Tag: Libertarianism

Darwinian Politics

Paul H. Rubin’s Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom is a fine introduction to the sociobiology of politics. Rubin is a self-identified libertarian but he makes a serious attempt to avoid dogmatism and consider evidence that points in the opposite direction. For example, on the issue of personal freedom his research forced him to qualify his views about government regulation of personal behavior. In most other aspects, he believes that knowledge of evolutionary psychology can help us in recognizing irrational and wealth-destroying ancestral thinking and conduct. To what extent such recognition can alter our behavior is not a topic he discusses in much detail. In some cases, he seems to be of the opinion that there are general human traits that are so “hardwired” that it would be futile for politicians to go against them, but in other cases he seems to lament the persistence of other hardwired human traits in our modern society. I suspect that, ultimately, where one locates oneself in such debates is itself influenced by ideology, which presents some non-trivial challenges in drawing normative conclusions from sociobiology.

The main thesis of the book is that humans have spent most of their existence in small groups of hunter gatherers and our thinking and conduct concerning economical and political matters is greatly shaped (and constrained) by this.  Most of the chapters are aimed at working out the implications of this for various issues, ranging from conflicts between groups to the politics of envy.

Rubin is not a friend of social contract / state of nature theorizing. He not only believes that contractarianism provides little guidance about the State and politics in the real world, but that the social contract metaphor itself is harmful because it suggests that humans have more freedom in choosing the rules and institutions of their society than they actually have (and can have). He draws an interesting analogy to this view and the Standard Social Science Model (and its political offspring, Marxism) in which human psychology is basically a blank slate. He writes, “if real policies are based on false constructions, then real suffering may ensue.”

One of the strongest sections in the book is where Rubin explains why evolution is not incompatible with individual or group differences. His argument draws upon evolutionary game theory in demonstrating why we would expect individuals who employ different “strategies” to be present in varying proportions in the population, including a small proportion of sociopaths. It would be reasonable to conclude from this that different character traits give rise to different kinds of political beliefs, and that we should expect a permanent “war” between these various types of people. Rubin, however, does not pursue this line of thought and focuses on how general evolved human traits may conflict with rational decision making and welfare maximization.

He devotes a whole chapter to group conflict and this chapter is by far the least exciting because he rather uncritically adopts the outlook of progressive economists.  Rubin puts a lot of emphasis on the observation that individuals can be part of, and can identify with, all kinds of groups. There is little discussion, however, of the degree to which this behavior persists in decision making about personal and political matters. The author is correct that prejudiced consumers and producers decrease the economic gains available to them but he does not discuss cases where “discrimination” can contribute to economic welfare or safety. He also seems to treat the Western economy as a given and does not consider the possibility that (rapid) demographic changes can alter the popularity and functioning of a free market itself. This individualist position should be well known to libertarians (especially of the Objectivist variety) but the question of how a society of (secular) individualists should deal with internal and external threats of more collectivist groups of people is ignored in this context. He is a staunch opponent of affirmative action, however, because it strengthens ethnic identity politics and is extremely dangerous.

In the chapter on altruism, cooperation, and sharing I feel that the evolutionary perspective runs into limits. To some people, evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of just-so stories that allows for the (permanent) co-existence of competing theories and normative conclusions. Rubin thinks that a roughly utilitarian position is implied by human evolution, as opposed to Rawlsian income distribution or Marxism because the latter positions embrace views of human justice that are not compatible with human evolution. He counters the criticism that utilitarianism leads to undesirable implications if carried to its logical extremes by pointing out that such preferences would not have been fitness maximizing, which is an interesting evolutionary take on “rationalist” academic philosophy. This chapter is perhaps the most interesting for his exposition of the debate about the existence of altruism and whether it can be explained without resorting to group selection.

Rubin discusses the existence of envy in some detail and this is the topic where our evolved psychology seems to be highly incompatible with the characteristics of free market economies, in which economic transactions benefit both parties and the gains of the rich do not come at the expense of the poor. It should not be surprising, however, that most humans (including intellectuals) cannot distinguish between, what he calls, dominance hierarchies and productive hierarchies. As a consequence, people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that the wealthy people do not exercise power. In his discussion of political power, he returns to this topic when he notes that this failure to distinguish between economic success and political power leads many people to believe that government can be a countervailing power instead of a substitution of coercion for mutual benefit.

