luckily I majored in philosophy at a school where that subject was so analytical (read: boring) that there was no way I could continue w/it in grad school; and i was too dogmatically Austrian to consider going to econ grad school (not to mention that I couldn't do the math!). as a result I inadvertently ended up learning about the real world (or so I like to think).
the only thing I do criticize is that Palmer et al. are so busy defending the received versions of libertarianism that they never mention that the point of the articles by me that they're bashing is that once the philosophical detritus is cleared away, knowledge of how politics works actually offers a plausible way to defend what anyone else out there would view as--libertarianism! All Palmer et al. see is my critique of the usual versions of libertarianism. Rather than welcoming an ally in political science, they castigate a traitor. I don't get it.
Posted by: jeff at November 20, 2002 1:06 PM
Jeff, I'm sorry for the ad hominem attack. I know you're extremely well read in the social sciences. I was chafing at your description (what I took to be an ad hominem attack) of libertarians as ignorant of the world, particularly when I think of various kinds of libertarians or fellow travelers who have done much to understand how the real world really works: Buchanan, Hayek, North, Vernon Smith, Gordon Tullock, Posner, Epstein, and so forth.
Posted by: dc at November 20, 2002 1:18 PM
My wind-laden response can be read here.
I think that a gradual easing into "community norms" would occur in a libertarian society as people freely shifted from one locale to another. They'd choose which micro-cultures they felt most comfortable in. While this would inevitably result in some friction, I don't believe it would be notable and it would fade down and out to a low level normal for any fluid society.
I think libertarians are just as likely as anyone else to judge something according to their values. However, I don't believe libertarians have a problem with worrying about being preceived as judgemental or conservative-like. Tony himself has mentioned the vociferous opposition to drug laws several times. You can count on that opposition on some social issues and you can really count on that opposition on economic issues. Libertarians regularly pop up in discussions on those topics.
Some things people would rather stay quiet about. It may have something to do with an inherent tendancy for individuals to not want to rock the boat and stir up controversy. I certainly don't think it's true that those who say little or nothing about behavior they believe is bad have a reduced moral authority.
Excellent essay! Probably my favorite out of the four so far.
Posted by: Charles Hueter at November 21, 2002 2:22 AM
