Bleeding Heart Libertarians
I think that libertarian hostility to Hobbes has blinded them to one of his deepest insights, an insight that in many ways makes him less authoritarian than many of the libertarians I know.
I. Hobbes and the Problem of Private Judgment
First, I recommend this on Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy.
Let’s begin with some review. Hobbes believes that all people are naturally free and equal.* That is, no one was born with natural authority over others. Political authority can only come from agreement. Yes, Hobbes has a notion of tacit consent and yes, Hobbes believed in a limited set of natural laws that prescribe some natural duties. But he nonetheless recognized that in a great many circumstances, for John to have a duty to obey Reba, John must have agreed to that duty.
We all know that Hobbes thought the state of nature was a state of Warre. And for this reason, each person’s rational self-interest dictates that she should submit herself to the Sovereign, who in turn would have almost unlimited power to resolve disputes and provide for the common good. You should know that in Hobbes’s day, Bishop Bramhall called Leviathan a “Rebell’s Catechism” because Hobbes argued that subjects have a right of self-defense against the Sovereign, not only to preserve their bodily integrity but to preserve their family and even their honor. So the Sovereign’s power is not unlimited.
Some of you were probably taught that Chapter 15 of Leviathan is the whole book. That’s the chapter where Hobbes addresses the “foole” who said in his heart that there is no such thing as justice. The point of Hobbes’s contractarianism, so the story goes, is to answer the foole, to show that even he is rationally committed to signing up with the Sovereign.
But I read Leviathan differently (I’m not alone). Hobbes is not worried first and foremost about the foole. Instead, he is concerned about how ordinary people with their various moral and religious views can get along with one another. That’s why the entire second half of Leviathan concerns the Christian religion. He is not only worried about sincere individuals who disagree about what the natural law requires of them but about what God requires of them (these are not really distinct for Hobbes, but whatever).
The core problem of Leviathan, then, is this: how can free and equal people who deeply disagree about what the natural (moral) law requires of them, live in peaceful, stable relations with one another? Hobbes recognizes that “no one man’s reason, nor the reason of any one number of men, makes the certainty.” For Hobbes, therefore,
[W]hen there is a controversy in an account the parties must by their own accord (emphasis KV’s) set up for right reason the reason of some arbitrator, or judge, to whose sentence they will be standard, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever (Ch.V, paragraph 3, emphasis KV’s).
Ordinary people disagree all the time and for all kinds of reasons. And if they are to live together well, they need to resolve these disputes. The reason that I believe that half of Leviathan is devoted to religion is because Hobbes thought the need to resolve religious disagreements was perhaps most important of all. Hobbes spends an extensive amount of time trying to show how his conception of public judgment (or public reason) is compatible with Scripture and why the final interpretation of Scripture must lay with the Sovereign.
II. Libertarians vs. Hobbes
Traditional libertarians criticize Hobbes for thinking that disagreement is a disaster. Through the market, private property and limited government, we can go our separate ways and live together well. I agree with that criticism. Libertarians also recognize that some property claims will be the subject of dispute and so arbiters are needed (at least in the form of protection agencies or a minimal state). I agree with that too.
However, the problem with traditional libertarians is that they confine the range of reasonable disagreement to disputes about how to make libertarian property rights more determinate and resolve disputes among legitimate property holders. In other words, they think the range of disagreement is rather small and so arbiters have limited authority.
But let’s confront traditional libertarians with an undeniable truth: reasonable people disagree about way more political and moral matters than the scope of libertarian property rights. In fact, the large majority of reasonable people find libertarian conceptions of property rights deeply objectionable. And many of those reasonable disagreements remain after they become familiar with libertarian arguments.
So let me pose a question to traditional libertarians (related to one of my previous posts): you want to set up a libertarian society because you think it is required by justice and to serve the common good. But your free and equal fellows reasonably reject your conception of property rights. As a result, the coercion you are prepared to use to defend your property against their encroachments will be coercion that they have strong reason to reject.
Libertarians avoid the problem of private judgment by implicitly assuming that libertarian property rights are the default no-coercion point. A society without coercion is a society with property rights. But that’s false. Property rights are coercive. That does not mean that property rights cannot be justified. It just means that the coercion involved in defending property rights must be justified to all persons.
