Tag: Liberty

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.

Liberty and oblivion

In 1991 the Libertarian Alliance published an article called “Immortality: Liberty’s Final frontier” (PDF) by David Nicholas. In this article the author argues that “the continuing fact of death renders all talk of liberty ultimately futile.” The author further argues that our concern for the future will diminish as we approach death. But instead of facing the enemy, we devise all kinds of defensive strategies.

Life extensionists often speak disparagingly of such coping mechanisms. But as argued on the Depressed Metabolism blog before, one can hardly blame people for trying to live in peace with the inevitable. Raging at the prospect of death, if no rational means can be imagined to overcome or delay it during our lifetime is foolish and unproductive. But as Herbert Marcuse said, there is a difference between accepting death and elevating it to something that gives meaning to life.

Historically, the delay between the technical ability to place a person in low subzero temperatures to avoid decomposition and its actual implementation was not excessive at all. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to broader acceptance of cryonics is that most people still believe that the inability of the human body to sustain itself as an integrated organism must necessarily mean the end of the person as well.

In her  dissertation “An Examination of the Bio-Philosophical Literature on the Definition and Criteria of Death: When is Dead Dead and Why Some Donation After Cardiac Death Donors are Not” Leslie Whetstine dissects traditional definitions of death and proposes an “ontological” definition of death that recognizes what is important in humans: personhood and consciousness. Such a definition of death should make us think twice before giving up on a person when technologies are available that offer the prospect of being cured and restored to good health in the future.

Overcoming death is an ambitious (perhaps too ambitious) objective to sway the general public, not in the least because it contains a strong element of wishful thinking. But spreading the “meme” that most people who currently are destined for the worms or the flames still possess the neurophysical basis of their personality at “death” might have a better chance.

But we should be careful not to present the fight against death as a fight for liberty.  Death is not a man-made imposition and should not be brought under the rubric of human freedom. It can become an issue of liberty when political mechanisms are used to prevent people to take advantage of the means that offer them a chance to postpone death and prolong life. If we present the case for life extension and experimental medical procedures such as cryonics in a thoughtful manner, such scenarios may be minimized.

Curing “rights talk” with more “rights talk”

John Gray reviews Dominic Raab’s The Assault on Liberty: What went Wrong with Rights and makes an important observation:

Ironically, while he astutely criticizes the rise of a legalistic culture of rights, Raab seems to believe we can extricate ourselves from our present predicament through another exercise in legalism. Yet when much of the British political class no longer cares about freedom and barely understands what it means, a Bill of Rights can hardly be expected to turn the tide. It was not law or rights that Churchill invoked when dismantling wartime infringements of freedom. It was civilization, which requires a measured restraint in the use of power on the part of our rulers without which bills of rights are not much more than scraps of paper.

Classical liberals should not be surprised about the current proliferation of rights. As soon as the term right is divorced from actual contract, the road is cleared for all other kinds of rights claims. The challenge is to overcome the incoherent thinking about rights as such.

The presumption of liberty

Perhaps no political philosopher has done as much painstaking work to review the legitimacy and need for political authority as Anthony de Jasay.  What makes de Jasay’s work stand out is his ability to engage with the technical arguments of political economists and philosophers without sacrificing common sense. For example, de Jasay understands the complications of enforcing contracts without a state but never loses sight of the obvious point that a hypothetical contract to establish a state cannot be treated as an actual contract.

Anthony de Jasay is a patient thinker; his work makes the advocates of government look like raving fanatics, too impatient to appreciate the value of contract and convention, substituting coercion for agreement without examining their arguments and/or the operation of markets in great detail.

