Bleeding Heart Libertarianism

May an economist jump in?

Interesting stuff, Matt. It’s a big deal to me that markets feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Otherwise, better socialism or something. But isn’t there a gap between saying, “Let’s use measures such as a progressive income tax to somewhat flatten out the income distribution” and trying to engineer the income distribution or, say, guarantee that no one suffers a loss of income?

I guess I’m trying to ask what you mean by “social justice.”

Hi Roger,

Of course, some of my best friends are economists.
I think there’s definitely a gap between the two proposals you mention. And, importantly, I think there’s a gap between both of those proposals and embracing an idea of social justice.
The term social justice means different things to different people, so I don’t propose to give any kind of general definition of the term. I’m roughly in agreement with what Jason has to say about the issue in his post. Social justice is a way of describing a moral standard by virtue of which political and economic institutions can be evaluated. To affirm a commitment to social justice is to say that it is a condition on the moral legitimacy of institutions that (and here is where theorists will diverge in the details) they work to the benefit of all, that they secure people’s “real” freedom as opposed to merely formal freedom, that they afford a society’s most vulnerable members genuine opportunities to flourish, etc.
The clearest contrast, I think, is with those libertarian theories that hold that the only constraint on the moral legitimacy of moral and political institutions is that they respect individuals’ negative rights, so that the justice of distributions is understood (in Nozick’s terms) in entirely historical terms. A distribution is just if it arose from another just situation by just steps, period. Nozick’s theory is actually probably more complicated (once the implications of the Lockean Proviso are taken on board) than this picture suggests, but if you focus just on that motto it looks like it could be compatible with institutions being perfectly just that they lead to the poor starving en masse in the streets. That doesn’t sound right to me.
Now, what *follows* from a commitment to social justice, in terms of public policy, is a complicated matter both morally and empirically. You might think that even though Nozick was wrong to deny the idea of social justice, it’s nevertheless true that the minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified. Not just because it respects individuals’ negative rights, but because it does so in a way that is compatible with the requirements of social justice (or that produces outcomes that are compatible with the requirements of social justice). In other words, he might have gotten the right answer for the wrong reason. Or you might think that meeting the requirements of social justice requires something more: maybe some kind of social safety net, for instance.
I’m not prepared to defend a full theory of social justice here, so perhaps you’ll find the schematic nature of my response unsatisfying. But I hope this does a little bit to make the general idea clearer.

Looks interesting – I’ll be following your blog.

I commented on Will Wilkinson’s link and will repost it here:

”
I’ve been wondering if the cooperative economic model is something that liberaltarian types could get behind. The book Humanizing the Economy is a good recent overview. It’s attractive to liberals because the cooperative model is concerned with, well, cooperation, interdependence, community, strength in numbers and so on. It’s attractive to libertarians and conservatives because empowerment comes not from government but from people banding together to strengthen their hand.

It’s also interesting that health cooperatives were included as part of the Affordable Care Act, and that this section has been neither particularly celebrated nor controversial.
”

It seems like the cooperative model is a way of furthering social justice that could be embraced by people across the spectrum. Thoughts on that?

Brink Lindsey, of Liberaltarian fame, endorsed our (John Mackey, Muhammad Yunus, Hernando de Soto, etc.) book “Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems” by calling us “bleeding heart libertarians,”

“Michael Strong and his coauthors sketch out a provocative and appealing vision of what you might call ‘bleeding heart libertarianism.’ … Regardless of where you fit on theideological map, they will challenge the way you think about social progress. So if you’re interested in how to make the world around you a better place, take the challenge and read this book.”

Unlike Brink and Will, however, I’m a bit of an anarcho-capitalist; see here for “Ten Practical Steps Towards Creating a Nozickian Utopia of Utopias,”

http://athousandnations.com/2009/09/08/ten-practical-steps-towards-creating-a-nozickian-utopia-of-utopias/

That said, of course I believe that with respect to the implications of his thought, Nozick was the ultimate Rawlsian,

http://athousandnations.com/2009/08/21/gated-communities-and-nation-states-the-cartel-responsible-for-global-poverty/

Let me suggest that Nozick’s (protean) views are not, in practice, opposed to a conception of distributive justice that is historically grounded. His contrast between patterned and historical principles of justice admits explicitly that he is providing an ideal theory of justice in acquisition and transfer, and that actual holdings are by no means necessarily justified by this theory to the extent they deviate from ideal theory. To put it mildly, the level of real historical deviation is substantial. The big lacuna in the libertarian literature is an “error theory” that reconciles those principles with a radically non-ideal historical record. Which (hint, hint) would be a great train of thought for this blog to explore.

