[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Is libertarianism a faith position?

[Terry W. Colvin]

[This, though long, sums up a lot of personal reservations about

libertarianism I have long had. What I personally appreciate is that 
Leser actually takes such subjects up: it's a relief to read this 
exposition rather than being told that one is 'stupid' or 'recalcitrant' 
for seriously questioning such suppositions. And I personally do think 
that skeptics should apply themselves to examining the pretexts of 
libertarianism as much as they do any other world-view that ultimately 
puts a lot of emphasis on assumption and faith.][J.H.]

by Edward Leser [edited and abridged]

Libertarianism is usually defined as the view in political philosophy 
that the only legitimate function of a government is to protect its 
citizens from force, fraud, theft, and breach of contract, and that it 
otherwise ought not to interfere with its citizens dealings with one 
another, either to make them more economically equal or to make them 
more morally virtuous. Most libertarian theorists emphasize that their 
position is not intended to be a complete system of ethics, but merely a 
doctrine about the proper scope of state power: their claim is not that 
either egalitarian views about the distribution of wealth or traditional 
attitudes about sexuality, drug use, and the like are necessarily 
incorrect, but only that such moral views ought not to guide public 
policy. A libertarian society is in their view compatible with any 
particular moral or religious outlook one might be committed to, and 
this is taken to be one of its great strengths: people of all 
persuasions in a pluralistic society can have reason to support a 
libertarian polity, precisely because it does not favor any particular 
persuasion over another. A libertarian society is, it is claimed, 
genuinely neutral between diverse moral and religious worldviews.

It simply isn't true that libertarianism is neutral between various 
moral and religious worldviews, notwithstanding that most libertarians 
would like to believe (indeed do believe) that it is. The reason, as it 
turns out, is that there is no such thing as libertarianism in the first 
place: it would be more accurate to speak in the plural of 
libertarianisms, a variety of doctrines each often described as 
libertarian, but having no common core, and each of which tends in 
either theory or practice to favor some moral worldviews to the 
exclusion of others. It also turns out that the illusion that there is 
such a thing as libertarianism -- a basic set of beliefs and values that 
all so-called libertarians have in common -- is the source of the 
illusion that a libertarian society would be a truly neutral one. When 
one gets clear on exactly which version of libertarianism one is talking 
about, it will be seen that what one is talking about is a doctrine with 
substantial moral commitments, commitments which cannot fail to promote 
some worldviews and to push others into the margins of social life.

To see that this is so, we need only look at some specific and 
paradigmatic examples of libertarian political theories, and there is no 
more appropriate place to start than at the beginning, with the early 
classical liberal (as opposed to modern, egalitarian liberal) political 
thinkers whom libertarians typically regard as their intellectual 
forebears. Take John Locke (1632-1704), who famously argued that the 
primary function of a government was to protect the property rights of 
its citizens, with the most fundamental property right being that of 
self-ownership. That we own ourselves entails, in Lockes view, that we 
own our labor and its fruits, and this in turn entails that we can (with 
certain qualifications) come to own whatever previously unowned natural 
resources we mix our labor with. Self-ownership thus grounds the right 
to private property, and with it the basic rights that determine the 
proper scope and functions of state power.

But what grounds the right of self-ownership itself? The answer, 
according to Locke, was that it derives from *God*. How? God, being the 
creator of everything that exists other than Himself including us is the 
ultimate owner of everything that exists including us. Therefore, when a 
person harms another person by killing him, stealing from him, and so 
forth, he in effect violates the rights of God, because he damages what 
is God's property. To respect God's rights over us, therefore, we must 
recognize our duty not to kill, harm, or steal from each other, which 
entails treating each other as having certain rights relative to each 
other the rights to life, liberty, and property. And these rights can 
usefully be summed up as rights of self-ownership. But ultimately, as it 
turns out, we dont really own ourselves: *God does*. Relative to Him, we 
are merely leasing ourselves, as it were, and are accountable to Him for 
how we use His property. Relative to other human beings, however, we are 
in effect self-owners; we must treat others as if they owned themselves, 
and not use them as if they were our property.