I suspect most libertarians will respond that they can use coercion to protect their justly acquired property no matter what other reasonable people think. After all, libertarianism is true and statism is false. But that means that you, libertarian, are prepared to coerce your equal to do what you demand even though she has not agreed and will likely not agree were you to explain your reasoning to her. That is, you are prepared to subordinate your non-libertarian fellows to your will.
Hobbes thinks you would be wrong to do that because you have no authority to impose your interpretation of what morality and justice require on others. When you do so, you exercise power over them without authority. Hobbes believed that coercion requires justification to the rational self-interest of all persons. Of course, he thought the most easily justified regime was near-absolute monarchy (actually, that’s not quite right) but he still understood the problem of private judgment. Unlike libertarians, Hobbes was not prepared to use violence against others to establish his preferred system of authority if others did not recognize that having a state was in their self-interest. But traditional libertarians are different: when it comes to non-libertarians, they’re the boss.
Traditional libertarian, in at least one sense, Hobbes was less authoritarian than you.
III. Postscript for Hobbes-Hataz
I know libertarians aren’t supposed to say anything nice about Hobbes because he was a Big Ole’ Statist. But please try to separate his Big Ole’ Statism from his political philosophy as such. If you’re a libertarian Hobbes-hata, you probably know enough philosophy to have an opinion on Aristotle. And if you’re a contemporary libertarian, you probably like Aristotle. You overlook his belief in natural slaves because, of course, that’s not essential to his philosophy. But if you’re open to Aristotle despite his belief in natural slaves, surely you can be open to Hobbes despite his Big Ole’ Statism.
*I will say more about the idea of natural freedom and equality in a future post.
While writing the section on free immigration for my forthcoming book, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, I posted this as my Facebook status: “If you claim to care about the poor and support social justice, but you are not in favor of open immigration, I do not have to and do not take you seriously.”
A Facebook friend offered an interesting challenge to the libertarian position. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of the libertarian view, and then explain and respond to that challenge.
Immigration restrictions cause poverty, misery, suffering, and death. Michael Huemer explains this with a thought experiment: Imagine starving Marvin heads to the market in search of food. Imagine Marvin has little to trade. Yet there are people in the market willing to trade food for whatever Marvin has. Imagine that in the absence of interference, Marvin will successfully get to the market, make the trade, and eat. However, now imagine that you forcibly prevent Marvin from getting to the market. You post guards to keep him out. Suppose this works. The guards continually capture Marvin and turn him away. As a result, Marvin starves and dies. In this situation, Huemer says, you have done something morally comparable to killing Marvin. His blood is on your hands.
So, it turns out that Bryan Caplan isn’t a bleeding heart libertarian either.
Unlike Will, though, Bryan’s problem isn’t with the libertarianism of BHL, but with its bleeding heart. Bryan, you see, doesn’t think we have much in the way of obligations to strangers beyond simply leaving them alone. That might sound like a radically libertarian doctrine, but Bryan thinks that is really just a matter of “common-sense ethics.”
That sounded quite wrong to me, so I asked Bryan what he thought of the sort of “shallow pond” examples made famous by Peter Singer. To me, these cases seem to present exceptionally clear examples of situations where we do have a positive moral obligation to strangers.
Yesterday, Bryan blogged his response (UPDATE: fixed link). Bryan starts off by questioning whether we really have an obligation to save the drowning child. After all, we’d praise someone who rescued a kid in that way as a hero. So perhaps this shows that they are going above and beyond the call of duty?
This strikes me as pretty implausible. To have a duty to X is for it to be wrong for one not to X. And it’s pretty clear to me that someone who walked passed the drowning child without a very good excuse would be acting quite wrongly. We might call the person who saves the child a hero, but I think that’s a bad way of distinguishing duty from supererogation. The way to make that distinction is not to look at how we react to people who do the good thing, but to look at how we react to people who fail to do it. And someone who fails to save a drowning child is going to trigger a very different set of reactive attitudes than someone who fails to perform a paradigmatic supererogatory action like, say, volunteering for the Peace Corps.