The author attributes the existence of religion to a form of enlightened anthropomorphism that also allows humans to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemma situations. He attributes the popularity of religions like Christianity and Islam to their universal non-ethnic nature. Unfortunately, the author does not treat the topic of how rising secularism in the Western world will affect such conventions about cooperation and altruism in much detail. In the same chapter, he also discusses a form of competition called “handicap competition,” in which humans engage in self-harming behavior to signal their superior fitness. The author does not draw this link but it is intriguing to think that a lot of the obligatory self-loathing that progressive intellectuals display in discussions about multiculturalism is actually a means to signal their superiority instead of an actual attempt to reduce their own power.

The chapter about how humans make political decisions is quite interesting for libertarians, and those of the anti-political variety in particular, because it documents in some detail how our inherited political conduct is mostly irrelevant and ineffective in today’s world. In particular, we vastly overestimate the importance of our own political views and behavior. As the author notes, “given the vanishingly small probability that a single vote will influence the outcome of an election, there is no reason for people to vote at all.” One important consequence of this is that individuals have a much greater incentive to make rational decisions as consumers than as voters. In politics, ancient zero-sum views on economic issues and envy persist. As such, Rubin provides an evolutionary explanation for the economic populism and political failure that the economist Bryan Caplan identified in his groundbreaking book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. In a sense, this indictment of mass politics as such is more radical than the political anti-statism that informs contemporary rights-based libertarianism.

One of the most interesting and far-reaching discussions in the book concerns the contrast between the study of rationality by behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists on the one hand, and evolutionary psychologists on the other. It has become quite trendy to document and highlight all kinds of cognitive biases, but Rubin contrasts this field with the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, who has shown that if problems are presented in a way that tracks our evolved abilities, respondents are much more likely to give the right answer. Rubin then gives a number of examples of cognitive bias and explores their evolutionary basis. Sadly, it seems that no matter how one defines rationality, it looks like most political activity remains irrational, wasteful, and divisive in today’s world.

The book ends with some analytic and policy implications of the materials presented in the preceding chapters. He basically restates his preference for limited government, against confiscatory income redistribution, and for more liberal immigration policies. Aside from the fact that the author seems to take the orthodox rationale for government as the preferred provider of public goods for granted (at least in this book), one would expect an evolutionary utilitarian such as Rubin to end on a more critical note about democracy, universal suffrage, and its effects on welfare. Otherwise, Darwinian Politics is an important book that warrants careful study and contains a lot of interesting ideas and references.

Pattern junkies and the financial meltdown

In an opinion piece for Forbes, legal scholar Richard A. Epstein draws attention to the political philosophical aspects of the financial meltdown:

Fannie and Freddie didn’t design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the “patterned principles” of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully in his 1974 masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Public policy makers attribute goals to society and look at its institutions, and ultimately people, as means to produce them. Such a teleological mindset stands in strong contrast to “historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes.”

Whether “fairness” in the mortgage market or the creation of an “ownership society” is the goal, the underlying premise of society as collective enterprise towards “shared” goals is bound to create winners and losers and unintended consequences (which require additional interventions and so forth).

Epstein’s characterization of Congress as a  “pattern junkie” is very much to the point because, as a general rule, politicians cannot resist the siren song of using the coercive power of the state to overturn contract and spontaneous cooperation. As Anthony de Jasay points out in his treatise on political power The State, not intervening would require that the state has ends that lie beyond politics:

It seems anomalous if not self-contradictory for the state both to have a will and to want to minimize itself. For this to be rational, its ends must lie beyond politics, and be unattainable through governing.

Rights: nonsensical, empirical and hypothetical

If there is one thing that characterizes contemporary political discourse, and contemporary political liberalism in particular, it is the obsession with “rights.” Individual rights are absolute, or “trumps,” that do not permit to be overridden by collective goals, and can only be defeated by another trump. But since every right implies a corresponding obligation (a cost), increasing the number of rights we have also increases the number of obligations. If many of these rights are perceived to be equally important, or to be weighed differently in different circumstances, the scope and depth of collective choice will expand and creation and enforcement of rights will come to reflect the moral and political fashions of the day. Of course, this will largely defeat the trump-like nature that rights were supposed to have in the first place.

The fundamental question is where these “rights” come from in the first place. Rights are supposed to be “self-evident,” can be deduced from God’s will, the logic of reason, or the nature of man, etc. Unfortunately, attempts to find a solid foundation for rights have not been very fruitful, and even philosophers that agree on the same foundation for rights have often derived wildly different conclusions about the nature of those rights. But despite the failure to find objective evidence (either empirical or logical) for the existence of rights, “rights-talk” increasingly dominates public discourse. This is not just confined to modern “egalitarian” liberalism but has been a dominant feature of libertarianism as well, as evidenced by the writings of Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard, and the early Robert Nozick.