Jason-
That’s certainly an apt summary of the distinction between a patterned and a historical conception. Though (perhaps because I’m biased toward historical conceptions myself) I think people’s intuitions about that scenario would turn out to depend pretty strongly on WHY it turned out to be the case that this outcome occurred. And, more generally, I think most people’s real-world concerns for social justice stem from a (sometimes muddled) mix of patterned and historical concerns. I suspect, for instance, that most people have relatively strongly patterned intuitions about disparities resulting from differing *initial* endowments, but would be substantially more comfortable with inequalities between people who were seen as starting out at relative economic parity, at least in the absence of serious physical or mental disabilities. (The intuition here being that, pace Rawls, at least some kinds of differences in “endowment”—in the broad sense that encompasses abilities and dispositions—are sufficiently constitutive of the person that it’s not appropriate to have them drop out behind the Veil.)

Anyway, let me adjust my proposed program slightly: It would be interesting to see how far a historical or restitution-oriented theory of social justice could get us, and to what extent our residual “patterned” intuitions could be addressed by a theory focused on parity of initial endowments rather than distributional outcomes as such. (It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly, the theory outlined in Dworkin’s “Sovereign Virtue” tries to make that sort of distinction.) It might be (and, indeed, my gut sense is) that the best theory of justice still ends up having *some* ineradicable, purely patterned component. But I’d like to see how much of the work could be done by historical principles.

I just want to say that this blog will be a terrific new voice in the libertarian academic movement and yet another distraction from my work.

Looks great guys!

I am a libertarian economists, and certainly a consequentialist with special concern for the well being of least well off.

Perhaps I am in error, but I often think that libertarians of my stripe are entirely indifferent to inequality of income amoung the relatively well off. Process concerns are the sole concern.

For example, suppose we have a scenario where a business professor has an increase in income from 100k to 125k, and a businessman has an increase of 200k to 600k.

Compare that to a more socially just situation where the professor increases income from 100k to 130k and the businessman goes from 200k to 300k.

Perhaps I should be more careful in my example, but my point is that I would put zero weight on the more equal distribution of increases in the second situation.

On the other hand, if casual workers increase their incomes from 10k to 12k in one scenario, or else from 10k to 15k, it would means something to me.

Of course, if the businessman making the huge income incease did so because he cashed out on risky activities and those who directly paid him didn’t care because in fact, the taxpayers covered his loss, well, that obvious, would be a concern. Process.

I often wonder if concern for the poor, which I share, is often a cover for concern about “unfair” incomes going to the rich (even the modestly well off) relative to highly paid professionals, (including leading academics.)

Leading libertarian (or classical economists) have advocated some kind of social safety net for years. Obviously, not all of them, but leading ones like Friedman and Hayek. But somehow, high liberals see them as advocating laissez fair. Why? Well, they have no interest in doing anything to fix the “injustice” of unfair distribution amoung the well off.

I don’t have too much to say, but I wanted to say how glad I am to see this blog. I’m a liberal/social justice activist in my mid-twenties who has been wishing for more dialogue between liberals and libertarians (and people in the middle) for years. Looking forward to more!

Matt: when the revolution comes, will you be serving beer?

–brian

Matt asks me: “But could you say a bit more about what you thought was the inaccuracy?” and adds: “I agree with you that Hayek is some form of consequentialist, rather than a natural rights thinker. And he thought, like most libertarians seem to do, that markets serve the interests of the poor.”

Well, that pretty much fixes it. I thought it was innacurate to bundle Hayek with Nozick without mentioning how different their moral theories were. For Hayek the bleeding-heart consequentialist, the fact that markets do in fact serve the material interests of the poor counts importantly in their favor. For a non-consequentialist it can’t.

Matt further adds: “The question is what his moral commitments would lead him to saying if they [free markets] didn’t [serve the poor].” I don’t know what he’d say. But is that really a relevant question? I like voluntary trade because both parties benefit. If you were to ask me: “But what would you say about voluntary trade if it didn’t benefit both parties?,” my answer would be “Huh? How could it not?”

If the real question is, what did Hayek say about involuntary transfers to support the needy?, then the answer is that in Constitution of Liberty he endorsed them. Is that what it takes to believe in distributive or social justice in your sense?

Liberal and Libertarians have been working together organically for decades, and I find people like http://www.Libertarian-International.org

We were using Liberaltarian in the ’40′s, BTW.

Lawrence: There’s an interesting passage somewhere in Hayek where he says that the difference between Rawls and him is merely verbal. I wonder what your take on that is. (I don’t have the citation on hand–perhaps you know what I’m talking about.)

How can bleeding-heart “libertarianism” possibly hold up under the Aristotelian-Perfectionist juggernaut soon to be unleashed?

Well, this seems like a good idea for a blog, even though I suspect much of what you write won’t be my cup of tea.

To be quite direct, I consider myself a democratic socialist – or maybe a social democrat; I go back and forth – and I am not really much attracted to libertarianism. If anything, the older I get the less appealing libertarianism is to me as a political philosophy. So I will probably argue with you folks a lot and try to persuade you that you are wrong about a number of things. Hope you will do the same.

Perhaps you need to read Julian Simon.  Try starting with Hoodwinking the Nation.