But is it an enforceable duty? Bryan asks:
Would it be morally permissible to point a gun at a person if he fails to rescue the Drowning Child voluntarily? Much less clear. To pull the trigger? Even less so.
Why, oh why, does it always have to be about guns for libertarians? Yes, I know that in some ultimate sense, every law is backed by the threat of violence. If you break the speed limit and are sent a fine, and don’t pay it, and resist when the cops show up at your house, and resist very effectively when they try to physically force you into their car, then eventually they very well might take out their gun. But that just. doesn’t. mean. that posting a speed limit sign is the same thing as pointing a gun at you. Or even the moral equivalent of doing so. So yes, I’m quite willing to say that people have an enforceable duty to rescue drowning children. Whether pointing guns at the recalcitrant is morally defensible or advisable is an entirely different question, though to sate your curiosity I’m sure we could come up with a suitably fancy thought experiment in which I’d be willing to do it.
Which leaves us with Bryan’s final, and I think strongest, point. Peter Singer wants to use the drowning child case to argue that we have a moral obligation to give lots and lots of money to poor people in the developing world. The idea is that their poverty puts them in a desperate situation analogous to the drowning child, and our (relative) wealth puts us in the position of the passer-by who can help at relatively little personal cost.
But as my old mentor David Schmidtz forcefully argued (along with many others), there seem to be a lot of morally significant differences between the case of the drowning child and the case of international poverty. And one difference – the difference that Bryan highlights here – is that while being in a position to pull a drowning child out of a pond is a bizarrely rare occurrence, being in a position to rescue someone in poverty is not. Indeed, we’re all in that latter position right now. And if you head on over to Oxfam and save somebody by, say, donating $500 right now, you will still be in that position with respect to all the other starving children in the world, and all the rest of the money in your bank account.
So what does this mean? Well, one way of putting the point is this. It’s reasonable to think that people have a moral obligation (even an enforceable one) to save any drowning children they come across because the expected cost this obligation imposes on any given individual is vanishingly low, while the expected social benefits are high. If, however, we held that people had the same obligation to rescue starving children abroad as they do to rescue drowning toddlers in ponds, then the costs to individuals would be immense. We can live a rich, normal life being fully committed to rescuing every single drowning child who crosses our path. A commitment to rescue every starving child in the world, in contrast, would consume our life.
If this line of argument works, it counts against an expansive personal duty to rescue. But…and here’s the rub for a libertarian like Bryan…it looks like it might actually count in favor of certain kinds of redistributive public policies. Here’s why. The problem with an expansive personal duty is basically one of fairness and free riding. Since most individuals will likely not comply with such a duty, those who do will be left with an unreasonably large share of the overall burden. If, on the other hand, everyone could be counted on to do their share, then each individual’s share might not be unreasonably large. And that’s just what coercive redistributive policies do. By greatly reducing the free rider problem, they can (in principle) devote serious resources to problems of poverty without imposing an unduly large burden on any particular individual. Think about it – on a purely domestic level, how much of your tax dollars go to programs that are actually designed to redistribute wealth to the poor (as opposed to, say, the elderly)?
So here’s the takeaway. The idea that individuals have no positive duties toward strangers is entirely implausible. And nothing in Bryan’s argument gives us any reason to doubt that those duties are real obligations, and in some cases even enforceable obligations. Moreover, part of Bryan’s argument actually counts against viewing those obligations as individual, private duties and in favor of viewing them as collective duties that should be coercively enforced. In other words, Bryan’s given us no reason here to oppose institutionalizing the duty to rescue in the form of a state-funded minimal social safety net.
Obviously, a lot matters on the details, and nothing in the argument presented here addresses other arguments that might be made against the welfare state, or against particular forms and mechanisms by which the welfare state might be instituted. But, in principle, I don’t see anything in Bryan’s argument that should keep him from joining us in the BHL camp. I’ll be sending him his t-shirt soon.
I think the right political theory is some form of contractualism. In this post, I will explain what I mean by contractualism and address some common but confused objections to it. I will partly summarize the main points in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Contractualism, Contractarianism and Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract.