That Lockes version of classical liberalism favors a decidedly religious 
social order should be obvious. Of course, Locke is also famous for 
promoting the idea of religious toleration, and would vehemently reject 
the suggestion that any particular denomination or its teachings ought 
to be promoted by government. But Locke was nevertheless very far in his 
thinking from the interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of 
church and state favored by the ACLU. For he also held that toleration 
cannot be extended to atheists, precisely because their denial of the 
existence of God amounted, in his view, to the denial of the very 
foundations of the moral order in general, and the classical liberal 
political order in particular. In Locke's estimation, if the suggestion 
that liberalism entails a right of toleration of atheism isnt exactly a 
self-contradiction, it will do until the real thing comes along; for the 
existence of any rights at all presupposes the falsity of atheism.

Whatever one thinks of their ultimate defensibility, Lockes position 
does at least arguably form a coherent and systematic whole; and, more 
to the present point, it quite obviously is not, and does not pretend to 
be, consistent with any claim to neutrality between all moral and 
religious worldviews.

This commitment to a particular moral view of the world was typical of 
the early classical liberals. Adam Smith (1723-1790) favored modern 
liberal capitalist society precisely because of what he took to be its 
moral advantages: it provided an unprecedented degree of material 
well-being for the masses, and it promoted such bourgeois virtues as 
sobriety, moderation, and diligence. Moreover, because in Smith's view 
capitalist society failed to promote certain other virtues (namely 
martial and aristocratic ones), and even tended positively to undermine 
some of them (insofar as consumerism and the hyper-specialization 
entailed by the division of labor oriented mens minds away from 
learning), there was an urgent need for government to foster 
institutions outside the market -- a professional military and publicly 
financed education, for example -- that would make up for its 
deficiencies.

It ought not to be supposed that the moralism of these early classical 
liberals was merely an artifact of their having written in a less 
secularist age. Indeed, one finds many of the same themes in their 
recent successors. F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) was perhaps the foremost 
champion of the free society and the market economy in the 20th century. 
He was also firmly committed to the proposition that market society has 
certain moral presuppositions that can only be preserved through the 
power of social stigma. In his later work especially, he made it clear 
that these presuppositions concern the sanctity of property and of the 
family, protected by traditional moral rules which restrain our natural 
impulses and tell us that you must neither wish to possess any woman you 
see, nor wish to possess any material goods you see.

Among the benefits of religious belief in Hayek's view is its 
strengthening [of] respect for marriage, its enforcement of stricter 
observance of rules of sexual morality among both married and unmarried, 
and its creation of a socially beneficial taboo against the taking of 
another's property. Indeed, though he was personally an agnostic, Hayek 
held that the value of religion for shoring up the moral presuppositions 
of a free society cannot be overestimated:

'We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, 
particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions 
have been preserved and transmitted If we bear these things in mind, we 
can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have 
become somewhat sceptical of the validity of some of their teachings and 
who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith 
would lead to a decline in morals. No doubt they were right.'

For these reasons, Hayek, though like Locke a great defender of the 
classical liberal belief in toleration of diverse moral and religious 
points of view, also held that such toleration must have its limits if a 
free society is to maintain itself, as the following passages 
illustrate:

'I doubt whether any moral rule could be preserved without the exclusion 
of those who regularly infringe it from decent company or even without 
people not allowing their children to mix with those who have bad 
manners. It is by the separation of groups and their distinctive 
principles of admission to them that sanctions of moral behavior 
operate.'