How do we reconcile the popularity of “rights-talk” with the lack of evidence for the existence of rights? The most obvious explanation is that by presenting an individual preference in the form of a “right” we depersonalize the nature of the claim. The “right” element confers credibility because it evokes truth, not individual preference. This effect is further enhanced by the fact that historically a lot of rights were assumed to be “self-evident” or derived from God’s will. The liberal philosopher Anthony de Jasay notes that the popularity of rights may be explained by its feature of hiding its redistributive nature and costs:

“‘Rights’ survive and crowd ‘goals’ out of circulation even if both convey the same substantive message, because rights-talk cheers and gratifies all who are accorded rights by it, and threatens no one overtly. Goals, on the other hand, unless they are innocuous, usually suggest not only the promise of something beneficial, but also the cost of attaining it, the effort it takes, and sometimes (in the case of visibly redistributive goals) an implication that if some gain by it, others must lose. Rights-as-goals are presumably easier to propagate and fitter to survive in the public consciousness than goals tout court.” (Anothony de Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism)

Right can exist in an empirical sense when they reflect a contract between individuals to perform or refrain from certain actions. But in this case rights follow from actual agreement. The evidence that such rights exist can be found in a (written) agreement. And the existence of such rights is usually confirmed by both parties because it is advantageous for them to accept the benefits and obligations of the agreement. The situation is different in the case of rights that do not reflect (implicit) agreement by the individuals who have to incur obligations and costs. Anthony de Jasay notes that “a ‘rights-based’ political theory in general, and rights-liberalism in particular, is losing determinacy and self-restraint when it loses sight of where the burden of proof lies.”

The existence of specific rights and obligations are often defended with the argument that they reflect a “social contract,” similar to a contract between two individuals. A major weakness of this line of thinking is, of course, that such a contract has never been agreed to in reality. This would not necessarily present a major obstacle in case the rights involved would be minimal and non-distributive, but most modern rights do not have this characteristic. For example, an agreement to abstain from harming someone can be complied with by doing nothing, but an agreement that says that “every person has a right to food and shelter” comes with far reaching obligations that will not likely generate universal agreement.

Some modern liberal philosophers (such as John Rawls) do not prefer a social contract so “trivial” and claim that more extensive rights can be justified by means of an hypothetical contract in which rights are derived behind a “veil of ignorance” in which individuals are deprived of information about the individuating characteristics of the citizens they represent. This raises the question of what the relationship is (or should be) between such agreements and what actual individuals would agree to in real life. The reason why such hypothetical agreements should create moral (and legal) obligations in real life is that they correspond (or should correspond) to our conception of justice. Unfortunately, such a justification runs into the same problems as the more straightforward derivation of rights earlier; it lacks objective empirical or logical content. So far the only credible attempt to derive rights (or explain their existence) from non-moral premises is found in Hobbesian contractarianism as represented by Thomas Hobbes, David Gauthier and Jan Narveson.

Anything that’s peaceful

Libertarians spend a non-trivial amount of time arguing for the obvious. At best, such arguments are redundant because there is no widespread believe that violence or threats of violence are a good thing. At worst, these debates hurt the prospects for a society with less violence because theories about the existence of  “natural rights” are rightly a source of  ridicule. The idea that “rights” just exist out there in the world without actual individuals engaging in contracts to establish rights is not going to persuade anyone with a sober mind.  In that sense, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and the (early) Robert Nozick did not do the renaissance of classical liberalism a favor.

A similar problem is encountered with terms like “liberty” and “freedom.” There have been extensive debates about the meaning of liberty as if there is a God-given “real” meaning of the word that just lies out there waiting to be discovered. Many libertarians would argue that we should seek a free society. But as Anthony de Jasay has noted, “The question of whether freedom is valuable or a free society is good ought not to enter at all into a properly thought-out political doctrine, liberal or other. It should be resolutely ignored. Whichever way the question were answered would, it seems to me, inevitably steer us in a teleological direction, and undermine the foundations on which the society that we could consider free might stand and survive. ”

“Consequentialist” libertarians have rejected the emphasis of “moralist” libertarians on (absolute) rights and liberty and have argued for evaluating public policies in light of their consequences. Liberty founder R.W. Bradford (1947-2005) repeatedly held the moralist libertarians responsible for the poor acceptance of libertarianism.  But it is hard to see why conventional consequentialist libertarianism would do much better. Most people do not come into this world seeking to optimize some kind of social welfare function or overall efficiency. In this sense consequentialist libertarianism is even further removed from reality – a point that has been well recognized by former utilitarians like Jan Narveson.