I. The Contractualist Formula
Here’s a generic contractualist principle of right action:
Contractualism: An act is wrong if its performance is disallowed by behavioral norms that each member of the moral community has sufficient reason to accept.
I modeled this definition on Tim Scanlon’s definition of contractualism with some small, though consequential, alterations.
Contractualism does not cover the whole content of morality. Instead, it covers what Scanlon calls the “what we owe to each other” or what Gerald Gaus calls “social morality.” These are the publicly recognized rules of conduct that determine not merely how we should treat others but the conditions under which others can hold us accountable or blame us for violating them.
II. Justification, Not Consent
Most readers will think that contractualism rests on the idea of a contract (true) that in turn depends on a conception of consent (false). The traditional social contract views (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) did rely on consent and agreement. But the contractualist tradition in political theory has evolved away from an ideal of actual agreement and hypothetical agreement. That is, the social contract does not consist in rules we have actually agreed to (which everyone and their mom has pointed out for three hundred years) or rules we would only hypothetically agree to (which everyone and their mom has pointed out can’t really generate obligations). Sam Freeman puts it this way: the “role of unanimous collective agreement” is in showing “what we have reasons to do in our social and political relations.” Agreement itself is not the binding act. Instead, agreement is reason-revealing.
Thus, the core normative idea of social contract theory (contractualism) is not consent or agreement but justification. As Rawls said of his original position, its aim is to settle “the question of justification … by working out a problem of deliberation.” (TJ, 16) Or as Gaus has put it, “Contractualism is … best understood as a method for publicly justifying the public moral code of a society. Seen in this light, the idea of ‘consent’ – or indeed ‘agreement’ – is only heuristic.” (Value and Justification, 328)
The social contract in contemporary political philosophy is the attempt to solve a justificatory problem by converting it into a deliberative problem. Justifying social arrangements requires showing that all citizens have sufficient reason to accept the arrangement.
What does it mean for justification to be the core normative idea? It means, following Rousseau, Kant and Rawls, that in some sense the laws and norms we impose on ourselves are self-legislated, that is, they are laws and norms to which we are rationally committed by our own lights. Laws and norms acquire the ability to obligate because we recognize in them some normative feature to which we regard ourselves as committed.
III. Contractualism vs. Utilitarianism and Self-Ownership
As opposed to utilitarian and self-ownership views, contractualist accounts of obligation begin with what we have reason to accept given our present commitments and beliefs. On a contractualist view, you cannot have an obligation unless you are in some non-esoteric sense rationally committed to recognizing the obligation. Utilitarianism says you have an obligation just when complying with the obligation promotes the good (regardless of whether you are rationally committed to recognizing that it does so). Self-ownership says you have an obligation to not use coercion/aggress just because others own themselves (regardless of whether you are rationally committed to recognizing that they do). Prima facie, it seems better to make our obligations depend on what reasons we recognize, not on objective factors that may be totally epistemically insulated from our rational capacities. Rationality and morality should be tightly tied.
The primary reason to prefer contractualism to utilitarianism is that it treats all persons as subjects of justification. On contractualism coercing people in line with principles they have reason to reject is wrong even if it brings about greater utility, since persons presumably have reason to reject principles that would allow them to be sacrificed for the greater good. On contractualism, persons are treated as ends in themselves.
A strong reason to prefer contractualism to self-ownership is that it is sensitive to utilitarian considerations. For instance, a norm can be justified to each person based on the fact that it increases utility for all persons. Consequently, coercion can be justifiably used to promote good outcomes, though the employment of coercion is restrained by the contractualist standard of reasonable rejectability.
Contractualism is the consequence-sensitive deontological theory that libertarianism needs.
IV. Objections: Relativism, Marginal Cases, the Priority of the Good and Redundancy
Some will object that contractualism makes our obligations objectionably relativistic. It is true that contractualism makes our obligations agent-relative in the sense that the facts that fix our obligations depend on the commitments of the particular agent who has the obligation. And it is true that our obligations will be subject to considerable variation across time and place. But whether contractualism makes our obligations objectionably relativistic is harder to demonstrate, as it must show that some intrinsically objectionable norm can be the object of rational justification in a non-trivial number of realistic cases.