It is not by conceding a right to equal concern and respect to those who 
break the code that civilization is maintained. Nor can we, for the 
purpose of maintaining our society, accept all moral beliefs which are 
held with equal conviction as morally legitimate, and recognize a right 
to blood feud or infanticide or even theft, or any other moral beliefs 
contrary to those on which the working of our society rests. For the 
science of anthropology, all cultures or morals may be equally good, but 
we maintain our society by treating others as less so:

'Morals must be restraints on complete freedom, they must determine what 
is permissible and what not. [T]he difficulties begin when we ask 
whether tolerance requires that we permit in our community the 
observance of a wholly different system of morals, even if a person does 
so entirely consistently and conscientiously. I am afraid I rather doubt 
whether we can tolerate a wholly different system of morals within our 
community, although it is no concern of ours what moral rules some other 
community obeys internally. I am afraid that there must be limits even 
to tolerance.'

It is significant that Hayek's view was as conservative and moralistic 
as it was despite its not being, like Locke's view, based on theological 
premises or even on the notion of natural rights. And as might be 
expected, contemporary natural rights theories have a tendency to imply 
no less conservative a moralism. To be sure, Robert Nozick (1938-2002), 
the most influential proponent of natural rights libertarianism in 
recent political philosophy, was no conservative, and was also a 
proponent of the idea that libertarianism is neutral between moral and 
religious worldviews. Indeed, given that his predecessors included 
people like Locke, Smith, and Hayek, Nozick might even have the 
distinction of being the first major classical liberal or libertarian 
theorist to suggest such a thing. The trouble is, Nozick is also 
notoriously unclear about where natural rights, and in particular the 
right of self-ownership, come from. But surely what we take to be the 
source of rights cannot fail to imply, as it does in Locke, a specific 
moral view of the world. So if Nozick's position seems to allow for 
neutrality between all worldviews, this is arguably precisely because he 
is so vague about the grounds of natural rights.

The history of recent libertarian theorizing about natural rights only 
confirms this suspicion, in my view. From the work of Ayn Rand 
(1905-1982) onward, such theorizing has been dominated by 
Aristotelianism, and in particular by some version or other of the idea 
that natural rights are ultimately to be grounded in the sort of natural 
end or purpose that Aristotle held all human beings to have. Now 
sometimes libertarian theorists try to cash out the idea of a natural 
end in only the thinnest of terms -- in Rand's case, in terms of the 
need to survive as a rational being. Notoriously, however, such an 
approach fails plausibly to yield a distinctively libertarian conception 
of rights: one might need some sort of rights in order to survive, but 
it is hard to see why one would need the extremely strong rights to 
liberty and private property (rights strong enough to rule out an 
egalitarian redistribution of wealth, say) libertarians want to affirm. 
So to make this sort of attempt to justify a libertarian conception of 
natural rights work, the libertarian needs to appeal to a much thicker 
conception of the natural end or purpose human beings have. In that 
case, though, it is very hard to see how anyone committed to this sort 
of approach can consistently avoid committing himself also to the very 
conservative moral views Aristotelian natural end theories are usually 
thought to entail, especially when worked out systematically after the 
manner of St. Thomas Aquinas and other natural law theorists.

So far my examples have all been cases where the failure of 
libertarianism to be neutral between all the moral and religious 
worldviews that exist within a modern pluralistic society involves a 
bias in favor of decidedly conservative points of view. Do I mean to 
imply, then, that all versions of libertarianism entail moral 
conservatism? By no means. Some versions in fact entail exactly the 
opposite; and in this very different way, they too fail to be neutral 
between moral and religious points of view.

Many libertarian theorists eschew any suggestion that rights are 
natural, and with it any appeal to God or human nature as the source of 
rights. They take our rights to be in some way artificial historically 
contingent conventions, say, or the products of some kind of social 
contract. The latter approach is an application to the defense of 
libertarianism of a view in moral theory sometimes called 
contractarianism, which holds that moral obligations in general and 
rights in particular can only be grounded in a kind of implicit 
agreement between all the members of society. Contrary to Locke, who 
held that our rights, being natural, pre-exist and put absolute 
conditions on any contract that can be made between human beings, the 
contractarian view is that rights only come into existence after, and as 
a result of, a social contract, and that their content is determined by 
the details of the contract. Libertarian contractarians argue that the 
details of such a social contract, when rightly understood, will be seen 
to entail libertarianism.