Unlike many other thinkers in this tradition, de Jasay is not a system builder. The bulk of his work involves the examination of arguments for government and the mechanisms of its operation when it exists. The lack of a normative case for liberty is not an omission, however, but deliberate. As should be evident from writings such as “Frog’s legs, shared ends, and the rationality of politics” (PDF) and “Values and the Social Order” (both reprinted in the book Against Politics), as a non-cognitivist, de Jasay does not find justificationism in ethics and political philosophy credible. Although the values we hold are often means to other (higher) values, going down the line we will arrive at a point where arbitrary, subjective preferences are the sole remaining reason for believing in something. This non-cognitivist position is not necessarily harmful to the cause of liberty because it undermines most, if not all, arguments in favor of political authority.

De Jasay believes that the decomposition of liberalism in the 20th century reflects “a design that positively invited tinkering.” As argued in great detail in his Choice, Contract and Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism, the progressive loss of rigor in liberal thinking reflects a tension between its two elements; maximization of a goal (freedom) and observance of a rule (no harm):

With regard to both freedom and the interests across which it must not trespass, one can only take positions that are ultimately subjective, ‘unprovable’, supported by intrinsically unwinnable, contestable, but unrebuttable arguments. Within these loose limits, disparate content can be read into freedom and nearly any interest can be claimed to be sufficient ground for an inviolable right.

A recurrent theme in de Jasay’s oeuvre is that liberty should be presumed, not because we have a “right” to it, or because it is the most important value or goal, but because it follows from the requirements of epistemology and logic. His current thinking on this has culminated in an essay called Freedom from a Mainly Logical Perspective (2005).  In a nutshell, the argument (as I understand it), goes as follows:

There are two basic means of evaluating the truth of a statement, verification and falsification. The  preferred choice between these two means should reflect the nature of the proposition at hand. If a claim is made that someone is not free to do something, the burden should be on the person who challenges that freedom. The reason for this is that the challenger needs only a strong enough case that at least one reason against the act in question is valid. If the burden of proof would rest on the person whose freedom is contested, the number of arguments that need to be falsified in order to prove that there is no good reason against it would be impractically large, or even infinite:

Even if an action is not challenged for ulterior motives or out of sheer busybodiness, the formal requirement to show that it would cause no harm and breach no obligation (i.e., that no one’s right could be opposed to it) is sufficient to stop any and all action and freeze everyone in impotent mobility. (Before Resorting to Politics)

The philosopher of science and critical rationalist Gerard Radnitzky was so impressed with de Jasay’s case for the presumption of liberty that he stated that “for the first time the political philosophy of libertarianism and of classical liberalism has gotten a solid base in logic and epistemology.” Instead of appealing to a person’s preference for liberty, logic dictates that liberty should be presumed:

Jasay’s argument entails the request to any rational being, in particular to legislators, not to request (in sincerity) what is logically impossible (like falsifying the objector’s claim that there is an obstacle to my doing X, when the list of obstacles is denumerably infinite or de facto inconsistent). This has nothing to do with value judgments: the logically impossible is literally “unthinkable,” since thinking and logic are two sides of the same coin. “Ought implies Can” is a descriptive statement. (Against Politics, for “Ordered Anarchy” (PDF))

The presumption of liberty is in harmony with the fundamental rules of action in Roman and common law in which the accused is considered innocent until proven guilty, and possession gives rise to title unless the evidence proves otherwise.  Far from being a trivial principle, it is an antidote against the “rightsism” that pervades contemporary political culture:

“Rightsism” purports solemnly to recognize that people have “rights” to do certain specific things and that certain other things ought not to be done to them. On closer analysis, these “rights” turn out to be the exceptions to a tacitly understood general rule that everything else is forbidden; for if it were not, announcing “rights” to engage in free acts would be redundant and pointless. The silliness that underlies “rightsism”, and the appalling effect it exerts upon the political climate, illustrates how far the looseness of current liberal thought can drift away from a more strict structure that would serve the cause of liberty instead of stifling it in pomposity and confusion. (Liberalism, Loose or Strict (PDF))

If having a “right to liberty” is an incoherent concept, and rights can limit freedom, what is the source of rights? Here de Jasay argues that the source of rights is contract; “the deontology of rights is their epistemology.” Leaving to the side the concept of “natural rights,” we can distinguish between rights that are created by political authority or rights that reflect contract. In both cases, the right of  one person corresponds to an obligation of another person (or persons). But whereas rights that reflect contract can be confirmed by the bearer of the obligation, this is often not the case with the rights that are created through the political process. Such rights are imposed through power and not acknowledged by both the right holder and the bearer of the obligation.