Some will object that contractualism cannot account for our obligations to borderline persons, such as the mentally handicapped, the dead and the unborn. But whether that is so depends on the version of contractualism you adopt. Most contractualists think you can evaluate a norm based partly on whether it is reasonable to believe that future generations will have reason to accept it. That’s a way of including non-existent persons in the scheme of rights and obligations, so there is no reason in principle that contractualism can’t be extended to cover borderline persons.
Some will object that contractualism objectionably privileges the right over the good. Many Aristotelians argue that contractualism implausibly ascribes reasons to persons to frustrate their good in the name of doing the right thing. But it is far more intuitive to agree with contractualists that sometimes the right is prior to the good. To avoid cases of sacrificing the one for the many, Aristotelians have to engage in fancy footwork about how non-consequentialist behavior is actually required by your final end of flourishing. While that dance might work, traditional Aristotelian theories of practical reason still root our reasons to do the right thing in our flourishing. But our main reason to keep our promises is that we promised, not because keeping our promises promotes our flourishing.
Some will object that contractualism is redundant. Contractualism says that you do wrong when you violate rules or norms that persons have sufficient reason to accept. But that seems like adding an epicycle to determining what is right. Why not just think the right thing to do is what we have sufficient reason to do? Well, contractualism helps delineate the set of reasons for action by requiring that we treat others as ends by considering what reasons they acknowledge as weighty for them. So contractualism is not redundant because it provides people with weighty, deontological reasons to attend to others’ reasons for action, or at least the reasons they take themselves to have.
So there you have it: the generic structure of contractualism, some clarifications and replies to obvious objections. There’s much more to say, but it’s a start.
Our very own Gary Chartier recently did an interview with Reason TV about his new book, Markets Not Capitalism. You can watch it here.
And after you’re done, go ahead and get a copy of that book. It is an absolutely terrific collection of essays, containing a number of good pieces from our own Roderick Long and our erstwhile guest-blogger Charles Johnson. Plus other newish stuff from Kevin Carson and Sheldon Richman, and some classics from Benjamin Tucker, Karl Hess, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Murray Rothbard.
Whether you’re down with the “left-wing market anarchist” project or not, it’s a worthwhile and stimulating read!
For those of you who are interested, here’s CATO Institute’s final legal brief in the upcoming Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of the individual mandate (the link is to a summary, but you can click below that to the actual brief.) My prediction, for what it’s worth, is that the Supreme Court will reject the challenge and send plaintiffs to fight this one in the political arena.
In this post, my aim is to identify political philosophy’s fundamental question. Yes, I want to attempt this in a blog post, so my answer will undoubtedly be radically incomplete. But I believe I can sketch a brief case for why the social contract theorists got it right. If we understand why, I believe a compelling defense of classical liberalism will come into view.
I. Why Not “What is Justice?”
If most philosophers over the course of history had been asked to articulate political philosophy’s fundamental question, most have followed Plato: “What is Justice?”
Modern political philosophy’s great discovery is that well-meaning, intelligent individuals reasoning freely will answer this question differently. The most prominent strand of modern political philosophy, the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls explicitly grapples with this fact of disagreement. The very point of the social contract is to provide a set of principles and institutions by which we can resolve our disputes about what morality and justice require. In this way, their theories of justice are reflexive. Determining what justice requires must begin with the recognition that we will never fully agree about what justice requires.
If we accept the fact of reasonable disagreement as basic, we can grasp the social contract theorist’s temptation to “go meta.” We do not answer “What Is Justice?” simply by identifying what maximizes welfare or what brings about the common good. Those are matters of dispute. Unless we can first agree to set aside some of our differences, we cannot generate a stable or a free society, for a society that attempts to institutionalize one answer to “Why Is Justice?” must coerce those who disagree with the dominant group’s sectarian vision.