Now since any such contract can only ever be purely hypothetical (the 
claim is not that we literally have ever made or could make such an 
agreement), the contractarian approach raises all sorts of philosophical 
questions. Moreover, the claim that the details of the contract would 
favor libertarianism is by no means uncontroversial. (The 
non-libertarian Rawls, after all, also appeals to a kind of social 
contract theory.) But since the libertarian social contract theorist 
typically denies that there is any robust conception of human nature 
which can plausibly determine the content of morality, and typically 
characterizes what he regards as a rational party to the social contract 
as refusing to agree to any rule that he does not personally see as in 
his self-interest (where his self-interest is typically defined in terms 
of whatever desires or preferences he actually happens to have), it is 
easy to see how conservative moral views are going to be ruled out as 
indefensible from a contractarian point of view: not all parties to the 
social contract will agree to them, and so they cannot be regarded as 
morally binding.

Utilitarianism is another moral theory libertarians have sometimes 
appealed to in defense of their position. This is, to oversimplify, the 
view that what is morally required is whatever promotes the best 
consequences, where this is usually understood to entail maximizing the 
satisfaction of individual desires or preferences. Here too, whether 
either utilitarianism as a general moral philosophy or the strategy of 
using it to defend libertarianism in particular is defensible are 
matters of great controversy. But just as utilitarianism in general 
tends to be radically unconservative (as it is in the work of Peter 
Singer, perhaps the best known contemporary utilitarian) so too is it 
when applied to a defense of libertarianism. For any view that appeals 
merely to what people happen in fact to desire or prefer without asking, 
after the fashion of Aristotelianism or natural law theory, what desires 
or preferences we ought to have given our nature is bound not to sit 
well with the conservative moralist's tendency to see certain kinds of 
desires and preferences as intrinsically disordered and immoral, so that 
there can be no question of maximizing their satisfaction.

Of course, the expression utilitarian is sometimes used by libertarians 
in a much looser way, to refer, not to utilitarianism as a general moral 
philosophy, but merely to a defense of libertarianism which emphasizes 
certain practical economic benefits of the free market, such as its 
ability to generate wealth and technological innovation. Now by itself, 
this sort of economic approach doesn't count as a complete defense of 
libertarianism, since many egalitarian liberals and non-libertarian 
conservatives would acknowledge these benefits of the market but deny 
that such considerations address all their concerns, such as moral ones. 
But there is a tendency among some economics-oriented defenders of 
libertarianism to go well beyond this modest appeal to what are 
generally recognized to be economic considerations -- a tendency to try 
to analyze all human behavior and social institutions in economic terms, 
and thereby to reduce all considerations to purely economic ones. At its 
most extreme, the results are artifacts like Richard Posner's book 'Sex 
and Reason', which attempts to account for all human sexual behavior in 
terms of perceived costs and benefits.

Now many of those committed to the sorts of unconservative versions of 
libertarianism Ive just described would insist that their position 
really is neutral between moral worldviews, since they would not 
advocate keeping those with conservative sensibilities from living in 
accordance with their views or expressing them in public. But this 
misses the point. For the versions of libertarianism described in the 
last section do not treat conservative views as truly moral views at 
all; they treat them instead as mere prejudices: at best matters of 
taste, like one's preference for this or that flavor of ice cream, and 
at worst rank superstitions that pose a constant danger of leading those 
holding them to try to restrict the freedoms of those practicing 
non-traditional lifestyles. Libertarians of the contractarian, 
utilitarian, or economistic bent must therefore treat the conservative 
the way the egalitarian liberal treats the racist, i.e., as someone who 
can be permitted to hold and practice his views, but only provided he 
and his views are widely regarded as of the crackpot variety. Just as 
the Lockean, Smithian, Hayekian, and Aristotelian versions of 
libertarianism entail a social marginalization of those who flout 
bourgeois moral standards, so too do these unconservative versions of 
libertarianism entail a social marginalization of those who defend 
bourgeois moral standards. Neither kind of libertarianism is truly 
neutral between moral worldviews.

