Monday, June 03, 2019
The Unfortunate Abuse of the libertarian Ethic
The lower case "L" isn't a typo.
Libertarianism holds that individual liberty is the highest political value. That is, political decisions must first of all promote individual rights, the conditions needed for self-responsible individuals to flourish.* If advanced human civilization has a future, it will be a libertarian one; only the libertarian ethic provides the freedom required for peaceful relations among people who think for themselves (and thus differ) and for an economy in which everyone can be well off. In the past I've lamented the abuse of the libertarian principle, including treating it as a complete ethic. Today's American Thinker brings home just how awry things can go.
In a very thoughtful piece, American Thinker's Taylor Lewis analyzes a debate between Sohrab Amhari and David French. Amhari and Lewis identify French as a classical liberal, which I think is roughly correct (roughly), and French agrees. French's response to Amhari is excellent and, I think, devastating... but that's because Amhari picked the wrong target. If Amhari wanted to make sense, he should have highlighted those "libertarians" like Bryan Caplan who declare "You Have No Right to Your Culture," or Horwitz and Mangu-Ward in their insistence that libertarianism is a complete ethic, or best (i.e. worst) of all, the utterly mad Ethics of Liberty of Murray Rothbard (read Chapter 14 if you doubt "madness"). These are examples of the doctrine that people who believe in freedom can be simpatico with the radical left. (In Rothbard's defense, he'd likely have despised contemporary leftists and said so. He was nothing if not contrarian.)
There's something deeply wrong with treating libertarianism as a complete ethical system: it isn't. Libertarianism is really about respecting individual rights, and nothing more. That's important and enough for a political philosophy, but it's hardly a complete prescription for everything right and wrong, or for how to live. Should you worship? And if so, who or what? How many spouses should you have, if any, and should you be faithful to them? Should you have one mate, or breed with every possible person (or animal) you can find? Or suppose you have an extremely addictive drug that is also harmful, e.g. meth. Should you sell it to someone, after explaining to them the harm it will ultimately do them? And how about if the potential "customer" is five years old? The theory of rights can't answer whether these questions. They don't involve violation of others' rights, but that doesn't mean any answer is as good as another.
Or consider this: you find someone's lost wallet on the street. What should you do? Leave it lying there? Keep it? Take money and return the rest? Send it back intact? Send it back after adding an extra $100? I think you should send it back intact, but not because of a libertarian strict respect for individual rights, but rather because of what Adam Smith called empathy, Jesus' "Golden Rule." There's simply a lot more to ethics than "don't violate rights." In other words, libertarianism is a proper subset of ethics.
One of the galling stupidities of contemporary libertarians is to treat libertarianism as if it is a complete ethic. It isn't. It does define the limits to force, i.e. violence, and thus to the legitimate power of the state.
So this brings us to the question posed in Taylor's title: "Can Conservatives Afford to Be Nice Anymore?" Classical liberalism is not a matter of being nice. And it's not a matter of being sympathetic to bad or immoral choices that people make. Rather, it's a matter of respecting peoples' rights to make their own decisions, so long as they violate no one else's rights, even if their decisions are stupid or self-destructive. And if people propose terrible ideas that would destroy liberty and impose tyranny, we must defend their freedom to utter such ideas, as French argues. And should they ever try to impose them on us, we need to utterly crush them. That's the germ of truth in Amhari's essay. And meanwhile, we should campaign hard (peacefully) to reverse the intellectual and moral degeneracy of the left.
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*Non-self-responsible individuals cannot flourish.