II. The Social Contract Theorists’ Question
Of course, the great social contract theorists gave different formulations of their fundamental question, but I believe a common idea can be drawn out of their work. Here is Jerry Gaus‘s formulation of the question:
Can the authority of social morality be reconciled with our status as free and equal moral persons in a world characterized by deep and pervasive yet reasonable disagreements about the standards by which to evaluate the justifiability of claims to moral authority? (xv)
All of the great social contract theorists recognized three facts, one moral and two empirical: (i) that persons are naturally free and equal, (ii) that they significantly and persistently disagree about what morality requires of them and of others and (iii) that it is in the interest of all to have some set of commonly accepted rules by which our disputes can be resolved, social cooperation protected and our lives made better-off.
But these three facts present a deep puzzle. If people disagree about what morality requires but they recognize the need to resolve (at least some) of their disputes in a public manner, then who gets to resolve disputes? That is, who’s the boss? If people are naturally free and equal, any claim to authority must somehow be validated by those subject to it. But if they disagree about morality then they will surely disagree about who they think should resolve those disagreements. The tragedy: rational and reasonable people cannot satisfy their common interest in social cooperation and dispute resolution because they are free and disagree.
The social contract theorists identified the three most salient moral and empirical features of modern political life beyond the circumstance of justice themselves: we are free and disagree but we need each other still. That is why I think they correctly identified modern political philosophy’s fundamental question.
III. The Political Economists’ Question
Many political philosophers do not think that political economy provides its own version of political philosophy’s fundamental question. After all, political economy is purely descriptive; how could political economists have anything to say about how institutions should work? To understand why this attitude is confused, remember that the great political economists were political philosophers.
In my view, the great political economists (Hume, Smith, Mill, Hayek and Buchanan, among others) were trying to answer much the same question as the social contract theorists. This is not clear at first, as political economy is so often identified with the utilitarian tradition. Their question: “What is best for humans?” Their answer: institutions that maximize welfare.
But let’s go deeper for a moment. After all, what did the great political economists spend most of their time doing? Describing the conditions under which ordinary, largely equal human beings actually learned to cooperate despite their disagreements.
Hume and Smith were economists and historians as well as moral philosophers. They developed complex theories of how human beings learned to live together despite their differing interests, tastes and judgments. John Stuart Mill wrote The Principles of Political Economy, one of the greatest works of political economy in the 19th century. Hayek and Buchanan were political philosophers whose greatest achievements were advancing our understanding of how diverse individuals cooperate in an extended social order.
The great political economists were in this way preoccupied with much the same problem as the social contract theorists.
It is true that the two sides have not gotten along. The great political economists have usually been roundly skeptical of the social contract as a ground for the social order, and the great social contract theorists have often not recognized that the great political economists were addressing their question because they believed the political economist’s project was descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Yet we mustn’t draw this contrast too sharply. Obviously Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls were deeply interested in how real institutions function. None of them believed you could determine which institutions were just without institutional analysis. All relied on political science, history and economics in their own way. And I think one can make a strong argument that in the end Hume and Smith were contractarians of an evolutionary sort (Smith’s impartial spectator can be interpreted as a contractor). Buchanan explicitly embraces the contractarian label.
So I see the great political philosophers and political economists as involved in a loosely united endeavor: to explain the authority of the restraints of political life in a world of free and equal persons who deeply disagree with one another about what is true, right and just.
IV. Why One Question?
A natural reply suggests itself: why think that political philosophy has a fundamental question? Surely it has many questions that, while related to one another, are not the same.
Perhaps. But I see political philosophy’s fundamental question as a kind of methodological orientation. It guides the projects we pursue and the problems we explore. The fact that so many great thinkers were preoccupied with the same basic concern means that we contemporary political philosophers could do worse than to follow them.
But even if you do not think the social contract question is the most basic, I hope you can agree that we can evaluate political theories by how well they answer it. If a political theory can explain how free and equal people can cooperate on fair terms, then that is an excellent reason to believe it is true. One core reason I reject self-ownership and utilitarian approaches to political philosophy is that I became convinced that they cannot adequately answer the question posed to us by the social contract theorists.
In any case, the social contract question is my question and it is the question by which I evaluate different political theories and research projects. I am a classical liberal (a Strong BHL, if you like) because I believe that classical liberal institutions provide the best answer. We will see why.