There are two dramatic consequences of this difference between these 
kinds of libertarianism. The first is that a society self-consciously 
guided by principles of the Lockean, Smithian, Hayekian, or Aristotelian 
sort will, obviously, be a society of a generally conservative 
character, while a society self-consciously guided by principles of a 
contractarian, utilitarian, or economistic sort will, equally obviously, 
be a society of a generally anti-conservative character. The point is 
not that the former sort of society will explicitly outlaw bohemian 
behavior or that the latter will explicitly outlaw conservative 
behavior. The point is rather that the former sort of society is bound 
to be one in which the bohemian is going to feel out of place, while the 
latter is one in which the conservative is going to feel out of place. 
In either case, there will of course be enclaves here and there where 
the outsider will find those of like mind. But someone is inevitably 
going to get pushed into the cultural catacombs. In no case is a 
libertarian society going to be genuinely neutral between all the points 
of view represented within it.

The second dramatic consequence is that there are also bound to be 
differences in the public policy recommendations made by the different 
versions of libertarianism. Take, for example, the issue of abortion. 
Those whose libertarianism is grounded in Lockean, Aristotelian, or 
Hayekian thinking are far more likely to take a conservative line on the 
matter. To be sure, there are plenty of pro-choice libertarians 
influenced by Hayek. But by far most of these libertarians are 
(certainly in my experience anyway) inclined to accept Hayek's economic 
views while soft-pedaling or even dismissing the Burkean traditionalist 
foundations he gave for his overall social theory. Those who endorse the 
latter, however, are going to be hard-pressed not to be at least 
suspicious of the standard moral and legal arguments offered in defense 
of abortion. Even more clearly, libertarians of a Lockean or 
Aristotelian-natural law bent are going to have strong grounds for 
regarding abortion as no less a violation of individual rights than is 
the murder of a man, woman, or child: a fetus is no less God's property 
than is a child or adult; and on the standard Aristotelian-natural law 
view, the fetus is fully human not a potential human being, but rather a 
human being which hasn't yet fulfilled all its potentials and thus has 
all the rights that any other human being has.

By contrast, libertarians influenced by contractarianism are very 
unlikely to oppose abortion, because fetuses cannot plausibly be counted 
as parties to the social contract that could provide the only grounds 
for a prohibition on killing them. Utilitarianism and economism too 
would provide no plausible grounds for a prohibition on abortion, since 
fetuses would seem to have no preferences or desires which could be 
factored into our calculations of how best to maximize the satisfaction 
of such preferences or desires.

There are also bound to be differences over the question of same-sex 
marriage. From a natural rights perspective, whether Lockean or 
Aristotelian, it is hard to see how the demand for a right to same-sex 
marriage can be justified. For if there is a natural right to marriage, 
then marriage must be a natural institution; and the standard defense of 
marriage as a natural institution appeals to the idea that it is has a 
natural function, namely procreation, which entails in turn that it is 
inherently heterosexual. Nor can a Hayekian analysis of social 
institutions fail to imply anything but skepticism about the case for 
same-sex marriage. Hayek's position was that traditional moral rules, 
especially when connected to institutions as fundamental as the family 
and found nearly universally in human cultures, should be tampered with 
only with the most extreme caution. The burden of proof is always on the 
innovator rather than the traditionalist, whether or not the 
traditionalist can justify his conservatism to the innovators 
satisfaction; and change can be justified only by showing that the rule 
the innovator wants to abandon is in outright contradiction to some 
other fundamental traditional rule. But that there is any contradiction 
in this case is simply implausible, especially when one considers the 
traditional natural law understanding of marriage sketched above.

