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Libertarianism as if (The Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Loren E. Lomasky
Loren E. Lomasky
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Bowling Green State University
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Extract

In this essay I wish to consider the implications for theory and practice of the following two propositions, either or both of which may be controversial, but which will here be assumed for the sake of argument:

(L) Libertarianism is the correct framework for political morality.

(M) The vast majority of our fellow citizens disbelieve (L).1

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 350 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1998

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References

1 The labels are mnemonic, indicating, respectively, the truth of the Libertarian credo and the rejection of this credo by the Majority of the citizenry.

2 See especially my Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

3 In the interest of full disclosure, I announce that my own view falls within such moderate libertarianism.

4 Robert Nozick's wonderful coinage; see his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).Google Scholar

5 It is, admittedly, a disputable question of metaphysics whether these “two” candidates are in fact numerically distinct.

6 I am serving, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, on a scholar's panel of the Commission on Civic Renewal co-chaired by William Bennett and Sam Nunn. At our initial meeting, one of the paper authors opined without a millimeter of tongue in cheek: “Most of the nation's political and opinion leaders seem bent upon a revival of old-fashioned laissezfaire at the national level.” This drew not a single demurral from my fellow panelists. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

7 My empirical data here about people's beliefs comes from trials I have conducted with my students. I admit that a population of Bowling Green State University undergraduates may not accurately represent the prevailing overall level of ignorance.

8 Locke might be so described, but on his account the divine will, insofar as it establishes the basic rights of persons, is not expressed in positive commands, but rather is read off the structure of the natural order.

9 As I understand their arguments, Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard fall within Aristotelian libertarianism. For Kantian libertarianism, see Hoppe, Hans-Hermann, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which it is argued that acknowledgment of the liberty rights of one's interlocutors is a necessary presupposition of discourse.

10 See, for example, the symposium on “The End of Democracy?” in the November 1996 issue of the Christian conservative journal First Things.

11 I discuss moral relativism at greater length in “Harman's Moral Relativism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 3 (Fall 1979), pp. 279–91.Google Scholar

12 I say technology to underscore the fact that these norms and practices must be created through skilled artifice rather than simply discovered as preexisting components of the natural order. Whether virtues are similarly dependent on conventional undertakings is a separate question. I am inclined to believe that some virtues can be genuinely natural to an extent that so-called natural law or natural rights cannot be.

13 Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar

14 Kant, Immanuel, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 112.Google Scholar

15 The contrast is from Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 That is not to say that a libertarianism that is not realized is impotent. It can serve as a beacon for seeing one's way through the moral mists with sufficient clarity to realize that we could lead better lives with our fellows under a regime of expansive liberty. As such, libertarianism can be a valuable object of study, advocacy, and inspiration. It also, as I argue below, yields significant implications concerning how one ought to act in venues at considerable distance from the libertarian desideratum.

17 See Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 54–58.Google Scholar

18 Unaccountably, Rawls denies this. See ibid., p. 243, n. 32.

19 See Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, What Is Property: An Enquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), p. 11.Google Scholar I have been unable to discover who originated “Taxation is theft.” In Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1971)Google Scholar, John Hospers refers to a pamphlet entitled “Taxation is Theft,” issued by the Society for Individual Liberty, Silver Springs, Maryland, but no publication date is indicated. Lysander Spooner is the spiritual ancestor of the locution, but he identifies taxation with robbery rather than theft in No Treason, No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870; reprint, Larkspur, CO: Pine Tree Press, 1966), p. 17.Google Scholar It is mysterious why the equation with theft has won out in contemporary libertarian circles; Spooner's phrasing makes the point more effectively.

20 Thus the characterization of crime as a wrong done not only to the individual victim but to the people.

21 Compare with Susan Brownmiller's claim that “from prehistoric times to the present … rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Brownmiller, , Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p. 15 (emphasis in the original). She does not say that many/most men are beneficiaries, direct or otherwise, from violent sexual impositions on women. Nor does she maintain that all heterosexual intercourse resembles rape in relevant respects, nor even that all heterosexual intercourse is morally defective for reasons that correspond to those rendering rape morally defective. These latter claims are merely far-fetched and eminently disputable. But what she actually maintains is dumbfoundingly preposterous — moreover, preposterous in a way that announces a relation of hostility to all men and, perhaps, to all women whose coital practices she disapproves. This is not, I believe, an example that ought to commend itself to libertarians.Google Scholar

22 Polls have revealed that a majority of those in their thirties and younger believe that Social Security will not be there for them when they retire. Nonetheless, they have not shown themselves to be politically mobilizable in opposition to the system. I explore why that might be so in “Is Social Security Politically Untouchable?” Cato Journal, vol. 5 (1985), pp. 157–75.Google Scholar

23 George Will writes on this issue with an eloquence and passion rarely matched in his oeuvre.

24 For a discussion of expressive ethics, see Brennan, Geoffrey and Lomasky, Loren, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Toward a Democratic Morality.”

25 Or almost period. May I, as a cooperative libertarian, camouflage my views and take a job as a Drug Enforcement Agency employee so as to be able to sabotage its efforts from within? To do so is extremely dangerous, not only in the personal sense that if one were detected the consequences for one's well-being would be severe, but also in the sense that it puts one perilously close to abandoning the cooperative camp for the rejectionist one. Perhaps, though, it is possible to be a rejectionist in one limited sphere while otherwise being a cooperator. These are difficult and important issues that deserve more consideration than I can lend them here.

26 The candidate was Harry Browne, author of a book entitled How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (New York: Macmillan, 1973).Google Scholar