A small minority of libertarians have hopes of reconciling egoism and libertarianism. These authors often spend considerable time making the case for ethical egoism. For people who tend to look at such questions from the perspective of empiricism and modern science such investigations are rather excessive. The interesting question is not so much whether there are objective moral truths but what happens when people who have left such beliefs behind interact.  This question can be approached from a Hobbesian perspective or from an evolutionary perspective. But what often is discovered is a general desire to discourage and prohibit violence.

It is not likely that Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard will be remembered for their breakthroughs in moral philosophy but what these authors have in common is their identification of classical liberalism with non-aggression. This re-conceptualization of classical liberalism has been an important breakthrough because it enables to see things like “regulation” and “public policy” in fairly non-ambiguous physical terms. If one strips away all the rhetoric about “rights” and “democracy” one is left with a State that mostly engages in violence and threats of violence against peaceful people. One of the major contributions of modern libertarians has been to show this is the case – even when the State only claims a  “monopoly on violence” to solve public goods problems.

Contra libertarians such as R.W. Bradford, the desire for peace is neither outdated nor ineffective. People may differ on the importance of “negative” or “positive” liberty or growing “the economy” but few people go out in public  speaking out in favor of violence against the innocent. The main task of libertarians is not to look for “justifications” or “foundations” but the demystifying of the State and the defense of anything that’s peaceful.

Rand Paul and the anti-discrimination paradigm

In the aftermath of the Rand Paul civil rights controversy a surprising number of self-identified libertarians have endorsed state-restrictions on freedom of association. In essence, the argument is that historical and contextual circumstances can warrant the broadening of anti-discrimination laws to the private sector. This  is not just  a trivial exception to libertarian support of strong property rights but also ignores the distinct classical liberal outlook that the *withholding of a benefit* should not be treated as a harm and punished by the state. As a matter of fact, it seems to be an argument that past “crimes against humanity”  and “group rights” should trump peaceful individual choice.

Libertarians who advocate such restrictions on the freedom of association have argued that libertarianism should not be treated as an a-historical set of dogma’s. That is not an unreasonable argument but it is interesting to note that such claims are made by the same people who display a similar kind of dogmatism on the issue of open borders. It appears that dogmatism is more objectionable when it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.

Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the recent eagerness to embrace elements of modern liberalism is that libertarianism has become too popular to concern itself with controversial views. There are now many self-identified libertarians  who wake up in the morning and go to work advocating smaller government and public policy changes. Some of them even run for office. The current transformation of libertarianism is similar to what happened to classical liberalism in Europe. We are inclined to think that ideology shapes politics but we should not ignore the fact that politics shapes ideology as well. What is urgently needed is a “public choice of political ideology.”

Another problem with this position is that it ignores the broader role that “racism” accusations play in progressive thinking. For example, let’s say Rand Paul proposes to repeal the welfare state to prevent a sovereign debt crisis. One obvious “liberal” response is to argue that such a course of action will disproportionally hurt minorities and Paul is back defending himself against racism charges again. It is hard to see how libertarians can effectively counter such accusations unless they simply reject the egalitarian premise that informs contemporary political debate.

It is also interesting to note that small government libertarians are more vulnerable to the racism charge than anarchists. I am not aware of any claims that anarchists are “racist” because they advocate abolishing all government laws, which necessarily will also include laws against racial discrimination. This feature of anarchism might explain why socialist anarchism is no longer popular among progressives. After all, it is hard to imagine how a stateless society will produce radical egalitarianism across the globe.

The libertarian critics of Rand Paul are correct that libertarianism should not be conceived as a sterile rationalist ideology. If there is any chance for libertarianism to survive it should be conceived as a form of rational choice firmly rooted in empirical reality. But if Ben O’ Neill’s Independent Review article “The Antidiscrimination Paradigm: Irrational, Unjust, and Tyrannical” is any indication, the practice of discrimination can be reconciled with rational decision making. Despite this article, and Walter Block’s heterodox articles on discrimination, it is remarkable how little thought libertarians have given to formulating a coherent moral perspective on anti-discrimination laws.