On the other hand, it is easy to see how contractarianism, 
utilitarianism, and economism might be thought to justify same-sex 
marriage. If the actual desires or preferences of individuals are all 
that matter, and some of those individuals desire or prefer to set up a 
partnership with someone of the same sex and call it marriage, then 
there can be no moral objection to their doing so.

If these different versions of libertarianism differ so radically in 
terms of their justifying grounds and implications, why are they usually 
regarded as variations of the same doctrine? And why are they so 
commonly held to be neutral between various moral and religious 
worldviews if, as I have tried to show, they clearly are not? The answer 
to both questions, I think, is that all these versions of libertarianism 
are often thought, erroneously, to be committed fundamentally to the 
value of freedom: they are versions of libertarianism, after all, so 
liberty or freedom would seem to be their common core, and this might 
seem to include the freedom of every person to follow whatever moral or 
religious view he likes. But in fact none of these doctrines takes 
liberty or freedom to be fundamental. What is taken to be fundamental is 
rather natural rights, or tradition, or a social contract, or utility, 
or efficiency; freedom falls out only as a consequence of the 
libertarians more basic commitment to one of these other values, and the 
content of that freedom differs radically depending on precisely which 
of these fundamental values he is committed to. For the 
Aristotelian-natural law theorist, freedom includes not only freedom 
from excessive state power, but also freedom from those moral vices 
which prevent the realization of our natural end; for the contractarian 
or utilitarian, however, freedom may well include freedom from the very 
concepts of moral vice and natural ends. Freedom would also entail for 
the latter the right to commit suicide, while for the Lockean, there can 
be no such right, since suicide would itself violate the rights of the 
God who created and owns us.

This difference in the understanding of freedom has its parallel in a 
difference in what we might call the tone in which various libertarians 
assert the right of self-ownership. In the mouth of some libertarians, 
what self-ownership is fundamentally about is something like this: Other 
human beings have an intrinsic dignity and moral value, and this entails 
a duty on my part not to use them as means to my own ends; I therefore 
have no right to the fruits of another man's labor. In the mouths of 
other libertarians, what it means is, at bottom, rather this: I can do 
whatever what I want to do, as long as I let everyone else do what they 
want to do too; there are no grounds for preventing any of us from 
doing, in general, what we want to do. The first view expresses an 
attitude of deference, the second an attitude of self-assertion; the 
first reflects a commitment to strong moral realism and a rich 
conception of human nature, the second a thin conception of human nature 
and a tendency toward moral minimalism or even moral skepticism. And the 
first, I would submit, is more characteristic of libertarians of a 
Lockean, Hayekian, or Aristotelian bent, while the latter is more 
typical of libertarians influenced by contractarianism, utilitarianism, 
or economism.

It is sometimes said that contemporary conservatism is an uneasy 
alliance between libertarians and traditionalists, and that this 
alliance is destined eventually to collapse due to the inherent conflict 
between the two philosophies. But it can with equal or even greater 
plausibility be argued that it is in fact contemporary libertarianism 
which comprises an uneasy alliance, an association between incompatible 
factions committed to very different conceptions of freedom. **The 
trouble with libertarianism is that many of its adherents have for too 
long labored under the illusion that things are otherwise, that their 
creed is a single unified political philosophy that does not, and need 
not, take a stand on the most contentious moral issues dividing 
contemporary society.** This has led to confusion both at the level of 
theory and at the level of policy. Libertarians need to get clear about 
exactly what they believe and why. And when they do, they might find 
that their particular version of libertarianism commits them or ought to 
commit them to regard as rivals those they might once have considered 
allies.

Edward Feser (edwardfeser at hotmail.com) is the author of On Nozick 
(Wadsworth, 2003).


-- 

Paul W Harrison, TESL



-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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