Does this mean that strict liberals cannot loyally accept the government of their country as legitimate, and are in effect advocating anarchy? Logically, the answer to both questions must be “yes,” but it is a “yes” whose practical consequences are necessarily constrained by the realities of our social condition. (Liberalism, Loose or Strict (PDF))

But who is going to determine when a liberty causes a harm or breaches a contract? It appears that de Jasay prefers these questions to be answered by common law and convention instead of government. Although such sponteaneous order may be “inefficient,” and sometimes “unfair,” this should be prefered over the political process which is intrinsically redistributive and nonunanimous. Without the prospect to secure private gain from the political process and to socialize its costs, the presumption of liberty may be secure for practical reasons as well.

The rationality of politics

In his paper “Frog’s legs, shared ends, and the rationality of politics” (PDF), Anthony de Jasay discusses the role of rationality in political philosophy. He writes that “much of the old confusion we deplore in political theory, and much of the fresh confusion we spread when trying to get rid of what has been spread, springs from false notions of what rationality is and what it does.” Not controversial is rationality as an attribute of thought that conforms to logic or grammar, or to express hypothetical imperatives in which the rationality of the means is evaluated to achieve a goal (what Max Weber calls “Zweckrationalität,” or instrumental rationality). But can we push the use of rationality beyond this? Can we ascribe rationality to ends (values)? De Jasay argues that “justificationism” or “foundationalism” is not possible:

Any finite regress of ends is ended by a final end or value, about which it is futile to ask to what else it leads, what comes after it, for what reason we pursue it. If the question were not futile, the end would not be final, non-instrumental. Since not every reason can have a further reason, the scope of rationality in choosing actions is strictly limited.

Where does this leave political philosophy? Can we say that one political arrangement is more rational than others? This does not seem possible because at some point down the line we will end up with a statement that is not a hypothetical imperative but a value judgment.  But “to each his own value” is problematic in cases where values are of such a nature that they can only be realized if everyone complies. An example of such a value statement is that there should be an equal distribution of wealth. At this point, de Jasay argues that when pressed to justify the rationality of such an end, we invariably end up with some form of the “common good” of which he says that “the content and drift of political philosophy depends to no small extent on whether it admits the concept of the common good, or rules it out as gobbledygook.”

De Jasay reviews three different versions of the common good (mystical, communitarian, and  as  an aggregate of the good of individuals members) and finds them all lacking in logical and/or empirical content. “Any political decision that, by invoking the common good, overrides the will and wishes of some to satisfy others, is the execution of a value judgment about individual wills and wishes.” Although these value judgments are not disreputable at such, it is disreputable to dress them up as facts or products of rational thought.

Although de Jasay’s argument that value judgments that require compliance of all will have to invoke an argument involving the common good could benefit from more elaboration, his point about the limited role that rationality can play in political philosophy is well taken. De Jasay’s oeuvre  is part of a small, but persuasive, tradition in which skepticism, instead of fanatical moralism, undermines most, if not all, reasons for engaging in politics.

A good deal, however, is left to be said about what is not to be done, and said, and why. Nine parts of practical politics is the making of non-unanimous decisions by some, that hurt others. Do we really want such decisions imposed as rational means to ends that are ultimately neither rational nor irrational, and must be posited by brazen assertion, mystical communion with the good, or occult value-comparisons between persons? Pareto-optimal outcomes offer a minimal morally legitimate space for a minimal state, and no more. Surely, it tells something about the ontology of politics that logic, morality, or both lend themselves so much better to condemning political action than to defending its legitimacy.