Today would have been the 80th birthday of one of my deepest intellectual heroes and a man whose optimism about the future of humanity has become part of my intellectual DNA. I speak, of course, of the irreplaceable Julian Simon. Rob Bradley offers a really nice appreciation here. I will only add that 45 of the most memorable minutes of my life was spent on a boat trip to St. Tropez talking with Julian (and my friends Pete Boettke and Dave Prychitko) a few months before his untimely death. He was gracious and indulgent and sparkling with the three of us young punks and I’ve tried since then to interact with students and young scholars with the patience, respect and time he gave us.
I think that Julian’s work is of central importance to the BHL project. What he demonstrated is that freedom is the precondition for human progress, and that this progress uplifted not just those at the top but particularly the least well off among us. It also shows that the increasing wealth of the Western world has not, and need not, come at the expense of the poorer parts of the world. Economic growth is a positive sum game and leads not to an increasing scarcity of resources and more difficulty in improving the lot of humanity, but to a world of abundance and longer, better, lives for all.
At a time when too many wrongly interpret the data to argue that we are destroying the planet and then conclude we need to expand the state to protect the world’s poor from the rapaciousness of the West, Julian’s work is more important than ever. And it is important to both the “bleeding heart” and the “libertarian” parts of BHL. He has shown us that the wealth that freedom brings us does not come at the long-term cost of destroying or over-populating the planet and condemning the rest of the world to poverty in the process. That empirical reality has to be part and parcel of any attempt to persuade other bleeding hearts of the value of libertarianism to their project. Julian’s books should be at the top of the stack of recommended reading for those who disagree with libertarians’ preferred means to our shared ends.
Julian was taken from us much too soon, but we have pages and pages of his work (a good hunk of it online here) to remind us that the world does indeed keep getting better as long as we leave people free to draw upon and deploy the ultimate resource: the creativity of the minds of the amazing creature we call homo sapiens. Thanks Julian for your own creativity, unflagging optimism, and deep intellectual courage in the face of those who tried to drag you down. You were a model for us all.
Obviously each of these following steps would need more explication and defense than I’m giving here. The picture is also a bit oversimplified, since (for one thing) it concerns reciprocal determination between just two virtues rather than among them all. But it will help to fill in a bit the picture I sketched in my earlier post.
1. The prima facie content of benevolence is consequentialist. [Note: for present purposes, the difference principle counts as consequentialist.]
2. The form of consequentialism best answering to benevolence’s prima facie content will be some sort of rule-consequentialism (for familiar Humean/Hayekian reasons).
3.The prima facie content of justice is deontological.
4. The form of deontology best answering to justice’s prima facie content will be a self-ownership principle.
5. Because property rights, qua rights, are enforceable, and self-ownership rules out any use of force except in defense of self-ownership, the only system of property rights consistent with self-ownership will be one that treats property as an extension of the self (and so the conception of the self, in order to be consistent with self-ownership and property rights, must be construed so as to make this possible).
6. When property is treated as an extension of the self, a principle of self-ownership will render such rights highly stringent.
7. Although benevolence’s prima facie content is consequentialist, there are considerations internal to benevolence (e.g., respect) that push it toward reconciliation with deontic justice.
8. Although justice’s prima facie content is deontological, there are considerations internal to justice (e.g., fairness) that push it toward reconciliation with consequentialist benevolence.
9. If the gap between the prima facie contents of self-ownership and rule-consequentialism is large and/or likely to be found in normal situations, the extent to which self-ownership needs to be revised will be greater and more structural.
10. If the gap between the prima facie contents of self-ownership and rule-consequentialism is small and/or likely to be found only in abnormal situations, the extent to which self-ownership needs to be revised will be small and mainly a matter of temporary exceptions.
11. We know from libertarian economic and social theory (and in particular, a synthesis of Austrian, agorist, and mutualist theory) that the gap between self-ownership (together with stringent property rights) and most plausible versions of rule-consequentialism [including the difference principle] is small and/or likely to be found only in abnormal situations.
12. Thus the content of justice after conciliation with benevolence will still be essentially a form of self-ownership (together with stringent property rights), albeit with a few small revisions and temporary exceptions.
I am teaching a course this term which is basically an examination of modern libertarian political philosophy and political theory for PhD students in economics. But, I am also teaching an advanced topics course in economic theory for PhD students this term. In the first course, we have so far discussed the evolution of the argument for taming man’s passions, including his passions expressed within the realm of politics. We used Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977) to serve as the primary text to discuss this intellectual evolution. In the past I have used Scott Gordon’s Controlling the State (Harvard University Press, 2002), but that is a much more historical rather than philosophical treatment of the issue — though getting that history right is vital to the exercise. In my advanced topics course, our preoccupation so far has been on rationality and equilibrium modeling, and we have been focusing our reading on a variety of text and journal articles. This week we discussed a paper by Paul Anand from The Economic Journal, on the issue of intransitivity and rationality in choice. As luck would have it, Mario Rizzo — who is teaching a course on behavioral economics this term at NYU — just posted about this issue, and why being rational might not always be rational. Restating last night’s conversation, however, is not my intent with this post, but rather I’d like to perhaps stimulate a discussion on what actually is the relationship between economics and philosophy. In the Anand paper, he argues explicitly that while economists have freely borrowed and engaged the literature in psychology over human choice (e.g., consider Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow), they have failed to engage as seriously the philosophical literature in decision theory and action theory (e.g., Donald Davidson). Reading that claim made me think — what exactly should the relationship between economics and philosophy be in the modern academic discourse.
My disciplinary training is squarely within economics, though I minored in philosophy as an undergraduate, and I devoted a considerable amount of time as a graduate student studying the philosophy of science under the guidance of my dissertation adviser Don Lavoie. And while I have written a number of articles on the method and methodology of economics, my primary research has been in applied political economy that has drawn on the disciplines of history, politics and sociology far more than pure philosophy. At GMU, besides my position in economics, I am a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy, Honors College, Russian Studies, and Center for Global Studies, and I have taught in the School of Law, and served on many dissertations in the School of Public Policy. In each of my intellectual forays into interdisciplinary work, economics provides the guiding framework (perhaps arrogantly so). Sociology might provide interesting questions, but it is within the argumentative structure of economics that answers are to be found. Historical data has no meaning until made intelligible by way of economic analysis. Politics may be an interesting subject matter, but again it is economics that provides the analytical lens to make sense of political behavior from voting to revolutions. And, in political theory I think the position staked out by my teacher James Buchanan is the one I am most comfortable with, and serves as the guiding framework for my teaching approach to the course mentioned above.
Within the Buchanan analytical framework the relationship between social philosophy and economics can be understood to reflect the distinction between choice over the rules, and choice within a given set of rules. Social philosophy examines “what is a good game of life”, but that question cannot be operationalized unless we talk about “what are the good rules that define that game”. In answering that question, however, we must always be mindful of the strategies that players will play once the rules are established. In other words, we have to answer “How will the players play the game given those rules?”, and to do that we require the analytical apparatus of economics. It is the tacking back and forth between “What are the good rules?” and “How will players play given those rules?” that we form a political economy answer to questions of social organization. This is one of the reasons I am so intrigued by non-ideal theories of justice, as opposed to ideal theorizing — the non-ideal theorizing takes seriously the constraints of treating men as they really are, and seeks to find the pattern of institutions that will allow us to live better together. In short, it represents philosophy disciplined by economics in order to produce better philosophy.
That is one possible relationship between economics and philosophy in the context of political theory.
On the other hand, there is also the disciplining role of philosophical discourse in the context of economics. Methodological discussions and the questions of philosophy of science should not just be the peculiar interests of some practicing economists, but should occupy the attention of all economists at least twice in their careers — at the beginning so they can make an informed choice over what sort of economics they want to do, and at the end of their careers as they reflect back on the success or failure of their research endeavors. Ultimately, methodology matters because it determines not only what one considers interesting questions to pursue, but perhaps more importantly what are acceptable answers to those questions.
How do professional philosophers see the relationship between economics and philosophy? Is Anand correct that economists could learn as much, if not more, from action theorists as from psychologists on the nature of human choice? Is Buchanan right that philosophical inquiry into the ‘good society’ must always be tempered by a discussion of self-interest with guile and thus the possibility of strategic opportunism?
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